So much for the critics. For the artist, if Ruskin said more than Turner himself could understand, he has summed up his achievement in a few passages which may possibly outlast the works themselves. "There has been marked and constant progress in his mind; he has not, like some few artists, been without childhood; his course of study has been as evidently as it has been swiftly progressive; and in different stages of the struggle, sometimes one order of truth, sometimes another, has been aimed at or omitted. But from the beginning to the present height of his career he has never sacrificed a greater truth to a less. As he advanced, the previous knowledge or attainment was absorbed in what succeeded, or abandoned only if incompatible, and never abandoned without a gain: and his present works present the sum and perfection of his accumulated knowledge, delivered with the impatience and passion of one who feels too much, and has too little time to say it in, to pause for expression or ponder over his syllables." And again of his latest works—"There is in them the obscurity, but the truth, of prophecy; the instinctive and burning language, which would express less if it uttered more; which is indistinct only by its fulness, and dark with its abundant meaning. He feels now, with long-trained vividness and keenness of sense, too bitterly, the impotence of the hand and the vainness of the colour to catch one shadow or one image of the glory which God has revealed to him. He has dwelt and communed with Nature all the days of his life: he knows her now too well, he cannot falter over the material littlenesses of her outward form: he must give her soul, or he has done nothing, and he cannot do this with the flax, the earth, and the oil. 'I cannot gather the beams out of the east, or I would make them tell you what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this, and let us remember together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the night sky, or I would make that teach you what I have seen; but read this, interpret this, and let us feel together. And if you have not that within you which I can summon to my aid, if you have not the sun in your spirit, and the passion in your heart, which my words may awaken, though they be indistinct and swift, leave me; for I will give you no patient mockery, no laborious insult of that glorious Nature, whose I am and whom I serve. Let other servants imitate the voice and the gesture of their master, while they forget his message. Hear that message from me; but remember that the teaching of Divine truth must still be a mystery.'"

Within a very few years Ruskin was performing a more useful service for the English School of painting than that of gilding the fine gold of its greatest genius. Whether or not he was aware of the fact, young Holman Hunt had borrowed a copy of "Modern Painters," which, he says, entirely changed his opinions as to the views held by society at large concerning art, and in 1849 there were exhibited Hunt's Rienzi, Rossetti's Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and Millais' Lorenzo and Isabella, each inscribed with the mystic letters "P.R.B.," meaning "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." It is interesting to note that this alliance was formed when the three young artists were looking over a book of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

In the following year Hunt exhibited the British Family, Millais, The Carpenter's Shop, and Rossetti the Ecce Ancilla Domini, and in 1851 were Hunt's Two Gentlemen of Verona and three by Millais. The fury of the critics had now reached a point at which some notice had to be taken of it—as of a man in an apopleptic fit. That of the Times in particular:—"These young artists have unfortunately become notorious by addicting themselves to an antiquated style, false perspective, and crude colour of remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery "snapped instead of folded," faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated into skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's shop, and expression forced into caricature. That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity deserves no quarter at the hands of the public." It was in disapproval of the tone of this outburst that the author of "Modern Painters" addressed his famous and useful letter to the Times, vindicating the artists, and following it up with another in which he wishes them all "heartily good speed, believing in sincerity that if they temper the courage and energy which they have shown in the adoption of their systems with patience and discretion in framing it, and if they do not suffer themselves to be driven by harsh and careless criticism into rejection of the ordinary means of obtaining influence over the minds of others, they may, as they gain experience, lay in our England the foundation of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for three hundred years."

If any one of this strenuous young band had been a painter of the first rank, this prediction might have been abundantly verified. But it must be owned that none of them was. Holman Hunt came nearest to being, and Millais probably thought he was, when he had abandoned his early principles and shaped for the Presidency of the Academy. Rossetti had more genius in him than the others, but it came out in poetry as well as in painting, and perhaps in more lasting form. As it was, the effects of the revolution were widespread and entirely beneficial; but those effects must not be looked for in the works of any one particular artist, but rather in the general aspect of English art in the succeeding half century, and perhaps to-day. It broke up the soil. The flowers that came up were neither rare nor great, but they were many, varied, and pleasing, and in every respect an improvement on the evergreens and hardy annuals with which the English garden had become more and more encumbered from want of intelligent cultivation. More than this, the freedom engendered of revolt had now encouraged the young artist to feel that he was no longer bound to paint in any particular fashion. People's eyes were opened to possibilities as well as to actualities; and though they were prone to close again under the soporific influence of what was regular and conventional, they were capable of opening again, perhaps with a start, but without the necessity for a surgical operation. In 1847, for example, George Frederick Watts had offered to adorn, free of charge, the booking-hall of Euston Station, and had been refused—Watts, by the by, was quite independent of the Pre-Raphaelites—whereas in 1860 the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn accepted his School of Legislature, and in 1867 he was elected an academician.

