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 happiness that one can 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 given me their
poetry to read; & once in Liverpool on my way to Sligo, "I had
seen 'Dante's 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 was a perpetual bewilderment
that my father, who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter,
now painted portraits of the first comer, children selling
newspapers, or a consumptive 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 change coming bit by bit and
its defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-
schools.
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