he
details of the story there has been no chronicling of persons; all the
minor and subsidiary figures are imaginary, devised so as to illustrate
to the best of the writer's ability the various influences which are
continually brought to bear upon the artist in the London of to-day.
There are traits and reminiscences of actual experience in the
book,--what story was ever without them? But no living person has been
drawn, and no living person has any just reason to think himself or
herself aggrieved by any sentence which it contains.

CHAPTER I

It was the day of the private view at the Royal Academy. The great
courtyard of Burlington House was full of carriages, and a continuous
stream of guests was pressing up the red-carpeted stairs, over which
presided some of the most imposing individuals known to the eyes of
Londoners, second only to Her Majesty's beefeaters in glory of scarlet
apparel. Inside, however, as it was not yet luncheon-time, the rooms were
but moderately filled. It was possible to see the pictures, to appreciate
the spring dresses, and to single out a friend even across the Long
Gallery. The usual people were there: Academicians of the old school and
Academicians of the new; R.A.'s coming from Kensington and the 'regions
of culture,' and R.A.'s coming from more northerly and provincial
neighbourhoods where art lives a little desolately and barely, in want of
the graces and adornings with which 'culture' professes to provide her.
There were politicians still capable--as it was only the first week of
May--of throwing some zest into their amusements. There were art-critics
who, accustomed as they were by profession to take their art in large and
rapid draughts, had yet been unable to content themselves with the one
meagre day allowed by the Academy for the examination of some 800 works,
and were now eking out their notes of the day before by a few
supplementary jottings taken in the intervals of conversation with their
lady friends. There were the great dealers betraying in look and gait
their profound, yet modest, consciousness that upon them rested the
foundations of the artistic order, and that if, in a superficial
conception of things, the star of an Academician differs from that of the
man who buys his pictures in glory, the truly philosophic mind assesses
matters differently. And, most important of all, there were the women,
old and young, some in the full freshness of spring cottons, as if