ADDENDA TO THE FOURTH LECTURE 163

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, that sentence of Carlyle is inevitably and irreversibly true:-“Day after day, looking at the high destinies which yet await literature, which literature will ere long address herself with more decisiveness than ever to fulfil, it grows clearer to us that the proper task of literature lies in the domain of BELIEF, within which, poetic fiction, as it is charitably named, will have to take a quite new figure, if allowed a settlement there. Whereby were it not reasonable to prophesy that this exceeding great multitude of novel writers and such like, must, in a new generation, gradually do one of two things, either retire into nurseries, and work for children, minors, and semifatuous persons of both sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novel fabric into the dust cart, and betake them, with such faculty as they have, to understand and record what is true, of which surely there is and for ever will be a whole infinitude unknown to us, of infinite importance to us? Poetry will more and more come to be understood as nothing but higher knowledge, and the only genuine Romance for grown persons, Reality.”¹

141. As I was copying this sentence, a pamphlet was put into my hand, written by a clergyman, denouncing Woe, woe, woe! to “exceedingly young men of stubborn instincts, calling themselves Pre-Raphaelites.”*

* Art, its Constitution and Capacities, etc. By the Rev. Edward Young, M.A. The phrase “exceedingly young men of stubborn instincts,” being twice

¹ [Diderot, reprinted in Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 2 of the 1872 edition.]

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