Matthew Arnold, the apostle of culture, found his idealism in the purely mental region.  Rossetti was the idealist of the heart, with its whole world of emotions, and that subtle and far-reaching inter-play between soul and body for which Carlyle had always made too little allowance.  Mr. H.G.  Wells and Mr. Bernard Shaw, proclaiming themselves idealists of the social order, have been reaching conclusions and teaching doctrines at which Carlyle would have stood aghast.  These are but random examples, but they are one in this, that each has protested against that one-sidedness for which Carlyle stood.  Yet each is a one-sided protest, and falls again into the snare of setting the affections upon things which are not eternal, and so wedding man to the green earth again.

Thus we find paganism—­in some quarters paganism quite openly confessed—­occupying a prominent place in our literature to-day.  Before we examine some of its aspects in detail a word or two of preliminary warning may be permissible.  It is a mistake to take the extremer forms of this reaction too seriously, although at the present time this is very frequently done.  One must remember that such a spirit as this is to be found in every age, and that it always creates an ephemeral literature which imagines itself to be a lasting one.  It is nothing new.  It is as old and as perennial as the complex play of the human mind and human society.

Another reason for not taking this phase too seriously is that it was quite inevitable that some such reaction should follow upon the huge solemnities of Carlyle.  Just as in literature, after the classic formality of Johnson and his contemporaries, there must come the reaction of the Romantic School, which includes Sir Walter Scott, Byron, and Burns; so here there must be an inevitable reaction from austerity to a daring freedom which will take many various forms.  From Carlyle’s solemnising liturgy we were bound to pass to the slang and colloquialism of the man in the street and the woman in the modern novel.  Body and spirit are always in unstable equilibrium, and an excess of either at once swings the fashion back to the other extreme.  Carlyle had his day largely in consequence of what one may call the eighteenth-century glut—­the Georgian society and its economics, and the Byronic element in literature.  The later swing back was as inevitable as Carlyle had been.  Perhaps it was most clearly noticed after the deaths of Browning and Tennyson, in the late eighties and the early nineties.  But both before and since that time it has been very manifest in England.