With this doctrine of art for art’s sake we are now dissatisfied. We object to it, not for the sake of “morality,” against which it was partly directed, nor yet for the sake of “nature,” but for the sake of art, whose function it limits rather than glorifies. We have seen the school of art, if we may speak of a school of art, that carried the banner on which those words were inscribed, tire and fall away as the nineteenth century drew to its close, until now the tattered banner, with words almost illegible, is carried only by a schoolboy who joined the procession late and marches on, unconscious that the parade is over, that he is marching alone, and that nobody is looking at him. Yet the demonstration was successful; its promoters, who stitched the banner with gaiety, hope, and defiance, themselves painted and wrote fine things, and men are working to-day whose work would have been impossible if, in the course of its march, that small, daring procession had not walked seven times round a city of Jericho and blown silver trumpets under its walls. Some battle-cries are no more than an irrelevant but inspiriting noise. Most of them, however, are related to something fought for, (St. George and Merry England!), something that, it is hoped, will superintend the fight (God with us!), or something that is fought against (A bas Marat!). The knight who shouted, “Two red roses across the moon” on a sultry day when-- “... the battle was scattered from hill to hill From the windmill to the watermill.” may have been incomprehensible to his enemies, but was not incomprehensible to himself, and “Art for Art’s sake!” forty and fifty years ago, a surprising, rather ridiculous phrase in the ears of the early Victorians who then survived, was something very different for the men who were fighting to destroy a petrified mental attitude towards art in general. We must first understand what they fought against before we have the right to speak of the meaning of their battle-cry.