The Will and the Way by Bernard Capes — Read

The Royal Academy exhibition opens, as all the world knows, its portals to an ecstatic public on the first Monday in May. Those are the lock-gates, as it were, to a stream of life at flood. Fashion pours in till the rooms can hold no more, swirls and babbles awhile, and flows out again by the swing doors, to the lower levels of Piccadilly. Any acquaintance with pictures is the last thing the flood has dreamed of making meanwhile. It has been in far too congested a state to reflect on anything but its own discomforts. A glimpse of a girl and a dog, of a silver birch reflected in a pool, of a tumbling wave, transparent as the convention which produced it--any one, or all of these, caught through casual loop-holes between ineffable frocks and peerless and peerful coats, must suffice it for all the culture contained in a couple of thousand or so painted canvasses. For the rest, it has the individual consolation of knowing that, if fire were to break out and anneal the whole conglomerate mass of which it forms an item, it would be baked up, like a currant in a cake, with a horde of dukes, duchesses, bishops, and celebrities of every caste and description, and be thenceforth for all time a distinguished well-connected memory. The game, therefore, may be said, literally, to be 'worth the candle'--to those, anyhow, who like the game.

Mr. Robert Le Strang was not one of these. Perhaps he under-estimated, or had forgotten in his pretty lengthy exile from native institutions, the enormous attractions of that one which represents pictorial culture at its highest social expression. He had seized this earliest opportunity to examine the work of an artist in whom he was interested, and he found the task beyond him. All the approaches to everywhere were blocked. He was shouldered, had his toes trodden on, his hat tilted over his eyes, and his temper ruffled. Being by nature a philosophically polite man, he decided that he had better give up the struggle before it betrayed him into retaliation, and postpone his search to a more accommodating occasion. He left the building and went home.