Books: Eminent Victorians

L >> Lytton Strachey >> Eminent Victorians

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

E-Text prepared by Martin Adamson
martin@grassmarket.freeserve.co.uk

EMINENT VICTORIANS

by Lytton Strachey

Preface

THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know
too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the
historian--ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which
selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the
highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our
fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so
vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would
be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail
before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous
narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that
singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy.
He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall
upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing
searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will
row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into
it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the
light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths,
to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by these
considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have
attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some
Victorian visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense,
haphazard visions-- that is to say, my choice of subjects has
been
determined by no desire to construct a system or to prove a
theory, but by simple motives of convenience and of art. It has
been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain. It would
have been futile to hope to tell even a precis of the truth about
the Victorian age, for the shortest precis must fill innumerable
volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, an educational
authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have
sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth
which took my fancy and lay to my hand.

I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of
interest from the strictly biographical, no less than from the
historical point of view. Human beings are too important to be
treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is
independent of any temporal processes-- which is eternal, and
must
be felt for its own sake. The art of biography seems to have
fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few
masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great
biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and
Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a
few shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the
most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of
writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do
not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life
as to live one. Those two fat volumes, with which it is our
custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know them, with
their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,
their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of
selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the
cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow,
funereal barbarism. One is tempted to suppose, of some of them,
that they were composed by that functionary as the final item of
his job. The studies in this book are indebted, in more ways than
one, to such works-- works which certainly deserve the name of
Standard Biographies. For they have provided me not only with
much indispensable information, but with something even more
precious-- an example. How many lessons are to be learned from
them! But it is hardly necessary to particularise. To preserve,
for instance, a becoming brevity-- a brevity which excludes
everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant--
that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer. The second, no
less surely, is to maintain his own freedom of spirit. It is not
his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare
the facts of the case, as he understands them. That is what I
have aimed at in this book-- to lay bare the facts of some cases,
as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without
ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a Master--'Je n'impose
rien; je ne propose rien: j'expose.'

A list of the principal sources from which I have drawn is
appended to each Biography. I would indicate, as an honourable
exception to the current commodity, Sir Edward Cook's excellent
Life of Florence Nightingale, without which my own study, though
composed on a very different scale and from a decidedly different
angle, could not have been written.

Cardinal Manning

HENRY EDWARD MANNING was born in 1807 and died in 1892. His life
was extraordinary in many ways, but its interest for the modern
inquirer depends mainly upon two considerations--the light which
his career throws upon the spirit of his age, and the
psychological problems suggested by his inner history. He
belonged to that class of eminent ecclesiastics -- and it is by
no means a small class -- who have been distinguished less for
saintliness and learning than for practical ability. Had he lived
in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been neither a Francis
nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As it was,
born in the England of the nineteenth century, growing up in the
very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the
first onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the
victories of Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange
concatenation of circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his
own person that long line of diplomatic and administrative
clerics which, one would have thought, had come to an end for
ever with Cardinal Wolsey.

In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again. The tall
gaunt figure, with the face of smiling asceticism, the robes, and
the biretta, as it passed in triumph from High Mass at the
Oratory to philanthropic gatherings at Exeter Hall, from Strike
Committees at the Docks to Mayfair drawing-rooms where
fashionable ladies knelt to the Prince of the Church, certainly
bore witness to a singular condition of affairs. What had
happened? Had a dominating character imposed itself upon a
hostile environment? Or was the nineteenth century, after all,
not so hostile? Was there something in it, scientific and
progressive as it was, which went out to welcome the
representative of ancient tradition and uncompromising faith? Had
it, perhaps, a place in its heart for such as Manning--a soft
place, one might almost say? Or, on the other hand, was it he who
had been supple and yielding? He who had won by art what he would
never have won by force, and who had managed, so to speak, to be
one of the leaders of the procession less through merit than
through a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front
rank? And, in any case, by what odd chances, what shifts and
struggles, what combinations of circumstance and character, had
this old man come to be where he was? Such questions are easier
to ask than to answer; but it may be instructive, and even
amusing, to look a little more closely into the complexities of
so curious a story.

I

UNDOUBTEDLY, what is most obviously striking in the history of
Manning's career is the persistent strength of his innate
characteristics. Through all the changes of his fortunes the
powerful spirit of the man worked on undismayed. It was as if the
Fates had laid a wager that they would daunt him; and in the end
they lost their bet.

His father was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the
Bank of England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town
every day from his country scat in a coach and four, and was
content with nothing short of a bishop for the christening of his
children. Little Henry, like the rest, had his bishop; but he was
obliged to wait for him--for as long as eighteen months. In those
days, and even a generation later, as Keble bears witness, there
was great laxity in regard to the early baptism of children. The
delay has been noted by Manning's biographer as the first
stumbling-block in the spiritual life of the future Cardinal; but
he surmounted it with success.

