account of what has happened since the tide, as we hope, began to
turn in the direction of art. True it is, that his unequalled style
of English and his wonderful eloquence would, whatever its subject-
matter, have gained him some sort of a hearing in a time that has
not lost its relish for literature; but surely the influence that he
has exercised over cultivated people must be the result of that
style and that eloquence expressing what was already stirring in
men's minds; he could not have written what he has done unless
people were in some sort ready for it; any more than those painters
could have begun their crusade against the dulness and incompetency
that was the rule in their art thirty years ago unless they had some
hope that they would one day move people to understand them.

Well, we find that the gains since the turning-point of the tide are
these: that there are some few artists who have, as it were, caught
up the golden chain dropped two hundred years ago, and that there
are a few highly cultivated people who can understand them; and that
beyond these there is a vague feeling abroad among people of the
same degree, of discontent at the ignoble ugliness that surrounds
them.

That seems to me to mark the advance that we have made since the
last of popular art came to an end amongst us, and I do not say,
considering where we then were, that it is not a great advance, for
it comes to this, that though the battle is still to win, there are
those who are ready for the battle.

Indeed it would be a strange shame for this age if it were not so:
for as every age of the world has its own troubles to confuse it,
and its own follies to cumber it, so has each its own work to do,