(1922) the victorian age

8/14/2019 (1922) The Victorian Age

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THE VICTORIAN AGE


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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSC. F. CLAY, MANAGER

LONDON : FETTER LANE, E.G. 4

NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO.BOMBAY \CALCUTTA L MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.MADRAS )TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. OFCANADA, LTD.TOKYO: MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


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THEVICTORIAN AGEThe Rede Lecture for 1922

BYWILLIAM RALPH INGE,

C.V.O., D.D., D.Litt., F.B.A.HON. FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE

CAMBRIDGEAT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS1922


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First Impression May 1922Second Impression May 1922Third Impression July 1922

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THE VICTORIAN AGEEACH generation takes a specialpleasure in removing the householdgods

of itsparents

from theirpedestals,and consigning them to the cupboard.The prophet or pioneer, after being at

first declared to be unintelligible orabsurd, has a brief spell of popularity,after which he is said to be conventional,and then antiquated. We may find morethan one reason for this. A movementhas more to fear from its disciples thanfrom its critics. The great man is linkedto his age by his weakest side ; and hisepigoni, who are not great men, caricature his message and make it ridiculous.Besides, every movement is a reaction,and generates counter-reactions. Thependulum swings backwards and forwards. Every institution not only carrieswithin it the seeds of its own dissolution,but prepares the way for its most hatedrival.


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[6]The German Von Eicken found, in

this tendency of all human movementsto provoke violent reactions, the masterkey of history. Every idea or institutionpasses into its opposite. For instance,Roman imperialism, which was createdby an intense national consciousness,ended by destroying the nationality ofrulers and subjects alike. The fanaticalnationalism of the Jews left them apeople without a country. The CatholicChurch began by renouncing the world,and became the heir of the defunctRoman empire. In political philosophy,the law of the swinging pendulum mayact as a salutary cold douche. Universalsuffrage, says Sybel, has always heraldedthe end of parliamentary government.Tocqueville caps this by saying that themore successful a democracy is in levellinga population, the less will be the resistancewhich the next despotism will encounter.But the pendulum sometimes swingsvery slowly, and oscillates within narrowlimits ; while at other times the changesare violent and rapid. The last centuryand a half, beginning with what Arnold


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[7]Toynbee was the first to call the Industrial Revolution, has been a period ofmore rapid change than any other whichhistory records. The French Revolution,which coincided with its first stages,helped to break the continuity betweenthe old order and the new, and both byits direct influence and by the vigorousreactions which it generated cleft societyinto conflicting elements. Then followeda Great War, which shook the socialstructure to its base, and awakened intointense vitality the slumbering enthusiasm of nationality. At the same time,a variety of mechanical inventions gaveman an entirely new control over theforces of nature and a new knowledgeof the laws of nature, and this newknowledge, not content with practicalapplications, soon revolutionised all thenatural sciences, and profoundly affectedboth religion and philosophy. The reignof Queen Victoria, which I have chosento mark the limits of my survey to-day,covered the latter half of this saeculummirabile^ the most wonderful century inhuman history.


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There are of course no beginnings orends inhistory.

We may walk for afew miles by the side of a river, notingits shallows and its rapids, the gorgeswhich confine it and the plains throughwhich it meanders ; but we know thatwe have seen neither the beginning northe end of its course, that the wholeriver has an unbroken continuity, andthat sections, whether of space or time,are purely arbitrary. We are alwayssowing our future ; we are always reaping our past. The Industrial Revolutionbegan in reality before the accession ofGeorge III, and the French monarchywas stricken with mortal disease beforeLouis XV bequeathed his kingdom tohis luckless successor.

But there can be no question that theriver of civilisation reached a stretch ofrapids towards the end of the eighteenthcentury. For instance, in locomotionthe riding-horse and pack-horse hadhardly given place to the coach andwaggon before the railway supersededroad traffic ; the fast sailing clippershad a short lease of life before steam


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[9]was used for crossing the seas. Industrialchanges came too quickly for the government to make the necessary readjustments,at a time when the nation was fighting forits life and then recovering from its exhaustion. The greatest sufferings causedby the revolution in the life of the peoplewere in the first half of the century ; thelatter half was a time of readjustmentand reform. One great interest of theVictorian Age is that it was the timewhen a new social order was being builtup, and entirely new problems were beingsolved. The nineteenth century hasbeen called the age of hope ; and perhaps only a superstitious belief in theautomatic progress of humanity couldhave carried our fathers and grandfathersthrough the tremendous difficulties whichthe rush through the rapids imposedupon them.Let us spend five minutes in picturingto ourselves the English nation in a condition of stable equilibrium, as it wasin the eighteenth century. Before theIndustrial Revolution, the country wason the whole prosperous and contented.


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which have never, I think, been fully explained, the deathrate rapidly declined,at the very time when economic conditions demanded a larger population.This is the more remarkable, when weremember the manner in which youngchildren were treated before the FactoryActs.

Political power was in the hands ofa genuine aristocracy, who did more todeserve their privileges than any otheraristocracy of modern times. They were,as a class, highly cultivated men, whohad travelled much on the Continent,and mixed in society there. In 1785Gibbon was told that 40,000 Englishwere either travelling or living abroadat one time. They were enlightenedpatrons of literature and art, and madethe collections of masterpieces whichwere the pride of England, and whichare now being dispersed to the winds.Their libraries were well stocked, andmany ofthem were accomplished classicalscholars. They were not content, liketheir successors to-day, to load theirtables with magazines and newspapers.


