Frederick Harrison
MR. AUSTIN HARRISON'S book about his father is really a criticism of the Victorian Age, and very interesting it =is, possibly more interesting than if it had been all about Frederick Harrison. " Nothing trimming, poignant or scandalous can ever be made out of me," writes the old Positivist, with whimsical frankness. "I was never a politician or even a litterateur." There was in his life, he continues, no love interest to record (although he was certainly a devoted husband). " I never smoked a pipe or got drunk, I hive nothing to retract or to regret." Perhaps that last clause explains the fact that as a subject for biography he is a little dull.
Frederick Harrison lived at the precise moment when it was possible for such a man to make for himself a name. The second half of the nineteenth century was the golden age of the well-off intellectuals. For them social life had reached a perfection of pleasantness not dreamed of before. Supported by a vast army of perfectly trained servants, a Small band of men and women formed a coterie which t&y regarded as the civilized world. Their city was indeed set on a hill, and more men among them were conspicuous than their intellectual stature accounted for.
Evidently Mr. Austin Harrison was happy in the Victorian Age ; evidently he no longer approves it. Looking back he says that it was "a hard, ugly, and quite preposterous period of prosperity, sacred to the value of the pound sterling." From the point of view of those who did not share the prosperity, the verdict may appear just, but surely to those among whom Frederick Harrison towered and shone' it must quite honestly have seemed beautiful and compassionate, sacred not to the pound sterling, but to a very expensive and exclusive form of sweetness and light.
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