William Ralph Inge

“ We sometimes forget that until the reign of George III a town was regarded as improving a landscape. A city was a glorious and beautiful thing, an object to be proud of. The hill of Zion is a fair place, the joy of the whole earth, because it had the holy city built upon it. Never since civilisation began has such ugliness been created as the modern English or American town. Ruskin saw in these structures a true index of the mind of their builders and inhabitants, and the sight filled him with horror. ”

“ The grandest and most fully representative figure in all Victorian literature is of course Alfred Tennyson. And here let me digress for one minute. It was a good rule of Thomas Carlyle to set a portrait of the man whom he was describing in front of him on his writing-table. It is a practice which would greatly diminish the output of literary impertinence. Let those who are disposed to follow the present evil fashion of disparaging the great Victorians make a collection of their heads in photographs or engravings, and compare them with those of their own little favourites. ”

“ We are always sowing our future; we are always reaping our past. The Industrial Revolution began in reality before the accession of George III, and the French monarchy was stricken with mortal disease before Louis XV bequeathed his kingdom to his luckless successor.
But there can be no question that the river of civilisation reached a stretch of rapids towards the end of the eighteenth century. ”

“ A fanatical nationalism began to foster racial animosity; the enragés of Europe began to preach class-hatred and to find many listeners; protective tariffs were set up on every frontier; international law became a mere cloak for the schemes of violence; and, as has been said, all Europe ‘breathed a harsher air.’ Worst of all, the mad race of competitive armaments, which was destined to wreck a great part of the wealth which two generations of peaceful industry had gathered, was begun. ”

“ I will not speculate on the causes which from time to time throw up a large number of great men in a single generation. I will only ask you to agree with me that since the golden age of Greece (assuming that we can trust the portrait busts of the famous Greeks) no age can boast so many magnificent types of the human countenance as the reign of Queen Victoria. We, perhaps, being epigoni ourselves, are more at home among our fellow-pygmies. ”

“ I have no doubt that the Elizabethan and the Victorian Ages will appear to the [Pg 54] historian of the future as the twin peaks in which English civilisation culminated. The twentieth century will doubtless be full of interest, and may even develop some elements of greatness. But as regards the fortunes of this country, the signs are that our work on a grand scale, with the whole world as our stage, is probably nearing its end. Europe has sacrificed its last fifty years of primacy by an insane and suicidal struggle. America has emerged as the tertius gaudens. ”

“ The palmiest day of English novel-writing was in the fifties, when Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Kingsley, Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton and Meredith were all [Pg 49] writing. Later in the reign there was a short set-back, and the fortunes of English fiction seemed for a few years to be less promising than they became in the next generation, when several new writers of great ability and charm appeared. Now we seem to be once more in the trough of the wave; and I cannot doubt that the main cause of the decay is the pernicious habit of writing hastily for money. ”

“ Those who have studied the family portraits in a great house, or the wonderful portrait gallery in the Provost’s Lodge at Eton, will see on the faces not only the pride and self-satisfaction of a privileged class, but the power to lead the nation whether in the arts of war or of peace. ”

“ Industrial changes came too quickly for the government to make the necessary readjustments, at a time when the nation was fighting for its life and then recovering from its exhaustion. The greatest sufferings caused by the revolution in the life of the people were in the first half of the century; the latter half was a time of readjustment and reform. One great interest of the Victorian Age is that it was the time when a new social order was being built up, and entirely new problems were being solved. The nineteenth century has been called the age of hope ”

“ At the same time, a variety of mechanical inventions gave man an entirely new control over the forces of nature and a new knowledge of the laws of nature, and this new knowledge, not content with practical applications, soon revolutionised all the natural sciences, and profoundly affected both religion and philosophy. The reign of Queen Victoria, which I have chosen to mark the limits of my survey to-day, covered the latter half of this saeculum mirabile, the most wonderful century in human history. ”

“ He hated the scepticism of the Revolution, its negations, its love of claptrap rhetoric and fine phrases, and above all its anarchism. He wished to see society well ordered, under its wisest men; he wished to overcome materialism by idealism, and loose morality by industry and the fear of God. Justice, he declared, is done in this world; right is might, if we take long views. Institutions collapse when they become shams, and no longer fulfil their function. The sporting squires ought to be founding colonies instead of preserving game. ”

“ Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art; and here again the Victorian Age occupies the most favourable part of the curve.
[Pg 50] Of the other glories of Victorian literature I can say nothing now. But before leaving this part of the subject, consider the wonderful variety of strong or beautiful English prose writing which that age produced. Froude, Macaulay, Newman, Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson are each supreme in very different styles; and all of them achieved excellence by an amount of labour which very few writers are now willing to bestow. ”

“ Besides, every movement is a reaction, and generates counter-reactions. The pendulum swings backwards and forwards. Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival. ”

“ THE VICTORIAN AGE Each generation takes a special pleasure in removing the household gods of its parents from their pedestals, and consigning them to the cupboard. The prophet or pioneer, after being at first declared to be unintelligible or absurd, has a brief spell of popularity, after which he is said to be conventional, and then antiquated. We may find more than one reason for this. A movement has more to fear from its disciples than from its critics. The great man is linked to his age by his weakest side ”

