WILLIAM     MORRIS                 35
     imve ceased to exist. Later, in the forties, Ruskin
     recorded that the Royal Academy Exhibitions repeated
     and again: "The same foolish faces in
     , again an                             hu nsiper.,
     the same brown cows in ditches, the same white sails in
 '   squalls and the same slices of lemons in saucers." Art
     had become a fashion, style had degenerated into man-
  iy nerism, and mannerism had fallen into pettiness.
      g       bscsThe Pre-Raphaelites revolted
    ". agaipt classicis as a foreign element introduced into
                     Sir osha Rynods and his contepraries,
    for whom the later Italian schools represented al that is
    beautiful and desirable in art. They turned for aid and
    inspiration to mediaevalism, as tO the ri htfuI and common
    Inheritance of the modern nations,  hey, rejected the
    facility fatal to ideas, the artistic subterfuges and conven-
    Ins of the followers of "the grand style;" seeking their
    uides and modes i artists who lived in a time when
    uhman thought teemed, although it struggled with an
                i el  of    :ession ;-sometimes even to the
    tof childishness. Thus in the old Italians and old
    FR e Ii igs they found their masters, whom they did not
     servilely imitate, but to whom they were attracted as to
    . the founders of a national and popular art.
                              The mediaevalism of Rossetti,
  jk William Morris and Burne-Jones was real It was due
  tih to natural impulse, fostered by judicious study, and
    ..revealed in sincere and beautiful forms, whether through
    the medium of pictorial, decorative, or poetic art, and
J1  : whether derived from ItaRin, French, or Icelandic sources.
     In common with the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth
   :centuries, the English Pre-Raphaelite poets and artists
     were restless, passionate and imaginative. Like them,
     too        began their work     imperfectly trained in
   N technique. But all that was ingenuous and pardonable
   6. to the critic, In the early masters, became, in the modem
   iil Englishmen, open to the reproach of affectation, indolence
     and even degeneracy. Again, the subjects and titles

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