ADDENDA TO THE FOURTH LECTURE 161

138. I COULD not enter, in a popular lecture, upon one intricate and difficult question, closely connected with the subject of Pre-Raphaelitism-namely, the relation of invention to observation; and composition to imitation. It is still less a question to be discussed in the compass of a note; and I must defer all careful examination of it to a future opportunity. Nevertheless, it is impossible to leave altogether unanswered the first objection which is now most commonly made to the Pre-Raphaelite work, namely, that the principle of it seems adverse to all exertion of imaginative power. Indeed, such an objection sounds strangely on the lips of a public who have been in the habit of purchasing, for hundreds of pounds, small squares of Dutch canvas, containing only servile imitations of the coarsest nature. It is strange that an imitation of a cow’s head by Paul Potter, or of an old woman’s by Ostade, or of a scene of tavern debauchery by Teniers, should be purchased and proclaimed for high art, while the rendering of the most noble expressions of human feeling in Hunt’s “Isabella,” or of the loveliest English landscape, haunted by sorrow, in Millais’ “Ophelia,”¹ should be declared “puerile.” But, strange though the utterance of it be, there is some weight in the objection. It is true that so long as the Pre-Raphaelites only paint from nature, however carefully selected and grouped, their pictures can never have the characters of the highest class of compositions.² But, on the other hand, the shallow and conventional arrangements

¹ [For Holman Hunt’s “Claudio and Isabella,” exhibited 1853, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. iv. § 5; for “Ophelia” see note in Vol. XI. p. 217.]

² [Compare Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. x. § 21, where this remark is referred to and further discussed.]

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