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 zesthetic 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 ? 
236 
