Holman Hunt, then, having found his way to the earnest study of nature as a basis for art—Ruskin helping him on the road—in turn pointed out the way to Millais. And hardly had Hunt and Millais become acquainted, before they were joined by another Academy student, of whom we must now give some account.

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian exile who became Professor of Italian at King's College. His maternal grandmother was an Englishwoman. Gabriele had three other children, Maria Francesca, William Michael, and Christina Georgina. Of this highly gifted family it must suffice to say that each of its members became distinguished as a writer, and Dante Gabriel—as he chose to call himself—also as a painter. From his earliest years he breathed an atmosphere of romance, of literature, and of art. Four years later than Millais, and two years after Millais left it, he entered Sass's Academy, then kept by a Mr. Cary, and after remaining there four years, passed to the Academy Schools. Neither at the one place nor the other did he work with sufficient steadi-ness to receive a thorough grounding in the practice of his art; indeed, he did not proceed to the Life and Painting Schools at the Academy. For a time, it seemed likely that he would abandon painting for poetry, in which, as early as 1847, he did such enduring work as “ .” But he had already seen and admired Madox Brown's ; and the same painter's cartoons exhibited in Westminster Hall, and his , exhibited in 1848, so aroused his enthusiasm that he forthwith wrote to the artist asking to be received as a pupil. The story has often been told how Madox Brown, smarting under lack of appreciation, suspected a practical joke, and called at the address given in the letter armed with a thick stick and prepared to chastise the offender should his suspicion prove to be correct. He found, however, that Rossetti was in earnest, and acceded to his request. The relation of master and pupil did not last long. Rossetti was set to draw jars and bottles, and Pegasus soon kicked over the traces. At the Royal Academy Exhibition that year Rossetti saw Holman Hunt's , admired it, and forthwith sought that painter's help. Hunt, seeing that his pupil could be drawn but not driven, set him to work on a design with a literary motive, but including still-life accessories that would develop his technical skill. Thus the pill was sugared, and by August of the same year Rossetti was sharing his studio, and Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti were brought into close companionship.

It was well for English art that these three young men thus came together. Separately they might have achieved little or much; but they could not have accomplished that of which they actually proved capable : the carrying of revolution to a speedily successul issue. Each contributed to the common stock of ability something that the others lacked, and the whole was a combination of brilliant gifts. Holman Hunt was a sound craftsman, unfailingly conscientious and painstaking in his work, and resolved to devote his art to the highest purpose. Millais, as we have seen, had met with unprecedented success as a student, and was already looked to for great things. A movement in which he took part could not fail for lack of notice, and even if opposition should come—as it did, and of the bitterest kind—he had a buoyancy of spirit that would bear up bravely against it long after most men would have succumbed. Rossetti's technical equipment was far inferior to that of the other two, but he overflowed with zeal and enthusiasm, was a born inspirer of men, and had great imaginative power. Revolt was not far distant when these three had begun to discuss together the problems of art.

The final resolve was precipitated by the study of Lasinio's engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, which revealed to the young students an art not satisfied with itself, but reaching after higher things, and earnestly seeking to interpret nature and human life. To be of the same spirit as the painters who preceded Raphael, using art as a means to noblest ends, and not merely to emulate the accomplishment of Raphael, as if art had said its last word when he died, was the ambition that the engravings awakened in the three young artists as they studied them. They were not blind to the genius of Raphael, nor did they deny that art had accomplished great things after his time; but, in Holman Hunt's own words, “It appeared to them that afterwards art was so frequently tainted with the canker of corruption that it was only in the earlier work they could find with certainty absolute health. Up to a definite point, the tree was healthy: above it disease began, side by side with life there appeared death.”

