That is how the nineteenth century looks to us.  Most of the mountains are in labour with ridiculous mice, but the spheres are shaken by storms in intellectual teacups.  The Pre-Raffaelites call in question the whole tradition of the Classical Renaissance, and add a few more names to the heavy roll of notoriously bad painters.  The French Impressionists profess to do no more than push the accepted theory of representation to its logical conclusion, and by their practice, not only paint some glorious pictures, but shake the fatal tradition and remind the more intelligent part of the world that visual art has nothing to do with literature.  Whistler draws, not the whole, but a part of the true moral.  What a pity he was not a greater artist!  Still, he was an artist; and about the year 1880 the race was almost extinct in this country.[22]

Through the fog of the nineteenth century, which began in 1830, loom gigantic warnings.  All the great figures are ominous.  If they do not belong to the new order, they make impossible the old.  Carlyle and Dickens and Victor Hugo, the products and lovers of the age, scold it.  Flaubert points a contemptuous finger.  Ibsen, a primitive of the new world, indicates the cracks in the walls of the old.  Tolstoi is content to be nothing but a primitive until he becomes little better than a bore.  By minding his own business, Darwin called in question the business of everyone else.  By hammering new sparks out of an old instrument, Wagner revealed the limitations of literary music.  As the twentieth century dawns, a question, which up to the time of the French Revolution had been judiciously kept academic, shoulders its way into politics:  “Why is this good?” About the same time, thanks chiefly to the Aesthetes and the French Impressionists, an aesthetic conscience, dormant since before the days of the Renaissance, wakes and begins to cry, “Is this art?”

It is amusing to remember that the first concerted clamour against the Renaissance and its florid sequelae arose in England; for the Romantic movement, which was as much French and German as English, was merely a reaction from the classicism of the eighteenth century, and hardly attacked, much less threw off, the dominant tyranny.  We have a right to rejoice in the Pre-Raffaelite movement as an instance of England’s unquestioned supremacy in independence and unconventionality of thought.  Depression begins when we have to admit that the revolt led to nothing but a great many bad pictures and a little thin sentiment.  The Pre-Raffaelites were men of taste who felt the commonness of the High Renaissance and the distinction of what they called Primitive Art, by which they meant the art of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries.  They saw that, since the Renaissance, painters had been trying to do something different from what the primitives had done; but for the life of them they could not see what it was that the primitives did.  They had the taste to prefer Giotto to Raffael, but the