H. H. Asquith

“ It used to be a favourite critical exercise among less eminent Victorians than Macaulay to discuss which was the greater writer—Dickens or Thackeray? Tennyson or Browning? Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot? I think we are all agreed now that comparisons of this kind are, if not futile, at least unprofitable. Men and women of creative genius cannot be labelled and classified, like plants or politicians. Nor do the masterpieces of Victorian fiction, either separately or collectively, belong to any of the recognized schools. ”

“ Indeed among all his speeches, leaving aside his prolonged duel with Sir Robert Peel in the forties, I myself should select it as the one which best displays his characteristic powers, and their equally characteristic limitations: irony, invective, boundless audacity of thought and phrase, the thrill or the shock when least expected, a brooding impression of something which is neither exactly sentiment nor exactly imagination but has a touch of both, a glittering rhetoric, constantly hovering over the thin boundary line which divides eloquence and bombast. ”

“ A catalogue of the great Victorian men of Science, and of their achievements, would include W. K. Clifford and F. M. Balfour: whose early deaths were declared by Huxley to be the greatest loss in his time to that department of Thought, not only in England but in the world.
If not actually the most important, certainly the most interesting, intellectual event in the Age was the appearance of Darwin's 'Origin of Species' in 1859. There was nothing new in the conception of Evolution: it had a pedigree which stretched down from Heraclitus to Lamarck. ”

“ Of the imaginative writers of the Victorian Age, the Poets and the Novelists, it would be impossible to say too much, and difficult to say anything that has not been better said before. If we want to measure the sum of our total indebtedness to them, we have only to try and realize how much the thoughts and the modes of speech of the average man, throughout the English-speaking world, have been and are unconsciously coloured by their creations and inventions. ”

“ Somewhere and somehow, he has been endowed with something which is to be found nowhere else in the realm of nature; the power of initiative and self-determination, of conceiving and pursuing ideals; the capacity to build up an organized communal life, which is not merely cyclical or stereotyped (like that of the ants and the bees and the wolves) , but contains within itself the potentiality and the seeds of progress material, intellectual, spiritual. ”

“ Matthew Arnold, a fine poet and an unsurpassed literary critic, also became one of the Prophets. What drove him into the pulpit was, not so much moral resentment at the social paradoxes of his time, as intellectual irritation and impatience at the stupidity and sterility of contemporary life. The whole community—upper, middle, and lower classes—Barbarians, Philistines, Populace—seemed to him to be equally wanting in the 'one thing needful'. ”

“ It is difficult now to believe, and it had become difficult long before the curtain dropped on the Victorian Age, that the conclusions of Darwin, whether warranted or not by the evidence, should have been supposed to imperil, or even to affect, men's conceptions of the real place of Man in the hierarchy of Nature. Within the technical domain of Biology, it is possible that Darwin raised more questions than he settled. There have been in that area ever since a succession of sects and schisms which almost recall the early centuries of the Christian Church ”

“ I am interested in it to-day only in so far as it affected men and ideas in the Victorian Age.
There can be no question as to the extent and the depth of the interest which was aroused. There had been nothing like it since the accession of the Queen. The Scientific Camp was divided: the veteran Owen resolutely hostile, Lyell not wholly convinced, and the younger spirits, the men of the future, headed by Huxley—one of the few men of whom it can be doubted whether he had a finer faculty for Science or for Letters—full of enthusiastic faith. By some of them Darwin was hailed as a second Newton ”

“ In the case of another pair of the most gifted authors of the time, Robert Browning and George Meredith, each of whom had to wait before he could make good his claims to pass, from the worship of a coterie, into the recognized Pantheon, the fault lay, perhaps, as much with the perversity of the writer as with the dullness of the public. Mr. Chesterton in his suggestive little book ('The Victorian Age in Literature' [4] ) says of Browning—and I respectfully agree with him—that it is not true that he was careless of form or style. ”

“ The number of people who really think in any age and country is very limited, and still smaller is the number of those who think for themselves. Socrates found it to be so in the highly intelligent and favoured community in which he was such a disturbing element. It is certainly not easy to say how far the philosophic developments, which went on in England during the Victorian Age, tinged or biased the thoughts of the average man. ”

