“Somerville is mounting the platform,” remarked George Murray to a group of Royal Academicians Silence soon reigned, enabling the clear, ringing voice of the lecturer to be heard.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a new plan to submit to you.” (“Hear! hear!”) “A plan which suggested itself to me after my first visit, this season, to the Royal Academy. I was struck by the attitude of the public, and noticed group after group passing scornfully in front of portraits, historical subjects, and war pictures. In fact, very few were the pictures that attracted any attention at all. Then I observed that landscapes aroused a good deal of attention on the part of the dissatisfied crowds, and that pictures representing the human form in its Edenic attire were the object of their closest observation. I was filled with wonderment at the evolution of a public who the preceding year had rushed to gaze at pictures by Sargent, Orchardson, Collier, Alma Tadema, and the rest. As I strolled through the rooms I saw many a woman blushing as she came in front of a portrait of an over-dressed woman; men with downcast eyes hurried away from the pictures of our so-called great men in their military uniforms or in any other garments. My first determination on leaving the place was to have my portrait removed; and, strange to say, the committee did not in any way oppose my wish, as many had thought fit, like me, to have their likenesses taken away. This is a great sign of the present evolution towards true art. I do not for one moment expect our artists—who have already made their names—to approve at once of my reform; but in time they may come to see their past errors, as already one step towards the reform of art has been taken by closing the doors of the Royal Academy.” (Here there were murmurs amongst the minority of malcontents.) “Yes, I heard this very morning that this would be the last day of the exhibition; the President having resolved to take this ominous resolution to punish the public, and teach them a lesson. We must, all of us, bear this well in mind: that art cannot any longer, in our new mode of life, be the means of obtaining wealth or position, and that nature is the sole guide and model which is to lead the artist to artistic eminence. As to painting garments from memory, the mere notion of such a sartorial nightmare ought to make the true artist shudder with horror. I therefore propose that a committee should be organised, similar to the one appointed for the reform of public monuments, to judge of the pictures which, in future, shall be sent to the Academy. The name of the artist would only be submitted to the committee after the picture had been accepted or rejected. The name of the person who had sat for the portrait would equally remain unknown, until the majority of the members on the committee should have recognised whom it was. The subject of an historical picture would likewise remain unrevealed, until the majority of members had been able to guess the subject when they looked at the picture—I see a few R.A.’s at the end of the hall, laughing and whispering. I quite understand their mirth, for they are looking forward to mystifying the committee, whose members are often sadly lacking in historical knowledge. I can only advise those gentlemen at the end of the hall to develop a keener sense of discrimination in the choice of their subjects, before they attempt to represent on wood, or copper—for there is no canvas—an historical incident, without the aid of local colour or garments. Our stage was reformed the day that Nature held up her mirror and showed man as God had made him; fiction said her last word when the high pressure of our abnormal civilisation suddenly collapsed, and allowed man and woman to look into each other’s eyes, and for the first time realise the abnormal condition of their former lives. The same evolution awaits plastic art and the painter’s avocation, for if a committee cannot tell, by looking at a picture, what the subject is, they will have to retire so as to learn how to observe and how to remember. Likewise, if an artist is unable to paint his subject without the trapping of garment, the sooner such an exponent of art takes to some other means of expressing his thoughts, the better. The aim of art, in our present civilisation, is to be useful, either in the material or the abstract world; and to be useful one must be clear and true—I hear someone saying that I am limiting art most shamefully; I think it is Mr Vane. No, I beg his pardon, truth and lucidity do not limit art. Had Mr Vane said that my new plan would limit the number of artists he would no doubt have been nearer the truth. We need only a very few artists, just as we need very few writers, and you will soon see that vanishing of clothes and upholstery will reduce their number. Now, I want to propose that a branch should be added to this committee, whose work should be to judge the past works hanging in our numerous galleries, more especially those of our English artists who have won fame. Let us take as one example out of thousands, ‘The Huguenots’ by Millais. Have a perfect copy drawn of it, without the clothes which cover the figures, and let this picture be shown to a committee of historians unacquainted with the picture, and ask them to tell you what is ailing these three souls at war with each other. I defy the committee to tell you. The incidental feud which tortures these three souls is merely anecdotal, and not an eternally human conflict. How few of our standard works would be comprehended without the external label which makes the subject intelligible. But those few, who would escape the public’s condemnation, would be sufficient to stimulate our young artists who are penetrated with a true and disinterested love of art. As to the rest who cannot learn the lesson taught them by nature, let them put their cerebral energy to other uses, either industrial or scientific. We are going fast towards the time, when, as Prudhon said, ‘The artist must at last be convinced of this, that there is no difference between an artistic creation and an industrial invention.’
