fered
for old family recipes. The simple peasants of the district willingly
parted with copies of their heirlooms, for a consideration, to the
different American agents, who, filled with joy, repaired to their London
offices in order to compare notes, and fully persuaded that England was a
greener country than ever Constable painted it. What was their
mortification on discovering that all the recipes were entirely
different; they could not be reconciled even by machinery. So it is with
Pre-Raphaelitism; every critic believes that he knows the great secret,
and can always quote from one of the brotherhood something in support of
his view. At the beginning the brothers meekly accepted Ruskin's
explanation of their existence; his, indeed, was a very convenient,
though not entirely accurate, exposition of their collective view, if
they can be said to have possessed one. How far Ruskin was out of
sympathy with them, indiscreet memoirs have revealed. An artistic idea,
or a group of ideas, must always be broken gently to the English people,
because the acceptance of them necessitates the swallowing of words. When
the golden ladders are let down from heaven by poets, artists, or critics
even; or new spirits are hovering in the intellectual empyrean, the
patriarch public snoring on its stone pillow wakes up; but he will not
wrestle with the angel. He mistakes the ladders for scaffolding, or some
temporary embarrassment in the street traffic; he orders their instant
removal; he writes angry letters to the papers and invokes the police.
After some time Ruskin's definition of Pre-Raphaelitism was generally
accepted, and then the death of Rossetti produced other recipes for the
Stilton cheese, Mr. Hall Caine being among the grocers. Whatever the
correct definition may be, ungracious and ungrateful though it is to
praise the dead at the expense of the living, it has to be recognised
that among the remarkable group of painters in which even the minor men
were little masters, the greatest artist of them all was Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. 'By critic I mean finding fault,' says Sir William Richmond;
so let us follow his advice, and avoid technical discussion along with
the popular jargon of art criticism. 'After staying two or three hours
in the always-delightful Leicester Galleries, let us walk home and think
a little of what we have seen.' For the essence of beauty there is
nothing of Mr. Holman Hunt's to compare with Rossetti's