The Virtuous Victorian
WHEN Miss Amy Lowell, in her essay on Émile Verhaeren, says that the influence of Zola on the younger writers of France and Belgium was necessary "to down the long set of sentimental hypocrisies known in England as 'Victorian,'" she repeats a formula which has been in popular use for many years, and to which we attach no very exact significance. "Early-Victorian," "mid-Victorian," we use the phrases glibly, and without being aware that the mental attitude to which we refer is sometimes not Victorian at all, but Georgian. Take, for example, that fairly famous sentiment about the British navy being "if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance." Nothing more oppressively smug was ever uttered in
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