Volume 10, Number 6 · March 28, 1968
Mistaken Identity
By Christopher Ricks
Victorian Minds
by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Knopf, 392 pp., $8.95
Gertrude Himmelfarb respects minds that are of two minds. The heroes of Victorian Minds are either men of principled ambiguity or men who effect a change of heart as well as a change of mind. Heroes like Edmund Burke, whose defenses of conservatism are more liberal than liberalism, and who may be the greater as a writer because he is susceptible of a 'double reading.' Or Thomas Malthus, whose second edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population quietly but drastically reversed the argument of his first edition. Or John Stuart Mill, because he had a heavy bear who went with him—'the other John Stuart Mill' who was 'anything but the perfect liberal' and who even had the courage to come in his last years to an open expression of theism. Or Lord Acton, appalled at the doctrine of papal infallibility but refusing to quit the Roman Catholic Church because to do so would be to make out that for the first time the Church was acting wickedly—whereas through all its history it had perpetrated wickedness. Or Walter Bagehot, with his 'divided nature': 'that rare species of the twiceborn who could give proper due to the rights and merits of the once-born.' Or James Anthony Froude, with his 'ambivalent set of motives' toward Thomas Carlyle about whom he wrote with such lacerating candor. Or John Buchan, whose biographies of Montrose and Cromwell emanate from one who is himself a 'complicated man torn by conflicting ideas and emotions.' Or Benjamin Disraeli, whose very opportunism about the Reform Act of 1867 constituted a magnanimity of liberalism scarcely to be found in the Liberal Party.
Review, 2673 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |