High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Women’s dislike of violence might help avoid war and conflict. Men would cease to be corrupted by the unfair advantage they were otherwise given in life. Women would learn self-respect and the means of self-help. They would also learn how to get on without using their sexuality to exert power over men, but by relying on their intellect and force of reason. ‘The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism,’ he wrote.173 ‘Where there is least liberty, the passion for power is most ardent and unscrupulous.’ Otherwise, women were prey to ‘mischievous luxury and social immorality’ to get their way. ‘Any society which is not improving, is deteriorating’, he observed.174 ‘The moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and in cultivation.’175 He proposed, in terms more radical than almost all males could countenance, the most profound means of improvement available. He would not live to see the victory of his ideas, but victorious they would be. On receiving his book Gladstone wrote to him, in June 1869, to say that ‘whether I am able or not to adopt your broad proposition I shall derive great profit from the perusal, and everywhere find scattered what will claim my sympathy.’176 His ministry would take tentative steps towards liberating women, but the process would run into the next century.

  Meanwhile, some women suffered brutality from their husbands, which the State by its inaction condoned. In May 1874 Colonel Egerton Leigh, a Conservative MP, begged the government to deal with ‘the very insufficient punishment awarded to men for violent attacks on women’.177 He knew much was said about women’s rights, but thought the first duty of Parliament was to redress women’s wrongs. The press reported ‘outrageous and cowardly attacks upon women by men.’ He added: ‘Sometimes a woman who has only been married a fortnight appeared before a magistrate with two black eyes . . . sometimes men put their wives on the fire; sometimes they jumped upon them.’ Many such women would lie – ‘there was no lie a woman was not ready to go through to save these rascals of men from punishment. In one case, where a woman’s nose was much injured, she declared that she had bit it herself.’ He added that a boy who saw his father beat his mother would do the same to his own wife – ‘what the children in some families saw was enough to infernalise a whole generation’.

  He had a ready solution. The garotting epidemic of the 1860s had been stopped by the determined and merciless use of the cat-o’-nine-tails. Flogging, in ever larger quantities if the offence were repeated, would presumably bring cruel husbands under control too. ‘It might not succeed,’ he added. ‘But if it did, it would be a great thing to have put an end to a practice which was a disgrace to this country in the eyes of all continental nations, who believed that if the English people could not sell their wives, they could beat them to death almost while they were alive.’178 As with too much else concerning the rights of women, the State chose not to listen.

  PART IV

  THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN

  CHAPTER 15

  THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION: VICTORIAN INTELLECTUALS AND THE NEW BRITAIN

  I

  THE INTELLECTUAL CLIMATE in which attempts at reform were made in the 1850s and 1860s had been shaped, as far as the Liberal ruling class was concerned, by Thomas Babington Macaulay. In the 1840s and 1850s Macaulay had published his History of England, and in it had set a tone of self-confidence for the times that was rooted in what the twentieth century came to call ‘the Whig interpretation of history’: a story of inexorable progress from darkness to light in a secure, Protestant and increasingly liberal society. No one could have disagreed with this analysis more than Carlyle, and the passing of the Reform Act was his opportunity to say so. He was one of several great thinkers of the period – Mill, Ruskin, Huxley, Arnold and Stephen were the others – who used the earthquake of reform to recast their minds about the new future of Britain. This debate made the period immediately following 1867 one of the most intellectually turbulent of the century: but, unlike other great periods of ferment, this one was sparked by the new secularism and the increasingly democratic society it had helped create, not about the old, theocentric Britain of the era before Chartism.

  Carlyle exhibited his rage in Macmillan’s Magazine, republishing his essay as a pamphlet. Despite the growth of the press, magazines and reviews remained a powerful – perhaps the most powerful – medium for the dissemination of ideas from intellectuals or politicians to a wider, intelligent public. Shooting Niagara: and After? was Carlyle’s last significant political pronouncement: he was seventy-one, in indifferent health, and, though he would live until 1881, only his Reminiscences remained to be written of his serious literary work. He had been widowed the previous year, was engaged in revising Frederick the Great, which hung around his neck like the proverbial millstone, and was suffering from dyspepsia. He told his brother John, a doctor, that ‘my digestion etc etc has gone quite to chaos’.1 His pessimism and unhappiness translated into a work that was by his own admission ‘very fierce, exaggerative, ragged, unkempt and defective.’

