sympathetic labour and retrospect, however, was far from being merely
sentimental; for the other half of this divided soul was looking
ahead. Those same revolutions, often so destructive, stupid, and
bloody, filled it with pride, and prompted it to invent several
incompatible theories concerning a steady and inevitable progress in
the world. In the study of the past, side by side with romantic
sympathy, there was a sort of realistic, scholarly intelligence and an
adventurous love of truth; kindness too was often mingled with
dramatic curiosity. The pathologists were usually healers, the
philosophers of evolution were inventors or humanitarians or at least
idealists: the historians of art (though optimism was impossible here)
were also guides to taste, quickeners of moral sensibility, like
Ruskin, or enthusiasts for the irresponsibly beautiful, like Pater and
Oscar Wilde. Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double
preoccupation with the past and with the future, a longing to know
what all experience might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to
hasten to some wholly different experience, to be contrived
immediately with a beating heart and with flying banners. The
imagination of the age was intent on history; its conscience was
intent on reform.

Reform! This magic word itself covers a great equivocation. To reform
means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of
the act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
Usually the movement starts from the mere sense of oppression, and
people break down some established form, without any qualms about the
capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may
be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order,
intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious
forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre