The main characteristic of that movement is that it is both moral and religious, a devotion to God and the active service of man, a recognition at once of the rights of nature and of spirit.  It does not, on the one hand, raise the individual as a natural being to the throne of the universe, and make all forces social, political, and spiritual stoop to his rights; nor does it, on the other hand, deny these rights, or make the individual a mere instrument of society.  It at least attempts to reconcile the fundamental facts of human nature, without compromising any of them.  It cannot be called either individualistic or socialistic; but it strives to be both at once, so that both man and society mean more to this age than they ever did before.  The narrow formulae that cramped the thought of the period which preceded ours have been broken through.  No one can pass from the hedonists and individualists to Carlyle and Browning without feeling that these two men are representatives of new forces in politics, in religion, and in literature,—­forces which will undoubtedly effect momentous changes before they are caught again and fixed in creeds.

That a new epoch in English thought was veritably opened by them is indicated by the surprise and bewilderment they occasioned at their first appearance.  Carlyle had Emerson to break his loneliness and Browning had Rossetti; but, to most other men at that day, Sartor and Pauline were all but unintelligible.  The general English reader could make little of the strange figures that had broken into the realm of literature; and the value and significance of their work, as well as its originality, will be recognized better by ourselves if we take a hurried glance at the times which lay behind them.  Its main worth will be found to lie in the fact that they strove to bring together again certain fundamental elements, on which the moral life of man must always rest, and which had fallen asunder in the ages which preceded their own.

The whole-hearted, instinctive life of the Elizabethan age was narrowed and deepened into the severe one-sidedness of Puritanism, which cast on the bright earth the sombre shadow of a life to come.  England was given up for a time to a magnificent half-truth.  It did not

    “Wait
  The slow and sober uprise all around
  O’ the building,”

but

    “Ran up right to roof
  A sudden marvel, piece of perfectness."[A]

[Footnote A:_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._]

After Puritanism came Charles the Second and the rights of the flesh, which rights were gradually clarified, till they contradicted themselves in the benevolent self-seeking of altruistic hedonism.  David Hume led the world out of the shadow of eternity, and showed that it was only an object of the five senses; or of six, if we add that of “hunger.”  The divine element was explained away, and the proper study of mankind was, not man, as that age thought,