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[12]Lastly, they fought Napoleon to a finish,and never showed the white feather.Those who have studied the familyportraits in a great house, or the wonderful portrait gallery in the Provost'sLodge at Eton, will see on the facesnot only the pride and self-satisfactionof a privileged class, but the power tolead the nation whether in the arts ofwar or of peace.No doubt, political corruption wasrampant ; but it was not till George IIItried to govern himself by means ofcorruption, that its consequences weredisastrous. The loss of America wasthe first serious blow to the aristocraticregime.The

necessary changeswould have

come about earlier but for the FrenchRevolution and the war. The formercaused a panic which now seems to usexaggerated. But we are accustomed torevolutions, and know that they neverlast more than a few years; the FrenchRevolution was the first of its kind.Moreover, France had long been theacknowledged leader of civilisation, and


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['3]a general overturn in that country terrified men like Gibbon into prophesyingthat a similar outbreak was likely tooverwhelm law, order and property inEngland. They did not realise howdifferent the conditions were in the twocountries. The most modest democraticreforms were therefore impossible tillNapoleon was out of the way, and till theanti-revolutionary panic had subsided.One result of the war has not alwaysbeen realised. The eighteenth centuryhad been international ; there was noChauvinism or Jingoism anywhere tillthe French, fighting ostensibly under thebanner of humanity, had kindled the fireof patriotism in Spain, in Germany, andeven in Russia. England had always hada strong national self-consciousness ; andafter the war the bonds of sympathy withFrance were not at once renewed, so thatour country, during the early part ofVictoria's reign, was more isolated fromthe main currents of European thoughtthan ever before or since. Men of letterswho lamented this isolation now turnedfor inspiration rather to Germany than


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[4]to France. On the other hand, the wardid not interrupt the intellectual life ofthe country to anything like the sameextent as the recent Great War. At noperiod since the Elizabethans was theresuch an output of great poetry ; and itdoes not seem to have occurred to anyyoung lady of that time to ask Scott,Wordsworth or Jane Austen what theywere doing during the war.Modern sociologists have drawn luridpictures of the condition of the working^ ** i_ __^ ^" r~"^*^*^^' **-*class during the earlier part of the lastcentury. It seems in truth to have beenvery bad. Byron in 1812 told the Lords :'I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but neverunder the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in thevery heart of a Christian country.' In1 83 1 a member of parliament said : c Anagricultural labourer and a pauper thewords are synonymous.' Those who wantdetails can find them in the well-knowncontroversial books by the Hammonds,which state the case against the govern-


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['5]ing class in an exhaustive manner. Therewas in fact too much ground for Disraeli'sstatement that England at that timeconsisted of two nations, the rich andthe poor. The poor were still largelyilliterate, and so inarticulate ; and thecomparative absence of the large half-educated class which now dominatesall public discussion made the cultivatedgentry a class apart. Their own standardof culture was higher than that of theleisured class to-day ; but they took littleinterest in the lives of the poor, until theywere forced to do so. We however whohave witnessed the succession ofeconomiccrises which attend and follow a great warought not to forget the appalling difficulties with which the government wasconfronted. In 1795 there was actualfamine, which was met by the famoussystem of doles out of the rates, in augmentation of wages, a most mischievousbit of legislation, like the similar expedients of the last three years. It hadthe double effect of pauperising therural labourer and of putting an artificialpremium on large families the children


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who were carted off in waggon-loads tofeed the factories. It was repealed onlywhen the ruined farmers were abandoning their land, and the glebe-owning clergytheir livings. Fluctuations in prices hadmuch to do with the miseries ofthe hungrythirties and forties ; but over-population,as the economists of the time pointed outwith perfect justice, was one of the maincauses. It was not till much later thatthere was food enough for all ; and thiswas the result of the new wheat fields ofAmerica and the sheep walks of Australia,which brought in food and took awaymouths, fin Ireland the barbarous andilliterate peasantry multiplied till thepopulation exceeded eight millions, whenthe inevitable famine illustrated nature'smethod of dealing with recklessness. Theonly error with which the economists ofthis time may be charged was that theydid not realise that over-population is theresult of a very low standard of civilisation. Families are restricted wheneverthe parents have social ambitions and astandard of comfort. Where they havenone, the vital statistics are those ofRussia, Ireland, India and China.]


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[17]The astonishing progress in all measur

able values which marked the first halfof the reign produced a whole literatureofcomplacency. I quoted some examplesof the language which was then common,in my Romanes Lecture on 'The Idea ofProgress.' Macaulay supplies some of thebest examples. We must remember thatthe progress was real, and that its speedwas unexampled in history. The countrywas, in vulgar language, a going concern,as it never was before and has not beensince. The dominions beyond the seaswere being peopled up and consolidated.At home education was spreading, libertywas increasing, and the light taxes wereraised with an ease which fortunately forourselves we no longer even remember.Principles seemed to have been discoveredwhich guaranteed a further advance inalmost every direction, intellectual as wellas material. For that was the great ageof British science ; and most branches ofliterature were flourishing. Hope told aflattering tale, and optimism became asort of religion.

