Eminent Victorians
By . New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1918. Royal 8vo, xii+351 pp. Illustrated. $3,50.
EVEN a carping critic might limit his censure of Eminent Victorians to two points: the price, which lamentably belies the book by marking it as for the few, and the proof-reading, which is slipshod to a degree. The author’s achievement
is nothing less than to have written four brief biographies of which the four subjects once actually lived and died — unlike the subjects of most official and standard ’lives’ in howsoever many volumes, which subjects, never having been so venturesome as to do the one, can certainly never be felt to have done the other.
Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and General George Gordon — ’Chinese’ Gordon — live in these pages, in evocations at once subtle and decisive. They are not coaxed or cuffed or stamped or prodded or lashed into life: they are just neatly extricated and released from the husk of popular veneration which time tends to construct round every great personality, turning fact into myth and the man into a superman. Cardinal Manning, the wily and ruthless contriver, filled with the self-searchings of an egoistic pietism; Florence Nightingale, the woman possessed of a demon of benevolent energy, making slaves of her friends and driving them by overwork to distraction and actual death; Dr. Arnold, the pompous and puzzled man, solving with phrases, to his own intense satisfaction, all the greatest problems of life and of education; General Gordon, the devout megalomaniac, pathetic and heroic instrument of British imperialism — these four are made to live with such a power ot life, that not all the eulogy of partisan interest combined with all that of popular superstition, or any other thaumaturgy, can ever reconvert them into the great spiritual organizer, the white angel of mercy, the daring educational reformer, and the martyred saint of Khartoum.
It is a poor tribute to biography, as we mostly know it in English, to say that the four subjects of Eminent Victorians are as vital as characters in lhe noblest fiction; but that is the best available comparison; for while fiction is the art of conferring life on those who perhaps never lived, polite biography remains the dismal art of embalming those who have lived.
But there is more to Mr. Strachey’s achievement. There is a unity which turns the volume into a book, its sequence of biographic sketches into history. The author not only makes over to us bodily his four eminent Victorians: he makes the four portraits coalesce into a very shrewd analysis of that portentous thing, Victorianism — or, rather, of its spiritual essence. All four of his personages — and with them the large group of others, both more and less eminent — are compound of two substances. One is the itch for personal prestige, the insistent necessity to mingle in great doings, to take a hand in the game, even if one must force one’s way to the table. The other is an unctuous and egocentric pietism. And the significant fact is that these two substances are non-interpenetrating. The Victorian will to action, to power, is the fundamental and determining thing: the Victorian will to worship is relatively superficial. All the typical Victorians, like Miss Nightingale, get God into their clutches and make him bow down and serve their intense personal desires. Their piety is used to provide an entirely factitious set of reasons for doing precisely what they have set their hearts upon. Nothing about them is more astonishing than the ease with which they bring the Deity round to their own way of thinking. There, surely, is the core of weakness and falsity at the centre of the Victorian spirit. That spirit substituted a self-conscious religiosity for religion; it belied and vitiatcd intelligible human motives by sanctimoniously parading them as the will of God. This is the principal reason why even some very towering personages of the Victorian time, seen through the clear lens of the historian, appear on the intellectual side as gesturing pigmies, children playing at life, fledging philosophers thinking that they think. And, because of their self-deceptions about motive, even their most brilliant actions lack the dignifying seal of a passionate and purging s incerity. W. F.