Victorian England: Portrait of an Age E-Book

G.M. Young

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This brilliant and evocative book is now widely regarded as the greatest single study of the age in any language. The late George Kitson Clark characterized it as "an historical essay of unique interest and importance." Though the book deserves to rank as a classic, its allusive style makes it rather difficult fare for the general reader. In less than two hundred pages Young paints a picture so subtle and compact that only the specialist in Victorian history can fully appreciate the value of his vivid narrative. The allusive nature of the Portrait recently sent a few dozen scholars scurrying under the guidance of Kitson Clark, to hunt down and verify its numerous references and quotations. Their exhaustive efforts have unearthed a few minor blemishes, but these fail to detract from the book's overall brilliance. Thought the Portrait is esteemed by scholars, few have noted how much the book is a reflection of its time and of the abiding cultural concerns of Young's intellectual life. In print continuously since its first appearance in 1936, this study of the Victorian era from 1837-1901 is regarded as the greatest history of that time ever written. G. M Young's remarkable survey has outstanding clarity, delicious wit, and penetrating scholarship. "An immortal classic, the greatest long essay ever written."--Simon Schama. "A magnificent piece."--Punch. "Every page is delightful reading."--Guardian. "[A] breathtaking range of scholarship, richness and aptness of language, and acid sharpness of wit."--Country Life.

Leseprobe

Victorian England: Portrait of an Age

by G. M. Young

Copyright 1930 George Malcolm Young.

This edition published by Reading Essentials.

All Rights Reserved.

VICTORIAN ENGLAND

ἀρεταὶ δ' αἰεὶ μεγάλαι πολύμυθοι·

βαιὰ δ' ἐν μακροῖσι ποικίλλειν

VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Portrait of an Age

by G. M. YOUNG

INTRODUCTION

In the First War, partly from curiosity and partly for comfort, I set myself to study the course and outcome of the great Napoleonic struggle. When Waterloo had been fought and won, I went on to the years of peace and distress which followed, and so to the collapse of Tory domination in 1830, to the Reform Bill and the New Poor Law, to the England of young Gladstone, young Tennyson, young Darwin: of the Oxford Movement: of the Benthamites: of Factory Inspectors and School Inspectors: of Chadwick and Horner: of Sybil and the People’s Charter. As I read, my picture of Victorian England grew clearer, and it was a very different picture from the one at that time commonly accepted by popular opinion and set out by popular writers. So, in a fit of wrath over what seemed to me a preposterous misreading of the age, I wrote an Essay[1] which was intended as a manifesto, or perhaps an outline for others to fill in. I had had little or no experience of writing, and the Essay was in places sadly crude, and in places badly rhetorical. But it did, I found, induce some readers to reconsider their ideas, and re-orientate their attitudes: ideas and attitudes generated rather by an emotional antipathy to the Victorian Age than by any insight into its historic significance. So when Oxford asked me to plan a book on Early Victorian England, to match those on Shakespeare’s England and Johnson’s England, I felt I was committed to do my best, and I think I can justify my rashness by saying that I persuaded Sir John Clapham to write the chapter on ‘Work and Wages’.

For myself I reserved the final, summary chapter, to be called ‘Portrait of an Age 1831 to 1865’, the Reform Bill and the death of Palmerston being, as it were, the natural limits of the period. In the Essay of which I have spoken, I had, somewhat paternally, exhorted young historians to study the methods of the great masters. I followed my own advice with the result that my first draft rapidly degenerated into a flat imitation of Macaulay’s Third Chapter. It went into the fire. The second was more promising, but, as I was thinking it into shape, I found myself asking, what is this chapter really about? For that matter, what is History about? And the conclusion I reached was that the real, central theme of History is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening: in Philip Sidney’s phrase, ‘the affects, the whisperings, the motions of the people’; in Maitland’s, ‘men’s common thought of common things’; in mine, ‘the conversation of the people who counted.’ Who were they? What were the assumptions behind their talk? And what came of it all? Then ‘the boy born in 1810’ offered himself as the interpreter of that talk, and my first paragraph wrote itself.

