materialism and positiveness of our day,
bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford,
the school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of
transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art. For the artist can accept
no sphere of life in exchange for life itself. For him there is no
escape from the bondage of the earth: there is not even the desire of
escape.

He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of
the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of
Asia will create for itself the monstrous, many-breasted idol of Ephesus,
but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual
life which conforms most clearly to the perfect facts of physical life.

'The storm of revolution,' as Andre Chenier said, 'blows out the torch of
poetry.' It is not for some little time that the real influence of such
a wild cataclysm of things is felt: at first the desire for equality
seems to have produced personalities of more giant and Titan stature than
the world had ever known before. Men heard the lyre of Byron and the
legions of Napoleon; it was a period of measureless passions and of
measureless despair; ambition, discontent, were the chords of life and
art; the age was an age of revolt: a phase through which the human spirit
must pass but one in which it cannot rest. For the aim of culture is not
rebellion but peace, the valley perilous where ignorant armies clash by
night being no dwelling-place meet for her to whom the gods have assigned
the fresh uplands and sunny heights and clear, untroubled air.

And soon that desire for perfection, which lay at the base of the
Revolution, found in a young English poet its most complete and flawless
realisation.

Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer:
Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian
painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in
Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of
England.

Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and
clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of
beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats
was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite
school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak.

Blake had indeed, before him, claimed for art a lo