Nevertheless, such complacency was


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[18]bound to produce a violent protest.Disraeli, whose well-remembered warning about 'the two nations' has alreadybeen quoted, described the age as onewhich by the help of mechanical inventions had mistaken comfort for progress.And comfort, as another critic of socialscience has said, is more insidious thanluxury in hampering the higher development of a people. The literature of socialindignation was contemporaneous withthe literature of complacency. Carlyleand Ruskin were its chief prophets ; butwe must not forget the novels of Dickens,Charles Reade and Kingsley.

Carlyle and Ruskin both denouncedthe age with the vehemence of majorprophets vehemence was in fashion atthat time in English literature but theydid not approach the 'condition of England question ' from quite the same angle.Carlyle was a Stoic, or in other words aCalvinist without dogmas; he had alsolearned to be a mystic from his studiesof German idealism. He represents onephase of the anti-French reaction ; hehated most of the ideas of 1789, as


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['9]displayed in their results. He hated thescepticism of the Revolution, its negations, its love of claptrap rhetoric andfine phrases, and above all its anarchism.He wished to see society well ordered,under its wisest men ; he wished to overcome materialism by idealism, and loosemorality by industry and the fear of God.Justice, he declared, is done in this world ;right is might, if we take long views.Institutions collapse when they becomeshams, and no longer fulfil their function.The sporting squires ought to be founding colonies instead of preserving game.As for the new industrialism, he dislikedit with the fervour of a Scottish peasant.Ruskin was a Platonist, steeped in thestudy of Plato, and bound to him bycomplete sympathy. We cannot separateRuskin the art-critic from Ruskin thesocial reformer. His great discovery wasthe close connection of the decay of artwith faulty social arrangements. Uglinessin the works of man is a symptom ofsocial disease. He could not avert his eyesfrom the modern town, as Wordsworthdid, because the modern town meant a


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[20]great deal to him, and all of it wasintolerable. He observed that the disappearance of beauty in human productions synchronised with the invention ofmachinery and the development of greatindustries, and he could not doubt thatthe two changes were interconnected.We sometimes forget that until the reignof George III a town was regarded asimproving a landscape. A city was aglorious and beautiful thing, an object tobe proud of. The hill of Zion is a fairplace, the joy of the whole earth, becauseit had the holy city built upon it. Neversince civilisation began has such uglinessbeen created as the modern English orAmerican town. Ruskin saw in thesestructures a true index of the mind oftheir builders and inhabitants, and thesight filled him with horror. He readwith entire approval what Plato wroteof industrialised Athens. 'The city ofwhich we are speaking,' he says in theLaws, c is some eighty furlongs fromthe sea. Then there is some hope thatyour citizens may be virtuous. Had youbeen on the sea, and well provided with


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[2,]harbours, and an importing rather than aproducing country, some mighty saviourwould have been needed, and lawgiversmore than mortal, if you were to haveeven a chance of preserving your Statefrom degeneracy. The sea is pleasantenough as a daily companion, but it hasa bitter and brackish quality, filling thestreets with merchants and shopkeepers,and begetting in the souls of men uncertain and dishonest ways, making theState unfaithful and unfriendly to herown children and to other nations.' LikePlato, Ruskin would fain have returnedto a much simpler social structure, wheneach country, and even to a great extenteach village, was sufficient to itself. Hedid not show how such a return is possiblewithout blowing up the great towns andtheir inhabitants ; but he quite seriouslyregarded the Industrial Revolution asa gigantic blunder, and believed thatEngland would never be healthy or happyuntil what his contemporaries called progress had been somehow swept away withall its works. How this was to be done hehardly considered. Like a true Platonist,


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[*]he set before his countrymen, in glowinglanguage, the beauty of the eternal Ideasor absolute Values, pleaded that there wasno necessary connection between equalityof production and equality of remuneration, and instituted various experiments,not all unsuccessful, in restoring the oldhandicrafts and the temper which inspired them.The problem of mending or endingindustrialism, foolishly called capitalism,remains unsolved. Ruskin's own artisticlife would have been impossible withoutthe paternal sherry and the rich menwho drank it ; and Morris' exquisitemanufactures depended absolutely on thepatronage of the capitalists whom hedenounced. But the indignation whichthese Victorian social reformers exhibitedhad much justification, even after theworst abuses had been partially remedied.A mixture of rapid progress and extreme departmental inefficiency is oneof the characteristics of the earlier partof the reign. Lord Justice Bowen haswritten an instructive sketch of theadministration of the Law between 1837


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and 1887. There were two systems ofjudicature, Law and Equity, with adifferent origin, different procedure, anddifferent rules of right and wrong. Oneside of Westminster Hall gave judgmentswhich the other side restrained thesuccessful party from enforcing. Thebewildered litigant was driven backwardsand forwards. Merchants were hinderedfor months and years from recoveringtheir dues. The fictitious adventures ofJohn Doe and Richard Roe, the legalGog and Magog, played an importantpart in trials to recover possession of land.Arrears accumulated year by year. TheCourt of Chancery was closed to thepoor, and was a name of terror to therich. It was said by

a legal writer that'no man can enter into a Chancery suitwith any reasonable hope of being aliveat its termination, if he has a determinedadversary.' Bowen says that Dickens'pictures of the English law 'containgenuine history.' The horrors of thedebtors' prison are well known, andnearly 4000 persons were sometimesarrested for debt in one year. In 1836,


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494 persons were condemned to death,though only 34 were hanged.

