THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL
665
is also an introduction to Virginia Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen,
after whom the character of Mr. Ramsay was, surprisingly, modeled.
Surprisingly-for it was of Stephen, the Victorian intellectual
par
excellence,
that John Morley said, "His natural kindness of heart,
supported by his passion for reason and fair play, made him the
most considerate and faithful of men," a judgment which other con–
temporaries echoed. What, then, is one to make of the narrow, mean,
vitriolic Mr. Ramsay, who was also the broadminded, enlightened,
good-humored Mr. Stephen, author of some thirty volumes of bio–
graphical and critical works, among them the urbane two-volume
History of English Thought in ·the Eighteenth Century
and the per–
ceptive three-volume
English Utilitarians,
editor of the monumental
Dictionary of English Biography,
and contributor to it of no less
than 378 distinguished articles?
The muckraker, even the sophisticated Lytton Strachey variety
of muckraker, would solve the problem easily enough by creating two
figures, a public Dr. Jekyll and a private Mr. Hyde, of which the
Mr. Hyde would be assumed to be the real person. This technique,
unsatisfactory at best, would be particularly unfortunate in the case
of an intellectual, for whom public and private cannot be so neatly
distinguished, for whom the public man, the thinker, is as essentially
the real person as the private, domestic man. Leslie Stephen was such
an intellectual, by birth, character and vocation. He was, despite the
muckraker, neither a fool, nor a fraud, nor a split personality. He
was all of a piece-a Victorian man of letters.
Virginia Woolf herself never forgot that Mr. Ramsay was Mr.
Stephen, an intellectual whose life and fate were, in large measure,
the life and fate of his mind, and whose private terror was that pe–
culiar to the intellectual profession, the terror of being declared
counterfeit. Mr. Ramsay badgered his wife with the questions: Were
his mental powers weakening? Was his last book as good as his earlier
ones? And he tormented himself with the thought that his writings,
voluminous though they might be, would not survive his lifetime.
Leslie Stephen had similar anxieties. Himself a professional book-re–
viewer, he could not bear, he confessed, to read reviews of his own
books. Before the publication of one of his works, he wrote to a
friend: "I always suffer from a latent conviction that I .am an
im–
poster and that somebody will find me out."
