Victorian era

“ While they fought, merchants and artisans, tradesmen and small landowners quietly strengthened their position, developed the industries of the country, accumulated wealth, and ushered in that new social condition that made England what she was in the Victorian era—the greatest commercial country in the world. ”

“ Of course middle-aged men know, as well as we ancients, the fact that social life in England—or{2} rather let me say in Europe—is very different from what it was in the days of their fathers, and are perfectly well acquainted with the great and oftentimes celebrated causes which have differentiated the Victorian era from all others. ”

“ For long enough yet will persist turbulent discomfort and the clamour of quacks hawking the millennium; but at last will be peace, and it is surely a longing for that peace that has turned men's minds partly to high romance, but more generally to the manners and genius of a century ago. Those of an older generation than my own have, perhaps, never betrayed their gentle Victorian heritage. One may envy and applaud their wisdom. ”

“ I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense, haphazard visions-- that is to say, my choice of subjects has been determined by no desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives of convenience and of art. It has been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain. It would have been futile to hope to tell even a precis of the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest precis must fill innumerable volumes. ”

“ It would be easy to go through the other departments of national life—the Navy, Finance, Colonial and Indian Policy, the growth and distribution of Wealth, Locomotion and Transport, Education, Science, Medicine and Surgery, and to prove that the progress during the reign of Queen Victoria was quite unprecedented. ”

“ And in most of the current criticism on things Victorian, so far as it is not mere fashion or folly, one seems to feel the Victorian spirit itself speaking. It arraigns Victorian things by a Victorian standard; blames them not because they have moved in a particular direction, but because they have not moved far enough; because so many of the things they attempted are still left undone, because the ideals they preached and the standards by which they claimed to be acting were so much harder of satisfaction than they knew. ”

“ Victorianism has the distinction of being the only period in literature whose very name savors of the byword and the reproach. To be an Elizabethan is to be envied for the gift of youthful exuberance and an exquisite joy in life. ”

“ It is, of course, the easy fashion now to sneer at Victorian standards. To my mind they embody all that is clean and sound in the nation. It does not follow that because Victorians revelled in hideous wall-papers and loved ugly furniture, that therefore their points-of-view were mistaken ones. There are things more important than wall-papers. They certainly liked the obvious in painting, in music, and perhaps in literature, but it hardly seems to follow logically from that, that their conceptions of a man's duty to his wife, family, and country were necessarily false ones. ”

“ This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our language, would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian literature as a whole. In the meantime, it may be worth while for the men and women of to-day, who are full of all the excellent work around us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly sixty years ago. ”

“ 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 VICTORIAN BACKGROUND I I intend, in this and two following lectures, Gentlemen, taking my illustrations in the main from Victorian times, to examine with you how one and the same social question, urgent in our politics, presented itself to several writers of imaginative genius, all of whom found something intolerable in England and sought in their several ways to amend it. ”

“ And while neither the statement nor the solution of the nineteenth is reckoned adequate today, still the Victorians did accomplish something if not much, and all we can say for ourselves is that we have not accomplished much, if something. Moreover, to flatter ourselves that we are the first to discover the social onus of poverty and other ills, is to ignore the contributions not only of the novelists but of Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Henry George. When the remaining four-fifths of our century shall have been added to history, we may perhaps applaud ourselves. ”

“ But above all he typifies the two things that really make the Victorian Age itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulæ; the richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition. ”

“ The Victorian Age was the age of accumulation; not of a mere piling up of material wealth, but of the growth and gathering in every land of all those elements and factors which go to make up the power of States. Education spread itself over the broad surface of the millions. Science had opened the limitless treasure-house of nature. ”

“ The most that we can do is to indicate one or two points in which the true Victorians had a certain resemblance to one another, and were unlike their successors of our own day. They were more evidently in earnest, less conscious of themselves, more indifferent to ridicule, more absorbed in their work. ”

“ Even as the Elizabethan lived with all his might and was not troubled about many things, his art was intense and round, but restricted; and as the Victorian commonly views life by the light of a patent reading-lamp, and so, sitting apart, sees much to perplex, the novel gives a more complex treatment of life, with rarer success in harmony. ”

“ Lately, when I've been reading up the Elizabethans, and one or two other periods, I've been amazed more than ever at the way things change. Even in talking to my uncle of seventy about the Victorians, it comes out astoundingly. The whole machinery of life, and the minds of every class and kind of man, change beyond recognition every generation. I don't know that 'Progress' is certain. All I know is that change is. These solid solemn provincials, and old maids, and business men, and all the immovable system of things I see round me, will vanish like smoke. ”

