Calvinist. There are moments when
George Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess. There are also
moments when Ruskin turns into a governess, without even the excuse of
sex. But in all these cases the alteration comes as a thing quite abrupt
and unreasonable. We do not feel this acute angle anywhere in Homer or
in Virgil or in Chaucer or in Shakespeare or in Dryden; such things as
they knew they knew. It is no disgrace to Homer that he had not
discovered Britain; or to Virgil that he had not discovered America; or
to Chaucer that he had not discovered the solar system; or to Dryden
that he had not discovered the steam-engine. But we do most frequently
feel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number of
things they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do not
know. We feel, in a sort of way, that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Carlyle when he asks the Irish why they do not bestir themselves and
re-forest their country: saying not a word about the soaking up of every
sort of profit by the landlords which made that and every other Irish
improvement impossible. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Ruskin when he says, with a solemn visage, that building in iron is ugly
and unreal, but that the weightiest objection is that there is no
mention of it in the Bible; we feel as if he had just said he could find
no hair-brushes in Habakkuk. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man
like Thackeray when he proposes that people should be forcibly prevented
from being nuns, merely because he has no fixed intention of becoming a
nun himself. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like Tennyson,
when he talks of the French revolutions, the huge crusades that had
recreated the whole of his civilisation, as being "no graver than a
schoolboy's barring out." We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Browning to make spluttering and spiteful puns about the names Newman,
Wiseman, and Manning. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Newman when he confesses that for some time he felt as if he couldn't
come in to the Catholic Church, because of that dreadful Mr. Daniel
O'Connell, who had the vulgarity to fight for his own country. We feel
that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like Dickens, when he makes a blind
brute and savage out of a man like St. Dunstan; it sounds as if it were
not Dickens talking but Dombey. We feel it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Swinburne, when he has a Jingo fit and c