Victorians knew how to nurture their souls | James Marriott | The Times


James Marriott has been reading Roy Jenkins’s biography of Gladstone. One of the inspiring things about that pre-eminent Victorian was his dedication to self-betterment, carried out in a spirit of what Jenkins calls “wild and almost pointless eclecticism”. The great furnace of Gladstone’s turbulent psychology was fed by literature, ideas and poetry. He wrote books on theology and on Homer. He was the author of a long essay on Tennyson. He chopped down trees. He collected china (his enemies said it was chipped and worthless).

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Gladstone could not have begun to offer the kind of therapy-polished explanation of his own psychology that passes for a sign of a well-tended mind today. But he did believe in the cultivation of what he might have called his soul — with poetry, with enthusiasms, with knowledge pursued for its own sake. Those Victorian aspirations to “the best that has been thought and said” have been worn away by (often justified) modern suspicions of snobbery and prejudice.

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It is a curious irony that our age of rigorous “self-optimisation” has so little to say about the inner life. Your abs must be toned in the gym, your bowels cleansed with smoothies of exotic concoction, your body relaxed on expensive holidays . . . but your spirit? Towards these matters, the tone of our present culture is increasingly one of hostility or suspicion. A growing number of sub-optimal mental states (nerves, melancholy) fall under the expanding category of “mental health issues”. Inner turbulence is to be smoothed away with meditation or therapy or the digital sedatives of Netflix and TikTok.

Gladstone’s enthusiasms belonged to a wider sense of spiritual self-responsibility. The diary that records his reading also contains the famous whip symbols which marked his bouts of self-flagellation for lapses into impurity with prostitutes and pornography.

The point is that as our culture has become less religious we have tended towards a mechanistic rather than a spiritual understanding of ourselves. In the 21st century we are prone to thinking of the human mind and body as a machine or a computer. We are tools to be made more efficient — hence the rise of productivity apps such as Blinkist, which abridges works of non-fiction to 15 minutes of “key insights”. The point of a book is not its effect on you, but what you can extract from it to improve your efficiency in the world.