Publicexecutions continued to 1867. If afarmer's gig knocked down a foot passenger in a lonely lane, two persons werenot allowed to speak in court the farmerand the pedestrian. Most of these abuseswere rectified long before the end of thereign.The Universities were slowly emerging from the depths to which they hadsunk in the eighteenth century, whenthey neither taught nor examined normaintained discipline. We all rememberGibbon's description of the Fellows ofhis College, 'whose dull but deep potations excused the brisker intemperanceof youth.' These gentlemen were mostof them waiting for College livings, towhich they were allowed to carry off, asa solatium, some dozens of College port.Cambridge, it is only fair to say, neverfell quite so low as Oxford, and began toreform itself earlier. The Mathematicaland Classical Triposes were both foundedbefore Queen Victoria's accession. Butpublic opinion thought that the Uni-


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versity authorities needed some stimulation from outside, and in 1850 a RoyalCommission was appointed for Oxford,and two years later another for Cambridge.The Reports of these two Commissionsare very amusing, especially that of theOxford Board, which lets itself go in arefreshing style. Itsmembers had receivedprovocation. The Governing Bodies generally refused to answer their questions.Some of the Colleges had exacted an oathfrom new Fellows to reveal nothing aboutthe affairs of the College. The Dean ofChrist Church declined to answer lettersfrom the Royal Commission ; the President of Magdalen replied that he was notaware that he had misused his revenues,and

begged to close the correspondence.These dignified potentates are not sparedin the Report. The Cambridge Report,which is much more polite, did goodservice by recommending the foundationof a medical school. Changes later, suchas the abolition of all Anglican privileges,and the permission of Fellows to marry,came later. In the case of the Universities,as in that of the Law, the improvements


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[26]between 1837 and the first Jubilee wereenormous.The Civil Service, it is almost needlessto say, was a sanctuary of aristocraticjobbery. The Clerks were languid gentlemen with long whiskers, who arrived lateand departed early from their Offices.

The Army in 1837 consisted, in actualstrength, ofabout 100,000 men, ofwhom19,000 were in India and 20,000 in Ireland. There had been a strong movementafter the peace to abolish the army altogether, on the ground that another warwas almost unthinkable. The Duke ofWellington was only able to keep up thissmall force by hiding it away in distantparts of the empire ; the total number oftroops in Great Britain was only 26,000.Officers were ordered to efface themselvesby never wearing uniform except onparade. A Royal Duke could not begiven a military funeral, because ' therewere not troops enough to bury a FieldMarshal.' As to the quality of the troops,the Duke frequently called them 'thescum of the earth,' and the brutal discipline of the time did everything to


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justify this description, for the soldierwas supposed to have surrendered allhis rights as a man and a citizen. Theprivates enlisted for life or for twenty-one years, and it was so difficult to getrecruits that they were frequently caughtwhile drunk, or frankly kidnapped. Theywere dressed, for campaigning in thetropics, in high leather stocks and buttoned up jackets, so that hundreds diedof heat apoplexy. Lord Wolseley thinksthat in 1837 50,000 Frenchmen couldhave easily taken London. Nor was thedanger of a French invasion at all remote.The Volunteer movement, the socialeffects ofwhichwere excellent,was mainlydue to the Prince Consort, a far wiserman than was recognised during his lifetime.The Crimean War revealed in glaringcolours the incompetence of the militaryauthorities and of the Cabinet at home.If we had been fighting against anyEuropean power except Russia, withwhom utter mismanagement is a tradition, there can be no doubt that our armywould have been destroyed, as it ought


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[28]to have been at Inkerman. The militarycredit of the nation was only partiallyrestored by the prompt suppression ofthe Indian Mutiny. Yet here again theage of hope and progress made good itsprofessions. The mistakes in the BoerWar seem not to have been nearly sobad as those in the Crimea.

It would be easy to go through theother departments of national life theNavy, Finance, Colonial and IndianPolicy, the growth and distribution ofWealth, Locomotion and Transport,Education, Science, Medicine and Surgery, and to prove that the progress duringthe reign of Queen Victoria was quiteunprecedented. The creed of optimismwas natural and inevitable at such a time,though cool heads might remember theline of Publilius Syrus,

Ubi nil timetur, quod timeatur nascitur.Lecky, a historian with some practical

experience of politics, deliberately statedhis opinion that no country was everbetter governed than England between1832 and 1867, the dates of the first


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Reform Bill and of Disraeli's scheme todish the Whigs. As far as internal affairsgo, it would not be easy to prove himwrong. The one prime necessity forgood government was present ; thosewho paid the taxes were also those whoimposed them. If there was some falseeconomy, as there was in the CrimeanWar, sound finance benefited the wholepopulation by keeping credit high,interest low, and taxation light. Politicallife was purer than it had been, andpurer probably than it is now. TheHouse of Commons enjoyed that immense prestige which has been completely lost since the old Queen's death.The debateswere read with semi-religiousfervour

by every goodcitizen over his

breakfast, and a prominent politician wastreated with even more exaggeratedreverence than our worthy grandfatherspaid to bishops. The debates were goodbecause they were real debates and conducted by men who all spoke the samelanguage. The rhetorical methods of theworking man are quite different fromthose of the gentry, and mutual annoyance


