Many of his followers were quite as absurd in their misplaced admiration as the maligned public in its denunciation, and no one knew it better than he. He came upon two of them once as they were waxing eloquent before a sketch that had somehow escaped his studio,—possibly overlooked and left behind in some of his movings. He listened a moment to their raptures, fitted his monocle to his eye, took a look at this “masterpiece,” and said:
“God bless me, I wonder where that came from. Not worth the canvas it’s painted on.”
And he turned away.
We who have been taught to see, not wholly but in part, may laugh at our betters who, when he first appeared, could see nothing at all; but our virtue is acquired.
His attitude towards critics is summed up in the short but pointed article written in December, 1878, shortly after the Ruskin suit, and called “Art and Art Critics.”
“Shall the painter, then (I foresee the question), decide upon painting? Shall he be the critic and sole authority? Aggressive as is this supposition, I fear that, in the length of time, his assertion alone has established what even the gentlemen of the quill accept as the canons of art and recognize as the masterpieces of work.”
All of which is undeniably true. The painter must in the end judge of painting, and the sculptor judge of sculpture. But there are two distinct sides to a work of art,—to every work, for that matter: there is the relation between the worker and his work, and the relation between the completed work and the public,—the work being the intermediary between artist and people, his means of communication, his mode and manner of speech.
There is, therefore, the process of creation and the process of appreciation, of utterance and of understanding.
The painting of a picture is one thing, its appreciation by the public is quite another.
A man need not be a dramatist to watch the effect of a drama upon the audience; a man need not own a vineyard to know good wine.