Propaganda definitely decided upon, the young artists formed them-selves into a society, for which they chose as a title “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” and they proceeded to enrol four other members—James Collinson, a painter, Thomas Woolner, a sculptor, F. G. Stephens, a painter who afterwards devoted himself to literature, and Rossetti's brother, William Michael, a writer and critic. It is not certain whether or not Ford Madox Brown was invited to join the Brotherhood. On the whole, the probability is that he was not so invited. Mr. Holman Hunt has said definitely : “The Pre-Raphaelites, although admiring the genius displayed in the works of Madox Brown, did not ask or desire him to become a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, although, almost entirely owing to the influence of Rossetti, an invitation was framed but never delivered. Their reasons were : (1) That he was rather too old to sympathise entirely with a movement that was a little boyish in tone ; (2) that although his works showed great dramatic power, they had too much of the grimly grotesque to render him an ally likely to do service with the general public ; and (3) that his works had none of the minute rendering of natural objects that the Pre-Raphaelites, as young men, had determined should distinguish their works.” Madox Brown himself expressed his dislike of cliques. The aims of the Pre-Raphaelites were practically identical with his own, and there is no doubt that he influenced them considerably both in example and precept. But so far as the organised movement was concerned, he was certainly not a sympa-thiser, and his influence must have been deterrent rather than encourag-ing. It is for this reason that he cannot be given, not merely a high place, but any place at all, amongst those who accomplished speedily that which but for their organised revolt might not have come about for many years. For the victory was greatly helped by the very fierceness of the attack they drew upon themselves. It gained for them, as we shall shortly see, a most powerful ally.

Before recording the story of their conflict with the defenders of the then current principles and practice of art, we must learn more clearly what it was for which they had determined to fight. Mr. William Rossetti has thus summed up the matter. They were agreed that, to be a Pre-Raphaelite, it was necessary : “ (1) To have genuine ideas to express ; (2) to study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them ; (3) to sympathise with what is direct and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote ; and (4) most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.” It will be observed that nothing is said here about the “minute rendering of natural objects” which Mr. Holman Hunt says, as quoted above, “the Pre-Raphaelites, as young men, had determined should distinguish their works.” Also we may note that while Mr. F. G. Stephens has said that one of their principles “was to the effect that when a member found a model whose aspect answered his idea of the subject required, that model should be painted exactly, so to say, hair for hair,” Mr. William Rossetti has denied that such a principle was ever adopted. The explanation of these discrepancies is, of course, that the Brotherhood was not a company with a prospectus accurately drawn up by a lawyer; there was general rather than detailed agreement of aim; and the after-recollection of each member as to that agreement has been coloured by what was in his own mind at the time. It is significant that while Holman Hunt has remained faithful to the delineation of minute detail throughout his career, Rossetti never troubled himself overmuch about it, and Millais abandoned it before many years had elapsed. Even Holman Hunt has definitely stated that, though this principle was adopted for their work as young men, it was never intended to be binding upon them in later years. The Pre-Raphaelites were sufficiently agreed to unite in a revolt; they were not sufficiently alike in temper and aim to ensure that their practice should remain identical in after years, even if it were so at the outset, and even this was only approximately the case. We may note also that Ruskin's advice to be absolutely faithful to nature was only addressed to young artists, and that, immediately after the passage in “ ” quoted above he says : “Then when their memories are stored, and their imaginations fed, and their hands firm, let them take up the scarlet and 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.”

Revolt was determined upon and the standard of revolt had to be raised. This was done in the year 1849, when each of the three painters exhibited a picture with the letters “P.R.B.” appended to his signature. Either the letters were overlooked, or their significance was not understood, for they passed without notice ; and all the three pictures were favourably received. They were Holman Hunt's , Millais's , and Rossetti's . The following year Holman Hunt exhibited , Millais , and , and Rossetti . Now the storm burst. The meaning of the letters “P.R.B.” had become known; and the revolutionary aims of the young artists were bitterly resented and their performances vehemently attacked. The whole Press was against them—excepting the , but there William Rossetti was the critic! In Charles Dickens wrote, with reference to Millais's picture, “You come . . . to the con-templation of a Holy Family. You will have the goodness to discharge from your minds all post-Raphael ideas, all religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts ; all tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful or beautiful associations, and to prepare yourselves as befits such a subject—pre-Raphaelly considered—for the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive and repelling.” The previous year's pictures had all been sold. This year there were no sales, with the exception of Millais' , which, however, had been commissioned by a dealer and long remained on his hands. The rebels were courageous enough to try again, and in 1851 Holman Hunt ex-hibited , and Millais , , and . Rossetti did not exhibit any important work ; so the other two were left to carry on the conflict. The outburst of indignant pro-test was more furious than before, and the demand was even made that the offending canvases should be removed from the walls of the Academy.

