a kind of success. As there are no more laws and no more
standards, there is nothing to learn. The merest student is at once set
upon a level with the most experienced of his instructors, and boys and
girls in their teens are hailed as masters. Art is at last made easy,
and there are no longer any pupils, for all have become teachers. To
borrow Doctor Johnson's phrase, "many men, many women, and many
children" could produce art after this fashion; and they do.

So right are the practitioners of this puerile art in their proclaimed
belief that the public will never accept it while anything else exists,
that one might be willing to treat it with the silent contempt it
deserves were it not for the efforts of certain critics and writers for
the press to convince us that it ought to be accepted. Some of these men
seem to be intimidated by the blunders of the past. Knowing that
contemporary criticism has damned almost every true artist of the
nineteenth century, they are determined not to be caught napping; and
they join in shouts of applause as each new harlequin steps upon the
stage. They forget that it is as dangerous to praise ignorantly as to
blame unjustly, and that the railer at genius, though he may seem more
malevolent, will scarce appear so ridiculous to posterity as the dupe of
the mountebank. Others of them are, no doubt, honest victims of that
illusion of progress to which we are all more or less subject--to that
ingrained belief that all evolution is upward and that the latest thing
must necessarily be the best. They forget that the same process which
has relieved man of his tail has deprived the snake of his legs and the
kiwi of his wings. They forget that art has never been and cannot be
continuously progressive; that it is only the sciences connected with
art that are capable of progress; and that the "Henriade" is not a
greater poem than the "Divine Comedy" because Voltaire has learned the
falsity of the Ptolemaic astronomy. Finally, these writers, like other
people, desire to seem knowing and clever; and if you appear to admire
vastly what no one else understands you pass for a clever man.

I have looked through a good deal of the writings of these "up-to-date"
critics in the effort to find something like an intelligible argument
or a definite statement of belief. I have found nothing but the
continually repeated assumption that these new movements, in all their
varieties, are "living" and "vital." I can f