Part 2

The Army in 1837 consisted, in actual strength, of about 100,000 men, of whom 19,000 were in India and 20,000 in Ireland. There had been a strong movement after the peace to abolish the army altogether, on the ground that another war was almost unthinkable. The Duke of Wellington was only able to keep up this small force by hiding it away in distant parts of the empire; the total number of troops in Great Britain was only 26,000. Officers were ordered to efface themselves by never wearing uniform except on parade. A Royal Duke could not be given a military funeral, because 'there were not troops enough to bury a Field Marshal.' As to the quality of the troops, the Duke frequently called them 'the scum of the earth,' and the brutal discipline of the time did everything to justify this description, for the soldier was supposed to have surrendered all his rights as a man and a citizen. The privates enlisted for life or for twenty-one years, and it was so difficult to get recruits that they were frequently caught while drunk, or frankly kidnapped. They were dressed, for campaigning in the tropics, in high leather stocks and buttoned up jackets, so that hundreds died of heat apoplexy. Lord Wolseley thinks that in 1837 50,000 Frenchmen could have easily taken London. Nor was the danger of a French invasion at all remote. The Volunteer movement, the social effects of which were excellent, was mainly due to the Prince Consort, a far wiser man than was recognised during his lifetime.

The Crimean War revealed in glaring colours the incompetence of the military authorities and of the Cabinet at home. If we had been fighting against any European power except Russia, with whom utter mismanagement is a tradition, there can be no doubt that our army would have been destroyed, as it ought to have been at Inkerman. The military credit of the nation was only partially restored by the prompt suppression of the Indian Mutiny. Yet here again the age of hope and progress made good its professions. The mistakes in the Boer War seem not to have been nearly so bad as those in the Crimea.

It would be easy to go through the other departments of national life--the Navy, Finance, Colonial and Indian Policy, the growth and distribution of Wealth, Locomotion and Transport, Education, Science, Medicine and Surgery, and to prove that the progress during the reign of Queen Victoria was quite unprecedented. The creed of optimism was natural and inevitable at such a time, though cool heads might remember the line of Publilius Syrus,

Ubi nil timetur, quod timeatur nascitur.

Lecky, a historian with some practical experience of politics, deliberately stated his opinion that no country was ever better governed than England between 1832 and 1867, the dates of the first Reform Bill and of Disraeli's scheme to dish the Whigs. As far as internal affairs go, it would not be easy to prove him wrong. The one prime necessity for good government was present; those who paid the taxes were also those who imposed them. If there was some false economy, as there was in the Crimean War, sound finance benefited the whole population by keeping credit high, interest low, and taxation light. Political life was purer than it had been, and purer probably than it is now. The House of Commons enjoyed that immense prestige which has been completely lost since the old Queen's death. The debates were read with semi-religious fervour by every good citizen over his breakfast, and a prominent politician was treated with even more exaggerated reverence than our worthy grandfathers paid to bishops. The debates were good because they were real debates and conducted by men who all spoke the same language. The rhetorical methods of the working man are quite different from those of the gentry, and mutual annoyance is generated by the mixture of styles in debate. Above all, the House of Commons was still a rather independent body. The history of England shows that as soon as the Commons freed themselves from the control of the king, they began to try to free themselves from the control of the constituencies. They debated in secret; they made their persons legally sacrosanct; and on several occasions they turned out a member who had been duly elected by his constituents, and admitted a member who had been duly rejected. These encroachments could not last long. The Bradlaugh case was the last attempt to repeat the tactics by which Wilkes was kept out of Parliament; but until the poisonous delegate theory obtained currency, the member of Parliament was a real legislator, with a right to think, speak and vote for himself. During the middle part of the reign, the dramatic duel between Gladstone and Disraeli gave a heroic aspect to party politics, and kept up the public interest.

In foreign politics it is not so easy to share Lecky's opinion. The opium war against China, and the Crimean War, were blunders which hardly anyone now defends; and Palmerston's habit of bullying weak foreign powers did not really raise our prestige. For a long time we could not make up our minds whether France or Russia was the potential enemy; a vacillation which proved that the balance of power, which we thought so necessary for our safety, already existed. Our statesmen were blind to the menace from Germany, down to the end of the reign and later. The Crimean War only increased the friction between France and England. The French fortified Cherbourg, and talked openly of invasion. In 1860 Flahault, the French ambassador in London, said bluntly that 'his great object was to prevent war between the two countries.'

