The Victorians
Page 69
Kensal Green, where Manning lay until his co-religionists disturbed his bones, and where so many of his celebrated contemporaries lie beneath the grass, is, by the standards of most public cemeteries, a model of beauty and decorum. When they buried Manning it must have still possessed real charm, when the rich were still extravagantly interred in the undecayed catacombs at six guineas each.16 It was one of the sights of London. Those who went there as sightseers in the Nineties must have had a sense of palpable difference between themselves and the early Victorians. It is probably impossible to define precisely the spirit of any particular period. Generalizations about the 1890s abound – but who is to say that Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley are more ‘typical’ of the decade than the lower-middle-class Charles and Carrie Pooter satirized in The Diary of a Nobody? Is Cecil Rhodes a more archetypical Nineties man than David Lloyd George or Keir Hardie?
Recognizing the danger of generalization, however, one can discern in the last years of the nineteenth century ways in which the world seemed different to those with eyes to see it: and, which is rather different, trends in the 1890s which history was later to read as decisive. To define is perhaps more dangerous than to generalize – A thought expressed is a lie as Fedor Tyutchev wrote – but one can discover trends, or areas of understanding, in which the ethos of the 1890s may be seen as transitional, leaving behind the old Victorian world and looking ahead to the modern. Three such areas might be loosely grouped under the three headings of Metaphysics, English Domestic Politics and the World Order.
Metaphysics might seem an off-putting word, but one struggles to find a synonym for anything as general as the first of these categories which I wish to consider: namely the way that men and women now viewed the Nature of Things – what they thought this world was, who they were, what they were doing in it. We would be considering here a matter which is clearly all but impossible to define neatly: but without an understanding of the metaphysic which guides (or does not guide) individuals and societies, there seems little point in trying to say anything about them at all. Without such a metaphysical understanding, history would be a mere catalogue of events, or of the clothes worn on these occasions. To understand the words written or said by our ancestors, the shape of society which they created or accepted, the first task must be to understand how they saw reality itself. And the perception of reality during this era – the many perspectives of artists, poets, religions, philosophy – can be said to have shifted somewhat at the end of the nineteenth century.
Secondly, since our focus has been largely on Victorian Britain, no image of the 1890s would make sense unless it could examine the political situation in this period of transition. It is the beginning of the end for aristocratic government. The system which had delivered a succession of aristocratic prime ministers from Lord Liverpool to Lord Salisbury – and whose two great commoner prime ministers, Gladstone and Disraeli, lived the lives of landed aristocrats – was radically challenged by the sort of Liberalism represented by Chamberlain and Dilke on the one hand in the 1880s or the young David Lloyd George in the 1890s. But how much of the old aristocratic system would be obliterated in the process of change? How successful would the gradualist or Fabian socialists become in changing the structure of society altogether? Why would the revolutionary socialists succeed in some European countries but not in Britain? These are the questions which come to mind in the decade in which the forces of reaction seemed for the most part triumphant, and in which such events as the foundation of the Independent Labour Party at Bradford in 1893 – so momentous to the perspective of later generations – barely disturbs the prosperous surface of a political world still dominated by the aristocracy.
And they relate very closely to the third matter – world order, the shape of the late nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century world. The rival nationalisms of the European powers, which hindsight sees marching inexorably to the tragic calamity of the First World War, seemed to those engaged in much of the sabre-rattling like displays of power. The generals, monarchs, armament manufacturers and politicians who appeared to lesser mortals so powerful seem to hindsight as mighty as a child playing ‘I’m the King of the Castle’ on a hayrick with a can of petrol in one hand and a box of matches in the other. Much of that story lies outside the scope of this book, but what lies very much within it is the New Imperialism. After the Scramble for Africa, the expansion of the British Empire beyond India to Burma and Malaya and wider still to China, Papua, Polynesia, and the rush by the European countries to colonize the world, the Imperial idea became the central fact of the new world-order. As with aggressive nationalism in Europe itself, so here, hindsight can see the inescapable fragility of the Imperial idea, the shows of strength leading to inexorable disaster for many, if not all, concerned – governed and governors. That is not how it appeared at the time, even though the great Imperial War in South Africa in which Britain was engaged, as the Queen’s reign drifted to its close, forced even the most devoted prophets of Imperialism to ask heart-searching questions about the future.
fn1 Kings are for the realm’s service, not vice versa.
fn2 The Catholic burying-ground, St Mary’s, adjoins Kensal Green Cemetery proper.
