st
patient work of the Pre-Raphaelites. That work is, even in its humblest
form, a secure foundation, capable of infinite superstructure; a reality
of true value, as far as it reaches, while the common artistical effects
and groupings are a vain effort at superstructure without
foundation--utter negation and fallacy from beginning to end.

139. But more than this, the very faithfulness of the Pre-Raphaelites
arises from the redundance of their imaginative power. Not only can all
the members of the school compose a thousand times better than the men
who pretend to look down upon them, but I question whether even the
greatest men of old times possessed more exhaustless invention than
either Millais or Rossetti; and it is partly the very ease with which
they invent which leads them to despise invention. Men who have no
imagination, but have learned merely to produce a spurious resemblance
of its results by the recipes of composition, are apt to value
themselves mightily on their concoctive science; but the man whose mind
a thousand living imaginations haunt, every hour, is apt to care too
little for them; and to long for the perfect truth which he finds is not
to be come at so easily. And though I may perhaps hesitatingly admit
that it is possible to love this truth of reality too intensely, yet I
have no hesitation in declaring that there is _no hope_ for those who
despise it, and that the painter, whoever he be, who despises the
pictures already produced by the Pre-Raphaelites, has himself no
capacity of becoming a great painter of any kind. Paul Veronese and
Tintoret themselves, without desiring to imitate the Pre-Raphaelite
work, would have looked upon it with deep respect, as John Bellini
looked on that of Albert Duerer; none but the ignorant could be
unconscious of its truth, and none but the insincere regardless of it.

140. How far it is possible for men educated on the severest
Pre-Raphaelite principles to advance from their present style into that
of the great schools of composition, I do not care to inquire, for at
this period such an advance is certainly not desirable. Of great
compositions we have enough, and more than enough, and it would be well
for the world if it were willing to take some care of those it has. Of
pure and manly truth, of stern statement of the things done and seen
around us daily, we have hitherto had nothing. And in art, as in all
other things, besides the literature of which it speaks,