270
PARTISAN REVIEW
of Bellamy, Morris, Wells, and other writers. Richard Jefferies's
After
London
(1885), W H. Hudson's
A Crystal Age
(1887), Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward: 2000-1887
(1888), Morris's post-industrial reply to
Bellamy,
NewsJrom Nowhere
(1891), Edward Carpenter's
Towards Democracy
(1883), Grant Allen's
The British Barbarians
(1895), Gissing's
New Grub
Street
(1891) and Wells's dire repudiation of such visions in The
Time
Machine
(1895) and
When the Sleeper Awakes
(1899) are diverse attempts to
summon a future to come forth and transform, as if by magic, dangerous
present forces. Max Nordau's
Degeneration
was an immense success when it
was translated into English in 1895: it spoke to fears at large. Ian Watt has
pointed out, in
Conrad in the Nineteenth Century,
that even Thomas Huxley,
"Darwin's greatest advocate," was beset by the disjunction between natur–
al man and social man, the theme of his Romanes lecture in 1893. "The
ethical process," according to Huxley, "is in opposition to the principle of
the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities best fitted
for success in that struggle." Freud's early essays on sexuali ty and culture,
written in the last years of the old century, are meditations on the same
theme, the degree to which neurasthenia is caused by a conflict between
the instincts of sexuality and aggression on the one hand, and on the other,
the sedate demands of civilization.
In the context of such perturbation it seems wishful thinking to
appeal, as many writers in the nineteenth century did, to the 'Eternal
Gospel' ofJoachim di Fiore, according to which the kingdom of the Spirit
will supersede that of the Son, just as the kingdom of the Son has super–
seded that of the Father; an age of Love will succeed to the ages of Law
and Discipline. This appeal is found in Renan's 'Joachim de Flore et l'E–
vangile eternel', Pater's
The Renaissance,
Yeats's 'The Tables of the Law' and
many other writings.
Meanwhile there were many local exacerbations to be dealt with and
suffered. One of the most pressing of these was the change in the relation
between writer and reader as a result of the Education Act of 1870.
Toynbee argues in
A Study oj History
that while "a system of universal
compulsory gratuitous instruction has made education the birthright of
every child," the expectations aroused by that achievement have been
thwarted by several unforeseen obstacles. One stumbling-block "has been
the inevitable impoverishment in the results of education when the
process is made available for 'the masses' at the cost of being divorced from
its traditional cultural background." A second obstacle has been "the util–
itarian spirit in which the fruits of education are apt to be turned to
account when they are brought within everybody's reach." The possibili–
ty of "turning education to account as a means of amusement for the
masses-and of profit for the enterprising persons by whom the amuse–
ment is purveyed-has only arisen since the introduction of universal
