are lions in the street.1 Generalizations serve as lines of communication between generations, and, if necessary, risks must be run in order to keep the lines open. I This generation in Great Britain is modern in the sense that it is not Victorian. Its members were born whilst Queen Victoria was still alive, but they never knew they were not themselves moulded by the times before the "sixties." They were not born, as their parents were, into the atmosphere of pre-" critical" and pre-Darwinian religion. Their education did not begin with the statement "Creation of the world, 4004," nor are their minds governed by the assumptions it implies. In fact, the change from genuinely Victorian times to to-day is a change from the reliance upon, to the criticism of, assumptions. This is true whether, as we look back, we consider conservative or liberal, orthodox or agnostic thought. The mind of the early and middle nineteenth century was held together in an union which differences strained but did not break. Yet the differences were violent enough. On the one hand, neither insularity nor reaction could keep out of England the movements which had their source and inspiration in the French Revolution. A passion for liberty and reform was a note of the century which had such a beginning. On the other hand, the religious world in England in early Victorian days was as an island within an island. Little of the radicalism and scepticism which did cross. the Channel percolated into a world of immemorial tradition revitalized by two revivals. Nevertheless, the gulf between free-thinking, reforming intellectuals and good Evangelicals or Tractarians was not so deep, but that they had moral and even religious assumptions in 1 Proverbs xxvi. 13: The sluggard saith, There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets. common. They were often united in such mental and spiritual elements as formed foundations for the religious negations of the one party and for the affirmations of the other. The truth of this is fully compatible with the fact that a few thinkers, born at the beginning of the century, went much further than their fellows towards a complete repudiation of all beliefs, as far indeed as any one to-day.1 But for the most part the minds of liberals in early and middle Victorian times were rich in an optimism. drawn from a capital of uncriticized assumptions. They were busy with emancipation from the entail of the past their battle-cry was "Liberty." If pain was involved in the escape from old beliefs and institutions it was greatly mitigated for them by the conviction that the essentials of true religion and morality were unaffected by it. An energy in emancipation was given to them by-as it were their "stance" upon a rock of belief, if not in God, at least in goodness as inherent in the natural order of things. Such optimism lay behind their almost pathetic belief in education as the way of all salvation. It quickened their impatience with ecclesiastical dogmas and sancIt gave heart to men in their struggle with "Hebrew old clothes." It allowed that expansion of ethical fervour which, as in George Eliot, seemed but tions. 1 No doubt, to name one such conspicuous exception, there was John Stuart Mill in existence to separate himself scornfully from those "who reject revelation' and "take refuge in an optimistic Deism, a worship of the order of nature and the supposed course of providence, at least as full of contradictions and perverting to moral sentiments as any of the forms of Christianity" (J. S. Mill, Autobiography, p. 70); and to congratulate himself upon his wife's "complete emancipation from every form of superstition, including that which attributes a pretended perfection to the order of nature and the universe" (ibid. p. 108). There was also Carlyle, to whom at one time as a young man "the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!" (Sartor Resartus, chap. vii.). Yet this was the revolt of a minority such as could be neighbours to a majority possessed of more positive convictions, just as in a parliament the views of an extreme radical section can coexist alongside of a mass of more moderate opinion. Moreover, for Carlyle, at any rate, such revolt was only temporary and a preliminary to his passage from "The Everlasting No" to "The Everlasting Yea." to increase with the loosening of her grasp upon distinctively Christian doctrine. It reappeared in others in the assumption of the benevolence of nature to the individual. Here, indeed, for the heroes of political emancipation, the upholders of economic orthodoxy, and the believers in unrestrained competition and the doctrine of laisser-faire, was the very fulcrum to the lever of nineteenth-century liberty. Individual man, it was thought, needed only to be freed from artificial and traditional restraints, and to be set in a nature similarly liberated, for it to provide to each his meat in due season, and for him to fare as well as he deserved. We can gauge the strength of this optimistic reliance upon nature if we observe its reaction upon Darwinism. Though the doctrine of the "struggle for existence" in itself cut at the roots of the belief in the benevolence of nature to the individual, many were quick to infer from the observation of a continuous upward development in the past added grounds for their general faith in progress for the future. "Progress," indeed, was the bottom layer of Victorian assumptions. It still survives among a superior minority that has disencumbered itself of any other convictions. It still appears in the "man in the street's" confidence in times of adversity that, thanks to the general order of things, "something is likely to turn up. By Nevertheless, Darwin was the sexton to these assumptions. Whether fairly or not, the change from Victorian to "modern" times is associated with his name. his writings it was as though he made a channel through which waters, long dammed out, flooded in. Many are alive to-day to recall the swirl of the waters, whether of dogmatic and agnostic science, or of uncritical Bible criticism, as they rushed through the formerly impenetrable bulwarks of Victorian religion.' 