Now the pure and lofty classicism of the seventeenth century, as exemplified supremely in the poetry of Milton, was saved from materialism by the robust piety of a Puritan world. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the accession of imperial and commercial power brought with it a certain coarsening of the moral fibre of the nation, that the “grand” style became petrified, as it always tends to do, into the grandiose. A people nurtured in the somewhat tawdry luxury of the Hanoverian period was not likely to take very serious views of life, but was well content with superficial philosophies. In the blaze of outward prosperity the inward vision grew dim. Art became the slave of tradition instead of the handmaid of a living will. Then the great wave of rebellion, surging through the life of Europe, swept into the deep backwaters of imaginative and creative thought. Men born into the storm and stress of revolution, and confronted with the great problems of practical life, were driven back to question ultimate things; were thrown once more upon the spiritual world. And as the outward struggle spent itself, its full significance weighed more upon the peoples. The deep charm of the contemplative, the reflective, the critical, fell once more upon the European mind. So the “classic” temper—the love of order and authority (degraded at last into mere acceptance of tradition and rule)—gave place to the “romantic” temper,—the temper of enquiry and experiment, the sense of the mystery and the reality of life, the openness of the mind towards spiritual things. And with this new consciousness of the invisible world and all its significance upon the life of man, comes the utter discarding of _self_-consciousness; the repudiation of “pose.” Life has become too real for attitudinizing. The first result of this change of spirit upon the art of a nation appears in the choice of subject for artistic treatment. The painter begins to portray not merely things and persons but incidents and conditions; to picture men and women as they are in actual life; in short, to _state the problems_ fairly; to see facts and examine circumstances, in order to reach the solutions and the meanings, vaguely guessed and earnestly desired by the soul awakened to the perception of the supernatural and the divine. This was the initial task of the neo- romantic revival; in this lay the primary significance of the new school of painting which appeared soon after the year 1845 on English exhibition walls.