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.

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.

-Isfanakh.

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