40
Appearance and Reality
ONE OF THE strangest spiritual Odysseys of the age was that of Annie Besant (1847–1933), the vicar’s wife who was brave enough, aged twenty-seven, to run away from a cruel husband and a religion in which she no longer believed. She risked losing her children (though in the event, the deed of separation, dated 25 October 1873, gave her custody of her daughter Mabel). With atheism and political radicalism she espoused, as an ineluctable consequence, poverty and social ostracism.1
She became the friend and collaborator of Charles Bradlaugh, leader of the National Secular Society. As an advocate of birth control and a distributor of The Fruits of Philosophy (an inappropriately titled tract about how to limit procreation) she was arrested, tried and condemned, though on appeal she escaped imprisonment. But then she began to drift away from Bradlaugh’s secular radicalism in favour of socialism. The arch-cad and con-artist Edward Aveling, medic, actor, Marxist, helped to effect this transition. She was rescued when he subsequently fell in love with Eleanor Marx, whose life he quite literally destroyed – luring her into a ‘suicide pact’ without keeping his side of the bargain. In the socialist circles of Aveling, Bernard Shaw and the rest, Annie flourished. She was immensely brave as an agitator, as we have seen in our account of ‘Bloody Sunday’ – November 1887 – and she was also a superb public speaker.2 Something, however, was lacking. In W.T. Stead, of all people, she briefly found a father-figure. Atheism, she admitted, had brought peace from the torment of believing in an unjust God, but it left her ‘without a Father’.3
Where would such a figure go? Beatrice Potter, after her marriage to Sidney Webb in 1892, was another woman of essentially religious disposition, who poured her longing for a ‘cause’ into socialism. She and her husband would be seen as key figures in the story of the British Labour Movement. Certainly, Shaw and the Webbs remained forever scornful of the direction in which Annie Besant chose, by contrast, to move, but in its way it was no less revealing, no less characteristic of its time.
In January 1889 Stead took her to meet the founder of the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky (1831–91), on one of the sage’s visits to London. The obese, pop-eyed Russian aristocrat (naturalized American since 1878) talked ‘easily and brilliantly’ of her travels.4 ‘Nothing special to record, no word of occultism, nothing mysterious; a woman of the world chatting to her evening visitors.’ But when they rose to go, Madame Blavatsky, with a ‘yearning throb’ in her voice, said, ‘Oh my dear Mrs Besant if you would only come among us.’ Annie felt an overwhelming urge to bend down and kiss Blavatsky, but she resisted, and made her adieux.5 Within a few months, Annie Besant had found her vocation and her life’s work. Although in April 1889 she accepted re-election as a member of the Fabian executive
and was still aligning herself with such secular figures as Shaw and the Webbs, her eyes were now upon the distant horizons of the Orient. Like the soldier in Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’, she could hear the temple bells a-calling. By the time she had attended the funeral of her old comrade Charles Bradlaugh she had put on Madame Blavatsky’s ring – the symbol of esoteric power – and became one of the great prophets of Theosophy. (One of the young Indians she befriended and who attended Bradlaugh’s funeral was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who had visited Madame Blavatsky at Annie’s house in St John’s Wood.)6
Blavatsky has been much ridiculed, and her credentials are often questioned. She claimed that she had achieved enlightenment and initiation into the esoteric mysteries after seven years wandering alone in the Tibetan mountains. Even after the Younghusband expedition of 1903–4, Tibet remained closed to all but a very few travellers, so a white female traveller would, one would have supposed, have encountered some difficulties. As it happens, Blavatsky was so obese as to have difficulty climbing the stairs: another reason sceptics have cast doubt on her claims to have ascended Himalayan heights in quest of wisdom.
