We in England, in our great burst of literature during the first thirty years of the present century, had no manifestation of the modern spirit, as this spirit manifests itself in Goethe’s works or Heine’s.  And the reason is not far to seek.  We had neither the German wealth of ideas, nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas.  There reigned in the mass of the nation that inveterate inaccessibility to ideas, that Philistinism,—­to use the German nickname,—­which reacts even on the individual genius that is exempt from it.  In our greatest literary epoch, that of the Elizabethan age,[154] English society at large was accessible to ideas, was permeated by them, was vivified by them, to a degree which has never been reached in England since.  Hence the unique greatness in English literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  They were powerfully upheld by the intellectual life of their nation; they applied freely in literature the then modern ideas,—­the ideas of the Renascence and the Reformation.  A few years afterwards the great English middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakespeare, entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years. He enlargeth a nation, says Job, and straiteneth it again. [155]

In the literary movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century the signal attempt to apply freely the modern spirit was made in England by two members of the aristocratic class, Byron and Shelley.  Aristocracies are, as such, naturally impenetrable by ideas; but their individual members have a high courage and a turn for breaking bounds; and a man of genius, who is the born child of the idea, happening to be born in the aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from freely developing it.  But Byron and Shelley did not succeed in their attempt freely to apply the modern spirit in English literature; they could not succeed in it; the resistance to baffle them, the want of intelligent sympathy to guide and uphold them, were too great.  Their literary creation, compared with the literary creation of Shakespeare and Spenser, compared with the literary creation of Goethe and Heine, is a failure.  The best literary creation of that time in England proceeded from men who did not make the same bold attempt as Byron and Shelley.  What, in fact, was the career of the chief English men of letters, their contemporaries?  The gravest of them, Wordsworth, retired (in Middle-Age phrase) into a monastery.  I mean, he plunged himself in the inward life, he voluntarily cut himself off from the modern spirit.  Coleridge took to opium.  Scott became the historiographer-royal of feudalism.  Keats passionately gave himself up to a sensuous genius, to his faculty for interpreting nature; and he died of consumption at twenty-five.  Wordsworth, Scott, and Keats have left admirable works; far more solid and complete works than those which Byron and Shelley