THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL
677
with unmanliness. His philosophy, such as it was, was a sound, Eng–
lish utilitarianism. His religion was a healthy agnosticism. His aesthe–
tic principles were common 'sense and good nature. He was, in short,
one of those "manly and affectionate fellows" whom he so admired
in college.
If all
of this sometimes added up to Philistinism, then he
admitted to being a "thorough Philistine who is dull enough to glory
in his Philistinism." Besides, Philistinism was a word "which a prig
bestows upon the rest of the species." He disclaimed any comprehen–
sion of the non-literary arts
i
"artistic people," he once told his ar–
tistic children, "inhabit a world very unfamiliar to me." And he was
only so much of an intellectual as his compulsive sense of manliness
permitted him to be-and manliness drove a hard bargain. The re–
sult was that Stephen, who, as Maitland put it, had a "lust for pen
and ink" so great that he begrudged the time spent at the dinner
table, could be found uttering, and, what is more, believing, such
crude Philistinisms as: "To recommend contemplation in preference
to action is like preferring sleeping to walking." Or: "The highest
poetry, like the noblest morality, is the product of a thoroughly
healthy mind." Writing itself, if conducted in the properly casual
and sportsmanlike spirit, was not unmanly. But thinking, which re–
fuses to abide by the conventions of manly propriety, was. It is for
this reason that Stephen, as he once confessed, found that he could
write when he could not read-and
a fortiori
when he could not
think.
Mr. Ramsay knew, what Stephen perhaps only suspected, that
as an intellectual he had failed. He did not know that this failure
had been the price of
his
admission to the society of Victorian intel–
lectuals. But he knew that something somewhere had gone wrong.
His mind had failed him. Yet-
It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a
piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in
twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of
difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately,
until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people
in the whole of England ever reach Q.... But after Q? What comes
next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely
visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers in the distance. Z is only reached
