The Life of Ideas
Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians.
by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Knopf. 253 pp. $19.95.
There is nothing academic about Gertrude Himmelfarb’s splendid collection of essays, Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians. Unlike those intellectual historians whose pleasure is watching ideas slowly gliding down the vistas of history, splitting apart, combining and recombining, banging together and repelling or swallowing or exploding each other like organisms with lives of their own, Miss Himmelfarb cares about ideas as they have to do with the lives of those who think them. How is this or that idea actually lived? What experience gave rise to it? What kind of social order issues from it? Does this idea or that, whatever its proponents’ claims for it, really tell us anything about how to live?
Consider, for instance, the welter of notions that make up the ethos of that group of early 20th-century writers, painters, and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group. The children and grandchildren of an interrelated aristocracy of intellectuals, social reformers, and philanthropists, the “Bloomsberries” turned upside down the strenuous, civic-minded moral and social ethic to which their parents had themselves clung after rejecting the evangelical religion of their own highminded parents. Following the message of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica—that the highest goods are “a total commitment to ‘personal affections’ and ‘aesthetic enjoyments’” for their own sakes—the Bloomsbury group made a religion of art and a cult of the artist, as each of them deemed himself to be.
Theirs was an art with a difference, Miss Himmelfarb explains in “A Genealogy of Morals: From Clapham to Bloomsbury” (originally published in COMMENTARY, February 1985). The novel, conceived by Virginia Woolf as a species of poetry, broke away from the representation and interpretation of social reality and strove to become “self-sufficient, a thing-in-itself.” Similarly, painting, in the hands of Roger Fry, created “constructions which do not stand for something else, but appear to have ultimate value.” Bodied forth in this art was “an inspiration by which to live”—an inspiration that, not surprisingly, “was entirely private and personal, not a way to live in society but a way to live with oneself, with one’s own feelings and sensibilities.”
As for artists, according to the Bloomsbury group their role was to cultivate those “timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion” from which such inspiration flows. “Being good” rather than “doing good” was their calling, and it made them of greater worth than ordinary folk who followed custom and habit rather than the “vast variety and turmoil of human impulses.” And so the Bloomsberries, like the gods in “The Lotos Eaters” on their bed of asphodel, formed a community of amoral superior beings, who among themselves perfected those “personal affections” that completed G.E. Moore’s conception of the highest good.
And what were the personal relations that gave these superior beings such worth? The Higher Sodomy is what they themselves called the “compulsive and promiscuous” homosexuality that shuffled and reshuffled their relationships in a variety of permutations amazing even to them. And this behavior could have a particularly nasty edge, as in the fate of Angelica Bell. Her husband, David Garnett, had before she was born been the lover of her father, Duncan Grant, and had tried to seduce her mother, Vanessa Stephen, who was married to Clive Bell when she had the affair with Duncan Grant that produced poor Angelica, with her almost satirical name. As with some obscure antinomian sect, this forbidden behavior only served to intensify the Bloomsberries’ sense of special election. For Miss Himmelfarb it points up the “callowness, conceit, and complacency” of their ideas.
_____________
Not only does action often disclose the ultimate tendency of ideas, but—conversely—understanding and judging what people do often requires knowing the idea that informs their behavior. What people think they are doing, what they intend, is part of the meaning of what they do. Consider the case of the five eminent couples Miss Himmelfarb discusses in this book’s title essay, a rejoinder to Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Eminent but “irregular”: the Thomas Carlyles and the John Ruskins never consummated their marriages; George Eliot and G.H. Lewes lived together unmarried because he could not get a divorce; John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor grew intimate (if chastely so) long before her first husband died and they could marry; and Dickens—the great practitioner of the family novel-left his wife and the mother of his nine children for a young actress.
To Phyllis Rose (as summarized by Miss Himmelfarb) these couples exemplify the universal truth that marriage is a power relationship; for their response to that circumstance she most admires Jane Carlyle, who achieved equality by perpetual resistance and rebellion, and George Eliot and G.H. Lewes, who sidestepped the issue in their happy cohabitation, unencumbered by marriage or children and, because of their social ostracism, unburdened by dinner parties, weekend guests, and each other’s friends. “Treated as sinful lovers,” writes Mrs. Rose, “they remained lovers.” By making the relationship a matter only of personal commitment, not of law or convention, they reestablished morality “on a more serious, a more existential, basis.”
