The "New English," then, had some justification for their establishment; and although they did not make very much headway before the close of the nineteenth century, they find themselves at the opening of the twentieth in a position to determine to a very considerable extent what the future of English painting is to be, just as the Academy succeeded in determining it before they came into existence. For the Academy everything that was vital in English art in the last half century had no existence--was simply ignored. For the New English, it was the seed that flowered, under their gentle influence, into the many varieties of blossoms with which our garden is already filled. To the Academy there was no such thing as change or development--their ears were deaf to any innovation, their eyes were blind to any fresh beauty. To others, every new movement foretold its significance, and the century closed with the recognition of the fact that art must live and develop if it is to be anything but a comfortable means of subsistence for a self-constituted authority of forty and their friends. Let me be allowed to conclude this chapter, and my imperfect efforts to indicate the energies of six centuries of art in so small a space, with a passage from a lecture delivered in 1882 by Mr Selwyn Image, now Slade Professor at Oxford, which embodies the spirit in the air at that time, and foreshadows what was to come. "I do not feel that we have come here to sing a requiem for art this afternoon," he said. "As a giant it will renew its strength and rejoice to run its course. I am not a prophet, I cannot tell you just what that course is going to be. Nor is it possible to estimate what is around us with the same security, with the same value, that we estimate what has passed--you must be at a certain distance to take things in. But in contemporary art we can notice some characteristics, which are quite at one with what we call the modern spirit; and extremely suggestive--for they seem to indicate movement, and therefore life, in this imaginative sphere, just as there is movement and life in the sphere of science or of social interests. For instance, in modern representative work ... I think anyone comparing it as a whole with the work of the old masters, will be struck as against their distinctness, containedness, simplicity and serenity; with its complexity, restlessness, and vagueness, and emotion, and suggestiveness in place of delineation, and impressionism in place of literal transcription--and this alike in execution and motive. I do not mean to say that these qualities are better than the qualities that preceded them, or worse--but only that they are different, only that they are of the modern spirit--only that they indicate movement and life; and so far that is hopeful--is it not?" THE END _INDEX_ Academy of Painting, the French, 231 ---- the Royal, 279, 286, 329-333 Alamanus, Giovanni or Johannes, 60, 61 Allegri, Antonio, or Correggio, 58