The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Walter B.
Houghton
Victorian
Anti-Intellectualism
Journal of the History of Ideas,
13 (3Jun. 1952, 291-313.
Man is sent hither not to question, but to work: “the end of man,”
it was long ago written, “is an Action, not a Thought.”
Carlyle, “Characteristics.” [1
The practical nature of the English mind, its deep
respect for facts, its pragmatic skill in the adaptation of means to ends, its
ready appeal to common sense - and therefore, negatively, its suspicion of
abstract and imaginative speculation - have always been characteristic of the
nation. What distinguishes the
Victorian period is that the conditions of life tended to increase this bias, to
lessen the contrary influences of theological and classical studies, and thus to
make what may be called a kind of anti-intellectualism a conspicuous attitude of
the time. [2] This is not
to forget that many of the Victorians were intellectuals nor that the age of
Mill and Darwin made significant contributions to thought. It is to claim only that middle- and
upper-class society was permeated by a scornful or frightened view of any free
and detached play of the mind. The
Industrial Revolution alone would have gone far to bring this about; but when
the intellectual climate added its powerful pressure in the same direction, the
result was inevitable.
If “the extremely practical character of the
English people” made them, as Mill recognized, excel all the nations of
1. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (5 vols.,
2. The more radical sense of the term anti-intellectualism,
meaning a doubt or denial of our capacity to discover ultimate truth or resolve
the dilemmas of practical life, does not apply to the Victorians as a whole,
though it begins to appear in the last decades of the century. In the period from 1825 to 1875 their
faith in the human mind and their confidence that solutions to their problems
could be found suggest that in this sense of the word we are far more
anti-intellectualist than they. In
still another use of the term, meaning reliance upon authority or upon inner
feeling, conscience, or intuition rather than upon logical reason, many
Victorians may be called anti-intellectual, but that attitude, which is better
defined as anti-rationalism, is not under consideration.
3. J. S. Mill, “Comparison of the Tendencies of French
and English Intellect,” The Monthly Repository VII, n.s. (1833), 802.
The italics are
Mill’s.
291
tion - and did so under high competitive pressure - received an indelible training in practical contrivance. It was, as Carlyle said in 1829, the age of machinery in the inward as well as outward sense of the word; “the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends.” [4] When Mill spoke in 1835 of the celebrity of England resting on her docks, her canals, and her railroads, he added, “In intellect she is distinguished only for a kind of sober good sense;… and for doing all those things which are best done where man most resembles a machine, with the precision of a machine.” [5
In minds so constituted, and in lives so immersed in
business, what counts is tangible results, in profits, in larger plants or
firms, in promotion and social advancement - in short, material or worldly
comfort. The test of value is
utility in the narrow sense:
There is a general opinion got abroad, that nothing is valuable that is not useful; and though the word useful is not very explicitly defined, yet there is a feeling that usefulness is confined to the material productiveness which regards the being and well being of the body. The earth is useful because it produces corn, and the miller is useful because he grinds the corn. 6
And thought is useful only so far as it improves
productiveness by devising better machinery, political, social, or mechanical.
Otherwise it is neglected or
disparaged. When John Morley
analyzed the intellectual climate of the sixties and seventies, he found what he
called the political spirit, “which is incessantly thinking of present
consequences and the immediately feasible,” to be “the strongest element in our
national life, the dominant force, extending its influence over all our ways of
thinking;” with the result that all matters not bearing “more or less directly
and patently upon the material and structural welfare of the community” were
falling out of sight. 7 This was simply Mill’s analysis a
generation earlier:
The English public think nobody worth listening to,
except in so far as he tells them of something to be done, and not only
that, but of something which can be done immediately. What is more, the only reasons
they will generally attend to, are those founded on the specific good
consequences
4. “Signs of the Times,” Essays, II,
59.
5. “Professor Sedgwick’s Discourse on the Studies of the
6. “Poetry and Prose,” unsigned, Athenaeum, no. 418
(Oct. 31, 1835), 817.
7. 0n Compromise, first published in 1874
(
292
to be expected from the adoption of the specific proposition. [8
Small wonder that in the passage where he spoke of
England’s celebrity resting on her docks and railroads, Mill went on to say that
“philosophy - not any particular school of philosophy, but philosophy altogether
- speculation of any comprehensive kind, and upon any deep or extensive subject
- has been falling more and more into distastefulness and disrepute,” not merely
among businessmen, but “among the educated classes of England.” Except in mathematics and science, there
was “not a vestige of a reading and thinking public engaged in the investigation
of truth as truth, in the prosecution of thought for the sake of
thought.” This no doubt is
overstatement, but such a reading public was much smaller, proportionally to
those who read at all, than it had been fifty years earlier. And Mill put his finger squarely on the
assumption that underlay this decline. There was no recognition, he said, that
from philosophical inquiry into the nature of man and society, “a single
important practical consequence can follow.”