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is generated by the mixture of stylesin debate. Above all, the House ofCommons was still a rather independentbody. The history of England shows thatas soon as the Commons freed themselves from the control of the king, theybegan to try to free themselves fromthe control of the constituencies. Theydebated in secret ; they made their persons legally sacrosanct ; and on severaloccasions they turned out a member whohad been duly elected by his constituents,and admitted a member who had beenduly rejected. These encroachmentscould not last long. The Bradlaugh casewas the last attempt to repeat the tacticsby which Wilkes was kept out of Parliament ; but until the poisonous delegatetheory obtained currency, the memberof Parliament was a real legislator, witha right to think, speak and vote for himself. During the middle part of the reign,the dramatic duel between Gladstoneand Disraeli gave a heroic aspect to partypolitics, and kept up the public interest.In foreign politics it is not so easy toshare Lecky's opinion. The opium war


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[3']against China, and the Crimean War,were blunders which hardly anyone nowdefends ; and Palmerston's habit of bullying weak foreign powers did not reallyraise our prestige. For a long time wecould not make up our minds whetherFrance or Russia was the potential enemy;a vacillation which proved that thebalance of power, which we thought sonecessary for our safety, already existed.Our statesmen were blind to the menacefrom Germany, down to the end of thereign and later. The Crimean War onlyincreased the friction between Franceand England. The French fortifiedCherbourg, and talked openly of invasion.In 1 860 Flahault, the French ambassadorin London, said bluntly that 'his greatobject was to prevent war between thetwo countries.'

This prolonged jealousy and suspicionbetween the two western powers madeit

impossiblefor

Englandto exercisemuch influence on the Continent. The

settlement after 1815 handed over centraland eastern Europe to governments ofthe type which it is the fashion to call


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[3*]reactionary. Russia, Prussia, and Austria,acting together, were not to be resisted.And so the disturbances of 1848, oncemore kindled by Paris, just failed ; anddemocracy had a serious rebuff. Nearlyall the despotic governments of Europewere overthrown in 1848, and nearly allwere restored a year later. The Frenchindeed got rid of their king, mainlybecause he was a pacifist ; but Germanyrefused to be unified under the red flag,and began to prepare for a very differentdestiny. The Pope wobbled and thencame down heavily on the side of theold order* Meanwhile, England lookedon. Chartism was a very feeble affaircompared to the continental revolutions,and it flickered out in this year. Thepeople had got rid of the corn-laws, andwere fairly content ; there was nothingat all like a class war in this generation.So, while Macaulay was showing howvery differently we manage things inEngland compare, for example, 1688with 1848 we decided to invite theworld and his wife to London, to envyand admire us in Sir Joseph Paxton's


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[33]great glass house. We must not laughat that architectural monstrosity. It wasthe mausoleum of certain generous hopes.On the Continent men had been shotand hanged for the brotherhood of thehuman race ; we hoped to show them amore excellent

way.We had

givena lead

in free trade ; we still hoped that ourexample would soon be followed in allcivilised nations. We had reduced ourarmy to almost nothing ; we hoped thatmilitarism was a thing of the past. Allthese hopes were frustrated. A fanaticalnationalism began to foster racial animosity ; the enrages of Europe began topreach class-hatred and to find manylisteners ; protective tariffs were set upon every frontier ; international law became a mere cloak for the schemes ofviolence ; and, as has been said, all Europe' breathed a harsher air.' Worst of all,the mad race of competitive armaments,which was destined to wreck a great partof the wealth which two generations ofpeaceful industryhad gathered,was begun.We have to remember that the prosperity and security of the happy time

I. R. L. \


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[34]which we are now considering were dueto temporary causes, which can neverrecur. In the nineteenth century Englandwas the most fortunately situated country,geographically, in the world. When theopening and development of the Atlantictrade deprived the Mediterranean portsof their pride of place, an Atlantic stageof world-commerce began, in whichEngland, an island with good harbourson its western coasts, was in the mostfavourable position. The Pacific stagewhich is now beginning must inevitablygive the primacy to America. We hadalso a long start, industrially, over allour rivals, and our possession of greatcoal-fields and iron-fields close togethergave us a still further advantage. Ourlabour was then cheap and good ; ourmanufacturers capable and energetic.All these advantages are past or passing.Henceforth we shall have to competewith other nations on unprivileged conditions. It is useless to lament the inevitable, but it is foolish to shut oureyes to it. The Victorian Age was theculminating point of our prosperity.


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[35]Our great wealth, indeed, continued toadvance till the catastrophe of 1914.But there was a shadow of apprehensionover everything c never glad confidentmorning again.'Let us now turn to the intellectualand spiritual movements of the reign.The Romanticist revolution was complete, in a sense, before 1825. It was aEuropean, not only an English movement, and perhaps it was not less potentin France than in Germany and England,though in accordance with the geniusand traditions of that nation it took verydifferent forms. In England it inspiredverse more than prose, though we mustnot forget Scott's novels. It produced agalaxy

ofgreat poetry during the GreatWar, and added another immortal gloryto that age of heroic struggle. By a

strange chance, nearly all the great poetsof the war-period died young. Wordsworth alone was left, and he was sparedto reap in a barren old age the honourswhich he had earned and not receivedbetween 1798 and 1820. For aboutfifteen years there was an interregnum

3 *


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[36]in English literature, which makes aconvenient division between the greatmen of the Napoleonic era and the greatVictorians.From about 1840, when great literatureagain began to appear, the conditionswere more like those with which weare familiar. There was an unparalleledoutput of books of all kinds, a very largereading public, and a steadily increasingnumber ofprofessional authors dependenton the success of their popular appeal.As in our own day, a great quantity ofgood second-rate talent trod on the heelsof genius, and made it more difficult forreally first-rate work to find recognition.The impetus of the Romantic movement was by no means exhausted, butit began to spread into new fields. Thestudy of 'Gothic' art and literature hadbeen at first, as was inevitable, ill-informed. Its reconstruction of the MiddleAges was a matter of sentimental an-tiquarianism, no more successful thanmuch of its church restoration. TheVictorians now extended the imaginativesensibility which had been expended on


