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.
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.
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