in a series of private interviews. Hence Browning,
great as he is, is rather one of the Victorian novelists than wholly of
the Victorian poets. From Ruskin, again, descend those who may be called
the Pre-Raphaelites of prose and poetry.

It is really with this rationalism triumphant, and with the romance of
these various attacks on it, that the study of Victorian literature
begins and proceeds. Bentham was already the prophet of a powerful sect;
Macaulay was already the historian of an historic party, before the true
Victorian epoch began. The middle classes were emerging in a state of
damaged Puritanism. The upper classes were utterly pagan. Their clear
and courageous testimony remains in those immortal words of Lord
Melbourne, who had led the young queen to the throne and long stood
there as her protector. "No one has more respect for the Christian
religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into
private life----" What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne
became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is
well mirrored in his novels--for he was a man who felt at home in
mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all the
accidents that must always eat the edges of any systematic
circumference, it may still be said that the Utilitarians held the fort.

Of the Oxford Movement what remains most strongly in the Victorian Epoch
centres round the challenge of Newman, its one great literary man. But
the movement as a whole had been of great significance in the very
genesis and make up of the society: yet that significance is not quite
easy immediately to define. It was certainly not aesthetic ritualism;
scarcely one of the Oxford High Churchmen was what we should call a
Ritualist. It was certainly not a conscious reaching out towards Rome:
except on a Roman Catholic theory which might explain all our unrests by
that dim desire. It knew little of Europe, it knew nothing of Ireland,
to which any merely Roman Catholic revulsion would obviously have
turned. In the first instance, I think, the more it is studied, the more
it would appear that it was a movement of mere religion as such. It was
not so much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma.
For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not
mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought. It was a revolt
against the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which m