Rossetti, and sank completely under his influence.
Through the advice of the Pre-Raphaelite leader, the
novice enthusiast began at once to paint, without
academic training, or the craftsmanship necessary to
an artist. Rossetti maintained that the enforced drudgery
of copying from the antique would blunt, if it did not
destroy, the delicate imagination of his younger friend: an
opinion taken not without reason, but which strictly
carried out as it was, might have led to disaster, had the
strenuous later efforts of Burne-Jones not atoned for the
deficiencies of his first work. Indeed, as he once remarked
of himself, in the technique of his art, at twenty-five he
was but fifteen, and before he could adequately express
the depth of his feeling and the beauty of his conceptions,
he was forced to submit himself to the ordeal of patient
toil. Two years of study under the direction of Rossetti
constituted his sole art-education, if we except the fertile
production, the constant observation and experiment which
finally rendered him the greatest self-made painter of
modern times. At fifty, he had become a subtile, exquisite
draughtsman, a consummate master of color, an artist of
so   ronounced a personty as to be recognized in the
slightest sketch coming from his hand. Hifaults, his
exaggerations, like those of Botticelli, to whom he offers
many points of resemblance, seemed to proceed not from
ignorance, or lack of perception, but rather from fixed
principles inherent in his quaRlies as a great decorative
painter. In some scheme known to hinmself alone lay,
without doubt, the explanation of his peculiar treatment
of the human body: the small head, the great height and
slenderness, the weight thrown upon one foot, the inward
arch of the stiffened leg, the contrast in curve between the
supporting and the supported side, and the other points
noted withoutexplanation by the French critic, M. de la
Sizeranne, who seems not to recall that precisely the same
treatment prevailed among the later sculptors of Greece: a
fact which, in view of the intense studiousness of Burne-


WILLIAM MORlRIS


42