Now it was that the stalwart ally already mentioned came to the rescue. As we have seen, John Ruskin had already unconsciously helped the movement through “,” which Holman Hunt had read. He now wrote two letters to the Times in defence of the artists against whom all other writers were unanimous in violent abuse. He carried the war into the enemy's camp by replying in detail to various criticisms. The Pre-Raphaelites' pictures had been accused of lacking truth to nature. Ruskin maintained their truthfulness and transferred the accusation to the work of the Academicians. He similarly dismissed, and then brought against the popular painters, such charges as those of faultiness in perspective and lack of light and shade. The light and shade of the Pre-Raphaelites, he declared, was that of nature ; the popular painters only gave the dim chiaroscuro of the studio. Hostile criticism first wavered before this vigorous counter-attack, then fled, and the victory was won. That which people could not see for themselves they could see when it was pointed out to them by the author of“.”

The main facts respecting the Pre-Raphaelite movement appear to be, then, that independently of Madox Brown's earlier “return to nature” Holman Hunt also found his way there, and afterwards induced Millais to follow him; that, although Rossetti had been greatly influenced by Madox Brown, it was Holman Hunt's help that was of most use to him as a painter; that it was when Hunt, Millais and Rossetti were working together that the organised movement, the Brotherhood, was started by them; that they, and more especially Hunt and Millais, bore the brunt of the battle against adverse—we might say hostile—criticism ; and that the battle was turned from threatened defeat to almost sudden victory with the help of their literary ally Ruskin.

What had been accomplished? Certain deadening conventions and formulæ had been discredited. Not for the first, nor for the last time had the authorities been shown to lack authority. Nature had been vindicated as the great storehouse of truth and beauty to which the artist must constantly go for suggestion and inspiration, if not literally to imitate what he finds there, if his work is to have vital beauty. There had also been vindicated the artist's right to be himself, to speak his own thought in his own way, not to be called upon to mimic the manner of some one else, however eminent. Such things as these had been gained. To the debit side of the account must be placed some confusion of the boundaries of nature and art, due to excesses inevitably incident to revolt. The gains, however, were permanent. Always hereafter must it be easier for English art to shake off a surplus weight of tradition than it would have been but for the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The losses were temporary. Things lost sight of, or wrongly seen, came into view again when the dust of the conflict had been laid. The Pre-Raphaelite Millais lived to paint . The opinion has already been expressed that English art would have recovered from the malady that afflicted it even had the organised Pre-Raphaelite movement never existed. There would still have been such men as Watts, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, and these, and others, could not have been killed by the prevailing formalism. But the Brotherhood was formed, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti did revolt against the Academic tradition, Ruskin did come to their help against those who would have shouted them down; it was in this way that the revival was accomplished; and the men and the work they did must ever have a high place in the annals of English art.

There was also gain in the revolution, as against a possible quiet evolution, in the calling out of conspicuous qualities of courage and de-termination. For a time these young men had to suffer more than abuse, however violent. They had to face actual hardship, to have pictures that had been commissioned left on their hands ; and in one case an R.A., who had given Holman Hunt a commission, denied, after the outcry against the Brotherhood had arisen, that he had ever done so. Millais knew what it was to have left on his hands a picture, the money promised for which had been spent beforehand on the mere necessaries of life for his parents and himself. Happily, in this case the friend in need soon turned up. The young artists may or may not have known it from the outset, but they had chosen the hardest way for themselves of accomplishing their object; and there is gain, both to one's self and others, in bravely overcoming difficulties.

Where was Madox Brown all this time? He was going his own way, independently of the Brethren, and getting as his portion, not abuse, but mere neglect. Nor did he obtain the approval and defence of Ruskin. It may be said, therefore, that his lot was a worse one than that of the Brethren ; and perhaps this is true. Was it wrong, then, to say that, in choosing revolt, they had chosen the hardest way? No; because, at the first, their pictures sold, and it was at least as much their open defiance of authority as the character of their work that raised the outcry against them. Madox Brown's work has not even yet, perhaps, obtained as general approval as was soon obtained by that of the Pre-Raphaelites. This is not said in his disparagement. The present writer has more than admiration, he has reverence, for the genius of the man who painted , , , , and the mural paintings in the Manchester Town Hall. But it was needful to say what has been said in order to determine his relation to the organised Pre-Raphaelite movement. He himself did not wholly approve of it. No wrong is done to him, therefore, by showing that he played no part in it.

