BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Moral Victorians
Victorian Prelude. By Maurice J. Quinlan. (Columbia University Press. Published in England by Humphrey Milford. 208.)
HYPOCRISY, as the late Professor Elie Halevy would occasionally explain, has many merits. A guilty conscience is often conducive to worse behaviour than a conscience at ease. And a nation, no less than an individual, is sometimes obliged to act upon the precepts it professes. It is true, Professor Halevy would conclude, that the English are the most hypocritical of people ; it is also true that they are the most virtuous.
The practice and profession of virtue have not, however, been equally fashionable at all periods of English history alike. The English Sunday in the eighteenth century might be a day so gloomy that, as Voltaire observed, there was nothing to do but to go " au sermon, au cabaret et chez les flutes de joie." Law might publish his Serious Call and the poets, essayists and painters castigate the vices and follies of their times ; nevertheless, the founders of The Spectator permitted themselves expressions which would hardly have been used by the founders of Blackwood, and the Brontë sisters would not have been altogether at ease at a party of Mrs. Thrale's. " At other periods of history," writes Mr. Quinlan in his study of the change which had come over English manners, " nations have boasted of their tolerance, their wisdom or their progressiveness. It was a distinguishing feature of the Victorian age that people gloried in their moral superiority."
The most potent single element in the change was of course the religious revival. Like all religious reformers, the Evangelicals were primarily concerned with faith, not works ; faith rapidly spread to morals and morals to manners. At the centre there might be a core of fervid missionaries ; at the periphery an increasing number of meritorious clergymen. " I cannot call that situation nothing," says Edmund Bertram, when rallied on his choice of profession, " which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind . . . which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence." And twenty years later, when the new era is safely established, Mrs. Trollope (an author who should find a place in Mr. Quinlan's bibliography as the perfect mirror of her times) is prompted by less scrupulous behaviour of Parisians to the reflection: " The clergy of England, with their matronly wives and highly educated daughters, form a,distinct caste to which there is nothing that answers in the whole range of con- tinental Europe. . . . While such men as these mingle freely in society, as they constantly do in England, and bring with them the females who form their families, there is little danger that notorious vice will choose to obtrude itself."
Nor was this beneficial influence confined to the higher ranks of society, for, as Mr. Quinlan points out, it was among the very poor that the change was most remarkable. The bawdy ballads of the eighteenth century vanished, drunkenness decreased, Francis Place and his wife could walk through the districts of Petticoat Lane and Spitalfields without hearing " an improper or even impertinent word," though twenty years before they would have been " assailed with the most opprobrious language and blackguarded from one end of the lane to the other." There had been no economic improve- ment to account for it ; rather the contrary. But there had been an almost unbelievable increase in literacy. "An instructed and intelli- gent people is always more decent and orderly than a stupid one," Adam Smith had observed ' • the tract societies, the works of the rationalists and the mass of writing produced to refute them, the Sunday Schools, whatever the purpose of their promoters or their own shortcomings (and Mr. Quinlan is lenient to neither) had between them proved him right.
Unfortunately, high moral sentiments and a large reading public do not suffice to create or even to preserve good literature. Mr. Quinlan's concern is with evidence, not with literature as such, and he does not discuss the effect of the new earnestness on Miss Austen or Wordsworth or Thackeray, nor the taste for increasing sentiment by dilution which was to become such an unfortunate element in much of the writing which we call Victorian ; but he contributes an excellent chapter on expurgators. " Under the greenwood tree,"
wrote Plunket, " who loves to work with me." " The lying pos- ture," Mr. Quinlan comments, " probably seemed indelicate, if not suggestive, to the editor, and, as a moralist, he was eager to encourage industry." With such vigilance at work even Henry IV
might be made fit, as Bowdler put it, " to be read by a gentleman in the company of ladies."
For the ladies too must be considered. They, like the poor, had
become literate; must be saved from Mary Wollstonecraft as the poor from Thomas Paine. Let them preserve at all costs a sense of propriety (" at once the guard and charm of feminine virtue . . dress decorously, visit the poor, and on no account employ male hairdressers. How far we are from the days when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu prescribed a pint of champagne and a gallop as the best remedy for the world's cares!
It may be left to the professional historian to take Mr. Quinlan up on points of detail. For the common reader he has produced a book as instructive as it is entertaining. It is incomplete, but neces- sarily so, since it is not an attempt to unravel all the strands which formed the web of nineteenth century society, but only to disentangle those which give it the most distinctive colour. The author suggests that the- eighteenth century had more of Victorianism in it than most of us suppose ; may he now proceed to a sequel to show that the Victorians themselves possessed livelier qualities than an intensive study of their worst literature would indicate. He is a historian, not a philosopher, and we may safely avoid Professor Halevy's question: whether with or in spite of their pretensions, they were not indeed
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