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Mentalities, Movements and Institutions Characteristic for the Victorian Age in Historical Succession

Summary

I.THE MENTALITIES

So far we have studied the following mentalities:

- the utilitarian mentality, which was the dominant1 one; it was the appanage of the entrepreneurial middle classes and rested upon the social laws and institutions related to the creation of wealth; it was inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy turned into a slogan about “the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers”

-the old liberal and humanistic paradigm, dominant in the first half of the nineteenth century (inspired from Thomas Carlyle’s free preaching of Puritanical values to the mass of mankind) and which was transformed by John Henry Newman into a system of education ,with distinterestedness, knowledge and virtue, as its main values

-the new, modern liberal and positivistic paradigm, dominant in the mid-Victorian period, namely in the 1850s and 1860 and transmitted to modern enlightened and democratic, i.e., liberal societies (to the capitalistic democracies) in the twentieth century. This mentality was turned into a civic, ethical conception by John Stuart Mill, who explained how societies can practically function in fairness to truth and to their mature members. Mill borrowed virtue, this important component of the old liberal, idealistic paradigm as an essential modern virtue from the residual culture of the humanistic idealists. Matthew Arnold also added to the positivistic, new liberal conception the old virtues of the classical tradition, of Bildung. He wished to educate the majority of mankind so as to develop persons in a plenary way, multilaterally, through the four powers. Especially, Matthew Arnold used the power of beauty, as he was a poet, also, to develop the historical sense of modern people. Notice the

1 See Raymond Williams’s text “Dominant, Residual, Emergent”, in Surdulescu, R and Stefanescu, B Reader in Contemporary Critical Theories. Bucharest: the English Department of the University of Bucharest. 1999, p.150seq

The complexity of a culture is to be found not only in its variable processes and their social definitions - traditions, institutions, and formations - but also in the dynamic interrelations, at every point in the process, of historically varied and variable elements.(…) By ‘residual’ I mean something different from the ‘archaic’, though in practice these are often very difficult to distinguish. Any culture includes available elements of its past, but their place in the contemporary cultural process is profoundly variable.// By ‘emergent’ I mean (…)elements of some new phase of the dominant culture (…) and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it; emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel//. The area of effective penetration of the dominant order into the whole social and cultural process is thus now significantly greater.NOW REFERS TO CAPITALISM, IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: in advanced capitalism, because of changes in the character of labour, in the social character of communications, and in the social character of decision-making, the dominant culture reaches much further than ever before in capitalist society into hitherto ‘reserved’ or ‘resigned’ areas of experience and practice and meaning.

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combination between the residual elements of the old liberal paradigm and the values of Bildung in the dominant, new liberal conception.

Dover BeachBY MATTHEW ARNOLD

The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line of sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched land,Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Ægean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world.

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Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night.

As can be seen in “Dover Beach”, he circumscribed modernity as an age with only feeble faith, and consequently suffering from a state of confusion. He wished to raise the cultural awareness of the moderns and to enrich their lives through the contact with tradition. For Arnold, the literature of older civilizations and earlier important or canonical stages of civilization could equip the present as a whole with interpretive power and deliverance; they could alleviate modern unhappiness. Interpretive power was “the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, intimate sense of them – of things – and of our relations with them” (Maurice de Guerin, in Essays in Criticism, the First Series – 1865). In addition, culture offers deliverance to man. Deliverance is “the comprehension of the present and the past” and puts man “in possession of general ideas” (On the Modern Element in Literature, 1857).

After studying the cultural campaigns and movements for correcting the contours of the mainstream or dominant mentality, which meant to enlarge it with the point of view of opposing mentalities (as for example enlarging the new liberal paradigm with the old liberal paradigm in modern education), it will be possible to talk about the emergent mentality of agnosticism and of aestheticism. Agnosticism, as presented by Thomas Henry Huxley in “Agnosticism and Christianity” (1899) was a mentality which insinuated itself in the wake of science, as superior on the scale of mankind’s intellectual evolution. Aeshteticism imposed itself upon the late Victorian contemporaries as a decadent, underground, subversive movement (but it became the dominant cultural movement of the first half of the twentieth century, in modernism). Whereas agnosticism addressed what Arnold had called “the power of intellect and knowledge”, by separating it for ever from theology (to which the intellect had been considered organically linked in the old liberal paradigm), aestheticism was one of the late Victorian emergent mentalities and movements which criticized the dominant materialism and utilitarianism of the day.

Aestheticism had this in common with socialism, the utopian brand, as will be seen below.

The people who call themselves "Agnostics" have been charged with doing so because they have not the courage to declare themselves "Infidels." It has been insinuated that they have adopted a new name in order to escape the unpleasantness which attaches to their proper denomination. To this wholly

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erroneous imputation, I have replied by showing that the term "Agnostic" did, as a matter of fact, arise in a manner which negatives it; and my statement has not been, and cannot be, refuted. Moreover, [310] speaking for myself, and without impugning the right of any other person to use the term in another sense, I further say that Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions. The justification of the Agnostic principle lies in the success which follows upon its application, whether in the field of natural, or in that of civil, history; and in the fact that, so far as these topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity.

II.Movements, Institutions

The social and cultural movements of the Victorian age are, all of them, expressions of the quarrel between dominant capitalism, its practices and institutions, residual idealism, and emergent socialism.

