ck. The
most that we can do is to indicate one or two points in which the true
Victorians had a certain resemblance to one another, and were unlike
their successors of our own day. They were more evidently in earnest,
less conscious of themselves, more indifferent to ridicule, more
absorbed in their work. To many of them full work and the cares of
office seemed a necessity of life. It was a typical Victorian who, after
sixteen years of public service, writing a family letter, says, 'I feel
that the interest of business and the excitement of responsibility are
indispensable to me, and I believe that I am never happier than when I
have more to think of and to do than I can manage in a given period'.
Idleness and insouciance had few temptations for them, cynicism was
abhorrent to them. Even Thackeray was perpetually 'caught out' when he
assumed the cynic's pose. Charlotte Bronte, most loyal of his admirers
and critics, speaks of the 'deep feelings for his kind' which he
cherished in his large heart, and again of the 'sentiment, jealously
hidden but genuine, which extracts the venom from that formidable
Thackeray'. Large-hearted and generous to one another, they were ready
to face adventure, eager to fight for an ideal, however impracticable it
seemed. This was as true of Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, and all
the _genus irritabile vatum_, as of the politicians and the men of
action. They made many mistakes; they were combative, often difficult to
deal with. Some of them were deficient in judgement, others in the
saving gift of humour; but they were rarely petty or ungenerous, or
failed from faint-heartedness or indecision. Vehemence and impatience
can do harm to the best causes, and the lives of men like the Napiers
and the Lawrences, like Thomas Arnold and Charles Kingsley, like John
Bright and Robert Lowe, are marred by conflicts which might have been
avoided by more studied gentleness or more philosophic calm. But the
time seemed short in which they could redress the evils which offended
them. They saw around them a world which seemed to be lapped in comfort
or swathed in the dead wrappings of the past, and would not listen to
reasoned appeals; and it would be futile to deny that, by lifting their
voices to a pitch which offends fastidious critics, Carlyle and Ruskin
did sometimes obtain a hearing and kindle a passion which Matthew Arnold
could never stir by his scholarly exhortations to 'sweetness and light'.

But