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[37]nature and history, to the life of theindividual. This meant that the novelinstead of the poem was to be the characteristic means of literary expression ; andeven the chief Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning, are sometimes novelistsin verse.The grandest and most fully representative figure in all Victorian literature

is of course Alfred Tennyson. And herelet me digress for one minute. It wasa good rule of Thomas Carlyle to seta portrait of the man whom he wasdescribing in front of him on his writing-table. It is a practice which wouldgreatly diminish the output of literaryimpertinence. Let those who are disposed to follow the present evil fashionof disparaging the great Victorians makea collection of their heads in photographsor engravings, and compare them withthose of their own little favourites. Letthem set up in a row good portraits ofTennyson, Charles Darwin, Gladstone,Manning, Newman, Martineau, LordLawrence, Burne Jones, and, if theylike, a dozen lesser luminaries, and ask


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[38]themselves candidly whether men of thisstature are any longer among us. I willnot speculate on the causes which fromtime to time throw up a large numberof great men in a single generation. Iwill only ask you to agree with me thatsince the golden age of Greece (assumingthat we can trust the portrait busts ofthe famous Greeks) no age can boast somany magnificent types of the humancountenance as the reign of Queen Victoria. We, perhaps, being epigoni ourselves, are more at home among ourfellow-pygmies. Let us agree with Ovid,if we will :Prisca iuvent alios; ego me nunc denique natum

Gratulor; haec aetas moribus apta meis.But let us have the decency to uncoverbefore the great men of the last century ;and if we cannot appreciate them, letus reflect that the fault may possibly bein ourselves.

Tennyson's leonine head realises theideal of a great poet. And he reignednearly as long as his royal mistress. Thelongevity and unimpaired freshness of


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[39]the great Victorians has no parallel inhistory, except in ancient Greece. Thegreat Attic tragedians lived as long asTennyson and Browning ; the Greekphilosophers reached as great ages asVictorian theologians ; but if you lookat the dates in other flowering times ofliterature you will find that the life of aman of genius is usually short, and hisperiod of production very short indeed.

Tennyson isnow depreciated for severalreasons. His technique as a writer of versewas quite perfect ; our newest poets preferto write verses which will not even scan.He wrote beautifully about beautifulthings, and among beautiful things heincluded beautiful conduct. He thoughtit an ugly and disgraceful thing for awife to be unfaithful to her husband, andcondemned Guinevere and Lancelot asany sound moralist would condemn them.A generation which will not buy a novelunless it contains some scabrous story ofadultery, and revels in the 'realism' ofthe man with a muck-rake, naturally 'hasno use for' the Idylls of the King, andcalls Arthur the blameless prig. The


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[40]reaction against Tennyson has culminatedin abuse of the

Idylls,in which the presentgeneration finds all that it most dislikes

in the Victorian mind. Modern researchhas unburied the unsavoury story thatModred was the illegitimate son of Arthurby his own half-sister, and blames Tennyson for not treating the whole story as anOedipus-legend. In reality, Malory doesnot so treat it. He admits the story, butdepicts Arthur as the flower of kinghood,'Rex quondam rexque futurus.' Tennyson, however, was not bound to followMalory. He has followed other and stillgreater models, Spenser and Milton. Hehas given us an allegorical epic, as heexplains in his Epilogue to the Queen :

Accept this old imperfect tale,New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul,Ideal manhood closed in real manRather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost,Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain

peak,And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still ; or himOf Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's.The whole poem is an allegory. Camelotis

Never built at all,And therefore built for ever.


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[41]The charming novelettes in which theallegory is forgotten need no more justification than the adventures in The FaerifQueene, or the parliamentary debates inParadise Lost. The Idylls fall into linewith two of the greatest poems in theEnglish language ; and when Tennysonwrites of Arthur, 'From the great deepto the great deep he goes,' he is tellinghis own deepest conviction of what ourbrief life on earth means the convictionwhich inspires his last words of poetry,Crossing the Bar.Tennyson knew materialism and revolution, and whither they tend.The children born of thee are sword and fire,Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws.

And The fear lest this my realm, uprearedBy noble needs at one with noble vows,From flat confusion and brute violenceReel back into the beast and be no more.We are told that he is shallow, an echo

of the thoughts of educated men at thetime, and that, like the Victorians ingeneral, he never probes anything to thebottom. It is true that he reflects his


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[42]age ; so do almost all other great men ;and that his age was an age of transition ;so, I believe, are all other ages. He represents his age both in his deep-rootedconservatism or moderate liberalism, andin his reverence for the new knowledgewhich was undermining the conservativestronghold, especially in religion. He isunjustly reproached with speaking contemptuously of the French Revolution,'the red fool-fury of the Celt,' as 'nograver than a schoolboys' barring out.'He despised barricades and red flags andSeptember massacres, because he believedthat the victories of broadening Freedomare to be won by constitutional means.He is a little self-righteous about it, nodoubt ; that helps to date him. He came,we must remember, half-way betweenthe Pantisocracy of Coleridge and hisfriends and the still cruder vagaries ofour young intellectuals. Years broughtthe philosophic mind to Carlyle,Southey,Wordsworth and Coleridge. Years willbring a relative sanity to our youngBolsheviks ; they will then, I hope (for Iwish them well), begin to read Tennyson.


