looking at things--reveals it. And yet,
though it is only the sum of all these separate personalities so
diverse and distinct, each age or generation possesses a certain
"style" of its own, unconsciously revealing a kind of general
personality. Everyone knows it is as unnecessary to date a book as a
church or a candlestick, since church and candlestick and book always
bear the date written on the face. The literature of the last three or
four generations, for instance, has been distinguished by Rebellion as a
"style." Rebellion has been the characteristic expression of its most
vital self.

It has been an age of rebels in letters as in life. Of course,
acquiescent writers have existed as well, just as in the Ark (to keep up
the illustration) vegetarians stood side by side with carnivors, and
hoofs were intermixed with claws. The great majority have, as usual,
supported traditional order, have eulogised the past or present, and
been, not only at ease in their generation, but enraptured at the vision
of its beneficent prosperity. Such were the writers and orators whom
their contemporaries hailed as the distinctive spokesmen of a happy and
glorious time, leaping and bounding with income and population. But, on
looking back, we see their contemporaries were entirely mistaken. The
people of vital power and prolonged, far-reaching influence--the
"dynamic" people--have been the rebels. Wordsworth (it may seem strange
to include that venerable figure among rebels, but so long as he was
more poetic than venerable he stood in perpetual rebellion against the
motives, pursuits, and satisfactions of his time)--Wordsworth till he
was forty-five, Byron all his short life, Newman, Carlyle, Dickens,
Matthew Arnold, Ruskin--among English writers those have proved
themselves the dynamic people. There are many others, and many later;
but we need recall only these few great names, far enough distant to be
clearly visible. It was they who moved the country, shaking its torpor
like successive earthquakes. Risen against the conceit of riches, and
the hypocrisies of Society, against unimpassioned and unimaginative
religion, against ignoble success and the complacent economics that
hewed mankind into statistics to fit their abstractions--one and all, in
spite of their variety or mutual hostility, they were rebels, and their
personality expressed itself in rebellion. That was the common
characteristic of their "style."

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