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.
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_.
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