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Replagegos Omnifurian Directory 06
Page 01
The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a group and not a coterie. They were engaged in working and enjoying, in looking out for artistic promise, in welcoming and praising any performance of a kind that Rossetti recognised as "stunning." They were sure of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its mystic initials, was all a gigantic game; and they held together because they were revolutionary in this, that they wished to slay, as one stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and sentimental art of the day. They did not effect anything like a revolution, of course. It was but a ripple on the flowing stream, and they diverged soon enough, most of them, into definite tracks of their own. The strength of the movement lay in the fact that they hungered and thirsted after art, clamouring for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an ordinary man clamours for beer. But their aim was not to mystify or to enlarge their own consequence, but to convert the unbeliever, and to produce fine things.
Every one has seen a cornfield. If you pluck up one of the innumerable wheat plants which are fixed in the soil of the field, about harvest time, you will find that it consists of a stem which ends in a root at one end and an ear at the other, and that blades or leaves are attached to the sides of the stem. The ear contains a multitude of oval grains which are the seeds of the wheat plant. You know that when these seeds are cleared from the husk or bran in which they are enveloped, they are ground into fine powder in mills, and that this powder is the flour of which bread is made. If a handful of flour mixed with a little cold water is tied up in a coarse cloth bag, and the bag is then put into a large vessel of water and well kneaded with the hands, it will become pasty, while the water will become white. If this water is poured away into another vessel, and the kneading process continued with some fresh water, the same thing will happen. But if the operation is repeated the paste will become more and more sticky, while the water will be rendered less and less white, and at last will remain colorless. The sticky substance which is thus obtained by itself is called gluten; in commerce it is the substance known as maccaroni.
As nearly all the launches in the place belonged to the Government, I had then to apply to the Commandante of the flotilla of the Government boats. It will be easily understood that my anxiety was great to go and rescue my men; so that on leaving the palace I immediately proceeded to the private house of this gentleman--a great friend of the Governor, I learned afterwards. On sending in my card at five o'clock in the afternoon I was kept waiting a little time, then there appeared a yellow-faced individual in his pyjamas, muttering words which I should not like to repeat.
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