It is those who injure women who get the most kindness from them. (William Thackeray, Vanity Fair ) Philip Davis, The Victorians , p. 299. Va
Postagens
As she [Margaret Oliphant] argues in a piece on the art of autobiography (...), those who had kept themselves intact had intense personal memories, were emotionally single-minded. But the woman who has married and has children finds her experience overtaken, confused, and yet also made dense by the sucessive variety of claims, the unceasing busyness of a life which is no longer simply one's own. Perhaps, Mrs. Oliphant tried to persuaded herself, that was why Charlotte Brontë's work seemed much more powerful than her own: it had the intense yearning and frustration of the single woman, on the verge of fantasy. And yet, she added, "I have had far more experience and, I think, a fuller conception of life." (Philip Davis, The Victorians , p. 245)
She had seen enough to suspect that the world was a more complicate system than she had preconceived. There was not that strong and rude simplicity in its organization which she had supposed. The characters were more various, the motives more mixed, the classes more blended, the elements of each more subtle and diversified, than she had imagined...The consequences had outlived the causes, as costumes survives opinions. Sybil , Disraeli Philip Davis, The Victorians , pp.292.
It is of course Dickens who most acutely imagines what it would be like to be an illiterate creature in a world full of letters, signs and advertisements: "It must be a strange thing to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of the streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language - to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo does think, at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? ( Bleak House , 1853, ch. 16) (Philip Davis, The Victorians , pp. 234-5)
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Yet increasingly throughout the nineteenth century, whatever the actual achievements of the poets, the name "Poetry" too often became a vague short-hand term for a lost lyrical directness of first-person feeling, an ideal of Romantic transcendentalism that was seemingly no more, alongside other religious and spritual losses. In its place appeared an onstensibly smaller, more domesticated burgeois world. The close relation between the world of the realistic novel and the circunstances of its middle-class readers, the authorial reassurance offered by the detail sense of an automatically placeable context, seemed to some reviewrs, even in the 1860s, to be a poor replacement for the leap of connective imagination necessary to the reading of the poetry. (Philip Davis, The Victorians , p.225)
(...) George Henry Lewis specifically dismissed the idea of romantic genius as something utterly special and apart: it was not that genius differed from common humanity in suffering more, it differed only in being able to give that suffering greater expression (...). Art was not to be separated off from the full range of common, contemporary life. Philip Davis, The Victorians , p. 213.
Evolutionary theory meant not expecting absolute boundary lines between thinking and seeing, or between memory and hallucination. (...) in an essay on "The Dream as Revelation" later cited by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), [James] Sully described how in sleep, evolution is reversed and adults go back to the groudwork of their life, in a primitive animal immersion in bodily sensation. Philip Davis, The Victorians , p. 189.
Followers of the socialist and philanthropist mill-owner Robert Owen (1771-1858) would claim that human beings where wholly the products of their social enviroment. But to Idealists such as T.H. Green, the act of reflection upon ourselves offered a point from which we cannot and need not simply be identical with our histories, the amoral sum of our experiences and inheritances. To Green, the thoughts and influences that pass through our passive minds are not yet ours , and are never wholly us , until and unless the consciousness that present us to ourselves accepts them as such. (Philip Davis, The Victorians , p. 182, grifos do texto)
What Feurbach offered was a rule of religious translation. God did not make man in His own image: it was the other way round, we created God out of human qualities and human needs. Human beings unconsciously projected upon their God their own fragile ideals, to give Justice and Mercy and Love a surer form and a more permanent reality, outside those shelves. It was this idea of alienation - the projecting upon another of what really belonged to ourselves - which so attracted Marx to Feurbach. Philip Davis, The Victorians , p. 147.
Together with Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (1903), Eminent Victorians is one of the major works from the generation immediately suceeding the Victorians that helped to give the word "Victorian" that heavy sinky feeling which so often still accompanies it. We might perhaps speak of a "Renaissance" cast of mind or say that some phenomenon was essentially "Romantic", but neither of these descriptors has the derogatory force that "typically Victorian" has carried from at least 1918. (Philip Davis, The Victorians , p.1)
Why then, asks Ruskin, is the nineteenth century an age in which painting seems to have less and less interest and more and more concentration on what in previous times had been merely the natural background? A medieval knight or monk looking at modern painting would ask: why do those people now spend the whole their lives making pictures of trees and clouds and bits of stones and runlets of waters, instead of gods and saints and heroes? In the struggle to get into right relation with the universe, there are for Ruskin two opposite and yet related errors: the first "that of caring for man only; and for the rest of universe, little or not at all"; the other, "that of caring for the universe only; - for man, not at all." It is the second, he says, which "in a measure, is the error of modern science." It is the error of modern art too, if we lose trust in ourselves and our place in the universe. Philip Davis, The Victorians , p. 81
