Page:The Obligations of the Universities Towards Art.djvu/15

 dictates of reason in the young devoting themselves to the career.

These plaints have not been uttered in any narrow spirit, for it is evident the misdirection has been made not only in the loose and prejudiced spirit of previous journalistic writers on Art, but in the interests of a new movement, proclaiming a complete contempt for beauty of body and mind, and recommending young adventurers with paint and clay to emulate one another in setting at naught patient study and painstaking.

Leading up to this innovation, critics have for years advocated study in Paris, and many young men who have late in life taken to Art as a profession, and who know the commercial value of newspaper championship, have adopted this counsel, and have followed the wildest deviations of the realistic school, and so found a communistic road to distinction, the discoverers of which—spurred by inevitable antagonism to the over-sentimental and prettified idealism formerly paramount—have preferred a course the furthest away from fastidiousness of every kind.

The works of this realistic school are of a nature which to any previous age would have been inconceivable, and to any future generation it may be concluded they will be quite incredible, for it is impossible that the common sense of the world can exercise patience enough to preserve them even as curiosities.