This book offers an assessment of all important personalities and movements on the English literary and artistic scene from Ruskin to W.B Yeats. Twentieth century beliefs about the arts their relation to religion and the social order are traced to their origins in the middle of the last century. Ruskin, Rossette, William Morris, Walter Pater and the theorists of the fin de siecle are treated in detail in the course of an investigation which is indispensable to any student of the history of modern literarture and ideas.

ISBN 0 7156 1775 3. First published 1949, this second impression published 1983 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.