The æsthetic reaction, represented on the Continent by Chateaubriand, Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England by Walter Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and, above all, by Wordsworth, came in to give strength to this barrier. Under the magic of the men who led in this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which, in the previous century had been regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric masses of stone and mortar, to be masked without by classic colonnades and within by rococo work in stucco and papier maché, became even more beloved than in the thirteenth century. Even men who were repelled by theological disputations were fascinated and made devoted reactionists by the newly revealed beauties of mediæval architecture and ritual.[1]
The center and fortress of this vast system, and of the reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century, was the University of Oxford. Orthodoxy was its vaunt, and a special exponent of its spirit and object of its admiration was its member of Parliament, Mr. William Ewart Gladstone, who, having begun his political career by a labored plea for the union of church and state, ended it by giving that union what is likely to be a deathblow. The mob at the circus of Constantinople in the days of the Byzantine emperors was not more wildly orthodox than the mob of students at this foremost seat of learning of the Anglo-Saxon race during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. A curious proof of this had been displayed just before the end of that period. The minister of the United States at the Court of St. James was then Edward Everett. He was undoubtedly the most accomplished scholar and one of the foremost statesmen that America had produced; his eloquence in early life had made him perhaps the most admired of American preachers; his classical learning had at a later period made him Professor of Greek at Harvard; he had successfully edited the leading American review, and had taken a high place in American literature; he had been ten years a member of Congress; he had been again and again elected Governor of Massachusetts; and in all these posts he had
- ↑ A very curious example of this insensibility of persons of really high culture is to be found in American literature toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Adams, wife of John Adams, afterward President of the United States, but at that time Minister to England, one of the most gifted women of her time, speaking, in her very interesting letters from England, of her journey to the seashore, refers to Canterbury Cathedral, seen from her carriage windows, and which she evidently did not take the trouble to enter, as "looking like a vast prison." So, too, about the same time, Thomas Jefferson, the American plenipotentiary in France, a devoted lover of classical and Renaissance architecture, giving an account of his journey from Strasburg to Paris, never refers to any of the beautiful cathedrals or churches upon his route.
For the alloy of interested motives among English church dignitaries, see the pungent criticism of Bishop Hampden by Canon Liddon, in his Life of Pusey, vol. i, p. 363.
