Victorian Worthies | Page 4

been already created by the energy of Wakefield, and
developed by the wisdom of Parkes and Grey. In distant lands, on
stricken fields less famous but no less perilous, Wellington's men were
applying the lessons which they had learnt in the Peninsula. On distant
seas Nelson's ships were carrying explorers equipped for the more
peaceful task of scientific observation. In this century the highest
mountains, the deepest seas, the widest stretches of desert were to
reveal their secrets to the adventurers who held the whole world for
their playground or field of conquest.
And not only in the great expansion of empire abroad but in the growth
of knowledge at home and the application of it to civil life, there was a
field to employ all the vigour of a race capable of rising to its

opportunities. There is no need to remind this generation of such names
as Stephenson and Herschel, Darwin and Huxley, Faraday and Kelvin;
they are in no danger of being forgotten to-day. The men of letters take
relatively a less conspicuous place in the evolution of the Age; but the
force which they put into their writings, the wealth of their material, the
variety of their lives, and the contrasts of their work, endow the annals
of the nineteenth century with an absorbing interest. While Tennyson
for the most part stayed in his English homes, singing the beauties of
his native land, Browning was a sojourner in Italian palaces and villas,
studying men of many races and many times, exploring the subtleties of
the human heart. The pen of Dickens portrayed all classes of society
except, perhaps, that which Thackeray made his peculiar field. The
historians, too, furnish singular contrasts: the vehement pugnacity of
Freeman is a foil to the serene studiousness of Acton; the erratic career
of Froude to the concentration of Stubbs. The influence exercised on
their contemporaries by recluses such as Newman or Darwin may be
compared with the more worldly activities of Huxley and Samuel
Wilberforce. Often we see equally diverse elements in following the
course of a single life. In Matthew Arnold we wonder at the poet of
'The Strayed Reveller' coexisting with the zealous inspector of schools;
in William Morris we find it hard to reconcile the creative craftsman
with the fervent apostle of social discontent. Perhaps the most notable
case of this diversity is the long pilgrimage of Gladstone which led him
from the camp of the 'stern, unbending Tories' to the leadership of
Radicals and Home Rulers. There is an interest in tracing through these
metamorphoses the essential unity of a man's character. On the other
hand, one cannot but admire the steadfastness with which Darwin and
Lister, Tennyson and Watts, pursued the even tenor of their way.
Again we may notice the strange irony of fortune which drew Carlyle
from his native moorlands to spend fifty years in a London suburb,
while his disciple Ruskin, born and bred in London, and finding fit
audience in the universities of the South, closed his long life in
seclusion amid the Cumbrian fells. So two statesmen, who were at one
time very closely allied, present a similarly striking contrast in the
manner of their lives. Till the age of forty Joseph Chamberlain limited
himself to municipal work in Birmingham, and yet he rose in later life

to imperial views wider than any statesman's of his day. Charles Dilke,
on the other hand, could be an expert on 'Greater Britain' at thirty and
yet devote his old age to elaborating the details of Local Government
and framing programmes of social reform for the working classes of
our towns. Accidents these may be, but they lend to Victorian
biography the charm of a fanciful arabesque or mosaic of varied pattern
and hue.
Eccentrics, too, there were in fact among the literary men of the day,
even as there are in the fiction of Dickens, of Peacock, of George
Meredith. There was Borrow, who, as an old man, was tramping
solitarily in the fields of Norfolk, as earlier he wandered alone in wild
Wales or wilder Spain. There was FitzGerald, who remained all his life
constant to one corner of East Anglia, and who yet, by the precious
thread of his correspondence, maintained contact with the great world
of Victorian letters to which he belonged.
Some wandered as far afield as Asia or the South Seas; some buried
themselves in the secluded courts of Oxford and Cambridge and
became mythical figures in academic lore. Not many were to be found
within hail of London or Edinburgh in these forceful days. Brougham,
the most omniscient of reviewers, with the most ill-balanced of minds,
belongs more properly to the preceding age, though he lived to 1868;
and it is from this age that the novelists probably