But a perfectly balanced, divinely composite _movement_ is an impossibility. Anything so intelligent or so good as that is out of the question. For in the first place that class is such a small one that the rare existence of such individuals is quite independent of movements. And, in the second place, were there numbers of such men co-existing their aggregate of work would not be a movement. It would be the reverse of that. Any movement of such an obvious sort as we are considering would bring them away from their centre. And for that they are disinclined. So any movement is largely either a Romantic invasion or reaction: a Classical or a Scientific one. It usually will have the character of these limiting sub-divisions. It is the swing of the pendulum from side to side: it is the superficial corrective and fashionable play of the general sea of men. So all men must wear black in one generation, green in the next, then white, then black again: for that uniformity is a law of regulated life that cannot be contradicted. Fashion is the sort of useful substitute for conviction. At present it is the substitute for religion. So you get the cry against tradition, the cry against emotion, or against superstition, or against science. Men’s consciousness can only grasp one of these ideas at a time: they can only do any useful work under the spell of Fashion; that is, the one limited conformity prescribed for their generation. The work of any artist living under this spell of fashion, unable to function without this stimulus, and to see beyond this convention, dates very quickly and is seldom remembered after his death, except through some prank of the erudite, or some accident of history. But this slavery to fashion is a different thing from the acceptance of the form, the data, and atmosphere of a time. Rowlandson could evidently have existed, from the testimony of his work, in no other time than the eighteenth century. He _used_ the spirit, the form-content, the dress, the impressionability of his time with an uncanny completeness. But evidently had he been a dependent on fashion he could have done nothing of the sort. For he would have been far too afraid of what he handled, and far too obliged to it, to develop it in that bold and personal way. I would apply this analysis of the general character of movements to present events in the art of painting in the following way.