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[43]The second Locksley Hall is peculiarlyinteresting for our purpose, because,though the author protested that it waswritten in character, dramatically, it isplain that it does express his political andsocial disillusionments and anxiety aboutthe future ; and Gladstone answered itas an attack upon the England of the day,calling attention to the great progresswhich had been made in the ' sixtyyears ' since the first Locksley Hall.Tennyson saw that the Victoriansocial order was breaking up ; and withgreat prescience he foretold many of theevils which have since come upon us.The deluge of political 'babble'; theghastly cruelties of the Irish ; the indifference of the new voters to theBritish Empire ; the contempt for experience and wisdom, setting the feetabove the brain and bringing back thedark ages without their faith or hope ;the vague aspirations for internationalfriendship, blighted by the pressure ofover-population and ending in universalwar ; all these shadows of coming events,too clearly seen, have convinced him that


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[44]there is no straight line of progress, butmany a backward-streaming curve, whichoften seems more like retrogression thanprogress. This is not the language of1851. In truth the clouds began togather before the old Queen and the oldpoet died. Even in fiction, the note ofdisillusionment is heard with increasingclearness, in the latest novels of GeorgeEliot, in writers like Gissing, and in thelater books of Thomas Hardy comparedwith the earlier.

In religion Tennyson certainly represents the mood of the mid-century.Romanticism had given religion a newattractiveness in the revolutionary era.In France it stimulated the Neo-Catholicism of De Maistre and Chateaubriand ; in Germany it gave a mysticalturn to philosophical idealism ; and inEngland it produced an Anglo-Catholicrevival. But for reasons mentioned above,this revival remained intensely insular.England, and perhaps especially Oxford,were at this time so cut off from theContinent that the isolation of theEnglish Tractarians was not at first felt ;


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[45]and the constructive work ofphilosophersand critics on the Continent was spurnedas ' German theology.' Sowhen Newmanat length took the perhaps logical stepof joining the Roman communion, themovement broke up, and its ablestmembers turned against it with theanger of men who feel that they havebeen duped. Neither science nor criticismcould be disregarded any longer. English scholars began to read German, asCarlyle had exhorted them to do ; andeverybody began to read Darwin. Therearose among the educated class an attitude towards religion which we may callvery distinctively Victorian. Carlyleremained a Puritan, without any dogmatic beliefs except a kind of moralisticpantheism. Ruskin was a Protestantmedievalist, who admired everything ina medieval cathedral except the altar.Tennyson and Browning were ready tolet most dogmas go, but clung passionately to the belief in personal humansurvival. Tennyson's famous lines 'Therelives more faith in honest doubt, Believeme, than in half the creeds' have been


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[46]wittily parodied by Samuel Butler :'There lives more doubt in honest faith'etc. The sentiment in Tennyson's linesmay be easily defended ; but it must beconfessed that 'honest doubt' was something of a pose at the time. In readingsuch men as Clough, or Henri Amiel,the average man becomes impatient, andis inclined to say ' Why can't the fellowmake up his mind one way or the other,and get started ? ' They carry suspensionof judgment to the verge of futility, andthough they obviously suffer, one doesnot feel very sorry for them. It is theopposite failing from that of Macaulay,who as a historian suffers from a constitutional inability not to make up his mindon everything and everybody. MatthewArnold is also a religious sceptic ; buthe has formulated a liberal Protestantcreed for himself, not very unlike that ofSir John Seeley's 'Ecce Homo.' It wasnot a happy time for religious thinkers,unless they made themselves quite independent of organised Christianity.Intolerance was very bitter ; and only thesecular arm stopped a whole series of


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[47]ecclesiastical prosecutions, which wouldhave made the

ministryof the Church

of England impossible except for fools,liars, and bigots. Real hatred was shownagainst the scientific leaders, whichDarwin calmly ignored, and Huxleyreturned with interest.

But though the contradictions andperplexities of rapid transition were morefelt in religion than in any other subject,it may be doubted whether organisedChristianity has ever been more influential in England than during the Victorian age, before the growth of thetowns threw all the Church's machineryout of gear. Many of you will rememberLecky's charming description of the typical country parsonage, and the graciousand civilising influences which radiatedfrom what was often the very ideal of aChristian home. The description is inno way exaggerated ; and now that highprices and predatory taxation have destroyed this pleasant and unique featureof English life, it is worth while to recallto the younger generation what it was inthe time of their fathers and grandfathers.


