Vae Victorianis

The Eighteen-Seventies. Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society

THE Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature enjoyed them- selves recently in reconsidering the England of the Eighteen- Seventies. This England had little that was startling in it ; but the period, as Mr. de la Mare says, is " just remote and just retrievable enough to be singularly beguiling." Mr. Hugh Walpole, indeed, makes a higher claim for it :— " These ten years cover the most markedly transitional period of the English novel and they show so curious a meeting of opposite waters, so violent a contrast of men, methods, ideas, and morals, that there has been no other confasion quite so great in all the history of English Letters." - There were certainly great happenings in this decade. A young architect called Thomas Hardy published his first novel ; Charles Dickens died ; a curious and original social satire called Erewhon appeared anonymously ; Robert Louis Stevenson began to win his fame ; the first decadents appeared ; many of the old Victorian stalwarts were still writing. But for all this variety, Mr. Walpole seems to be ante-dating the years of confusion. Standards were still comparatively firm. As

Mr. Walpole himself remarks :—

" In the 'seventies the novelists took it for granted that once you were married you were happy for ever after. In the 'nineties the novelists took it for granted that once you were married you were done for. In the modern novel as none of the characters are married at all the old question scarcely arises."

It happens, queerly enough, that the most vivid sense of the reality of the 'seventies is given in the two studies of women writers. Mr. Walter de in Mare writes a very charming paper on the works of the women novelists. His own memory can just stretch back to those years :—

" Shallow, brimmed hats, or ovals of fur or velvet, crowned heads with the hair bunche41 behind in a chignon. Between these and the ferocious English sun a little fringed parasol afforded a pleasant and becoming shade. In the following years monstrous flounces began to multiply, the train to expand, the waist ' to contract. Indoors was waiting a cap (or lappets ') to ensure respect for the matron of thirty and upwards, who, says Mrs. Alexander, might still be called charming even at that advanced age . . . About 1880 whiskers, curly or weeping-willow-wise, and, if need be, dyed, were vanishing from the scene, together with that ' fantastic velvet vestment,' the smoking jacket. The crinoline was ' in.' I recall, too, a sort of tongs which were worn dangling from the hips to keep the train from out of the dust. Little 'buses, with a conductor hanging from a strap behind, or with a hole in the roof for the collection of fares, and with straw in the interior, roamed the streets, which rang merrily with the strains of the butcher's boy whistling Thicly-fol-loil or Tommy, make room for your Uncle."

" That wicked Ouida " was responsible for nine novels during the 'seventies ; Mrs. Henry Wood for ten ; Miss Braddon for sixteen. Those were the days of productivity ! Mr. de la

Mare recalls that nine of the novelists he mentions were re- sponsible between them for 554 publications, chiefly in three

volumes, which gives them an average of some sixty-one works each.

Miss Victoria Sackville-West's story of the _ women. pods leads us into a gloomier realm ; for, to tell the truth, in those

days women poets were still imitative and conventional. They still made up for their audacity in writing at all by a very marked and unexceptional turn for moralizing :—

" Poets are usually supposed to be in advance of their time ; and women, especially, are supposed to travel by short-cute ; but if the evidence of the women poets of the eighteen:seirenties is to be believed, neither of these two platitudes has a grain of truth in it. Truth compels me to confess that women poets of the eighteen- seventies, though numerous and prolific, are exceedingly dull."

In private life they were not always so tame. Mrs. Alexander, though moral enough, had a vein of acid good sense. When a tea-table visitor asked her, " Don't you yearn on starlit nights to be upon the Alps high above the earth, on the line of the eternal snow ?" she answered briefly, "No, I don't."

Professor Saintsbury contributes an admirable article on Andrew Lang. Perhaps the most intimate of the papers is Lord Crewe's study of his father, Lord Houghton. And

perhaps, although the paper by no means confines itself to the 'seventies, it was as well to begin the volume with it ; for Lord Houghton, with his cultivation, his paradoxical air, and his capacity for friendship, was able to feel himself at home in

many separate camps ; was able, for example, to entertain both Disraeli and Gladstone. The most vivid of the contri- butions is Sir Arthur Pinero's " The Theatre in the 'Seventies." The editor, Mr. Harley Granville-Barker, confines himself, in his own paper, to the poetic drama.

The volume, then, is not a heavy or academic exploration of the period, and there is not even much that is new in its pages. The most informative studies are those of Oxford and Cambridge. The Royal Society of Literature, however, obviously spent many pleasant evenings in retrospect ; and we can now share their pleasure. No doubt those readers will find it most poignant whose own memories will be stirred and who will feel themselves some quiet regret for those good old days.