The Victorian Age in Literature | Page 8

note that when Huxley was charged with being rhetorical,
he expressed his horror of "plastering the fair face of truth with that
pestilent cosmetic, rhetoric," which is itself about as well-plastered a
piece of rhetoric as Ruskin himself could have managed. The difference
that the period had developed can best be seen if we consider this: that
while neither was of a spiritual sort, Macaulay took it for granted that
common sense required some kind of theology, while Huxley took it
for granted that common sense meant having none. Macaulay, it is said,
never talked about his religion: but Huxley was always talking about
the religion he hadn't got.
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. The third reaction was a group that tried to create a
sort of new romantic Protestantism, to pit against both Reason and
Rome--Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice--perhaps Tennyson.
Browning also was at once romantic and Puritan; but he belonged to no
group, and worked against materialism in a manner entirely his own.
Though as a boy he bought eagerly Shelley's revolutionary poems, he
did not think of becoming a revolutionary poet. He concentrated on the
special souls of men; seeking God in a series of private interviews.
Hence Browning, great as he is, is rather one of the Victorian novelists

than wholly of the Victorian poets. From Ruskin, again, descend those
who may be called the Pre-Raphaelites of prose and poetry.
It is really with this rationalism triumphant, and with the romance of
these various attacks on it, that the study of Victorian literature begins
and proceeds. Bentham was already the prophet of a powerful sect;
Macaulay was already the historian of an historic party, before the true
Victorian epoch began. The middle classes were emerging in a state of
damaged Puritanism. The upper classes were utterly pagan. Their clear
and courageous testimony remains in those immortal words of Lord
Melbourne, who had led the young queen to the throne and long stood
there as her protector. "No one has more respect for the Christian
religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into
private life----" What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne
became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is
well mirrored in his novels--for he was a man who felt at home in
mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all the
accidents that must always eat the edges of any systematic
circumference, it may still be said that the Utilitarians held the fort.
Of the Oxford Movement what remains most strongly in the Victorian
Epoch centres round the challenge of Newman, its one great literary
man. But the movement as a whole had been of great significance in
the very genesis and make up of the society: yet that significance is not
quite easy immediately to define. It was certainly not æsthetic ritualism;
scarcely one of the Oxford High Churchmen was what we should call a
Ritualist. It was certainly not a conscious reaching out towards Rome:
except on a Roman Catholic theory which might explain all our unrests
by that dim desire. It knew little of Europe, it knew nothing of Ireland,
to which any merely Roman Catholic revulsion would obviously have
turned. In the first instance, I think, the more it is studied, the more it
would appear that it was a movement of mere religion as such. It was
not so much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma.
For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not
mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought. It was a revolt
against the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which may
roughly be called (in a cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) having

your cake and eating it too. It saw that the solid and serious Victorians
were fundamentally frivolous--because they were fundamentally
inconsistent.
A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes'
intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up
something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an
outline and a shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine