But though the contradictions and perplexities of rapid transition were more felt in religion than in any other subject, it may be doubted whether organised Christianity has ever been more influential in England than during the Victorian age, before the growth of the towns threw all the Church’s machinery out of gear. Many of you will remember Lecky’s charming description of the typical country parsonage, and the gracious and civilising influences which radiated from what was often the very ideal of a Christian home. The description is in no way exaggerated; and now that high prices and predatory taxation have destroyed this pleasant and unique feature of English life, it is worth while to recall to the younger generation what it was in the time of their fathers and grandfathers.
I have taken Tennyson as my example of Victorian literature, because his is the greatest and most representative name. It is no reproach to say that he is thoroughly English. Browning is more cosmopolitan, but his method of facing the problems of life like a bull at a fence is characteristically English.
There is no time to speak at length of the Victorian novel, another bright star in the firmament of the reign. Our nation has a great tradition in fiction, and we shall be wise to stick to it, instead of preferring a corrupt following of the French, whose novelists, in spite of their clever technique, seem to me frequently dull and usually repulsive. Dickens and Thackeray have been rivals, almost like Gladstone and Disraeli, and perhaps few are whole-hearted admirers of both. That any educated reader should fail to love one or the other is to me inexplicable. The palmiest day of English novel-writing was in the fifties, when Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Kingsley, Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton and Meredith were all writing. Later in the reign there was a short set-back, and the fortunes of English fiction seemed for a few years to be less promising than they became in the next generation, when several new writers of great ability and charm appeared. Now we seem to be once more in the trough of the wave; and I cannot doubt that the main cause of the decay is the pernicious habit of writing hastily for money. If we take the trouble to consult Mr Mudie’s catalogue of fiction, we shall learn to our amazement that there are several writers, whose names we have never heard, who have to their discredit over a hundred works of fiction apiece. They obviously turn out several books a year, just as a shoemaker manufactures so many pairs of boots. The great novelists have generally written rapidly, rather too rapidly; but such a cataract of ink as these heroes of the circulating library spill is absolutely inconsistent with even second-rate work. Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art; and here again the Victorian Age occupies the most favourable part of the curve.
Of the other glories of Victorian literature I can say nothing now. But before leaving this part of the subject, consider the wonderful variety of strong or beautiful English prose writing which that age produced. Froude, Macaulay, Newman, Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson are each supreme in very different styles; and all of them achieved excellence by an amount of labour which very few writers are now willing to bestow.
I have no wish to offer an unmeasured panegyric on an age which after all cannot be divested of the responsibility for making our own inevitable. It was to a considerable extent vulgarised by the amazing success of the Industrial Revolution. Napoleon’s nation of shopkeepers did judge almost everything by quantitative standards, and by quantitative standards the higher values cannot be measured. There was no lack of prophets to point out a better way, but the nation as a whole was not unfairly caricatured as John Bull, that stout, comfortable, rather bullying figure which excited Ruskin’s indignation, and which others have said that we ought to burn instead of Guy Fawkes. We were unpopular on the Continent just when we thought that all other nations were envying us. They did envy us; but with the underlying conviction that there must be something wrong in a world where the Palmerstonian John Bull comes out top.
The greatness of the age, as I have said, depended on a combination of circumstances in their nature transient. It resembled the short-lived greatness of Venice, Genoa, and Holland. Before the end of the reign society had begun to disintegrate, so that we find antagonistic movements flourishing together. Theoretical socialism reached its zenith; but there was also an outburst of romantic imperialism, of which Sir John Seeley, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, was one of the founders, Froude and Dilke powerful propagandists, Rudyard Kipling the poet, and Joseph Chamberlain the practical manager. It was a mild attack of the epidemic which afterwards enticed Germany into the Great War, and the worst that can be said of it is that it encouraged a temper of sentimental brutalism in the English people, and brought us for the first time into danger from a coalition of foreign powers. The second Jubilee was its day of triumph; the Boer War the beginning of its downfall.
The fusion of social classes proceeded more and more rapidly as the century went on. At the beginning of the reign the territorial oligarchs purchased another lease of power by an alliance with the successful commercial class which, with the Indian Nabobs, had been violently radical until the aristocracy recognised them. The two parties quarrelled about the Corn Laws and Factory Acts, but when these questions were settled, they gradually drew together, while lavish new creations of peers turned the House of Lords into the predominantly middle class body which it is now. Towards the end of the reign the higher gentry began again to go into trade, as they had done until the Georges brought in German ideas, and the way was prepared for the complete destruction of social barriers which the Great War effected. Meanwhile, there were ominous signs that our civilisation, like others in the past, might be poisoned by the noxious by-products of its own activities. Parasitism at both ends of the scale, but far most at the lower, became an ever-increasing burden on industry, and symptoms of race-deterioration became apparent to the very few who have eyes for such things. Legislation removed most of the obvious evils in the workmen’s lot, but one evil it could not remove, and this became more grievous and more resented every year. The great industry was turning human beings into mere cogs in machines, and as mechanism every year tended to supplant manual skill, the clever craftsman of the past was functionally obsolescent, and a type of workman was evolved who needed no craftsmanship such as an intelligent man could be proud to acquire and happy to exercise. This problem, which threatens the life of our civilisation, was already beginning to loom darkly before the eyes of the late Victorians.
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. America has emerged as the tertius gaudens. Where shall we be thirty years hence? It is for you, my younger hearers, to answer that question, for the answer depends on yourselves. We old Victorians will before then have made room for you by quitting a world to which, as I am sure you think, we no longer belong.
PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY J. B. PEACE, M.A. AT THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS