ms it may assume.

How much our memory of pictures colours the impressions of nature we
receive is probably not suspected by us, but who could say how a scene
would appear to him, had he never looked at a picture? So sensitive is
the vision to the influence of memory that, after seeing the pictures of
some painter whose work has deeply impressed us, we are apt, while the
memory of it is still fresh in our minds, to see things as he would
paint them. On different occasions after leaving the National Gallery I
can remember having seen Trafalgar Square as Paolo Veronese, Turner, or
whatever painter may have impressed me in the Gallery, would have
painted it, the memory of their work colouring the impression the scene
produced.

But, putting aside the memory of pictures, let us consider the place of
direct visual memory from nature in our work, pictures being indirect or
second-hand impressions.

We have seen in an earlier chapter how certain painters in the
nineteenth century, feeling how very second-hand and far removed from
nature painting had become, started a movement to discard studio
traditions and study nature with a single eye, taking their pictures out
of doors, and endeavouring to wrest nature's secrets from her on the
spot. The Pre-Raphaelite movement in England and the Impressionist
movement in France were the results of this impulse. And it is
interesting, by the way, to contrast the different manner in which this
desire for more truth to nature affected the French and English
temperaments. The intense individualism of the English sought out every
detail, every leaf and flower for itself, painting them with a passion
and intensity that made their painting a vivid medium for the expression
of poetic ideas; while the more synthetic mind of the Frenchman
approached this search for visual truth from the opposite point of view
of the whole effect, finding in the large, generalised impression a new
world of beauty. And his more logical mind led him to inquire into the
nature of light, and so to invent a technique founded on scientific
principles.

But now the first blush of freshness has worn off the new movement,
painters have begun to see that if anything but very ordinary effects
are to be attempted, this painting on the spot must give place to more
reliance on the memory.

Memory has this great advantage over direct vision: it retains more
vividly the essential things, and has a habit of losing what is
un