Henry Tonks, Mr. Augustus John, Mr. William Orpen, Mr. Von Glehn, Mr. MacColl, and Professor Holmes, cannot possess even such unity of purpose as inspired Mr. Holman Hunt and his associates of the ’fifties.  The New English Art Club is simply an admirably administered association whose members have rather less in common than is shared by the members of an ordinary political club.  The exhibitions are for this reason intensely interesting.  They cannot be waved aside like mobs, and no comprehensive epigram can do them even an injustice.

I never knew any painter worthy of the name who paid the smallest attention to what a critic says, even in conversation.  He will retort; but he will not change his style or regulate his motives to suit a critic’s palate.  So may I now mention their faults?  What painter is without fault?  Their faults are shared by nearly all of them; their virtues are their own.  I see among them an absence of any desire for beauty—­for physical beauty.  If the artists have fulfilled a mission in abolishing ‘the sweetly pretty Christmas supplement kind of work,’ I think they dwell too long on the trivial and the ignoble.  They put a not very interesting domesticity into their frames.  Rossetti, of course, wheeled about the marriage couch, but his was itself an interesting object of virtu.  Modern art ceased to express the better aspirations and thoughts of the day when modern artists refused to become the servants of the commune, but asserted themselves as a component part of an intellectual republic.  That is why people only commission portraits, and prefer to buy old masters who anticipate those better aspirations.  Burne-Jones, however, expressed in paint that longing to be out of the nineteenth century which was so widespread.  Now we are well out of it, the rising generation does not esteem his works with the same enthusiasm as the elders.  It reads Mr. Wells on the future, and looks into the convex mirror of Mr. Bernard Shaw; but it does not buy Dubedats to the extent that it ought to do.  The members of the New English Art Club could, I think, preserve their aesthetic conscience and yet paint beautiful things and beautiful people.  Mr. Steer has now given them a lead.  I wonder what Mr. Winter’s opinion would be?  He is the best salesman in London.

Among dealers, the ancient firm of Messrs. P. & D. Colnaghi, of which Thackeray writes, is the doyen.  That of Messrs. Agnew is the douane.  Here it is that the official seal must be set before modern paintings can pass onwards to the Midlands and the middle classes.  Well, I felicitate the august officials on removing a tariff of prejudice; I felicitate the young artists who, released from the bondage of the Egyptian Hall, can now enjoy the lighter air, the larger day, the pasturage and patronage of Palestine.  I compliment the fearless collectors, such as Mr. C. K. Butler, Mr. Herbert Trench, Mr. Daniel, His Honour Judge Evans, the Leylands and the