Two somewhat remarkable effects of the movement are attributed to it by Mr Edmund Gosse (in a note on the work of Alfred Hunt, written in 1884), which are probably typical of many more. The Liverpool Academy, founded in 1810, had an annual grant of £200 from the Corporation. In 1857 it gave a prize to Millais' Blind Girl in preference to the most popular picture of the year (Abraham Solomon's Waiting for the Verdict), and so great was the public indignation that pressure was brought to bear on the Corporation, the grant was withdrawn, and the Academy ruined.

In the other instance we may not go the whole way with Mr Gosse, when in speaking of the Pre-Raphaelite principle he says that "the school of Turnerian landscape was fatally affected by them," or that all the landscape painters, except Alfred Hunt, "accepted the veto which the Pre-Raphaelites had tacitly laid upon composition or a striving after an artificial harmony of forms in landscape." But to a certain extent their influence undoubtedly was prejudicial in that respect. In suggesting another reason for the cessation of Turner s influence he is quite as near the mark, namely, the action of the Royal Academy in admitting no landscape painters to membership. At Turner's death in 1851 there were only three, among whom was Creswick. "This popular artist," says Mr Gosse, "was the Upas tree under whose shadow the Academical patronage of landscape died in England. From his election as an associate in 1842 to that of Vicat Cole in 1869, no landscape painter entered the doors of the Royal Academy." Of this august body we shall have something to say later on.

IV

MANET AND WHISTLER AGAINST THE WORLD

Let us now cross the channel again, and see what is going on there, in 1863. Evidently there is something on, or there would not be so much excitement. As we approach the Capital we are aware of one name being prominent in the general uproar—that of Édouard Manet.

Manet's revolt against tradition began before he became an artist, as was in fact necessary, or he would never have been allowed to become one. The traditions of the Bourgoisie were sacred, and their power and importance since the revolution of 1848 not to be lightly set aside. But young Manet was so determined that he was at last allowed by his bourgeois parents to have his way, and was sent to study under that very rough diamond Couture. Now again his "revolting" qualities showed themselves, this time in the life class. Théodore Duret, his friend and biographer, puts it so amusingly that a quotation, untranslated, is imperative:—"Cette repulsion qui se développe chez Manet pour l'art de la tradition," he says, "se manifeste surtout par le mépris qu'il témoigne aux modèles posant dans l'atelier et à l'étude du nu telle qu'elle était alors conduite. Le culte de l'antique comme on le comprenait dans la première moitié du xixe siècle parmi les peintres avait amené la recherche de modèles speciaux. On leur demandait des formes pleines. Les hommes en particulier devaient avoir une poitrine large et bombée, un torse puissant, des membres musclés. Les individus doués des qualités requises qui posaient alors dans les ateliers, s'etaient habitués à prendre des attitudes prétendues expressive et heroïques, mais toujours tendues et conventionelles, d'où l'imprévu était banni. Manet, porté vers le naturel et épris de recherches, s'irritait de ces poses d'un type fixe et toujours les mêmes. Aussi faisait-il tres mauvais ménage avec les modèles. Il cherchait à en obtenir des poses contraires à leurs habitudes, auxquelles ils se refusaient. Les modèles connus qui avaient vu les morceaux faits d'après leurs torses conduire certains élèves à l'école de Rome, alors la suprême récompense, et qui dans leur orgueil s'attribuaient presqu'une part du succès, se revoltaient de voir un tout jeune homme ne leur témoigner aucun respect. Il paraît que fatigué de l'eternelle étude du nu, Manet aurait essayé de draper et même d'habiller les modèles, ce qui aurait causé parmi eux une véritable indignation."