This yearning after far-off worlds of beauty was combined with a demand for new delights of colour. The Impressionists had centred every effort in compassing the most difficult elements of the world of phenomena--light, air, and colour--ending in extreme imitation of reality. Then came a desire for colours, more radiant, more vivid than ever was seen on this poor world of ours; and since hardly any of the younger generation fulfilled the desire of the modern longing, the standard of a bygone age was raised aloft, and there set in the anti-naturalistic, anti-modern current that still survived from the age of romance in the work-a-day world of the present. How was it possible that England should have taken the lead upon this occasion also? Can an Englishman, a matter-of-fact being who finds his happiness in comfort and a practical sphere of action, be at the same time a Romanticist? Is not London the most modern town in Europe? Yet, without a question, this is the very reason why the New Romanticism found its earliest expression there, although it was the place where Naturalism had reigned longest and with the greatest strictness. There was a reaction against the prose of everyday life, just as, in the earlier part of the century, English landscape painting had been a reaction against town life. To escape the whistle of locomotives and the restless bustle of the struggle for existence, men take refuge in a far-off world, a world where everything is fair and graceful, and all emotions tender and noble, a world where no rudeness, no discord, and nothing fierce or brutal disturbs the harmony of ideal perfection. These artists become revellers in a land of fantasy, and flee from reality to an inner life which they have created for themselves, wander from London's railways and fogs to the sunny Italy of Botticelli, take their rest in the land of poetry, and come back with packing-cases full of lovely pictures and hearts full of happy emotions.