BOOKS
Their heroes moved among them
Alberto Manguel
THE VICTORIAN WORLD PICTURE by David Newsome John Murray, f25, pp. 310 At the end of this rich and readable hook, which seems so much longer than it really is because of the wealth of informa- tion and anecdote it contains, the historian David Newsome, glossing a sermon of Julius Hare, reminds us that learning from the past is a very different thing from tak- ing refuge in it. The first course is sensible, something 'all right-minded people should do'; the second impossible, because 'the past is past'. The Victorian World Picture is meant to be read as a cautionary tale, not as a nostalgic romp.
Not that cautionary tales cannot be amusing and Newsome's lesson sparkles with delightful stories on every page. Here is the sick Alfred, Lord Tennyson, resorting to a therapy of 'no reading by candlelight, no going near a fire, no tea, no coffee, per- petual wet sheet and cold bath'. Here is the Laureate's coachman looking forward to the day when he could go up to London, `in order to be there when the poor cut the throats of the quality'. Here is an anony- mous and well-read pork-butcher who, hearing the scholar E. E. Kellett somewhat pompously quote from The Merchant of Venice while travelling in a crowded train- compartment, joyfully remarked, 'That's Portia.' Here is the snobbish Mrs Creighton who, when her husband became Bishop of London, begged the wife of his successor at Peterborough 'to insist that the clergy should call the Bishop My Lord' because it seemed to her due to his position. Here is the theologian F. D. Maurice wrestling with the great Unitarian question of whether God, in the end, intends to save a few or all of humankind, and concluding, so movingly, 'I dare not fix any limits to the power of His love.' Here is Cardinal Man- ning, looking like a 'ghost clad in flames', alighting in Kensington High Street as the assembled crowd dropped to their knees in reverence. Here is Charles Darwin who, at the end of a hard working-day, liked to have novels read to him, but only on condi- tion that they had a happy ending.
Newsome has arranged this Victorian parlour of souvenirs and knick-knacks into sobering order, dividing his treasures with- in, without and beyond Victoria's realm. In every case, it is the view of the Victorians themselves that is given, whether directed towards their own compatriots, towards the outside and foreign world, or towards the life to come. What emerges is a picture largely of self-congratulation: never before, never again, were the British people so certain of having been chosen by God for reasons untold in Scripture but obviously with the island's glory in His mind. Whether Britain became an imperial power `on the strength of a rather crude and blind instinct,' as J. R. Seeley observed, and `in a fit of absence of mind', is debatable. Victoria may have been surprised to find herself at the head of a vast empire; the rising commercial classes perhaps less so.
It is difficult to sum up the careful web of progress Newsome traces throughout the period: progress in commerce, in technology, in the arts, in religion and morality. In the centre of this web is the notion of Work, no doubt a Victorian key- word in capital letters, and the spectre of Idleness. Newsome quotes Lord Cromer, delivering in the 1880s the shortest prize- giving speech ever: 'I have only three things to say to you,' quoth the Great Man. `Love your country, tell the truth, and don't dawdle'. (Thirty years later, Kipling expanded the advice in his much-abused `If '.) Those who dawdled, those unable or unwilling to work fell under the Malthusian laws of surplus population which, calling for the abolition of Poor Relief, so enraged Dickens and Carlyle. Technology, later worshipped as emblematic of the Empire's strength, was blamed at first for the economic hardships of the working classes. Steam (for George Eliot) or coal (for Ruskin) were the great enemies of true civilisation, and the railway the embodi- ment of what Matthew Arnold called 'this strange disease of modern life/ With its sick hurry, its divided aims.' Against these rebels, Utilitarianism, in the person of John Stuart Mill, raised its head.
Is it significant that at least three of the most clear-cut ages of British history — the Elizabethan Age, the Victorian Era and the Thatcher Years — have been named after a dominatrix? What Kipling later called `the bonds of discipline' seemed to appeal to Victorians. Following the example of their stern queen, they worshipped strong men and women in high places, though not all to the extent of the Kentish squire who (Newsome tells us) bribed the Empress Eugenie's maid to obtain her Majesty's full chamber-pot and preserved it 'as a sacred relic'.
What exactly did the Victorians learn from the heroic qualities of their betters? Here the notions of Victorian ethics become hazy. Carlyle, who spoke so movingly of the poor in Past and Present (1843), advised the revolutionary Mazzini, exiled in London some ten years later, 'If people would not behave well, put collars round their necks', and in his vile Latter Day Pamphlets (1850) congratulated the Governor of Jamaica on his brutal treat- ment of 'our beautiful Black darlings'. And yet, not all became lapsed humanitarians. Margaret Fuller, present at Carlyle's encounter with Mazzini, 'felt', Newsome points out, 'both embarrassed and ashamed'.
Arguably, the Victorians were the contemporaries of their heroes and the exemplary lives they chose to follow were drawn from among those still living. G. M. Young, quoted by Newsome, remarked that the young of 1850 obtained their instruction from masterpieces published since their birth by luminaries, pointed out to them in the streets:
To watch Mr Macaulay threading his way through the Piccadilly traffic, book in hand; to see Mr Dickens running up the steps of the Athenaeum; to recognise the Laureate by his cloak and Mr Carlyle by his shawl, were the peculiar joys of that time.
It is tempting to transpose the Victorian admiration for great personages to our own day and see if we are capable of fitting the bill: 'To watch Mr Steiner threading his way through King's Cross traffic, book in hand; to see Mr Rushdie running through the door of the Groucho; to recognise Harold Pinter by his scowl and Germaine Greer by her scarf . . . ' No, I'm afraid it wouldn't work. Either our examples are not exemplary enough or we no longer believe in this kind of spiritual and intellec- tual guidance.
Nevertheless, I wish someone would give Mr Newsome a vantage point from which to look at our time and tell us who we are. He has an uncanny knack for cataloguing without being dogmatic, for labelling with originality, for making order out of the kaleidoscopic debris that a society leaves in its wake, and his Victorian Weltanschaung makes me long for an up-to-date com- pendium, so that I can see what we're doing in this millennial chaos.
Time grows shorter. We count by decades now; we used to count by ages and before that by vast periods which separat- ed, according to Lucretius, the time of mortals from that of the gods. Quite rightly, Newsome reminds us how recently societies have become conscious of their passing, and none more than the society that began calling itself Victorian half- way through the last century, barely 14 years after the accession of their Queen. In fact, the Victorians seem to be the first among the British to hold up a mirror consciously to the whole of their society to contribute, as it were, to their own definition.
Surprisingly, Newsome doesn't once quote Chesterton, who wrote a splendid book on the period, The Victorian Age in Literature, and whose views still seem eminently reasonable. Chesterton, who believed, like Newsome, that we can learn from the past, concluded: The Victorian Age made one or two mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is, mistakes that were real- ly mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a country must extend peace; it has certainly often extended war. They thought that commerce inside a country must certain- ly promote prosperity; it has largely promot- ed poverty. But for them these were experiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If we continue the capitalist use of the popu- lace, if we continue the capitalist use of external arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will not be on the dead.
Previous page
