He remembered his graduate school advisor, white-haired Professor Alice Tyler, at the beginning of her first lecture on the Victorians saying, This is the period of American history I just hate to teach. When asked why, she said, It’s so depressing.
Victorians in America, she explained, were nouveaux riches who had no guidelines for what to do with all their sudden wealth and growth. What was depressing about them was their ugly gracelessness: the gracelessness of someone who has outgrown his own codes of self-regulation.
They didn’t know how to relate to money. That was the problem. It was partly the new post-Civil War Industrial Revolution. Fortunes were being made in steel, lumber, cattle, machinery, railroads and land. Everywhere one looked new innovations were creating fortunes where there was nothing before. Cheap labor was pouring in from Europe. No income taxes and no social codes really forced a sharing of the wealth.
After scrambling for their lives to get it, they couldn’t just give it away. And so the whole thing became involuted.
That’s a good word, involuted. Twisted in upon itself like the curves of their ornamental woodwork and the paisley patterns of their fabrics. Victorian men with beards. Victorian women with long involuted dresses. He could see them walking among the trees. Stiff, somber. It was all a pose.
He remembered elderly Victorians who had been nice to him as a child. It was a niceness that set him on edge. They were trying to improve him. It was expected that he would benefit from their attention. The Victorians always took themselves seriously, and the thing they took most seriously of all was their code of morality, or virtue, as they liked to call it. The Victorian aristocrats knew what quality was and defined it very carefully for persons with a less fortunate upbringing than their own.
He got an image of them standing back of Rigel’s shoulder at breakfast this morning endorsing every word Rigel said. They would have, too. That superiority Rigel asserted this morning was exactly the pose they would have affected.
You can duplicate it perfectly by pretending you’re a king of some European country, preferably England or Germany. Your subjects are devoted and demanding of you. You must show respect to your own station in life. It is not permitted that your inner personal feelings be publicly displayed. Your whole Victorian purpose in life is to capture and maintain that pose.
The tormented children of the Victorians often spoke of their morality as Puritanism but this really slanders the Puritans. The Puritans were never the gaudy, fraudulent, ornamental peacocks the Victorians were. Puritan moral codes were as simple and unadorned as their houses and clothes. And they had a certain beauty because, in their early period at least, the Puritans really believed in them.
It wasn’t from Puritans but from contemporary Europe that the Victorians got their moral inspiration. They thought they followed the highest English standards of morality, but the English morality they looked up to wasn’t anything Shakespeare would have recognized. Like Victoria herself, it was more out of the German Romantic tradition than anything English.
Smug posing was the essence of their style. That’s what these mansions were, poses — turrets and gingerbread and ornamental cast iron. They did it to their bodies with bustles and corsets. They did it to their whole social and psychic lives with impossible proprieties of table manners and speech and posture and sexual repression. Their paintings captured it perfectly — expressionless, mindless, cream-skinned ladies sitting around ancient Greek columns, draped in ancient Greek robes, in perfect form and posture, except for one breast hanging out, which no one noticed, presumably, because they were so elevated and so pure.
And they called it quality.
For them the pose was quality. Quality was the social corset, the ornamental cast iron. It was a quality of manners and egotism and suppression of human decency. When Victorians were being moral, kindness wasn’t anywhere in sight. They approved whatever was socially fashionable and suppressed or ignored anything that was not.
The period ended when, after having defined for all time what Truth and Virtue and Quality are, the Victorians and their Edwardian successors sent an entire generation of children into the trenches of the First World War on behalf of these ideals. And murdered them. For nothing. That war was the natural consequence of Victorian moral egotism. When it was over the children who survived never got tired of laughing at Charlie Chaplin comedies of those elderly people with the silk hats and too many clothes and noses up in the air. Young people of the twenties read Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald, drank bootleg gin, danced tangos into the night, drove fast roadsters, made illicit love, called themselves a lost generation, and never wanted anything to remind them of Victorian morality again.
Ornamental cast-iron. If you hit it with a sledgehammer it doesn’t bend. It just shatters into ugly, coarse fragments. The intellectual social reforms of this century just shattered those Victorians. All that’s left of them now is ugly fragments of their ornamental cast-iron way of life turning up at odd places, such as these mansions and in Rigel’s talk this morning.
Instead of improving the world forever with their high-flown moral codes they did just the opposite: left the world a moral vacuum we’re still living in. Rigel too. When Rigel starts all that breakfast oratory about morals he’s just blowing hot air. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s just trying to imitate a Victorian because he thinks it sounds good.
Phædrus had told Rigel he couldn’t answer Rigel’s question because it was too difficult, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. It could be done, but not with direct answers. Clever, hip-shot answers have to come out of the culture you’re living in and the culture we’re living in doesn’t have any quick answer to Rigel. To answer him you have to go all the way back to fundamental meanings of what is meant by morality and in this culture there aren’t any fundamental meanings of morality. There are only old traditional social and religious meanings and these don’t have any real intellectual base. They’re just traditions.
That’s why Phædrus got such a weary feeling from all this. All the way back to the beginning. That’s where he had to go.
Because Quality is morality. Make no mistake about it. They’re identical. And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world. The world is primarily a moral order. But it’s a moral order that neither Rigel nor the posing Victorians had ever, in their wildest dreams, thought about or heard about.
8
The idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value sounds impossible at first. Only objects are supposed to be real. Quality is supposed to be just a vague fringe word that tells what we think about objects. The whole idea that Quality can create objects seems very wrong. But we see subjects and objects as reality for the same reason we see the world right-side up although the lenses of our eyes actually present it to our brains upside down. We get so used to certain patterns of interpretation we forget the patterns are there.
Phædrus remembered reading about an experiment with special glasses that made users see everything upside down and backward. Soon their minds adjusted and they began to see the world normally again. After a few weeks, when the glasses were removed, the subjects again saw everything upside down and had to relearn the vision they had taken for granted before.