with equal truth. "Faith in machinery," said the author of 'Culture and Anarchy,' "is our besetting danger. Often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; but always in machinery, as if

it had a value in and for itself. What is freedom but machinery? what is population but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is wealth but machinery? what are, even, religious organisations but machinery?" Yet, by a strange paradox, the Victorians, who in their brutal worship of success, commercial and spiritual, seemed to care not a jot for the things of the mind, might boast a larger number of great contemporaries, as we shall presently see, than had smiled upon England since the sixteenth century.

And still the Victorians bustled to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest. Still they shouted that in so doing they were achieving the highest moral purpose. It was part of their turbulence, like their tea-meetings, and their religious feuds, and their fondness for brawling in the street. Above all, they proved their boisterousness in the conduct of their vices. The Victorian Age was the age of the Marquis of Hastings as well as of Dr Arnold, of Baron Nicholson and Trial by Jury as well as of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, of Kate Hamilton's and Evans's and the Hole in the Wall. Men lost fortunes

on the turf, and solaced their saddened souls with rough practical jokes. The hero who emptied a sack of rats into a dancing hell enjoyed a success which even Mr Robert Lowe might have envied.

How, then, shall you find a common denominator for such an Age as this, how express it in simple terms? It combined in itself all the elements of contradiction. It was pious and blasphemous: the highpriests of Nonconformity jostled Mr Bradlaugh on the platform. It was cruel and philanthropical: it busied itself with charities; it did its official best to thwart Florence Nightingale in the Crimea; and it bitterly opposed Lord Shaftesbury and Mr Disraeli when they attempted to rescue the over-ridden children from the factories. It was prudish in word and thought as no Age has ever been, yet those of it who chose might listen enthralled to the ribaldries of the Garrick's Head. Even the criminal classes were on the alert to frighten the burgess or to afford amusement to the amateur of crime. The Victorian Age was, in brief, a golden era of the Old Bailey. How shall our tamer times match Orton and Charles Peace, Benson and the corrupt deteotives, Wainwright and Palmer? It may be said that these great men condescended to the Age as by an accident, and the Age is not entitled to take credit for them. But even if we omit them from the argument, we must still confess that the Victorian Age was

an age of rough and lawless energy.

Energy, that is its charaoteristic energy often misdirected and to wrong ends, but energy restless and unmistakable. The ferment, like the machinery, which the Victorians vaunted, frequently led to nothing, and it seemed inconsistent with the prudish sentimentality which also prevailed. But there it was, and it expressed itself most clearly in the rhetoric, which was the passion of all good Victorians. It was a time of long speeches and long books. Carlyle and Ruskin preached the value of silence in unnumbered volumes. Gladstone solved the problem of packing the minimum of sense into the maximum of words. Even the men of science, with the single exception of Darwin, were rhetoricians as well as patient observers of the truth. Fifty years ago the meetings of the British Association were welladvertised opportunities of eloquence. The sound of Professor Tyndall's peroration at Belfast still echoes in the ears of the devout. "If unsatisfied, the human mind," thus he spoke, "with the yearning of a pilgrim for his distant home, will still turn to the mystery from which it has emerged, . . . then, casting aside all the restrictions of materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faoulties, may be called the creative faculties of man. Here, however, I touch a theme too

great for me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled by the loftiest minds when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past." Is that science, or is it oratory? We do not know; we do know that it is a characteristic piece of Victorianism.

Thus the Victorian Age was an Age of fret and ferment. Not only were men curious about their souls; they were prepared to fight about their souls. Theology flew at the throat of science. Nonconformity was alert to do battle against the Established Church. These impulses were apparent even in the great. But the great were great in spite of them. The tendencies of the Age marked and did not spoil their work. Even though they adopted the prevailing fashions, as women adopted the orinoline, they kept their genius separate and alive. Easily they rose above their environment, and they are judged not by the standard of a time, but by the standard of all time. The characteristics of the Victorians overlaid them superficially. That which gave them immortality was something which went back very far into the past.