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I have taken Tennyson as my exampleof Victorian literature, because his is thegreatest and most representative name.It is no reproach to say that he is thoroughly English. Browning is more cosmopolitan, but his method of facing theproblems of life like a bull at a fence ischaracteristically English.There is no time to speak at length ofthe Victorian novel, another bright starin the firmament of the reign. Our nationhas a great tradition in fiction, and weshall be wise to stick to it, instead ofpreferring a corrupt following of theFrench, whose novelists, in spite of theirclever technique, seem to me frequentlydull and usually repulsive. Dickens andThackeray have been rivals, almost likeGladstone and Disraeli, and perhaps fewarewhole-hearted admirers ofboth. Thatany educated reader should fail to loveone or the other is to me inexplicable.

r~ The palmiest day ofEnglish novel-writingI was in the fifties, when Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot,

Anthony Trollope, Kingsley, Disraeli,Bulwer Lytton and Meredith were all


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[49]writing. Later in the reign there was ashort set-back, and the fortunes of Englishfiction seemed for a few years to be lesspromising than they became in the nextgeneration, when several new writers ofgreat ability and charm appeared. Nowwe seem to be once more in the troughof the wave ; and I cannot doubt that themain cause of the decay is the pernicioushabit of writing hastily for money. Ifwe take the trouble to consult MrMudie'scatalogue of fiction, we shall learn to ouramazement that there are several writers,whose names we have never heard, whohave to their discredit over a hundredworks of fiction apiece. They obviouslyturn out several books a year, just as ashoemaker manufactures so many pairsof boots. The great novelists have generally written rapidly, rather too rapidly ;but such a cataract of ink as these heroesof the circulating library spill is absolutely inconsistent with even second-ratework. Literature flourishes best when itis half a trade and half an art ; and hereagain the Victorian Age occupies themost favourable part of the curve.

I. R, 1 , 4


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[JO]Of the other glories of Victorian litera

ture I can say nothing now. But beforeleaving this part of the subject, considerthe wonderful variety of strong or beautiful English prose writing which that ageproduced. Froude, Macaulay, Newman,Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson are eachsupreme in very different styles; and allofthem achieved excellence by an amountof labour which very few writers are nowwilling to bestow.

I have no wish to offer an unmeasuredpanegyric on an age which after all cannot be divested of the responsibility formaking our own inevitable. It was toa considerable extent vulgarised by theamazing success of the Industrial Revolution. Napoleon's nation of shopkeepersdid judge almost everything by quantitative standards, and by quantitativestandards the higher values cannot bemeasured.JThere was no lack of prophets"tcrpolnt out a better way, but the nationas a whole was not unfairly caricaturedas John Bull, that stout, comfortable,rather bullying figure which excitedRuskin's indignation, and which others


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have said that we ought to burn insteadof Guy Fawkes. We were unpopularon the Continent just when we thoughtthat all other nations were envying us.They did envy us ; but with the underlying conviction that there must besomething wrong in a world where thePalmerstonian John Bull comes out top.The greatness of the age, as I havesaid, depended on a combination of circumstances in their nature transient. Itresembled the short-lived greatness ofVenice, Genoa, and Holland. Before theend of the reign society had begun todisintegrate, so that we find antagonisticmovements flourishing together. Theoretical socialism reached its zenith ; butthere was also an outburst of romanticimperialism, of which Sir John Seeley,Regius Professor ofHistory at Cambridge,was one of the founders, Froude and Dilkepowerful propagandists, Rudyard Kiplingthe poet, and Joseph Chamberlain thepractical manager. It was a mild attackof the epidemic which afterwards enticedGermany into the Great War, and theworst that can be said of it is that it en-


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[5*]couraged a temper of sentimental brutal-ism in the English people, and broughtus for the first time into danger from acoalition of foreign powers. The secondJubilee was its day of triumph ; the BoerWar the beginning of its downfall.The fusion of social classes proceededmore and more rapidly as the centurywent on. At the beginning of the reignthe territorial oligarchspurchased anotherlease of power by an alliance with thesuccessful commercial class which, withthe Indian Nabobs, had been violentlyradical until the aristocracy recognisedthem. The two parties quarrelled aboutthe Corn Laws and Factory Acts, butwhen these questions were settled, theygradually

drew together, while lavish newcreations of peers turned the House ofLords into the predominantly middle classbody which it is now. Towards the endof the reign the higher gentry began againto go into trade, as they had done untilthe Georges brought in German ideas,and the way was prepared for the complete destruction of social barriers whichthe Great War effected. Meanwhile,


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[53]there were ominous signs that our civilisation, like others in the past, might bepoisoned by the noxious by-products ofits own activities. Parasitism at both endsof the scale, but far most at the lower,became an ever-increasing burden on industry, and symptoms of race-deterioration became apparent to the very fewwhohave eyes for such things. Legislationremoved most of the obvious evils in theworkmen's lot, but one evil it could notremove, and this became more grievousand more resented every year. The greatindustry was turning human beings intomere cogs in machines, and as mechanismevery year tended to supplant manualskill, the clever craftsman of the past wasfunctionally obsolescent, and a type ofworkman was evolved who needed nocraftsmanship such as an intelligent mancould be proud to acquire and happy toexercise. This problem, which threatensthe life of our civilisation, was alreadybeginning to loom darkly before the eyesof the late Victorians.

I have no doubt that the Elizabethanand the Victorian Ages will appear to the


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[J4]historian of the future as the twin peaksin which English civilisation culminated.The twentieth century will doubtless befull of interest, and may even developsome elements of greatness. But as regards the fortunes of this country, thesigns are that our work on a grand scale,with the whole world as our stage, is probably nearing its end. Europe has sacrificed its last fifty years of primacy by aninsane and suicidal struggle. America hasemerged as the tertius gaudens. Whereshall we be thirty years hence ? It is foryou, my younger hearers, to answer thatquestion, for the answer depends on yourselves. We old Victorians will before thenhave made room for you by quitting aworld to which, as I am sure you think,we no longer belong.

PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY J. B. PEACE, M A.AT THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS


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(1922) the victorian age

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