Microscopic fidelity to nature, which formed the first principle in the programme of the Brotherhood, has been carried in Holman Hunt to the highest possible point. Every flower and every ear of corn, every feather and every blade of grass, every fragment of bark on the trees and every muscle, is painted with scrupulous accuracy. The joke made about the pre-Raphaelites has reference to Holman Hunt: it was said that when they had to paint a landscape they used to bring to their studio a blade of grass, a leaf, and a piece of bark, and they multiplied them microscopically so many thousand times until the landscape was finished. His works are a triumph of industry, and for that very reason they are not a pleasure to the eye. A petty, pedantic fidelity to nature injures the total effect, and the hard colours--pungent green, vivid yellow, glaring blue, and glowing red--which Holman Hunt places immediately beside each other, give his pictures something brusque, barbaric, and jarring. But as a reaction against a system of painting by routine, which had become mannered, such truth without all compromise, such painstaking effort at the utmost possible fidelity to nature, was, in its very harshness, of epoch-making significance. With regard, also, to the transcendental purport of his pictures Holman Hunt is perhaps the most genuine of the group. In the whole history of art there are no religious pictures in which uncompromising naturalism has made so remarkable an alliance with a pietistic depth of ideas. The first, which he sent to the exhibition of 1854, "The Light of the World," represents Christ wandering through the night in a gold-embroidered mantle, with a lantern in His hand, like a Divine Diogenes seeking men. Taine, who studied the picture impartially without the catalogue, describes it, without further addition, as "Christ by night with a lantern." But for Holman Hunt the meaning is Christianity illuminating the universe with the mystic light of Faith and seeking admission at the long-closed door of unbelief. It was because of this implicit suggestion that the work made an indescribable sensation in England; it had to go on pilgrimage from town to town, and hundreds of thousands of copies of the engraving were sold. The pietistic feeling of this ascetic preacher was so strong that he was able to venture on pictures like "The Scapegoat" of 1856 without becoming comical. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ FORD MADOX BROWN. ROMEO AND JULIET.] [Illustration: FORD MADOX BROWN. CHRIST WASHING PETER'S FEET.]