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 offends 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!