It

And by this accident of great men the Victorian Age will be ever memorable. was not responsible for them; it held them under no debt; on the other hand, they repaid their nurture a hundredfold. Tennyson, for instance, the greatest poet who wrote when Victoria was on the

sure

throne, owed nothing to his contemporaries save a set of unimportant opinions. To them he seemed a man with a "message." The philosophers, the theologians, and the men of science all claimed him for their own. They were that his one and only purpose was to interpret for them their little creeds. When he published "In Memoriam," an undiscerning critic declared that "the author had made a definite step towards the unification of the highest religion and philosophy with the progressive science of the day." Then the politicians laid hold of him, and, until the publication of "Maud," were convinced that his supreme aim was aim was to interpret the creed of middle-class Liberalism. They looked to him to give shape and substance to their own vague hopes of freedom. And their vague hopes are all forgotten. What remains to us is the exquisite poet, alive always to the sights and sounds of nature, quick to transmute into words what he saw and heard the poet of "Tithonus " and "Enone," of "Lucretius' and "Vastness," the poet who takes his place with the greatest of all the Ages, with Shakespeare and Donne, and Crashaw and Milton, and Pope and Wordsworth and Keats. Even the "Idylls of the King," moss-grown as they may seem to-day with the sentiment of the Victorian Age, will reveal their beauties afresh to the coming generation, which will eare not a jot about the battle

of science and theology. Even "The Princess" will presently be purged of its middle-class liberalism, and when the dross is laid bare, the gold will be valued at its proper worth as pure and flawless.

Tennyson was the poet of the Victorians. Charles Dickens was their writer of prose. Let us forget for a moment the wonderful phantasmagoria which was his world. Let us put out of our minds the amazing men and women whom he created out of the vast fertility of his mind and brain, and let us remember that he wrote English as few have ever written it. He was a true master of the English phrase, of the English epithet, of the English word. He had lapses into blank verse-that is true; but when he chose, what Poe said of Tennyson may be said with equal truth of him: "So perfect is his rhythmical sense that he seems to see with his ear." He was so simple that the delioate mysteries and harmonies of human character sometimes escaped him. If you compare his work with of Balzac, his great contemporary, you might think that now and again he writes like a child, but always like a child of genius. Where Balzac plants his feet upon the rook of reality, Dickens is in fairyland. And yet in fairyland he gathers the truth. In a single carioature he will assemble the threads of universal experience. Crummles is the actor of all time; Podsnap, as he was never young, will never grow old;

that

Pecksniff resumes in his own person the hypocrisies of all the ages. Dickens's touch with his own Age, his sermons and his theses, will fade away as surely as the philosophy of Tennyson will fade away, and there will be left behind the prose of a man of genius, the fun and fancy of the eternal child. If there is a better story in the range of English literature than 'Great Expectations,' we do not know it. And where between Shakespeare and Charles Dickens shall you find his like?

Above and beyond the Viotorians also stands Matthew Arnold, their sternest critic and wisest commentator, great in the wit and irony of his prose, great in the beauty of his verse. And Disraeli, the one imaginative statesman of his time, and the sole master

in his kind—the political novel he too transcends the Age, whose fashions of speech and pose and costume he knew well how to exaggerate. If these are the greatest, how many were there who came not far behind them! Of the poets, Browning and Swinburne-this last a true Victorian in controversy; of the novelists, Thackeray and Trollope, and Wilkie Collins, and the sisters Brontë, any one of them fit to be the glory of an epoch; of the rhetoricians, Carlyle and Buskin and Gladstone, supreme in verbiage if not in understanding. Here are but a few names which cast a lustre upon an Age which is perhaps too near to us for a full appreciation, and upon which all the sneers of Mr Strachey and others shall never avail to cast a lasting shadow.