  All this combined with Carlyle’s loathing of democracy to produce a brutal attack on the political class. He had noted in his journal throughout 1867 his feelings about reform, and one metaphor stands out: ‘England getting into the Niagara rapids far sooner than I expected.’2 He was feeling apocalyptic: ‘Newspaper editors, in private, I am told, and discerning people of every rank, as is partly apparent to myself, talk of approaching “revolution”, “Commonwealth”, “Common illth”, or whatever it may be, with a singular composure.’ Carlyle seemed to represent no view, by this stage, except his own: but when published in pamphlet form once the bill had gone through Parliament it sold 4,000 copies in three weeks. However, Carlyle’s influence was waning, something Fitzjames Stephen had noted three years earlier: ‘To take Mr Carlyle as a great leader of English thought, to describe him as the representative of a thing called English Idealism, is to misunderstand him altogether. His thought . . . has had singularly little influence upon the world . . . he has exercised hardly any perceptible influence upon English philosophy . . . politics, morals, theology, metaphysics, political economy . . .’ He had not, Stephen added, ‘materially influenced the main current of thought in this country on important subjects.’3 Stephen was a committed utilitarian, something Carlyle abhorred and had called ‘pig philosophy’ in the Latter Day Pamphlets.4 Stephen’s rationalism made much of Carlyle’s doctrine, with its search for heroes and lamentations of the end of feudalism, quite unpalatable: however, the two men admired each other, so much so that Carlyle made Stephen his executor, and left him his writing-desk.

  In Shooting Niagara, Carlyle started with the assertion that there had not for a thousand years or ‘since the Heptarchy ended’ been an epoch in English history when ‘the question of utter death or of nobler new life for the poor Country was so uncertain’.5 He compared ‘the Niagara leap of completed democracy’ with the resolve of Bismarck in forging Prussia into a dominant force, implicitly prophesying Britain’s subjection to Germany.6 He feared democracy had made men into a ‘swarm’, and suggested that after ‘manhood suffrage’ there would be Horsehood and Doghood suffrage too.7 He felt no good would come to the slaves emancipated after the Civil War in America; nor, by the same token, would much good come to those formerly unfranchised who would be given the vote in Britain. He snarled: ‘Bring in more voting; that will clear away the universal rottenness, and quagmire of mendacities, in which poor England is drowning; let England only vote sufficiently, and all is clean and sweet again. A very singular swarmery this of the Reform movement, I must say.’8

  He damned the Reform Bill as ‘the calling in of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash . . . the intellect of a man who believes in the possibility of “improvement” by such a method is to me a finished-off and shut-up intellect, with which I would not
argue: mere waste of wind between us to exchange words on that class of topics.’ He had no doubt why this thoughtless pursuit of the Niagara rapids was happening: ‘Traitorous Politicians, grasping at votes, even votes from the rabble, have brought it on’.9 His principal target was ‘he they call Dizzy’, ‘this clever conscious juggler’, ‘a superlative Hebrew Conjuror, spell-binding all the great Lords, great Parties, great Interests of England, to his hand in this manner, and leading them by the nose, like helpless mesmerised somnambulant cattle, to such issue – did the world ever see a flebile ludibrium of such magnitude before?’10 The Latin means ‘a farce to weep at’: ‘The end of our poor Old England (such an England as we had at last made of it) to be not a tearful Tragedy, but an ignominious Farce as well!’

  He derided Edmond Beales, the leader of the Reform League, as having been assisted by ‘ragamuffins’; accused Walpole of having been intimidated into appeasement; and suggested the government’s behaviour had been of a piece with its treatment of Edward Eyre, the late Governor of Jamaica, who had been recalled and threatened with impeachment for his severity in putting down a rebellion. Carlyle rebuked ‘the Majesty’s Ministers, who, instead of rewarding their Governor Eyre, throw him out of window to a small loud group, small as now appears, and nothing but a group or knot of rabid Nigger-Philanthropists, barking furiously in the gutter, and threatening one’s Reform Bill with loss of certain friends and votes’.11 He taunted the ministry for its capitulation to Beales: ‘Safer to humour the mob than repress them, with the rope about your neck.’12

  The House of Commons was, plainly, an institution of which Carlyle had expected no better. The support of the Lords for the bill he found shocking. ‘What are you good for, then?’ he yelled at the aristocracy. ‘Show us, show us, or else disappear!’13 Yet he still expressed the hope that the aristocracy, which he saw as retaining many of its old virtues, would come to the rescue; and if it did not, there might be an aristocracy of talent and courage, rather as in Cromwell’s time, that would save the country. It was the old call, again, for the Hero to come forward, just as he had uttered nearly thirty years earlier, translated to ‘these ballot-boxing, Nigger-emancipating, empty, dirt-eclipsed days’.14 Yet there was no more prospect of it than in 1840; indeed, much less so. Meanwhile, spurred on by reform, the trades union movement ‘with assassin pistol in its hand, will at once urge itself on Reformed Parliament’.15

  He believed it would take a ‘kingly soul’ to do what was necessary to improve society, such as by setting up schools: ‘Right schools were never more desirable than now. Nor ever more unattainable, by public clamouring and jargoning, than now.’16 He felt modern education was mostly about teaching people to speak, rather than to think. As always with Carlyle, speech was silvern; silence was golden. The Reform Act would only make things worse. By the end of the essay he is just ranting, roaring with despair at a situation he has decided is irredeemable. He observes that, for good measure, getting everybody to engage in military drill would be no bad idea. ‘That of commanding and obeying, were there nothing more, is it not the basis of all human culture?’17

