In each case it would
generally be said that the change indicated was a return to nature and
passion from the artificial coldness of the dominant school. That
reaction, whatever its precise nature, took characteristically different
forms in England and in France; and it is as illustrating one of the
most important distinctions that I propose to say a few words upon the
contrast thus exhibited.

Return to Nature! That was the war-cry which animated the Lake school in
their assault upon the then established authority. Pope, as they held,
had tied the hands of English poets by his jingling metres and frigid
conventionalities. The muse--to make use of the old-fashioned
phrase--had been rouged and bewigged, and put into high-heeled boots,
till she had lost the old majestic freedom of gait and energy of action.
Let us go back to our ancient school, to Milton and Shakespeare and
Spenser and Chaucer, and break the ignoble fetters imported from the
pseudo-classicists of France. These and similar phrases, repeated and
varied in a thousand forms, have become part of the stock-in-trade of
literary historians, and are put forward so fluently that we sometimes
forget to ask what it is precisely that they mean. Down to Milton, it is
assumed, we were natural; then we became artificial; and with the
Revolution we became natural again. That a theory so generally received
and so consciously adopted by the leaders of the new movement must have
in it a considerable amount of truth, is not to be disputed. But it is
sometimes not easy to interpret it into very plain language. The method
of explaining great intellectual and social movements by the phrase
'reaction' is a very tempting one, for the simple reason that it enables
us to effect a great saving of thought. The change is made to explain
itself. History becomes a record of oscillations; we are always swinging
backwards and forwards, pendulum fashion, from one extreme to another.
The courtiers of Charles II. were too dissolute because the Puritans
were too strict; Addison and Steele were respectable because Congreve
and Wycherley were licentious; Wesley was zealous because the Church had
become indifferent; the Revolution of 1789 was a reaction against the
manners of the last century, and the Revolution in running its course
set up a reaction against itself. Now it is easy enough to admit that
there is some truth in this theory. Every great man who moves his race
profoundly is of necessi