And to do this it became necessary to set out, as it were, the _terms_ on which life is lived; to deal not merely with the beauty which man loves and the joy which he desires, but also with the stern conditions of their attainment. The struggle between the present evil and the recognized good, the conflict of the soul with earthly bonds, Love baffled in dire cross-currents of fate and duty, or wasted and despoiled in sin, Faith shaken by the storms of circumstance, Hope bowed down before the closing doors of death; and, on the other hand, the glory of consummated joys (though never without the under-thought of their transiency), or the strength of human fidelity and endurance—these are the themes of the second renaissance. It is hardly surprising that the considerable class of critics (more numerous in the eighteen-forties than to-day) to whom all seriousness is melancholy and all mystery painful, should have dismissed much of the Pre-Raphaelite work under the inaccurate label of “pessimism.” To bring the mood of awe, of sadness, of perplexity, into art at all, and more especially to present serious themes with the directness of familiar life, and without the stage-craft glamour of the heroic and the exceptional, is, in the judgment of such persons, to be indisputably a pessimist. Yet from this standpoint we should have to exclude no small part of the greatest art the world has ever seen. If we accept Heine’s dictum that no man is truly a man until he suffers, we shall call no nation great in art until it is great in tragedy. There comes with every awakening of an age (whether in ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, or mediæval Italy) to problems new to the world at large, or which the preceding age had lost sight of, a straining of the vision towards ultimate meanings and purposes. And the cry for light is answered often by a lurid dawn.