I had always been convinced that Victorianism was a myth, engendered by the long life of the sovereign and of her most illustrious subjects. I was constantly being told that the Victorians did this, or the Victorians thought that, while my own difficulty was to find anything on which they agreed: any assumption which was not at some time or other fiercely challenged. ‘Victorian History’, I had said, ‘is before all things a history of opinion. To see ideas embodying themselves in parties and institutions: institutions and parties closing in upon ideas: to show old barriers sometimes sapped, and sometimes stormed, by new opinions: positions once thought impregnable abandoned overnight, and forces once thought negligible advancing to unforeseen victories, that is to understand Victorian history.’ And the historian must be in sympathy with them all.

So conceived, my final draft did not dissatisfy me. I thought the outlines were true, the incidents fairly selected, the omissions justified, though I might with advantage have found space for the Mutiny and the transfer of India to the Crown. But, when I was asked to expand my chapter into a survey of the whole reign, I found myself involved in difficulties which I could not always master. I see now that I should have carried my book to 1914, and treated Late Victorian and Edwardian England as the ancien régime of the England in which I was writing. I could then have shown, more clearly than I have, the ecumenical significance of the age, revealed not only in the foundation of the great Dominions but in that marvellous network of commerce and finance which may truly be called a World Economy, and which was created by the genius, and sustained by the strength of Victorian England. That is what I should try to set out if I were beginning afresh. But as the greatest of our masters has said, ‘where error is irreparable, repentance is useless’.

G. M. Y.

1952

[1]

Published as ‘Victorian History’ in Selected Modern Essays: Second Series (The World’s Classics, No. 406. Oxford University Press, 1932).

PORTRAIT OF AN AGE

I

A boy born in 1810, in time to have seen the rejoicings after Waterloo and the canal boats carrying the wounded to hospital, to remember the crowds cheering for Queen Caroline, and to have felt that the light had gone out of the world when Byron died, entered manhood with the ground rocking under his feet as it had rocked in 1789. Paris had risen against the Bourbons; Bologna against the Pope; Poland against Russia; the Belgians against the Dutch. Even in well-drilled Germany little dynasts were shaking on their thrones, and Niebuhr, who had seen one world revolution, sickened and died from fear of another. At home, forty years of Tory domination were ending in panic and dismay; Ireland, unappeased by Catholic Emancipation, was smouldering with rebellion; from Kent to Dorset the skies were alight with burning ricks. A young man looking for some creed by which to steer at such a time might, with the Utilitarians, hold by the laws of political economy and the greatest happiness of the greatest number; he might simply believe in the Whigs, the Middle Classes, and the Reform Bill; or he might, with difficulty, still be a Tory. But atmosphere is more than creed, and, whichever way his temperament led him, he found himself at every turn controlled, and animated, by the imponderable pressure of the Evangelical discipline and the almost universal faith in progress.

Evangelical theology rests on a profound apprehension of the contrary states: of Nature and of Grace; one meriting eternal wrath, the other intended for eternal happiness. Naked and helpless, the soul acknowledges its worthlessness before God and the justice of God’s infinite displeasure, and then, taking hold of salvation in Christ, passes from darkness into a light which makes more fearful the destiny of those unhappy beings who remain without. This is Vital Religion. But the power of Evangelicalism as a directing force lay less in the hopes and terrors it inspired, than in its rigorous logic, ‘the eternal microscope’ with which it pursued its argument into the recesses of the heart, and the details of daily life, giving to every action its individual value in this life, and its infinite consequence in the next. Nor could it escape the notice of a converted man, whose calling brought him into frequent contact with the world, that the virtues of a Christian after the Evangelical model were easily exchangeable with the virtues of a successful merchant or a rising manufacturer, and that a more than casual analogy could be established between Grace and Corruption and the Respectable and the Low. To be serious, to redeem the time, to abstain from gambling, to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, to limit the gratification of the senses to the pleasures of a table lawfully earned and the embraces of a wife lawfully wedded, are virtues for which the reward is not laid up in heaven only. The world is very evil. An unguarded look, a word, a gesture, a picture, or a novel, might plant a seed of corruption in the most innocent heart, and the same word or gesture might betray a lingering affinity with the class below.

