That one of these propositions completely nullifies the other it is hardly necessary to indicate. The ‘ideal form’ which every phenomenon strives after does not stand before the bodily eyes of the painter. He reads it, according to some preconceived notion, into the phenomenon. He has to deal with individual forms which, through ‘accident or disease,’ have diverged from the ‘ideal form.’ In order to bring them back in painting to their ideal form, he must alter the object given by nature. Ruskin demands that he should do this, but at the same time says that every alteration is an act of ‘powerless indolence or blind audacity.’ Naturally, only one of these mutually exclusive statements can be true. Unquestionably it is the former. The ‘ideal form’ is an assumption, not a perception. The separation of the essential from the accidental, in the phenomenon, is an abstraction--the work of reason, not of the eye or æsthetic emotion. Now, the subject-matter of painting is the visible, not the conjectural; the real, not the possible or probable; the concrete, not the abstract. To exclude individual features from a phenomenon as unessential and accidental, and to retain others as intrinsic and necessary, is to reduce it to an abstract idea. The work of art, however, is not to abstract, but to individualize. Firstly, because abstraction presupposes an idea of the law which determines the phenomenon, because this idea may be erroneous, because it changes with the ruling scientific theories of the day, whereas the painter does not reproduce changing scientific theories, but impressions of sense. Secondly, because the abstraction rouses the working of thought, and not emotion, while the task of art is to excite emotion. Nevertheless, the pre-Raphaelites had no eye for these contradictions, and followed blindly all Ruskin’s injunctions. They typified the human form, but they rendered all accessories truthfully, and had neither ‘the blind audacity nor powerless indolence’ to change any of them. They painted with the greatest precision the landscape in which their figures stood, and the objects with which they were surrounded. The botanist can determine every kind of grass and flower painted; the cabinet-maker can recognise the joining and glueing in every footstool, the kind of wood and varnish in the furniture. Moreover, this conscientious distinctness is just the same in the foreground as in the extreme background, where, according to the laws of optics, things should be scarcely perceptible.