Miss Himmelfarb rightly finds these judgments mistaken and grotesque. Jane Carlyle stands out not for her rebellion but for the extraordinary “love and devotion that transcended all the difficulties and frustrations” of marriage to her impotent, cranky, difficult, sometimes cruel genius of a husband. As for Phyllis Rose’s estimate of George Eliot and Lewes—that it is “liberating not to have children or friends, to shun society and public life”—Miss Himmelfarb thinks it “as extraordinary a vision of marital (or extramarital) bliss as it is of human freedom.”
Worse, it is not at all the vision these eminent Victorians themselves held of what they were doing—something Phyllis Rose would have known had she attended to their social and moral ideas rather than imposing her own sexual politics on them. Far from flaunting their “irregularity,” they viewed it as an unfortunate lapse, to be regularized if possible or else concealed, for they subscribed wholly, almost obsessively, to a morality rooted in law and custom. And like other eminent Victorians, they did so out of their beliefs about the sources of meaningfulness and dignity in their own lives. “Feeling guilty about the loss of their religious faith, suspecting that the loss might expose them to the temptations of immorality and the perils of nihilism, anticipating the Nietzschean dictum that if God does not exist everything is permitted, they were determined to make of morality a substitute for religion,” Miss Himmelfarb writes. “And having forfeited the sanctions of religion, they were thrown back all the more on the sanctions of convention and law.”
_____________
Such principles proved adequate to endow the lives of these figures with worth and purpose. But other Victorians, similarly unsettled by the crisis of belief that Miss Himmelfarb takes as central to the era’s intellectual life, looked elsewhere for authoritative precepts by which to live as individuals and in groups. One characteristic answer, widely persuasive even today, is a faith in rationality that Miss Himmelfarb finds naive at best. As a case in point she holds up, in “Bentham’s Utopia,” the plan devised by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) for “managing” England’s paupers, which unfolds step by rational step to a totalitarian conclusion made grimmer by Bentham’s sincere incomprehension of what makes life human.
Bentham’s totalitarianism did not flinch from the prospect of incarcerating over a tenth of England’s population in prisonlike “Houses of Industry” owned by shareholders and run by efficient, profit-seeking independent contractors who would turn the ceaseless labor of the dross of society if not into gold then at least into sterling. People would be born into such institutions and die out of them, Bentham imagined. As he grew enthusiastic over the reasonableness of his scheme, he convinced himself of the positive felicity of the pauper’s life—healthy, secure, clean, and with so rudimentary an education for the children that they would never imagine there was more to want in life (especially since they would work from the age of four and be separated from their fathers and other elders who could tell them what they were missing). Perhaps, Miss Himmelfarb mildly observes, utilitarianism—“a philosophy that professes to be eminently rational and pragmatic, untainted by any metaphysical or religious assumptions”—could stand a thoroughgoing reappraisal if it could produce, through the pen of its founder, a monstrosity like this.
Similarly anti-humanistic is the utopian rationalism of William Godwin (1756-1836), with its belief that men are perfectible and can become totally free of such irrational, misleading impulses as self-love, prejudice, competitiveness—from passion, period. For Godwin, to live entirely according to reason means the “total extirpation of the infirmities of our nature”: say goodbye to disease, fatigue, melancholy, lust, perhaps even to mortality. The only impediment is government—because any government, no matter how just, corrupts our nature. Once liberated from institutions of any kind, human perfectibility will assert itself.
No wonder, says Miss Himmelfarb, that under the spell of Godwin’s philosophy young men like Wordsworth and Coleridge saw in the French Revolution only the pangs of the rebirth of human nature out of “custom, law, and statute” into the light of Reason—this, even after the Revolution had turned bloodthirsty with the execution of the king and the queen and the declaration of war on England.
“The humanist,” writes Miss Himmelfarb, “accepting human nature with all its infirmities, recognizing . . . that men are always ‘creatures of passion,’ seeks to reform social institutions so as to make men more rational and more virtuous. . . . It is the utopian who is so dissatisfied with human nature, so obsessed with a vision of perfection, that he can only seek to transform human nature and social institutions. . . . Perfect (or near-perfect) men . . . do not require any institutions.” Such utopianism is “a dangerous illusion which tempts us, in the name of the best, to reject the better and end up with the worse.”
