THE VICTORIAN AGE.

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 16174, 27 December 1924, Page 11 (Supplement)

THE VICTORIAN AGE.

UNDER CRITICISM.

(By Scissibus.)

Mr E.- M. Nicholson has written m the Edinburgh Review a searching and severe criticism of the Victorian Age. He looks at the Victorians in perspective and rather suggests that they left a good deal for their successors to clear up. It is a most useful article to read as a commentary of the present political situation. "The aristocracy was never deposed —it abdicated," he says. "The mistake its members made was in thinking that without their support the new industrialism was bound to fail, or at least to stand still; when, actually, it was destined to become the greatest interest of the country, whether they liked it or not. Even at the end of the eighteenth century it still seemed possible that the leadership of the movement might fall (as it ought to have fallen) to the upper instead of to the middle classes. If the vast wealth which the aristocracy possessed four or five generations ago had been thrown into industrialism instead of into land, the modern world would be a far less ugly place.

They Took Alarm.

"From the middle of the eighteenth century until the Reform Act of 1832, the aristocracy were the absolute rulers of England. In the latter half of the eighteenth century they were cultivated and very liberal; they seemed made to control to best advantage the colossal scientific-industrial machine which was in process <\t creation. But they took alarm at the ideas which generated the French Revolution, and were driven into opposition by the Reform Act. Thus the class which had been the most progressive and enlightened in the eighteenth century became a serious obstacle, to development in the nineteenth." The Victorians had the solid Forsyte virtues as' well as" the Forsyte faults; they were respectable in the good sense as well as the bad; they had stability and a half-vanished sense of integrity for the loss of which the wcjrld will be the worse. They had still enough beliefs left to help them towards an almost indescribable sureness of themselves. We are anchorless, and if that spells freedom it means also danger and a universal un - certainty and chaos.

Actually a large part of the Victorian atmosphere cannot be grasped without fully realising how large a part beliefs still played in it, for the more we find out the less we knowEven long after the Origin of Species was. published the average Victorian not merely believed, but knew that God had created Adam and Eve; that everyone on earth was descended from them; that Providence ruled all things for the best, and that every man who was good would go to heaven. In fact, the average Victorian knew everything worth knowing: we know nothing. "The more complicated theories of light, heat, and sound, may be clearer to us; we may have discovered a thousand more ways of making wheels and currents do the work of men, but we have no idea now where man came from, nor, what is more important, where he is likely to go to. We huvq no longer any criterion by which to judge what Is right and what wrong; all the heights to which a man might look up ; are tumbled down, and there remain 'only the things under our feet —wheels, belts, pistons, currents, propellers—all working very intricately and well, as machinery should, but quite useless for our guidance. "But the thing which we shall soon be envying the Victorian most of all is the knowledge that he was a man, a human being with a soul to save. That belief was worth the whole world.

The New Knowledge.

"Biologists delve with accursed skill deeper and deeper into the relation between body and mind, tracing love and activity to a secreted fluid; and thought to the re-shuffling of cells within the brain. Psycho-an-alysts produce their quack mystery in order to have the pleasure of asserting that we are more bestial than the monkeys, from whom Darwin traced our deifeent. The true psychologists add a third prong to the new Morton's Fork. They tell us that though we may flatter ourselves that we are responsible for our actions, we are, in fact, liable to hav x e our opinions changed on vital matters by the furnishings of the room in which we happen to be when any subject is broached.

"Whichever prong we choose we are ' impaled. Logically, relentlessly, the argument narrows down: if these things are so, then men are not responsible for their actions; therefore, a criminal, not being able to avoid his crime, can hardly be said to be guilty of it, for guilt implies choice; consequently it is unjust to.inflict any punishment on him. Add when the theory of justice is gone, civilisation can stand upright no longer. "If these things are so, we must regard the Victorian Age of transition as the latest generation in which a thinking man could regard himself as a man in the old sense of the word—a human being possessing a soul, belonging to a different world from the brutes, arid entirely able to control his own actions. And on the larger scale of affairs of State the Victorian Age was the last when the rulers might actually rule, when a personality still counted for enough to change the currents of history. Today the civilisation machine sweeps on

"Ih 1870 there were still personalities to ride the tempest: by 1914 the clash would come of' its own unthinking volition, and the' storm-tossed individuals whose misfortune'it was to be the nominal rulers of Europe at that moment show up as effectively as a knot of railway porters when two expresses colilde at full speed in their station. If . only it were creditable that the Jews, or the newspaper magnates, or the international financiers, really were responsible, then we might still believe in the power, not, perhaps, of one man, but at least of a small group of men, actually to rule the world in the sense that it once could be ruled. Comfort or Goodness? "The Victorian philosophy very convenietly confused comfort with goodness—Even now, Dean Inge, writing on the Victorian Age, can set out to prove that it was a better time than ours by showing that it was certainly a more comfortable one. In that quality of comfort we may grant . the Victorians to have been foremost among the generations, which have

ever lived. The all-round comfort of mind and body enjoyed by the possessors of Victorian country houses has never been equalled before, and seems hardly likely to be reached again. But their ease is a quality which we must leave future generations to appreciate in the Victorians, for it was gained largely by their 'busying themselves rather with what was productive of quiet content' —at the expense of their descendants. And those always best enjoy a banquet who are not called in to clear up after its ending." 'J LJ-M IT