I can best illustrate this by recalling to your mind that marvellous picture of the so-called literary school of England, a picture by Luke Fildes known as "The Doctor" and now hanging in the Tate Gallery in London, in which the whole sad story is told in logical sequence by the artist's consummate handling of the darks and lights in regular progression.
You will pardon me, I hope, if I leave the more technical details of my subject for a moment that I may discuss with you one of the peculiarities of the so-called art-loving public of to-day, notably that section which insists that no picture should tell a story of any kind.
To my own mind this picture of Luke Fildes reaches high-water mark in the school of his time, and yet in watching as I have done the crowds who surge through the Tate Galleries and the National Gallery, it is an almost every-day occurrence to overhear such contemptuous remarks as "Oh, yes, one of those literary fellows," drop from the lips of some highbrow who only tolerates Constable because of the influence his example and work had on Corot and other men of the Barbizon school.
Another section lose their senses over pure brush work.
A story of Whistler—one he told me himself—will illustrate what I mean. Jules Stewart's father, a great lover of good pictures and one of Fortuny's earliest patrons, had invited Whistler to his house in Paris to see his collection, and in the course of the visit drew from a hiding-place a small panel of Meissonier's, of a quality so high that any dealer in Paris would have given him $30,000 for it.
Whistler would not even glance at it.
Upon Stewart insisting, he adjusted his monocle and said: "Oh, yes, very good—snuff-box style."
This affectation was to have been expected of Whistler because of his aggressive mental attitude toward the work of any man who handled his brush differently from his own personal methods, but saner minds may think along broader lines.
If they do not, they have short memories. Even in my own experience I have watched the rise and fall of men whose technic called from the housetops—a call which was heard by the passing throng below, many of whom stopped to listen and applaud; for in pictures as in bonnets the taste of the public changes almost daily. One has only to review several of the schools, both in English and in Continental art, noting their dawn of novelty, their sunrise of appreciation, their high noon of triumph, their afternoon of neglect, and their night of oblivion, to be convinced that the wheel of artistic appreciation is round like other wheels—the world, for one—and that its revolutions bring the night as surely as they bring the dawn.