BOOKS AND WRITERS
Wmade a solemn-face guy of something we called Victorianism and danced the carmagnole round the preposterous image. There was no need to keep step. It was a free and easy, and we were emancipated. It was amusing, and for years it was profitable. But some grew weary of the dance, and some grew wiser, detecting a smile on the face of the guy. Mr. G. M: Young has told how he read Eminent Victorians on its appearance, and sighed, "The game is up for civilisation! " He recovered from depression to castigate, in an unaccustomed state of asperity, the "Dirty 'Twenties" for irreverence. What is Victorianism ? Thackeray is supposed to typify one aspect in rejecting a poem by Mrs. Browning on the ground that the word " harlot " would be disturbing to his readers. He had learned how to keep his tongue between his teeth—and his work paid the penalty of this discipline. But a label that sticks to so many things cannot be said to cover anything. Were Podsnap and Pecksniff typical Victorians ? They seem as plentiful today as at any time in history. Pretentiously respectable, self-complacent, censorious, materialist, eloquently platitudinous, insular, hypo- critical, puritanical and furtively prurient—all these things are said to combine to stamp the era, and not only its ordinary folk but the outsizes in intellect and social activity. Clearly, a period so monstrous merits the increasing attention being given to it. And the more it is examined the more need we find to sort out our opinions.
Small heed was taken of the ancestral voices themselves. We preferred to listen to derision from the young men of the 'twenties. The Victorian Age did not really begin till the nine- teenth century was half spent. It ended when British imperialism had struck its last blow in the Boer War, and left the new genera- tion confused and ashamed. At the beginning of the era Macaulay pulled out exultant organ-stops about the benefits of science to rich and poor in the "truly merry England" of Queen Victoria. And there was another Victorian, a small boy-when that was written, who lived through the glory and the triumph and the rest, saw them die away and fade into the light of common day. Look- ing down the future, seventy years after Macaulay's trumpet flourish, he could only hope that pain to all living things upon the earth should be kept down to a minimum. That was all the philosophy that Victorianism had left to Thomas Hardy.
How can a synthesis be made of these contradictions, and a label attached ? Eleven eminent American critics* have assayed a re-interpretation of the age's literature and agree, more or less, that it was the expression of a single humane conviction, the con- viction that it was possible to adapt human culture to the surprising new worlds of science, democracy and industrialism—phenomena that seemed to have sprung up without warning. Carlyle had a horrible remedy for a sick world, but complacency about the state of Victorian society was not his most noticeable habit. He made more noise about the maladies of his time than Matthew Arnold did, but they were united in the fear that the worship of Mammon betokened approach to a new Dark Age. In this they were far from being representative men of Victorian England ; but they were representative of a flowering time in literature when most of its notable contributors felt, as Keats did, the burden of the world. They were the protest against the age, the protest of the thinkers and the artists. Only in a chronological sense can we speak of a Victorian literature ; at least, any other sense is very limited. What really distinguishes that world of letters is the number of its giants. Having for thirty years flung missiles at them, we now realise that we have wasted our cleverness. The increasing number of bio- graphical studies and the changed tone are proof of that. "The soft shock of wizened apples" fell upon the hilly rock.
Ethical formalities were mixed too liberally with much of the pure lyrical beauty of the poetry, and the fluent and disciplined * The Reinterpretation of Victorian Literature. Edited by Joseph E. Baker. (Princeton University Press. London: Oumberkge. 24s.) prose of the 'fifties and later, just as the writings of our time are fogged with political and psychological formalities. A century hence (if the world by then is not quite dehumanised) literary criticism, sifting the chaff from the grain, may decide that, taking us all in all, we were not so bad. Taking the Victorian writers all in all, we now see that they made one of the greatest eras in our literary history. There was such a sense of new freedom in the 'fifties that the young lions often roared through their hats, so the roar reaches us with a muffled sound. " 'Twas gladsome, but often foolish forsooth." In that spirit Meredith in age revised the free outpouring of youth's spirit.
Tennyson's luxuriant texture, instinctive mastery of music, and inborn natural wildness were too often subdued or interrupted by impulses of standardised propriety. We seize upon this and over- look other impulses that cried out against abuses of the time. That everything can be used as a subject for poetry is thouglit to be a discovery of this century. But Tennyson and Browning knew the idea was as old as poetry. No poet as yet has been moved to a creative act by groundnuts or the National Health Service ; yet the lyrical Tennyson was quicker off the mark than Karl Marx (who made a footnote reference),when the report of the Select Committee on Food Adulteration was published in 1855. "Chalk And alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread," he protests in Maud. (Marx overlooked the plaster of Paris.) Victorian England was the earliest machine-age society ; from it emerged the problems of our own time. Dr. Emery Neff, 4i an essay on social background and social thought, traces the growing awareness of the problems among poets, novelists and essayists. They had at their disposal informa- tion immensely exceeding their personal observation, for the era, " unprecedently self-conscious, was prolific in social statistics. Never had a society examined itself with such conscientious thoroughness." The Queen's reign was seldom free of the stress and strain of a society in rapid change, trying desperately, as Dr. Neff says, to "preserve in a life increasingly industrial and urban the human values of the past. Into this effort every form of literature, even art criticism and superficially 'pure' poetry, was drawn." Dr. Neff urges the need for a large reinvestigation of 'Victorian literature in its relation to the social scene. The enquirers should be sufficiently artists to present the whole scene, instead of content- ing themselves with the makeshift of putting background in one department, literature in-another, leaving the reader to observe their interconnection. Much will be revealed of subtleties of purely literary interest. Social influence on style' can be identified most directly in the popular didactic works, but it is strongly in evidence in the higher reaches of the great essayists. "The rewards will be rich," says Dr. Neff, "not only in understanding of the past, but also in insight into analogous situations and problems in the present' troubled scene." Other rich rewards for literary biographers in search of subjects are promised by these American essayists. Dr. John W. Dodds names a number of new biographical territories awaiting exploration. But the hunt was up before he wrote, and some critics and historians have run past his signposts. Recently an English biographer showed that even Martin Tupper had im- portance, above his unchallenged position as champion platitu- dinarian, which made him worth study as a Victorian representative of the era's eccentrics Although a few of Dr. Dodd's suggestions have been covered, he is left with a budget that could keep bio- graphers busy for a lifetime. Nor need they pursue their task in conviction that literature is any better for being sociological, or worse. Nevertheless, its character is more compelling when written with a large discourse, and the Victorians were noble dealers in that line. As Dr. Howard Mumford Jones decides, in an essay on the comic 'spirit and Victorian sanity, under the smashing impact of the new science, which threatened to- everything to anarchic materialism, they did their best to conserve the human tradition, without which, as we fearfully understand now the menace is on the doorstep, the world will reach a new order of
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