This prolonged jealousy and suspicion between the two western powers made it impossible for England to exercise much influence on the Continent. The settlement after 1815 handed over central and eastern Europe to governments of the type which it is the fashion to call reactionary. Russia, Prussia, and Austria, acting together, were not to be resisted. And so the disturbances of 1848, once more kindled by Paris, just failed; and democracy had a serious rebuff. Nearly all the despotic governments of Europe were overthrown in 1848, and nearly all were restored a year later. The French indeed got rid of their king, mainly because he was a pacifist; but Germany refused to be unified under the red flag, and began to prepare for a very different destiny. The Pope wobbled and then came down heavily on the side of the old order. Meanwhile, England looked on. Chartism was a very feeble affair compared to the continental revolutions, and it flickered out in this year. The people had got rid of the corn-laws, and were fairly content; there was nothing at all like a class war in this generation. So, while Macaulay was showing how very differently we manage things in England--compare, for example, 1688 with 1848--we decided to invite the world and his wife to London, to envy and admire us in Sir Joseph Paxton's great glass house. We must not laugh at that architectural monstrosity. It was the mausoleum of certain generous hopes. On the Continent men had been shot and hanged for the brotherhood of the human race; we hoped to show them a more excellent way. We had given a lead in free trade; we still hoped that our example would soon be followed in all civilised nations. We had reduced our army to almost nothing; we hoped that militarism was a thing of the past. All these hopes were frustrated. A fanatical nationalism began to foster racial animosity; the _enrages_ of Europe began to preach class-hatred and to find many listeners; protective tariffs were set up on every frontier; international law became a mere cloak for the schemes of violence; and, as has been said, all Europe 'breathed a harsher air.' Worst of all, the mad race of competitive armaments, which was destined to wreck a great part of the wealth which two generations of peaceful industry had gathered, was begun.

We have to remember that the prosperity and security of the happy time which we are now considering were due to temporary causes, which can never recur. In the nineteenth century England was the most fortunately situated country, geographically, in the world. When the opening and development of the Atlantic trade deprived the Mediterranean ports of their pride of place, an Atlantic stage of world-commerce began, in which England, an island with good harbours on its western coasts, was in the most favourable position. The Pacific stage which is now beginning must inevitably give the primacy to America. We had also a long start, industrially, over all our rivals, and our possession of great coal-fields and iron-fields close together gave us a still further advantage. Our labour was then cheap and good; our manufacturers capable and energetic. All these advantages are past or passing. Henceforth we shall have to compete with other nations on unprivileged conditions. It is useless to lament the inevitable, but it is foolish to shut our eyes to it. The Victorian Age was the culminating point of our prosperity. Our great wealth, indeed, continued to advance till the catastrophe of 1914. But there was a shadow of apprehension over everything--'never glad confident morning again.'

Let us now turn to the intellectual and spiritual movements of the reign. The Romanticist revolution was complete, in a sense, before 1825. It was a European, not only an English movement, and perhaps it was not less potent in France than in Germany and England, though in accordance with the genius and traditions of that nation it took very different forms. In England it inspired verse more than prose, though we must not forget Scott's novels. It produced a galaxy of great poetry during the Great War, and added another immortal glory to that age of heroic struggle. By a strange chance, nearly all the great poets of the war-period died young. Wordsworth alone was left, and he was spared to reap in a barren old age the honours which he had earned and not received between 1798 and 1820. For about fifteen years there was an interregnum in English literature, which makes a convenient division between the great men of the Napoleonic era and the great Victorians.

From about 1840, when great literature again began to appear, the conditions were more like those with which we are familiar. There was an unparalleled output of books of all kinds, a very large reading public, and a steadily increasing number of professional authors dependent on the success of their popular appeal. As in our own day, a great quantity of good second-rate talent trod on the heels of genius, and made it more difficult for really first-rate work to find recognition. The impetus of the Romantic movement was by no means exhausted, but it began to spread into new fields. The study of 'Gothic' art and literature had been at first, as was inevitable, ill-informed. Its reconstruction of the Middle Ages was a matter of sentimental antiquarianism, no more successful than much of its church restoration. The Victorians now extended the imaginative sensibility which had been expended on nature and history, to the life of the individual. This meant that the novel instead of the poem was to be the characteristic means of literary expression; and even the chief Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning, are sometimes novelists in verse.

