ABSTRACT
Spencer’s personal life was often a matter of pretence and mimicry. In the realm of fancy he could imitate his father and his uncles. ey were earnest dogmatic men who never spoke of frivolities such as royal personages, courts, bishops or lords. It was not only the great who were beneath their notice. As Herbert mentioned at the beginning of An Autobiography, his family was not prone to gossip. By this he did not mean that they failed to express unfavourable opinions of others. On the contrary, Herbert remembered distinctly that no one had a good word to say about his uncle John, a solicitor, who was thought to be selfi sh. e lack of gossip simply meant that no one in the family indulged in the kind of idle prattle about acquaintances or about the amusing foibles of relations. ere were no
human details to lighten the weight of the never-ceasing serious discussion and argument. It was not only people that were missing as subjects of conversation; no cultural topics were canvassed. e family omitted poetry, fi ction, drama and history from their agenda. “ eir conversation ever tended towards the impersonal.” It avoided what Herbert later called the “aesthetic” of life. at is, they could not see gentle features in the visages of either real or imaginary persons, but concentrated on the skeleton underneath: the simple principles that they believed underlay and shaped both human behaviour and the material world. When the uncles brandished a symbol it was a political sign, not an artistic one. In his own later search for principles, and in his use of political symbols, Herbert was true to these family traits, but at other levels he passively rejected “nonconformity” as lacking in subtlety and beauty, or even as plainly false. ere were political implications as well in that he could not espouse the extreme Protestant values of independence and individuality that have often been ascribed to him.