This blindness to the ultimate connections between theory and practice extended even into the field where we should least expect it, the physical sciences. As late as 1850, according to Huxley, “practical men” still “believed that the idol whom they worship - rule of thumb - has been the source of the past prosperity, and will suffice for the future welfare of the arts and manufactures. They were of opinion that science is speculative rubbish; that theory and practice have nothing to do with one another; and that the scientific habit of mind is an impediment, rather than an aid, in the conduct of ordinary affairs.” [10
This was not so stupid as it looks. The fact is that the Industrial Revolution owed very little to scientific theory. The great inventors, Watt, Stephenson, Arkwright, Hargreaves, had had little mathematics and less science. Their inventions were almost entirely empirical. [11] It was only after the mid-century that the work of trained scientists like Davy and Faraday began to reveal the practical fruits of scientific theory. And even a generation later Huxley had to attack the notion “that there is a sort of scientific knowledge of direct practical use,
8. Article cited in note 3, 802. Cf. Dissertations,
II, 220.
9. Dissertations,
I, 98-99. The quotations that follow are
on page 97.
10. In “Science and Culture” (1880), Science and Education
(New York, 1898), 137. I deduce
the date of 1850 from the fact that Huxley refers, on 136, to the situation
“some thirty years ago.”
11. This was recognized by the writer of “Plato, Bacon, and
Bentham,” Quarterly Review LXI (1838), 502.
293
which can be studied apart from another sort of
scientific knowledge, which is of no practical utility, and which is termed
‘pure science.’” [12] It is ironic that the very success of
early technology, instead of encouraging scientific research, confirmed the
anti-intellectualism that is indigenous to the business mind.
[13
If “deep thinking,” even deep scientific thinking, is
“quite out of place,” as William Sewell dryly remarked, “in a world of railroads
and steam-boats, printing-presses, and spinning-jennies,” [14] so too are the
humanities. They fail to pass the
same utilitarian test. The
important studies became the vocational skills - mining, electricity, surveying,
agriculture, bookkeeping, together with the necessary mathematics and a little
history. This, indeed, is Bentham’s
curriculum. [15] It is the new education which the Society
for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge set out to provide, and the
What is the real worth in the market of the article
called “a Liberal Education,” on the supposition that it does not teach us
definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to
better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once make this man a
lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to
discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of every
kind? [17]
Tried by that standard, art and philosophy are condemned
as useless or patronized as “cultural.” A writer in the Athenaeum for
1835
12. “Science and Culture,” op. cit.,
155.
13. This is illustrated by the quotation from Carlyle’s
Past and Present, below, footnote 30.
14. “Carlyle’s Works,” Quarterly Review LXVI
(1840), 447. Sewell also noticed
the assumption “that prudent practice has no connexion with profound
theory.”
15. In his Chrestomathia, The Works of Jeremy Bentham,
ed. John Bowring (11 vols.,
16. See Sydney Smith, “Edgeworth’s Professional
Education,”
17. Discourse VII, “Knowledge and Professional Skill,” The
Idea of a University, first published in 1852 (London, New York, and Bombay,
1901), 153.
charged that “a thorough-paced Utilitarian… cannot
exactly see the use of Painting and Music; flowers look pretty, but then flowers
are of no use.” [18]
This sounds like a caricature,
but a writer in the Westminster Review ten years earlier said quite
seriously that he would be “glad to be informed, how the universal pursuit of
literature and poetry, poetry and literature, is to conduce towards
cotton-spinning.” [19 ] Art is defended, if it is defended, as an
ornament or a recreation. [20]
Philosophy is a waste of time, or worse, a distraction from work.
There is a revealing statement in
Modern Painters, all the more significant because Ruskin was no
utilitarian in either the narrow or broad sense of the
term:
An affected Thinker, who supposes his thinking of any
other importance than as it tends to work, is about the vainest kind of person
that can be found in the occupied classes. Nay, I believe that metaphysicians and
philosophers are, on the whole, the greatest troubles the world has got to deal
with.... Busy metaphysicians are always entangling good and active
people, and weaving cobwebs among the finest wheels of the world’s business;
and are as much as possible, by all prudent persons, to be brushed out of their
way, like spiders, and the meshed weed that has got into the Cambridgeshire
canals, and other such impediments to barges and business.
[21]
The imagery reminds us that Ruskin’s father made a
fortune in the City.
To adopt the related attitudes I have been describing is
simply to deny, however unconsciously, what
18. Number 418 (
19. Volume IV (July, 1825), 166.
20. Bentham’s judgment is standard: see Works, I,
317-318; II, 212-213, 252-260. Cf.
Quarterly Review (reference in note 11), 504-505: “It would require a
separate article to trace downwards the decline of Art to its present debased
condition of a mere slave to pleasure; and it would need another to show how our
notion of Education has dwindled from the right formation of the whole man, to
the introduction of mere passive notions of outward things - useful
knowledge, as it is called - into his brain.” As the writer implies, the two articles
would be intimately connected.
21. Volume III (1856), in The Works of John Ruskin,
ed. Cook and Wedderburn (39 vols.,
22. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,”
(1864), Essays in Criticism, first series
(
23.
