the reign of the critic was ephemeral, for at every corner the public is having its revenge now. The masses disdainfully pass in front of pictures we extolled, hiss the plays we boomed, and roar at the music we admired. We coaxed the public, and conciliated the fashionable centres of Society so as to solidify our position and fill our purses; we blinded the many-headed hydra, stuffed cottonwool in its ears, and anæsthetised its power of appreciation into believing that we were indispensable to the development of art. The irony of it is, that it is that very public which is giving us a colossal lesson. Changed surroundings have altered the standard of art; and the hydra is giving us tit for tat. We have nothing else to do but to retire cheerfully. My dear friends, I come to you to cry, _Peccavi_, and to beg for your forgiveness for past errors of judgment. We have no need to dog the artist’s footsteps when there exists no longer any stimulus to inferior work, and when the reign of saleable art is over. The era of the artist-his-own-critic is at hand. Let the artist fight his battle with the hydra; best of all, leave the artist to fight his own battle with his own conscience, for the latter will prompt him to do only that which is necessary for the happiness of himself and others.” “What about Sargent?” broke in the clarion voice of Hornsby, who was standing at the end of the hall, close to the President of the Academy. “Ah! _mea culpa_,” solemnly uttered Sinclair, “when you come to Sargent, you touch the depth of artificiality—if such a thing can be said. But our past Society was the age of tragic frivolity, and Sargent was the Homer of that modish _Odyssey_. He illustrated the law of natural selection by making garments the main feature in his portraits. Under his brush the inner souls of his models withered away, while artificial surroundings and vestments emphasised in his pictures a condition of spurious passions and morbid excitability. Run through, mentally, the gallery of Sargent’s portraits, and you will see their anatomy wither under the robe of Nessus. He endowed flounces, feathers and ribands with Medusa-like ferocity; and the Laocoon is not more fatally begirded, nor are his limbs more piteously crushed by snakes, than are these frail women’s hearts muffled and hidden by clouds of lace and chiffon. Do you remember that youth whom he immortalised a few years ago? That heir to great properties on whose fatuous brow was stamped the mark of the symbol of militarism? That diagonal mark of white skin on a sunburnt forehead is a painted satire. Kipling gave us a high-flavoured _philippic_ on Tommy Atkins; to Sargent was entrusted the mission of immortalising the Tommy of the upper classes. Like a faithful chronicler, Sargent intended to hand down to posterity the biography of Society as he saw it—that is to say—the living product of artificial environment. Hogarth was a dramatic historian of the unbridled passions of a brutal Society.