William Ralph Inge

“ One result of the war has not always been realised. The eighteenth century had been international; there was no Chauvinism or Jingoism anywhere till the French, fighting ostensibly under the banner of humanity, had kindled the fire of patriotism in Spain, in Germany, and even in Russia. England had always had a strong national self-consciousness; and after the war the bonds of sympathy with France were not at once renewed, so that our country, during the early part of Victoria's reign, was more isolated from the main currents of European thought than ever before or since. ”

“ 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. The House of Commons enjoyed that immense prestige which has been completely lost since the old Queen's death. The debates were read with semi-religious fervour by every good citizen over his breakfast, and a prominent politician was treated with even more exaggerated reverence than our worthy grandfathers paid to bishops. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The longevity and unimpaired freshness of the great Victorians has no parallel in history, except in ancient Greece. 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. ”

“ I have no doubt that the Elizabethan and the Victorian Ages will appear to the 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. ”

“ The nineteenth century has been called the age of hope; and perhaps only a superstitious belief in the automatic progress of humanity could have carried our fathers and grandfathers through the tremendous difficulties which the rush through the rapids imposed upon them.
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. The masses had no voice in the government, but most of them had a stake in the country. ”

“ 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. There are of course no beginnings or ends in history. ”

“ 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. The astonishing progress in all measurable values which marked the first half of the reign produced a whole literature of complacency. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. As for the new industrialism, he disliked it with the fervour of a Scottish peasant.
Ruskin was a Platonist, steeped in the study of Plato, and bound to him by complete sympathy. ”

“ Towards the end of the reign the higher gentry began again to go into trade, as they had done until the Georges brought in German ideas, and the way was prepared for the complete destruction of social barriers which the Great War effected. Meanwhile, there were ominous signs that our civilisation, like others in the past, might be poisoned by the noxious by-products of its own activities. Parasitism at both ends of the scale, but far most at the lower, became an ever-increasing burden on industry, and symptoms of race-deterioration became apparent to the very few who have eyes for such things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ugliness in the works of man is a symptom of social disease. He could not avert his eyes from the modern town, as Wordsworth did, because the modern town meant a great deal to him, and all of it was intolerable. He observed that the disappearance of beauty in human productions synchronised with the invention of machinery and the development of great industries, and he could not doubt that the two changes were interconnected. 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. ”

“ There was no lack of prophets to point out a better way, but the nation as a whole was not unfairly caricatured as John Bull, that stout, comfortable, rather bullying figure which excited Ruskin's indignation, and which others have said that we ought to burn instead of Guy Fawkes. We were unpopular on the Continent just when we thought that all other nations were envying us. ”

“ We have to remember that the prosperity and security of the happy time which we are now considering were due to temporary causes, which can never recur. In the nineteenth century England was the most fortunately situated country, geographically, in the world. 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then, for reasons which have never, I think, been fully explained, the deathrate rapidly declined, at the very time when economic conditions demanded a larger population. This is the more remarkable, when we remember the manner in which young children were treated before the Factory Acts.
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Like a true Platonist, he set before his countrymen, in glowing language, the beauty of the eternal Ideas or absolute Values, pleaded that there was no necessary connection between equality of production and equality of remuneration, and instituted various experiments, not all unsuccessful, in restoring the old handicrafts and the temper which inspired them. ”

“ 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 aim of village agriculture was to provide subsistence for the parishioners, not to feed the towns. The typical village was a street of cottages, each with a small garden, and an open field round it, divided up like a modern allotments area. The roads between villages were mere tracks across the common, often so bad that carts were driven by preference through the fields, as they still are in Greece. So each parish provided for its own needs. The population was sparse, and increased very slowly, in spite of the enormous birthrate, because the majority of the children died. ”

“ America has emerged as the tertius gaudens. Where shall we be thirty years hence? It is for you, my younger hearers, to answer that question, for the answer depends on yourselves. We old Victorians will before then have made room for you by quitting a world to which, as I am sure you think, we no longer belong. ”

“ But we are accustomed to revolutions, and know that they never last more than a few years; the French Revolution was the first of its kind. Moreover, France had long been the acknowledged leader of civilisation, and a general overturn in that country terrified men like Gibbon into prophesying that a similar outbreak was likely to overwhelm law, order and property in England. ”

“ In religion Tennyson certainly represents the mood of the mid-century. Romanticism had given religion a new attractiveness in the revolutionary era. In France it stimulated the Neo-Catholicism of De Maistre and Chateaubriand; in Germany it gave a mystical turn to philosophical idealism; and in England it produced an Anglo-Catholic revival. But for reasons mentioned above, this revival remained intensely insular. England, and perhaps especially Oxford, were at this time so cut off from the Continent that the isolation of the English Tractarians was not at first felt ”

“ Disraeli, whose well-remembered warning about 'the two nations' has already been quoted, described the age as one which by the help of mechanical inventions had mistaken comfort for progress. And comfort, as another critic of social science has said, is more insidious than luxury in hampering the higher development of a people. The literature of social indignation was contemporaneous with the literature of complacency. Carlyle and Ruskin were its chief prophets ”