Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/95

80 lyrics, and there was Keats and The Ancient Mariner; and Walter Scott’s novels, and the great artists of older days. But these latter, without some sort of guidance, might seem capricious and fantastic. I think the impression was that beauty was something exotic, and that poetic imagination meant fancying very quaint and fine out-of-the-way things. One enjoyed things nearer home and more genuine; but perhaps one did not know that they were to be called beauty, or that they demanded imagination.

A great revelation came probably to many individuals with three influences: Ruskin, with his Turner interpretation and with the theory of beauty as the expression of the workman’s life; the rapprochement of Greek and modern drama through the profounder interpretation of Euripides, beginning from Browning and going on to Professor G. Murray; and oddly enough, the Pre-Raphaelite movement in English painting, which brought, like Walter Scott and William Morris, the end of the romantic