The discipline of children was becoming milder, because it was touched with that tenderness for all helpless things which we see increasing throughout the eighteenth century, and with that novel interest in the spectacle of the opening mind which was a characteristic product of the Revolutionary years. But it was, perhaps for the same reason, more vigilant; and moral, or social, anxiety made it for girls at least more oppressive.[2] Yet if, with Rosalind and Beatrice in our eye, we recall Dryden’s saying about ‘the old Elizabeth way for maids to be seen and not heard’, we shall realize how easy it is to misunderstand our grandmothers. The outstanding Victorian woman is a blend of the great lady and the intellectual woman, not yet professional, and we can graduate the proportions until, at the opposite ends of the scale, we encounter the limiting instances of the Queen herself and Harriet Martineau. In Mrs. Grote, who would have been a far more effective Member of Parliament than her husband, who sat with her red stockings higher than her head, discomfited a dinner-party by saying ‘disembowelled’ quite bold and plain, and knew when a hoop was off a pail in the back kitchen, the great lady is formidably ascendant; in Mrs. Austin the intellectual woman. In Mrs. Austin’s daughter, Lady Duff Gordon, in Lady Eastlake—another product of the high secluded culture of the provinces—and, with the emphasis of genius, in Miss Nightingale, the kind achieves its balance.

But for working use the eighteenth century had conceived a standard type of womanhood, sensitive and enduring, at once frailer and finer than the man[3]—in a word, Amelia—and this type, repeated and articulated in a thousand novels, had blended insensibly with the more positive type evolved, in a humanitarian age, by the persuasive working of a religion of duty. Helen Pendennis in fiction, Mrs. Tennyson in life, might serve as examples; Miss Nightingale’s caustic allusion to ‘woman’s particular worth and general missionariness’ as a corrective. In making up the account of English morals in the nineteenth century it is necessary to bear in mind that the most influential women were reared in an atmosphere which made them instinctively Custodians of the Standard. The two who had most aptitude and most capacity for rebellion were fanatics, Charlotte Brontë for the moral, Harriet Martineau for the economic law. Mary Wollstonecraft left, unhappily, no equal successor, and George Sand could never have grown in English soil. Thus it came about that the pagan ethic which, when faith in God and Immortality had gone, carried into the next, the agnostic, age the evangelical faith in duty and renunciation, was a woman’s ethic. George Eliot’s rank in literature has, perhaps, not yet been determined: in the history of ideas her place is fixed. She is the moralist of the Victorian revolution.

That the ethic could be so transposed from a Christian to a Stoic key shows how native the discipline was. It had its roots deep down in the habits of a northern race,[4] vigorous and self-controlled, not sensitive but not unkindly, in country rectories and manor houses, in the congregations of City churches, in the meeting houses of Yorkshire clothing towns. It rose and spread with the advance of the class which principally sustained it: Wesley and his followers carried it into regions which the old churches had hardly touched; Wilberforce and Hannah More brought wit and fashion to its support; Cowper brought poetry. By the beginning of the nineteenth century virtue was advancing on a broad invincible front. The French wars made England insular, and conscious of its insularity, as it had not been since the Conquest. The Evangelicals gave to the island a creed which was at once the basis of its morality and the justification of its wealth and power, and, with the creed, that sense of being an Elect People which, set to a more blatant tune, became a principal element in Late Victorian Imperialism. By about 1830 their work was done. They had driven the grosser kinds of cruelty, extravagance, and profligacy underground. They had established a certain level of behaviour for all who wished to stand well with their fellows. In moralizing society they had made social disapproval a force which the boldest sinner might fear.

By the beginning of the Victorian age the faith was already hardening into a code. Evangelicalism at war with habit and indifference, with vice and brutality, with slavery, duelling, and bull-baiting, was a very different thing from Evangelicalism grown complacent, fashionable, superior. Even its charity had acquired what a Yorkshire manufacturer once grimly styled a ‘diffusive, itinerant quality’. The impulses it had quickened showed at their best in the upper ranks of society, where they had been absorbed into an older tradition of humour, culture, and public duty; or at the Universities, where they blended with new currents of intellectual eagerness and delight. The piety of a fine scholar like Peel or a haughty Border lord like Graham, of Gladstone or Sidney Herbert, had not much in common with the soul-saving theology of the money-making witness-bearers, those serious people whose indifference to national affairs Bright was one day to deplore. But, morally, their way of life was the same. Evangelicalism had imposed on society, even on classes which were indifferent to its religious basis and unaffected by its economic appeal, its code of Sabbath observance, responsibility, and philanthropy; of discipline in the home, regularity in affairs; it had created a most effective technique of agitation, of private persuasion and social persecution. On one of its sides, Victorian history is the story of the English mind employing the energy imparted by Evangelical conviction to rid itself of the restraints which Evangelicalism had laid on the senses[5] and the intellect; on amusement, enjoyment, art; on curiosity, on criticism, on science.

