ABSTRACT
Millais has forgotten that the body of man possessing the body of woman, a mother's arm going round her child, a sower's gesture as he scatters seed, are more than movements to satisfy a particular moment's lust, to mitigate a child's momentary fear, to ensure a crop in the five-acre field; that they are things eternally significant, parts of a rhythm that began before the individual life and will persist after it, and that it is an abominable triviality to relate the movement only to its immediate excuse. The radical trouble with the new Millais was that he began to provide prosaic, circumstantial justification for the presence and the occupations of the people in his pictures. Monna Lisa in that strange landscape, the Melancholia amidst that strange alliance of properties, or that tailor at his workaday task, all offer us, for immediate acceptance and complete satisfaction, an inexplicable inner harmony between the figure and its setting.
