Page:Pen And Pencil Sketches - Volume I.djvu/152

98 to-morrow we die and shall be made ourselves clay pipes,’ says the modern world, and drags this poor bright painter down into the abyss with it, vainly clutching at a handful of scent and flowers in the May gardens.

“Under which sorrowful terms, being told also by your grand Academicians that he should paint the nude, and accordingly wasting a year or two of his life in trying to paint schoolboys’ backs and legs without their shirts or breeches, and with such other magazine material as he can pick up of sick gipsies, faded gentlewomen, pretty girls disguised as hawkers, and the red-roofed or grey remnants of old English villages and manor-houses, last wrecks of the country’s peace and honour, remain- ing yet visible among the black ravages of its ruin, he supplies the demands of his temporary public, scarcely patient, even now that he is gone, to pause beside his delicate tulips or under his sharp- leaved willows, and repent for the passing tints and falling petals of the life that might have been so precious, and perhaps, in better days, prolonged.

“That is the main moral of the exhibition. Of the beauty of the drawings, accepting them for what they aim at being, there is little need that I should add anything to what has been said rightly by the chief organs of the London press. Nothing can go beyond them in subtlety of exhi-