[2]

But any one who supposes that there was such a thing as a ‘Victorian’ family or ‘Victorian’ father should meditate Norris of Bemerton’s Spiritual Counsel, 1694, or The Ladies’ Calling (Oxford University Press, 1673).

[3]

God! she is like a milk-white lamb that bleats

For man’s protection.

God! indeed. But this is Keats (1817), and is Rousseau’s Sophie rather than Fielding’s Sophia. One does not easily picture Emma Woodhouse (1816) bleating for Keats.

[4]

I may refer to Hazlitt’s contrast of Northern and Southern manners in Hot and Cold (Plain Speaker).

[5]

Kingsley (who described Shelley as a lewd vegetarian) correctly diagnosed Byron as an Evangelical gone wrong. Byron’s objection to mixed bathing, even when the parties are married, as ‘very indelicate’, comes from his Venetian period.

II

The Evangelical discipline, secularized as respectability, was the strongest binding force in a nation which without it might have broken up, as it had already broken loose. For a generation and more the static conception of society[6] had been dissolving because society itself was dissolving. ‘A nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman,’ Cromwell told one of his Parliaments, ‘that is a good interest.’ But the good interest was splitting into a hundred aristocracies and a hundred democracies, button-makers and gentlemen button-makers,[7] all heels and elbows, jostling, pushing, snubbing, presuming. On the whole, the articulate classes, whose writings and conversation make opinion, were gainers by the change—it has been estimated, for example, that between 1815 and 1830 the purchasing capacity of the classes above the wage-earning level was all but doubled—and the Victorian belief in progress was bottomed on the complacency which comes of steadily rising incomes and steadily improving security. Mixed with this, no doubt, was the vulgar pride in mere quantity, the thoughtless exultation of a crowd in motion. But no one can read for long in the literature of the thirties and forties without touching a finer and deeper pride, portentously draped in tables of trade and revenue and the publications of the Useful Knowledge Society, but glowing with the authentic sense of war and victory, man against nature, and reason against the traditions of the elders.

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

To travellers descending from the moorlands, the smoke and roar of Lancashire seemed like the smoke and roar of a battle-field, and the discipline of the factories like the discipline of a great army. It is hardly an accident that the first history of the Renaissance came from Liverpool[8] and that the most conspicuous memorial of the Utilitarians is a History of Greece. Across the ages, the modern Englishman recognized his peers.

But we must be careful if we are to keep the picture true, not to view the early Victorian age of production through that distorting medium, the late Victorian age of finance. Science touched the imagination by its tangible results. It was immersed in matter, and it conformed directly to the Augustan canon of historic progress by its immediate contribution to the ‘order, regularity, and refinement of life’. Romance and the Revolution bred ideas of human purpose which only slowly permeated the English mind. Even in 1830—far more powerfully in 1840—they were beginning to work. But the common intelligence was still dominated by the solid humanism of the Augustans, to which the Eighteenth Proposition of Oxford Liberalism would have seemed a self-evident truth:

Virtue is the child of Knowledge: Vice of Ignorance: therefore education, periodical literature, railroad travelling, ventilation, and the arts of life, when fully carried out, serve to make a population moral and happy.[9]

’The objects of this Society’, so ran the prospectus of the Rochdale Pioneers, ‘are the moral and intellectual advancement of its members. It provides them with groceries, butcher’s meat, drapery goods, clothes and clogs.’ Gas-lighting of the streets was hardly an improvement so much as a revolution in public security;[10] cheap cotton goods in personal cleanliness, colza lamps in domestic comfort. Finance, the manipulation of wealth and credit as things by themselves, three or four degrees removed from the visible crop or ore, was an adjunct. Production was the thing itself.

