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 in 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