676
PARTISAN REVIEW
for example, as Hume or Kant, he might have developed a system
of metaphysics comparable in its effect upon the history of though'
to the doctrines of either of those thinkers. He was, one might fancy,
formed by nature to be a German professor, and accidentally dropped
into the American forests."
The Victorian essayist had the temperament which Americans
associate not with the literary critic but rather with the cultural an–
thropologist. A variety of beliefs, styles and personalities came under
his purview, and, in the fashion of the anthropologist, he gave them
each the best of his understanding and sympathy. But he never made
the mistake of believing them or accepting them at face value, much
as the anthropologist takes care neither to be contemptuous of the
Zulu nor to be taken in by the Christian. Toward all of his subjects
he displayed the same gentle irreverence, with only the slightest hint
of the superciliousness that betrays the superior man who is above
the battle. Thus Stephen could write, of the greatest mind of
his
time: "Newman is good enough as a writer and ingenious enough as
a sophist to be worth a little examination. I only consider him as a
curiosity." Or he could refer to Hobbes as "the Herbert Spencer of
the seventeenth century," and describe philosophy in general as a
by-product of social evolution and as "the noise that the wheels
make as they go round."
But like the anthropologist, who often harbors behind his fac;ade
of impartiality a whole armory of liberal beliefs and assumptions
(cooperation
is
freedom, freedom is happiness, happiness is democ–
racy ... ), the essayist too had his stock of prejudices, which every
now and then emerged in the rhetoric of the essay. In Stephen's case,
they were expressed by his favorite invectives, "morbid" and "un–
manly." Morbid and unmanly were anything tainted with excessive
sentiment, sensibility, emotion or exoticism. Donne's love poetry was
morbid. Rousseau had a morbid tendency to introspection and a
morbid appetite for happiness. Balzac's lovers were morbidly senti–
mental and morbidly religious. Keats, Shelley and Coleridge were
unmanly. Charlotte Bronte's Rochester and George Eliot's Tito and
Daniel Deronda were all feminine. (A reviewer of Stephen's book
on Eliot corrected what he took to be a typographical error
in
the
description of a male character as womanly.)
Stephen was confident that he himself could never be charged
