Books: Retroactive Iconoclasm

(2 of 2)

John v. Harriet. Much of the author's rereading of Victorian history has the twist of human sadness to it. John Stuart Mill may have been the Olympian intellect of his age, but he was capable of literally sacrificing his reason to placate his platonic paramour, Harriet Taylor. Mill saw, for example, that a basic fault of socialist theory was its overemphasis on security or, as he put it, "what is gained for positive enjoyment by the mere absence of uncertainty." Harriet had once thought so, too, but she changed her mind between the first and second editions of Mill's Principles of Political Economy. So her admirer, though protesting pitiably that she had scuttled ''the strongest part of the argument," dutifully rewrote the sentence to proclaim that socialism would bring "an end to all anxiety concerning the means of subsistence; and this would be much gained for human happiness."

At least Mill knew what he was arguing about, which put him one up on the usual Victorian intellectuals, who regarded high birth and "common sense" as qualifications enough to pass judgment on anything. A Cambridge don named Henry Fawcett announced after dinner: "I am interested in Socrates, and want to know more about him, so I am thinking of giving a lecture upon him." When another don asked him if he had ever "read Socrates' works" Fawcett replied, "No, but I mean to."

The Greatest Happiness. The author's taste for retroactive iconoclasm leads her now and then into dubious reasoning, as when she tries to tidy up the reputation of the post-Victorian novelist-politician John Buchan. Buchan was a classic Blimp—parochial, priggish and bigoted—whose certainty of the natural racial superiority of Christian Englishmen came with the franchise. Miss Himmelfarb passes oft this deadly blindness as mere clubmanship, "both too common and too passive to be scandalous"—forgetting that it was such passivity that permitted Hitler's slaughterous variations on the theme.

But for most of Victorian Minds, the reader can only be grateful. It is useful, after all, for welfare-staters and all other ostensible believers in "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" to be reminded that Jeremy Bentham, the man who popularized that phrase, was primarily interested in the greatest profit for Jeremy Bentham, and that his utilitarian creed can serve nicely as a justification for, say, mass rape or an occasional bit of cannibalism.