I found Cyril in a large and lofty studio in Chelsea, filled with the
curiously carved black furniture of Bombay, mixed, for contrast, with
a few Indian cabinets of carved and fretted ivory exquisitely
wrought. He greeted me cordially. The walls were covered with
Japanese drawings. I began by asking him about The Caricaturist.
'Well,' said he, 'now that the House of Commons has become a
bear-garden, and t'other House a waxwork show, and the intellect and
culture of the country are leaving politics to dummies and cads, how
can the artistic mind condescend to caricature the political world--a
world that has not only ceased to be intelligent, but has even ceased
to be funny? The quarry of _The Caricaturist_ will be literature,
science, and art. Instead of wasting artistic genius upon such small
fry as premiers, diplomatists, and cabinet ministers, our cartoons
will be caricatures of the pictures of Millais, Leighton,
Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Watts, Sandys,
Whistler, Wilderspin: our letterpress will be Aristophanic parodies
of Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne; game
worth flying at, my boy! The art-world is in a dire funk, I can tell
you, for the artistic epidermis has latterly grown genteel and thin.
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