Victorian England Portait of an Age

VICTORIAN ENGL Sffe ENGLAND PORTRAIT OF AN AGE BY G. M. YOUNG Servants talk about People Gentlefolk discuss Things. Victorian Precept OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD 1936 A PORTRAIT OF AN AGE I BOY born in 1810, in time to have seen the re joicings after Waterloo and the canal boats carrying the wounded to hospital, to remember the crowds cheer ing for Queen Caroline, and to have felt that the light had gone out of the world when Byron died, entered man hood with the ground rocking under his feet as it had rocked in 1789, Paris had risen against the Bourbons Bologna against the Pope Poland against Russia the Belgians against the Dutch. Even in well-drilled Ger many little dynasts were shaking on their thrones, and Niebuhr, who had seen one world revolution, sickened and died from fear of another. At home, forty years of Tory domination were ending in panic and dismay Ireland, unappeased by Catholic Emancipation, was smouldering with rebellion from Kent to Dorset the skies were alight with burning ricks. A young man looking for some creed by which to steer at such a time might, with the Utilitarians, hold by the laws of political economy and the greatest happiness of the greatest number he might simply believe in the Whigs, the Middle Classes, and the Reform Bill or he might, with difficulty, still be a Tory. But atmosphere is more than creed, and, whichever way his temperament led him, he found himself at every turn controlled, and animated, by the imponderable pressure of the Evangelical discipline and the almost universal faith in progress. Evangelical theology rests on a profound apprehension of the contrary states of Nature and of Grace one merit ing eternal wrath, the other intended for eternal happi ness. Naked and helpless, the soul acknowledges its worthlessness before God and the justice of God s infinite displeasure, and then, taking hold of salvation in Christ, passes from darkness into a light which makes more fearful the destiny of those unhappy beings who remain 2 VICTORIAN ENGLAND without. This is Vital Religion. But the power of Evan gelicalism as a directing force lay less in the hopes and terrors it inspired, than in Its rigorous logic, the eternal microscope with which it pursued its argument into the recesses of the heart, and the details of daily life, giving to every action its individual value in this life, and its infinite consequence in the next. Nor could it escape the notice of a converted man, whose calling brought him into frequent contact with the world, that the virtues of a Christian after the Evangelical model were easily exchangeable with the virtues of a successful merchant or a rising manufacturer, and that a more than casual analogy could be established between Grace and Corruption and the Respectable and the Low. To be serious, to redeem the time, to abstain from gambling, to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, to limit the gratification of the senses to the pleasures of a table lawfully earned and the embraces of a wife lawfully wedded, are virtues for which the reward is not laid up in heaven only. The world is very evil. An unguarded look, a word, a gesture, a picture, or a novel, might plant a seed of corruption in the most innocent heart, and the same word or gesture might betray a lingering affinity with the class below. The discipline of children was becoming milder, be cause it was touched with thattenderness for all helpless things which we see increasing throughout the eighteenth century, and with that novel interest in the spectacle of the opening mind which was a characteristic product of the Revolutionary years. But it was, perhaps for the same reason, more vigilant and moral, or social, anxiety made it for girls at least more oppressive. 1 Yet if, with Rosalind and Beatrice in our eye, we recall Dryden s saying about c the old Elizabeth way for maids to be seen and not heard, we shall realize how easy it is to mis understand our grandmothers...