Boyhood (1840-1856)
unconscious alike of his powers and of his destiny. In science, religion, morals, philosophy, literature and art, in everything that spelt culture, one of the most brilliant periods in several English generations had passed its climax, was resting comfortably, and was about to slip unknowingly in decline towards the tragic, explosive overthrow that Darwin was quietly preparing for it with his patient accumulation of biological data.
The fruits of the Romantic Revolt had been reaped; a fresh consciousness of the beauties of the past, of nature and human nature unadorned, unrestrained by ugly fetters, had been gained. And the dangerous sordidness, the self-consuming flames of license that had too often accompanied the Satanic outbreaks of the opening of the century had been rigidly suppressed soon after Victoria had mounted the throne.
Wordsworth, last of the great poets of the late Renascence, had reformed, been crowned, relapsed into dulness, and died. Carlyle's barbarous, infinitely repetitious thunders had dulled many ears to the faint unrestful reverberations of the pseudo-cataclysm of 1848, that continued only in a steady and soothing decrescendo. Tennyson had written In Memoriam, Browning Christmas Eve and Easter Day: cogent forces on the side of an optimistic mysticism. Dickens had ceased crying out against the fantastic squalor of industrialism and was slumming in the American backwoods, to the Londoners' intense satisfaction. George Eliot had begun to ruin her splendidly human stories with moral Positivism, imported from Paris by Lewes. Thackeray was chanting of the rippling tragic comedy on the surface of the
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