if the world is much the wiser for the critic's labour. Creeds, æsthetic or other, howsoever carefully defined, do not for the most part contain religions, nor is an atmosphere of imagination and emotion lightly to be expressed in an article of belief. So far as the first apostles of the English Renaissance are concerned, the doctrine most obviously illustrated by their works is the doctrine of developement, and, starting from Rossetti's youthful avowal of his uncompromising 'adherence to nature,' we may review at pleasure the kaleidoscopic changes in the phases of an art-reformation culminating in the beautiful phantasms of life presented to us by Edward Burne-Jones.

Such impressions of the futility of critical classification are more especially evoked when the publication of the personal biographies of artists supplements the records of their work, and places each artist before us in the full light of his accentuated individuality. Moreover, such biographies challenge a revision of those impersonal judgements we have been wont to bestow upon the artist's art. For they present us with a new standard-the painter's own-wherewith to measure his success or failure. They enable us to compare aims with achievements, while efforts we held as sterile are ennobled by our knowledge of the great conception underlying the abortive endeavour.

Yet that such publications are wholly a gain is a proposition open to dispute. One personality, the personality the artist has himself disclosed-voluntarily, or it may be unawareson the walls of an exhibition or on the pages of a printed book, we already possess, nor will any deny that a partial revelation of a fractional individuality is an inherent quality of true genius. But by the side of this self-revealed personality the biographer sets a second and supplementary portrait. He draws a portrait of the intimate personality known to the friends, the associates, the fellow-workers of a lifetime, and he delineates it as it existed in the privacy of affection and relationship, as it had evolved its own thoughts, been kindled with its own enthusiasms, endured its own disillusions, suffered its own emotions. He portrays it as it evinced in daily intercourse and among common occurrences, the griefs with which it grieved, the joys by which it had been gladdened within the shut doors and curtained windows of its own separate and-for when all is shown that may be manifest, all said that may be spoken, so it still remainsimpenetrable selfhood.

Such posthumous editings of personalities where the in

terest of the biography lies-as with most artists--not in facts and actions, but in the record of those subjective phases of being for which no collective epithet suffices, may seem to some of us a doubtful homage. The dead have already given to us of their best; moreover a part of their special genius lay in their choice of what they gave and of what they withheld. If one fraction of the gifts of the gods to the elect has been the power of expression, the other has been as certainly the faculty of reticence. It has been an element of their inspiration to suppress, so far as their art was concerned, those inferior qualities which, although they form an integral section of the human paradox, tend in their manifestation to confuse that particular aspect of life, of passion, of beauty, truth, or thought, it has been the primary aim of the individual poet or painter to embody in his art, which it has been his secondary aim to imprint upon the minds, sympathies, or imagination of that outer multitude with whom the artist neither has nor desires to have any further, closer, or more personal bond. Thus it is that painters and poets with illuminated instinct have, at their own and no other man's pleasure, lifted or drawn close the veil over those heterogeneous endowments of temperament that constitute their inner individuality. They have regarded art, not as a confessional, but-however various may be the god of its dedication-as a shrine.

Upon their biographers rests likewise the obligation of selection, but it is of selection with a difference. While the choice, the giving or withholding of the artist is wholly based upon his relationship to his art, the choice of his biographer admits of other considerations, and is in a great measure determined by his desire to portray a personality in its fuller relationship to life at large. And in the accomplishment of his purpose he is weighted by a dual responsibility to observe both the loyalty of reticence he owes to his subject and the sincerity of disclosure he owes to his readers. In the performance of the task it is not perhaps too much to say that the biographer who fulfils either obligation completely is usually a defaulter with regard to the other.

Yet howsoever we may deprecate it theoretically, a curious or sympathetic public insistently demands to know more of the personality of an artist, and of those circumstances and surroundings that colour and mould it, than he has himself revealed by the medium of books written,

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pictures painted, or opinions pronounced. And custom, in response to the demand, has created its own convention of compliance on the part of those to whom memories of the dead are the heritage of kinship or affection.

In the Memoirs of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris the one written by Rossetti's surviving brother, the other mainly compiled from the reminiscences and by the request of Morris's most intimate friend-readers may find whatsoever it may be theirs to learn of the lives and thoughts of the two great artists whose names, inseverably linked with that of Edward Burne-Jones, have been most closely, and despite all disparities of aim and attainment, associated one with another in popular estimation and to a large extent in general criticism. The lives of the three cover possibly the most momentous period of English artfrom the growth of that brotherhood, of which Millais and Holman Hunt were foremost members when Rossetti, aged 21, exhibited 'The Girlhood of Mary Virgin' in 1849, down to the summer of 1898, when the death of Edward BurneJones, followed by the winter exhibition at the New Gallery of his collected works, closed the chronicle of an accomplished revolution in the ideals and criticism of English painting. And thus for the space of some fifty years the biographies of Rossetti and Morris present a picture of the leading figures whose influence effected that revolution, set each in its own framework. They are the record of the human atmosphere of sentiment, affection, opinion, and habit, which gives to personality, if not its form, at least its bent; of the surroundings, social, material, and immaterial, which act as the ferment to bare initial principles and theories of art, and which leaven those ideas that each man may assimilate but no man can create, with individualisations of character, of circumstance, of time, and of locality.