  His conclusion was typically Carlylean: no proposal, but a dramatic prophesy. There would have to be a ‘sheer fight’ between Anarchy and Anti-Anarchy: ‘nothing short of a duel to the death could ever void that great quarrel’.18 He believed, however, that ‘to Anarchy, however million-headed, there is no victory possible’; because the decent men – those such as had served in the New Model Army under Cromwell – would eventually put themselves to the fight. ‘What are Beales and his 50,000 roughs against such; what are the noisiest anarchic Parliaments, in majority of a million to one, against such?’ His residual hope was that ‘the Aristocracy, as a class, has as yet no thought of giving up the game, or ceasing to be what in the language of flattery is called “Governing Class”.’19 He was right in that the aristocracy would fight for a while yet, until defeated by the 1911 Parliament Act; but even he, in his shouting and bawling, seems to have seen the game was up.

  II

  Carlyle had been reduced to ranting; a more rational assault on the democratic mood after the second Reform Act was found in James Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, published in 1873. Stephen, a barrister, enjoyed an enviable reputation as a journalist and had made himself an equally formidable one as an intellectual. He had just returned from two years in India, attempting to codify the laws of that country. Coming from an England in which, as he saw it, the threats and occasional manifestations of a mob had intimidated the ruling class into change, he had been impressed to see how, less than fifteen years after the Mutiny, India was ruled firmly but well without resort to democracy, by a small elite cadre of Oxbridge-educated civil servants.

  Stephen was born in 1829 into the intellectual aristocracy, to James Stephen, an eminent jurist and civil servant who in 1849 became professor of modern history at Cambridge. Young Fitz was an outsider despite his Establishment grounding. In the mid-1840s his father took a house at Windsor so that he and his brother Leslie – the father of Virginia Woolf and an architect of the Dictionary of National Biography – could be day-boys at Eton. The other boys, swift to pounce on anything smacking of irregularity, proceeded to bully him. Unsurprisingly, this seems to have affected young Fitz’s cast of mind in more ways than one. ‘I was in the school, but not of it, and was a kind of Pariah,’ he recorded in a fragment of his unpublished autobiography.20

  ‘It had however the great advantage of keeping me in my father’s society, and acquainting me continually more and more with his opinions on all sorts of subjects.’ He regarded this as his real education, and talked of how it ‘gave me feelings of contempt for the inanity of the Eton masters’. His father’s discussions with his children were literary, religious, political and historical, and there were frequent references to the great men of the day and their part in events: great men Stephen knew personally, and tales of whom kept his son enthralled so much that ‘I could have listened . . . forever’. He talked of Macaulay, ‘infinitely more eloquent and learned’ than Stephen himself; and of Carlyle, ‘striking and picturesque’. Although young Fitz would come to find Carlyle shallow, long on rhetoric and short on analysis, he also came to understand in his late forties and early fifties that Carlyle’s interpretation of power and the uses of authoritarianism had much to commend it.

  Fitz sought to be a writer of such eminence as to have an entry into the salons and literary life of London. His powers of expression and thought were sufficient to find him space in the reviews. He established himself by the 1860s as a formidable critic of politics and society, just as had the historian Carlyle, the art critic Ruskin, or the school inspector Arnold. He made a particular name from the mid-1850s on the Saturday Review. He savaged writers so eminent as Dickens and Mrs Gaskell for sentimentality. His writings have the common theme of pursuit of the truth, and that sentimentality is an obstacle to be cleared before the object can be attained. Stephen was a rationalist, and to him the worlds of such novelists had no rationality at all. He deplored the novel as an instrument of propaganda, and lambasted ‘the political novelists with their . . . hasty generalisation and false conclusions [who] exercise a very wide and very pernicious political and social influence.’21

  Although Stephen taunted Dickens and poked Carlyle through the bars of his cage, the great intellectual assault of his literary career would be on Mill. This could not have been predicted, as Stephen – a Benthamite – had admired Mill’s logic and his writings. Also, though a late developer intellectually, Stephen had no record of academic achievement to suggest he could take Mill on. His Cambridge career ended with a mere pass degree, though he had been an Apostle. It was unclear whether he had the makings of a man who would seek to shake the accepted currents of thought of the day. Logic was the antithesis of the sentimentalism Stephen so abjured, and Mill’s formulation of it deeply attracted him when younger. He saw the framework of logic could be applied to the social sciences – such a
s history, economics, politics and sociology – and help instill more intellectual rigour and make them, therefore, more credible. His writings contain many reflections upon this necessity, and Mill’s system of logic is Stephen’s model.