ne-sidedness for which Carlyle stood. Yet each is a one-sided protest,
and falls again into the snare of setting the affections upon things
which are not eternal, and so wedding man to the green earth again.

Thus we find paganism--in some quarters paganism quite openly
confessed--occupying a prominent place in our literature to-day. Before
we examine some of its aspects in detail a word or two of preliminary
warning may be permissible. It is a mistake to take the extremer forms
of this reaction too seriously, although at the present time this is
very frequently done. One must remember that such a spirit as this is to
be found in every age, and that it always creates an ephemeral
literature which imagines itself to be a lasting one. It is nothing new.
It is as old and as perennial as the complex play of the human mind and
human society.

Another reason for not taking this phase too seriously is that it was
quite inevitable that some such reaction should follow upon the huge
solemnities of Carlyle. Just as in literature, after the classic
formality of Johnson and his contemporaries, there must come the
reaction of the Romantic School, which includes Sir Walter Scott, Byron,
and Burns; so here there must be an inevitable reaction from austerity
to a daring freedom which will take many various forms. From Carlyle's
solemnising liturgy we were bound to pass to the slang and colloquialism
of the man in the street and the woman in the modern novel. Body and
spirit are always in unstable equilibrium, and an excess of either at
once swings the fashion back to the other extreme. Carlyle had his day
largely in consequence of what one may call the eighteenth-century
glut--the Georgian society and its economics, and the Byronic element in
literature. The later swing back was as inevitable as Carlyle had been.
Perhaps it was most clearly noticed after the deaths of Browning and
Tennyson, in the late eighties and the early nineties. But both before
and since that time it has been very manifest in England.

But beyond all these things there is the general fact that before any
literature becomes pagan the land must first have been paganised. Of
course there is always here again a reaction of mutual cause and effect
between literature and national spirit. Carlyle himself, in his doctrine
of heroes, was continually telling us that it is the personality which
produces the _zeitgeist_, and not _vice versa_. On the other hand it is
equall