THE "VICTORIAN AGE"

I

ONCE upon a time this seems an appropriate

opening for a talk about the Victorian Age— once upon a time a benevolent grandfather took me for a treat into a small round building which then stood upon Plymouth Hoe and advertised itself as a Camera Obscura. Perhaps I should explain to you that a Camera Obscura is, or was, a temple of alleged entertainment; and that the apparatus consisted of a darkened chamber lit only through a lens in the roof and having, beneath the lens a circular white table on which you gazed and saw a portion of the landscape outside, with the people and things moving upon it. A simple scientific toy!—but in those days we were easily entertained. You, who belong to a more critical generation, may incline to ask why anyone should pay twopence for admission to a panorama which he could view more distinctly for nothing by the simple process of staying outside.

Well, no doubt that hits on the secret why, with the growth of analytical reason, Cameras Obscura have had their day. But you would be on stronger ground, though quite wrong, if you argued that the appeal of realism is permanent (witness Madame Tussaud's) while that of romance must be transient, since it rests

on energy, movement, phenomena in themselves and by nature fleeting. For I assure you that the moving throng upon the table made a vision far more romantic than had been the actual view of the actual promenaders outside. The heavy door of the chamber shut out their chatter and exchange of "good-days." These people within a few feet of us pursuing the zest of life like gnats in a miz-maze! In silence on that white table they met and gesticulated, lifted their hats or bowed; or they came to the edge of it

Unconscious of their doom the little victims played-they came to the edge of it and so dropped off, like the people in the Vision of Mirza-dropped off and departed this life into nothingness; the pea-jacketted gentleman with the single eyeglass and the Piccadilly whiskers, the little lady who minced in elastic-sided Balmorals beneath a pagoda-shaped parasol, the non-commissioned officer in tight scarlet with a cane under his arm, either immediately following or immediately followed by the nursemaid wheeling a perambulator in shape like a Roman Chariot reversed. Sergeant, nursemaid, perambulator-all went over the table's edge, and were lost.

II

That queer, somewhat romantic, almost uncanny sensation of the Camera Obscura recurred the other evening, when, preparing to write these pages for you, I shut my eyes and let pass in review a procession of figures, men and women "of importance in their day," who crossed our country's stage while yet Victoria was Queen: Gladstone, aquiline of eye; Disraeli with a face like a mask-but whether painted for tragedy or for comedy none could guess, and he wouldn't tell; Lord Salisbury, huge of bulk, floundering up Piccadilly like

a whale with a wake of respectful curiosity astern-for he carried an unconscious sea-shouldering greatness; Tennyson, by no means unconscious of greatness; Browning, hiding his under a glad confident guise of middle-class prosperity; Swinburne, like nothing on earth; modest Darwin; Huxley and Tyndall, no pair less similar; Rossetti, William Morris, Millais-Millais handsomest of men; George Eliot, always suggestive somehow of a camel, with George Henry Lewes for driver; Florence Nightingale; Gordon; Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater; Carlyle with (to adapt his own phrase) the east wind and the fire in his belly; Ruskin—to me a bent figure in gown and velvet cap, moving Oxford with eyes that, under bushy brows, seemed to look inward on torture, rarely outward, but then always with inexpressible love. Other Oxford figures are Dean Liddell of the Lexicon, "in form and moving how express and admirable!" Jowett, round and cherubic: Mark Pattison and Robinson Ellis-great in desiccation. So to Cambridge to Monro, Thompson, J. E. B. Mayor and, with Leslie Stephen, back to London to St. Paul's, where you hear Church or Liddon preach; or, if you prefer it, to Spurgeon's tabernacle or to the City Temple to hear Dr. Parker; or to the Theatre and Irving-or Nellie Farren-and thence back to the Savile, or the Art's Club or the Garrick where you may sup perhaps in company with Stevenson, Henley, Henry James; or to Westminster where you may watch Parnell, Bradlaugh, Randolph Churchill, playing their parts in the tragi-comedy. Of course, if you have a previous engagement at Buckingham Palace, you will meet others there diversely great; and your wife, if you have the luck to possess one, will wear a bodice cut by Queen Victoria's order to a lowness in the so-called neck to this day, or

up to a few weeks ago, shocking in a Tottenham Police Court.

"These for our greatest"-and behind them are Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Newman, Mill, Clough, Kingsley, Martineau; while among them move Anthony Trollope and "Ouida," Froude, Freeman, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, Frith and Whistler, Burne Jones, Ford Madox Brown, with other strange ghosts-Kinglake, Burton of The Arabian Nights, Livingstone, James Thomson of The City of Dreadful Night, Laurence Oliphant, Coventry Patmore, Miss Braddon. I mix them at haphazard as they pass across the mind's eye's retina: but the Victorian stage was a crowded one anyhow.

III

And I grant you how much of a stage it all seems in review: how far removed even for those of us who can look back wistfully to the old theatre, the comfortable stalls! I seem to stand again gazing on that white table, and to see Disraeli with his eyeglass nearing the edge and tottering over to the tune of something from Gilbert and Sullivan. The Victorian Age is done; it is passing back into history even during this hour of yours which I occupy, who have seen numbers of these men and women and even been privileged to converse with some few of them; or rather, to listen and drink in admiration of John Bright's exquisite voice softly repeating bad poetry by the fireplace of the Reform Club Smoking Room; of Meredith, at his own board, dragging spoons and forks towards him to illustrate over a bottle of Château Neuf du Pape, the disposition of Napoleon's force at Austerlitz.

They have all gone over the edge of the table, these figures so commanding in their day; and the Victorian Age, upon which some of you already shoot back the light shafts of your ridicule, is a monument, closed as definitely as any epoch in history can be closed.

For actually of course no epoch in history ever had a definite beginning or a definite end. Even of the Christian Era itself men were whispering surmises,

magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo

before and after it stole on them so quietly as it did: and it yet may (I say it reverently and with conviction) withdraw itself from an unworthy world "like a thief in the night" with as soft a footfall as it came. Men and women did not change their habits, opinions, natures, in 1837 or again in 1901, and what you laugh at as "Victorian" includes a great deal that we laughed at as "Early Victorian" or, later, as "Mid-Victorian"; and your aversion (say) for the Crystal Palace or Frith's Derby Day, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, or, if you will, the novels we poor fellows wrote in the 'nineties, is itself, and while you feel it, passing and growing incorporate in the tragicomedy which the more it changes the more is the same thing. Forgive me if in this, and quite in the Victorian manner, I stress the obvious. I grant you the Victorian Age is closed: definitely closed, if you will, by the late War: that you can view it, with its many oddities and certain glaring sins, yourselves shut off as I was in my Camera Obscura. But I greatly desire to warn you against the habit of viewing things so; of parcelling theology, history, literature, what-not into periods, and so excluding a sense of life's continuous variety, energy, flow. These Victorians were your grandfathers and fathers; they built this Lacedæmon which, after