I could not uand where the charm had gohat I had felt, when as a school?boy of twelve or thirteen, I had played among the unfinished houses, once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought it was because these were real houses, while my play had been among toy?houses some day to be inhabited by imaginary people full of the happihat one see in picture books. I was in all things Pre?Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen, my father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and giveheir poetry to read; & on Liverpool on my way to Sligo, "I had seen Dantes Dream in the gallery there??a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic power, and to?day not very pleasing to me??and its colour, its people, its romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away." It erpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a Pre?Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first er, children selling neers, or a ptive girl with a basket offish upon her head, and that when, moved perhaps by memory of his youth, he chose some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it unfinished. I had seen the ge ing bit by bitand its defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art? schools. We must paint what is in front of us, or A man must be of his own time, they would say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien?Lepage. Then, too, they were very ignorahey read nothing, for nothing mattered but Knowing how to paint, being iion against a geion that seemed to have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought myself alone in hating these young men, now indeed getting towards middle life, their pt for the past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few months I was to discover others of my own age, who thought as I did, for it is not true that youth looks before it with the meical gaze of a well?drilled soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power.
Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, where the eye discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves, though from it certainly does e so much proletariaoric? I was uhers of my geion ihing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple?minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible church, out of poetic tradition: a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, a bundle of images and of masks passed eion to geion by poets & painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this traditioually, and not in pictures and in poems only, but in tiles round the ey?pied in the hangings that kept out the draught. I had eveed a dogma: Because those imaginary people are created out of the deepest instinan, to be his measure and his norm, whatever I imagihose mouths speaking may be the I go to truth.
When I listehey seemed always to speak of ohing only: they, their loves, every i of their lives, were steeped in the supernatural. Could even Titians Ariosto that I loved beyond other portraits, have its grave look, as if waiting for some perfect fi, if the painters, before Titian, had not learned portraiture, while painting into the er of po