A great deal too much has been made in writing of Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelitism. To a nature like Rossetti's any school, any methods he may have taken up with, or inspired, would be largely accidental to his environment. Arrived at a time of reaction, of revolution in English painting, with his qualities of leadership he threw himself into Pre-Raphaelitism as a new movement, but it is more than probable his genius would have found methods of expression as personal to itself in the refinements that entered English painting in the wake of Pre-Raphaelitism,--only the Pre-Raphaelite movement could not have been but for the ardent genius of Rossetti which poured inspiration into all those who gathered about him. He departed from Pre-Raphaelite tenets just when it suited him; its hold over him lay chiefly in that he liked to realise very definitely the shapes of objects in his art, because they made his dreams real and gave pleasure to those eyes of his that so hungered after every sign of beauty. The secrets of art lie, after all, more within the vision than in expression. That Rossetti could have directed his genius into another manner from Pre-Raphaelitism seems possible from the fact that in his poetry so many styles meet and show his variegated temperament expressing itself in opposing forms. What was of literary significance in Rossetti's art perhaps gained from Pre-Raphaelitism, for Pre-Raphaelitism made things symbolical. To nearly every object that they brought into their pictures the Pre-Raphaelites gave meaning other than its own, other than that which was simply artistic. Now Rossetti, looking on his art and its relationship to life from a literary more than from an artistic standpoint, striving to attain in art not an imitation of life but an expression of his ideas about it, found, as we have said, painters' problems a difficulty. He was irritated by difficulties which to a whole-hearted painter present pleasures of conquest in proportion to their resistance to his craftsmanship and skill. In other ways Rossetti lacked the characteristics of really great painters as such; he had not the seeing eye that gives to every outward thing a shape and colour already formed within the mind. From such a cult of the eyes as this comes the true painter. By taking thought art does not become a metaphor for ideas, though the whole aim of its subject may be to make it so. Art is always metaphorical, whatever its subject and however unconsciously, to itself. The presence of genius only is needed. Yet because in actual pigment red can never be anything other than red, ideas are clothed more easily in the colour of words, for in themselves words have no colour and they have no existence other than the existence which they have in thought, and the colour which any language lends them.