ssical grace. But there could not be a greater delusion. For
though it is true that the new realism was not fully developed all over
Europe until the eighteenth century, it had its beginnings in the
sixteenth century, and not in the 'cold' north, but in the 'romantic'
south. The first signs of the new movement are to be found not in
England or in Flanders, but in Spain in the sixteenth century. It was
the _Lazarillo de Tormes_, the first of the Picaresque novels which
struck the new note, which turned from the fantastic and conventional
world of the romances in which Don Quixote had nourished his soul, and
from the heroic world of beauty and grace of the dramatists, to the bare
and hard reality of the life of the beggar and the vagabond. Not even
Defoe himself ever surpassed the clearness and precision of the
_Lazarillo_, and it was the first work of a type, whose slow development
can be traced in almost every country in Europe: in England, in the
realistic attempts of Greene and Nash and Deloney, in Germany in
_Simplicissimus_, in France in the _Roman comique_ of Scarron and in the
_Gil Blas_ of Le Sage, who was an almost exact contemporary of Defoe.

And all this can be traced just as clearly in the history of painting.
The great Italian painting had ended with the gorgeous magnificence of
the Venetian school, with Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto, and its
mastery passed for a few years to Flanders, to Rubens and Vandyck; but
in the painting of Spain and of the Low Countries in the later
seventeenth century we find ourselves in another world. The little
beggar boys of Murillo may perhaps show a somewhat mannered realism, but
the Spanish painting, as a whole, while it would be absurd to try to
describe it under any one phrase, shows very clearly the determination
to present the reality of the world under terms which are very
different from those of the great Italians of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. And when we turn to the art of the Low Countries in
the latter part of the seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries,
leaving for the moment out of account the new art of landscape painting,
we find ourselves in the same world as that of Defoe and Hogarth.

What was this, then, that had come to European art and literature?
Clearly what we see is the transition from the heroic world of the
tragedy, from the splendid beauty and force of the Italian painters,
from the infinite grace of the romantic comedy, to som