The intellectual reaction from Classical to Romantic is duly registered by a change of subject.  Ruins and mediaeval history come into fashion.  For art, which is as little concerned with the elegant bubbles of the eighteenth century as with the foaming superabundance of the Romantic revival, this change is nothing more than the swing of an irrelevant pendulum.  But the new ideas led inevitably to antiquarianism, and antiquarians found something extraordinarily congenial in what was worst in Gothic art.  Obedient limners follow the wiseacres.  What else is there for them to follow?  Stragglers from the age of reason are set down to trick out simpering angels.  No longer permitted to stand on the laws of propriety or their personal dignity, they are ordered to sweeten their cold meats with as much amorous and religious sentiment as they can exude.  Meanwhile the new fellows, far less sincere than the old, who felt nothing and said so, begin to give themselves the airs of artists.  These Victorians are intolerable:  for now that they have lost the old craft and the old tradition of taste, the pictures that they make are no longer pleasantly insignificant; they bellow “stinking mackerel.”

About the middle of the nineteenth century art was as nearly dead as art can be.  The road ran drearily through the sea-level swamps.  There were, of course, men who felt that imitation, whether of nature or of another’s work, was not enough, who felt the outrage of calling the staple products of the “forties” and “fifties” art; but generally they lacked the power to make an effective protest.  Art cannot die out utterly; but it lay sick in caves and cellars.  There were always one or two who had a right to call themselves artists:  the great Ingres[21] overlaps Crome; Corot and Daumier overlap Ingres; and then come the Impressionists.  But the mass of painting and sculpture had sunk to something that no intelligent and cultivated person would dream of calling art.  It was in those days that they invented the commodity which is still the staple of official exhibitions throughout Europe.  You may see acres of it every summer at Burlington House and in the Salon; indeed, you may see little else there.  It does not pretend to be art.  If the producers mistake it for art sometimes, they do so in all innocence:  they have no notion of what art is.  By “art” they mean the imitation of objects, preferably pretty or interesting ones; their spokesmen have said so again and again.  The sort of thing that began to do duty for art about 1840, and still passes muster with the lower middle class, would have been inconceivable at any time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the death of George IV.  Even in the eighteenth century, when they could not create significant form, they knew that accurate imitation was of no value in itself.  It is not until what is still official painting and sculpture and architecture gets itself accepted as a substitute for art, that we can say for certain that the long slope that began with the Byzantine primitives is ended.  But when we have reached this point we know that we can sink no lower.