imitations of the antique, recorded in fresco and mosaic the manners and fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish, would now be an historical gold-mine.  If only they had been Friths instead of being Alma Tademas!  But photography has made impossible any such transmutation of modern rubbish.  Therefore it must be confessed that pictures in the Frith tradition are grown superfluous; they merely waste the hours of able men who might be more profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence.  Still, they are not unpleasant, which is more than can be said for that kind of descriptive painting of which “The Doctor” is the most flagrant example.  Of course “The Doctor” is not a work of art.  In it form is not used as an object of emotion, but as a means of suggesting emotions.  This alone suffices to make it nugatory; it is worse than nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false.  What it suggests is not pity and admiration but a sense of complacency in our own pitifulness and generosity.  It is sentimental.  Art is above morals, or, rather, all art is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works of art are immediate means to good.  Once we have judged a thing a work of art, we have judged it ethically of the first importance and put it beyond the reach of the moralist.  But descriptive pictures which are not works of art, and, therefore, are not necessarily means to good states of mind, are proper objects of the ethical philosopher’s attention.  Not being a work of art, “The Doctor” has none of the immense ethical value possessed by all objects that provoke aesthetic ecstasy; and the state of mind to which it is a means, as illustration, appears to me undesirable.

The works of those enterprising young men, the Italian Futurists, are notable examples of descriptive painting.  Like the Royal Academicians, they use form, not to provoke aesthetic emotions, but to convey information and ideas.  Indeed, the published theories of the Futurists prove that their pictures ought to have nothing whatever to do with art.  Their social and political theories are respectable, but I would suggest to young Italian painters that it is possible to become a Futurist in thought and action and yet remain an artist, if one has the luck to be born one.  To associate art with politics is always a mistake.  Futurist pictures are descriptive because they aim at presenting in line and colour the chaos of the mind at a particular moment; their forms are not intended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information.  These forms, by the way, whatever may be the nature of the ideas they suggest, are themselves anything but revolutionary.  In such Futurist pictures as I have seen—­perhaps I should except some by Severini—­the drawing, whenever it becomes representative as it frequently does, is found to be in that soft and common convention brought into fashion by Besnard some thirty years ago, and much affected by Beaux-Art students ever since.  As works of