295
It was applicable as much to some of the Victorian
prophets as to bourgeois society in general. If Mill and Newman and Bagehot, Morley
and Leslie Stephen were as ready as
Kingsley’s lecture on “How to Study Natural History”
(1846), which contains a eulogy of Bacon and business worthy of Macaulay,
recognizes that “in an industrial country like this, the practical utility of
any study must needs be always thrown into the scale” - and quite
rightly.
What money will it earn a man in after life? - is a question… which it is folly to despise. For if the only answer be: “None at all,” a man has a right to rejoin: “Then let me take up some pursuit which will… be of pecuniary benefit to me some day.” [24
The beauty of scientific studies is that besides drawing
the imagination away from an inner world of morbid fancies and fixing it on
external objects, they save you money. Think how much wealth is lost “for want
of a little knowledge of botany, geology, or chemistry” - mines sought where no
mine could be, crops attempted to be grown where no crops could grow. On the other hand, hidden treasures are
missed, improvements in manufacturing passed over, all from ignorance of
science. “And for the man who
emigrates, and comes in contact with rude nature teeming with unsuspected
wealth, of what incalculable advantage… ,” etc., etc. True enough,
Some years later Kingsley gave the students of
24. Lectures and Essays (
25.
296
They say knowledge is power, and so it is. But only the knowledge which you get by
observation. Many a man is very
learned in books, and has read for years and years, and yet he is useless. He knows about all sorts of
things, but he can’t do them. When you set him to do work, he makes a
mess of it. He is what is called a
pedant: because he has not used his eyes and ears. He has lived in books. He knows nothing of the world about him,
or of men and their ways, and therefore he is left behind in the race of life by
many a shrewd fellow who is not half as book-learned as he: but who is a
shrewd fellow - who keeps his eyes open - who is always picking up new facts,
and turning them to some particular use. 26
After this, Kingsley’s protest that he does not mean to undervalue book-learning, “no man less,” has a rather hollow ring. Its only possible value is its contribution of new facts capable of being turned to use. The notion that books may so broaden and deepen one’s knowledge of life, and so sharpen one’s perceptions, that he can live more wisely and judge more intelligently, has dropped out of Kingsley’s mind - and to a large extent, the Victorian, in fact, the modern mind. In bourgeois society the conception of utility became too narrow to include the great but intangible utility of the humanities. 27
This is illustrated specifically by James Anthony
Froude. When he succeeded Mill as
Chancellor of St. Andrews, his inaugural address was plainly a reply to his
predecessor’s plea for intellectual and aesthetic culture. He deplored the devotion of so much time
and effort in university education “to subjects which have no practical bearing
upon life.” The humanities, he
said, “are supposed to have an effect on character,” but the truth is that
“history, poetry, logic, moral philosophy, classical literature, are excellent
as ornament,… they may be the amusement of your leisure hereafter; but they will
not help you to stand on your feet and walk alone.” And since you cannot master all the
objects of knowledge, and must choose among them,
26. Charles Kingsley: Letters and Memories of His Life,
ed. by his wife (2 vols.,
27. CI. Peter Bayne, “
297
“the only reasonable guide to choice in such matters is utility.” [28
What is responsible for such an attitude? Froude gives the answer
himself:
In a country like ours, where each child that is born among us finds every acre of land appropriated, a universal “Not yours” set upon the rich things with which he is surrounded,… such a child, I say, since he is required to live, has a right to demand such teaching as shall enable him to live with honesty, and take such a place in society as belongs to the faculties which he has brought with him. [29]
Such an education will enable him to succeed, if not in overcrowded
The anti-intellectualism of Carlyle, the master of
Froude, and of Kingsley, too, in good part, is in the end equally radical. For quite other reasons, which I shall
come to presently, it was well established long before he felt the fascination
of
There is an element of truth here - or there might be.
Theory may be too absolute, out of
touch with concrete conditions. But
that point is not made; nor is this an oversight. Three years earlier
28. Short Studies on Great Subjects (4 vols.,
29.
30. From Book III, chap. 5, ed. Edwin Mims (New York, 1918),
184-186.
298
Carlyle had written to Emerson that “all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me.” [31] Plainly, therefore, he means this passage to exalt practice at the expense of thought; and in doing so, he even ignores the potential contribution of scientific theory to the very industrial success he so much admires, though in this respect, as we have seen, his mistake was still a common deduction from the empirical character of the great inventions. [32
This passage reminds one of Carlyle’s earlier attack on
the Theoriser in “Characteristics” (1831), but there the contrasting figure is
the man of insight and intuition, an intellectual like Goethe. The attack is on rationalism. [33]
Here the choice of Bull is a
measure of how far industrial progress could induce a Victorian “philosopher” to
discount the value of all thought, logical or intuitive. A similar shift of allegiance, from
intelligence to action, is seen in the changing conception of the hero. Originally Carlyle conceived of him as a
man whose “pure reason” pierced beyond nature into “the True, Divine and
Eternal,” and had included Dante, Shakespeare, Johnson, as well as Goethe, among
his great men. But after 1840 he
came more and more to identify greatness with dynamic energy, and to make heroes
of Dr. Francia, Cromwell, Frederick - and Governor Eyre. [34] The alternative to democracy was
not a “philosopher king” nor even a “patriot king “ but a dictator. And literature, in the broad sense that
includes philosophy and history, which Carlyle had once spoken of as the highest
of human vocations, as the modern priesthood, lost all of its value by
comparison.
