you to make your art
representative of the nineteenth century are advising you to produce an
art which your children, when you have them, will think old-fashioned.
But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic
people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours.

Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But
remember that there never has been an artistic age, or an artistic
people, since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been,
and will always be, an exquisite exception. There is no golden age of
art; only artists who have produced what is more golden than gold.

_What_, you will say to me, the Greeks? were not they an artistic people?

Well, the Greeks certainly not, but, perhaps, you mean the Athenians, the
citizens of one out of a thousand cities.

Do you think that they were an artistic people? Take them even at the
time of their highest artistic development, the latter part of the fifth
century before Christ, when they had the greatest poets and the greatest
artists of the antique world, when the Parthenon rose in loveliness at
the bidding of a Phidias, and the philosopher spake of wisdom in the
shadow of the painted portico, and tragedy swept in the perfection of
pageant and pathos across the marble of the stage. Were they an artistic
people then? Not a bit of it. What is an artistic people but a people
who love their artists and understand their art? The Athenians could do
neither.

How did they treat Phidias? To Phidias we owe the great era, not merely
in Greek, but in all art--I mean of the introduction of the use of the
living model.

And what would you say if all the English bishops, backed by the English
people, came down from Exeter Hall to the Royal Academy one day and took
off Sir Frederick Leighton in a prison van to Newgate on the charge of
having allowed you to make use of the living model in your designs for
sacred pictures?

Would you not cry out against the barbarism and the Puritanism of such an
idea? Would you not explain to them that the worst way to honour God is
to dishonour man who is made in His image, and is the work of His hands;
and, that if one wants to paint Christ one must take the most Christlike
person one can find, and if one wants to paint the Madonna, the purest
girl one knows?

Would you not rush off and burn down Newgate, if necessary, and say that
such a thing was without parallel