etter naturally made a breach between the writer and England's
official art. Watson, who was abroad when the whole thing happened,
had heard of it with mingled feelings. 'It will either make him--or
finish him!' was his own judgement, founded on a fairly exhaustive
knowledge of John Fenwick; and he had waited anxiously for results.
So far no details had reached him since. Fenwick seemed to be still
exhibiting, still writing to the papers, and, as far as he knew, still
selling. But the aspect of the man before him was not an aspect of
prosperity.

Watson, however, having started a subject which he well knew to be
interminable, would instantly have liked to escape from it. He was
himself nervous, critical, and easily bored. He did not know what he
should do with Fenwick's outpourings when he had listened to them.

But Fenwick had come over--charged--and Watson had touched the spring.
He sat there, smoking and declaiming, his eyes blazing, one hand
playing with Watson's favourite dog, an Aberdeen terrier who was
softly smelling and pushing against him. All that litany of mockery
and bitterness, which the Comic Spirit kindles afresh on the lips of
each rising generation, only to quench it again on the lips of those
who 'arrive,' flowed from him copiously. He was the age indeed for
'arrival,' when, as so often happens, the man of middle life, appeased
by success, dismisses the revolts of his youth. But this was still the
language--and the fierce language--of revolt! The decadence of English
art and artists, the miserable commercialism of the Academy, the
absence of any first-rate teaching, of any commanding traditions, of
any 'school' worth the name--the vulgarity of the public, from royalty
downward, the snobbery of the rich world in its dealings with art:
all these jeremiads which he recited were much the same--_mutatis
mutandis_--as those with which, half a century before, poor Benjamin
Haydon had filled the 'autobiography' which is one of the capital
'documents' of the artistic life. This very resemblance, indeed,
occurred to Watson.

'Upon my word,' he said, with a queer smile, 'you remind me of
Haydon.'

Fenwick started; with an impatient movement he pushed away the dog,
who whimpered.

'Oh, come--I hope it's not as bad as that,' he said, roughly.

Watson sharply regretted his remark. Through the minds of both there
passed the same image of Haydon lying dead by his own hand beneath the
vast pictures that no one