a
picture to the Royal Academy on the understanding that if I did I should
probably be elected Associate that year, and also that my picture would
be bought by the Chantrey Fund. My answer to that was, "If my picture is
good enough to be purchased for the Chantrey Bequest my picture can be
purchased from the walls of the Grosvenor Gallery as well as from the
walls of the Royal Academy. That seems to me to be justice."

The "New English," then, had some justification for their establishment;
and although they did not make very much headway before the close of the
nineteenth century, they find themselves at the opening of the twentieth
in a position to determine to a very considerable extent what the future
of English painting is to be, just as the Academy succeeded in
determining it before they came into existence.

For the Academy everything that was vital in English art in the last
half century had no existence--was simply ignored. For the New English,
it was the seed that flowered, under their gentle influence, into the
many varieties of blossoms with which our garden is already filled. To
the Academy there was no such thing as change or development--their ears
were deaf to any innovation, their eyes were blind to any fresh beauty.
To others, every new movement foretold its significance, and the century
closed with the recognition of the fact that art must live and develop
if it is to be anything but a comfortable means of subsistence for a
self-constituted authority of forty and their friends.

Let me be allowed to conclude this chapter, and my imperfect efforts to
indicate the energies of six centuries of art in so small a space, with
a passage from a lecture delivered in 1882 by Mr Selwyn Image, now Slade
Professor at Oxford, which embodies the spirit in the air at that time,
and foreshadows what was to come. "I do not feel that we have come here
to sing a requiem for art this afternoon," he said. "As a giant it will
renew its strength and rejoice to run its course. I am not a prophet, I
cannot tell you just what that course is going to be. Nor is it possible
to estimate what is around us with the same security, with the same
value, that we estimate what has passed--you must be at a certain
distance to take things in. But in contemporary art we can notice some
characteristics, which are quite at one with what we call the modern
spirit; and extremely suggestive--for they seem to indicate movement,
and therefore l