Books, Arts & Manners: Victoria’s Secrets

The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience Vol. 3: Victoria to Freud, by Peter Gay (Norton, 685 pp., $30)

TO THE educated middle class in the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace that virtue must be taught and learned—that “natural” man, contrary to the Rousseauean myth, was a savage and not a noble one. So assuming, vast numbers of writers, preachers, philosophers, and scientists devised theories and rules of conduct and social conventions that would tame that beast in man. In The Cultivation of Hatred, the third of a projected seven volumes on bourgeois culture in the Victorian era, Peter Gay attempts to describe cute broad aspect of the undertaking that aimed at controlling man’s presumed natural inclination toward violence. Mr. Gay unnecessarily compounds the difficulties of his task by using words in a somewhat muddled fashion. The word “hatred” in his title, for instance, is too strong. He means, rather, aggressiveness; and at midpoint in the work, he calmly declares that “the aggressive drive, we know, is not synonymous with hostility.” Again, he writes of “alibis” for aggression, only to soften the tone by using the word interchangeably with “rationales” and “justifications.”

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Forrest McDonald

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The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience Vol. 3: Victoria to Freud, by Peter Gay (Norton, 685 pp., $30)

TO THE educated middle class in the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace that virtue must be taught and learned—that “natural” man, contrary to the Rousseauean myth, was a savage and not a noble one. So assuming, vast numbers of writers, preachers, philosophers, and scientists devised theories and rules of conduct and social conventions that would tame that beast in man. In The Cultivation of Hatred, the third of a projected seven volumes on bourgeois culture in the Victorian era, Peter Gay attempts to describe cute broad aspect of the undertaking that aimed at controlling man’s presumed natural inclination toward violence. Mr. Gay unnecessarily compounds the difficulties of his task by using words in a somewhat muddled fashion. The word “hatred” in his title, for instance, is too strong. He means, rather, aggressiveness; and at midpoint in the work, he calmly declares that “the aggressive drive, we know, is not synonymous with hostility.” Again, he writes of “alibis” for aggression, only to soften the tone by using the word interchangeably with “rationales” and “justifications.”