Socialism was a mentality that wished to extend the benefits of modern life to the underprivileged labourers, whom Karl Marx considered to be the exploited creators of the modern material wealth2. Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels called them proletarians. Radical, revolutionary Marxism and utopian socialism ended up advocating the complete abolition of property and the capitalist mode of production, and its replacement by a more just form of communist ownership over the production means. This cause was enthusiastically embraced by artists, William Morris, the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement and sponsor of the workshops of this movement and Oscar Wilde. Wiliam Morris wrote “How I became a Socialist” and Oscar Wilde “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”. But there existed another, more moderate form of socialism, Fabianism – from the name of the Fabian Society set up in London in 1884 by the Anglo-Irish artist George Bernard Shaw and his friends, the couple of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. This brand of socialism advocated the slow reformation FROM WITHIN of blind capitalism. Fabianism was a brand of socialism that sought to reform the laissez-faire state by improving the social 2 Looking back from Marx, Wilde and Shaw, it is obvious that Thomas Carlyle was a proto-socialist. In Past and Present (1843)he criticized the cruelties of laissez-faire capitalism and its worship of the God Mammona, or Mammonism, as Thomas Carlyle called the modern cult for money.

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structure of the capitalistic state slowly (the name of this brand of socialism derives from a Roman general, Fabius Cunctator, who strategically delayed action in order to win battles). Fabian socialism was seeking to achieve a fairer distribution of wealth as a means of securing fairer living conditions for the mass of society in a more interventionist state than the original laissez-faire one. It is along Fabian principles that the 20th century British state developed, working towards a mixed economy, organized along both capitalistic, trade lines while it also gave planning/interventionist/centralized authority to the state. The best literary explanation of Fabianism as a social cause is to be found in the play “Major Barbara”, by George Bernard Shaw (published in 1905), which confronts the effects of the Christian institution of charity called The Salvation Army with the effects of reforming along utilitarian lines the life of the poor social orders. Major Barbara and her fiancé tried to discover a better brand of maturity than that of their middle-class parents. They were out to offer food, shelter and spiritual consolation by Christian conversion to people whose maturity and wisdom was coined in anger. By the conversion of contrite souls, the Salvation Army sought to appease the social anger of the down-to-earth, rough maturity of laid-off workers, a typically staunch maturity of the lower orders of society. Shaw’s play is related to the confrontation between the social link provided by charity (in the establishment of the charitable organization of the Salvation Army) and the social link provided by pragmatic efficiency (as embodied in the arms factory which creates work-places for people).

EXCERPTS FROM OSCAR WILDE’S THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM (1891)

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.(…)

Wilde considered that there were people who, just like the Salvation Army or the soup

canteens ” with admirable, though misdirected intentions (….) very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. 

Socialism advocated the abolition of property because, as Wilde stated: Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism,

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and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism.

The most outstanding cultural movement was that of the first avant-garde, the Pre-Raphaelite artists’ movement (see the Power Point presentation). This movement was supported from inside the establishment institution of the Royal Academy of Arts, by John Ruskin, who was also one of the proto-socialists, together with Carlyle, and had turned his back on the present, returning in painting to the Pre-Raphaelite period of Giotto and Giovanni Bellini and in architecture to the Gothic style. He was the cultural father of the Gothic revival in architecture, which produced the Houses of Parliament and the red-brick universities designed and constructed in the same style all over the British Empire.

The Oxford Movement – a religious revival movement within the Anglican High Church, whose brilliant leader was, in the 1830s, John Henry Newman. They published several Tracts for the Times, and Newman’s Tract 90 demonstrated how Victorian religiousness was tepid. At the time, there also existed a group of rationalist Christians, called the Noetics, who had a more positivistic view of faith.Also, there existed Low Church revivals, for example the Methodist revival, which can be understood in George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede, one of whose protagonists is Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher.

As far as the Victorian institutions are concerned, after the movements enumerated, it becomes obvious that the Royal Academy of Arts was one of the institutions which defended the dominant mentality and therefore conservative, while the Arts and Crafts movement and its workshops represented the emergent mentality together with the avant-garde movement of the Pre-Raphaelites. Similarly, the Oxford Movement worked against the dominant mentality in the established High Church – and as proof of that, John Henry Newman eventually opted for another, non-English religious establishment: the Catholic or Rome Church. But the Tractarian movement led to the appearance of Anglo-Catholicism as a new religious denomination. Also, notice the spread of newer Protestant, Low Church Movements, which led to the appearance of the Free Church Federation in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century.

Appendix, texts to translate in the seminars, before the exam

From the Cambridge Dictionary of Illustrated Heritage – THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT entry

From Thomas Carlyle: Past and Present, Part III (The Modern Worker), “The Gospel of Mammonism”

….we for the present, with our Mammon-Gospel, have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair competition' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings;

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we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. "My starving workers?" answers the rich mill-owner: "Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?"—Verily Mammon-worship is a melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, "Where is thy brother?" he too made answer, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Did I not pay my brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me?

Carlyle’s proto-socialist critique of laissez faire from Book I of Past and Present

The world, with its Wealth of Nations, Supply-and-demand and suchlike, has of late days been terribly inattentive to that question of work and wages. We will not say, the poor world has retrograded even here: we will say rather, the world has been rushing on with such fiery animation to get work and ever more work done, it has had no time to think of dividing the wages; and has merely left them to be scrambled for by the Law of the Stronger, law of Supply-and-demand, law of Laissez-faire, and other idle Laws and Un-laws,—saying, in its dire haste to get the work done, That is well enough!

'Laissez-faire,' 'Supply-and-demand,' 'Cash-payment for the sole nexus,' and so forth, were not, are not and will never be, a practicable Law of Union for a Society of Men. That Poor and Rich, that Governed and Governing, cannot long live together on any such Law of Union. Alas, he thinks that man has a soul in him, different from the stomach in any sense of this word; that if said soul be asphyxied, and lie quietly forgotten, the man and his affairs are in a bad way.