Life was action, not talk. The speech, the book, the review or
newspaper article was so much force expended - force lost to practical
usefulness…
31. The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo
Emerson, ed. C. E. Norton (2 vols.,
32. Indeed, he cites James Brindley here, and Watt,
Arkwright, and Brindley in the important passage on industrial achievement in
“Chartism” (1839) (Essays, IV, 180-185) which marks his “conversion.”
33. Essays, III, 5-6.
34. Tennyson reported in 1848 what he learned from
conversation with Carlyle (Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir
[2 vols., London, 1905], I, 279): “Goethe once Carlyle’s hero, now Cromwell
his epitome of human excellence.”
35. J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His
Life in
HHC: [bracketed] displayed
on page 300 of original.
299
The last sentence makes one think of Kingsley or Froude,
where the same admiration for strength is allied with the expansion of
Finally, there is Macaulay, “the great apostle of the
Philistines,” whose essay on Bacon is the locus classicus of Victorian
anti-intellectualism. [37] The glory of Baconian philosophy
was its practical aim, “the multiplying of human enjoyments and the mitigating
of human sufferings,” physical enjoyments and physical sufferings; and as a
result, it has wonderfully succeeded - witness its tremendous fruits in the
nineteenth century. [38] Ancient philosophy by contrast
“disdained to be useful.” It “dealt
largely in theories of moral perfection” designed “to form the soul,” and it
failed to make men virtuous. [39] “Words, and more words, and nothing but
words, had been all the fruit of all the toil of all the most renowned sages of
sixty generations.” [40] The Stoic and the
Baconian come to a village where the
36. See Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), which was
dedicated to Brooke (and cf. also the highly fascistic passage on Brooke in
Letters and Memories, I, 222-224); and Froude’s English Seamen in the
Sixteenth Century (1895).
37. The phrase is
38. Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays
(6 vols.,
39. Pp. 436 and 437.
40. P. 445. Cf. Bentham’s remark in the Deontology
which
300
small-pox has just begun to rage. The Stoic wastes his time preaching
fortitude against the ills of life, while the Baconian whips out a lancet and
begins to vaccinate. 41 It does not occur to Macaulay that
we need both, so completely has the useful become the tangible -and the
attainable.
An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in
Utopia. The smallest actual good is
better than the most magnificent promises of impossibilities. The wise man of the Stoics would, no
doubt, be a grander object than a steam-engine. But there are steam-engines. And the wise man of the Stoics is yet to
be born. [42]
Unrealizable ideals are useless. Wisdom is simply practical knowledge. [43]
2. THE INTELLECTUAL CLIMATEIn an age of transition, when established beliefs are
questioned and new ones debated, “the divisions among the instructed nullify
their authority,” and the uninstructed are forced to judge for themselves.
[44 ] This they might have
done with some caution but for the further fact that in an age of democratic
theory the assumption of equality gave the average man a self-confidence he had
never had before. As Coleridge
noted, all men were now considered able to judge. [45] And that meant, in effect, the
exalting of natural shrewdness at the expense of the trained intellect. No need for special knowledge or
theoretical analysis, except in “pure” science. Everywhere else the answers are available
to common sense. This is the
situation described by Mill in The Spirit of the Age
(1831):
Every dabbler… thinks his opinion as good as another’s.
Any man who has eyes and ears shall
be judge whether, in point of fact, a person who has never studied politics, for
instance, or political economy systematically, regards himself as any-way
precluded thereby from promulgating with the most unbounded assurance the
crudest opinions, and taxing men who have made those sciences the occupation of
a laborious life, with the most con-
41. Pp. 464-465.
42. P. 460.
43. Cf. John Morley, “Byron” (1870), Critical
Miscellanies (3 vols., London, 1913), I, 205: “That intense practicalness
which seems to have done so many great things for us, and yet at the same moment
mysteriously to have robbed us of all, forbids us even to cast a glance at what
is no more than an aspiration.” In
“Locksley Hall” (line 141) Tennyson made the distinction which Macaulay
obliterated: “Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”
