I never knew any painter worthy of the name who paid the smallest attention to what a critic says, even in conversation. He will retort; but he will not change his style or regulate his motives to suit a critic's palate. So may I now mention their faults? What painter is without fault? Their faults are shared by _nearly_ all of them; their virtues are their own. I see among them an absence of any _desire_ for beauty--for physical beauty. If the artists have fulfilled a mission in abolishing 'the sweetly pretty Christmas supplement kind of work,' I think they dwell too long on the trivial and the ignoble. They put a not very interesting domesticity into their frames. Rossetti, of course, wheeled about the marriage couch, but his was itself an interesting object of _virtu_. Modern art ceased to express the better aspirations and thoughts of the day when modern artists refused to become the servants of the commune, but asserted themselves as a component part of an intellectual republic. That is why people only commission portraits, and prefer to buy old masters who anticipate those better aspirations. Burne-Jones, however, expressed in paint that longing to be out of the nineteenth century which was so widespread. Now we are well out of it, the rising generation does not esteem his works with the same enthusiasm as the elders. It reads Mr. Wells on the future, and looks into the convex mirror of Mr. Bernard Shaw; but it does not buy Dubedats to the extent that it ought to do. The members of the New English Art Club could, I think, preserve their aesthetic conscience and yet paint beautiful things and beautiful people. Mr. Steer has now given them a lead. I wonder what Mr. Winter's opinion would be? He is the best salesman in London.