more and more
our attention, as not a mere background, but as an integral part of the
picture; but it was not till the seventeenth century and the Flemish and
Dutch painters that we see the transition complete, and the artist sets
before us not some scene in human life, but simply the beauty and
splendour of 'nature' herself.

It was not till Thomson began to publish _The Seasons_ in 1726 that the
development was complete in poetry. Thomson is a difficult poet to
appreciate rightly, for though his subject was 'nature' his method was
often as conventional and artificial as that of any Augustan; but he was
a lover of the fields and woods, and his imagination, if it is not very
powerful, is often very sincere. What was begun by Thomson was carried
on with greater sincerity and reality by Cowper, and was transformed by
the imagination of Gray and Collins. We sometimes think of this
development as specifically English, and it is true that in Wordsworth
and Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique and
unmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of Wordsworth as though
it were the only form under which nature can be presented. That would be
to ignore the qualities, in England of Keats and Tennyson, and in Europe
of great artists in whom the treatment of nature assumed other forms.
The great poetry of nature began in England, but it was carried on in
all the European countries, and for more than a century it was dominated
mainly by the genius of Rousseau in France and of Goethe in Germany. I
cannot here pretend to deal with the treatment of nature in Rousseau,
or with the outcome of his influence first in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
and Chateaubriand, and then in the elegiac beauty of Lamartine and de
Musset's _Nuits_; nor can I deal with the poetry of nature in Goethe,
and its lesser but often beautiful expression in the German
'Romanticists', and in Heine. It is only possible here to remind
ourselves that neither the poetry nor the painting of nature belongs to
any one country, but is an intimate part of all modern art.

* * * * *

And thus at last we come to the great revolution itself, that great
revolution in art and thought and life, of which the political and
social revolution is one form, and of which we are all the children. In
this, all the elements of which we have been thinking are gathered up
and come to perfection; reality, sentiment, nature. And this was