For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have
been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but
of new technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of
marble quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-
lying hills of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for
that intensified vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple
humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard
porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain. The
splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of the new
oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has been due to
the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased
consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim. The
critic may try and trace the deferred resolutions of Beethoven {253} to
some sense of the incompleteness of the modern intellectual spirit, but
the artist would have answered, as one of them did afterwards, 'Let them
pick out the fifths and leave us at peace.'

And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like
the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on
elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you
will find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to
perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age
and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages.

And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction
against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous
poetry and painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti
and Burne-Jones by a far greater splendour of colour, a far more
intricate wonder of design than English imaginative art has shown before.
In Rossetti's poetry and the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a
perfect precision and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless,
a seeking for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining
consciousness of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value
which is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the
romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic note
was struck by Theophile Gautier's advice to the young poet to read his
dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a