An Open Season for Grandfathers

Suggesting that, After All, the Hair Cloth Sofa Was Perfectly Capable of Holding Up a Giant

SIMEON STRUNSKY

AT the age of eighty-three, Lord Bryce has published two big volumes on Modern Democracy and has found time and energy left over to denounce the tragic errors of British policy in Ireland, to censure the mistakes of Allied policy in Central Europe, and to write book reviews for the American press. Our admiration for so notable a manifestation of the Life Force is only enhanced when we consider the enormous handicap under which Lord Bryce has, labored. He was bom in 1838, the year after Queen Victoria's accession, and thus during the first third of his life he was undeniably an Early Victorian. During the next thirty years or so, he was obviously a Mid-Victorian. And then, in the ordinary course of events, he became a Late Victorian. That a man should thus defy the triple curse and be with us to-day as vigorous in his challenges, as impatient of suppressions, and as free from complexes as the youngest of us, proves—what ?

Perhaps it proves that it would not be a bad thing for present-day controversy to pick up the Encyclopedia and read a bit in English history between the years 1837 and 1901.

There are two words, of common occurrence in after-dinner discussion, which for sheer destructive effect have, possibly, no rivals in the language. One is Unpleasant and the other is Mid-Victorian. When your dear old aunt remarks that the Russian writers are unpleasant, there is obviously nothing more to be said. When your youngest niece observes that Bernard Shaw is Mid-Victorian, the show stops. Both words are final judgments and conversation turns to something else. It does happen, however, that people are sometimes seized with a strong curiosity to check up the definition of the utterly familiar and commonplace. Perhaps it is the eternal rebel, alive in the hearts of all of us, that is impelled now and then to turn to Webster to find out just what is the meaning of words like bread, home, father, country, and the like. It is not inconceivable that some unfortunate person to-day, having been properly put in his place by being called a Mid-Victorian, may turn to the reference book to find out just where in the history of the dark ages of humanity thg.t term places him.

If we subtract 1837, the year in which Victoria became queen, from 1901, the year in which she died, we get 64. If we divide 64 by two, we get 32. If we add 32 to 1837, we get the year 1869; the mid-most point of MidVictoria. Somewhere in the close vicinity of that date we must look for the most characteristic stigmata of that absurd period in human history.

A Mid-Victorian Masterpiece

NOW on April 12, 1866, very near to the middle point of the Mid-Victorian era, there was a speech delivered in the House of Commons. That speech has been characterized by one historian as "a masterpiece of classical eloquence, freely adorned and illustrated by those rich Vergilian hexameters with which he (the orator) delighted to season his parliamentary eloquence". That is, of course, what we would expect a Mid-Victorian oration to be. Ornate and not understandable of the masses, rich in references to the tombs of ancient Greece and Rome and utterly indifferent to contemporary humanity; unctuous and false. Well, it was not quite that. This speech of April, 1866, happened to be the summing-up in favor of the second Reform Bill; and the speaker happened to be a man named Gladstone, of whom a Post-Victorian named H. G. Wells has said that he was "a white-faced, black-headed man of incredible energy, with eyes like an eagle's and wrath almost divine".

That rather complicates the Mid-Victorian definition. This piece of florid declamation, under whose Vergilian tropes the fox-hunting squires in the House of Commons probably went to sleep, within the year brought about the enfranchisement of British Labor and transferred the balance of political power in England from the middle classes to the workers.

Nine years later, Mr. Gladstone published a volume on Homeric Synchronism, and so justified the crisp Post-Victorian verdict delivered somewhere else by Mr. Wells to the effect that Gladstone was the victim of a stunted education. Perhaps. But this should be noted: just as in 1867 a Mid-Victorian found it quite natural to employ Vergilian hexameters in the cause of the rights of Labor, so in 1876 Gladstone succeeded in combining the authorship of Homeric criticism with an excoriation against Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria—of which the echoes are still loud in our common speech—the practical results of which had quite a bit to do with the emancipation of the Balkan peoples and the Post-Victorian World War of the years 1914-1918. Incidentally, the Gladstone combination of a book on Homeric Synchronism and a flaying of Turkish misrule in 1876, stroqgly suggests the Bryce combination of two heavy volumes on Democracy and a denunciation of the wrongs of Ireland, in 1921.