His father was more careful in other ways. 'His refinement and
delicacy of mind were such,' wrote Manning long afterwards, 'that
I never heard out of his mouth a word which might not have been
spoken in the presence of the most pure and sensitive--except,'
he adds, 'on one occasion. He was then forced by others to repeat
a negro story which, though free from all evil de sexu, was
indelicate. He did it with great resistance. His example gave me
a hatred of all such talk.'

The family lived in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety. One day
the little boy came in from the farmyard, and his mother asked
him whether he had seen the peacock. 'I said yes, and the nurse
said no, and my mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive
me for not speaking the truth.' At the age of four the child was
told by a cousin of the age of six that 'God had a book in which
He wrote down everything we did wrong. This so terrified me for
days that I remember being found by my mother sitting under a
kind of writing-table in great fear. I never forgot this at any
time in my life,' the Cardinal tells us, 'and it has been a great
grace to me.' When he was nine years old he 'devoured the
Apocalypse; and I never all through my life forgot the "lake that
burneth with fire and brimstone". That verse has kept me like an
audible voice through all my life, and through worlds of danger
in my youth.'

At Harrow the worlds of danger were already around him; but yet
he listened to the audible voice. 'At school and college I never
failed to say my prayers, so far as memory serves me, even for a
day.' And he underwent another religious experience: he read
Paley's Evidences. 'I took in the whole argument,' wrote Manning,
when he was over seventy, 'and I thank God that nothing has ever
shaken it.' Yet on the whole he led the unspiritual life of an
ordinary schoolboy. We have glimpses of him as a handsome lad,
playing cricket, or strutting about in tasselled Hessian top-
boots. And on one occasion at least he gave proof of a certain
dexterity of conduct which deserved to be remembered. He went out
of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing him on the other
side of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after him. The
astute youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the
gate, jumped on to the horse's back and rode off. For this he was
very properly chastised; but, of what use was chastisement? No
whipping, however severe, could have eradicated from little
Henry's mind a quality at least as firmly planted in it as his
fear of Hell and his belief in the arguments of Paley.

It had been his father's wish that Manning should go into the
Church; but the thought disgusted him; and when he reached
Oxford, his tastes, his ambitions, his successes at the Union,
all seemed to mark him out for a political career. He was a year
junior to Samuel Wilberforce, and a year senior to Gladstone. In
those days the Union was the recruiting-ground for young
politicians; Ministers came down from London to listen to the
debates; and a few years later the Duke of Newcastle gave
Gladstone a pocket borough on the strength of his speech at the
Union against the Reform Bill. To those three young men, indeed,
the whole world lay open. Were they not rich, well-connected, and
endowed with an infinite capacity for making speeches? The event
justified the highest expectations of their friends; for the
least distinguished of the three died a bishop. The only danger
lay in another direction. 'Watch, my dear Samuel,' wrote the
elder Wilberforce to his son, 'watch with jealousy whether you
find yourself unduly solicitous about acquitting yourself;
whether you are too much chagrined when you fail, or are puffed
up by your success. Undue solicitude about popular estimation is
a weakness against which all real Christians must guard with the
utmost jealous watchfulness. The more you can retain the
impression of your being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses of
the invisible world, to use the scripture phrase, the more you
will be armed against this besetting sin.' But suddenly it seemed
as if such a warning could, after all, have very little relevance
to Manning; for, on his leaving Oxford, the brimming cup was
dashed from his lips. He was already beginning to dream of
himself in the House of Commons, the solitary advocate of some
great cause whose triumph was to be eventually brought about by
his extraordinary efforts, when his father was declared a
bankrupt, and all his hopes of a political career came to an end
forever.

It was at this time that Manning became intimate with a pious
lady, the sister of one of his College friends, whom he used to
describe as his Spiritual Mother. He made her his confidante; and
one day, as they walked together in the shrubbery, he revealed
the bitterness of the disappointment into which his father's
failure had plunged him. She tried to cheer him, and then she
added that there were higher aims open to him which he had not
considered. 'What do you mean?' he asked. 'The kingdom of
Heaven,' she answered; 'heavenly ambitions are not closed against
you.' The young man listened, was silent, and said at last that
he did not know but she was right. She suggested reading the
Bible together; and they accordingly did so during the whole of
that Vacation, every morning after breakfast. Yet, in spite of
these devotional exercises, and in spite of a voluminous
correspondence on religious subjects with his Spiritual Mother,
Manning still continued to indulge in secular hopes. He entered
the Colonial Office as a supernumerary clerk, and it was only
when the offer of a Merton Fellowship seemed to depend upon his
taking orders that his heavenly ambitions began to assume a
definite shape. Just then he fell in love with Miss Deffell,
whose father would have nothing to say to a young man without
prospects, and forbade him the house. It was only too true; what
WERE the prospects of a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial
Office? Manning went to Oxford and took orders. He was elected to
the Merton Fellowship, and obtained through the influence of the
Wilberforces a curacy in Sussex. At the last moment he almost
drew back. 'I think the whole step has been too precipitate,' he
wrote to his brother-in-law. 'I have rather allowed the instance
of my friends, and the allurements of an agreeable curacy in many
respects, to get the better of my sober judgment.' His vast
ambitions, his dreams of public service, of honours, and of
power, was all this to end in a little country curacy 'agreeable
in many respects'? But there was nothing for it; the deed was
done; and the Fates had apparently succeeded very effectively in
getting rid of Manning. All he could do was to make the best of a
bad business.

