he base of their artistic creations a desire
for a deeper spiritual value to be given to art as well as a more
decorative value.

Pre-Raphaelites they called themselves; not that they imitated the early
Italian masters at all, but that in their work, as opposed to the facile
abstractions of Raphael, they found a stronger realism of imagination, a
more careful realism of technique, a vision at once more fervent and more
vivid, an individuality more intimate and more intense.

For it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the aesthetic
demands of its age: there must be also about it, if it is to affect us
with any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality, an
individuality remote from that of ordinary men, and coming near to us
only by virtue of a certain newness and wonder in the work, and through
channels whose very strangeness makes us more ready to give them welcome.

La personalite, said one of the greatest of modern French critics, voila
ce qui nous sauvera.

But above all things was it a return to Nature--that formula which seems
to suit so many and such diverse movements: they would draw and paint
nothing but what they saw, they would try and imagine things as they
really happened. Later there came to the old house by Blackfriars
Bridge, where this young brotherhood used to meet and work, two young men
from Oxford, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris--the latter
substituting for the simpler realism of the early days a more exquisite
spirit of choice, a more faultless devotion to beauty, a more intense
seeking for perfection: a master of all exquisite design and of all
spiritual vision. It is of the school of Florence rather than of that of
Venice that he is kinsman, feeling that the close imitation of Nature is
a disturbing element in imaginative art. The visible aspect of modern
life disturbs him not; rather is it for him to render eternal all that is
beautiful in Greek, Italian, and Celtic legend. To Morris we owe poetry
whose perfect precision and clearness of word and vision has not been
excelled in the literature of our country, and by the revival of the
decorative arts he has given to our individualised romantic movement the
social idea and the social factor also.

But the revolution accomplished by this clique of young men, with
Ruskin's faultless and fervent eloquence to help them, was not one of
ideas merely but of execution, not one of conceptions but of creations.