Chapter II: Institutions (2)

Kingsley widens his criticism from the personal to the social point of view. He objects to luxury not so much because it shows up the luxurious as because it takes away even the necessities from those who have not, to add yet more luxuries to those that have. He questions--[329]

“* * * how a really pious and universally respected archbishop,
living within a quarter of a mile of one of the worst _infernos_
of destitution, disease, filth, and profligacy--can yet find
it in his heart to save £120,000 out of church revenues, and
leave it to his family; * * * how Irish bishops can reconcile
it to their consciences to leave behind them, one and all,
large fortunes * * * taken from the pockets of a Roman
Catholic population, whom they have been put there to convert
to Protestantism for the last three hundred years--with what
success, all the world knows.”

Moreover, because he sees in the church a possible vanguard to civilization, he rebels against its retrogressive and obstructive policy. He laments that the working men do not trust the clergy:[330]

“They suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale--mere
substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted, in order
to stop the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the
clergy; but whose fault is it if they do? * * * Every spiritual
reform since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish
itself in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every
ecclesiastical reform comes not from within, but from without
your body. Everywhere we see the clergy, * * * proclaiming
themselves the advocates of Toryism, * * * chosen exclusively
from the classes which crush us down; * * * commanding us to
swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as that of
a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad example,
and their scandalous neglect, have * * * alienated us; * * *
betraying in every tract, in every sermon, an ignorance of the
doubts, the feelings, the very language of the masses, which
would be ludicrous, were it not accursed before God and man.”

Meredith expresses the same idea, with the difference that he does not speak apologetically from within, but with the unqualified disapproval of the outsider. Jenny Denham, an incisive and thoughtful woman, says,[331]

“My experience of the priest in our country is, that he has
abandoned--he’s dead against the only cause that can justify and
keep up a Church; the cause of the poor--the people. He is a
creature of the moneyed class. I look on him as a pretender.”

In his subtle way Meredith satirizes the Catholic Church by having the Countess de Saldar take refuge in and approve of it. Its great asset is that its democracy includes even tailors. That it is the only true spiritual home for a true gentleman she proves by citing an example. A noble knight does not hesitate at telling a flat falsehood to save a lady, being safe in morality because “his priest was handy.” Her nature is defined as the truly religious, that is, one with need of vicarious strength and a sense of renewed absolution. Another exponent is Constance Asper, in _Diana of the Crossways_, whose boudoir was filled with expensive Catholic equipments, affording “every invitation to meditate in luxury on an ascetic religiousness.”

Butler was not content to view the Church from his external position with the silence of George Eliot or the casual comments of Meredith. The intensity of his iconoclasm demanded full expression,--kept, however, from crudeness by his ironic finish, and from injustice by his fundamental reasonableness. In _Erewhon_ his chief point is the perfunctory character of established religion. The Erewhonians have two distinct economic currencies, one of which is supposed to be _the_ system, and is patronized by all who wished to be considered respectable. Yet its funds have no direct value in the community, whose actual business is conducted on the other commercial system. The Musical Banks excel in architecture, and keep up a routine of receiving and paying checks. But their patrons are for the most part ladies and some students from the College of Unreason. Mrs. Nosnibor, a staunch shareholder, deplores this apparent lack of public interest, and remarks that it is “indeed melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most precious of all institutions.” Her guest observes,--[332]

“I could say nothing in reply, but I have ever been of opinion
that the greater part of mankind do approximately know where
they get that which does them good.”

The Musical Bankers not only protest too much as to the ascendancy of their institution, but consistently depreciate the other:[333]

“Even those who to my certain knowledge kept only just enough
money at the Musical Banks to swear by, would call the other
banks (where their securities really lay) cold, deadening,
paralyzing, and the like.”

