They fought, primarily, against a moral valuation of art. They fought, secondly, against “nature” ... against, that is to say, a crude conception of the relation between nature and art; against, to put that crude conception in its crudest form, the supposition that he who looked at a picture could find something in the external world, by its resemblance to which the picture should be judged. It would be a fascinating task to show that the too faithful imitation of external things is an impediment to the highest functions of art, and, on the other hand, that imitation in some kind, in some degree, is an essential part of that function. But I do not wish to be tempted into discussion of the true relation between art and nature, though a solution of that problem will, perhaps, suggest itself to those who read this paper to its end. I am here chiefly interested in art’s relation to ourselves. Nature for the moment is outside the discussion, though, in justice to the artists for art’s sake, I must point out that their revolt was not against “morality” alone. When we hear Wilde’s gay proclamation that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” we must take care to hear also, from Whistler, more serious, that “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music,” and that the artist “in all that is dainty and lovable ... finds hints for his own combinations, and thus is Nature ever his resource and always at his service, and to him is nought refused.” We must not imagine that the revolt was merely playful. Against “nature” and against “morality.” In an age when the painter of “Derby Day” assisted Ruskin by saying that he could not “see anything of the true representation of water and atmosphere in the painting of “Battersea Bridge,” they upheld the superiority of art to “nature.” In an age when Dickens was praised for his reforms of the workhouse and blamed for his love of low life, when novelists were judged by the deeds, no, by the manners of the persons of their fiction, when poets were judged by their private lives, they protested the irrelevance of all such things to the question at issue, which was the goodness or badness of the work of art to be judged. We must not blame their formula, but the ideas against which it was directed, for the bad manners, the morality that they hoped would be regarded as immorality, for the unpublishable private lives, that were the excesses after victory. We may, perhaps, smile as we observe how accurately they balance those other excesses against which they were a reaction.