For the idea, the rendering of absolutely poetic motives by naturalistic methods,' that inspired Rossetti: the ideal of beauty that illuminated Burne-Jones's imagination and kindled in the mind of William Morris a torch from which many a lesser man's hearth has caught some quiet household flame some gleam of the beauty art may bestow upon handicraft-although not born with their birth nor dying with their death, was essentially individual, with their individuality, in manifestation. Rossetti's art was the climax of personality in painting and poetry. Burne-Jones's has been repeatedly defined as the art of one man-the art of its

originator. In Morris the social instinct in its relationship to decoration produced, as its result, an accentuated phase of individual invention in the conception of mediæval tradition allied with modern productive energy.

That the principles which generated the Pre-Raphaelite movement at large were neither Post- nor Pre-Raphaelite, but eternal,' is undeniable, and kindred ideas had, no doubt, found various embodiments at various stages of the world's history. But while the pre-existent idea retains its elemental character, its revived expression necessarily differs. Lying dormant perhaps for centuries, when it draws to itself a new group of exponents, or it may be only one vigorous spirit to serve as its interpreter and apostle; when it germinates with a fresh impulse upon the earth, it must inevitably undergo modifications governed by new conditions. The manner of its exposition may indeed to a greater or less degree resemble the manner after which previous exponents gave it form and shape; Rossetti may reproduce some aspects of the art of the primitives; in Botticelli or Mantegna Burne-Jones may have found the antitype of manhood or womanhood corresponding to the type of ideal beauty which possessed his own imagination. The designs of William Morris may recall Gothic designs of past ages; but each and all retain, to a degree no one who has studied their more mature works can question, the stamp and imprint of their time and of their idiosyncrasies. The mere copyist, who sees the surface and traces the lines and repeats the colours, may at all times and in all places, doubtless, produce, if skill of hand and accuracy of eye be his, a dead facsimile of the past. But the very perfection of the facsimile removes his work by a gulf no man may span from the work of the artist in whom the vital idea, reviving from its sleep of centuries, has taken up its dwelling. Reanimated within him, it becomes by reason of its vitality part of his vitality, of his personality, a fraction of his individual life, swayed by the influences that propel his imagination, coloured by the divided prismlights of the temperament peculiar to himself. And thus, notwithstanding and in despite of elementary identities, it moves and impels him to create new forms of embodiment, which, if born of the same spiritual seed, are yet as diverse as the children of a new generation from the children of an old. For vitality, by law inflexible, effects diversity. The dead machine retraces, but the living spirit evolves, and the revived expression in art of a pre-existent concep

tion, if it be living, is necessarily recast, refashioned, and recoloured. As Rossetti himself wrote, work, to be truly worthy, should be wrought out of the age itself, as well as 'out of the soul of its producers, which must needs be a soul of the age.'

And in that soul of the age' new associations have grown up with the lapse of centuries. Traditions have added chapter to chapter. We neither see, hear, nor understand as dead generations saw, heard, and comprehended. The ear, the eye, the imagination, have undergone changes innumerable, defying analysis. The hearer, accustomed to detect harmonies in discord, to whom the innovations of modern dissonances and the sensuous melodies of a Wagner have become an accustomed tale, can no longer listen to the austere purity, the transparent simplicities of a Palestrina mass or a Haydn trio, as did his forebears. Eyes trained in the later schools, classic or romantic, naturalist or impressionist, can no longer view the works of the great primitive painters of simple faith with the eyes of lost ages. 'Il faut que l'art nous dépayse,' is a maxim excellent in the abstract. But conditions of life persist, and theories become synonymous with the impracticable. Could we displace ourselves in time, dispossess ourselves of race, dislocalise ourselves in the minor matter of nationality, it would indeed conduce to a perfect and catholic sympathy with what remote times, distant nations, and other races have performed in the arena of art. But, try as we may, the effort merely amounts to a transference of our own imagination. Wheresoever our fantasy takes us we carry with us all our inheritance of years, all our associations of nationality, all our atmosphere of race. We may endeavour to ignore the interim of time that walls us out from the past as we conjure up the vision of bygone centuries, but we regard that vision, strive as we may, from the standpoint of to-day. For we ourselves are the present; wherever we transplant ourselves it goes with us, and a Burne-Jones can never become, according to his vain aspiration, an Italian, nor a William Morris a mediævalist of the thirteenth century. Nor perhaps is art ever more perceptibly infected with the spirit of these-its latest-days than when with futile effort its aim is to evade their grasp.

And as it is with their art, so was it with the lives of the three artists. Their works bear the teethmark of their own age in its fever or lassitude, its introspection and its motiveless melancholy, and they themselves were