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 esthetic 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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