Victorianism

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Victoria, as she was known thenceforward, lived to see the dawn of the twentieth century, to witness the enormous development of the British empire in population, wealth, and power, and it is perhaps not too much to say, to win all hearts among her subjects by the simplicity, purity, and strength of her character. Had she displayed the stubborn stupidity of her grandfather, George III., or the immorality of some of his sons, it is not rash to believe that the tide of radicalism might have thrown down all barriers and swept away the throne on the flood of democracy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 is a time of unrest, of a hardening of temper, of the decay of the larger Victorian ideals, and of the growth of a more critical, cynical, and analytic spirit. The period, one will find, is not very rich in literature of the highest class; and looking back over our literature, and studying the rise and fall of the literary impulse, the alternation of rich harvest with lean years, one is tempted to regard the post-Victorian age as an interval between two epochs, between the great Victorian age and another, still to be, that will be as truly great. ”

“ But though this simple Victorian rationalism held the centre, and in a certain sense _was_ the Victorian era, it was assailed on many sides, and had been assailed even before the beginning of that era. The rest of the intellectual history of the time is a series of reactions against it, which come wave after wave. They have succeeded in shaking it, but not in dislodging it from the modern mind. The first of these was the Oxford Movement; a bow that broke when it had let loose the flashing arrow that was Newman. The second reaction was one man; without teachers or pupils--Dickens. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Victoria, my tale is done.’
Victoria toyed with her scarf awhile as though to remember all the points, then untied it knot by knot, in sheer weariness of soul.
‘And is that England, is that the Empire?’ she said, fixing me with her eyes in a way I did not exactly like.
‘Oh no, not altogether. Don’t let me be unfair. There are hundreds of square miles of beauty, refinement, luxury; exquisitely ordered homes, fine-natured men, courteous, suave, poised, high-bred from the bone; white women, oh, so white! some of them able to read Greek—Learning robed and perfumed. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While all the new influences were manifesting themselves in Victorian literature they did not, of course, supersede the great general inherited tendencies. This literature is in the main romantic. On the social side this should be evident; the Victorian social humanitarianism is merely the developed form of the eighteenth century romantic democratic impulse. On the esthetic side the romantic traits are also present, though not so aggressively as in the previous period; with romantic vigor the Victorian literature often combines exquisite classical finish ”

“ 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. ”

“ Under whose beneficent Imperial sway but hers could we find men whose past record is of political incendiarism, if not public crime, who, on showing any disposition to hold the lamp of Civilisation in lieu of the torch of Anarchy, have been elevated to posts of supreme trust, and have had pension, place, and title showered upon them? Truly, this Victorian era of ours, at least so far as it is concerned with the great Empire of Queen Victoria, is an era of hitherto unknown toleration of every form of race, creed, and opinion. ”

“ The collecting instinct has its roots in the very depths of human nature; and, in the case of Victoria, it seemed to owe its force to two of her dominating impulses—the intense sense, which had always been hers, of her own personality, and the craving which, growing with the years, had become in her old age almost an obsession, for fixity, for solidity, for the setting up of palpable barriers against the outrages of change and time. ”

“ In the days of Victoria the Good and her immediate predecessors these landlords who had ruled the Empire through the House of Lords made a losing fight for predominance against the new industrialists, men who employed great masses of people for their private gain in the iron and steel industries, cotton and wool, beer and shipping, and these again gave way to a rather different type who developed advertisement and a political and financial use of newspapers and new methods of finance. ”

“ To be a Queen Annian (if the phrase may be adapted) is to be respected for the accomplishments of mature manhood,—a dignified mein, ripened judgment, and polished wit. To be a Victorian—that indeed provokes the question whether ’twere better to be or not to be. The chronological analogy cannot, however, be carried out, for the Victorian, whatever the cause of his unfortunate reputation, can hardly be accused of senility. On the contrary, the impression prevails that the startled ingenuousness, for instance, with which he opened his eyes at Darwin, Ibsen, and the iconoclasts in Higher Criticism ”

“ I am reading with Victoria—reading in the deep eyes, without book. It is a course of social economy by a new method. The method is to look on this image of the Divine, as intently as may be without being caught in the act. I must not be caught; half of the gusty anger of the gods with adoring mortals comes of their dislike of being stared at. And, besides looking, there must be listening—listening with the heart. The ear will not do; the true message of this exquisite piece of being is only for a finer organ. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To-day, there is a continuous impulse in the middle class to grow smart, fast, intellectual, all that. Call this progress or call it decay, never mind; I submit that it exhibits Victorian respectability as merely a stage in the development of English people, and that we are tending towards a time when the jolly 1780’s will live again with something hectic and abandoned thrown in. The English people are a light people, a gay people, and the famous107 period 1830–1880 was, after all, a short period in the eight hundred years odd which separate us from the Conqueror. ”

“ To understand the many and bewildering changes which followed one another in rapid succession during the early years of Victoria's reign it is necessary to read the literature, more especially the works of those writers who took a deep and lasting interest in the lives and work of the people. ”

“ Both Socialism and Imperialism were utterly alien to the Victorian idea. From the point of view of a Victorian aristocrat like Palmerston, Socialism would be the cheek of gutter snipes; Imperialism would be the intrusion of cads. But cads are not alone concerned.
Broadly, the phase in which the Victorian epoch closed was what can only be called the Imperialist phase. Between that and us stands a very individual artist who must nevertheless be connected with that phase. ”

“ And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the splendour of the rich. ”

“ Let it suffice to say that the memory of Queen Victoria, that high personage, whose reign distinguishes itself in history not only in point of length, but in the fact that it is so peculiarly coincident with the wonderful tide of general advancement of civilization and material prosperity which has blessed Great Britain and the world in general, may perpetually be preserved in so fitting a manner as is done here tonight by the United British Societies in America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fields died and the Charles Street door was finally closed, at the beginning of 1915, the world had entered upon its first entire year of a new era. It is an era as sharply separated from that of her intimate contemporaries, the American Victorians, as any new from any old order. The figures of every old order take their places by degrees as “museum pieces,” objects of curious and sometimes condescending study. But let us not be too sure that in parting with the past we have let it keep only that which can best be spared. We would not wish them back, those Victorians of ours. ”