ng better
artists than they, and naturally so; for where, as in photography,
the drawing counts for nothing, the thought and judgment count for
everything; whereas in the etching and daubing processes, where great
manual skill is needed to produce anything that the eye can endure, the
execution counts for more than the thought, and if a fellow only fit
to carry bricks up a ladder or the like has ambition and perseverance
enough to train his hand and push into the van, you cannot afford to put
him back into his proper place, because thoroughly trained hands are
so scarce. Consider the proof of this that you have in literature. Our
books are manually the work of printers and papermakers; you may cut
an author's hand off and he is as good an author as before. What is the
result? There is more imagination in any number of a penny journal than
in half-a-dozen of the Royal Academy rooms in the season. No author
can live by his work and be as empty-headed as an average successful
painter. Again, consider our implements of music--our pianofortes, for
example. Nobody but an acrobat will voluntarily spend years at such a
difficult mechanical puzzle as the keyboard, and so we have to take our
impressions of Beethoven's sonatas from acrobats who vie with each other
in the rapidity of their prestos, or the staying power of their
left wrists. Thoughtful men will not spend their lives acquiring
sleight-of-hand. Invent a piano which will respond as delicately to
the turning of a handle as our present ones do to the pressure of the
fingers, and the acrobats will be driven back to their carpets and
trapezes, because the sole faculty necessary to the executant musician
will be the musical faculty, and no other will enable him to obtain a
hearing."

The company were somewhat overcome by this unexpected lecture. Sir
Charles, feeling that such views bore adversely on him, and were somehow
iconoclastic and low-lived, was about to make a peevish retort, when
Erskine forestalled him by asking Trefusis what idea he had formed of
the future of the arts. He replied promptly. "Photography perfected
in its recently discovered power of reproducing color as well as form!
Historical pictures replaced by photographs of tableaux vivants formed
and arranged by trained actors and artists, and used chiefly for the
instruction of children. Nine-tenths of painting as we understand it at
present extinguished by the competition of these photographs, and
the re