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though desiring to improve its efficiency. The characteristic might be
elucidated by comparison with the other great European literatures. In
France, Voltaire had begun about 1762 his crusade against orthodoxy, or,
as he calls it, his attempt to crush the infamous. He was supported by
his allies, the Encyclopaedists. While Helvetius and Holbach were
expounding materialism and atheism, Rousseau had enunciated the
political doctrines which were to be applied to the Revolution, and
elsewhere had uttered that sentimental deism which was to be so dear to
many of his readers. Our neighbours, in short, after their
characteristic fashion, were pushing logic to its consequences, and
fully awake to the approach of an impending catastrophe. In Germany the
movement took the philosophical and literary shape. Lessing's critical
writings had heralded the change. Goethe, after giving utterance to
passing phases of thought, was rising to become the embodiment of a new
ideal of intellectual culture. Schiller passed through the storm and
stress period and developed into the greatest national dramatist. Kant
had awakened from his dogmatic theory, and the publication of the
_Critique of Pure Reason_ in 1781 had awakened the philosophical world
of Germany. In both countries the study of earlier English literature,
of the English deists and freethinkers, of Shakespeare and of
Richardson, had had great influence, and had been the occasion of new
developments. But it seemed as though England had ceased to be the
originator of ideas, and was for the immediate future at least to
receive political and philosophical impulses from France and Germany. To
explain the course taken in the different societies, to ask how far it
might be due to difference of characteristics, and of political
constitutions, of social organism and individual genius, would be a very
pretty but rather large problem. I refer to it simply to illustrate the
facts, to emphasise the quiet, orderly, if you will, sleepy movement of
English thought which, though combined with great practical energy and
vigorous investigation of the neighbouring departments of inquiry,
admitted of comparative indifference to the deeper issues involved. It
did not generate that stimulus to literary activity due to the dawning
of new ideas and the opening of wide vistas of speculation. When the
French Revolution broke out, it took Englishmen, one may say, by
surprise, and except by a few keen observer