“ When the opening and development of the Atlantic trade deprived the Mediterranean ports of their pride of place, an Atlantic stage of world-commerce began, in which England, an island with good harbours on its western coasts, was in the most favourable position. The Pacific stage which is now beginning must inevitably give the primacy to America. We had also a long start, industrially, over all our rivals, and our possession of great coal-fields and iron-fields close together gave us a still further advantage. Our labour was then cheap and good; our manufacturers capable and energetic. ”

“ The only error with which the economists of this time may be charged was that they did not realise that over-population is the result of a very low standard of civilisation. Families are restricted whenever the parents have social ambitions and a standard of comfort. Where they have none, the vital statistics are those of Russia, Ireland, India and China.
[Pg 17] The astonishing progress in all measurable values which marked the first half of the reign produced a whole literature of complacency. ”

“ If we take the trouble to consult Mr Mudie’s catalogue of fiction, we shall learn to our amazement that there are several writers, whose names we have never heard, who have to their discredit over a hundred works of fiction apiece. They obviously turn out several books a year, just as a shoemaker manufactures so many pairs of boots. The great novelists have generally written rapidly, rather too rapidly ”

“ The problem of mending or ending industrialism, foolishly called capitalism, remains unsolved. Ruskin’s own artistic life would have been impossible without the paternal sherry and the rich men who drank it; and Morris’ exquisite manufactures depended absolutely on the patronage of the capitalists whom he denounced. But the indignation which these Victorian social reformers exhibited had much justification, even after the worst abuses had been partially remedied.
A mixture of rapid progress and extreme departmental inefficiency is one of the characteristics of the earlier part of the reign. ”

“ The great industry was turning human beings into mere cogs in machines, and as mechanism every year tended to supplant manual skill, the clever craftsman of the past was functionally obsolescent, and a type of workman was evolved who needed no craftsmanship such as an intelligent man could be proud to acquire and happy to exercise. This problem, which threatens the life of our civilisation, was already beginning to loom darkly before the eyes of the late Victorians. ”

“ A generation which will not buy a novel unless it contains some scabrous story of adultery, and revels in the ‘realism’ of the man with a muck-rake, naturally ‘has no use for’ the Idylls of the King, and calls Arthur the blameless prig. The [Pg 40] reaction against Tennyson has culminated in abuse of the Idylls, in which the present generation finds all that it most dislikes in the Victorian mind. Modern research has unburied the unsavoury story that Modred was the illegitimate son of Arthur by his own half-sister, and blames Tennyson for not treating the whole story as an Oedipus-legend. ”

“ Let us spend five minutes in picturing to ourselves the English nation in a condition of stable equilibrium, as it was in the eighteenth century. Before the Industrial Revolution, the country was on the whole prosperous and contented. [Pg 10] The masses had no voice in the government, but most of them had a stake in the country. There were no large towns, and the typical unit was the self-contained village, which included craftsmen as well as agriculturists, and especially workers in wool, the staple national industry. ”

“ From about 1840, when great literature again began to appear, the conditions were more like those with which we are familiar. There was an unparalleled output of books of all kinds, a very large reading public, and a steadily increasing number of professional authors dependent on the success of their popular appeal. As in our own day, a great quantity of good second-rate talent trod on the heels of genius, and made it more difficult for really first-rate work to find recognition. ”

“ Political power was in the hands of a genuine aristocracy, who did more to deserve their privileges than any other aristocracy of modern times. They were, as a class, highly cultivated men, who had travelled much on the Continent, and mixed in society there. In 1785 Gibbon was told that 40,000 English were either travelling or living abroad at one time. They were enlightened patrons of literature and art, and made the collections of masterpieces which were the pride of England, and which are now being dispersed to the winds. ”

“ Fluctuations in prices had much to do with the miseries of the hungry thirties and forties; but over-population, as the economists of the time pointed out with perfect justice, was one of the main causes. It was not till much later that there was food enough for all; and this was the result of the new wheat fields of America and the sheep walks of Australia, which brought in food and took away mouths. In Ireland the barbarous and illiterate peasantry multiplied till the population exceeded eight millions, when the inevitable famine illustrated nature’s method of dealing with recklessness. ”

“ The great Attic tragedians lived as long as Tennyson and Browning; the Greek philosophers reached as great ages as Victorian theologians; but if you look at the dates in other flowering times of literature you will find that the life of a man of genius is usually short, and his period of production very short indeed. ”

“ We however who have witnessed the succession of economic crises which attend and follow a great war ought not to forget the appalling difficulties with which the government was confronted. In 1795 there was actual famine, which was met by the famous system of doles out of the rates, in augmentation of wages, a most mischievous bit of legislation, like the similar expedients of the last three years. ”

“ Reform Bill and of Disraeli’s scheme to dish the Whigs. As far as internal affairs go, it would not be easy to prove him wrong. The one prime necessity for good government was present; those who paid the taxes were also those who imposed them. If there was some false economy, as there was in the Crimean War, sound finance benefited the whole population by keeping credit high, interest low, and taxation light. Political life was purer than it had been, and purer probably than it is now. ”

“ Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art; ”

“ I have no wish to offer an unmeasured panegyric on an age which after all cannot be divested of the responsibility for making our own inevitable. It was to a considerable extent vulgarised by the amazing success of the Industrial Revolution. Napoleon’s nation of shopkeepers did judge almost everything by quantitative standards, and by quantitative standards the higher values cannot be measured. ”