A generation which has come to take invention for granted and is, perhaps, more sensitive to its mischief than its benefits, cannot easily recover the glory of an age when knowledge, and with it power, seemed to have been released for an illimitable destiny.[11] The Englishman might reluctantly allow that in social amenity the French, in care for the well-being of the people the Prussians, went beyond him. He might at moments be chilled by the aesthetic failure of his time, so profuse and yet so mean: alienated by its ethical assurance, at once so pretentious and so narrow. In a petulant mood, he would talk, with Grote, of the Age of Steam and Cant, but all the while he knew that in the essential business of humanity, the mastery of brute nature by intelligence, he had outstripped the world, and the Machine was the emblem and the instrument of his triumph. The patriotism of early Victorian England, not yet blooded by the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, irritated by Napoleon III, or exalted by the vision of empire, was at heart a pride in human capacity, which time had led to fruition in England; and in the great humanist, who brought all history to glorify the age of which he was the most honoured child, it heard its own voice speaking.[12]

To articulate the creed of progress, to state its evidences and draw out its implications, was the mission of that remarkable group of men variously known as the Utilitarians, or the Philosophic Radicals. In discipleship or reaction no young mind of the thirties could escape their influence. Bentham’s alliance with James Mill, Mill’s friendship with Malthus and Ricardo, had created a party, almost a sect, with formularies as compact as the Evangelical theology, and conclusions not less inexorable. However far the Benthamite disciple went, he would find the old sage had been there before him; every trail was blazed, every pitfall marked, and in every path stood a lion, the Sinister Interest of Privilege. Between rulers and ruled there exists an inherent antagonism[13] which can only be resolved if rulers and ruled are identified by means of universal suffrage and the ballot-box, and the identity is preserved by publicity and a cheap press.[14] The sovereignty thus created is to be exercised through a carefully balanced system: of Parliament to legislate, central organs to direct, local organs to execute. On the question of Women’s Suffrage, the Utilitarians were somewhat inconsistently divided; Bentham, a flirtatious old bachelor, being more logical than James Mill, who, in spite of Malthus, had begotten more children than he could afford on a female whom he despised. On all other matters, above all on the sovereign authority of Economic Law, they spoke with one voice.

Reduced from an aspiration to a schedule, progress might seem a gloomy business for the mass of mankind. It rests on competition, and always and everywhere competition is reducing the profits of the employer, and the wages of the workman, to the level of bare subsistence. Only the landowner, the common enemy of all, continually profits by the growing demand for sites, and for food, because, always and everywhere, population is pressing on the means to live. Such is the law. But Nature has not left her children without all hope of escaping the fate to which her mathematics seem to have consigned them. By industry, and abstinence, the employer may enlarge the market for his goods; by industry, and continence, the workman may increase the purchasing power, and limit the numbers, of his class: progress, like salvation, is the reward of virtue; of diligence and self-education; of providence and self-control; and all the evolutionary speculation of the next age has for background Malthus’s Stoic vision of that remote, austere, divinity ‘whose purpose is ever to bring a mind out of the clod’.

In the early thirties the Philosophic Radicals were a portent, men whose meetings were watched, the spearhead of a revolution beginning with the ballot and going on, Heaven knew how far, to compulsory education and a federated Empire. Then, frigid and scholastic, as a party they fade from the view. The popular Radicals, hotter against Church and Lords, and readier champions of the unprivileged and the oppressed, made more noise; the people preferred the Tories. Grote lived to decline a peerage; when the ballot was at last conceded in 1872 John Mill had decided that he did not want it and had moved on to proportional representation instead; Leader vanished into an aesthetic Italian exile; Molesworth’s features are more familiar at Ottawa than his name at Westminster. The case for Free Trade was taken out of their hands by men who had learnt their economics in the counting-house, their logic on the platform, and their rhetoric in the pulpit.[15] But they had done inestimable service. They came down into a world where medieval prejudice, Tudor Law, Stuart economics, and Hanoverian patronage still luxuriated in wild confusion, and by the straight and narrow paths they cut we are walking still. The Gladstonian Liberals have gone where the Peelites followed the Canningites; the Evangelical creed long ago foundered on the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, and the great Whig name has not been heard for fifty years. But it would be hard to find any corner of our public life where the spirit of Bentham is not working to-day.

