scribe in the present chapter. If
the picture seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, the
reader should consult the chapters on "Classicism" and "The
Pseudo-Classicists" in M. Pellisier's "Literary Movement in France,"
already several times referred to. They describe a literary situation
which had a very exact counterpart in England.

[1] As another notable weakness of the age is its habit of looking, to the
past ages--not understanding them all the while . . . so Scott gives up
nearly the half of his intellectual power to a fond yet purposeless
dreaming over the past; and spends half his literary labors in endeavors
to revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction: endeavors
which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still successful
only so far as Scott put under the old armor the everlasting human nature
which he knew; and totally unsuccessful so far as concerned the painting
of the armor itself, which he knew _not_. . . His romance and
antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows
them to be false.--_Ruskin, "Modern Painters,"_ Vol. III. p. 279 (First
American Edition, 1860).

[2] See also the sly hit at popular fiction in the _Nonne Prestes Tale_:

"This story is also trewe, I undertake,
As is the book of Launcelot de Lake,
That women hold in ful gret reverence."

[3] "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. II. chap
xii, section vii.

[4] Sentimentalism approaches its subject through the feelings;
romanticism through the imagination.

[5] Ruskin, too indicates the common element in romanticism and
naturalism--a desire to escape from the Augustan formalism. I condense
the passage slightly: "To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop
the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system
which reduced streets to brick walls and pictures to brown stains.
Reaction from this state was inevitable, and accordingly men steal out to
the fields and mountains; and, finding among these color and liberty and
variety and power, rejoice in all the wildest shattering of the mountain
side, as an opposition to Gower Street. It is not, however, only to
existing inanimate nature that our want of beauty in person and dress has
driven us. The imagination of it, as it was seen in our ancestors,
haunts us continually. We look fondly back to the manners of the age
sought in the centuries which we profess