The Great Reign
Victorian England. By Cl. M. Young. (Oxford University , Press: 7s. 6d.) Two years ago, when the two composite volumes on Early l'ictorian England appeared under Mr. Young's editorship, it was generally recognised that among the best of their many excellent essays the final summing-up by the editor, entitled "Portrait of an Age," took a- very distinguished place. He has now completed it by adding nearly as much material again to cover the latter portion of the great Queen's reign ; and the whole is here published as a single compre- hensive study of the entire 64 years. Its method remains analytical, not narrative ; it is not a history; but a historical essay. But within its chosen sphere it is wonderfully good.
So flashing and frequent are its epigrams, that quite trivially- minded people might read it for amusement. • So wide and accurate is its knowledge, so fair. and temperate, yet so penetrating and subtle, are its fundamental judgments, that the most serious scholar must take off his hat to it.
Here,' picked almost at random, are a few specimens of his terse swift method in analysis.
"Tin Irish difficulty went deeper than the philosophy of the age [ho is speaking of the 'forties] could reach. The twin cell of English life, the squire administering what everybody recognises as law and the parson preaching what everybody acknowledges to be religion, had no meaning in a country where the squire was usuallynn invader and the parson always a heretic." (Page 44.) "In the circumstances of nineteenth-Century England, the argument for an Establishment must in fairness be pronounced to be convincing. The parochial system worked by a married clergy, was unquestionably a civilising influence which nothing else could have replaced. Whether it was in equal measure a religious influence, may be doubted." (Page 117.) "It was once the boast of Manchester that if a railway were opened to Jupiter, Lancashire could provide all the Jovians with f4h1rts in a year. Fifty years later it seemed more probable that the first traveller would find a German already established and doing good business." (Page 164.)
"The Imperialism of the 'nineties had burnt itself out in the Mafeking • bonfires." (Page 183.)
" Ftutdamentally what failed in the late Victorian age, and its flish,Edivardian epilogue, was the Victorian public, once so alert., se responsible. Compared with their fathers, the men of that time were ceasing to be a ruling or a reasoning st ock."
To admire such passages is not to suppose- them infallible. Taking the last /46,,t one, for instance, you might object that what quenched the Imperialism of the 'nineties was not
the occasional glory-days during the Boer War, nor even its Black Week, but its months and years of cold ingloriousness. Taking, again, the last of all, would it not be much truer, if instead of " public " he had written "ruling class'? The people who read the early Fabian Tracts were quite as "reasoning" as (and more numerous thin) those who read the review articles of the Philosophical Radicals. The difference was that in the earlier period the classes who read that sort of thing had not yet been politically submerged, as they began to be in the latter period, by the classes who did not. Nevertheless, Mr. Young's analysis Of the decadence in the 'eighties and 'nineties, both on its economic and material sides, and on its educational 'and spiritual sides, is, when he gets down to them, full of knowledge and aware- ness. In an interesting passage (pp. 96-8) he lays' some of the blame on the change from local-school and private- school to public-school education, following the work of Arnold. But, while discussing changes of curriculum, he does not notice the greatest of all—the movement to fill the boys' leisure time with the routine, always rather stereo- typing and often mind-destroying, of compulsory games.
That was surely much the biggest difference between upper- class education in 1850 and in 1880.
In his last pages the author reflects on his task, and on what the task Of the historian should be. His theory strikes the present reviewer as different from his practice; and less satisfactory. For in his practice he seems to strive on the whole for objectivity, in the spirit of the conclusion of the twenty-second chapter of the first book of Thucydides. But in his theory he exalts personal impressionism and Herodotus ; and goes on to state a view " the final and dominant object of historical study "(fathered upon Maitland), which involves bypostatising the "mind of an age" (or of a race) in a way only really tio be reconciled with a single disputable outlook in metaphysics.
At the end of all is 'a Chronological table ci*Cived on
novel and ambitious lines. Unfortunately it is not always accurate ; in the very first column the ages of Tennyson and William Barnes are both mis-stated. Tennyson's case (where the error is large) is the more surprising, because he was one of the ornaments of a peculiarly memorable birth- year, 1800. It produced a trio. of babies (the others were Gladstone and Darwin); • which no birth-year in English history can beat for eminence—and not many in the world's, unless 1770 (Beethoven, Hegel, Wordsworth).
II. C. K. Exson.
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