The Pre-Raphaelites had forced their world to look at pictures, and their ...

The Pre-Raphaelites had forced their world to look at pictures, and their originals, with a new eye: Swinburne had set the English muse dancing to a new and in the end an intolerably wearisome, tune: Pater had furnished the necessary philosophy with his doctrine of the aesthetic moment and the gemlike flame.

Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages; the Renaissance, recovering somewhat from its moral condemnation by Ruskin; the Catholic Church; Iceland, Paris, Japan; all were made to contribute something to the new ritualism or the new dandyism, of villanelles and peacock's feathers, Utamaro and Cellini, strange odors, strange sorrows, strange sins. What rapture to repeat, in a French accent more strange than all, some sonnet of Jose-Maria de Heredia: what ecstasy in the very syllables-Narcisse Virgilio Di: It seems I broke a close with force and arms: There came a mystic token from the King And the flying gold of the ruined woodlands drove thro' the aft... A Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee . . Her dauntless army scattered and so small: Her teeming millions fed from alien hands.

Under its iridescent froth, the aesthetic movement, like the Fourth Party in Parliament, was an earnest challenge to that grey respectability which was thinning indeed but had not quite lifted: with all their exotic

postures, the aesthetes were the lawful successors

or exponents of Ruskin, Arnold, and Browning,' much as Balfour and Lord Randolph were the true inheritors of Disraeli and Young England. They brought, or brought back, into English life much that we should be poorer without: they recovered for us something of a European standing, and something of a European outlook: refining form and opening new sources of delight.

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