ed in ancient art, was also probably nearer to the ancient world
both in form and in spirit.

Nor need I say anything about the deplorable ravages of the movement of
good taste and common sense, which produced Boileau and, in some
measure, Pope. It did some good, but far more evil, but happily it is
long past and dead and done with, and we can afford to remember the
little good and to forget the evil. Good or evil, it was at least very
clearly a European and not a national movement.

I must ask you now to consider the extraordinary changes which passed
over Europe in the eighteenth century, to trace the beginnings of that
change which culminated in what we generally call the Romantic movement.

We all know, though not as well as we should, the work of Defoe, and
beside Defoe there stands a painter whom also we all know, the great
Hogarth. We all at least have read _Robinson Crusoe_, and we have
probably all seen Hogarth's engravings of the good and bad apprentices,
and the series of paintings in the National Gallery known as the
'Marriage a la mode'.

What is it now that we find in Defoe and Hogarth? An infinite multitude
of detail--we all remember the 'three Dutch cheeses' and the
'fowling-pieces' which Robinson carefully ferried on his raft from the
wreck to the island--an unsparing presentation of all the ugly and
sordid realities of life; you might almost say, by preference the ugly
realities, the squalid vices, the stupid and brutal ferocity of human
nature. It is not a pretty or a pleasing world which we see in Hogarth
or in Defoe's _Colonel Jack_. But they are great artists. If you see
human nature often on its most repulsive side, in its harshest and most
repellent form, at least you see in their novels or pictures, the world
as they saw it in the streets and taverns, in the police courts and
prisons of their day, as for that matter you can still see it everywhere
in town or country. The world which they see may often, perhaps usually,
be ugly, but at least there is no conventional prettiness, there is no
smug veneer of an artificial good taste which refuses to call a spade a
spade, and which deliberately turns away from those things in life which
are irritating to its sense of decorum and propriety.

Here there is something new, and we can imagine a defender of the
nationalist conception of art saying that here at last we have an
obvious example of the revolt of northern realism against the southern
or cla