As to the cashiers and managers,--[334]

“Few people would speak quite openly and freely before them,
which struck me as a very bad sign. * * * The less thoughtful of
them did not seem particularly unhappy, but many were plainly
sick at heart, though perhaps they hardly knew it, and would
not have owned to being so. Some few were opponents of the
whole system; but these were liable to be dismissed from their
employment at any moment, and this rendered them very careful,
for a man who had once been a cashier at a Musical Bank was out
of the field for other employment, and was generally unfitted
for it by reason of that course of treatment which was commonly
called his education.”

_Erewhon Revisited_ deals more specifically with the miraculous and doctrinal side of Christianity, mirrored in the account of the origin of Sunchildism and its connection with the old Musical Banks. The two main characters are Hanky and Panky, Professors respectively of Worldly and Unworldly Wisdom. They are carefully distinguished:[335]

“Panky was the greater humbug of the two, for he would humbug
even himself--a thing, by the way, not very hard to do; and
yet he was the less successful humbug; * * * Hanky was the
mere common, superficial, perfunctory Professor, who, being a
Professor, would of course profess, but would not lie more than
was in the bond. * * * Panky, on the other hand, was hardly
human; he had thrown himself so earnestly into his work, that
he had become a living lie. If he had had to play the part of
Othello he would have blacked himself all over, and very likely
have smothered his Desdemona in good earnest. Hanky would hardly
have blacked himself behind the ears, and his Desdemona would
have been quite safe.”

The School is another favorite satirical topic. The only novelists who refrain from depicting the shortcomings of the educational system are Disraeli, Reade, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot. On the public side, Meredith might be added, as the theme of _Richard Feverel_, though educational, is made an individual matter.

The adverse opinion handed down on the methods and results of the prevailing system is more unanimous than is the case with other subjects. On the main indictments, inefficiency and cruelty in the lower schools, and inefficiency and carelessness in the higher, there is no minority report. On the whole, the Victorians were innocent of the partisanship that arose later over the great question of Culture versus Efficiency as an educational ideal. The primary stages might be allowed a modicum of the practical, though Gradgrind’s “facts” are failures, and Squeers stands in solitary glory as an advocate of applied arts and manual training. Mr. Tulliver is in line with his _Zeitgeist_ in fondly supposing the best thing he can do for Tom is to send him to an expensive private school, to learn Latin along with the son of Lawyer Wakem. An education was tacitly defined as that which makes a gentleman of you. And though no one would dissent from Thackeray’s dictum that “all the world is improving except the gentlemen,” neither would any one suppose that the definition might be modified or expanded.

A number realize that education begins at home. The close father and son relationship satirized in the case of Sir Austin and Richard because it was too close and inflexible, is presented as a beautiful ideal in those of Pisistratus and Mr. Caxton, Kenelm and Squire Chillingly, Clive and Colonel Newcome, and the Duke of Omnium and his sons.[336]

* * * * *

In David Copperfield’s recollections of the metallic Murdstone, Arthur Clennam’s of his childhood’s Sabbath and Alton Locke’s of his mother’s fearful bigotry, we get glimpses into the pathos of the old Puritan discipline. These are too sad for satire. Butler, no less sad, is also angry enough to brand it with his caustic wit. Theobald and Christina Pontifex are texts for a satiric sermon on parental incompetence, no less disastrous although “All was done in love, anxiety, timidity, stupidity, and impatience.” After the scene in which Theobald, having punished little Ernest severely and quite wantonly, rang the bell for prayers, “red-handed as he was,” his visitor reflects that perhaps it was fortunate for his host--[337]

“* * * that our prayers were seldom marked by any very
encouraging degree of response, for if I had thought there was
the slightest chance of my being heard I should have prayed that
some one might ere long treat him as he had treated Ernest.”

The keynote of this most Christian system is unconsciously hit upon by the bewildered little lad himself, who later concludes,--[338]

“* * * that he had duties towards everybody, lying in wait for
him upon every side, but that nobody had any duties towards him.”

Formal education naturally falls into the school and college divisions. We have the former presented dramatically by Brontë in _Jane Eyre_ (and more impressionistically in _Villette_), by Thackeray in _The Fatal Boots_ and _Vanity Fair_, by Butler in _The Way of All Flesh_, and by the zealous specialist in that field. It has been counted up that Dickens deals with twenty-eight schools and mentions a dozen others.[339] The most important are in _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Dombey and Son_, _David Copperfield_, and _Hard Times_.

