sorbed and almost lost in emotion, which are more
moving.

These novels, however, which appeared between 1730 and 1740, are
overshadowed by the works of the great Englishmen, by Richardson and
Sterne and Goldsmith, for these are not artists of England alone, but of
all Europe, known and loved and imitated in every country in Europe. The
sorrows of _Clarissa_, the pathetic or maudlin humour of Sterne, the
idyllic grace and gentle laughter of Goldsmith, these, as they moved
every heart, influenced even the greatest of European artists. The
influence of _Clarissa_ on Rousseau, of Goldsmith on Goethe and Jean
Paul Richter need no exposition.

The sentimental movement reached almost its highest level in the great
and morbid genius of Rousseau, who was himself the living embodiment of
the movement. Far more than even his creations, more than Julie or
Saint-Preux, was he himself possessed by an emotionalism which finally
became a disease. But, strangely enough, it was the Olympic genius of
Goethe which gave its supreme form to the treatment of life under the
terms of feeling. In _Werther_ this whole phase of art passed beyond
itself into the tragedy of the vain and hopeless efforts of an honest
but over-sensitive nature to control his emotion and to master his life.
Not indeed that it was with _Werther_ the movement ended: it was
continued in Byron: it was perhaps the most important element in what
the Germans call specifically their _Romantische Schule_, and in the
work of the French Romantic artists from Chateaubriand to Alfred de
Musset. If you wish to see it in painting you have only to look at the
work of Greuze, and at the engravings in our grandmothers'
'Forget-me-nots'. In spite of all its absurdities this sentimental
movement played a great part in preparing men for the great revolution
itself, for it opened men's hearts, it set free their emotions; if the
realism of Defoe and Hogarth had enabled men to escape from convention
and the mannerisms of good taste into a world of reality, the emotional
movement gave this reality fullness and content, represented a larger
and more intimate apprehension of life.

This brings us to another aspect of the art of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, to the poetry and painting of 'nature', to the
beginnings of that great artistic movement which culminates in
Wordsworth and Turner, and whose influence dominated all Europe in the
eighteenth century and continues to do so in