It is dangerous to force historic movements into exaggerated symmetry. But the parallel operation of Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism cannot be ignored. Their classics, Malthus on Population and Wilberforce’s Practical View, appeared almost simultaneously, one in 1797, the other in 1798. Their greatest victories in public affairs, the Abolition of Slavery and the Reform of the Poor Law, were won in 1833 and 1834. When a distracted Government threw the Old Poor Law at a Royal Commission, the Benthamites rose to the height of their opportunity. The Secretary of the Commission was Edwin Chadwick, whom the Patriarch had selected to be his apostle to the new age, and in his hands there was no fear lest the faith should grow cold. Born in 1800, in a Lancashire farmhouse where the children were washed all over, every day, the mainspring of Chadwick’s career seems to have been a desire to wash the people of England all over, every day, by administrative order. In practical capacity Chadwick was the greatest, in the character of his mind, in the machine-like simplicity of his ideas and the inexhaustible fertility of his applications, the most typical of the Benthamites. Napoleon III once asked him what he thought of his improvements in Paris. ‘Sir,’ he answered, ‘it was said of Augustus that he found Rome brick and left it marble. May it be said of you that you found Paris stinking and left it sweet.’ It might stand for Chadwick’s epitaph. He found England stinking. If he did not leave it sweet, the fault was certainly not his. Through the Poor Law Commission, the Benthamite formula—inquiry, legislation, execution, inspection, and report—was incorporated in our working constitution. It was rounded off by the invention of the Public Audit and the Grant-in-aid to tighten central control and stimulate local activity. But the corresponding formula for unofficial effort—information, agitation, the parent society, the local branch, the picture,[16] and the handbill—had been discovered by the Evangelicals and humanitarians in their warfare against slavery, and by them it was imparted to the Chartists and the Free Trade League.

The Evangelical and Utilitarian movements both rested on a body of doctrine which to question was impious or irrational; in both cases the doctrine was the reflection of an exceptional experience, the religious experience of a nation undergoing a moral revival, its social experience during a revolution in the methods of production: and in both cases a larger view was certain to show that neither was a more than provisional synthesis. In the meantime they furnished England with a code and a great company of interpreters: with their almost Genevan rigour, and almost Latin clarity, they imposed themselves like foreign task-masters on the large, ironic English mind, and their great doctrines were all too readily snipped into texts for the guidance of those who did not wish to think at all, and the repression of those who wished to think for themselves, into Cant for Practical Men and Cant for Serious Men. Finally, they were alike in this, that each imparted its peculiar virtue: the Evangelicals their zeal for holiness, the Utilitarians their faith in reason, to the movements, even to the reactions which sprang out of them, to Tractarians and Agnostics who denied their introspective ethic, to Tories and Socialists who challenged their conception of the competitive State.

[6]

As explained, for example, by an Irish judge in 1798. ‘Society consists of noblemen, baronets, knights, esquires, gentlemen, yeomen, tradesmen and artificers.’ The jury found that, as the subject had ceased to be a breeches maker without becoming a gentleman, he must be a yeoman.

[7]

For whom there were separate doors in the Birmingham taverns.

[8]

‘The historian of the Age of Leo (Roscoe) has brought into cultivation the extensive tract of Chatmoss,’ (Mrs. Barbauld, 1811.)

[9]

Newman, Apologia, Note A. But what does serve mean? The almost magical effect of ventilation on the moral habits (temper and sobriety) of a poor quarter was demonstrated again and again.

[10]

‘Without presuming to play on words,’ said the Lambeth magistrate, ‘I regard gas as essential to an enlightened police.’ It was once proposed to illuminate thieves’ quarters with lamps of a special construction so that law-abiding pedestrians should pass by on the other side.

[11]

The admiration of Bacon, almost amounting to a rediscovery, is very characteristic of the period. So is the Utilitarian preference for the more scholastic, less imaginative Hobbes. When his editor, Molesworth, stood for Southwark the populace paraded the streets shouting NO OBBS.

[12]

Il a son orgueil d’homme. Taine’s fine saying of Macaulay is true of his whole age. ‘That wicked XVIII century’ died hard: under his Romantic ornament Macaulay is through and through Augustan; and contemporary critics (Brougham and Harriet Martineau are examples) reproduce against him the charges which the early Romantics had laid against Gibbon—materialism and want of philosophy.