Major Bagstock is contemplating young Rob, a product of that school where they never taught honor, but were “particularly strong in the engendering of hypocrisy,” and deduces that “it never pays to educate that sort of people.” Whereupon--[340]

“The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his
son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and
badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his
place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound,
might not have been educated on quite a right plan in some
undiscovered respect, when Mr. Dombey, angrily repeating ‘The
usual return!’ led the major away.”

Young David Copperfield profits little by losing Murdstone and gaining Creakle. The aspect of this pleasant pedagogue so fascinates the gaze of the boys that they cannot keep to their books. When a culprit is called before the tribunal,--[341]

“Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he beats him, and we laugh at
it,--miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white
as ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots. * * * Miserable
little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject we were to
him! What a launch in life I think it now, on looking back, to
be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!”

From this infant purgatory the step to the college seems a long one, for that is by comparison an Elysium, however inane and frivolous. Those whose satiric arrows speed thither are Peacock, Lytton, Trollope, Kingsley, and Butler. Thackeray should be mentioned for his two chapters on University Snobs, and the preceding one on Clerical Snobs, in which he describes the colleges as the last strongholds of Feudalism; concluding--[342]

“Why is the poor College servitor to wear that name and that
badge still? Because Universities are the last places into which
Reform penetrates. But now that she can go to College and back
for five shillings, let her travel down thither.”

Squire Headlong inquires in vain at Oxford for “men of taste and philosophers.” Scythrop and Sir Telegraph were both cured at college of their love for learning. Desmond describes the university system as a “deep-laid conspiracy against the human understanding, * * * a ridiculous and mischievous farce.” But Dr. Folliott refused to succumb. Alluding to some one who cannot quote Greek, he adds,--[343]

“But I think he must have finished his education at some very
rigid college, where a quotation, or any other overt act showing
acquaintance with classical literature, was visited with a
severe penalty. For my part, I made it my boast that I was not
to be so subdued. I could not be abated of a single quotation by
all the bumpers in which I was fined.”

The same critic says elsewhere of the curriculum:[344]

“Everything for everybody, science for all, schools for all,
rhetoric for all, law for all, physic for all, words for all,
and sense for none.”

Pelham testifies that at Eton he was never taught a syllable of English literature, laws, or history; and was laughed at for reading Pope out of school. On his graduation from Cambridge, a place that “reeked with vulgarity,” he is congratulated by his tutor for having been passably decent. Whereupon he observes,--[345]

“Thus closed my academical career. He who does not allow that
it passed creditably to my teachers, profitably to myself, and
beneficially to the world, is a narrow-minded and illiterate
man, who knows nothing of the advantages of modern education.”

Trollope in _The Bertrams_, and Kingsley in _Yeast and Alton Locke_, have a few words for the subject, but add no new idea, except that Alton voices the disgust of the students themselves with their Alma Mater. It is this same young neophyte who is advised by Dean Winnstay to go to some such college as St. Mark’s, which “might, by its strong Church principles, give the best antidote to any little remaining taint of sans-culottism.”

In Butler’s Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason the leading subject is Hypothetics, and the most honored Chairs are those of Inconsistency and Evasion, both required courses. Genius and originality are resolutely discouraged, it being a man’s business “to think as his neighbors do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad.” These Erewhonian professors, by the way, might have adduced as evidence the well-known, horrified exclamation of Mary Shelley at the suggestion that her son be sent where he would be taught to think for himself. By refusing to “think like other people,” a man may become a poet and even a beautiful, ineffectual angel, but he cannot lead a comfortable nor a really effectual life. The problem as to who may safely be intrusted to lead public opinion, and who are safest as followers, is an intricate one, but it is certainly true that a sane and modest agnosticism is not necessarily synonymous with “the art of sitting gracefully on a fence,” which Butler concludes was brought to its greatest perfection in the Colleges of Unreason.

