People Are Always Good Company When They Are Doing
What They Really Enjoy.
A cat is good company when it is purring,
or a dog when it is wagging its tail.
The sketching clubs up and down the country might form the nucleus
of such a society, provided all professional men were rigorously
excluded. As for the old masters, the better plan would be never
even to look at one of them, and to consign Raffaelle, along with
Plato, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Dante, Goethe, and two others,
neither of them Englishmen, to limbo, as the Seven Humbugs of
Christendom.
While we are about it, let us leave off talking about "art for
art's sake." Who is art that it should have a sake? A work of art
should be produced for the pleasure it gives the producer, and the
pleasure he thinks it will give to a few of whom he is fond; but
neither money nor people whom he does not know personally should be
thought of. Of course such a society as I have proposed would not
remain incorrupt long. "Everything that grows, holds in perfection
but a little moment." The members would try to imitate
professional men in spite of their rules, or, if they escaped this
and after a while got to paint well, they would become dogmatic,
and a rebellion against their authority would be as necessary ere
long as it was against that of their predecessors: but the balance
on the whole would be to the good.
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