With him the
formula was for the _spectator_ of art; it has been misapplied to the
_maker_ of art. Pater's studies of the great pictures of the Renaissance
are, if anything, rather too much taken up with their intellectual
content, and their latent revelation of the temper of the time and the
artist. No, these young men are no disciples of Pater. In their
resoluteness to live in the Beautiful (which is not always
distinguishable from the Bestial), they have forgotten the other items of
the trinity of Goethe, they have lost sight of the True and the Whole. It
is Whistler who is the prophet of the divorce of Art from Life, of the
antithesis of Art and Nature. When Whistler said, "Another foolish
sunset," he spake the word that called into being all these "degenerate"
paradoxes, though I am not sure but what Mr. Sydney Grundy was before him
in creating a stage-manager who thinks meanly of the moons and the scenic
backgrounds of real life. It is a good joke, this of Nature paling before
Art, or reduced to plagiarising Art,--"Where, if not from the
Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping
down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into
monstrous shadows?"--but as the basis of a philosophy of Art it palls.
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