d of that species
of convert; so he left, turned to painting again, and disappeared." [9]

M. de la Sizeranne is rather scornful of these metaphysical definitions
of Pre-Raphaelitism; "for to characterise a Pre-Raphaelite picture by
saying that it was inspired by the Oxford movement, is like attempting to
explain the mechanism of a lock by describing the political opinions of
the locksmith." [10] He himself proposes, as the distinguishing
characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite art, originality of gesture and
vividness of colouring. This is the professional point of view; but the
student of literature is less concerned with such technical aspects of
the subject than with those spiritual aspects which connect the work of
the Pre-Raphaelites with the great mediaeval or romantic revival.

When Ruskin came to the rescue of the P.-R. B. in 1851, in those letters
to the _Times_, afterwards reprinted in pamphlet form under the title
"Pre-Raphaelitism," he recognised the propriety of the name, and the real
affinity between the new school and the early Italian schools of sacred
art. Mediaeval art, he asserted,[11] was religious and truthful, modern
art is profane and insincere. "In mediaeval art, thought is the first
thing, execution is the second; in modern art, execution is the first
thing and thought is the second. And again, in mediaeval art, truth is
first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second."
Ruskin denied that the Pre-Raphaelites were unimaginative, though he
allowed that they had a disgust for popular forms of grace and
prettiness. And he pointed out a danger in the fact that their
principles confined them to foreground work, and called for laborious
finish on a small scale. In "Modern Painters" he complained that the
Pre-Raphaelites should waste a whole summer in painting a bit of oak
hedge or a bed of weeds by a duck pond, which caught their fancy perhaps
by reminding them of a stanza in Tennyson. Nettles and mushrooms, he
said, were good to make nettle soup and fish sauce; but it was too bad
that the nobler aspects of nature, such as the banks of the castled
Rhine, should be left to the frontispieces in the Annuals. Ruskin,
furthermore, denied that the drawing of the Pre-Raphaelites was bad or
their perspective false; or that they imitated the _errors_ of the early
Florentine painters, whom they greatly excelled in technical
accomplishment. Meanwhile be it remarked that the originality of