44. J. S. Mill, The Spirit of the Age (1831), ed.
F. A. von Hayek (
45. Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. J. Shawcross
(2 vols.,
301
temptible ignorance and imbecility. It is rather the person who has studied the subject systematically that is regarded as disqualified. He is a theorist: and the word which expresses the highest and noblest effort of human intelligence is turned into a bye-word of derision. People pride themselves upon taking a “plain, matter-of-fact” view of a subject… Truth, they think, is under a peremptory obligation of being intelligible to them, whether they take the right means of understanding it or no. Every mode of judging, except from first appearances, is scouted as false refinement… Men form their opinions according to natural shrewdness, without any of the advantages of study. [46]
In this way democratic theory supported the influence of business - how closely can be seen in a passage of Bagehot’s which parallels the conclusion of Mill’s, but with a different point of reference. “A man of business hates elaborate trifling: ‘If you do not believe your own senses,’ he will say, ‘there is no use in my talking to you.’ As to the multiplicity of arguments and the complexity of questions, he feels them little: he has a plain, simple-as he would say, ‘practical’ - way of looking at the matter, and you will never make him comprehend any other.” [47]
Allowing for certain obvious distinctions, this might be
said of the typical evangelical or non-conformist; and if so, we must reckon
Victorian Puritanism as a major factor in the tendency not only to value the
active over the intellectual life, but to exalt conscience at the expense of the
intellect. Although the
eighteenth-century evangelicals, men like Isaac Mimer, Thomas Scott, and John
Newton, were concerned to some extent with theology, the pietistic core of the
Wesleyan movement soon came to the front. In the Clapham Sect emphasis had shifted
to works of charity and philanthropy - fighting the slave trade, establishing
foreign missions, distributing Bibles. By 1839 Newman could argue, without much
exaggeration, that “Evan-
46. Pp. 21-23.
Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), translated
by Henry Reeve (2 vols.,
47. “The First Edinburgh Reviewers” (1855), The Works of
Walter Bagehot (5 vois.,
302
gelical Religion or Puritanism… had no intellectual
basis; no internal idea, no principle of unity, no theology.” [48]
And a little later Mark Pattison traced “the professed
contempt of all learned inquiry, which was a principle of the Evangelical
school” to its original reaction against the intellectual, if too dry and
rational, character of eighteenth-century apologetics:
Evangelism, in its origin, was a reaction against the
High-Church “evidences”; the insurrection of the heart and conscience of
man against an arid orthodoxy. It
insisted on a “vital Christianity,” as against the Christianity of books. Its instinct was from the first against
intelligence. No text found more
favour with it than “Not many wise, not many learned.” [49]
When we recognize that this might equally be said of the
non-conformists, we have little difficulty accounting for middle-class
philistinism from its religious, no less than its commercial,
life.
Indeed, the two are closely connected. From the beginning Puritan ethics had
harmonized with business ideals, so much so that the former has been traced to
the rise of capitalism. This may be
debated, but it is certain that Puritanism laid great stress both on moral
discipline (the prerequisite for business efficiency) and on hard work and
well-earned profits (the latter rationalized as the reward of God upon
industry); and consequently neglected, or viewed with suspicion, the
intellectual and artistic life. This was Carlyle’s inheritance. It was from his father he first learned
“that man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream.” And the maxim was enforced by the
teacher’s example: “As a man of Speculation… he must have gone wild and
desperate as Burns: but he was a man of Conduct, and Work keeps all right.” [50] This is a relevant
illustration of a famous passage in Culture and Anarchy where
We may regard this energy driving at practice, this
paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this
earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have, as one force. And we may regard
the
48. Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), ed. Wilfred Ward
(
49. In “Learning in the Church of England” (1863), Essays
(2 vols.,
50. Reminiscences, ed. C. E. Norton (London and
New York, 1932), 5 and 9.
303
intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice… as another force. And these two forces we may regard as in some sense rivals… Hebraism and Hellenism, - between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them. [51]
In
They were joined by the reactionary effect -
intellectually reactionary - of the pain of doubt and the fear of religious
scepticism. At the very moment when
modern speculation seemed to be undermining Christian faith, and therefore
robbing men not only of religious consolations in the face of suffering and
death, but of the very sanctions of morality on which social order and personal
happiness depended, surely one had best stick to his job and leave well enough
alone. [53] Lecky spoke
for the age when he insisted that “a strong sense of the obligation of a full,
active, and useful life is the best safeguard both of individual and national
morals at a time when the dissolution or enfeeblement of theological beliefs is
disturbing the foundations on which most current moral teaching has been based.”
[54] And for the
intellectuals, there was the analogous obligation not to encourage intellectual
activity. This is brought out by
Mill in his essay on the “Utility of Religion”:
Many… are either totally paralysed, or led to confine
their exertions to matters of minor detail, by the apprehension that any real
freedom of speculation, or any considerable strengthening or enlargement of the
thinking faculties of mankind at large, might, by making them unbelievers, be
the surest way to render them vicious and miserable. Many, again, having
51. Pp. 129-130.
52. “Inaugural Address at St. Andrew’s” (1867), James and
John Stuart Mill on Education, ed. F. A. Cavenagh (Cambridge, Eng., 1931),
191.
53. Cf. Edward C. Mack, Public Schools and British
Opinion, 1780-1860 (New York, 1939), 289, where he speaks of “the amazing
disruptive force of new ideas” (after 1840) frightening the average middle- or
upper-class citizen “into reaction, into a mistrust of free thought of all
kinds. More and more he became
fearful of genuine liberalism
and confined his desire for knowledge to the narrowly
useful.”
54. The Map of Life,
first published in 1899
(
304
observed in others or experienced in themselves elevated feelings which they imagine incapable of emanating from any other source than religion, have an honest aversion to anything tending, as they think, to dry up the fountain of such feelings. They, therefore,… dislike and disparage all philosophy. [55]
exactly the same result which Mill had once associated
with worship of canals and railroads.
