Books: Retroactive Iconoclasm

VICTORIAN MINDS by Gertrude Himmelfarb. 397 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

The history of ideas, like etymology, is often regarded as just a game. Most of the time, the concerned man is satisfied to understand current meaning and usage, whether of ideas or of words, without worrying about origins. Enough to say that it's spinach, and the hell with what the Persians called it.* But intellectual history is really a game with serious consequences. In running down the genealogy of contemporary doctrines and institutions, the intellectual historian is likely to challenge their legitimacy, their reputations and ultimately their power to convince and control men.

In Victorian Minds, a splendid successor to her Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Gertrude Himmelfarb, history professor at the City University of New York, drops no immediate earthshakers. But her aims and her methods are combative—to contest the historians' encrusted misreading? and misinterpretations of half a dozen period intellectuals whose thought and work still prop up the creaky ideologies of the Atomic Age. Her definition of "Victorian" is wide; her subjects range in time from Edmund Burke, who died in 1797, to John Buchan, who lived until 1940. In influence, they range from the mighty John Stuart Mill to the gossipy James Anthony Froude, pilot fish to Carlyle.

Gladstone v. Disraeli. Author Himmelfarb (who is the wife of Editor-Writer Irving Kristol) is a lucid and frequently sardonic writer. She can be killingly funny as she reviews the historical garbling of England's sweeping Reform Act of 1867, which extended the voting rolls by 90%. History has traditionally assumed and stated that the act was conceived by the Liberal Gladstone and cannily sneaked past a bamboozled Disraeli, the Conservative leader in the House of Commons. The truth of the matter, she writes, was that Gladstone's original proposal did not really go very far toward true suffrage. Disraeli, convinced that the lower classes would vote Conservative, outfoxed Gladstone through every parliamentary maneuver and emerged with a broadening of the right to vote far beyond anything that the cautious Liberals had thought tolerable. But Gladstone did not dare vote against reform. He accepted the whole package, he said, "as I would assent to cut off my leg rather than lose my life."

Historians, alas, have understood only that liberals are by definition progressive, and conservatives reactionary, and so, says Miss Himmelfarb, they have steadfastly indulged in the most exquisite contortions in trying to credit the Reform Act to Gladstone.