By pioneering, or inventing, Theosophy, however, Helena Blavatsky was giving shape and voice to a yearning which lies buried in many human souls, the notion or wish that all faith is really one. True, the nineteenth century was an era of faith quite as much as it was one of doubt. While sophisticates abandoned the old Bible, new bibles were in the making. An angel called Moroni directed Joseph Smith, a teen-aged labourer from New England, to find, in 1827, those Golden Plates which would contain the new gospel, the Book of Mormon. In 1875, Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) was to publish Science and Health, later named Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which, as the central document of the new religion of Christian Science, was in effect to be a further testament, assuring believers that disease and indeed evil itself were illusory. Blavatsky’s new Scripture, Isis Unveiled (1877), was written by invisible Spirit hands. Half a million words long, it began by denouncing the scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley, and went on to expound its key doctrine, namely that all wisdom is One, that science is not opposed to religion, and that religious differences are man-made. Anyone who has nursed the thought that ‘deep down all religions are saying the same thing’ is more than halfway towards Theosophy. It appealed, said Peter Washington somewhat dismissively in his Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, to:
the world of autodidacts, penny newspapers, weekly encyclopedias, evening classes, public lectures, workers’ educational institutes, debating unions, libraries of popular classics, socialist societies and art clubs – that bustling, earnest world where the readers of Ruskin and Edward Carpenter could improve themselves, where middle-class idealists could help them to do so, and where nudism and dietary reform linked arms with universal brotherhood and occult wisdom.7
Henry Olcott (c.1830–1907), Blavatsky’s heavily bearded sidekick, was to be one of Annie’s close theosophical allies. A farmer from Ohio, who had been a signals officer in the Union army, Olcott was of good New Jersey stock, claiming descent from the pilgrims. Whereas Blavatsky was visited by Hidden Masters from the ancient Egyptian dynasties of Luxor, Olcott’s spiritual visitants came from India. A dark stranger from the Himalayas in an amber turban and white robes laid his hands on the colonel and told him he would do great work for humanity.8 It was largely through Olcott that Annie Besant visited India – a revelation which changed her life – in 1893. And it is in the Indian context that one sees some of the appeal of Annie’s new mystical creed for her old radical self. In Ceylon, the British officials regarded Theosophy as seditious. It questioned one of the very bases for a European presence there: namely the superiority of Christianity over Buddhism. Olcott and Blavatsky actually ‘took pansil’ – a form of Buddhist confirmation – in Colombo. Olcott wore sandals and dhoti. He identified with the Buddhist protests against Christian missions – 805 Christian schools against four Buddhist ones; Christian marriage the only legal form of marriage. In promotion of Buddhist parity with Christianity there was a cause which would certainly appeal to Annie Besant’s rebellious heart. There is an Olcott Street in Colombo. In 1967 the Singhalese prime minister said that ‘Colonel Olcott’s visit to this country is a landmark in the history of Buddhism in Ceylon’.9 At the very time in history when the white races were imposing Imperialism on Egypt and Asia, there is something gloriously subversive about those Westerners who succumbed to the Wisdom of the East, in however garbled or preposterous a form. The political implications of this were not lost on Gandhi, who welcomed Annie Besant’s support for Indian nationalism even when he rejected her spiritual teachings. (She in turn deplored his satyagraha – soul-force – policies of resistance to the Raj, believing, by the closing decades of her life, that change would come to India by means of spiritual revival, not political agitation. Such was the revolution which had come about in thirty years in the heart of the heroine of Bloody Sunday.)
Annie Besant was an exotic, and if all her life showed was one woman’s journey from socialism to theosophy, then she would hardly seem typical. But though her individual journey was distinctive, in many respects she was a mirror of her age – the wronged feminist of the Seventies, the political activist of the Eighties and, in the Nineties, the seeker after mystery, the grasper of some Greater Whole.
W.B. Yeats, who moved in some of the same circles as Annie Besant, has described in his unforgettable Autobiographies the liberating effects of what might seem – to a reader of our times – to be mumbo-jumbo. He too met Madame Blavatsky. And though he did not take her particularly seriously (‘a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humour and audacious power’)10 and was sceptical about her claims to be the mouthpiece of long-dead Indian or Egyptian ‘masters’, he by no means scorned the pursuit of ‘psychical research and mystical philosophy’. He saw it directly as a reaction against his own father (a genial artist) and the generation who had believed in both John Stuart Mill and ‘popular science’.11 For Yeats it was an epiphany when he met, in the British Museum Reading Room, ‘a man of thirty-six, or thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and an athletic body, who seemed before I heard his name, or knew the nature of his studies, a figure of romance’. This was Liddell Mathers, author of The Kabbala Unveiled, who introduced Yeats in 1887 to a society called ‘The Hermetic Students’ – where, after his initiation in a Charlotte Street studio, the Irish poet met alchemists, necromancers, readers of Henri Bergson, symbolists, fantasists. The magic, and the wisdom of the East, and the Kabbalistic-mystery side of Yeats were all usable, as were the Irish politics and the friendships, in the fashioning of his mighty poetic achievement: he remakes them in his later verse, just as the Grecian goldsmiths in his Byzantium hammer ‘gold and gold enamelling’.
