aching to cynicism
which are to be found in his writings. His greed of merriment overleaps
itself, and the confession of that is the deepest note in all his music.

Thus all the avenues leading beyond the earth were blocked. Other men
escape along the lines of kindliness, love of friends, art, poetry, or
religion. In all these avenues he walks or dances, but they lead him
nowhere. At the bars he stands, an absolute worldling and pagan, full of
an insatiable curiosity and an endless hunger and thirst. There is no
touch of eternity upon his soul: his universe is Vanity Fair.

LECTURE VII

SARTOR RESARTUS

We now begin the study of the last of the three stages in the battle
between paganism and idealism. Having seen something of its primitive
and classical forms, we took a cross section of it in the seventeenth
century, and now we shall review one or two of its phases in our own
time. The leap from the seventeenth century to the twentieth necessarily
omits much that is vital and interesting. The eighteenth century, in its
stately and complacent fashion, produced some of the most deliberate and
finished types of paganism which the world has seen, and these were
opposed by memorable antagonists. We cannot linger there, however, but
must pass on to that great book which sounded the loudest bugle-note
which the nineteenth century heard calling men to arms in this warfare.

Nothing could be more violent than the sudden transition from Samuel
Pepys, that inveterate tumbler in the masque of life, whose absurdities
and antics we have been looking at but now, to this solemn and
tremendous book. Great in its own right, it is still greater when we
remember that it stands at the beginning of the modern conflict between
the material and spiritual development of England. Every student of the
fourteenth century is familiar with two great figures, typical of the
two contrasted features of its life. On the one hand stands Chaucer,
with his infinite human interest, his good-humour, and his inexhaustible
delight in man's life upon the earth. On the other hand, dark in shadows
as Chaucer is bright with sunshine, stands Langland, colossal in his
sadness, perplexed as he faces the facts of public life which are still
our problems, earnest as death. There is no one figure which corresponds
to Chaucer in the modern age, but Carlyle is certainly the counterpart
of Langland. Standing in the shadow, he sends forth his great voice to
his