wanted, for success in the highest sense, materials and a basis; a
thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it.

At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the
French Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of
genius equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive
time of Greece, or out of that of the Renascence, with its powerful
episode the Reformation. But the truth is that the stir of the French
Revolution took a character which essentially distinguished it from such
movements as these. These were, in the main, disinterestedly
intellectual and spiritual movements; movements in which the human
spirit looked for its satisfaction in itself and in the increased play
of its own activity. The French Revolution took a political, practical
character. The movement, which went on in France under the old régime,
from 1700 to 1789, was far more really akin than that of the Revolution
itself to the movement of the Renascence; the France of Voltaire and
Rousseau told far more powerfully upon the mind of Europe than the
France of the Revolution. Goethe reproached this last expressly with
having "thrown quiet culture back." Nay, and the true key to how much in
our Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is this!--that they had their source
in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind. The
French Revolution, however,--that object of so much blind love and so
much blind hatred,--found undoubtedly its motive-power in the
intelligence of men, and not in their practical sense; this is what
distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the First's
time. This is what makes it a more spiritual event than our Revolution,
an event of much more powerful and world-wide interest, though
practically less successful; it appeals to an order of ideas which are
universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational?
1642 asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it