Nor are these the only reasons, grounded in the dangers
of scepticism, which discouraged freedom of thought. There was the other side of the same
coin, the pressure of public opinion. Even if the thinker himself believed that
the service of truth was worth any actual, or supposed, ill consequences that
might result, he was often deterred by the fear of social stigma and its
potential threat to his public career. Under such circumstances the better part
of wisdom, for anyone not prepared for martyrdom, was to narrow his “thoughts
and interest to things which can be spoken of without venturing within the
region of principles, that is, to small practical matters.” [56] Was there ever another age where the
potential cost of speculation ran so high? At one and the same time, the thinker was
threatened both by the fear of what he might do to society and the fear of what
society might do to him.
According to Edward Mack, “the suspicion of free thought
reached a climax in the sixties with the publication of the notorious Essays
and Reviews.”
[57] If
Kingsley is a typical case in point, as he usually is, this is certainly true.
Not only did he “thrust the book
away in disgust” as soon as he found it stirred up old “doubts and puzzles”; but
when his new curate asked him if he should read the essays, Kingsley told him,
“By no means.”
They will disturb your mind with questions which you are
too young to solve. Stick to the
old truths and the old paths, and learn their divineness by sickbeds and in
every-day work, and do not darken your mind with intellectual puzzles, which may
breed disbelief, but can never breed vital religion, or practical usefulness.
[58]
To this Froude would have given an emphatic “amen.” For
him the old paths of the eighteenth-century Church, so much criticized
by
55. Three Essays on Religion (
56. From Mill’s On Liberty (1859), in
Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (Everyman Library,
London and New York, 1910), 93.
58. Letter to the Bishop of
305
Newman, were the perfection of a healthy,
anti-intellectual religion:
It was orthodox without being theological. Doctrinal problems were little thought of. Religion, as taught in the Church of England, meant moral obedience to the will of God. The speculative part of it was accepted because it was assumed to be true. The creeds were reverentially repeated; but the essential thing was practice. People went to church on Sunday to learn to be good, to hear the commandments repeated… About the powers of the keys, the real presence, or the metaphysics of doctrine, no one was anxious, for no one thought about them. It was not worth while to waste time over questions which had no bearing on conduct, and could be satisfactorily disposed of only by sensible indifference. [59
But unhappily this ideal state of affairs was shattered by nineteenth-century inquiry. Religion passed “out of its normal and healthy condition as the authoritative teacher of obedience to the commandments, into active anxiety about the speculative doctrines on which its graces were held to depend.” [60] The wording is important. It was the anxiety, which Froude himself knew so well (it informs his semi-autobiographical Nemesis of Faith), that threw a nostalgic halo over the age when “doubts about the essentials of the faith were not permitted” and “doctrinal controversies were sleeping;” and led Froude into saying that an established creed should not be discussed (only bad men will question its formularies), and that the test of a religion is not its truth [not now when truth is so dubious] but its success – “you look to the work which it is doing.” [61
The last clause, as well as the earlier claim that the essential thing is practice, taken together with Kingsley’s appeal to “practical usefulness,” show how precisely the fear of speculation in religion and the emphasis of business came to the same conclusion. The concurrence is illustrated if we remember Ruskin’s opinion that metaphysical inquiry distracts men from secular business, and place beside it Thomas Arnold’s advice “to a person distressed by sceptical doubts” to refrain from theological inquiry because it tends “to lead men away from their great [Christian] business - the doing good to themselves and others.” [62] Indeed, if we recall the quotations from Kings-
59. “The
60. P. 264.
61. Respectively, 238, 242, 237, 238.
62. From a letter dated June 21, 1835, in A. P. Stanley,
Life of Thomas Arnold, first published in 1843 (London, 1904), 364. Also cf. the letter to Augustus Hare
(Aug. 3, 1833) 315, where Arnold laments the fact that men’s minds are being led
away “from the love of God and of Christ, to questions essentially tempting to
the [intellect, and which tend to no profit
towards godliness.” The reference
is to the clash of
HHC: [bracketed] displayed
on page 307 of original.
306
ley and Froude in the previous section, we see that the
concurrence is demonstrated not merely in the age, but in specific
individuals.
This is also true of Carlyle. If his admiration for industrial
achievement confirmed his earlier reaction against speculation, what made him
abandon, to begin with, the philosophical studies he had pursued ever since he
went to
The advice to abandon thought and work hard is not
merely a protection against the dangers of speculation; it is also the soundest
cure for those who catch the disease of doubt. It seemed to Froude
63. Essays, III, 1-18.
64. P. 26.
65. Respectively, “On Periods of European Culture”
(1838), printed by Edward Dowden, Transcripts and Studies (London, 1896),
38-39; Sartor Resartus (1833), ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), 195;
and a letter to Mill, June 13, 1833, Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart
Mill, John Sterling, and Robert Browning, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London,
1923), 57.
66. Essays, III, 27
and 28.
