ers us, and so the golden calf
appears.

We shall now glance very rapidly at a few out of the many literary
forces of our day in which we may see the various reactions from
Carlyle. First, there was the Early Victorian time, the eighteenth
century in homespun. It was not great and pompous like that century, but
it lived by formality, propriety, and conventionality. It was horribly
shocked when George Eliot published _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and _Adam
Bede_ in 1858 and 1859. Outwardly it was eminently respectable, and its
respectability was its particular method of lapsing into paganism. It
was afraid of ideals, and for those who cherish this fear the worship of
respectability comes to be a very dangerous kind of worship, and its
idol is perhaps the most formidable of all the gods.

Meanwhile that glorious band of idealists, whose chief representatives
were Tennyson, Browning, and Ruskin, to be joined later by George
Meredith, were fighting paganism in the spirit of Arthur's knights, keen
to drive the heathen from the land. Tennyson, the most popular of them
all, probably achieved more than any other in this conflict. Ruskin was
too contradictory and bewildering, and so failed of much of his effect.
Browning and Meredith at first were reckoned unintelligible, and had to
wait their day for a later understanding. Still, all these, and many
others of lesser power than theirs, were knights of the ideal, warring
against the domination of dead and unthinking respectability.

Matthew Arnold came upon the scene, with his great protest against the
preponderance of single elements in life, and his plea for wholeness. In
this demand for whole and not one-sided views of the world, he is more
nearly akin to Goethe than perhaps any other writer of our time. His
great protest was against the worship of machinery, which he believed to
be taking the place of its own productions in England. He conceived of
the English people as being under a general delusion which led them to
mistake means for ends. He spoke of them as "Barbarians, Philistines,
and Populace," according to the rank in life they held; and accused them
of living for such ends as field sports, the disestablishment of the
Church of England, and the drinking of beer. He pointed out that, so far
as real culture is concerned, these can at best be but means towards
other ends, and can never be in themselves sufficient to satisfy the
human soul. He protested against Carlyle, alt