Victorians, Edwardians, Historians

Most intelligent modern historians pursue their work in the awareness that they are continually reinventing their subject. The past, dead and immutable though it may be, is at the same time in a state of unvarying flux. Sustained in the present, existing as a mode of present consciousness, it registers with what sometimes seems uncanny precision and foresight the alterations of thought, attitude, and interest that occur in its future. Regarded in this light, the past appears to be a real masquerade, an interminable impersonation of the present; and the historians who lead us through the changing steps of this unending dance are not imposters but masqueraders — their masks, however, are their actual faces as well.

Considerations such as these apply with special relevance to the nineteenth century. The relevance has to do with the proximity of that era, or series of eras, to our own; with the fact that most of the larger social and intellectual problems that vex us today may be understood to have their distinctive origins then; and with the further fact that the leading analyses of and contending solutions to those problems about which we still argue today are also to be located in their first, and often their most important, occurrence during that span of years. The length of that span is itself a subject of interest, and one of the few matters upon which historians seem generally agreed is that the nineteenth century begins in the neighborhood of 1789 and ends somewhere around 1914. That consensus is less the sign of an impulse among historians to aggrandize for themselves a larger territory of time than it is an indication of their sense of the immensity of the epoch. And that sense is in turn compounded by a further sense of the diversity and complexity out of which the immensity is constituted.

Indeed, students of the middle and later decades of the century all play by common consent a game called Selective Victorianism. The conditions of this game stipulate that any work about the period that aspires to large and generalizing conclusions must contain an awareness that it omits as much if not more material than it includes, that every significant theory about the age admits to a countertheory, and that no account is ever really substantial enough to support the generalizations it offers. It is a game that nobody can win, and the only way to play it is by consistently breaking the rules.

The distinguished intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb is very much alive to these constraints, difficulties, and contradictions. Her new book, Victorian Minds, a collection of essays upon a number of figures and themes from the century, exemplifies her style of dealing with such problems. Although, she remarks, an alternative title for her volume might be “Varieties of Victorianism.” she has nonetheless a specific and coherent vision or interpretation of the era and its culture - “conservative revolution,” as she calls it. And she is equally committed to a particular point of view, that of a modern, enlightened Conservative, in the English rather than the American sense of that term. In this connection, the figures in this volume that are of chief importance to her are Burke and Bagehot, and to a lesser degree parts of Disraeli and moments of Lord Acton. The firmness and vigor of her commitment, moreover, lead her to insights of great value. For example, in “The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham” she is able to demonstrate how Bentham’s scheme for the Panopticon - a monstrous public building that was to serve with equal efficacy as a prison, factory, school, hospital, workhouse, and lunatic asylum was by no means a momentary aberration of a capacious and benevolent reforming intellect. In her view, this tyrannical structure (Bentham proposed to run it as a capitalist enterprise, with himself as chief capitalist) is “nothing less than the existential realization of Philosophical Radicalism,” a judgment whose merit is to be found not so much in its final persuasiveness as in the challenge to argument it candidly extends.

Similarly, because she is unencumbered by reverence for the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, she is able to write with striking effect about the influence on him of his companion and wife Harriet Taylor. That influence may not be so malign as Miss Himmelfarb is convinced that it was — in general it was in the direction of further liberality of opinion — but after reading her account and the material upon which it is based, one can no longer overlook the fact or magnitude of the influence. And after studying her long and intricate discussion of the machinations that led to the Reform Act of 1867, one is equally unable to overlook the errors and inconsistencies of the liberal politicians at the time, or the inconveniences and torments that confront liberal and leftist historians who try to interpret these events in accordance with orthodox presuppositions.

To be sure, not all of the essays collected here are moved by ideological intentions. Miss Himmelfarb’s excellent pieces on Leslie Stephen and James Anthony Froude, for instance, are sustained by other, and equally interesting, preoccupations. And in one chapter, which is devoted to an analysis of the moral and intellectual dilemmas of the historian Lord Acton, her inwardness with her subject is so complete, and her sympathies so vividly engaged, that she writes an essay of surpassing intelligence in which her ideological allegiances are dissolved in her commitment to her subject and transcended in forty pages of lucid and complex analysis conducted throughout at an extraordinary and uninterrupted pitch of intellectual intensity. It is intellectual history of the first order.

