Without him, and his wonderful wand
which made the dry bones of history live, England and France would
not have known this picturesque reaction. The stir in these two
countries was curiously characteristic of their genius. In France it
put on, in the first place, the shape of art, of poetry, painting,
sculpture. Romanticism blossomed in 1830, and bore fruit for ten
years. The religious reaction was a punier thing; the great Abbe,
who was the Newman of France, was himself unable to remain within the
fantastic church that he built out of medieval ruins. In England,
and especially in Oxford, the aesthetic admiration of the Past was
promptly transmuted into religion. Doctrines which men thought dead
were resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not poetry or painting, but
the sermons of Newman, the Tracts, the whole religious force which
has transformed and revivified the Church of England. That force is
still working, it need hardly be said, in the University of to-day,
under conditions much changed, but not without thrills of the old
volcanic energy.
Probably the Anglican ideas ceased to be the most powerfully
agitating of intellectual forces in Oxford about 1845. A new current
came in from Rugby, and the influence of Dr. Arnold and the natural
tide of reaction began to run very strong. If we had the apologiae
of the men who thought most, about the time when Clough was an
undergraduate, we should see that the influence of the Anglican
divines had become a thing of sentiment and curiosity.
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