Only now and then, and especially toward the latter
half of the eighteenth century, when thought began
to revive, and men dreamed of putting the world to
rights once more, there rose before them glimpses of
an Arcadian ideal. Country life—the
primaeval calling of men—how graceful and
pure it might be! How graceful—if
not pure—it once had been! The boors
of Teniers and the beggars of Murillo might be true
to present fact; but there was a fairer ideal, which
once had been fact, in the Eclogues of Theocritus,
and the Loves of Daphnis and Chloe. And so men
took to dreaming of shepherds and shepherdesses, and
painting them on canvas, and modelling them in china,
according to their cockney notions of what they had
been once, and always ought to be. We smile now
at Sevres and Dresden shepherdesses; but the wise
man will surely see in them a certain pathos.
They indicated a craving after something better than
boorishness; and the many men and women may have become
the gentler and purer by looking even at them, and
have said sadly to themselves: “Such might
have been the peasantry of half Europe, had it not
been for devastations of the Palatinate, wars of succession,
and the wicked wills of emperors and kings.”
LECTURE III—THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES
In a former lecture in this Institution, I said that
the human race owed more to the eighteenth century
than to any century since the Christian era.
It may seem a bold assertion to those who value duly
the century which followed the revival of Greek literature,
and consider that the eighteenth century was but the
child, or rather grandchild, thereof. But I
must persist in my opinion, even though it seem to
be inconsistent with my description of the very same
era as one of decay and death. For side by side
with the death, there was manifold fresh birth; side
by side with the decay there was active growth;—side
by side with them, fostered by them, though generally
in strong opposition to them, whether conscious or
unconscious. We must beware, however, of trying
to find between that decay and that growth a bond
of cause and effect where there is really none.
The general decay may have determined the course of
many men’s thoughts; but it no more set them
thinking than (as I have heard said) the decay of
the Ancien Regime produced the new Regime—a
loose metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not
hold water, and must not be taken for a philosophic
truth. That would be to confess man—what
I shall never confess him to be—the creature
of circumstances; it would be to fall into the same
fallacy of spontaneous generation as did the ancients,
when they believed that bees were bred from the carcass
of a dead ox. In the first place, the bees were
no bees, but flies—unless when some true
swarm of honey bees may have taken up their abode within
the empty ribs, as Samson’s bees did in that
of the lion. But bees or flies, each sprang
