When Miss Amy Lowell, in her essay on Émile Verhaeren, says that the influence of Zola on the younger writers of France and Belgium was necessary “to down the long set of sentimental hypocrisies known in England as ‘Victorian,’” she repeats a formula which has been in popular use for many years, and to which we attach no very exact significance. “Early-Victorian,” “mid-Victorian,” we use the phrases glibly, and without being aware that the mental attitude to which we refer is sometimes not Victorian at all, but Georgian. Take, for example, that fairly famous sentiment about the British navy being “if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.” Nothing more oppressively smug was ever uttered in the reign of the virtuous Queen; yet it was written by the most humorous and most pitiless of Georgian novelists, and it expressed the conviction of her soul.
When we permit ourselves to sneer at Victorian hypocrisies, we allude, as a rule, to the superficial observance of religious practices, and to the artificial reticence concerning illicit sexual relations. The former affected life more than it did literature; the latter affected literature more than it did life. A resolute silence is apt to imply or involve an equally resolute denial; and there came a time when certain plain truths were denied because there was no other way of keeping them out of sight. Novelists and poets conformed to a standard which was set by the taste of their day. So profoundly was the great Victorian laureate influenced by this taste that he grew reluctant to accept those simple old English stories, those charming old English traditions, the propriety or impropriety of which had never been a matter for concern. His “fair Rosamond” believes herself a wedded wife, and so escapes culpability. His “Maid Marian” wanders through Sherwood Forest under the respectable chaperonage of her father, and will not permit to Robin Hood the harmless liberties common among betrothed lovers.
“Robin, I will not kiss thee,
For that belongs to marriage; but I hold thee
The husband of my heart; the noblest light
That ever flashed across my life, and I
Embrace thee with the kisses of the soul.
Robin: I thank thee.”
It is a bit frigid and a bit stilted for the merry outlaws. “If love were all,” we might admit that conventionalism had chilled the laureate’s pen; but, happily for the great adventures we call life and death, love is not all. The world swings on its way, peopled by other men than lovers; and it is to Tennyson we owe the most splendid denial of domesticity—and duty—that was ever made deathless by verse. With what unequalled ardour his Ulysses abandons home and country, the faithful, but ageing, Penelope, the devoted, but dull, Telemachus, and the troublesome business of law-making! He does not covet safety. He does not enjoy the tranquil reward of his labours, nor the tranquil discharge of his obligations. He will drink life to the lees. He will seek the still untravelled world, and take what buffets fortune sends him.
“For my purpose holds