To
borrow Doctor Johnson's phrase, "many men, many women, and many
children" could produce art after this fashion; and they do.
So right are the practitioners of this puerile art in their proclaimed
belief that the public will never accept it while anything else exists,
that one might be willing to treat it with the silent contempt it
deserves were it not for the efforts of certain critics and writers for
the press to convince us that it ought to be accepted. Some of these men
seem to be intimidated by the blunders of the past. Knowing that
contemporary criticism has damned almost every true artist of the
nineteenth century, they are determined not to be caught napping; and
they join in shouts of applause as each new harlequin steps upon the
stage. They forget that it is as dangerous to praise ignorantly as to
blame unjustly, and that the railer at genius, though he may seem more
malevolent, will scarce appear so ridiculous to posterity as the dupe of
the mountebank. Others of them are, no doubt, honest victims of that
illusion of progress to which we are all more or less subject--to that
ingrained belief that all evolution is upward and that the latest thing
must necessarily be the best. They forget that the same process which
has relieved man of his tail has deprived the snake of his legs and the
kiwi of his wings.
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