The brilliant talent which has quite lately and quite suddenly arisen, to
devote itself to the use of the day or of the week, in illustrated
papers--the enormous production of art in black and white--is assuredly a
confession that the Honours of Mortality are worth working for. Fifty
years ago, men worked for the honours of immortality; these were the
commonplace of their ambition; they declined to attend to the beauty of
things of use that were destined to be broken and worn out, and they
looked forward to surviving themselves by painting bad pictures; so that
what to do with their bad pictures in addition to our own has become the
problem of the nation and of the householder alike. To-day men have
began to learn that their sons will be grateful to them for few bequests.
Art consents at last to work upon the tissue and the china that are
doomed to the natural and necessary end--destruction; and art shows a
most dignified alacrity to do her best, daily, for the "process," and for
oblivion.
Doubtless this abandonment of hopes so large at once and so cheap costs
the artist something; nay, it implies an acceptance of the inevitable
that is not less than heroic. And the reward has been in the singular
and manifest increase of vitality in this work which is done for so short
a life. Fittingly indeed does life reward the acceptance of death,
inasmuch as to die is to have been alive. There is a real circulation of
blood-quick use, brief beauty, abolition, recreation. The honour of the
day is for ever the honour of that day. It goes into the treasury of
things that are honestly and--completely ended and done with. And when
can so happy a thing be said of a lifeless oil-painting? Who of the wise
would hesitate? To be honourable for one day--one named and dated day,
separate from all other days of the ages--or to be for an unlimited time
tedious?