GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



so frequently following the removal from among us of those who 

 have played a conspicuous part in their day ; and this is more 

 particularly true of artists, and literary men ; for work that is 

 scientific and practical in its purpose, can be brought to the test 

 of experiment ; and science is essentially progressive, and not 

 subject to the fluctuation of taste, and the caprices of fashion. It 

 is otherwise with the fine arts, and the generation succeeding 

 Leighton and Millais, has witnessed in some quarters and these 

 actually defended by the Press the violation of every canon of 

 art by which taste might be guided and controlled. High ideals, 

 and a reverence for nature and the great achievements of the past, 

 have given way to a passionate desire to be original at any cost, 

 and to a clamorous self-advertisement. Looking back to the 

 condition and prospects of the Arts in the years immediately 

 preceding the great war, one realizes that we had then reached an 

 era of aesthetic topsy-turvydom that if art has anything to do 

 with morals, and I think it has, was significant of much that has 

 happened since. The sinister pictures that amused the thought- 

 less, bewildered the inexperienced, and caused deep resentment and 

 fears for art, in the breasts of the serious thinker seem to me to 

 have been the fitting foreword to the vision of the world as we now 

 see it ; a world in which international law has been wantonly 

 violated much as the rules of Art have been, and in which horror 

 succeeds horror. Is it too fanciful to say that the malign influence 

 of Nietzsche, spread over a continent, found visible expression in 

 Post Impressionism, and Futurism ? That as anarchy and cruelty 

 were openly preached by the man so anarchy and frightfulness 

 appear in the pictures ? 



Fortunately for Lord Leighton himself, though perhaps less so 

 for the arts, in the heyday of his artistic predominance and social 

 success, the anarchic influences that have since disturbed that 

 small section of the world that takes genuine interest in Art, had 

 not made themselves seriously felt. Revolutionary symptoms 

 had indeed appeared from time to time ; and of these Mr. Philip 

 Calderon, Keeper of the Royal Academy from 1887 to 1898 

 makes amusing mention in a letter he wrote to me in 1892 

 from which I shall have occasion to quote. These symptoms of 

 extravagance, however, were kept in check until the close of his 

 career, by the President's controlling influence and correct taste. 



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