ery
Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the
open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however
studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person. Every
minute accessory is painted in the same manner. And one of the chief
reasons for the violent opposition with which the school has been
attacked by other artists, is the enormous cost of care and labor which
such a system demands from those who adopt it, in contradistinction to
the present slovenly and imperfect style.

[Footnote 39: Or, where imagination is necessarily trusted to, by always
endeavoring to conceive a fact as it really was likely to have happened,
rather than as it most prettily _might_ have happened. The various
members of the school are not all equally severe in carrying out its
principles, some of them trusting their memory or fancy very far; only
all agreeing in the effort to make their memories so accurate as to seem
like portraiture, and their fancy so probable as to seem like memory.]

133. This is the main Pre-Raphaelite principle. But the battle which its
supporters have to fight is a hard one; and for that battle they have
been fitted by a very peculiar character.

You perceive that the principal resistance they have to make is to that
spurious beauty, whose attractiveness had tempted men to forget, or to
despise, the more noble quality of sincerity: and in order at once to
put them beyond the power of temptation from this beauty, they are, as
a body, characterized by a total absence of sensibility to the ordinary
and popular forms of artistic gracefulness; while, to all that still
lower kind of prettiness, which regulates the disposition of our scenes
upon the stage, and which appears in our lower art, as in our annuals,
our commonplace portraits, and statuary, the Pre-Raphaelites are not
only dead, but they regard it with a contempt and aversion approaching
to disgust. This character is absolutely necessary to them in the
present time; but it, of course, occasionally renders their work
comparatively unpleasing. As the school becomes less aggressive, and
more authoritative--which it will do--they will enlist into their ranks
men who will work, mainly, upon their principles, and yet embrace more
of those characters which are generally attractive, and this great
ground of offense will be removed.

134. Again: you observe that as landscape painters, their principles
must, in grea