Mr. Gladstone as the Life Force

JUST one thing more on Gladstone and I am through. It was, as we all know, the fundamental vice of Mid-Victorianism that it not only said "female" where we say "woman", and said "limb" where we say "leg", but that it said "compromise" where we say "principle", and said "confer" where we say "challenge", and that in general it said "hush" where we rise and speak out in meeting. Nevertheless, it happened that in 1886 the Mid-Victorian Gladstone so far forgot all the traditions and ambiguities of his time as to insist upon giving Home Rule to Ireland. At the age of seventy-seven he went to the mat on Ireland and split his party as ruthlessly as Post-Victorian Nikolai Lenin has ever split a Socialist party in order to get what he thinks is right or what he wants. To-day we know, of course, that there is no difference between what one wants and what is right, between the urgings of the Life Force and the good of humanity; but Gladstone seems to have had a glimpse of the truth. Seven years later he forced Home Rule through the House of Commons. That was not bad for a man of'eightyfour who said "female" and "limb."

The indications are plain that we are in for another battue against the Victorians. Mr. Lytton Strachey, who had a great deal of fun with them three years ago, has come back to the game. There may be any number of reasons. But I strongly suspect that all of us in this time of normalcy, as we cast up the account of the last few years and come to the conclusion that we have made rather a mess of things, are tempted to take it out of the ancestors of fifty years ago. Our own experiments in building new worlds having fliwered so badly, the inclination is strong to blame it on the fathers and grandfathers who left us such an incorrigible world to handle.

The Antimacassars vs. the Movies

NOW, if we must hate some one, there is no objection to our taking it out of the Victorians. But if we are wise, we will confine ourselves to generalities. A flat verdict of Guilty of Victorianism will probably get by, but if we enter into specifications there is likely to be trouble. Personally I should not overstress the black walnut of the grandfathers, their antimacassars, their evening hymns and their sex taboos. For it may happen that some belated Victorian will rise to ask which is the better record: a frowsy generation which sang hymns, which said "female" and "limb", but which nevertheless managed to stand science and economics and religion and Europe on their heads; or an open-air, short-skirted, freespoken generation which has to its credit the movies, Pollyanna and the World War.

The one thing above all others we must not, in prudence, emphasize is the Life Force. When it comes to zest and gusto and that sort of thing, we shall have a rather difficult time against the Victorian roughnecks—the hard drinkers, hard quarrelers, hard writers and hard thinkers, from Dickens down to James Bryce. If I were a contemporary successful novelist, and with the aid of a summer in Maine and a winter in California, succeeded in turning out my hundred thousand words every other year, I should think twice before laughing at the Victorians, who handled half a million words at a clip. If I were a young champion of progress battling against the forces of superstition, with a little bit taken from Freud, and a little bit taken from Nietzsche, and a little bit taken from Dostoievsky, I should be rather careful how I dismissed Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer and, incidentally, Karl Marx, who founded the First Internationale at London in 1864, which year is almost the very middest of MidVictorian.

As a whole, if I did yield to the temptation of casting adjectives at Grandfather, I should be careful to speak of the hateful Mid-Victorians, or the vicious Mid-Victorians, or the tough-hearted Mid-Victorians; but the last thing in the world I should think of saying would be the little, or the tame, or the cramped Mid-Victorians. For they had girth and lungs.

There is a story about a Mid-Victorian military commander of whom his opponents complained that he was given to drink. The head of State before whom the complaint was laid (himself a typical Mid-Victorian), is said to have inquired what brand of liquor the offending General used, as he wished to send a barrel of the same to his other generals.