More striking than anything to be seen in 1877 at the Royal Academy was the small collection of pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery, organized and controlled by a noble amateur--himself a painter also--with the avowed intention of exhibiting the latest and most eccentric phases of English art. To a Londoner the opening day was interesting, as revealing the newest works of the most conspicuous London artists. To a stranger fresh from continental pictures, old and new, eager to see the touch of hands so often described in print, it was a revelation not only of a few men's work, but of the tendency of a national art and the artistic temperament of a whole people. Superficially, these pictures seemed the exact opposite of those at the conservative Academy--as aberrant as the latter were commonplace. But to one who knew them as the work of a fashionable, highly-educated clique they seemed merely a reaction of the same spirit that produced the elder style. In striving to get out of the rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of English art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the original bathos of domestic sentimentality, runs up to the veriest contortions of affected mediaevalism, rarely striking out a note of common sense. Simple English art is the apotheosis of the British middle-class spirit, of Mr. Arnold's "Philistinism." English art departing from this spirit shows, not Mr. Arnold's "sweetness and light," not calmness, repose, sureness of self, unconsciousness of its own springs of life, but theories running into vague contradictions, a far-fetched abnormalness, a morbid conception of beauty, a defiant disregard of the fact that a public exists which judges by common sense and the eye, not by a fine-spun confusion of theories and an undefined but omnipotent and deified "aesthetic sense" non-resident in the optic nerve. Mr. Whistler's pictures to-day, cleverly as he can paint if he will, are not pictures--I do not mean in fact, which is certainly true--but in title. They are "Natures in Black and Gold," or "In Blue and Silver," or "In Blue and Gold," or "Arrangements in Black," or "Harmonies in Amber and Brown." Here we have the desperate reaction from the idea that _l'anecdote_ is everything to the idea that it is sufficient to represent nothing (poetically conceived!) with little color and less form, with the vaguest and slightest and most untechnical technique. It is hard to say which would most puzzle Titian redivivus--"Little cold tooties," or a blue-gray wash with a point or two of yellow, bearing some imaginary resemblance to the Thames with its gaslights, and called a "Nocturne in Blue and Gold."