I well know how this opportunism in criticism arises. It is the result of the co-operation of the basest and most despicable intellectual qualities. I find its causes in the dull feeling for the beautiful which renders weak and indistinct all reactions from artistic influences, and suffers neither delight nor irritation to arise: in the cowardly fear of man and pitiful adulation, which aims at injuring no one and only thinks of keeping a retreat open for itself; finally in common vanity, which prefers to please a crowd of gaping boobies rather than the select few, and the flattering, though so cheap, reputation of being “very intellectual,” to the responsibility of crude performance of duty. The favourite word by which the opportunistic critics compound with every artistic confidence trick is “development.” If the clairvoyant monitor utters the cry of “decay and degeneracy,” the opportunists reply, “buds of a new and splendid bloom.” They love to appeal to the history of art. That is right. When the Masolinos and Masaccios sprang up, the last pupils of Gaddi and Orcagna whimpered, “Now there is an end of painting.” But what was at an end was Byzantine art filled by Cimabue and Giotto with some fresh life, and what began was the ever glorious _Cinquecento_. And much nearer to us: when Delacroix emancipated himself from the colour rules of David’s pupils, and broke out into a downright exultation of red and blue and purple; when Corot, Rousseau, and Dupré set homely nature viewed with lyric eyes in the place of Poussin’s classic landscape degenerated into dial painting; then earnest voices likewise accused the innovators of digging the grave of art, and yet we know nowadays that Delacroix and Corot were by no means the wild anarchists which the Academicians held them to be, and that an uninterrupted line of development extends from David and Prudhon through Géricault to Delacroix, and from Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain through Joseph Vernet, and even through Watteau to Corot—a line which was unnoticed by contemporaries, yet one which we now see clearly. It is the dodge of an unscrupulous attorney to quote these examples when treating of the art of a Puvis de Chavannes, an Aman-Jean, the Præ-Raphaelites, _pointillistes_, _vermicellistes_, and _pipists_. There are sure marks of recognition by which the authorised can be distinguished from the unauthorised, the true from the false, development from retrogression, and buds from gall-nuts. A movement which, indeed, resolutely diverges from the taste dominant at a given time, though striving to approach nature, need not, but may, have a future; and he who does not suffer from stiffness in the joints will not, as a matter of course and on principle, refuse to follow it with benevolent curiosity. If, however, the new movement departs from nature, one may confidently say “it leads to nothing.” If an independent method which strives after personal expression reveals