s all that is conservative
and reverential of tradition in the minds of men, and arouses an
apparently inexplicable hostility, the bitterness of which is not at all
proportionate to the interest felt by the individual in the subject of
the reform, but to his constitutional antipathy to all reform, to all
agitation. The conservative at heart hates the reformer because he
agitates, not because he disturbs him personally. This is clearly seen
in the hostility with which the new Art has been met in England, where
conservatism has built its strongest batteries in the way of invading
reform. For the moment, the English mind, bending in a surprised
deference to the stormy assault of the enthusiasts of the new school,
partly carried away by its characteristic admiration of the heroism of
their attack and the fiery eloquence of their champion, Ruskin, and
perhaps not quite assured of its final effect, forgets to unmask
its terrible artillery. But to upset the almost immovable English
conservatism, to teach the nation new ways of thought and feeling, in a
generation! Cromwell could not do it; and this wave of reform that
now surges up against those prejudices, more immovable than the white
cliffs of Albion, will break and mingle with the heaving sea again, as
did that of the republicanism of the Commonwealth, whose Protector never
sat in his seat of government more firmly than Ruskin now holds the
protectorate of Art in England. When political reform moved off to
American wildernesses for the life it could not preserve in England, it
but marked the course reform in Art must follow. The apparent ascendency
which it has obtained over the old system will as certainly turn out
to be temporary as there is logic in history; because an Art, like a
political system, to govern a nation, must be in accordance with its
character as a nation,--must, in fact, be the outgrowth of it. The only
unfailing line of kings and protectors is the people; with them is no
interregnum; and when the English people become fitted by intellectual
and moral progress to be protectors of a new and living Art, it will
return to them just as surely as republicanism will one day return from
its exile,--

"And all their lands restored to them again,
That were with it exiled."

The philosophic Art will find a soil free from Art-prejudices and open
to all seeds of truth; it will find quiet and liberty to grow, not
without enemies or struggles, but with no enemie