by Mr. Hind to be quite a bad artist.  Apart, therefore, from the admirable criticism which is the main feature of the book, it shows great courage on the part of the inventor, great sacrifice, to admit that C. W. S. was a failure as an artist.  Bad artists, however, are always nice people.  I do not say that the reverse is true; indeed, I know many good and even great artists who are charming; but I never met a thoroughly inferior painter (without any promise of either a future or a past) who was not irresistible socially.  This accounts for some of the elections at the Royal Academy, I believe, and for the pictures on the walls of your friends whose taste you know to be impeccable.  There is more hearty recognition of bad art in England than the Tate Gallery gives us any idea of.

I know that the Chantrey Trustees were deprived of the only possible excuse for their purchases by the finding of Lord Lytton’s Commission; but I, for one, shall always think of them as kindly men with a fellow-feeling for incompetence, who would have bought a work by Claude Williamson Shaw if the opportunity presented itself.  I have sometimes tried to imagine what the pictures of invented artists in fiction or drama were really like—­I fear they were all dreadful performances.  I used to imagine that Oswald Avling was a sort of Segantini, but something he says in the play convinced me that he was merely another Verboekhoven.  Then Thackeray’s Ridley must have been a terrible Philistine—­a sort of Sir John Gilbert.  Poor Basil Hallward’s death was no great loss to art, I surmise:  his portrait of ‘Dorian Grey, Esq.’, from all accounts, resembled the miraculous picture exhibited in Bond Street a short while ago.  I am not surprised that its owner, whose taste improved, I suspect, with advancing years, destroyed it in the ordinary course after reading something by Mr. D. S. MacColl.  It is distinctly stated that Dorian read the Saturday Review!  Frenhofer, Hippolite Schimier, and Leon de Lora were probably chocolate-box painters of the regular second-empire type.  Theobald, we know from Mr. Henry James, was a man of ideas who could not carry out his intentions.  It must have been an exquisite memory of Theobald’s failures which made Pater, when he wished to contrive an imaginary artistic personality, take Watteau as being some one in whose achievements you can believe.  No literary artist can persuade us into admiring pictures which never existed; though an artist can reconstruct from literature a picture which has perished we know, from the ’Calumny of Apelles’ by Botticelli.  It was, therefore, wise to make Claude Williamson Shaw a failure as a painter.  In accordance with my rule he was an excellent fellow, nearly as charming as his author, and better company in a picture-gallery it would be difficult to find—­and you cannot visit picture-galleries with every friend:  you require a sympathetic personality.  It is the Claude—­the Claude Phillips in him which