But beyond all these things there is the general fact that before any literature becomes pagan the land must first have been paganised.  Of course there is always here again a reaction of mutual cause and effect between literature and national spirit.  Carlyle himself, in his doctrine of heroes, was continually telling us that it is the personality which produces the zeitgeist, and not vice versa.  On the other hand it is equally certain that no personality is independent of his age and the backing he finds in it, or the response which he may enlist for his revolt from it.  Both of these are true statements of the case; as to which is ultimate, that is the old and rather academic question of whether the oak or the acorn comes first.  We repeat that it is impossible, in this double play of cause and effect, to say which is the ultimate cause and which the effect.  The controversy which was waged in the nineteenth century between the schools of Buckle and Carlyle is likely to go on indefinitely through the future.  But what concerns us at present is this, that all paganism which finds expression in a literature has existed in the age before it found that expression.  The literature is indeed to some extent the creator of the age, but to a far greater extent it is the expression of the age, whose creation is due to a vast multiplicity of causes.

Among these causes one of the foremost was political advance and freedom—­the political doctrines, and the beginnings of Socialistic thought, which had appeared about the time when Sartor Resartus was written.  The Reform Bill of 1832 tended to concentrate men’s attention upon questions of material welfare.  Commercial and industrial prosperity followed, keeping the nation busy with the earth.  In very striking language Lord Morley describes this fact, in language specially striking as coming from so eminently progressive a man.[4] “Far the most penetrating of all the influences that are impairing the moral and intellectual nerve of our generation, remain still to be mentioned.  The first of them is the immense increase of material prosperity, and the second is the immense decline in sincerity of spiritual interest.  The evil wrought by the one fills up the measure of the evil wrought by the other.  We have been, in spite of momentary declensions, on a flood-tide of high profits and a roaring trade, and there is nothing like a roaring trade for engendering latitudinarians.  The effect of many possessions, especially if they be newly acquired, in slackening moral vigour, is a proverb.  Our new wealth is hardly leavened by any tradition of public duty such as lingers among the English nobles, nor as yet by any common custom of devotion to public causes, such as seems to live and grow in the United States.  Under such conditions, with new wealth come luxury and love of ease and that fatal readiness to believe that God has placed us in the best of possible worlds, which so lowers men’s aims and unstrings their