_____________
Godwin grew up in a strange Calvinist sect—the Sandemanians—for whom reason rather than faith or works was the source of salvation: his political theory did not come out of nowhere. After his year-long affair with Mary Wollstonecraft taught him that the infirmities of our nature hold their own pleasures, he looked more kindly on such imperfect human consolations as sentiment and Whiggery. But another of Miss Himmelfarb’s rationalists, the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb (1858-1943), was driven by her own early experience in the opposite direction; she increasingly moved toward making a religion of reason.
Torn between the energetic, rationalistic practicality of her beloved, life-affirming, venture-capitalist father and the gloomy, life-denying, religious austerity of her self-concentrated mother, Beatrice Potter reconciled the two tendencies in her marriage and lifelong intellectual partnership with Sidney Webb. Sidney had all her father’s unselfconscious, optimistic, scientific-minded energy, aimed at getting results. But with his “tiny, tadpole body,” his “Jewish nose,” his “underbred” accent, he was profoundly unattractive to her, especially by comparison with the seductive cabinet minister Joseph Chamberlain whom she had rejected despite her passionate love for him, since his idea of marriage would have required her to obliterate her own selfhood. Her marriage consequently had its own measure of life-denial, which extended to her ascetic abstemiousness, her stingy, seminar-like dinner parties, her distrust of emotions and of the “average sensual man.”
But the reconciliation was not perfect. All the selfless labor shoulder-to-shoulder with Sidney on behalf of socialism—the research, the writing, the lecturing, the ceaseless behind-the-scenes effort to persuade politicians and opinion-makers to her way of thinking—finally was not enough. Her Fabian science of society might well show how society should be organized to a particular end; it could not, however, determine what the end should be. For that she needed a faith, which, sadly, she ultimately found in the Soviet Union, with its “professed faith” in science, its “moral uplift,” and its Communist party like a “‘religious order’ complete with ‘strict disciplines’ and ‘vows of obedience and poverty.’” Despite purges, Moscow trials, and the rest, she kept that faith till she died in 1943—suggesting that Fabianism had within it something more than the safe, decent, prudent moderation generally taken as its keynote.
_____________
If scientific rationalism is an unsatisfactory guide to ordering society, science by itself is even less useful, despite the continual invocation of its authority by one social theory after another. A prime case in point are the social theories derived from Darwinism, on which Miss Himmelfarb is an established expert. They have had a curious, contradictory evolution, beginning with the crude Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer with its assertion that the struggle for existence ought to rule the social world no less than the natural world, assuring the survival of the fittest. Countering Darwinism’s image of man as a mere combative creature of nature, the poet Tennyson “looked to evolution as the instrument for the redemption of man, the means by which he would rise above nature, would . . . ‘Move upward, working out the beast,/And let the ape and tiger die.’” For Darwin’s great supporter, T.H. Huxley, society worked on a principle opposed to the principle governing nature; its ethical progress depended not on imitating nature but on combating it. And A.R. Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, denied that evolution could account for the development of the human brain or of man’s moral capacity.
The authoritativeness of science evaporates in this debate. And the same may be said today of the furor over sociobiology, a theory associated most notably with Edward O. Wilson of Harvard. Wilson claims that his theory, according to which “human emotions and ethical ideas and practices have been programmed to a substantial degree by natural selection,” reconciles the split between the Two Cultures (to use C.P. Snow’s famous phrase), for it is a theory that blends “biology and the social sciences.” But as Miss Himmelfarb points out, the gap Snow deplored was between science and the humanities, and that gulf is as wide as ever.
In fact, writes Miss Himmelfarb, ethical and social questions require answers not from science, which has little to say about human value, but from the humanities. Too bad, she remarks, that the humanities are now engaged in deconstructing, desocializing, and demoralizing themselves, “stripping them of any recognizable social and human reality.” That is a tendency Miss Himmelfarb resolutely opposes. This wise, humane, and moving book shows how right she is to do so.
_____________