On the subjects of Literature and the Press too much has been said to be ignored, but not much of any great consequence. Trollope took Journalism as a satiric province, with some little aid from Meredith. He also takes a shot, not too well aimed, at the current humanitarian fiction which purposes to set the world right in shilling numbers. He adds,--[346]

“Of all such reformers, Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It
is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down. It
is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he
has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer
put into proper sized pint bottles, there will be nothing left
for him to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man,
and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so
very good; his hard rich people so very hard, and the genuinely
honest so very honest. * * * Divine peeresses are no longer
interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern
peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much
twaddle as one of Mrs. Ratcliffe’s heroines, and still be
listened to.”

A favorite theme, especially among the earlier writers, is the pose of pessimism, alien to the self-satisfied optimistic spirit which prevailed with little opposition--except from James Thompson and Matthew Arnold--from Byron to Hardy.

The Honorable Mr. Listless finds the volumes of modern literature “very consolatory and congenial” to his feelings:[347]

“There is, as it were, a delightful north-east wind, an
intellectual blight breathing through them; a delicious
misanthropy and discontent, that demonstrates the nullity of
virtue and energy, and puts me in good humour with myself and
sofa.”

Pelham perceives--[348]

“* * * an unaccountable prepossession among all persons, to
imagine that whatever seems gloomy must be profound, and
whatever is cheerful must be shallow. They have put poor
Philosophy into deep mourning, and given her a coffin for a
writing desk, and a skull for an inkstand.”

Ganymede anticipates that Apollo’s new poem will be very popular, for “it is all about moonlight and the misery of existence.”[349]

It is in Meredith that we find the greatest point and depth in literary criticism, as in most other things. Under cover of apology for his own method of psychological analysis, he manages to convey his impression of those who tell and who love the story for the story’s sake. He cannot avoid, he explains, the slow start and detailed exposition in which he unfolds the situation, and adds:[350]

“This it is not necessary to do when you are set astride the
enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man’s mind at
home while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed
be rapid. Whether more active, is a question asking for your
notions of the governing element in the composition of man,
and of his present business here. * * * All ill-fortuned
minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to see with
distinctness that man is not as much comprised in external
features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the
fuller portraiture.”

It is Meredith also who says the last word on the English, as English. They are indeed the real objects under all these disguises of their activities, but they are not often synthesized and called by name. Yet--[351]

“An actually satiric man in an English circle, that does not
resort to the fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate
the excessive fury roused in his mind by an illogical people
of a provocative prosperity, * * * They give him so many
opportunities.”

He seizes one of them by symbolizing England in the Duvidney sisters; composed of such, it becomes--[352]

“* * * a vast body of passives and negatives, living by precept,
according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be
righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed. * *
* mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offense to an inscrutable
Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the dreary iteration of
the litany of sinfulness. * * * Satirists in their fervours
might be near it to grasp it, if they could be moved to moral
distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of strong
plain speech over the crack of their whips.”

He had already decided, in _Beauchamp’s Career_, that “It is not too much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once and entirely alter the face of the country.” Reade agrees with this opinion, only he says bluntly that one is “an ass * * * to have brains in a country where brains are a crime.” This national stupidity and sentimentality are made impregnable by national complacency. Lytton remarks on the egotistic nature of British patriotism:[353]

“The vanity of the Frenchman consists (as I have somewhere
read) in belonging to so great a country; but the vanity of the
Englishman exults in the thought that so great a country belongs
to himself.”

These criticisms are all from within. Disraeli is able to contribute one from without. He describes the British through his Jewish Besso:[354]

“There is not a race so proud, so wilful, so rash and so
obstinate. They live in a misty clime, on raw meats, and wines
of fire. They laugh at their fathers, and never say a prayer.
They pass their days in the chase, gaming, and all violent
courses. They have all the power of the State, and all its
wealth; and when they can wring no more from their peasants,
they plunder the kings of India.”

