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.

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the
arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in
feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and
specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines
of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of
Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified
vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to
which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard
porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain.