hool of his time, and yet in watching as I have done the crowds
who surge through the Tate Galleries and the National Gallery, it is
an almost every-day occurrence to overhear such contemptuous remarks
as "Oh, yes, one of those literary fellows," drop from the lips of
some highbrow who only tolerates Constable because of the influence
his example and work had on Corot and other men of the Barbizon
school.

Another section lose their senses over pure brush work.

A story of Whistler--one he told me himself--will illustrate what I
mean. Jules Stewart's father, a great lover of good pictures and one
of Fortuny's earliest patrons, had invited Whistler to his house in
Paris to see his collection, and in the course of the visit drew from
a hiding-place a small panel of Meissonier's, of a quality so high
that any dealer in Paris would have given him $30,000 for it.

Whistler would not even glance at it.

Upon Stewart insisting, he adjusted his monocle and said: "Oh, yes,
very good--_snuff-box style_."

This affectation was to have been expected of Whistler because of his
aggressive mental attitude toward the work of any man who handled his
brush differently from his own personal methods, but saner minds may
think along broader lines.

If they do not, they have short memories. Even in my own experience I
have watched the rise and fall of men whose technic called from the
housetops--a call which was heard by the passing throng below, many of
whom stopped to listen and applaud; for in pictures as in bonnets the
taste of the public changes almost daily. One has only to review
several of the schools, both in English and in Continental art, noting
their dawn of novelty, their sunrise of appreciation, their high noon
of triumph, their afternoon of neglect, and their night of oblivion,
to be convinced that the wheel of artistic appreciation is round like
other wheels--the world, for one--and that its revolutions bring the
night as surely as they bring the dawn.

Not a hundred years have passed since the broad, sensuous work of
Turner, big in conception and big in treatment, was followed by the
more exact painters of the English school, many of whom are still at
work, notably Leader and Alfred Parsons, both Royal Academicians, and
of whom some contemporaneous critic insisted that they had counted the
leaves on their elm-trees fringing the polished water of the Thames.
They, of course, had only been eclipsed by the broader brush