“ Of all the later Victorians he seems, at the present time, to have the widest circle of cultivated readers and to exercise the strongest influence on our writers of fiction.
* * * * *
III. VICTORIAN ESSAYISTS AND HISTORIANS There is rich reading in Victorian essays, which reflect not only the practical affairs of the age but also the ideals that inspire every great movement whether in history or literature. ”

“ Surely this young Victorian forgets that to the unwearying energy, the strong self-reliance, the clear heads and stout arms of her early settlers, his country owes the very wealth and culture of which he boasts, and to the growth of which he and his fellows have yet contributed so little! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Henceforth we shall have to compete with other nations on unprivileged conditions. It is useless to lament the inevitable, but it is foolish to shut our eyes to it. The Victorian Age was the culminating point of our prosperity. ”

“ That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian England. ”

“ There is something terrifying in the completeness of their lives and their civilisation. They are like a company of dons whose studies are of a remote and finished world. But the subject of their scholarship is the Victorian age, and especially Victorian England. Hence their liveliness and certainty, greater than men can reach who are concerned with the dubieties and changes of incomplete things. ”

“ Nor is there any abrupt termination to satiric affairs as the Victorians left them at the end of the century. The years stand as sign posts along the way, and not as barriers across it. The changes they call our attention to were less patent to those in and by whom they were working than to us with our perspective. From our moderate distance we are able to discern not only the evolutionary process but some of its results. ”

“ And those great dead of the Victorian line.
They passed, they passed, but cannot pass away,
For England feels them in her blood like wine.
She was their mother, and she is their daughter,
This Lady of the water,
And from their loins she draws the greatness which they were.
And still their wisdom sways,
Their power lives in her.
Their thews it is, England, that lift thy sword,
[Pg 9] They are the splendour, England, in thy song,
They sit unbidden at thy council-board,
Their fame doth compass all thy coasts from wrong,
And in thy sinews they are strong. ”

“ In the reign of Queen Victoria many thousands of trivial anecdotic pictures were bought and sold, were reproduced in Art Annuals and Christmas Numbers and won the favour of rich amateurs and provincial aldermen—so much so that Victorian art has been a favourite target for the shafts of critics formed in the school of Whistler and the later Impressionists. ”

“ Let me say, then, that in the region of Art and Literature I am still an impenitent Victorian. I have no desire to disparage the work of those who profess a more modern creed, and I think, although this perhaps may be vainglorious boasting, that I am not unable to appreciate the more instant appeal of a later day. But my talk with younger men, whose comradeship delights me, makes it often abundantly clear to me that I am disqualified, perhaps by age, from sharing to the full measure their more recent enthusiasms. ”

“ I found myself—and without knowing where I was—in the middle of that strange period of human evolution, the Victorian Age, which in some respects, one now thinks, marked the lowest ebb of modern civilized society ”

“ And if we take this fact about him first, we shall find it a key to the whole movement of this time. For the one dominating truth which overshadows everything else at this point is a political and economic one. The Industrial System, run by a small class of Capitalists on a theory of competitive contract, had been quite honestly established by the early Victorians and was one of the primary beliefs of Victorianism. The Industrial System, so run, had become another name for hell. By Morris's time and ever since, England has been divided into three classes: Knaves, Fools, and Revolutionists. ”

“ In the whole history of the English people there is no period so absolutely heroic, so full of enthralling interest, as that in which the might of England made itself apparent by land and sea—the period which saw good Queen Bess mistress of English hearts and Englishmen and sovereign of the great beginnings which have come to such a magnificent fruition under Victoria. ”

“ In spite of the severe discipline of his youth in the austere tradition of Queen Victoria—perhaps because of that—he had broken the gloomy spell of the Victorian Court, with its Puritanical narrowing influence on the social life of the people, and had restored a happier and more liberal spirit. ”

“ The Victorian Age is a convenient term in English literature to describe the period from 1837 to 1895: not that we assign any sacramental efficacy to a reign, or assume that the Queen has given any special impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years, nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradual evolution of thought can be exactly applied, or have any formative influence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name by which it can be labelled, is a mere artifice of classification. ”

“ At this particular moment when the great Timepiece of the Universe strikes away for us one era and rings in another, it is well for us that we should be brought to consider exactly where we stand in our national life, and to remember that England has just completed a thousand years of historical upward progress. ”

“ Jacobean furniture came in; respectable people began to dine at hotels and, what was much more fatal, to lunch at restaurants. Bridge came in ... cigarettes crept in. I do not say the middle class is dead, but when you are tempted to think that the Victorian period represented, in English history, anything but an accident, anything but the formulation of a class, then consider most of your young acquaintances, and ask yourself, honestly, whether those very people, fifty years ago, would not have gone to funerals with weepers tied round their hats. ”

“ There never was a period like the Victorian; in many respects the precedents of all older periods of Society fail to apply. In it the aristocrats believed in democracy, and resented the democrat who was practically their own creation. ”