Matthew Arnold came upon the scene, with his great protest against the preponderance of single elements in life, and his plea for wholeness.  In this demand for whole and not one-sided views of the world, he is more nearly akin to Goethe than perhaps any other writer of our time.  His great protest was against the worship of machinery, which he believed to be taking the place of its own productions in England.  He conceived of the English people as being under a general delusion which led them to mistake means for ends.  He spoke of them as “Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace,” according to the rank in life they held; and accused them of living for such ends as field sports, the disestablishment of the Church of England, and the drinking of beer.  He pointed out that, so far as real culture is concerned, these can at best be but means towards other ends, and can never be in themselves sufficient to satisfy the human soul.  He protested against Carlyle, although in the main thesis the two are entirely at one.  “I never liked Carlyle,” he said; “he always seemed to me to be carrying coals to Newcastle.”  He took Carlyle for the representative of what he called “Hebraism,” and he desired to balance the undue preponderance of that by insisting upon the necessity of the Hellenistic element in culture.  Both of these are methods of idealism, but Arnold protested that the human spirit is greater than any of the forces that bear it onwards; and that after you have said all that Carlyle has to say, there still remains on the other side the intellect, with rights of its own.  He did not exclude conscience, for he held that conduct made up three-fourths of life.  He was the idealist of a whole culture as against all one-sidedness; but curiously, by flinging himself upon the opposite side from Carlyle, he became identified in the popular mind with what it imagined to be Hellenic paganism.  This was partly due to his personal idiosyncrasies, his fastidiousness of taste, and the somewhat cold style of the exquisite in expression.  These deceived many of his readers, and kept them from seeing how great and prophetic a message it was that came to England beneath Arnold’s mannerisms.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti appeared, and many more in his train.  He, more perfectly than any other, expressed the marriage of sense and soul in modern English poetry.  He was the idealist of emotion, who, in the far-off dim borderlands between sense and spirit, still preserved the spiritual search, nor ever allowed himself to be completely drugged with the vapours of the region.  There were others, however, who tended towards decadence.  Some of Rossetti’s readers, whose sole interest lay in the lower world, claimed him as well as the rest for their guides, and set a fashion which is not yet obsolete.  There is no lack of solemnity among these.  The scent of sandalwood and of incense is upon their work, and you feel as you read them that you are worshipping in some sort of a temple with strange and solemnising rites.  Indeed they insist upon this, and assiduously cultivate a kind of lethargic and quasi-religious manner which is supposed to be very impressive.  But their temple is a pagan temple, and their worship, however much they may borrow for it the language of a more spiritual cult, is of the earth, earthy.