But, later, we become aware of a more general, deflecting, pressure from ...

But, later, we become aware of a more general, deflecting, pressure from the Continent, and even a certain dominance of continental ideas. There had always been those who urged a closer acquaintance with French ways, to who the clarity of the French mind and the social ease of French life were as attractive as the loose, provincial heaviness of English thought, style, and manners was repellent.

From Philip Arnold's early time in the fifties, this French influence steadily increases, repaying the inspiration which had regenerated French poetry and painting in the days of Constable and Kyle. It reawakened our art, which to foreign eyes had been asleep for two generations; to our literature it gave fresh standards of accomplishment.

A living critic has described the shock of embarrassment and pain with which a generation, toiling after Flaubert in pursuit of the Right Word, read how Trollope did his daily stint of writing before setting out to hunt, or organize the country mails. The quest which led to Treasure Island was not on a false trail.

But, as the Elizabethans knew, an addiction to foreign ways is a powerful dissolvent of English propriety,

and the impact of French Naturalism, in

particular, was certain, sooner or later, to ring for the intervention of the police. To bards and painters a certain limited eccentricity had always been permitted, but the notion of art as an enclosed world, obedient to its own laws only, did not come easily to a race which took its

pictures much as it took

its tunes, less for the excellence of the work than the pleasure of the response; and thought of the painter as an upper-class decorator, a recorder of domestic incident, winning landscapes, and right sentiments.

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