The grandest and most fully representative figure in all Victorian literature is of course Alfred Tennyson. And here let me digress for one minute. It was a good rule of Thomas Carlyle to set a portrait of the man whom he was describing in front of him on his writing-table. It is a practice which would greatly diminish the output of literary impertinence. Let those who are disposed to follow the present evil fashion of disparaging the great Victorians make a collection of their heads in photographs or engravings, and compare them with those of their own little favourites. Let them set up in a row good portraits of Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Gladstone, Manning, Newman, Martineau, Lord Lawrence, Burne Jones, and, if they like, a dozen lesser luminaries, and ask themselves candidly whether men of this stature are any longer among us. I will not speculate on the causes which from time to time throw up a large number of great men in a single generation. I will only ask you to agree with me that since the golden age of Greece (assuming that we can trust the portrait busts of the famous Greeks) no age can boast so many magnificent types of the human countenance as the reign of Queen Victoria. We, perhaps, being epigoni ourselves, are more at home among our fellow-pygmies. Let us agree with Ovid, if we will:

Prisca iuvent alios; ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor; haec aetas moribus apta meis.

But let us have the decency to uncover before the great men of the last century; and if we cannot appreciate them, let us reflect that the fault may possibly be in ourselves.

Tennyson's leonine head realises the ideal of a great poet. And he reigned nearly as long as his royal mistress. The longevity and unimpaired freshness of the great Victorians has no parallel in history, except in ancient Greece. The great Attic tragedians lived as long as Tennyson and Browning; the Greek philosophers reached as great ages as Victorian theologians; but if you look at the dates in other flowering times of literature you will find that the life of a man of genius is usually short, and his period of production very short indeed.

Tennyson is now depreciated for several reasons. His technique as a writer of verse was quite perfect; our newest poets prefer to write verses which will not even scan. He wrote beautifully about beautiful things, and among beautiful things he included beautiful conduct. He thought it an ugly and disgraceful thing for a wife to be unfaithful to her husband, and condemned Guinevere and Lancelot as any sound moralist would condemn them. A generation which will not buy a novel unless it contains some scabrous story of adultery, and revels in the 'realism' of the man with a muck-rake, naturally 'has no use for' the _Idylls of the King_, and calls Arthur the blameless prig. The reaction against Tennyson has culminated in abuse of the Idylls, in which the present generation finds all that it most dislikes in the Victorian mind. Modern research has unburied the unsavoury story that Modred was the illegitimate son of Arthur by his own half-sister, and blames Tennyson for not treating the whole story as an Oedipus-legend. In reality, Malory does not so treat it. He admits the story, but depicts Arthur as the flower of kinghood, 'Rex quondam rexque futurus.' Tennyson, however, was not bound to follow Malory. He has followed other and still greater models, Spenser and Milton. He has given us an allegorical epic, as he explains in his Epilogue to the Queen:

Accept this old imperfect tale, New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul, Ideal manhood closed in real man Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's.

The whole poem is an allegory. Camelot is

Never built at all, And therefore built for ever.

The charming novelettes in which the allegory is forgotten need no more justification than the adventures in _The Faerie Queene_, or the parliamentary debates in _Paradise Lost_. The Idylls fall into line with two of the greatest poems in the English language; and when Tennyson writes of Arthur, 'From the great deep to the great deep he goes,' he is telling his own deepest conviction of what our brief life on earth means--the conviction which inspires his last words of poetry, _Crossing the Bar_.

Tennyson knew materialism and revolution, and whither they tend.

The children born of thee are sword and fire, Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws.

And

The fear lest this my realm, upreared By noble needs at one with noble vows, From flat confusion and brute violence Reel back into the beast and be no more.

