We shall, perhaps, be better able to understand the first period of Wilde's public prominence, if we examine the origins of the movement of which, by accident and inclination, he became the accepted protagonist. Continental critics have noticed in his writings theories so closely analogous to those of the French Symbolists that they find it difficult not to believe that he was a disciple of that school, and, as it were, an English representative of Mallarme's salon in the Rue de Rome. It is true that, like the Symbolists, he sought intensity in art, and emphasis of its potential at the expense of its kinetic qualities. But in this he was English as well as French. Later in his life he was influenced by Maeterlinck and by Huysmans, but, while he was at Oxford and for some time after, he found his rules of art and life in the teaching of the Pre-Raphaelites. That teaching represents a movement in the same direction as the Symbolists, but a movement which, unlike the French, came to be identified with a desire to bring ordinary life into harmony with the intensity it demanded from art. It is worth while to gain a clear perspective by discovering the relation between such men as Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Ruskin, and the cult of knee-breeches and chrysanthemums with which Punch and "Patience" identified Wilde. This cult was not a sudden sporadic flowering of strange blooms in the frail hands of a few undergraduates. It had its origin in 1848, when the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded The Germ, an extraordinarily earnest little monthly magazine, in which appeared Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," and etchings by Holman Hunt and Madox Brown. Perhaps, indeed, it had an earlier origin in the poetry of Keats, whose pure devotion to art for art's sake foreshadowed the feeling of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, or in the poetry of Blake, who, like them, emphasized the difference between the Sons of David and the Philistines. But, if we go back so far, we must go further and find still deeper roots for it in the great figures of the Romantic Movement, in the figures who made that movement possible, in Goethe, in Rousseau, in Ossian, in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry." Wilde, at least, saw back thus far into his spiritual ancestry. But, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelites, refusing the abstract art whose beginnings are marked by the technical skill of Raphael, finding in early Italian painting, whose spirit was less hidden by clear and insistent letter, a vivifying principle, stood, not only for a new kind of painting, but for a new attitude towards art in general, and then for a new attitude towards life. They were attacked, and Ruskin, who thought they were trying to realize a prophecy of his own, came to aid them with eloquent defence. Their pictures were sold but seldom exhibited, so that a kind of separateness, almost a secrecy, came to belong to their admirers. The public in general looked