the poetry of the universe in a single fragment of nature, and would be a pantheistic artist of world-wide compass had he merely painted these stacks of hay for the rest of his natural existence. [Illustration: _Gaz des Beaux-Arts._ MONET. A VIEW OF ROUEN. (_By permission of the Artist._)] And here ends the battle for the liberation of modern art. _Libertas artibus restituta._ The painters of the nineteenth century are no longer imitators, but have become makers of a new thing, "enlargers of the empire." The prophetic words written in the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Hamburger, Philipp Otto Runge, "light, colour, and moving life," were to form the great problem, the great conquest of modern art; they were fulfilled after two generations. Through the Impressionists art was enriched by an opulence of new beauties. A new and independent style had been discovered for the representation of new things, and a new province--a province peculiar to herself--was won for painting. CHAPTER XXXII THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND The flood of Impressionism was at the same time crossed by another current. Impressionism was a phase of progressive art of world-wide influence. It proclaimed that nature and life were the inexhaustible mine of beauty. Then after Naturalism had taught artists to work upon the impressions of external reality in an independent manner, a transition was made by some who embodied the impressions of their inward spirit in a free creative fashion, unborrowed from the old masters. We feel the need of living not merely in the world around us, but in an inner world that we build up ourselves, a world far more strange and fair, far more luminous than that in which our feet stumble so helplessly. We must needs mount upon the pinions of fancy into the wide land of vision, build castles in the clouds, watch their rise and their fall, and follow into misty distance the freaks of their changing architecture. The more grey and colourless the present may be, the more alluringly does the fairy splendour of vanished worlds of beauty flit before us. It is the very banality of everyday life that renders us more sensitive to the delicate charm of old myths, and we receive them in a more childlike, impressionable way than any earlier age, for we look upon them with fresh eyes that have been rendered keen by yearning. From all this it is evident that Impressionism could not remain the mode of expression for the whole world of the present day. The longing for old-world romance would brook no refusal. It was demanded from art not that she should mirror nature, nature could be seen without her aid, but that she should carry us away on dream-wings to a distant world more beautiful than our own; not that she should be merely modern, but that she should afford us even to-day some reflection of that beauty which sheds forth its lustre from the works of the old masters.