EARLY VICTORIAN

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 127, 2 June 1927, Page 3

EARLY VICTORIAN

MUST NOT BE BAITED ULTRA MODERN SHAFTS I ' ■■ .i CAPTAIN PETER WRIGHT'S MISTAKE By no means are all the Victorians dead. If Captain Peter Wright .of the famous Gladstone-Wright libel suit had remembered this he might never have levelled at the Victorian Gladstone that ultra-modern shaft that brought the stateman's living sons charging out of the past. These ultra-modern ways require a certain delicacy of tread, writes Olair Price in the "New York Times Magazine." You have to watch your step. Where your challenge is likely to rouse some sleeping Victorian from his slumbers, you have to pass by on tiptoe. It is only where no possibility of reply exists that we moderns can. beat our chests and dare some dead Victorian to come out to single-handed combat. Unless, therefore, we are to abandon our favourite indoor sport of baiting the Victorians, it becomes a matter of common prudence to discover what Victorians can "be safely baited and what Victorians are still alive. Here a surprise awaits us. There are still many Victorians alive. Not all of them "date" obviously. The late Lord Eibblesdale, for example, could have been nothing other than Victorian, unless perhaps he was a trifle pre-Vic-torian. He was essentially of the parish of St. James's and perhaps of the time when Regency bucks sunned themselves in the bow window of White's. Certainly he "dated." The old-fashioned dignity, the taste for the costumes and the manners of a vanished age were unmistakable. VICTORIAN FIGURES THAT REMAIN. Who are the surviving Victorians? Divide them into politics, literature, the arts, the fighting service as they do at levees. In politics Lord Balfour Lord Oxford, and Lord Eosebery are still with us, two of them giants in their day and giants in ours. Even now Lord Balfour reigns alone in British politics. There is none other .to be placed beside him. Like Lord Oxford he was never Premier under Victoria but in his qualities of sagacity, caution, debating power, in his philosophical eminence and in his exceptionally wide culture he holds over from the Queen's period as one of its finest products. Mr. Asquith, who ruled that very Victorian party, the Liberal, until he accepted the title of Lord Oxford and recently laid down the leadership, j s still as "Victorian as his party was at one time. Lord Eosebery, now in his eightieth year, is not often heard from, although at present the questions he pokes at Lloyd George's political fund prove divertingly awkward to the fund's custodians. The great Gladstone and Lord, Salisbury, both of whom, like Eosebery, were Premiers under Queen Victoria, are dead, but both have Svine sons Lord Gladstone, who turned on Captain Wnght with such devastating effect, was South Africa's first Governor Lord Salisbury's sons, Viscount C ehvood better known as Lord Robert Cecil, and hls brother Lord H m^Vtv 11 fv- % P? euUarlv ecclesiastica quality of Victonanism. In literature we confront a difficulty. Britain is rich in authors who hold over ±rom th 3 Victorian period, but few of them can bo described as Victorian in the exclusive sense in which Tennyson Ruskin, Carlylc, Morris, and MeredHh were Victorian. Kipling is easy enough to place. The big brass-drum that beats through so much of his work is the later Victonanism at its noisiest. Shaw, Wells, and Barrie are easily disposed of too Their roots were Victorian, but not their spreading limbs and full foliWhat is to be said of Thomas Hardy? Does he belong to the Victorians, or, like Shaw, to all time? And what of Edmund Gosse? Does "Father and I Son enable us, to regard him as a faithful Victorian? Augustine Birrell is undoubtedly of the ctorians, and so are Le Gallienne and Symons of th« '90s. Conan Doyle made Sherlock Holmes a national character, and Sherlock Holmes in turn gave Baker street a Victorian appearance it has never lost. Jerome X Jerome and Sir Hall Came both produced their best-known work in what one roughly terms the Victorian period, and will probably be regarded as Victorians. Let it be added that, although the great Dickens died more than fifty years ago, his son is still one of the law officers in the City of London. JOURNALISTIC VICTORIANS. The same difficulty confronts us in the realm of journalism. George E. Sims, who wrote the "Mustard and Cress" column in "The Referee" for nearly fifty years, is dead, and Eobert Blatehfurd, the doughty "Nunquam" of the old "Clarion," has retired. But T. P. O 'Connor, not far from 80, is still going strong. Is Mr. O'Connor one of the- Victorians? Has any journalist ever been less circumscribed by the period into which he was born? It is hardly possible to label as Victorian a man whose best work has been done under later conditions. In the ease of artists we have a less crowded field to deal with. Sir Luke Fildes, who died recently, happens to be the easiest of all artists to place. His world-famous "Doctor," which now hangs in the Tate Gallery in London, is as Victorian as Victoria herself. Alfred Gilbert, the sculptor, who has recently come back to England from twenty years of self-imposed exile in Bruges, happens also to be unmistakable in his period. What would Ep- . stein or any other of the modernists say to Gilbert's ?'Victoria at Winchester," with all its ornate goldsmithry? In the army, too, we have an easy task. Old General Sir George Higginson, the centenarian "Father of the Guards," died only a few months ago, and General Sir Dighton Porbyn, V.C., the old and bent controller of the late Queen Alexandra's household, has also died within a few years. But every Boy Scout the world over knows that General Sir Robert Baden Powell is still alive. In the Church, Dr. John Clifford, the ("Old Odell") is still at the age of two ago, but there is no lack of clergy with the authentic Victorian stamp born in the Establishment and in the Free Churches. Among women, Dame Millicent Faweett is still the Victorian suffragette, and Lily Langtry, now living on the Riviera, remains the famous Victorian beauty. Ellen Terry has retired from the stage, but Sir F::ank Benson is yet active, and E. J. Odell ("Old Odell") is stil, at the age of 92, the father of London's stage and the doyen of London's Bohemia. To bait the stuffy Victorians has long bceu fashionable, but it is not yet quite as safe and easy a fashion as it will be a few years from now. At present, as Captain Peter Wright has discovered, there are too many Victorians still living.