Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/20

the man had met. The Genius of the eighteenth century—that age of victorious but unsatisfying common sense—lay at its last gasp. It had indeed received its mortal wound in that revolt of the human spirit against its contented optimism, from which the French Revolution sprang: and its death, though it might be postponed, was impossible to avert. Eighty-Nine—if Eighty-Nine had borne no Jacobin children—would have killed it outright; and Coleridge and Wordsworth would have sung a new Song of Deborah over its destruction. But Eighty-Nine unfortunately was too soon succeeded by Ninety-Three; and the moribund Genius received a new lease of life amid loud rejoicings, in which Coleridge and Wordsworth joined. But by 1830 this lease had run out, and the long delayed reaction came. The new generation were tired to death of the eighteenth century tradition, and profoundly disgusted with the intellectual and spiritual patrimony which they had inherited from it. They were sick of its sandy Utilitarianism, its cast-iron economics, its uninspired and uninspiring theology, the flat and deadly prose of its theory of life. They were ripe, especially the younger among them, for rebellion against a system which however eminently conformable to the practical reason, had no word of response to utter, no shred of satisfaction to offer to those two most importunate claimants in human and especially in youthful human nature—the energies and the emotions. The new generation were crying out for at least a religion of action if they could hold no longer by any religion of speculative belief. They wanted a politico-social creed which would find room for the new ideas and aspirations rejected or coldly viewed by the politicians of the old order. Above all they passionately longed, as did the newly risen Romanticists in France—for a presentment of human life in literature with all the wealth of colour and animation of movement which belong to it in every age, and which they felt were not wanting to it in their own. They were unutterably weary of contemplating the world as a mere store-house of facts and figures, or as a mechanical creation of laws,