THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL
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which I know to be utterly baseless and which I am yet unable to
dispense by an effort of will"), and the conviction that he was un–
loved and uncared for. The optimistic, science-ravished utilitarian
who contemplated a world free from the slavery of color, the tyranny
of arbitrary power and the subjugation of religion and church, was
wretched, willful and harsh. The man who made a philosophy of
common sense was prostrated by the minor crises of domestic life-a
child late for dinner, an unexpected household expenditure, a vanity
offended. "I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead,"
his
children
once heard him groan in genuine misery, "I wish my whiskers would
grow."
There are different habitats of madness suitable for different
varieties of intelligence and sensibility. There are the super-rational
heights of madness on which may be found, perhaps, an exalted
spirit like Hegel; and there are the irrational depths in which a Dos–
toevsky or Nietzsche may find refuge. Victorian intellectuals dwelled,
for the most part, upon the plains of madness-that deceptively
peaceful countryside where philosophers paraded as journalists, and
writers showed off their Rugby Blues more proudly then their Ox–
ford Firsts. Here lived those scientists and rationalists (Darwin, Hux–
ley, Spencer) who suffered from lifelong illnesses which defied medi–
cal diagnosis and cure; those historians of enlightenment (Maine,
Lecky) who were subject to spells of painful depression; those novel–
ists of domestic comedy (Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray, Meredith)
whose marriages were tragically unhappy; those religious heretics
(Harrison, Morley) who were fanatically orthodox and puritanical
in morals; those successful and wealthy authors (Macaulay, Dickens)
who were obsessed with the fear of bankruptcy; those respectable
moralists (Ruskin, Carlyle) who lived in the shadow of serious sexual
aberrations, and those others (George Eliot, Mill ) who flouted the
most peremptory moral conventions. In this company of "manly and
affectionate fellows" that made up English intellectual society, Ste–
phen was a member in good standing.
