Two Models of Man in Confrontation in the Victorian Age

The Victorian age allows regarding side by side an older, and a newer, model of perfection for the
human being in the middle of a social network. In old societies, the smaller community was the matrix
for social existence, while in modern societies, a much larger, anonymous concentration of human
beings is the norm. In the smaller community (for example a family), affective and kinship ties bind
people together; these ties are strengthened by the participation in common to essential moments of
human life (marriage, birth, burial ceremonies or, in general, feasts). In the larger society, people are
usually strangers to each other (and they are all anonymous members of the same expanding groups);
what keeps the members of ample societies together is their work and business (or trade) relations and
the unanimous observance of ethical (moral, practical) norms. For the regulation of life in the larger
society, principles observed by everybody are essential.

Since principles have always been the province of philosophy, it is interesting to consider where the
principles that informed the two models of society in confrontation in the Victorian age came from. For
the older model of man, the theocentric conception reigned supreme and the authority of the Biblical
God and the teachings of Jesus Christ was uncontested. This was a paternalistic and hierarchical
conception which placed God the Father at the top of a hierarchy that had man at the bottom.
Modernity reversed this hierarchy and the newer model of man was anthropocentric. The trust in man’s
own powers inspired a new individualistic, democratic, civic and cultural faith.

In studying Thomas Carlyle, the oldest Victorian essayist, through a number of key terms associated with
his name (meritocracy, captains of industry, laissez-faire, mammonism) and then John Stuart Mill, the
leading mind of the modern age, it is possible to understand that what distinguishes the older from the
newer model of man and society is their grounds or standards, respectively. It will be seen that Thomas
Carlyle applies the standard of Biblical virtue in order to accuse modern man and modern society of
being on the wrong path, while John Stuart Mill, on the contrary, presents them optimistically, because
he inspired by the theorems of physics (namely by modern science) and has a pragmatic understanding
of the human civic relations which form the basis of modern democracy.

Thomas Carlyle was an adversary of capitalist wealth and democracy because he saw how these eroded
the affective ties which formerly united men in communities and how they replaced the affective, god-
fearing ties with anonymous and materialistic ones. Especially, he resented the fact that democracy
eliminated all paternalistic authority and leveled society. For Carlyle, a mass of people unable to obey
the directives of a meritocracy, was frightening. Especially, Carlyle resented the replacement of an
aristocracy of merit (meritocracy), by merciless captains of industry, whose production of wealth was
protected by the laissez-faire principle. He called the capitalists’ greed mammonism (after the Biblical
name of the devil which ruled over the love of money, Mammon).
Here are some excerpts from Past and Present (1843), his book which set the model of the monastic
past and praised its capacity to educate virtue as the basis of the social link. Notice that the superiority
of old social life over modern life is based upon the theocentric or theological model which organized
life in a monastery (as can be seen in Book II, titled The Ancient Monk and set in the convent of St.
Edmundsbury). Carlyle’s arguments and style derive from the Bible, which makes of him a free preacher.

Book III, titled The Modern Worker , is addressed to the “Unhappy Workers, unhappier Idlers, unhappy
men and women of this actual England!” in general, men whose life Carlyle deplores because it suffers
from Mammonism

For there is one Reality among so many Phantasms; about one thing we are entirely in earnest:
The making of money […]True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon- Gospel,
have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the
totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due
laws-of-war, named 'fair competition' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly
forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we think,
nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. "My starving
workers?" answers the rich Mill-owner: "Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay
them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?"—Verily
Mammon-worship is a melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and
was questioned, "Where is thy brother" he too made answer, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Did I
not pay my brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me? (“The Gospel of
Mammonism”)

Truly they are strange results to which this of leaving all to 'Cash;' of quietly shutting up the God's
Temple, and gradually opening wide-open the Mammon's Temple, with 'Laissez-faire, and Every man for
himself,'—have led us in these days!

Let the Captains of Industry retire into their own hearts, and ask solemnly, If there is nothing but
vulturous hunger, for fine wines, valet reputation and gilt carriages, discoverable there?...