“ And in the supremely difficult art of writing for Children, which requires, in addition to command over the unexpected and the picturesque, the power of mixing good sense with good nonsense, and letting the one glide imperceptibly into the other, he has not been surpassed; except perhaps by his Victorian contemporary, whom we here in Oxford claim as especially our own, Lewis Carroll. ”

“ Such, in broad outline, was the outside atmosphere, in which the intellectual soil, with a fecundity which hardly failed for forty years, produced, in almost unrivalled profusion, the masterpieces of the Victorian Age. Nothing can be more striking, or more unaccountable upon any abstract theory, than the copiousness and the variety of its Personal resources. ”

“ But the Philistine bourgeoisie became his favourite target, with their narrow intellectual and spiritual outlook, their barren daily treadmill of routine, their absorption in superficial goods, their smug and sordid self-complacency. ”

“ That is a doctrine which can neither be preached to nor practised by man, unless man is a thinking being, looking before and after, not the sport of blind forces, but capable of transcending and dominating them. For this purpose his physical pedigree—whatever it be—is of little moment: whether his origin as animal was a special creation; or the last stage in development, by this or that evolutionary process, from the lowest forms of organic life ”

“ I have said or implied that the note of revolt is not characteristic of the Victorian Age. But the Victorians were not allowed to wax fat, and to bask in the sunshine of their prosperity and content, without reproof, exhortation, and even denunciation. The prophetic office has rarely in history been better filled or more faithfully exercised. ”

“ Culture (as he conceives it) consists in the possession within of a perennial source of Sweetness and Light—an unhappy phrase which he borrowed from Swift, and which became perhaps his most irritating catchword—and manifests itself in a balance of interests, a catholic sympathy, a due sense of relative values, a wide outlook upon life. ”

“ The demonstration of the mutability of species, with its possible, perhaps its necessary, corollary, that the human race had been physically developed from some lower form of organism, seemed to many excellent people to be a death-blow, not only to Revelation, but to all the higher and more spiritual conceptions of man's nature and functions. The lead in this sense was at once taken by a picturesque and interesting personage—the then Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. ”

“ In the intellectual sphere it will be found that most of the great names of the Victorian Age are those of men and women born in the ten years between 1809 and 1819. Carlyle, Macaulay, Disraeli, J. S. Mill are all a little earlier, and Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, Millais, George Meredith a little later. But the Calendar of those ten years is worth recounting:
In 1809 Darwin, Gladstone, Tennyson. ”

“ But in the general sphere of thought, Huxley, the purity of whose Darwinism no one could call in question, put the matter on its right footing in the Romanes Lecture to which I have already referred. Its real thesis is this: that (assuming the whole Darwinian interpretation of the cosmic chronicle to be true) 'Ethical progress depends not on imitating the cosmic process but on defeating it'. ”

“ The former arrayed themselves under the banner of Herbert Spencer, one of the notable men of the Age, who devoted himself to the things of the Intellect with a single-mindedness, and an indifference to the world, the flesh, and the devil, which recall the lives of the early Renaissance scholars. After an unconventional and fragmentary education, he began active life at the age of seventeen in the first year of the Queen's reign as a railway engineer. ”

“ Dickens's 'Pickwick Papers', and Carlyle's 'French Revolution'. During the decade which followed our literature was enriched by 'Vanity Fair', 'Jane Eyre', the first volume of 'Modern Painters', and the first two volumes of Macaulay's 'History'.
A distinguished man, happily still amongst us, who was born near the beginning of the Queen's reign, and was later on an ornament both of the forensic and the political world—Sir Edward Clarke—has recently produced an interesting autobiography. ”

“ Romanes, the founder of this Lecture, and himself an accomplished biologist, went so far as to write: 'If we may estimate the importance of an idea by the change of thought which it effects, this idea of natural selection is unquestionably the most important idea that has ever been conceived by the mind of man. ”

“ They concentrated their main efforts upon the improvement of the mechanism of industry and communication, and upon the attainment of the commercial and financial primacy of the world. It is not fair to say that they were wholly wrapped up in Materialism, and the pursuit of wealth and comfort. ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1928, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 94 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”