ABSTRACT
The first half of the reign of Queen victoria had been the heyday of the Victorian sages: Carlyle had spoken powerfully on social and political questions, Newman on theology, Ruskin on art and society. 1 During the second half of the reign Matthew Arnold was trying to speak with a similar authority in advocating the pursuit of 'sweetness and light'. Perhaps the influence of the sages had never been so great as some sympathetic twentieth-century commentators have liked to imagine. Certainly, Anthony Trollope - a representative figure - remarked in his autobiography, written in the mid 1870s, how contemporaries were refusing to be influenced by the pessimism of Carlyle or Ruskin. 'The loudness and extravagance of their lamentations' seemed 'so contrary to the convictions of men who cannot but see how comfort has been increased, how health has been improved, and education extended.' Had the sages been wrong in their warnings? Or was it that society - increasingly urbanized, commercialized, and democratized - now lacked the capacity to accept their guidance because it had become irretrievably corrupted? Materially, as, Trollope emphasized, many late-Victorians were becoming much more satisfied. And satisfaction was a suspect state of mind according to Matthew Arnold, since (as he argued in Culture and Anarchy) culture properly understood 'begets a dissatisfaction'. It was an ideal standard to be earnestly pursued, and yet never to be attained. 'Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming.'