“Instead of limiting art by subjecting its productions to truth and lucidity, I believe that we shall give a more powerful impetus to artistic expression. Our new mode of life will inevitably create in us new sentiments, and more simple morals, even new sensations, which will inevitably develop in us new modes of expressions; so that a greater display of facial expressions will forcibly be followed by a richer scale of artistic execution. Besides which, we cannot take all the credit to ourselves in this reform of art; the public has given us a lesson by scorning the false manifestations of art, which inadequately represent his present condition. We cannot stop the reform, for the current is too strong and we must go with it.” (Cheers and applause.) “I believe Mr Sinclair has a few words to say to you, for which he has this morning begged me to ask your indulgence, though I feel sure he does not in any way need it.”
Lionel left the platform, shook hands with several men who had gathered round him, and joined the group which included Lady Carey and Mrs Archibald.
Sinclair took the position vacated by Lionel, and leaning indolently against the table spoke as in a reverie:—
“I have come to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, of the death of the art critic.” Every head turned towards him; one could have heard a pin drop. Sinclair seemed to wake suddenly from his meditation at the sound of his own voice, and began earnestly to address his audience. “I hope you will take it well from me, for you know how wedded I was to my profession. But if I have come here this day to tell you of the total decomposition of the critic, it is only after having maturely reflected over, and analysed my past career. The eclipse of journalism, the judicious weeding of publishers’ lists, have worked a transformation in our conception of art, be it plastic, dramatic or lyric, and we are now asking ourselves what caused the feverish infatuation for one particular author, painter or musician? But we find it next to impossible to answer. Real talent certainly was not sufficient to force the market, nor did the eulogies of critics help to boom a work which was distasteful to the public. On the other hand, no anathema showered at the head of a despised author ever stopped the sale of his inferior work.” (Laughter—many heads looked round the hall to see if the much-abused author was there.) “The critic did not guide the artist, nor did he teach the public what it had to admire or condemn. The public was a hydra with many heads and many judgments; from the Letters of Elizabeth to Herbert Spencer’s Ethics, it devoured all, for its appetite was varied though at times unhealthy. I am sorry to say that the only achievement of the critic was to make the public believe he was leading it. It was indeed very clever of him to convince the hydra of his own importance, and as long as it lasted it was well and good; but the reign of the critic was ephemeral, for at every corner the public is having its revenge now. The masses disdainfully pass in front of pictures we extolled, hiss the plays we boomed, and roar at the music we admired. We coaxed the public, and conciliated the fashionable centres of Society so as to solidify our position and fill our purses; we blinded the many-headed hydra, stuffed cottonwool in its ears, and anæsthetised its power of appreciation into believing that we were indispensable to the development of art. The irony of it is, that it is that very public which is giving us a colossal lesson. Changed surroundings have altered the standard of art; and the hydra is giving us tit for tat. We have nothing else to do but to retire cheerfully. My dear friends, I come to you to cry, Peccavi, and to beg for your forgiveness for past errors of judgment. We have no need to dog the artist’s footsteps when there exists no longer any stimulus to inferior work, and when the reign of saleable art is over. The era of the artist-his-own-critic is at hand. Let the artist fight his battle with the hydra; best of all, leave the artist to fight his own battle with his own conscience, for the latter will prompt him to do only that which is necessary for the happiness of himself and others.”
“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.”
Sinclair, on his way across the hall, was dazed by the thunderous applause which greeted him on his passage. The group of A.R.A.’s had left the hall, no doubt to ponder these weighty questions in solitude, and with the exception of Vane, Mowbray, Mrs Archibald and their small group, the whole audience was acquiescent.
“I never would have believed it of you, old man,” sneered Vane. “What is to become of us, when men like you, who kept the public taste in check, give up the game?”