Mr. Strachey, acting as funeral director for a group of bloated
reputations, is a welcome addition to the small group of men who
continue what Samuel Butler began. The howls going up in the Times Lit.
Sup. from the descendants of the ossements are but one curl more of
incense to the new author.
His book is a series of epitomes, even the illustrations, from the
peculiar expression of Mr. Gladstone's rascally face to the differently,
but equally, peculiar expression of Newman's and the petrified settled
fanatic will-to-power in Cardinal Manning's, are epitomes.
Whatever else we may be sure of, we may be sure that no age with any
intellectual under-pinnings would have made so much fuss over these
"figures." For most of us, the odor of defunct Victoriania is so
unpleasant and the personal benefits to be derived from a study of the
period so small that we are content to leave the past where we find it,
or to groan at its leavings as they are, week by week, tossed up in the
Conservative papers. The Victorian era is like a stuffy alley-way which
we can, for the most part, avoid. We do not agitate for its
destruction, because it does not greatly concern us; at least, we have
no feeling of responsibility, we are glad to have moved on toward the
open, or at least toward the patescent, or to have found solace in the
classics or in eighteenth century liberations.
Mr. Strachey, with perhaps the onus of feeling that the "Spectator" was
somewhere in his immediate family, has been driven into patient
exposition. The heavy gas of the past decades cannot be dispersed by
mere "BLASTS" and explosions. Mr. Strachey has undertaken a chemical
dispersal of residues.
At the age of nine Manning devoured the Apocalypse. He read Paley at
Harrow, and he never got over it. Impeded in a political career, he was
told that the Kingdom of Heaven was open to him. "Heavenly ambitions"
were suggested. The "Oxford Movement" was, in a minor way, almost as bad
as the Italian Counter-Reformation. Zeal was prized more than
experience. Manning was the child of his age, the _enfant prodigue_ of
it, who could take advantage of all its blessings. A fury of "religion"
appears to have blazed through the period. This fury must be carefully
distinguished from theology, which latter is an elaborate intellectual
exercise, and can in its finest developments be used for sharpening the
wits, developing the rational faculties (_vide_ Aquinas). Theology,
straying from the enclosures of religion, enters the purlieus of
philosophy, and in some cases exacts stiff definitions.
Froude, Newman and Keble were part of an unfortunate retrogression, or,
as Mr. Strachey has written, "Christianity had become entangled in a
series of unfortunate circumstances from which it was the plain duty of
Newman and his friends to rescue it." Keble desired an England "more
superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion."
_Tracts for the Times_ were published. Pusey imagined that people
practised fasting. It was a curious period. One should take it at length
from Mr. Strachey.
The contemporary mind may well fail to note a difference between these
retrogradists and the earlier nuisance John Calvin, who conceived the
floors of hell paved with unbaptized infants half a span long. Mr.
Strachey's patient exposition will put them right in the matter.
We have forgotten how bad it was, the ideas of the Oxford movement have
faded out of our class, or at least the free moving men of letters meet
no one still embedded in these left-overs. Intent on some system of
thought interesting to themselves and their friends, they "lose touch
with the public." And the "public," as soon as it is of any size, is
full of these left-overs, full of the taste of F.T. Palgrave, of Keble's
and Pusey's religion.
To ascertain the under-side of popular opinion, or I had better say
popular assumption, one may do worse than read books of a period just
old enough to appear intolerable.
(For example, if you wish to understand the taste displayed in the
official literature of the last administration you must read anthologies
printed between 1785 and 1837.)
Mr. Strachey's study of Manning is particularly valuable in a time when
people still persist in not understanding the Papal church as a
political organization exploiting a religion; its force, doubtless, has
come, through the centuries, from men like Manning, balked in political
careers, suffering from a "complex" of power-lust.
Among Strachey's "Eminent" we find one common characteristic, a sort of
mulish persistence in any course, however stupid. One might, develop
the proposition that Nietzsche in his will-to-power "philosophy" was no
more than the sentimental, inefficient German of the "old type"
expressing an idolization of the British Victorian character.