isting social state to the
solitude and seeming freedom of mountain and forest and ocean, as though
the only cure for the woes of civilisation lay in annihilating it. This
was an appeal less to nature than from man, just as we have said that
Byron's was, and hence it was distinct from the single-eyed appreciation
and love of nature for her own sake, for her beauty and terror and
unnumbered moods, which has made of her the mistress and the consoler of
many men in these times. In the days of old faith while the catholic
gods sat yet firm upon their thrones, the loveliness of the universe
shone to blind eyes. Saint Bernard in the twelfth century could ride for
a whole day along the shore of the Lake of Geneva, and yet when in the
evening his comrades spoke some word about the lake, he inquired: 'What
lake?'[3] It was not mere difference of temperament that made the
preacher of one age pass by in this marvellous unconsciousness, and the
singer of another burst forth into that tender invocation of 'clear
placid Leman,' whose 'contrasted lake with the wild world he dwelt in'
moved him to the very depths. To Saint Bernard the world was as wild and
confused as it was to Byron; but then he had gods many and saints many,
and a holy church in this world, and a kingdom of heaven awaiting
resplendent in the world to come. All this filled his soul with a
settled certitude, too absorbing to leave any space for other than
religious emotion. The seven centuries that flowed between the spiritual
mind of Europe when Saint Bernard was its spokesman, and the spiritual
mind of which Byron was the interpreter, had gradually dissolved these
certitudes, and the faint lines of new belief and a more durable order
were still invisible. The assurance of science was not yet rooted, nor
had men as yet learned to turn back to the history of their own kind, to
the long chronicle of its manifold experiences, for an adequate system
of life and an inspiring social faith. So they fled in spirit or in
flesh into unfamiliar scenes, and vanished from society, because society
was not sufficiently social.

[Footnote 3: Morison's _Life of St. Bernard_, p. 68 (2d edit.)]

The feeling was abnormal, and the method was fundamentally artificial. A
sentimentalism arose, which is in art what the metaphysical method is in
philosophy. Yet a literature was born of it, whose freshness, force,
elevation, and, above all, a self-assertion and peculiar aspiring
freedom that h