He  is  a  deeply  religious  man,  and  grew  more  and
more  spiritual  in  his  symbolism,  as  shown  in  the  pa-
thetic painting  of  'The  Light  of  the  World.'  He
went  to  the  Holy  Land  to  study  local  nature,  olive-
trees,  rocks,  flowers,  costume  and  racial  types,  under-
going some  hardships  but  seeking  to  steep  his  soul  in
the  atmosphere  of  the  Orient,  and,  as  one  says,  ''he
meditated  on  Christ  when  the  evening  shadows  gath-
ered over  the  tomb  at  Golgotha ' ' ;  while  through  his


2o8  ENGLISH  PRE-RAPHAELITES

reading  of  Renan  lie  was  led  to  naturalize  his  views  of
the  gospels  and  to  use  the  mists  of  Palestine  to  explain
the  ghostly  appearances  in  the  New  Testament.  He
scandalized  the  sober  English  mind  by  his  literalism,
but  the  tremendous  picture  of  '  The  Scapegoat '  is  one
of  the  strongest  if  grimmest  in  modern  art — strong
too  in  its  poetic  idealism.
The  names  of  Watts,  Woolner,  Collinson  the  sculp-
tor, H.  G.  Stevens,  Arthur  Hughes,  Frederic  Sandys,
Noel  Paton,  Charles  Collins,  Walter  Deverell  and  other
later  names,  have  been  associated  with  the  Pre-Raph-
aelite fraternity  (P.  R.  B.)  which  however  lasted  but
a  brief  period  of  five  or  six  years,  and  coincided  in
some  points  with  the  naturalistic  revival  in  France,
also  with  the  romantic  school  of  poetry  represented  by
Rossetti,  Morris,  Swinburne,  Tennyson  and  Browning,
and,  on  the  continent,  with  the  music  of  Schumann,
Schubert  and  Chopin.
George  Frederic  Watts  has  been  remotely  classed
with  the  brotherhood,  but  he  was  older,  and  has  out-
lived all.  When  he  adopted  Pre-Raphaelite  ideas  he
had  himself  begun  to  employ  clear  colors  on  white
ground,  not  shading  colors  by  the  same  but  laying  one
color  by  the  side  of  another  as  in  Japanese  painting.
