164 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

I thank God that the Pre-Raphaelites are young, and that strength is still with them, and life, with all the war of it, still in front of them. Yet Everett Millais is this year of the exact age at which Raphael painted the “Disputa,” his greatest work; Rossetti and Hunt are both of them older still-nor is there one member of the body so young as Giotto, when he was chosen from among the painters of Italy to decorate the Vatican.¹ But Italy, in her great period, knew her great men, and did not “despise their youth.”² It is reserved for England to insult the strength of her noblest children-to wither their warm enthusiasm early into the bitterness of patient battle, and leave to those whom she should have cherished and aided, no hope but in resolution, no refuge but in disdain.

142. Indeed it is woeful, when the young usurp the place, or despise the wisdom, of the aged; and among the many dark signs of these times, the disobedience and insolence of youth are among the darkest. But with whom is the fault? Youth never yet lost its modesty where age had not lost its honour; nor did childhood ever refuse its reverence, except where age had forgotten correction. The cry, “Go up, thou bald head,” will never be heard in the land which remembers the precept, “See that ye despise not one of these little ones;”³ and although indeed youth may become despicable, when its eager hope is changed into presumption, and its progressive power into arrested pride, there is something more despicable still, in the old age which has learned neither judgment nor gentleness, which is weak without charity, and cold without discretion.

quoted (carefully excluding the context) from my pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism.⁴

¹ [Millais in 1854 was 25; Rossetti, 26; and Hunt, 27. Giotto was 22 when summoned to Rome-that is, if Vasari’s date for the painter’s birth (1276) be correct.]

² [1 Timothy iv. 12.]

³ [2 Kings ii. 23; Matthew xviii. 10.]

⁴ [See below, p. 355. Mr. Young cites the phrase at pp. 11, 13 of his pamphlet (Bristol, 1854); at p. 18 he says of the Pre-Raphaelite movement that “over and above its moral delinquencies, of arrogance, bigotry, and destructiveness,” it “panders to the downward tendency of the age,” etc.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]