box, it creates a presumption of doubt as to whether there is anything particular in it.  In my nursery days one of my brothers was fond of locking up his private treasures in a box, producing it in public, unfastening it, glancing into it with a smile, and then softly closing it and turning the key in a way calculated to provoke the most intense curiosity as to the contents; but upon investigation it proved to contain nothing but the wool of sheep, dried beans, and cases of exploded cartridges.

So, too, I have known both writers and artists who made a mystery out of their craft, professed a holy rapture, as if the business of imagination and the art of setting things down were processes that could not be explained to ordinary people, but were the property of a brotherhood.  And thus grow up cliques and coteries, of people who, by mutual admiration, try to console one another for the absence of the applause which the world will not concede them, and to atone for the coldness of the public by a warmth of intimate proximity.

This does not in the least apply to groups of people who are genuinely and keenly interested in art of any kind, and form a congenial circle in which they discuss, frankly and enthusiastically, methods of work, the books, ideas, pictures, and music which interest them.  That is quite a different thing, a real fortress of enthusiasm in the midst of Meshech and Kedar.  What makes it base and morbid is the desire to exclude for the sake of exclusion; to indulge in solitary raptures, hoping to be overheard; to keep the tail of the eye upon the public; to attempt to mystify; and to trade upon the inquisitive instinct of human beings, the natural desire, that is, to know what is going on within any group that seems to have exciting business of its own.

The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a group and not a coterie.  They were engaged in working and enjoying, in looking out for artistic promise, in welcoming and praising any performance of a kind that Rossetti recognised as “stunning.”  They were sure of their ground.  The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its mystic initials, was all a gigantic game; and they held together because they were revolutionary in this, that they wished to slay, as one stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and sentimental art of the day.  They did not effect anything like a revolution, of course.  It was but a ripple on the flowing stream, and they diverged soon enough, most of them, into definite tracks of their own.  The strength of the movement lay in the fact that they hungered and thirsted after art, clamouring for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an ordinary man clamours for beer.  But their aim was not to mystify or to enlarge their own consequence, but to convert the unbeliever, and to produce fine things.