[13]

Translate this into economic terms, substitute for the antagonism of rulers and ruled the antagonism of employers and employed, and some curious conclusions will follow which the Socialists of the next age were ready to draw.

[14]

‘The principle of human nature, upon which the necessity of government is founded, the propensity of one man to possess himself of the objects of desire at the cost of another, leads on, by infallible sequence, not only to that degree of plunder which leaves the members (except the instruments and recipients) the bare means of subsistence, but to that degree of cruelty which is necessary to keep in existence the most intense terrors.’—James Mill on Government.

[15]

The supersession of Charles Villiers by Cobden, Bright, and W. J. Fox is typical.

[16]

For example, the fine colour prints by Smith after Morland, of the shipwrecked crew entertained by natives, whom they return to carry into slavery.

III

Much of accident goes to the making of history, even the history of thought, which might seem to be most exempt from contingencies. The Victorian record would have been very different if Canning had lived to the years of Palmerston, if the new writers had grown up under the shadow of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. But the old men lived and the young men died. A strange pause followed their departure, and the great Victorian lights rose into a sky which, but for the rapid blaze of Bulwer Lytton, was vacant. Tennyson and Macaulay, Carlyle and Newman, Gladstone and Disraeli, Arnold and Dickens appear above the horizon together. In Sydney Smith’s stately compliments to the Graduate of Oxford,[17] the eighteenth century bows itself off the stage and introduces its successor. With the appearance of Vanity Fair in 1847, the constellation is complete and the stars are named. It was part of the felicity of the fifties to possess a literature which was at once topical, contemporary, and classic; to meet the Immortals in the streets, and to read them with added zest for the encounter.

Anchored to its twofold faith in goodness and progress, the early Victorian mind swung wide to the alternating currents of sentiment and party spite, but the virulence of the Press,[18] and the gush of the popular novel were play on the surface of a deep assurance. There are whimperings, sometimes bellowings, of self-pity, but defiance was no longer the mode. The greater and better part of English society accepted the social structure and moral objective of the nation, as a community of families, all rising, or to be raised, to a higher respectability. To those postulates their criticism of life was not directed: they were satisfied, not indeed with the world as it was, for they were all, in their way, reformers, but as it would become by the application of those reasoned and tested principles which made up the scheme of progress and salvation.

Poised and convinced, they could indulge, too, in a licence of feeling impossible to a generation bred in doubt, and they could take their ease in an innocent vulgarity which to a later age would have been a hard-worked and calculated Bohemianism. They could swagger and they could be maudlin. In public they could be reserved, for they were a slow and wary race, and reserve is at once the defence of the wise and the refuge of the stupid. But cynicism and superciliousness, the stigmata of a beaten age and a waning class, were alien to the hopeful, if anxious, generation which had taken the future into its hands. In their exuberance and facility, the earlier Victorians, with their flowing and scented hair, gleaming jewellery and resplendent waistcoats, were nearer to the later Elizabethans; they were not ashamed; and, like the Elizabethans, their sense of the worthwhileness of everything—themselves, their age, and their country: what the Evangelicals called seriousness; the Arnoldians, earnestness; Bagehot, most happily, eagerness—overflowed in sentiment and invective, loud laughter, and sudden reproof. Once at Bowood, when Tom Moore was singing, one by one the audience slipped away in sobs; finally, the poet himself broke down and bolted, and the old Marquis was left alone. We are in an age when, if brides sometimes swooned at the altar, Ministers sometimes wept at the Table; when the sight of an infant school could reduce a civil servant to a passion of tears; and one undergraduate has to prepare another undergraduate for the news that a third undergraduate has doubts about the Blessed Trinity—an age of flashing eyes and curling lips, more easily touched, more easily shocked, more ready to spurn, to flaunt, to admire, and, above all, to preach.