Accordingly, in the first place, he decided that he had received
a call from God 'ad veritatem et ad seipsum'; and, in the second,
forgetting Miss Deffell, he married his rector's daughter. Within
a few months the rector died, and Manning stepped into his shoes;
and at least it could be said that the shoes were not
uncomfortable. For the next seven years he fulfilled the
functions of a country clergyman. He was energetic and devout; he
was polite and handsome; his fame grew in the diocese. At last he
began to be spoken of as the probable successor to the old
Archdeacon of Chichester. When Mrs. Manning prematurely died, he
was at first inconsolable, but he found relief in the distraction
of redoubled work. How could he have guessed that one day he
would come to number that loss among 'God's special mercies? Yet
so it was to be. In after years, the memory of his wife seemed to
be blotted from his mind; he never spoke of her; every letter,
every record, of his married life he destroyed; and when word was
sent to him that her grave was falling into ruin: 'It is best
so,' the Cardinal answered, 'let it be. Time effaces all things.'
But, when the grave was yet fresh, the young Rector would sit
beside it, day after day, writing his sermons.

II

IN the meantime, a series of events was taking place in another
part of England, which was to have a no less profound effect upon
Manning's history than the merciful removal of his wife. In the
same year in which he took up his Sussex curacy, the Tracts for
the Times had begun to appear at Oxford. The 'Oxford Movement',
in fact, had started on its course. The phrase is still familiar;
but its meaning has become somewhat obscured both by the lapse of
time and the intrinsic ambiguity of the subjects connected with
it. Let us borrow for a moment the wings of Historic Imagination,
and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the thirties, take a
rapid bird's-eye view.

For many generations the Church of England had slept the sleep of
the...comfortable. The sullen murmurings of dissent, the loud
battle-cry of Revolution, had hardly disturbed her slumbers.
Portly divines subscribed with a sigh or a smile to the Thirty-
nine Articles, sank quietly into easy living, rode gaily to
hounds of a morning as gentlemen should, and, as gentlemen
should, carried their two bottles of an evening. To be in the
Church was in fact simply to pursue one of those professions
which Nature and Society had decided were proper to gentlemen and
gentlemen alone. The fervours of piety, the zeal of Apostolic
charity, the enthusiasm of self-renunciation-- these things were
all very well in their way and in their place; but their place
was certainly not the Church of England. Gentlemen were neither
fervid nor zealous, and above all they were not enthusiastic.
There were, it was true, occasionally to be found within the
Church some strait-laced parsons of the high Tory school who
looked back with regret to the days of Laud or talked of the
Apostolical Succession; and there were groups of square-toed
Evangelicals who were earnest over the Atonement, confessed to a
personal love of Jesus Christ, and seemed to have arranged the
whole of their lives, down to the minutest details of act and
speech, with reference to Eternity. But such extremes were the
rare exceptions. The great bulk of the clergy walked calmly along
the smooth road of ordinary duty. They kept an eye on the poor of
the parish, and they conducted the Sunday Services in a becoming
manner; for the rest, they differed neither outwardly nor
inwardly from the great bulk of the laity, to whom the Church was
a useful organisation for the maintenance of Religion, as by law
established.

The awakening came at last, however, and it was a rude one. The
liberal principles of the French Revolution, checked at first in
the terrors of reaction, began to make their way into England.
Rationalists lifted up their heads; Bentham and the Mills
propounded Utilitarianism; the Reform Bill was passed; and there
were rumours abroad of disestablishment. Even Churchmen seemed to
have caught the infection. Dr. Whately was so bold as to assert
that, in the interpretation of Scripture, different opinions
might be permitted upon matters of doubt; and, Dr. Arnold drew up
a disquieting scheme for allowing Dissenters into the Church,
though it is true that he did not go quite so far as to
contemplate the admission of Unitarians.

