, the Pre-Raffaelites
were not artists, but archaeologists who tried to make intelligent
curiosity do the work of impassioned contemplation. As artists they do
not differ essentially from the ruck of Victorian painters. They will
reproduce the florid ornament of late Gothic as slavishly as the steady
Academician reproduces the pimples on an orange; and if they do attempt
to simplify--some of them have noticed the simplification of the
primitives--they do so in the spirit, not of an artist, but of the
"sedulous ape."

Simplification is the conversion of irrelevant detail into significant
form. A very bold Pre-Raffaelite was capable of representing a meadow
by two minutely accurate blades of grass. But two minutely accurate
blades of grass are just as irrelevant as two million; it is the formal
significance of a blade of grass or of a meadow with which the artist is
concerned. The Pre-Raffaelite method is at best symbolism, at worst pure
silliness. Had the Pre-Raffaelites been blessed with profoundly
imaginative minds they might have recaptured the spirit of the Middle
Ages instead of imitating its least significant manifestations. But had
they been great artists they would not have wished to recapture
anything. They would have invented forms for themselves or derived them
from their surroundings, just as the mediaeval artists did. Great
artists never look back.

When art is as nearly dead as it was in the middle of the nineteenth
century, scientific accuracy is judged the proper end of painting. Very
well, said the French Impressionists, be accurate, be scientific. At
best the Academic painter sets down his concepts; but the concept is not
a scientific reality; the men of science tell us that the visible
reality of the Universe is vibrations of light. Let us represent things
as they are--scientifically. Let us represent light. Let us paint what
we see, not the intellectual superstructure that we build over our
sensations. That was the theory: and if the end of art were
representation it would be sound enough. But the end of art is not
representation, as the great Impressionists, Renoir, Degas, Manet,
knew (two of them happily know it still) the moment they left off
arguing and bolted the studio door on that brilliant theorist, Claude
Monet. Some of them, to be sure, turned out polychromatic charts of
desolating dullness--Monet towards the end, for instance. The
Neo-Impressionists--Seurat, Signac, and Cross--have produc