A young man brought up in a careful home might have heard, whether delivered or read aloud, a thousand sermons; an active clergyman was a social asset to a rising neighbourhood, his popularity a source of spiritual danger to himself. The form of preachers was canvassed like the form of public entertainers, and the circulation of some Victorian sermons is a thing to fill a modern writer with despair. If we consider the effect, beginning in childhood, of all the preachers on all the congregations, of men loud or unctuous, authoritative or persuasive, speaking out of a body of acknowledged truth to the respectful audience below them, we shall see why the homiletic cadence, more briefly Cant, is so persistent in Victorian oratory and literature. It sufficed to persuade the lower middle classes that Tupper was a poet and the upper middle classes that Emerson was a philosopher. Mr. Gladstone formed his style by reading sermons aloud, and his diaries are full of self-delivered homilies.[19] Old Sir Robert Peel trained his son to repeat every Sunday the discourse he had just heard, a practice to which he owed his astonishing recollection of his opponents’ arguments and something, perhaps, of the unction of his own replies. The sermon was the standard vehicle of serious truth, and to the expositions and injunctions of their writers and statesmen the Victorian public brought the same hopeful determination to be instructed, and to be elevated, which held them attentive to the pleadings, denunciations, and commonplaces of their preachers.

The body of acknowledged truth, out of which this early Victorian literature speaks, appears, at first sight, to consist of little more than all those dogmas which a victorious middle class had imposed on the nation. There is not much in it which the Compleat English Tradesman could not understand, and still less that he would not approve; as he could not understand Browning, Browning had to wait outside. But to take the height of the Victorian classics we must view them from the waste land of dreary goodness, useful information, and tired humour, stretching all about them, and no one who has survived the exploration will underrate the genius which could raise such a fabric on such foundations. The world desired to be instructed: it was given Grote and Thirlwall, Milman and Macaulay, Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Mill’s Logic, Mill’s Political Economy; to be elevated: it had Past and Present, Modern Painters, and In Memoriam; it asked for theology and got Newman, for education and got Arnold. Out of the Minerva Press came Disraeli, out of the horseplay of sentimental Cockneys, Dickens.

It is only necessary to set these names down in order to realize what potent agencies of dissolution were working in the early Victorian years. English society was poised on a double paradox which its critics, within and without, called hypocrisy. Its practical ideals were at odds with its religious professions, and its religious belief was at issue with its intelligence. We, for example, should probably count an employer who kept children of nine working nine hours a day in a temperature of 98 degrees as, at least, a very stupid man. If he went farther and insisted that, when they wished to lift up their hearts in song, it must not be in carnal ditties like ‘A Frog He Would A’Wooing Go’, but in hymns—

By cool Siloam’s glassy rill

How sweet the lily grows,

How sweet the scent upon the hill

Of Sharon’s dewy rose—

we might credit him with a touch of diabolical humour. We should be wrong in a matter where it is both important and difficult to go right. He may have been a low hypocrite who slept with pretty mill girls on the sly. He may have been a kindly and intelligent man who had convinced himself that only by production, kept down to the lowest cost, could the country be fed, and that the sufferings of the poor in this present time were not worthy to be compared with the glory which should be revealed in them hereafter. Or, like most of us, he may have been something in between: borne along partly by conviction, partly by example, and neither disposed nor able to analyse ideas which proved themselves by their material results. Cheap labour meant high profits; respectable workpeople meant good work.[20]

It could not last. It was impossible to maintain for ever the position that Christian responsibility was a duty everywhere except in economic life, and that strength and vigour, the control of nature by science, of events by prudence, are good things everywhere except in the hands of the State: not less impossible to suppose that the criticism which was unravelling the constitution of the rocks and the legends of antiquity, would always consent to stand in respectful submission before the conventions, or the documents, of contemporary Protestantism. So long as the fear of subversion persisted, criticism could not act with freedom: clerisy[21] and bourgeoisie stood together, and, where they differed, the clerisy, on the whole, preserved a loyal silence. Indeed, in State affairs they did not differ greatly. When, in his tract on Chartism, Carlyle essayed to translate the verities into practice, he had nothing to suggest that half the parsons in the land did not know already: that everybody should be sent to school and the odd man to the colonies. In religion they were coming to differ deeply, as the strong surviving vein of Augustan rationalism was reinforced by the conclusions of Victorian science. But the sanctions of orthodoxy were still formidable, and in a world where Prometheus Unbound might be judicially held to be a blasphemous libel,[22] a certain economy in the communication of unbelief was evidently advisable.