The Victorians and Ourselves

122 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY ritual and creeds, its taboos and superstitions. He would have to show how this established "folklore" has been growing more and more unsatisfactory in recent decades and has therefore been defended with the more passionate insistence by the elders and medjcine-men of the tribe. But he would also have to show why no new "folklore" has replaced it, because new "folklore" develops only along with new organizations which meet new needs more efficiently than the old organizations. And in Canada we have had no Roosevelt to become· the nucleus of a new social mythology. It would be too much, however, to expect such a book under Institute auspices. For the activities of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs would be part of the "folklore" to be studied. THE VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES* R. K. GoRDON Mr Routh will be remembered by T rinity undergraduates of thirty years ago as a very ljvely member of the staff and as an interesting, energetic lecturer on English, French, and Latin. In recent years he has been known to readers of Th( Year's Work in English Studies as an authority on nineteenth-century literature. This book- its full and rather odd title is Towat·ds the Twen/i(th Cm tury: Essays in the Spiritual Histot·y of the Nineteenth-is solid, learned, and highly interesting. It covers some of the same ground as Mr Routh's shorter and slighter book, Money, Morals and Manners as R(vuzled in Modern Literatur( (1935). Not an ordinary literary history and not a portrayal of the social or political scene, the present volume might stand on the shelf between Professor Elton's Suroey of English Literature, 1830-1880 and Mr G. M. Young's Portrait of an Age. Perhaps it does not quite deserve to be in such good company. It is heavier going and more solemn than the other two books; and its English occasionally lapses into learned jargon of this sort: " a kind of physical vitality, so immaterialised that it fi.nds its proper scope in the superphysical, energising the intellect." *TowanlJ the Twentieth Century: Essays in the Spiritunl History of tM Nineteenth, by H . V. Routh , Cambridge Universi ty Press (Toronto, Macmi11an Co. of Canad a), 1937, $7.00. REVIEWS 123 The book covers the period from Newman's Tracts to Bucler's Way of All Fles/z. It does not supply a clear, confident answer to the question: What is Victorianism? Indeed, one of the merits of Mr Routh's enquiry is that he does not offer us a tag or label to stick on the a,ge. On the contrary, he makes clear its rich variety of doctrines, principles, and ideals by his sketches, admirable, brief, and independent, of the careers and ideas of some of the greatest and most representative Victorian writers. He confines himself to those who have, or who were thought by their contemporaries to have, some claim to be thinkers. Dickens, Thackeray, TroJlope, and other entertainers are, therefore, passed over because they offer "no special guidance on the arts and duties of life." Mr Routh writes for " those who expect more from literature than the pleasures of the imagination and of expressiveness;" and his main purpose, he tells us, is to find help in the Victorian sages for the difficulties of our own day. The results of Mr Routh's search are not always encouraging. Newmanism is dismissed as something fit to be relegated to museums and lecture-rooms. Tennyson is "in the highest sense a failure" (whatever that means); and Browning "is more a sign of the times than an influence in their fulfilment." Carlyle's "failure completes the impression that there was something specially uncongenial and disconcerting in that epoch, from which we perhaps are still suffering." It is not that Mr Routh yields to what he calls the "rather ignoble temptation to belittle the achievement of these geniuses whom we can no longer imitate.': When he speaks of them purely as literary artists, which is not often, he is generous in praise, but his main business is with the value (if any) which their teaching still holds for...