GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



Nay, is it not all the better for making an appeal to the faculties 

 and nobler emotions of man ? 



It is true that a picture may satisfy the requirements of Art 

 without any such direct appeal ; that a work of art should first 

 attract attention on its aesthetic merits, and not as a study of men 

 and manners. The story, if there be any, should be of secondary 

 importance, otherwise it were better told in words than in print. 

 For Art is not to be the mere handmaiden of Literature ; such a 

 position would derogate from her dignity. However, she is safe- 

 guarded by the needs of the case, because without high technical 

 excellence, the artist cannot reach the heart and intellect of the 

 spectator, and it is obvious that the finer the technique, the more 

 forcibly will the thought, and lesson, be conveyed. 



Hogarth lies in Chiswick Churchyard. Most people know the 

 spot, and the heavy-railed, eighteenth- century tomb raised by his 

 friends to his memory. 



Even those who have never visited Chiswick are familiar with 

 Garrick's epitaph thereon inscribed : 



" Farewell, great painter of mankind, 



Who reached the noblest point of art, 

 Whose pictured morals charm the mind 

 And through the eye correct the heart. 



" If genius fire thee, Reader, stay ; 



If Nature touch thee drop a tear ; 

 If neither move thee turn away, 



For Hogarth's honoured dust lies here." 



James McNeill Whistler, the stranger from across the Atlantic, 

 who made his home with us, and William Hogarth, so sturdily 

 British, whose work, or some of it, Whistler nevertheless greatly 

 admired, types as they are of opposing principles and aims in 

 Art, lie interred in the same graveyard. There are many mansions 

 in the Heaven of Art ; let those who so mercilessly abuse the 

 dissenters from their own narrow creeds, remember this ; and that 

 the apostle of breadth and mystery, with no story to tell beyond 

 the beauty of the vague and suggestive, and the great teacher and 

 humorist who felt no detail to be unworthy of his brush if it 

 accentuated, in language artistically worthy, the force of the human 

 dramas he presented, has each in that heaven his appropriate place. 

 Who will be bold enough to say that we could have spared either ? 



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