Nevertheless they all, even the Hebrew within their parliamentary halls, believed in the English character and the civilization it was blunderingly working out. The most incorrigible satirist of that civilization was Peacock (who often, we suspect, gets carried away by his own eloquence), and in his fervent summary of almost all our public failures, he hints in the very phrasing, although ironically, at the possibility of these failures being transformed into successes. Sir Telegraph Paxarett, accused of extravagance, retorts with a conditional promise of retrenchment:[355]

“When ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate the temperance and
humility of the founder of that religion by which they feed and
flourish; when the man in place acts on the principles which
he professed while he was out; when borough electors will not
sell their suffrage, nor their representatives their votes; when
poets are not to be hired for the maintenance of any opinion;
when learned divines can afford to have a conscience; when
universities are not one hundred years in knowledge behind all
the rest of the world; when young ladies speak as they think,
and when those who shudder at a tale of the horror of slavery
will deprive their own palates of a sweet taste, for the purpose
of contributing all in their power to its extinction:--why then,
Forester, I will lay down my barouche.”

Satire, being frankly a destructive process, makes no pretense of supplementing its iconoclasm by reconstruction. But such implication of reform as may lurk in the criticism that paves the way may be looked for more assuredly than elsewhere in attacks on institutions. Such criticism is neither lowered by the recrimination that puts satire of individuals below the normal satiric level, nor elevated by the artistic detachment that lifts satire of human nature above it. For it is not in the too small lump of the solitary specimen that the leaven can best work, nor yet in the too large mass of the whole human race. It is in the unit between these two extremes, the body politic or social or religious or educational, that it may best perform its fermenting ministrations.

Even so, however, the idealism of the Victorian novelists did not take this positive turn. English genius has on the whole contributed its share to the anthology of Utopian vision, even to the furnishing of the name, but the nineteenth century, preëminent in criticism and speculation, venting more talk about it than all the other centuries put together, has to its credit in this line, aside from _Erewhon_ and _The Coming Race_, only Morris’s _News from Nowhere_, and that is too naïve in its simplification of human nature and too absurd in its glorification of medievalism to be taken seriously. More carefully thought out as an Ideal State, more searching in its seriousness, more pertinent in its satire, and more constructive in its conclusion, than any of these, is the American product, Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_.

The Victorians did their looking backward literally from their own present instead of an imagined future. And since in so doing they did for the most part but cast their eye on prospects drear, and since they shrank from a future they could only guess and fear if they thought about it at all, they wisely and practically spent themselves on the present. And because of this acceptance of the present and all its institutions as a whole, they could couch their lances only against this or that detail, not against the challenge of civilization itself.

The following instances show a characteristic difference in their resemblance. “In England, poverty is a crime,” exclaims Lytton in the nineteenth century. The observation is ironic, the tone scornful, and the object of the ironic scorn is the snobbishness of those who from the heights of wealth look down upon and despise the poor. The rebuke is intended for the alien attitude toward that portion of society which we may expect, according to Biblical authority, always to have with us. Poverty itself is a mysterious dispensation, having indeed many discernible compensations, and ever mitigable by applied morality.

“Poverty is the only crime,” echoes Bernard Shaw in the twentieth century. His assertion is meant literally, the tone is decisive, and the indictment is lodged against society at large for being so stupid and inefficient as to permit such a canker, pernicious but curable, to infect its body.

To remedy the supercilious attitude toward the poor is still to leave poverty intact and in permanent possession of the field. To remedy the criminal carelessness which tolerates its presence is to abolish the thing itself.

But even if the twentieth century has stated the problem, it has not yet solved it. And while neither the statement nor the solution of the nineteenth is reckoned adequate today, still the Victorians did accomplish something if not much, and all we can say for ourselves is that we have not accomplished much, if something. Moreover, to flatter ourselves that we are the first to discover the social onus of poverty and other ills, is to ignore the contributions not only of the novelists but of Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Henry George. When the remaining four-fifths of our century shall have been added to history, we may perhaps applaud ourselves. At present it will do us no harm to render unto Victorianism the acknowledgment that is its due.