1 Compare, for the above, Henry Sidgwick's words in 1860 on In Memoriam: "Hence the most important influence of In Memoriam' on my thought opened in a region . . . deeper than the difference between Theism and Christianity : This generation is modern in the sense that it never knew the world "before the flood." While it has been growing up the assumptions of Mid-Victorian liberalism have been going bankrupt. Their capital has been running out. Even their last survivor, Progress, has been at grips with a doubt deeper than itself as to man's place in the universe. For the infection of a kind of cosmic nervousness has become widespread. Somehow the world is now felt to be less domestic than it was. The skies have darkened and men's minds have become more sombre. In some a sense of the mere scale and range of the world in size and time has prompted a philosophy of relativity wherein nothing is absolutely true or right at any passing moment. Others have been led by the observation of the effects of physical environment to ask whether matter is not dominant over mind and spirit. Others have been appalled to realize that nature (so far from being benevolent to the individual) aims only at the survival of the race, and cares nothing for its members except as contributing to the health of the species. In greater or less degree through all minds is spread the sense that they are in a world which is indifferent to their interests. And thereout springs a fear of being thrown upon its mercies: a consequent prudential reliance upon the weapons that it lay in the unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of humanity. And this influence has increased rather than diminished as years have gone on and as the great issues between Agnostic Science and Faith have become continually more prominent. In the sixties I should say these deeper issues were somewhat obscured by the discussions on Christian dogma, and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. You may remember Browning's reference to this period The Essays and Reviews debate During these years we were absorbed in struggling for freedom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion. . . . Well, the years pass, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call 'Hebrew old clothes' is over, Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us to? It brings us face to face with atheistic science: the faith in God and Immortality, which we have been struggling to clear from superstition, suddenly seems to be in the air: and in seeking for a firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the fight with death' which In Memoriam' sc powerfully presents " (quoted in Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i. p. 301). money can buy for the struggle for existence; and a doubt whether morality is not the philosophy either of those who are paid to maintain it, or of those who can afford to be good. Furthermore, the mind of society has become morbid with the sickness of an industrial order which has been built upon an economic philosophy of half-truths. The confident optimism of the era of the Great Exhibition and the Manchester School has withered away. The faith (which we are told appears again and again in the writings of Richard Cobden 1) "that God is over all, and that Providence will right wrongs and check wickedness without our help," has faltered in the face of the results of individualistic competition, whose theological motto has run, "Every man for himself and God for us all, as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens." Here indeed is a main reason for the waning of the ethical (let alone theistic) confidence which was found in men otherwise agnostic. The economic conditions of morality have been laid bare, and the relationship of all parts of society to one another has been recognized. The parts of the body politic which talk and write most have been found to be but margins upon a world of which the facts confute their theories. Yet the solidarity of the social whole ensures that none of its members can escape from the fortunes of the rest. Therefore the whole mind of our time is tainted by the moral powerlessness of men in modern competitive businesswhere the sway over human volition of uncontrolled and accidental forces is at its highest; where the natural struggle for existence is made many times worse by the intricate devices of scientific ingenuity; where men are as good as they dare be; where it is most evident that the world left to run loose and not battled with is indifferent to the hopes and fears of individual human beings. 1 John Maccunn: Six Radical Thinkers, Richard Cobden, p. 133. |