io4 



NA TURE 



[July 22, 1922 



The Victorian Age. 



The Victorian Age: The Rede Lecture for 1922. By 

 Dr. William Ralph Inge. Pp. 54. (Cambridge: 

 At the University Press, 1922.) 2s. 6d. net. 



IN choosing the Victorian Age as the subject of 

 his Rede Lecture, Dean Inge afforded his audience 

 ample occasion in which to enjoy the obiter dicta, 

 which so frequently characterise his public utterances, 

 and impart to them so piquant a flavour. It may 

 be said the theme itself provided its opportunities. 

 Its possibilities, in fact, of observations en passant, 

 without a too obvious breach of continuity, are well- 

 nigh limitless. The learned lecturer evidently revelled 

 in the wealth and suggestiveness of his material, 

 and the epigrams and aphorisms, at times, are almost 

 coruscant in their brilliancy. Not that we would for 

 a moment imply that the Dean's prelection in any 

 way resembles the sermon of which King James 

 remarked " that the tropes and metaphors of the 

 speaker were like the brilliant wild flowers in a field 

 of corn, very pretty, but which did very much hurt 

 the corn." The richness of the soil which the Dean 

 undertook to cultivate ensured the wealth and vigour 

 of his crop ; his. flowers do but enhance the beauty 

 of the field. 



It may, however, be questioned whether the Dean's 

 obiter dicta are always as sound as they are brilliant. 

 For example, it is by no means invariably true that 

 the pioneer starts by being unintelligible or absurd, 

 has then a brief spell of popularity, and ends by I icing 

 conventional and antiquated. The general character 

 of the Civil Service in 1837 no doubt left much to be 

 desired, but it is a travesty to say that it was " a 

 sanctuary of aristocratic jobbery," and that its clerks 

 were languid gentlemen with long whiskers, who, like 

 Charles Lamb, departed early from their offices 

 because they arrived late. The Dean occasionally is 

 in danger of risking his credit for veracity by his 

 irrepressible lore of paradox and his affection for the 

 epigram's peculiar grace, and for 



" Some unexpected and some biting thought 

 With poignant wit and sharp expression fraught." 



If, however, we make due allowance for the character- 

 istic foibles of the lecturer, the Dean's brilliant survey 

 of the significant features of the time covered by the 

 reign of Queen Victoria is both illuminating and 

 instructive. As he truly says, that period extended 

 over the latter half of a saeculum mirabile, the most 

 wonderful century in human history. His word- 

 picture of England before what Toynbee styled the 

 Industrial Revolution, is done in his most characteristic 

 manner. The country then, we are told, was, on the 

 NO. 275 I, VOL. I IO] 



whole, prosperous and contented. " The masses had 

 no voice in the government, but most of them had 

 a stake in the country. . . . Political power was in 

 the hands of a genuine aristocracy, who did more to 

 deserve their privileges than any other aristocracy 

 of modern times. . . . They were enlightened patrons 

 of literature and art, and made the collections of 

 masterpieces which were the pride of England and 

 which are now being dispersed to the winds. . . . 

 Those who have studied the family portraits in a 

 great house, or the wonderful portrait gallery in the 

 Provost's Lodge at Eton, will see on the faces not 

 only the pride and self-satisfaction of a privileged 

 class, but the power to lead the nation, whether in 

 the arts of war or of peace " — a picture, in short, 

 which will bring solace to the shade of that " Great 

 Cham of Literature," the immortal Dr. Samuel 

 Johnson. Not that the Dean can be truthfully 

 described as a landa lor temporis aeti, for he is never 

 wholly content with any age, and least of all with 

 that in which he lives. 



The whole account of the condition of England in 

 the earlier years of the Victorian Age is tinctured 

 with that flavour of mordant pessimism in which the 

 Dean delights, and practically every phase and in- 

 stitution of the period comes under the gentle lash 

 of his tolerant satire — its literature of complacency, 

 the Platonism of Ruskin, the vehemence of Carlyle, 

 the ugliness of the modern English or American town 

 (" Never since civilisation began has such ugliness 

 been created ") ; the gigantic blunder of the Industrial 

 Revolution ; the problem of mending or ending 

 industrialism, foolishly called capitalism. ( " Ruskin's 

 own artistic life would have been impossible without 

 the paternal sherry and the rich men who drank it ; 

 and Morris's exquisite manufactures depended absol- 

 utely on the patronage of the capitalists whom he 

 denounced.") Departmental inefficiency ; the systems 

 of judicature ; the slow emergence of the universities 

 from the lethargy of the eighteenth century, "when 

 they neither taught nor examined nor maintained 

 discipline," when the Fellows "were most of them 

 waiting for college livings, to which they were allowed 

 to carry off, as a solatium, some dozens of College 

 port " ; the state of the army, " when a Royal Duke 

 could not be given a military funeral, because there 

 were not troops enough to bury a Field Marshal " ; 

 its glaring incompetence as revealed by the Crimean 

 War, etc. 



But the age had its compensations. The Dean is, 

 constrained to admit with Lecky that, at least so far 

 as internal affairs went, no country was ever better 

 governed than England between 1832 and 1867. 

 " The one prime necessity for good government was 