We are told that he is shallow, an echo of the thoughts of educated men at the time, and that, like the Victorians in general, he never probes anything to the bottom. It is true that he reflects his age; so do almost all other great men; and that his age was an age of transition; so, I believe, are all other ages. He represents his age both in his deep-rooted conservatism or moderate liberalism, and in his reverence for the new knowledge which was undermining the conservative stronghold, especially in religion. He is unjustly reproached with speaking contemptuously of the French Revolution, 'the red fool-fury of the Celt,' as 'no graver than a schoolboys' barring out.' He despised barricades and red flags and September massacres, because he believed that the victories of broadening Freedom are to be won by constitutional means. He is a little self-righteous about it, no doubt; that helps to date him. He came, we must remember, half-way between the Pantisocracy of Coleridge and his friends and the still cruder vagaries of our young intellectuals. Years brought the philosophic mind to Carlyle, Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Years will bring a relative sanity to our young Bolsheviks; they will then, I hope (for I wish them well), begin to read Tennyson. The second _Locksley Hall_ is peculiarly interesting for our purpose, because, though the author protested that it was written in character, dramatically, it is plain that it does express his political and social disillusionments and anxiety about the future; and Gladstone answered it as an attack upon the England of the day, calling attention to the great progress which had been made in the 'sixty years' since the first _Locksley Hall_. Tennyson saw that the Victorian social order was breaking up; and with great prescience he foretold many of the evils which have since come upon us. The deluge of political 'babble'; the ghastly cruelties of the Irish; the indifference of the new voters to the British Empire; the contempt for experience and wisdom, setting the feet above the brain and bringing back the dark ages without their faith or hope; the vague aspirations for international friendship, blighted by the pressure of over-population and ending in universal war; all these shadows of coming events, too clearly seen, have convinced him that there is no straight line of progress, but many a backward-streaming curve, which often seems more like retrogression than progress. This is not the language of 1851. In truth the clouds began to gather before the old Queen and the old poet died. Even in fiction, the note of disillusionment is heard with increasing clearness, in the latest novels of George Eliot, in writers like Gissing, and in the later books of Thomas Hardy compared with the earlier.

In religion Tennyson certainly represents the mood of the mid-century. Romanticism had given religion a new attractiveness in the revolutionary era. In France it stimulated the Neo-Catholicism of De Maistre and Chateaubriand; in Germany it gave a mystical turn to philosophical idealism; and in England it produced an Anglo-Catholic revival. But for reasons mentioned above, this revival remained intensely insular. England, and perhaps especially Oxford, were at this time so cut off from the Continent that the isolation of the English Tractarians was not at first felt; and the constructive work of philosophers and critics on the Continent was spurned as 'German theology.' So when Newman at length took the perhaps logical step of joining the Roman communion, the movement broke up, and its ablest members turned against it with the anger of men who feel that they have been duped. Neither science nor criticism could be disregarded any longer. English scholars began to read German, as Carlyle had exhorted them to do; and everybody began to read Darwin. There arose among the educated class an attitude towards religion which we may call very distinctively Victorian. Carlyle remained a Puritan, without any dogmatic beliefs except a kind of moralistic pantheism. Ruskin was a Protestant medievalist, who admired everything in a medieval cathedral except the altar. Tennyson and Browning were ready to let most dogmas go, but clung passionately to the belief in personal human survival. Tennyson's famous lines 'There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds' have been wittily parodied by Samuel Butler: 'There lives more doubt in honest faith' etc. The sentiment in Tennyson's lines may be easily defended; but it must be confessed that 'honest doubt' was something of a pose at the time. In reading such men as Clough, or Henri Amiel, the average man becomes impatient, and is inclined to say 'Why can't the fellow make up his mind one way or the other, and get started?' They carry suspension of judgment to the verge of futility, and though they obviously suffer, one does not feel very sorry for them. It is the opposite failing from that of Macaulay, who as a historian suffers from a constitutional inability _not_ to make up his mind on everything and everybody. Matthew Arnold is also a religious sceptic; but he has formulated a liberal Protestant creed for himself, not very unlike that of Sir John Seeley's 'Ecce Homo.' It was not a happy time for religious thinkers, unless they made themselves quite independent of organised Christianity. Intolerance was very bitter; and only the secular arm stopped a whole series of ecclesiastical prosecutions, which would have made the ministry of the Church of England impossible except for fools, liars, and bigots. Real hatred was shown against the scientific leaders, which Darwin calmly ignored, and Huxley returned with interest.

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.