“What about Sargent?” broke in the clarion voice of Hornsby, who was standing at the end of the hall, close to the President of the Academy.
“Ah! _mea culpa_,” solemnly uttered Sinclair, “when you come to Sargent, you touch the depth of artificiality—if such a thing can be said. But our past Society was the age of tragic frivolity, and Sargent was the Homer of that modish _Odyssey_. He illustrated the law of natural selection by making garments the main feature in his portraits. Under his brush the inner souls of his models withered away, while artificial surroundings and vestments emphasised in his pictures a condition of spurious passions and morbid excitability. Run through, mentally, the gallery of Sargent’s portraits, and you will see their anatomy wither under the robe of Nessus. He endowed flounces, feathers and ribands with Medusa-like ferocity; and the Laocoon is not more fatally begirded, nor are his limbs more piteously crushed by snakes, than are these frail women’s hearts muffled and hidden by clouds of lace and chiffon. Do you remember that youth whom he immortalised a few years ago? That heir to great properties on whose fatuous brow was stamped the mark of the symbol of militarism? That diagonal mark of white skin on a sunburnt forehead is a painted satire. Kipling gave us a high-flavoured _philippic_ on Tommy Atkins; to Sargent was entrusted the mission of immortalising the Tommy of the upper classes. Like a faithful chronicler, Sargent intended to hand down to posterity the biography of Society as he saw it—that is to say—the living product of artificial environment. Hogarth was a dramatic historian of the unbridled passions of a brutal Society. Disrobe the figures of the _Mariage à la Mode_, or of the _Rake’s Progress_, and I believe the committee, which my friend Lord Somerville wishes to appoint to judge our past works of art, will easily be able to guess at a glance what tragedy is breaking the hearts of these ungentle personages. Sargent is the satirist of a clothed Society. His models would exist no longer were you to divest them of their meretricious furbelows; for their garments are the parts which help to form the aggregate of their psychology, and without their frills and trimmings, they would merely be marionettes stuffed with sawdust and held together with screws.” (Murmurs from several groups. The President of the Academy leaves the hall.) “The end of Society was nigh, when it could only boast of a School of Athens in which a Socrates was a tailor, Aspasia a Court dressmaker, and Diogenes an upholsterer. Plato and Aristotle’s philosophy did not more potently influence the world of thought of their epoch, than did the unappealable decretals of a Paquin, and the arbitrary ukase of a Poole.” The small minority of malcontents were endeavouring to stop the lecturer, whose clear voice managed to drown the hisses and the groans. He silenced them all. “We must have the courage to face this, for since the late cataclysm, we have been suddenly placed on a platform from which we are able to clearly view our past civilisation; and we can see that formerly we had no sense of objectivity, and that what we erroneously termed the modern world was but the heaping together of complexities and incongruities. Do you remember that perfect short story by Balzac, _The Unknown Masterpiece_? It is the story of an artist who jealously hides the picture he is painting from any intruding eye. He alone enters his sanctum, and there for hours he works at this great work. One day, some profane creature enters the studio, irreverently lifts the curtain which covers the canvas, and sees—nothing. Blurrs, daubs, uncertain design, in fact, confusion is all he can detect. This is what we have been doing for centuries; we daubed and smudged our social work for want of a proper perspective; we created a huge monstrosity just as this artist produced an incomprehensible picture, because he, and we, could not judge our production from the standpoint of another. I have digressed from my subject, and wandered far away from what was the purpose of this address. Let me conclude by telling you that the miserable efforts of the critic are futile in the new era of—art for art’s sake.”