theirs were
picturesqueness, eloquence, emotion, even sentimentalism. Both the
exaggerated hopes and the exaggerated fears aroused by the French
Revolution disinclined their victims to listen to the middling sanity
of Johnson. The hopes built themselves fancy castles of equality and
fraternity which instinctively shrunk from the broadsides of Johnsonian
ridicule. The fears hid themselves in caves of mediaeval reaction and
did not care to expose their eyes {173} to the smarting daylight of
Johnsonian common sense. His appeal had always been to argument: the
new appeal was at worst to sentiment, at best to history for which
Johnson was too true to his century to care anything. When Voltaire
writes an article on monasticism, he has nothing to say about how it
arose and developed; he neither knows nor cares anything about that.
For him it is, like everything else, a thing to be judged in a court of
abstract rationality, altogether independent of time and circumstance,
and as such he has no difficulty in dismissing it with brilliant and
witty contempt without telling us anything about what it actually is or
was. It was this unhistorical spirit which, as Burke rightly preached,
was the most fatal element in the French Revolution. But the French
are not to be blamed alone for an intellectual atmosphere which was
then universal in Europe. Little as Johnson would have liked the
association, it must be admitted that he was in his way as pure and
unhistorical a rationalist as Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists; and
that it was inevitable that the reaction in favour of history which
Burke set in motion would tell against him as well as against them.
Against the discovery that things can neither be rightly judged nor
wisely reformed except by examining how they came to be what they {174}
are, the whole eighteenth century, and in it Johnson as well as
Rousseau and Voltaire, stands naked. And the abstract rationalizing of
that century was soon to have another enemy in alliance with history,
the new force of science. Nothing has been more fatal to the arbitrary
despotism of mere reason than the idea of development, of evolution.
Directly it is seen that all life exhibits itself in stages it becomes
obvious that the dry light of reason will not provide the materials for
true judgment until it has been coloured by a sympathetic insight into
the conditions of the particular stage under discussion.

All these things, then, were ag