Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/87

 Rh when, as Taine said, men of letters adopted a style by which they held "as by their coats," was closed by the end of the eighteenth century, and men were beginning to return to nature for the refreshment of their souls and to history for the invigoration of their minds. This change in outlook and inspiration brought the poets into companionship with man as well as with nature, and the Cottar's Saturday Night came to be written and Shelley's magnificent songs of democracy and liberty to be sung. Wordsworth gave the simple dales-men the mien of godlike dignity, and Coleridge bathed the whole of life in a glow of spiritual equality. The new literary movement divided. The main stream appeared to flow backwards to mediævalism and the ages of romance, and it refreshed the political system which grew up to contest supremacy with the growths of the Revolution; the other, the waters of which were often mingled with those of the first, bearing Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Swinburne, flowed onward in a somewhat hesitating and twisting current, in the direction of Social Democracy. But neither stream freshened commercialism. The industrial order was shunned by both. The cash nexus, the self-made rich man, the lack of good taste which the plutocracy showed, the brutalising of the lower classes, the destruction of the beautiful in nature, the enclosure of spots hallowed by beauty, the religion of utility—in a word, Manchesterism—have been attacked, lampooned and insulted (sometimes, be it said, misrepresented, but that of itself is significant)