Little has been said hitherto with regard to the other members of the Brotherhood, and there is not much to say. Mr. William Rossetti has been quoted more than once. He was a writer from the outset, not an artist, and his work was to act as secretary to the Brotherhood and as editor of its short-lived organ, the . Mr. F. G. Stephens, an art student in the days of the Brotherhood, early abandoned art for art criticism. James Collinson made little mark as a painter. He became a Roman Catholic and resigned his membership of the Brotherhood, and his place was taken by Walter Howell Deverell, a painter of much promise, destined, however, to remain unfulfilled, as he died in 1854. The re- maining original member of the Brotherhood, Thomas Woolner, the sculptor, exercised but little influence on its fortunes. He emigrated to Australia in 1851.

The Brotherhood itself lapsed within three or four years. Its members soon ceased to add the letters “P.R.B.” after their signatures. Each of the three principal ones went his own way. If accurate rendering of detail is to be looked upon as an essential of Pre-Raphaelitism, Mr. Holman Hunt was the only one whose work, in after years, deserved the name. Millais, whom Holman Hunt had converted to his point of view, was wavering in 1858 and became a pervert soon after. Ruskin denounced his change of style as rather catastrophe than fall. It is not within our province to follow his after-career. “This looks easy,” he remarked to one who was watching him paint one of his later landscapes, “but I could not do it had I not first painted .” To him “the minute rendering of natural objects” had been a useful discipline which he abandoned when he thought it had served its purpose. As early as 1853 he had been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and he lived to occupy the presidential chair. Whether his change of style be approved or dis-approved, this is certain : his life-work would have been very different from what it was had he remained “an emulator of the pseudo-classical Etty,” instead of coming under the influence of Holman Hunt.

Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelitism was even shorter lived than Millais's. He did not exhibit between 1850 and 1853, and by this date he had ceased to trouble himself about fidelity to natural fact and had begun to produce designs in water-colour of entirely romantic and idealist character. He was only Pre-Raphaelite in that he went his own, not the Academic way; but his way was widely different from that of Holman Hunt and from either the earlier or later one of Millais. The three were agreed not to go the way of the generality of English artists of their time ; but, as already said, they differed too much from each other for one mode of expression to suffice for all of them. Nor, in later years, were they more at one as to the things to which they sought to give expression. Holman Hunt became, in the main, the earnest interpreter of the life and work of Christ ; Millais looked out upon life, and read and interpreted it, in accordance with the instincts, habits, and point of view of a healthy, simple-minded Englishman. Rossetti, poet as well as painter, becoming more and more a recluse, created a world of his own imagining, a world luxuriously beautiful, rich in colour and with heavily scented air, a land like the land of the lotus-eaters, where we fear lest the moral fibre be re-laxed. So widely different did the work of each of these painters become from that of the others, that not without difficulty, and only by putting their early works side by side, can we think of them as having together fought a great fight for art.

A few words must be said about the influence of the movement on the after-course of English painting. It was not enough that the men who took part in it should win recognition for their theory and practice of art. It was needful that the whole lump should be leavened, or, to revert to the figure with which we started, that the whole body, which was sick, should be re-invigorated. And the movement did, in fact, accom-plish what was required of it. Not merely did it quicken a few artists into life, it permeated the whole art of the nation. First came those who may be classed as disciples and imitators, such as Charles Allston Collins, Arthur Hughes, Frederick Sandys, W. S. Burton, W. L. Windus, George Martineau, W. J. Webbe, H. W. B. Davis, and John Brett. Most con-spicuous of all was Rossetti's pupil, Edward Burne-Jones, with whom, we may say, came William Morris and Walter Crane, and after him Spencer Stanhope and J. M. Strudwick. Frederic Shields has a place of his own, uniting a religious enthusiasm more intense than that of Holman Hunt with an instinct for symbolism and design akin to that of Rossetti. These names are but a selection from a long list that is ever receiving additions. One can hardly enter an exhibition today without seeing work that plainly declares its Pre-Raphaelite ancestry.

Of the wider influence that is semi-conscious, indirect, and partial, that is a consequence of the general awakening rather than of the direct stimulus of the three men who gave it a revolutionary character, this is not the place to speak at length. Even if it came within our scope, an exact estimate of the results of the movement is not yet possible. Our task has been accomplished if we have shown how and by whom Constable's prediction of the decay of English art was happily falsified through a return to nature and a typically English assertion—like that of Hogarth—of the right of the individual not to be made the slave of tyrannous fashion, and of the age not to be held down by the dead hand of the past.