hough in the main thesis
the two are entirely at one. "I never liked Carlyle," he said; "he
always seemed to me to be carrying coals to Newcastle." He took Carlyle
for the representative of what he called "Hebraism," and he desired to
balance the undue preponderance of that by insisting upon the necessity
of the Hellenistic element in culture. Both of these are methods of
idealism, but Arnold protested that the human spirit is greater than any
of the forces that bear it onwards; and that after you have said all
that Carlyle has to say, there still remains on the other side the
intellect, with rights of its own. He did not exclude conscience, for he
held that conduct made up three-fourths of life. He was the idealist of
a whole culture as against all one-sidedness; but curiously, by flinging
himself upon the opposite side from Carlyle, he became identified in the
popular mind with what it imagined to be Hellenic paganism. This was
partly due to his personal idiosyncrasies, his fastidiousness of taste,
and the somewhat cold style of the _exquisite_ in expression. These
deceived many of his readers, and kept them from seeing how great and
prophetic a message it was that came to England beneath Arnold's
mannerisms.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti appeared, and many more in his train. He, more
perfectly than any other, expressed the marriage of sense and soul in
modern English poetry. He was the idealist of emotion, who, in the
far-off dim borderlands between sense and spirit, still preserved the
spiritual search, nor ever allowed himself to be completely drugged with
the vapours of the region. There were others, however, who tended
towards decadence. Some of Rossetti's readers, whose sole interest lay
in the lower world, claimed him as well as the rest for their guides,
and set a fashion which is not yet obsolete. There is no lack of
solemnity among these. The scent of sandalwood and of incense is upon
their work, and you feel as you read them that you are worshipping in
some sort of a temple with strange and solemnising rites. Indeed they
insist upon this, and assiduously cultivate a kind of lethargic and
quasi-religious manner which is supposed to be very impressive. But
their temple is a pagan temple, and their worship, however much they may
borrow for it the language of a more spiritual cult, is of the earth,
earthy.

Mr. Thomas Hardy was the inevitable sequel to George Eliot. Everybody
knows how beautiful and how full of cha