The Great Victorians

The Victorians don't get a good press nowadays : stinking, smelly, retarded, fanatical, depressed, repressed, imperialistic, and patriarchal bastards. However, one Victorian whose works I have read quite extensively, Leslie Stephen, was someone whom you couldn't easily fit into any one of these 'types'. (Incidentally, Stephen was the father of the feminist (?) Virginia Woolf. Though whether Woolf recognised him as her father is, of course, another matter.)

A book that I am reading these days has the following to say about Stephen :

'A man, rugged and uncompromising, yet sensitive and diffident, pure-hearted, single-minded, melancholy in temper yet capable of high spirits and irony, inveterately industrious, a stubborn climber of Alps as well as mental peaks ... In him, the passion for salvation had been transmuted into the quest for truth and intellectual deliverance, so that instead of 'What shall I do to be saved?', the question had become, 'What shall I think to be honest?'. Till the end of his life, he was continuously engaged in a mental fight, in strenuous grapplings with the riddle of the painful earth, and in bearing, as best as he might, the 'heavy and the weary weight of this unintelligible world'. It is hard to believe, from the tone of his writings, that he found much joy or consolation in what he wrote, but he was by nature a Spartan, and he did not look for such things. George Eliot's phrase about the need to do 'without opium', and 'to live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance', seems to me applicable to him.'