Watch the mob. Watch it staring. Like cattle behind the rails which bar a fat green field they pass at leisure, ruminating, or its equivalent, gum-chewing, passing masterpiece after masterpiece, only to let their gaze joyfully light upon some silly canvas depicting a thrice-stupid anecdote. The socialists assure us that the herd is the ideal of the future. We must think, see, feel with the People. Our brethren! Mighty idea--but a stale one before Noah entered the ark. "Let us go to the people," cried Tolstoy. But we are the people. How can we go to a place when we are already there? And the people surge before a picture which represents an old woman kissing her cow. Or, standing with eyeballs agog, they count the metal buttons on the coat of the Meissonier Cuirassier. It is great art. Let the public be educated. Down with the new realism--which only recalls to us the bitterness and meanness of our mediocre existence. (Are we not all middle-class?) How, then, can art be aristocratic? Why art at all? Give us the cinematograph--pictures that act. Squeaking records. Canned vocally, Caruso is worth a wilderness of Wagner monkeys. Or self-playing unmusical machines. Or chromos. Therefore, let us joyfully stare. Instead of your "step," watch the mob.
He is a little old fellow, with a slight glaze over the pupils of his eyes. He is never dressed in the height of the fashion, yet, when he enters a gallery, salesmen make an involuntary step in his direction; then they get to cover as speedily as possible, grumbling: "Look out! it's only the old bird again." But one of them is always nailed; there is no escaping the Barmecide. He thinks he knows more about etchings than Kennedy or Keppel, and when Montross and Macbeth tell him of American art, he violently contradicts them. He is the embittered dilettante; embittered, because with his moderate means he can never hope to own even the most insignificant of the treasures exposed under his eyes every day, week, and month in the year. So he rails at the dealers, inveighs against the artists, and haunts auction-rooms. He never bids, but is extremely solicitous about the purchases of other people. He has been known to sit for hours on a small print, until, in despair, the owner leaves. Then, with infinite precautions, our amateur arises, so contriving matters that his hard-won victory is not discovered by profane and prying eyes. Once at home, he gloats over his prize, showing it to a favoured few. He bought it. He selected it. It is a tribute to his exquisite taste. And the listeners are beaten into dismayed silence by his vociferations, by his agile, ape-like skippings and parrot ejaculations. Withal, he is not a criminal, only a monomaniac of art. He sometimes mistakes a Whistler for a Dürer; but he puts the blame upon his defective eyesight.