Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 1, 2025
We look back with amusement to the Victorians, who put all their goods in the shop window, whose very movements were so far without freedom as to be subservient to the maintenance of uncreased clothing. A regard for "appearances" seemed to regulate action. It was an age of poseurs the age of the "professional air." In that age came into use among doctors "the bedside manner."
He stands for austerity and discipline in thought, style, and diction, for a fine exactness which in his case was compatible with the old passion for the idea of "freedom" no less than with that private, self-communing spirit which the Victorians loved to express. Such a poet as Mr. Maurice Hewlett, antiquarian as he often is in the subjects he treats, is much more modern in spirit.
It is, of course, the easy fashion now to sneer at Victorian standards. To my mind they embody all that is clean and sound in the nation. It does not follow that because Victorians revelled in hideous wall-papers and loved ugly furniture, that therefore their points-of-view were mistaken ones. There are things more important than wall-papers.
A number of the Victorians acknowledged that they lived from choice in London. Browning made Aurora outgrow pastoral verse, and not only reside in London, but find her inspiration there. Francis Thompson and William Henley were not ashamed to admit that they were inspired by London.
It was vigorous because, unlike other American publications, it was not oppressed by competition. Until the laws of international copyright were completed, the latest novels of the Victorians, then at their prime, could be rushed from a steamer, and distributed in editions which were cheap because no royalties had to be paid.
Macaulay and the Mills and all the regular run of the Early Victorians, took it for granted that if Manchester was getting richer, we had got hold of the key to comfort and progress. In this matter he is to be noted in connection with national developments much later; for he thus became the first prophet of the Socialists.
And he might have added Algernon Swinburne, who calls her "the greatest poet who ever was at all." Sappho and these two Victorians, I said to myself. . . . Why just these two? How keen is the cry of elective affinity athwart the ages! The soul, says Plato, divines that which it seeks, and traces obscurely the footsteps of its obscure desire. The footsteps of its obscure desire
There has never been a moment like the present in which there is a complete absence of pride in tradition, which is pleasure in romance. But the reason is simple. Our traditions belong to the pre-Industrial time. The romance of the Victorians was a last glow in the sky. We might even go as far as to read an occult significance into the art of Turner, the great painter of the sunset.
But the final proof that the Victorians were alive by this laughter, can be found in the fact they could manage and master for a moment even the cosmopolitan modern theatre. They could contrive to put "The Bab Ballads" on the stage. To turn a private name into a public epithet is a thing given to few: but the word "Gilbertian" will probably last longer than the name Gilbert.
It is pleasant to think of the Western millionaire, hot from some gridiron of rectangular civilisation, confirming good Victorians in the policy of changing vistas and restful curves.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking