“So I’m told,” said Jimmy.
“Style is the art of leaving out,” said Herbert. “They don’t leave out the R.A.’s pictures in the Academy. Hence the absence of style in the show.”
“Tut, tut, tut! Shop again!” cried Cornpepper, despairingly. “The only chance of progress for art is in neglecting values—not from ignorance, like the Germans, but from intention; not viewing Nature through a bit of black glass, like Millet, or toning down the violets of her shadows, but painting real sunlight.”
“But you can’t really paint sunlight,” put in Matt, timidly. “Paint’s only mud.”
“Quite so,” said Cornpepper. “But Delacroix said, ‘Give me mud, and I’ll paint you the skin of Venus.’ It depends on what you put round your mud.”
“Or how you put it on,” added Gurney. “The only way is to get optics to help you, and mix your primaries on the canvas, not on the palette, with a Bright’s brush.”
“I reckon you’ll be breaking out in ‘spots’ next,” laughed Rocks. “That Vibriste nonsense has been the ruin of young Dircks. He used to be quite second-rate, but since he crossed the Channel he squeezes his tubes on to his canvas, and it’s all streaks like a clown’s face.”
“Paint is neither mud nor sunlight,” interposed Butler, authoritatively. “It’s paint. Glory in it. Don’t pretend it’s silk or wood. According to the Academy, the highest art is to conceal paint.”
“Shop again!” groaned Cornpepper. “We’re an awfully narrow set, we artists—always girding at each other’s methods, though we’re all trying for the same thing.” Then, recalled by Butler’s frowning face to a sense of his position as chef d’école, a position he was not yet prepared to abdicate, he added, in more conciliatory accents: “All I object to in the Academy is its existence. No body of men has the right to say to the public, L’art, c’est moi. I don’t for a moment claim our work’s better than theirs, only—”
“That theirs is worse than ours,” suggested Jimmy.