fty, spiritual mission,
and had striven to raise design to the ideal level of poetry and music,
but the remoteness of his vision both in painting and poetry and the
incompleteness of his technical powers had been adverse to any real
influence. It is in Keats that the artistic spirit of this century first
found its absolute incarnation.

And these pre-Raphaelites, what were they? If you ask nine-tenths of the
British public what is the meaning of the word aesthetics, they will tell
you it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado; and if you
inquire about the pre-Raphaelites you will hear something about an
eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort of divine crookedness and holy
awkwardness in drawing were the chief objects of art. To know nothing
about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English
education.

As regards the pre-Raphaelites the story is simple enough. In the year
1847 a number of young men in London, poets and painters, passionate
admirers of Keats all of them, formed the habit of meeting together for
discussions on art, the result of such discussions being that the English
Philistine public was roused suddenly from its ordinary apathy by hearing
that there was in its midst a body of young men who had determined to
revolutionise English painting and poetry. They called themselves the
pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

In England, then as now, it was enough for a man to try and produce any
serious beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen; and besides
this, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood--among whom the names of Dante
Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais will be familiar to you--had on their
side three things that the English public never forgives: youth, power
and enthusiasm.

Satire, always as sterile as it is shameful and as impotent as it is
insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to
genius--doing, here as always, infinite harm to the public, blinding them
to what is beautiful, teaching them that irreverence which is the source
of all vileness and narrowness of life, but harming the artist not at
all, rather confirming him in the perfect rightness of his work and
ambition. For to disagree with three-fourths of the British public on
all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest
consolations in all moments of spiritual doubt.

As regards the ideas these young men brought to the regeneration of
English art, we may see at t