Not that the classicism of eighteenth century art was without a beauty and a meaning of its own. It was at least the relic of a noble ideal, the outworn garment of a spirit once vigorous and sincere. The true classic temper—the mental ordering of the visible world into types and models according to academic rule—is the natural outgrowth of man’s effort to select and classify those objects around him which it gives him pleasure to contemplate. The “choosing-spirit” of an age—its preference for certain aspects of life and indifference to other aspects—embodies itself in set forms and modes of artistic expression which are accepted by that age as sufficient and final, and stereotyped by common usage into conventions from which, in the progress of a growing people, all vitality gradually ebbs away. Just as in science or philosophy the theories and methods of authoritative men are established as “classic” till fresh facts and fresh problems come to light, so in literature, in music, and in painting, certain types and modes are adopted by general consent as the fit vehicles for the thought to be expressed, and these persist, by force of authority and usage, into a new age bringing new ideas into play and seeing the _subject-matter_ of all art—namely life itself—in a new light. Thus the accepted canons of art, which were at first the natural reflection of the highest culture of the period, become at last the barren dogmas of an outgrown habit of mind. The thought of the people has outrun the language of the schools. The strife of the new thought with the old language is begun. Such a strife it was that came upon the western world under the outward turmoil of the French Revolution. Europe was in the mood for great reactions. The vast and sordid materialism of the eighteenth century, with its prodigious hypocrisies and its flippant sensuality,—its sentimentality even, which, as Heine reminds us, is always a product of materialism—was rudely broken up. The disruption of the settled order of worldly things awoke men’s dormant questions as to the divine order of things, the moral government of the universe. Or rather, the rejection of external authority was but the evidence of the rejection of authority within—the rejection of traditional standards of right and wrong, beauty and happiness, wisdom and truth; and the demand for new standards for the criticism of life, for new ethics, new ideals, new gods.