Unity vs. Toleration

76 REVIEW: UNITY VS. TOLERATION John A. Lester, Jr. Journey Through Despair 1880-1914. Princeton : I967. $6.00. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture T.S. Eliot, while attempting to define those conditions which enable a civilization to flourish, stated that an excess of unity may be due to barbarism and hence lead to tyranny. At the same time, an excess of division may be due to decadence and may just as surely result in a tyranny of the onanlstlc Imagination where there is no permanence, bur only a succession of styles. In one sense, every culture has a choice of its own peculiar tyranny - that of primitive oppression or that of an overripe decadence during which excess Is tolerated precisely because It is excessive. What Eliot has accomplished, albeit unwittingly, is a remarkable polarization involving unity and toleration as its termini. An unfortunate difficulty stems from the fact that the period of literary transition under scrutiny in John Lester's Journey Through Despair exhibits a remarkable will to unity (manifested in British Imperialism, the formation of the Boy Scouts, etc) that co-exists along with the toleration of dandified affectation and the ldlosyncracles of styllzatlon.^ Lester shows us conclusiv lvely that any vision of the fln-de-slecle is remarkably paradoxical : obviously its cry of despair, .like that from the Munch painting. Is a far cry from Marxian Entfremdung. It Is for this reason, beyond all others, that the history-ofldeas approach limits rather than helps Lester's accomplishment. To put it most bluntly, something happened to history In the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Rather than a linear notion of time that would Include the traditional categories of causality and contiguity temporality Itself Is stylized as a function of human consciousness. Of course, Bergson coming to the British via T.E. Hulme formalized this change, but any reader of late nineteenth century philosophy or viewer of Impressionist visual art (characterized by a remarkable disappearance of watches and clocks from the canvas) would be able to detect the beginnings of Interest In the eventual redemption of time and space. It was a change that would come to fruition on surrealist landscapes, cubism, and modern poetry. If there arises a discrepancy between the historical succession of events and the alteration of styles so that life Imitates art rather than the other way around, then the study of history becomes confused with the study of art as Nietzsche suggested In a book whose title tells all: The Genealogy of Morals. By refusing to consider the numsasa·* styllzatlons of Victorian problems that WOXXSKb- during the f ln-de-slecle - one thinks immediately of the way In which Matthew Arnold transformed a religious figure, St. Paul, Into a castrated culture hero Lester makes the crucial mistake of taking so much literature of the eighties and nineties as "sincere" expressions of Victorian anxieties. This "angst-lflcatlon" of late Victorian literature means that Lester must start where both Barbara Charlesaorth's Dark Passages and Wlngfleld-Stratford's The Victorian Sunset commence - In the darkness of doubt: 77 To know that there Is an eternal truth consonant to man's being, and to know that man Is gifted with a faculty capable of perceiving at least a glimmer of that truth - these were the necessary axioms, and both were, or appeared to be, substantially demolished In the years between 1880 and 1914. Most of us Victorians have been In this kingdom before and are only too familiar with the difficulties encountered on the pilgrimage through the landscape of despair. The Journey Through Despair, although commencing In the darkness of the new relativity that challenged man·s age-long search for truth In the nineteenth century, moves rapidly to those responses - emotional. Intellectual, and Imaginative - with which late nineteenth century writers confronted the new sadness of their world. Although Lester documents the despair of the period very well, his tendency to believe that literature Is the direct expression of the emotional convictions of a people clouds the evidence . For example, he sees the growth of a children's literature In the works of Stevenson, Barrle, and Kenneth Grahame as the response to the pain and...