307
“as idle for the mind to hope to speculate clear of
doubt in the closet, as for the body to be physicked out of sickness kept lying
on a sofa.” To sit still and think was simply
fatal. Regular employment alone
could keep soul and body from disease. [67] Arthur Hallam may have “fought his
doubts and gathered strength,” “faced the spectres of the mind, and laid them,”
[68] but Tennyson himself had no such
success. According to
Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest
infinitestimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou hast,in thee: out
with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it
with thy whole might. Work while it
is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.
72
Out of its context would anyone imagine this was not the
daily chant of the Captains of Industry? The Intellectual and the
Industrial
67. The Nemesis of Faith (1849), ed. W. G. Hutchison
(
68. In Memoriam (1850), sec. 95, lines 13, 15-16.
69. “ ‘Locksley Hall’ and the Jubilee,” Nineteenth Century
XXI (1887), 4. Cf. the “philosophy” of James Fitzjames Stephen, as described
by Leslie Stephen in his Life of
his brother (
70. Edition cited in note 65: 166-168, 177, 188,
194.
71. P. 196.
72. P. 197.
308
Revolutions met together in the Gospel of Work, with the
powerful encouragement of Puritan ethics. The child of business and doubt was an
anti-intellectual. [73
In more Christian or clerical minds than Carlyle’s a
similar formula for exorcism is often employed and recommended. After Kingsley describes the battle
between faith and materialism which “has gone on in me since childhood,” filling
him with fear that he should “end by a desperate lunge into one extreme or the
other,” he suddenly throws up his hands and cries out with
relief:
But after all, what is speculation to practice? What does God require of us, but to do
justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him? The longer I live this seems to me more
important, and all other questions less so. If we can but live the simple right life
–
Do the work that’s
nearest,
Though it’s dull at
whiles;
Helping, when we meet
them,
Lame dogs over stiles. [74
Years earlier, long before Essays and Reviews, when Kingsley had suffered from the same doubts and puzzles which they raised afresh, he had put them “out of sight and mind, in the practical realities of parish work.” [75] Or rather, he tried to. What he said on one occasion to Maurice was true for a great part of his life: “I live in dark, nameless dissatisfaction and dread… Terrible and sad thoughts haunt me - thoughts which I long to put away, which I do and will put away in simple silent home-work.” [76] Thomas Arnold, so bothered by certain points in the Articles he could not go forward to ordination, was told by Keble “to put down the objections by main force,” that is, to take “a curacy somewhere or other, and cure himself not by physic, i.e., reading and controversy, but by diet and regimen, i.e., holy living” - advice “which he had the wisdom to act upon,” and on a later occasion himself gave “to a person distressed by sceptical doubts.” [77]
73. Cf. Past and Present, Book III, start of chap.
11 (ed. cited in note 30: 226- 228) where work is first exalted as the great
virtue of Plugson of Undershot, the cotton manufacturer, and then as the great
cure for “Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair
itself.”
74. Letter of
75. II, 130-131.
76. In a letter of
77.
309
From this perspective we can better understand the
tremendous activity of the Victorians, their capacity to pack so much writing,
books and essays and letters, into every twenty-four hours, and in many cases
(both the Arnolds, for example, as well as Kingsley, Mill, and Huxley) on top of
a regular job. This enormous
production, far greater than anything we are now accustomed to, had one source
in their confidence that the human mind could resolve every problem however
difficult, and that the individual could influence the course of events
regardless of all impersonal political or economic forces. But another source was the temptation to
bury their doubts and anxieties under the distraction of objective and constant
activity. This is reflected by the
frantic intensity with which they often work, so different from the quiet,
steady production that rests on inner peace and assurance. They cannot sit still - they dare not;
and they cannot work calmly.
Why did Kingsley write so much, novels and poems and
sermons and essays, let alone thousands of letters, and then, fatigued in mind,
plunge rabidly into violent physical action, running to hounds on foot, and
leaping hedges and ditches for five hours at a stretch, but because he could not
bear to be alone with himself?
78 “Except during sleep,… repose seemed
impossible to him for body or mind.” His “impetuous, restless, nervous” energy
made constant movement “almost a necessity to him.” 79 Would Carlyle’s later life have been
filled with so much writing done under such constant strain if at heart he had
found the spiritual peace he talked about? In a passage of Froude’s essay “On
Progress” where he is describing the change which had come over the
78. Letter to
John Bullar,
79. From a letter by John Martineau, once a pupil of
Kingsley’s at Eversley, Letters and Memories, I, 302-303, 300, 301
respectively.
80. Short Studies, II,
366-367.
310
method of escaping, the anxious and perplexing problems
of an age of transition.
Finally, there is another dimension to the
anti-intellectualism of doubt. It
runs this way: “Don’t speculate, but if you must, don’t speculate too much.
Beware of pushing arguments to
their logical conclusions, or examining first principles too closely. Stop before it’s too late.” No doubt the English have never been
conspicuous for logical rigor, but in the Victorian period there was a conscious
effort, personal and public, not merely to discourage the pursuit of truth, but
where that was impossible, to check it at a safe distance from subversive
conclusions.
