The effect of all this upon individuals is a very interesting phenomenon to watch.  Every one of us has been touched by the pagan spirit which has invaded our times at so many different points of entrance.  It has become an atmosphere which we have all breathed more or less.  If some one were to say to any company of British people, one by one, that they were pagans, doubtless many of them would resent it, and yet more or less it would be true.  We all are pagans; we cannot help ourselves, for every one of us is necessarily affected by the spirit of his generation.  Nobody indeed says, “Go to, I will be a pagan”; but the old story of Aaron’s golden calf repeats itself continually.  Aaron, when Moses rebuked him, said naively, “There came out this calf.”  That exactly describes the situation.  That calf is the only really authentic example of spontaneous generation, of effect without cause.  Nobody expected it.  Nobody wanted it.  Everybody was surprised to see it when it came.  It was the Melchizedek among cattle—­without father, without mother, without descent.  Unfortunately it seems also to have been without beginning of days or end of life.  Every generation simply puts in its gold and there comes out this calf—­it is a way such calves have.

Thus it is with our modern paganism.  We all of us want to be idealists, and we sometimes try, but there are hidden causes which draw us back again to the earth.  These causes lie in the opportunities that occur one by one:  in politics, in industrial and commercial matters, in scientific theories, or by mere reaction.  The earth is more habitable than once it was, and we all desire it.  It masters us, and so the golden calf appears.

We shall now glance very rapidly at a few out of the many literary forces of our day in which we may see the various reactions from Carlyle.  First, there was the Early Victorian time, the eighteenth century in homespun.  It was not great and pompous like that century, but it lived by formality, propriety, and conventionality.  It was horribly shocked when George Eliot published Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede in 1858 and 1859.  Outwardly it was eminently respectable, and its respectability was its particular method of lapsing into paganism.  It was afraid of ideals, and for those who cherish this fear the worship of respectability comes to be a very dangerous kind of worship, and its idol is perhaps the most formidable of all the gods.

Meanwhile that glorious band of idealists, whose chief representatives were Tennyson, Browning, and Ruskin, to be joined later by George Meredith, were fighting paganism in the spirit of Arthur’s knights, keen to drive the heathen from the land.  Tennyson, the most popular of them all, probably achieved more than any other in this conflict.  Ruskin was too contradictory and bewildering, and so failed of much of his effect.  Browning and Meredith at first were reckoned unintelligible, and had to wait their day for a later understanding.  Still, all these, and many others of lesser power than theirs, were knights of the ideal, warring against the domination of dead and unthinking respectability.