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in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite and its abundance in those by the adversaries of Pre-Raphaelitism. Finally, tired of inventing definitions that all exclude some of the objects to be defined, certain critics elevated themselves to very general reflection, and did something like a village preacher who, having become incoherent in his explanations, decides to start speaking in Latin. Yes, cried one of them, the Pre-Raphaelite movement was more than a revolution in the ideals and methods of painting. It was a single wave in a great reactionary tide the ever-rising protest and rebellion of our century against artificial authority, against tradition and convention in every department of life. It broke out, socially, with the French Revolution; it found voice in the poetic impulse which followed it in Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats; it spread from ethics to politics, it touched all morality and all knowledge, and it affected the whole literature of Europe from philosophy to fiction and from the drama to the lyric poem. Schumann and Chopin breathed it into music. Darwin, by reforming the world of science, laid down in the theory of evolution the basis of this new cosmogony[22] Here, one loses ones footing entirely. A school of art that resembles so many things outside art is not clearly differentiated enough from its rivals that, when it is described, one can recognise a painting that belongs to it. The definition of Pre-Raphaelitism is too narrow if we restrict it to the quest for detail, but becomes too large if we extend it to the conquest of a new philosophy. In one case, Pre-Raphaelitism is not really contained, and in the other, it is contained with too many other things. If one insists on the former, one must admit that the Pre-Raphaelites all broke with their aesthetic conventions to differing degrees, and if one adopts the second, one must conclude that they did not have any specific or marked conventions.
John Everett Millais,
Autumn Leaves, 1856.
Oil on canvas, 104.3 x 74 cm.
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester.
William Holman Hunt,
The Hireling Shepherd, 1851-1852.
Oil on canvas, 76.4 x 109.5 cm.
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester.
William Holman Hunt,
A Converted British Family Sheltering
a Christian Missionary from
the Persecution of the Druids , 1850.
Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 111 x 141 cm.
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology,
University of Oxford, Oxford.
But they did. One must remember that this narrow theory of realism was never anything but a training method used by twenty-year-old painters, which they invented to place a necessary tool in their hands, even if they would later abandon it. It was a framework for study, not a plan for execution; a learning manual, not a Bible for an ideal; a path, not a goal.[23] If, in the moments of exaggeration that are natural in youth, a writer in Germ described things differently, he had misunderstood. It is a great error to go looking through Germ, where neither Millais, nor Hunt, nor Rossetti explained their ideas, to find the secret of their hopes for art. Let us instead look at their works. Rossetti, in keeping only rarely to the rules that he himself had laid down, proved that in his eyes, painstaking realism was not the goal of art. Millais, by abandoning the Pre-Raphaelite theories starting at the age of twenty-eight, showed even more clearly that he considered them to be constraints from which he should one day free himself. Hunt thinks in exactly the same way: In agreeing to use the utmost elaboration in painting our first pictures, he said, we never meant more than to insist that the practice was essential for training the eye and hand of the young artist; we should not have admitted that the relinquishment of this habit of work by a matured painter would make him an apostate Pre-Raphaelite.[24] Finally, even Ruskin, who has often been accused of exaggeration, pointed out as early as 1843, in the book that the young Hunt read at night, that the realistic study of nature was in his opinion only a training method. Immediately after the call to reject nothing, select nothing and scorn nothing, which is always quoted, come these words which are never cited but nonetheless clarify his thoughts: Then, when their memories are stored, and their imaginations fed, and their hands firm, let them take
up the scarlet and the gold, give the reins to their fancy, and show us what their heads are made of. We will follow them wherever they choose to lead; we will check at nothing; they are then our masters, and are fit to be so. They have placed themselves above our criticism, and we will listen to their words in all faith and humility; but not unless they themselves have before bowed, in the same submission, to a higher Authority and Master.[25] It is therefore neither shocking nor extraordinary that Madox Brown, who was more knowledgeable than his followers, did not constrain himself to their method, or that Rossetti left it behind rather early, after one or two half-works, such as The Annunciation and Found, or that Millais did the same a few years later. There is no Pre-Raphaelite that did not, at some time, ignore the realist method. Identifying Pre-Raphaelitism with the Pre-Raphaelite theory of the early days leads to the conclusion that the movement was abandoned by all of its members.[26]