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.
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