Читать книгу Victorian England: Portrait of an Age - G. M. Young - Страница 5

Table of Contents

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 bleatsFor 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.