The Victorian Age in Literature | Page 7

this romance of history, so far
from making him more partial or untrustworthy, was the only thing that
made him moderately just. His reason was entirely one-sided and
fanatical. It was his imagination that was well-balanced and broad. He
was monotonously certain that only Whigs were right; but it was
necessary that Tories should at least be great, that his heroes might
have foemen worthy of their steel. If there was one thing in the world
he hated it was a High Church Royalist parson; yet when Jeremy
Collier the Jacobite priest raises a real banner, all Macaulay's blood
warms with the mere prospect of a fight. "It is inspiriting to see how
gallantly the solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies formidable
separately, and, it might have been thought, irresistible when combined;
distributes his swashing blows right and left among Wycherley,
Congreve and Vanbrugh, treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt
beneath his feet; and strikes with all his strength full at the towering
crest of Dryden." That is exactly where Macaulay is great; because he
is almost Homeric. The whole triumph turns upon mere names; but
men are commanded by names. So his poem on the Armada is really a
good geography book gone mad; one sees the map of England come
alive and march and mix under the eye.
The chief tragedy in the trend of later literature may be expressed by
saying that the smaller Macaulay conquered the larger. Later men had
less and less of that hot love of history he had inherited from Scott.
They had more and more of that cold science of self-interests which he
had learnt from Bentham.

The name of this great man, though it belongs to a period before the
Victorian, is, like the name of Cobbett, very important to it. In
substance Macaulay accepted the conclusions of Bentham; though he
offered brilliant objections to all his arguments. In any case the soul of
Bentham (if he had one) went marching on, like John Brown; and in the
central Victorian movement it was certainly he who won. John Stuart
Mill was the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and
delicate and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to
preach a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics,
a hard egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness
that can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that
brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester
School expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even a
sort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe
rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his
factory. There shone in him a beautiful reverence for women, which is
all the more touching because, in his department, as it were, he could
only offer them so dry a gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise.
Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other,
we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the
difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological
order. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and
not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will
occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect.
Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated:
notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no good
getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this
sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it
were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus
Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet
delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no
one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some
tenderness for anachronism.
Now for the great part of the Victorian era the utilitarian tradition
which reached its highest in Mill held the centre of the field; it was the

philosophy in office, so to speak. It sustained its march of codification
and inquiry until it had made possible the great victories of Darwin and
Huxley and Wallace. If we take Macaulay at the beginning of the epoch
and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they had much in
common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy of
controversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very much
alive to morality; and they were both very much more under the
influence of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley,
especially, was much more a literary than a scientific man. It is
amusing to