All of you who have read the fulsome and bombastic praise of Nature, together with the bitter disparagement of the work of man, in such works as _La Nouvelle Héloise_, the _Confessions_, his letters to _Monsieur de Malesherbes_, and his _Reveries of a lonely Rambler_, will not require to be told the gospel Rousseau preaches.[20] Suffice it to say, that he successfully created a love of the rough, of the rugged, the unhandseled and the uncultivated in the minds of almost all Europeans--especially Northerners, and that this love was rapidly reflected in landscape painting. This new feeling for the romantic, for the unconstrained and for the savage in Nature, although it soon dominated art, was, in its essentials, quite foreign to art and to the artist. It had nothing in common with the motives that prompt and impel the artist to his creations. Its real essence was moral and not artistic; its fundamental feature was its worship of the abstract principles of liberty, anarchy and the absence of culture, which rude nature exemplifies on all sides; and it was a moral or scientific spirit that animated it, whether in Rousseau or in his followers. Friedrich Schiller, who entirely supports Rousseau's particular kind of love for Nature, frankly admits this[21] in his able and profound analysis of the sentiment in question; whatever self-contempt, and contempt of adult manhood, may have lain behind Rousseau's valuations, Schiller brings all of it openly into the light of day, and in his efforts to support the Frenchman's school of thought, literally exposes it to ridicule. One or two voices, such as Hegel's[22] and Chateaubriand's, were raised in protest against this thoroughly vulgar and sentimental attitude towards savage and wild phenomena; but they were unable to resist a movement, the strength of which had been accumulating for so many centuries in the hearts of almost all Europeans; and, ultimately, numbers triumphed. Even the hand of man--of the artist--in a painted landscape, got to be a thing of the past. Realism--because it most conscientiously repeated that unconstrained and anarchical spirit which the romantic age loved to detect in matted weeds, in tangled and impenetrable coppices, in thick festoons of parasitic plants, in unhandseled brambles and in babbling brooks--became the ruling principle. Classical influence alone was able for a while to resist too rapid a decline; but soon we find Constable declaring in the early part of the nineteenth century, that "there is nothing ugly," and addressing aspiring artists in these words: "Observe that thy best director, thy perfect guide is Nature. Copy from her. In her paths is thy triumphal arch. She is above all other teachers; and ever confide in her with a bold heart:"[23] and a whole host of people following in his wake and applauding his principles.