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Style Over Substance
| Article
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10848 |
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Book World
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| Issue
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7 / 1986 |
4,044 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth Minogue
Kenneth Minogue teaches at the London School of Economics. |
MARRIAGE AND MORALS AMONG THE VICTORIANS
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Knopf
253 pp.
The title of the book derives from the first essay; others deal with such figures as Bentham, Godwin, Disraeli, the Webbs, and Michael Oakeshott, and such topics as social Darwinism and the Bloomsbury group. Nearly all of this is familiar Himmelfarb territory, and she deals with it in a masterly way. There are plenty of plums in the form of witty of bizarre remarks, and the whole might be thought merely popular. But then, intellectual history is, in this case, not quite the point. The real theme is a continuous moral argument.
We may immediately grasp it, I think, if we contrast Edmund Burke's eighteenth-century vision of society as a mysterious chain of generations each touching the next, with the moral sensibility which dominates our time. Burke's view is found in many passages of the Reflections on the Revolution in France and may be represented by such remarks as:
By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.
Himmelfarb herself quotes in the introduction that other famous passage about "the decent drapery of life." All such passages reveal a distinctively English "moral imagination" with which we may contrast the brutal twentieth-century simplicity of John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead." It was, apparently, the economist Joseph Schumpeter who characterized this as a "childless vision," but many others have connected it with Keynes' homosexuality; or at least, they have done so since his inclination in this direction became in recent times a matter of public knowledge. No one, of course is suggesting that homosexuality always entails this or any other particular moral view, but Himmelfarb is particularly concerned with a kind of hedonistic repudiation of moral seriousness in some influential circles of British life which first crystallized around the turn of the century and in which a certain kind of homosexual sensibility played a central part. In our day, other circumstances tempt some people to affirm that in the long run we are all dead: namely, the possibility of nuclear annihilation. But whether it is this possibility
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