-seeking Art, one in all its
characteristics essentially religious in the highest sense of the term,
holding truth dearer than all success in popular estimation, or than all
attractions of external beauty, reverent, self-forgetting, and humble
before Nature; that of the other is towards an Art Epicurean and
atheistic, holding the truth as something to be used or neglected at
its pleasure, and of no more value than falsehood which is equally
beautiful,--making Nature, indeed, something for weak men to lean on and
for superstitious men to be enslaved by. This distinction is radical; it
cuts the world of Art, as the equator does the earth, with an unswerving
line, on one side or the other of which every work of Art falls, and
which permits no neutral ground, no chance of compromise;--he who is not
for the truth is against it. We will not be so illiberal as to say that
Art lies only on one side of this line; to do so were to shut out works
which have given us exceeding delight;--so neither could we exclude
Epicurus and his philosophy from the company of doers of good;--but the
distinction is as inexorable as the line Christ drew between his and
those not his; it lies not in the product, which may be mixed good and
evil, but in the motive, which is indivisible.

Pre-Raphaelitism must take its position in the world as the beginning of
a new Art,--new in motive, new in methods, and new in the forms it puts
on. To like it or to dislike it is a matter of mental constitution.
The only mistake men can make about it is to consider it as a mature
expression of the spirit which animates it. Not one, probably not two
or three generations, perhaps not so many centuries, will see it in its
full growth. It is a childhood of Art, but a childhood of so huge a
portent that its maturity may well call out an expectation of awe.
In all its characteristics it is childlike,--in its intensity, its
humility, its untutored expressiveness, its marvellous instincts of
truth, and in its very profuseness of giving,--filling its caskets with
an unchoosing lavishness of pearl and pebble, rose and may-weed, all
treasures alike to its newly opened eyes, all so beautiful that there
can scarcely be choice among them.

To suppose that a revolution so complete as this could take place
without a bitter opposition would be an hypothesis without any
justification in the world's experience; for, be it in whatever sphere
or form, when a revolution comes, it offend