At this time, there was living in a country parish, a young
clergyman of the name of John Keble. He had gone to Oxford at the
age of fifteen, where, after a successful academic career, he had
been made a Fellow of Oriel. He had then returned to his father's
parish and taken up the duties of a curate. He had a thorough
knowledge of the contents of the Prayer-book, the ways of a
Common Room, the conjugations of the Greek Irregular Verbs, and
the small jests of a country parsonage; and the defects of his
experience in other directions were replaced by a zeal and a
piety which were soon to prove themselves equal, and more than
equal, to whatever calls might be made upon them. The
superabundance of his piety overflowed into verse; and the holy
simplicity of the Christian Year carried his name into the
remotest lodging-houses of England.

As for his zeal, however, it needed another outlet. Looking forth
upon the doings of his fellow-men through his rectory windows in
Gloucestershire, Keble felt his whole soul shaken with loathing,
anger, and dread. Infidelity was stalking through the land;
authority was laughed at; the hideous doctrines of Democracy were
being openly preached. Worse still, if possible, the Church
herself was ignorant and lukewarm; she had forgotten the
mysteries of the sacraments, she had lost faith in the
Apostolical Succession; she was no longer interested in the Early
Fathers; and she submitted herself to the control of a secular
legislature, the members of which were not even bound to profess
belief in the Atonement. In the face of such enormities what
could Keble do? He was ready to do anything, but he was a simple
and an unambitious man, and his wrath would in all probability
have consumed itself unappeased within him had he not chanced to
come into contact, at the critical moment, with a spirit more
excitable and daring than his own.

Hurrell Froude, one of Keble's pupils, was a clever young man to
whom had fallen a rather larger share of self-assurance and
intolerance than even clever young men usually possess. What was
singular about him, however, was not so much his temper as his
tastes. The sort of ardour which impels more normal youths to
haunt Music Halls and fall in love with actresses took the form,
in Froude's case, of a romantic devotion to the Deity and an
intense interest in the state of his own soul. He was obsessed by
the ideals of saintliness, and convinced of the supreme
importance of not eating too much. He kept a diary in which he
recorded his delinquencies, and they were many. 'I cannot say
much for myself today,' he writes on September 29th, 1826 (he was
twenty-three years old). 'I did not read the Psalms and Second
Lesson after breakfast, which I had neglected to do before,
though I had plenty of time on my hands. Would have liked to be
thought adventurous for a scramble I had at the Devil's Bridge.
Looked with greediness to see if there was a goose on the table
for dinner; and though what I ate was of the plainest sort, and I
took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of accident,
and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was fuzzy and
sleepy after dinner.' 'I allowed myself to be disgusted, with --
's pomposity,' he writes a little later, 'also smiled at an
allusion in the Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not
from pride or vanity, but mistrust; it certainly was
unintentional.' And again, 'As to my meals, I can say that I was
always careful to see that no one else would take a thing before
I served myself; and I believe as to the kind of my food, a bit
of cold endings of a dab at breakfast, and a scrap of mackerel at
dinner, are the only things that diverged from the strict rule of
simplicity.' 'I am obliged to confess,' he notes, 'that in my
intercourse with the Supreme Being, I am be come more and more
sluggish.' And then he exclaims: 'Thine eye trieth my inward
parts, and knoweth my thoughts ... Oh that my ways were made so
direct that I might keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy
Commandments when Thou hast set my heart at liberty.'

Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they
would have been different, if he had had a little less of what
Newman describes as his 'high severe idea of the intrinsic
excellence of Virginity'; but it is useless to speculate.

Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a
profound effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends,
and Froude, eagerly seizing upon the doctrines of the elder man,
saw to it that they had as full a measure of controversial
notoriety as an Oxford common room could afford. He plunged the
metaphysical mysteries of the Holy Catholic Church into the
atmosphere of party politics. Surprised Doctors of Divinity found
themselves suddenly faced with strange questions which had never
entered their heads before. Was the Church of England, or was it
not, a part of the Church Catholic? If it was, were not the
Reformers of the sixteenth century renegades? Was not the
participation of the Body and Blood of Christ essential to the
maintenance of Christian life and hope in each individual? Were
Timothy and Titus Bishops? Or were they not? If they were, did it
not follow that the power of administering the Holy Eucharist was
the attribute of a sacred order founded by Christ Himself? Did
not the Fathers refer to the tradition of the Church as to
something independent of the written word, and sufficient to
refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's unwritten
word? And did it not demand the same reverence from us as the
Scriptures, and for exactly the same reason--BECAUSE IT WAS HIS
WORD? The Doctors of Divinity were aghast at such questions,
which seemed to lead they hardly knew whither; and they found it
difficult to think of very apposite answers. But Hurrell Froude
supplied the answers himself readily enough. All Oxford, all
England, should know the truth. The time was out of joint, and he
was only too delighted to have been born to set it right.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23