Читать книгу Victorian England: Portrait of an Age - G. M. Young - Страница 7

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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.

The sense of being under a Code accompanies us through the early Victorian decades. To the age of revolt, which runs from Rousseau to Shelley, succeeds the age of acquiescence; the Titans are dead, or they have been tamed. It seems as if speculation had ceased; there is an answer to every question and usually the answer is no. Milman is ostracized for calling Abraham a sheik; Miss Mitford is publicly reproved for calling a pudding a roly-poly; old lords have to guard their words for fear of shocking young lords, and a Member of Parliament wishing to say contracted pelvis must put it in the decent obscurity of a learned language. A Parliamentary Committee, who asked a factory woman if she had ever miscarried, brought on themselves the anger of The Times for violating the principles which should preside over such inquiries, ‘a dread of ridicule and an anxious avoidance of indecency’, and The Economist, a paper of exceptional intelligence, declined to go into the details of the Public Health Bill of 1847 and fill its columns with a number of unpleasant words. A guilty conscience has never betrayed itself by a more superior sniff. Absurdity and impropriety, like domesticated dragons, guard the stability of society and the peace of the home, and absurdity seems to mean any way of thinking, impropriety any way of behaving, which may impair the comfort, impeach the dignity, and weaken the defence of the middle class. We remember with surprise that we are dealing with a race which had once, and not so long ago, been famous in its island for an independence and even eccentricity which it now only displayed abroad, and we ask what has happened to make it submit its behaviour, its language, and its ideas to this drastic and vigilant censorship.

[17]	‘He said [Modern Painters, I] was a work of transcendent talent, presented the most original views in the most elegant language, and would work a complete revolution in the world of taste.’ (Praeterita: Chapter ix.)

[18]	It was a Cambridge joke thatThe abysmal deeps of personalitymeant The Times.

[19]	He once delivered an address on Preaching (City Temple, March 22, 1877).

[20]

In the eighteenth century the mill often furnished the millowner’s harem: in our period rarely. I cannot resist the conclusion that the current religion did sometimes act as a provocative to sadism. A ghastly story came out in the Courts of a private tutor who prayed with a backward pupil, beat him to a jelly, kissed him, and left him to die. The connexion between religious professions and fraudulent dealing started many criminals on the downward path—or so they assured the prison chaplains. But, again, this is an old story. In Areopagitica the City Man and his Religion almost twists a smile from Milton.

[21]	Coleridge’s useful word for the educated classes acting as a body.

[22]	As Queen Mab actually was found to be in 1841.