The Amen of the Universe the Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to

By Otto Friedrich

What is this thing called love?

Denis Diderot answered with encyclopedic cynicism: "The voluptuous rubbing of two intestines."

The German poet Novalis was more poetic: "Love is the final purpose of world history--the amen of the universe."

The philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel philosophized: "What people call a happy marriage stands to love as a correct poem stands to an improvised song."

Stendhal was, as always, Stendhalian: "The greatest happiness love can offer is the first pressure of the hand by the woman one loves."

Thus, Yale History Professor Peter Gay, the eclectically erudite author of such embracing works as The Enlightenment and Weimar Culture, reaches far and wide to define his new subject, the emotional life of the middle classes in the 19th century. It is a challenging subject, and Gay challenges it with polymathic verve. In his first volume, The Education of the Senses, Gay concentrated on sex and demonstrated in exhaustive detail that despite what many people think about the Victorian era, nice girls did it then too. Now, in the second volume of a prospective six, he turns to the slightly more complex question of love and demonstrates once again that yes, they enjoyed it too.

Or as Gay rather weightily puts it, "There was in fact one essential principle on which cynics, metaphysicians, researchers, and ordinary bourgeois could cheerfully unite: true love is the conjunction of concupiscence with affection." This seems a rather obvious thesis to attract all the firepower that Gay devotes to it. And though it is doubtless true that Victorians in love behaved much like anyone else--lacking only the modern penchant for boasting--Gay also shows us that the Victorians and their Continental or American contemporaries were oddly different. Their new influence disturbed and bewildered them, and they often diagnosed themselves as "nervous."

This may seem to contradict the main thesis, but Gay is not one of those little minds bothered by the hobgoblins of foolish consistency. And the Victorians were themselves contradictory. What other age could produce such an exemplar of pious perversity as Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and chaplain to Queen Victoria herself? Even before he became engaged to young Fanny Grenfell, Kingsley wrote letters to her that were full of erotic imaginings: "A wanton tongue--yet chaste & holy, stole between my lips! What were you doing?--You were secretly kissing me." Yet whenever he felt that his yearnings were going beyond the "chaste & holy" Kingsley would sentence himself to a scourging, and tell Fanny about it too. Her family quite sensibly asked her to exile herself to the Continent for a year, and there she confided to a diary some of her anxieties about Kingsley's devotion to the whip: "How I will kiss away every trace of those unnatural stripes!"

Fanny had a modicum of common sense. "I will entreat you to hurry our wedding day," she wrote. But when her family finally approved the match, Kingsley had a new idea. "I wish to shew you & my God that I have gained purity & self-control . . . and therefore when we are married, will you consent to remain for the first month in my arms a virgin bride, a sister only?" Well, somehow they managed to conceive four children and live together in Victorian happiness for more than 30 years.

Though Gay enjoys portraying the bourgeoisie's secret passions, his somewhat diffuse book becomes more interesting when he turns to the process Freud called sublimation, the unconscious channeling of erotic energy into other fields. Music, for example, as in the lurid writhings of Wagner's Liebestod. This was the age that created the virtuoso as sex object--Franz Liszt seems never to have met a woman who said no--and also the age in which middle-class girls learned to play Chopin waltzes as part of the courtship process.

Gay sees sublimation everywhere. Of the 19th century love of feasting, he observes, "Even more than music, food is the food of love." Of the Victorians' love of nature, Gay points with a knowing smile to Robert Browning's image of a "cloud/ All billowy bosomed" and his "primal naked forms of flowers." Religion becomes a tortured form of sexuality (vide Kingsley), and so does modernity as symbolized by the new railroads that thrust murderously through Dombey and Son and Anna Karenina.

Unfortunately, Gay is a devoted Freudian, and though Freud had many important ideas, they do not really explain a civilization any more than they cure mental illness. And they tempt a cultural historian to overinterpret all his evidence, to argue all too often that things mean the opposite of what they seem to mean. When the heroine of Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames rejects her employer's advances, for example, Gay explains with lordly omniscience: "The psychoanalytically informed historian may take her vehement denial as a covert confession, but that was certainly not Zola's intention."

The novelist himself gets an instant psychoanalysis when Gay proclaims that one of his books "thinly veils Zola's obsessive and frightened fantasies. He himself was haunted by the spectre of being buried alive in a tunnel." And so on.

One is inevitably tempted to apply the method to its practitioner. What hidden fears and conflicts have compelled this distinguished professor to spend years in exploration of the erotic practices of his forefathers?