Love of men cannot be bought by cash-payment; and without love, men cannot endure to be together. You
cannot lead a Fighting World without having it regimented, chivalried ...The Leaders of Industry, if
Industry is ever to be led, are virtually the Captains of the World; if there be no nobleness in them, there
will never be an Aristocracy more.
Democracy…. means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you; here in our rigidly Conservative
Country, men rush into Democracy with full cry 'the liberty of not being oppressed by your fellow man' is
an indispensable, yet one of the most insignificant fractional parts of Human Liberty.

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out
the right path, and to walk thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able for; and
then, by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set about doing of the same! That is his true
blessedness, honour, 'liberty' and maximum of wellbeing: if liberty be not that, I for one have small care
about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you
that are wise; and keep him, were it in strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices! Every stupid, every
cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable madman: his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any
and every wiser man, could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when
he was going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter. O if thou really art
my Senior, Seigneur, my Elder, Presbyter or Priest,—if thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent
instinct lead and impel thee to 'conquer' me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what is good
and right, I conjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips
and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have been called, by all the Newspapers, a
'free man' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the Newspapers had
called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not
death, but life!— Liberty requires new definitions.
On the other hand, John Stuart Mill, who was also the author of On Liberty (1859), the handbook of
modern democracy, introduced the principles of the new model of man living in a society with a clear
civic agenda in his essays dedicated to Coleridge. Mill insisted on the dynamic relationship between
truth, fallibility and the liberty of opinion. As regards, truth, it is a socially defined function of several
truths, pragmatic and synthetic. It is obtained as a combination that results after harmonising several
partial truths, as can be possessed by real people in concrete circumstances.

–All students of man and society (…) are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing
falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in
almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the
right in what they affirmed, though in the wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been
made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its
doctrine correct.– (The essay on Coleridge, in Ana Cartianu & Ştefan Stoenescu Proza eseistică
victoriană [PEV] I p. 458)
Thus, it is in regard to every important partial truth; there are always two conflicting modes of thought,
one tending to give to that truth too large, the other to give it too small a place; and the history of opinion
is generally an oscillation between these extremes.– (Ditto, p. 460)
It is possible to harmonize the conflicting modes, but only in the long run, and very gradually:
–Thus, every excess in either direction determines a corresponding reaction; improvement consisting only
in this, that the oscillation, each time, departs rather less widely from the centre, and an ever-increasing
tendency is manifested to settle finally in.– (Ditto, p. 461)
There is a kind of physical, mathematical necesity shown to be at work in this extremely rational model of
human society, which proves that the inspiration of the new model of man and the civic society is the
model of science which underlies all clear, persuasive liberal discourse.
On Liberty creates a wider context for the understanding of the anthropocentric view of relative truth,
placing it in relation to fallibility.
Truth prevails over error (or as Mill calls error –human fallibility–), because it is possible to correct past
errors and to learn from them, so that all times –there is just enough truth for correct action (PEV I, p.
510). Here, Mill’s theory veers into the moral and ethical realm, and its optimism seems inspired by one
of Jesus Christ’s own reassuring teachings to the disciples.
–There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human
life. (…) Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which
justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human
faculties have any rational assurance of being right.– (Ditto)
The way to incline the balance in favour of truth by correcting error is, therefore, action. Here is the key
of Mill’s pragmatic optimism which he inherited by means of a closely supervised education from his
father, England’s greatest utilitarian philosopher, James Mill.
The unconstrained exchange of freely held opinions is considered by John Stuart Mill the prerequisite for
modern man’s advancement towards truth. Public opinion, discussion, is the complement of thought and
experience, which are of necessity limited, just as the individual person is. Exchange of ideas and
experience, however, if conducted according to the laws of justice and rationality, or if conducted fairly
enough can correct errors and make humanity asymptotically approach in action what it cannot hope to
attain in principle.
He (man in general, our note) is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience
alone. There must be discussion to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices
gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought
before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning. The whole
strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is
wrong.– (PEV I, p. 511)
Humility VERSUS Individuality as the Central Aims for the Education of Man in the Old as Compared to
the New Liberal Paradigm
In Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (a fantastic novel or essay serialized between 1833-4 and published
in volume form in 1836), we read a fervent and ingenious demonstration about the main virtue of
Renunciation, which is the virtue of puritanical man, who still considers himself to be the Biblical fallen
man. It should be noted that the memory of the Bible also causes Carlyle to recognize that there is an
infinity dwelling in man’s chest, which should be let be and do its work, not obstructing it while catering
for man’s materialistic needs. The aim of living, Carlyle claims in ”The Everlasting Yea” is to make man
blessed rather than happy, in accordance with the sublime, spiritual standard, and not the worldly,
communal one which may only , if ever, make man happy. As the ending of ”The Everlasting Yea”
excerpted on pages 87 – 88 of PEV I clearly shows, man can answer the challenges of life by drastically
reducing his claims and improving the spiritual powers inherent in his soul. What prevents man from
achieving blessedness is precisely his search for happiness – which , Carlyle has only just demonstrated
this in the ”Everlasting No” and the ”Centre of Indifference”, will only lead to alienation. Carlyle’s term
for universal alienation is ”the everlasting No” : ”The Everlasting No had said: ”Behold, thou art
fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)” . By contrast, in ”The Everlasting Yea” (his
handbook of metaphysical belief and vitalism) Carlyle employs at a climactic moment a mathematical
syllogism for his demonstration which suddenly proves both the grace and the efficiency of the best in his
talent and polymorphous personality: ”So true it is, what I then said, that the Fraction of Life can be
increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay,
unless my algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity” and, he continues, ”Make
thy claim of wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time write:
”It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin”. The good
life, was, for Carlyle, one in which man did not seek the utilitarian “greatest happiness for the greatest
numbers” but individual blessedness. Speaking as a moralist and a free-lance preacher, 1Carlyle asks
rhetorical questions and teaches severe lessons: ”What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be
Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thout wert born and predestined not to
be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe
seeking after somewhat to eat : and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close
thy Byron; open thy Goethe.”
The counterpart of Carlyle’s arithmetic of renunciation is John Stuart Mill’s presentation of the grounds
of individuality “as one of the elements of well-being” (the title of On Liberty, Chapter III).
In On Liberty , Chapter III, “Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being” Mill presents the
conditions for developing personal experience and attaining maturity – which represented a duty for every
member of a modern, democratic society

Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth as to know and benefit by the
ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being,
arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way. It is for him to find
out what part of recorded experience is properly applicable to his own circumstances and character.
(…)The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral
preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes
no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral,

1 It should be noted that Carlyle’s training included mathematics and theology, being trained to be a preacher, but
after coming into contact with the works of German deists, he decided he was no longer fit for the ecclesiastical
profession.
like the muscular, powers are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by
doing a thing merely because others believe it. If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the
person’s own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened by adopting it.–
This is the pledge of Mill’s humanism in his views on general education: to strengthen man rather than
weaken him by the misuse of reason, either because it is used in isolation or because it is not used at all.
John Stuart Mill’s argument continues –He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of
life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan
for himself employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee,
activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and
self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. (…) It is possible that he might be guided in some good
path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as
a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are
that do it. Among the works of man which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying,
the first importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown,
battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said by machinery – by automatons in
human form- it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women
who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens
built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and
develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

Jane Eyre and the Reconciliation of the Two Models of Man in Fiction

In Jane Eyre, the novel published by Emily Brontë in 1849, it is possible to follow not the competition
but the reciprocal completion of the old and the new models of human existence in both individual and
social growth. Because Jane is forced to (or simply justified in) becoming a rebel by the old puritanical
standards of man (since she is humiliated and tortured in her dead uncle’s house, in the Reeds family
where she is shown in how many ways she does not belong), she will gradually learn to make the most of
her individuality as an element of her own and of society’s well-being. After meeting, at Lowood school,
two virtuous women (one of the teachers there, Miss Temple and Helen Burns, a colleague and friend
who dies of consumption) and after drawing inspiration from them to make peace with the world by
becoming deliberately humble, Jane is ready for life. In the next stage of this Bildungsroman, Jane proves
a model for everyone while working as a governess at Thornfield Hall, yet, when pressed to marry the
Thornfield Hall master who was actually a polygamous man whom she also loved, without knowing he
was hiding in the attic a mad woman who was his wife, Jane flees, being ready to start life anew. She acts
with discretion and courage, as a strong individuality, by John Stuart Mill’s standards previously
presented (she exerts her faculty of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even
moral preference …making the right choice and acting with discretion). In the end she is rewarded with a
really blessed life next to the now lame and reformed former master, whom she had never stopped loving.