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The harmony of colours is a mere dream: let them only be as bright as a stained-glass window, and all is well. At this moment, there are two specimens of Pre-Raphaelitism to be seen at the Exhibition of the Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.
Immediately after finishing the pamphlet on "Pre-Raphaelitism," he left for the Continent with his wife and friends, the Rev. and Mrs. Daniel Moore; spent a fortnight in his beloved Savoy, with the Pritchards; and then crossed the Alps with Charles Newton. On the 1st of September he was at Venice, for a final spell of labour on the palaces and churches.
But for this work they are not now needed. Turner, the first and greatest of the Pre-Raphaelites, has done it already; he, though his capacity embraced everything, and though he would sometimes, in his foregrounds, paint the spots upon a dead trout, and the dyes upon a butterfly's wing, yet for the most part delighted to begin at that very point where the other branches of Pre-Raphaelitism become powerless.
We have said that Pre-Raphaelitism, as a movement in art, was contemporaneously jeered at; while to-day, among superficial or inappreciative students of the period, seriously to mention it or any of its cultured brotherhood is to provoke a smile.
But his father wanted to see "Modern Painters" completed, and so he began his third volume at Vevey, with the discussion of the grand style, in which he at last broke loose from Reynolds, as was inevitable, after his study of Pre-Raphaelitism, and all the varied experiences of the last ten years.
I was not of Stevenson's party and mainly I think because he had written a book in praise of Velasquez, praise at that time universal wherever Pre-Raphaelitism was accurst, and to my mind, that had to pick its symbols where its ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the first bored celebrant of boredom.
But for the time the movement was loudly mocked and decried, and perhaps all the more because of Ruskin's espousal of the fervid band, his letters of defence in the London "Times," and his discussion in his booklet on "Pre-Raphaelitism."
His work has a "weight" in this book which was common to the best illustration of the period, a deliberation which shows the influence of Durer over the illustrators of the sixties, and also the influence of pre-Raphaelitism in precise elaboration of form.
The want of grace, which is made almost a synonyme with Pre-Raphaelitism, has its origin in the same resolute clinging to truth as the artist comprehends it, and uncompromising determination to express it as perfectly as he has the power, a feeling which never permits him to think whether his work be graceful, but whether it be just; so that his tremulous and almost fearful conscientiousness tremulous with desire to see all, and fearful lest some line should wander by a hair's breadth from its fullest expressiveness makes him lose sight entirely of grace and repose.
And here there has been much stumbling in Pre-Raphaelitism, and there is likelihood of fall; likelihood of the actual being mistaken for the real, the show for the essence.
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