So long as speculation threatened to undermine the religious and moral foundations of society, it was wholly natural - if ultimately unwise - for society to demand that thought should issue not in a logical but in an orthodox answer. This is the requirement which Mill exposed and attacked in the
Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral? Among them we may occasionally see some man of deep conscientiousness, and subtle and refined understanding, who spends a life in sophisticating with an intellect which he cannot silence, and exhausts the resources of ingenuity in attempting to reconcile the promptings of his conscience and reason with orthodoxy, which yet he does not, perhaps, to the end succeed in doing. No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead
. [81]But this is a minority opinion. To most Victorians the first duty was not
to upset the applecart.
But not, I think, entirely from fear of public criticism. If In Memoriam is typical of the mid-Victorian mind in its “incapacity to follow any chain of reasoning which seems likely to result in an unpleasant conclusion,”
[82] was this because Tennyson was too prudent to risk publicly, or too timid to draw privately, the final deduction? Was it not both? Was it only deference to public opinion which made
81. Edition cited (note 56), 94. Cf. John Morley, in
“Byron”(1870), Critical Miscellanies, I,
238.
82. G. M. Young, Victorian
311
“the most sensible and well-informed men” whom Emerson
met in England “possess the power of thinking just so far as the bishop in
religious matters,” and talk with courage and logic on free trade or geology but
not on the English Church? [83] Was it not also the pervasive
psychology of the age-the pain of doubt, the terror of scepticism, the will to
believe - warning them where, and where not, they could pursue the truth in
safety without endangering their peace of mind or the stability of their
society? [84] Certainly it was the fear that “the
advance of natural explanation, whether legitimately or not, would be in some
degree at the expense of the supernatural” which made
To put the point another way, the public opinion which
Mill rapped for curbing free thought was not merely the normal intolerance that
characterizes a dominant social group, and especially one like the Victorian
middle class, already hostile to speculation for the best of business reasons.
It was itself the expression of
deep-seated fears. Why had it
become, as Ruskin noticed, “a point of politeness not to inquire too deeply into
our neighbour’s religious opinions; and to waive any close examination into the
tenets of faith?” His answer throws
a flash of light into the Victorian mind:
The fact is, we distrust each other and ourselves so much, that we dare not press this matter; we know that if… we turn to our next neighbour, and put to him some searching or testing question, we shall, in nine cases out of ten, discover him to be only a Christian in his own way, and as far as he thinks proper, and that he doubts of many things which we ourselves do not believe strongly enough to hear doubted without danger
. [85]Precisely. It is the danger to their own stability
which frightened the Victorians into making searching questions and tenacious
inquiry a point of serious indecorum, and one which the individual himself was
only too glad to respect. [86] In 1849,
the year before In Memoriam, Froude reported that English opinion had
rejected classical mythol-
83. English Traits, Works, V, 212-213.
84. Cf. Mill, On Liberty (ed. cited in note 56), 83:
“… the present age - which has been described as ‘destitute of faith, but
terrified at scepticism’ - in which people feel sure, not so much that their
opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them.” The reference is to Carlyle, “Sir Walter
Scott,” Essays, IV, 49.
85. John Morley,. The Life of William Ewart Gladstone
(3 vols.,
86. Stones of
312
ogy and supernatural stories of medieval saints and
witches, but was stopping short - or trying to stop short - of applying the
logical analogy to Biblical myth and miracle. “It halts here,” he said, “for it is
afraid of its conclusions.”
[87]
A personal experience of Wingfield-Stratford’s will give
concreteness to these generalizations:
I had been taught about God by a dear old Victorian
clergyman, who explained to me just why God must be. It was extremely simple. The world was so wonderful, that somebody
even more wonderful must have made it. Hence God.
I could detect no flaw in this reasoning, but a certain
apparent incompleteness. With a
faith I never afterwards recovered in the capacity of grown-up people, and
particularly reverend grown-ups, to resolve incipient doubt, I proceeded to
ask:
“But then, who made God?”
The result was not the explanation I had expected, but
an explosion that left me utterly bewildered. I had been brought up in a Christian
family… I had been the cause of unutterable grief and disappointment… Satan had
quite obviously entered into my heart, not without previous
encouragement...
I had, all unwittingly, blundered into what, to every good Victorian, was the unforgivable sin. It was not, as I half suspected myself, that the unknown God-maker was some one not quite respectable. It was simply that I had pried beneath the surface of a belief, that I had not known where to stop short of a logical consequence
. [88]It was not so, as Wingfield-Stratford goes on to point
out, in the ages of faith when the medieval schoolmen would leave no question
unanswered about the divine nature and attributes. “They had no fear, at the back of their
minds, that any danger to faith could lurk in the process of such
definition.” 89
But his conclusion that
Victorian common sense and business instinct dictated the curtailing of thought
in the cause of social stability is only half of the truth. The fear at the back of those grown-up
minds, which issued in such a horrified outburst, was personal as well as
social. Their own peace of mind was
at stake.
87. Nemesis of Faith, ii.
88. The Victorian Sunset (New York, 1932), 62. The italics are
mine.
89. P 63.
313
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