It is not difficult to trace, in the light of those utterances, the point of departure between Mr. Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites in their conception of that universe of Nature which they had studied with the like faithful care. Revolting from the quasi-perfection of Raphaelesque art, Ruskin had thrown himself upon Nature with the confidence of finding in her the absolute perfection vainly sought in the work of man. He had embraced without question the monistic theory of Nature as essentially beneficent and beautiful, and had never faced the principal of dualism which has been and must yet remain the crux of modern philosophy. Hence he failed to grasp the more romantic and subtle conception of the physical world as the scene, and not the drama, of life, which was immanent in the beginnings and revealed with the maturity of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It has been remarked by an astute critic that three of the greatest writers of the Victorian age— Ruskin, Carlyle, and Browning—have been ruined as thinkers by their ignorance of the law of Evolution, with all that it implies of waste and suffering, of sacrifice and conflict and loss. Ruskin’s philosophy of nature was founded upon an old and discredited cosmogony; and however remote may have been the thought of the Pre-Raphaelite painters from the purely intellectual conclusions of physical and mental science in the nineteenth century, however apart they may have lived from theological and ethical controversy, it can safely be said that no contemporary artist save Tennyson, in poetry or painting, has imbibed more completely that spirit of mystical and irresponsible conflict with Nature which they drew from the atmosphere of mediæval romance. They understood that he who returns to Nature, returns, as another writer has bluntly expressed it, to a great many ugly things. “We need,” says Mr. Frederic Harrison, “as little think the natural world all beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of loveliness and ghastliness, of harmony and chaos, of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and deaf to the waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth. What a mass there is in Nature which is appalling—almost maddening to man, if we coolly resolve to look at all the facts, as facts!”[3] It was well that the Pre-Raphaelite painters should return, as they did, to the reverent and unbiassed portrayal of the natural world as it presented itself to their eyes. That they should follow with absolute fidelity the phenomena around them, “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing,” was the essential preparation for artistic reform. But that they should advance from such a discipline to something of the selectiveness of fine art, was a step from the analytic method to a constructive effort based on that analysis and not—as in the Raphaelesque convention—independent of it. In all the highest Pre- Raphaelite work we feel instinctively that Nature is not the subject,