The French "impressionalist" clique, similar in spirit to these Englishmen, though less outré in practice, is not by any means of so great importance in France as they are in England. It has more than once been remarked in England that the old-fashioned amateur--patron and critic, _kenner_--is dying out, and that his modern substitute must not only choose, but experiment--not only admire, but be admired. This spirit, spreading through a nation, will not make it a nation of artists, but will make the nation's artists amateurs. No critic, no amateur, is more loath to try his own hand than the one who most deeply and rightly appreciates the skill of others, and the rare and God-given and difficult nature of that skill. The confusion of amateur with professional work lowers the standard, so there will be every year fewer to tell the mass of the nation that most useful of truths--how earnest a thing is true art, and how rare a native appreciation of its truest worth.
There is no place where the interest excited by national art is so widespread, where the exhibitions are so crowded, where they so regulate times and seasons, annual excursions to and departures from town, as in England. Yet there is no place where the interest in art seems to a stranger so factitious, so much a matter of fashion and custom, of instinctive following of chance-appointed bell-wethers. It would scarcely be a matter of surprise if the whole thing should collapse through some pin-thrust of rival interest or excitement, and next year's exhibition be a desert, next year's artists paint their theories and their souls for unregarding eyes, or rather for unheeding brains. Have we not an apology for such a suggestion in the history of the rage for Gothic architecture, so thoroughly demonstrated in every possible theoretical and philosophical way to be the only proper style for Englishmen present or future, so devotedly and exclusively followed for a while by the profession, only to be suddenly abandoned for its fresher rivals, the so-called styles of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne?
In the throngs that flocked to the opening of the Royal Academy, waiting hours before the doors were opened, fighting and struggling for a foothold on the stairs, eager to be the first to see, though there were weeks of opportunities ahead--in the rare recurrence through the hum of the vast criticising crowd of a word of technical judgment or sober artistic criticism--it was easy to recognize the same spirit that confuses morality with chair-legs, that finds a knocker more "sincere" and "right" than a door-bell, that insists as upon a vital necessity that the heads of all nails should be visible and that all lines should be straight, and would as soon have a shadow on its conscience as in the pattern of wall-paper. Nowhere was decorative art so non-existent a few years ago as in England--nowhere is it so universally dwelt upon to-day. Yet it is easy to see how entirely the revival is a child of theory and books and teachers and rules--how little owing to a spontaneous development of art-instinct in the people, a spontaneous desire for more beauty in their surroundings, a spontaneous knowledge of how it is best to be obtained.