Civilisation is hooped together
he wrote in a poem published in 1935, but it is in one sense a manifesto for the 1890s.
Civilisation is hooped together,
brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality …12
The 1890s were apprentice years for Yeats. Though he played with Indian and Irish mythology, his symbolism really developed later. The decade was for him, as a poet, the years of lyric, of the Rhymers’ Club, of those contemporaries whom he dubbed the ‘tragic generation’. ‘I have known twelve men who killed themselves,’ Arthur Symons looked back from his middle-aged madness, reflecting on the decade of which he was the doyen. The writers and artists of the period lived hectically and recklessly. Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) (one of the best lyricists of them all – ‘I cried for madder music and for stronger wine’) died from consumption at thirty-two; Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), a dipsomaniac,
died aged thirty-five from a stroke. John Davidson committed suicide at fifty-two; Oscar Wilde, disgraced and broken by prison and exile, died at forty-six; Aubrey Beardsley died at twenty-six. This is not to mention the minor figures of the Nineties literary scene: William Theodore Peters, actor and poet, who starved to death in Paris; Hubert Crankanthorpe, who threw himself in the Thames; Henry Harland, editor of The Yellow Book, who died of consumption aged forty-three, or Francis Thompson, who fled the Hound of Heaven ‘down the nights and down the days’ and who died of the same disease aged forty-eight. Charles Conder (1868–1909), water-colourist and rococo fan-painter, died in an asylum aged forty-one.
Arthur Symons might be said to have defined the Ethos of the Decadence when he came back from Paris and announced to his friends in the Rhymers’ Club, ‘We are concerned with nothing but impressions.’13 Yeats provides many archetypical vignettes of the set. One of the most memorable is of Lionel Johnson in his rooms in Clifford’s Inn: the walls covered with brown paper, the curtains (over door, window and book-case) grey corduroy; a portrait of Cardinal Newman hung on the walls and a religious painting by Simeon Solomon, a friend of the Swinburne-Rossetti circle until they rather priggishly dropped him after an incident in which he was arrested by the police for homosexual indecency. Yeats went to see Johnson at 5, but he never rose before 7 p.m., having his breakfast when others dined and spending the night reading theology, writing lyrics and – chiefly – drinking. ‘As for living,’ he said languidly, quoting from Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, ‘our servants will do that for us.’
Johnson was as it happens a gentleman, but this absurd remark should not lead a later generation into supposing that the appeal of the Decadence was limited to those who could afford servants. What it offered was the capacity for self-reinvention, for making the world into anything you wanted it to be. For that reason it was actually of particular appeal to those whose incomes did not run to employing many servants, and whose outer lives were limited by the crushing restraints of petty bourgeois semi-poverty. It is no accident that Arthur Machen (1863–1947) or Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913) should have flourished at the same time as Mr Pooter. Their exotic sorties into the world of the Occult in Machen’s case, and in Rolfe’s into full-blown fantasies first about himself becoming pope (his novel Hadrian the Seventh, 1904, is very nearly a work of genius), then about pursuing boys in Venice (the posthumous The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole), are surely admirable protests against the dingy worlds which both men in fact inhabited. They were the camp equivalent of Kipling’s ‘British soldier’ pining for the ‘Burma girl’ in Mandalay, sun-drenched or incense-drowned dreams to blot out the hell of suburban boredom. Rolfe’s background – the son of a piano-maker, he became a teacher before beginning his extraordinary career as would-be priest, failed seminarian, con-man and sponger – more than justified his decision to transform himself into Baron Corvo, a distressed nobleman of the Holy Roman Empire.