For the largest part, however, these essays are informed by the energy of Miss Himmelfarb’s engagement to her cause, and if party spirit can sometimes provoke original insight, it can also lead to restriction. The Bentham of her representation, to take the simplest instance, bears almost no resemblance to the Bentham, say, of Mill’s great essay, a work that Miss Himmelfarb both praises and, in my judgment, misreads. Her animus against Mill himself is at moments so pronounced that she treats a number of his perplexities and confusions as evidences of disingenuousness and bad faith, a lack of generosity not to be found when she deals with similar circumstances in the careers of figures with whose opinions she agrees. She leans upon Bagehot for support he cannot give, and mistakes the irony of his cynicism for the irony of intelligence. And though, as I have said, it is inevitable, I still sometimes find it disconcerting to see the cold war being fought out with such invincible pertinacity over the bones of the venerable dead.

These reservations and disagreements are, nevertheless, relatively minor. The richness and complexity of the age, and of Miss Himmelfarb’s apprehension of it, remain compelling; even the lesser or secondary figures with whom she deals often have a greater specific gravity, a more thickly textured responsiveness of mind, than the best minds of other periods and places. In this regard, however, it is important to observe that nothing is more characteristic of Victorian England than that it did not and could not produce a Nietzsche or a Baudelaire. The immense social density and resonance of the great and even the less than great Victorian figures were regularly purchased at the price, as it were, of refusing to “go all the way.” As the traditional spiritual and intellectual certainties continued to be eroded, the Victorians applied themselves with steadily increasing rigor to problems of social morality and to the imperatives entailed in the reformation of social life. “I now believe in nothing,”wrote Leslie Stephen, “but I do not the less believe in morality. ... I mean to live and die like a gentleman if possible.” And George Eliot, who had lost her religious beliefs, translated from the German a volume which discredited the divine and asserted the mythological nature of Jesus with a crucifix on the table before her. Behavior such as this was of a piece with her later utterance that God was inconceivable, immortality was unbelievable, but that duty was nonetheless still “peremptory and absolute.” Strategies and solutions of this kind helped to create the extraordinary social interest, the complex connectedness, of the great Victorians; but they helped as well to create and to define the farther limits beyond which they were unable to conduct their intellectual and literary explorations.

Mr. Hynes picks up at about this point in the spiritual chronology. In his original and important book, he undertakes to do for the end of the period, roughly from 1895 to 1914, what Walter Houghton, in The Victorian Frame of Mind, did for the middle decades of the century — to describe, by drawing upon a wide variety of firsthand sources, the cultural temper of the age. To this end, he writes chapters on such subjects as the fear of national decline that received widespread currency toward the end of the century (and that led among many other things to the founding of the Boy Scouts); the failure of both the Liberal government and liberal thinkers such as Masterman or Galsworthy to deal convincingly with the problems confronting them; the vicissitudes of socialism and the Fabian Society; spiritualist theories and the new sexology; the feminist movement, including conflicts over divorce and birth control, as well as female suffragism; censorship in the theater and in literature, and the attempt officially to organize morality; English provinciality in painting, music, and the dance; and the gradual permeation of new European influences during the years immediately before the war. It is a most impressive survey and succeeds in bringing coherent conceptual organization to a formidable mass of material that hitherto has largely been dealt with in separate and unrelated categories.

And yet, as Mr. Hynes himself realizes, it is impossible to write about these years with the centrality of command that one can exercise in relation to the earlier decades. For the Edwardian period is characterized precisely by the breaking up of the diverse yet essentially solidary Victorian arrangement, by the splitting off and increasing estrangement of the intellectual elites and vanguards from the established social order. Thus, the creative figures of first magnitude of the period — James, Conrad, Hardy, Yeats, the early Joyce and Lawrence — get perforce almost no mention in Mr. Hynes’s pages.

The intellectual personage who appears with greatest frequency in this account is H. G. Wells (Kipling and Shaw figure less prominently, and, I believe, Mr. Hynes is correct in this proportioning). If one simply juxtaposes this Edwardian prophet with any of his counterparts among the Victorian sages, with Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, or Newman, one gets an ineffaceable sense not merely of how authentically secondrate a mind Wells was, but of how radical a constriction had taken place in the possibilities of the official or public culture. But that is the very point of the sad history that Mr. Hynes has composed with such distinction. It is the history of the extinction of the Victorian cultural model and of its gradual replacement by a model which, if it does not follow the French or European arcs of development — if anything about the English is immortal, it is their particularism — is at least more familiar to us and recognizably modern.