M. de la Sizeranne is rather scornful of these metaphysical definitions of Pre-Raphaelitism; “for to characterise a Pre-Raphaelite picture by saying that it was inspired by the Oxford movement, is like attempting to explain the mechanism of a lock by describing the political opinions of the locksmith.” [10] He himself proposes, as the distinguishing characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite art, originality of gesture and vividness of colouring.  This is the professional point of view; but the student of literature is less concerned with such technical aspects of the subject than with those spiritual aspects which connect the work of the Pre-Raphaelites with the great mediaeval or romantic revival.

When Ruskin came to the rescue of the P.-R.  B. in 1851, in those letters to the Times, afterwards reprinted in pamphlet form under the title “Pre-Raphaelitism,” he recognised the propriety of the name, and the real affinity between the new school and the early Italian schools of sacred art.  Mediaeval art, he asserted,[11] was religious and truthful, modern art is profane and insincere.  “In mediaeval art, thought is the first thing, execution is the second; in modern art, execution is the first thing and thought is the second.  And again, in mediaeval art, truth is first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second.”  Ruskin denied that the Pre-Raphaelites were unimaginative, though he allowed that they had a disgust for popular forms of grace and prettiness.  And he pointed out a danger in the fact that their principles confined them to foreground work, and called for laborious finish on a small scale.  In “Modern Painters” he complained that the Pre-Raphaelites should waste a whole summer in painting a bit of oak hedge or a bed of weeds by a duck pond, which caught their fancy perhaps by reminding them of a stanza in Tennyson.  Nettles and mushrooms, he said, were good to make nettle soup and fish sauce; but it was too bad that the nobler aspects of nature, such as the banks of the castled Rhine, should be left to the frontispieces in the Annuals.  Ruskin, furthermore, denied that the drawing of the Pre-Raphaelites was bad or their perspective false; or that they imitated the errors of the early Florentine painters, whom they greatly excelled in technical accomplishment.  Meanwhile be it remarked that the originality of gesture in Pre-Raphaelite figure painting, which M. de la Sizeranne notices, was only one more manifestation of the romantic desire for individuality and concreteness as against the generalising academicism of the eighteenth century.[12]

As poets, the Pre-Raphaelites derive from Keats rather than from Scott, in their exclusive devotion to beauty, to art for art’s sake; in their single absorption in the passion of love; and in their attraction towards the more esoteric side of mediaeval life, rather than towards its broad, public, and military aspects.[13]