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.'