He is always most eager to be judged by the comrades of his craft when he realises, though perhaps only half consciously, that his appeal is no longer to the simple. It is the moment when art leans towards bric-a-brac, when the painter or the sculptor is no longer spurred by the larger desire to have his work understanded of the people, when he is content in each little coterie with the appreciation of his disciples who in their turn aim at nothing better than the approbation of their master. That any work worthy of the name, whether in literature, painting, or sculpture, must of necessity conform to the irrefutable laws of the medium in which it is expressed, is little better than an outworn platitude. But to concede so much is only to admit the inevitable limitations of every art; it is the acceptance of its inherent conditions, not the definition of its essence; and the endeavour to refuse to artists rightly equipped for their task the larger function of imaging the wider passions of life, is simply to rob the record of the past of its greatest and most enduring achievements. For my own part I have never made any pretence of bowing before these inordinate pretensions of the masters of mere technique. They form part of a gospel that has always been widely preached: in my youthful day it spread upon its banner the specious motto of “Art for Art’s sake”; but it reappears under many disguises, and rests ultimately and always upon the assumption that the men of the “métier” are the sole and exclusive judges of the worth of any artistic product. Certainly, if this dictum had prevailed in the time I am recalling, the great movement which won all our youthful enthusiasm, a movement beyond question the greatest and most influential in the Art of Europe during the nineteenth century, would never have found strength to develop. Never did young men of their calling meet with more embittered opposition from the accepted masters of the time; and if it had not been that a true impulse inspiring their work stirred a deeper response in a section of the public than was accorded to them by their fellow-painters, they would most surely have lacked the encouragement and the praise which to every artist is as the breath of his life. The thought and feeling of the time, as it found expression in every art, was moved by something deeper than the merely artistic impulse. That much-bespattered Victorian Era, whatever its limitations, could claim at least this cardinal virtue, that the men who are its foremost representatives were able to forge anew the links that bind life and art together. The gifts they owned were too great to let them stand in any fear of the threatened danger of “the literary idea”; and if occasionally they had to acknowledge a measure of failure, the fear of such failure never drove them to take refuge within the safe confines of mere technical accomplishment.