William Hurrell Mallock

Biography

A nephew of the historian Froude, he was educated privately and then at Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate Prize in 1872 for his poem The Isthmus of Suez and took a second class in the final classical schools in 1874, securing his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford University. Mallock never entered a profession, though at one time he considered the diplomatic service. He attracted considerable attention by his satirical novel, largely a symposium like Plato's Republic, The New Republic (1877), conceived while he was a student at Oxford, in which he introduced characters easily recognized as such prominent individuals as Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, Violet Fane, Thomas Carlyle, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Although the book was not well received by critics at first, it did cause instant scandal, particularly concerning the portrait of literary scholar Walter Pater:

His [Pater's] first main work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance was published in 1873. Over the next three or four years it became the focus of considerable hostility towards Pater, principally reviewers objected to its amoral hedonism. Moreover, Pater was the subject of a cruel satire in W. H. Mallock's The New Republic which was published in Belgravia in 1876-7 and in book form in 1877. He appeared there as 'Mr. Rose'—an effete, impotent, sensualist with a perchant for erotic literature and beautiful young men. In the second edition of the Renaissance the 'Conclusion' was removed, partly in response to the public ridicule, but mainly because of pressure brought to bear on Pater within Oxford by figures such as Benjamin Jowett. In particular, the discovery of his 'relationship' with William Money Hardinge, a Balliol undergraduate, threatened Pater with a sexual scandal.

Mallock's book appeared during the competition for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry and played a role in convincing Pater to remove himself from consideration. A few months later Pater published what may have been a subtle riposte: "A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew." "Mallock's New Republic was an essential book to Ronald [Knox], perhaps his favourite work of secular literature outside the classics."

His keen logic and gift for acute exposition and criticism were displayed in later years both in fiction and in controversial works. In a series of books dealing with religious questions he insisted on dogma as the basis of religion and on the impossibility of founding religion on purely scientific data. In Is Life Worth Living? (1879) and the satirical novel The New Paul and Virginia (1878) he attacked positivist theories and defended the Roman Catholic Church; one of his uncles, Hurrell Froude, had been a founder of the Oxford Movement.

In a volume on the intellectual position of the Church of England, Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption (1900), he advocated the necessity of a strictly defined creed. Later volumes on similar topics were Religion as a Credible Doctrine (1903) and The Reconstruction of Belief (1905). He also authored articles, being a frequent contributor to many newspapers and magazines, including The Forum, National Review, Public Opinion, Contemporary Review, and Harper’s Weekly. One in particular, directed against Thomas Huxley's agnosticism, appeared in the April 1889 issue of The Fortnightly Review, being Mallock's response to a controversy between, among others, Huxley and the Bishop of Peterborough.

He published several works on economics, directed against radical and socialist theories: Social Equality (1882), Property and Progress (1884), Labor and the Popular Welfare (1893), Classes and Masses (1896), Aristocracy and Evolution (1898), and A Critical Examination of Socialism (1908) – and later visited the United States in order to deliver a series of lectures on the subject:

The Civic Federation of New York, an influential body which aims, in various ways, at harmonising apparently divergent industrial interests in America, having decided on supplementing its other activities by a campaign of political and economic education, invited me, at the beginning of the year 1907, to initiate a scientific discussion of socialism in a series of lectures or speeches, to be delivered under the auspices of certain of the great Universities in the United States. This invitation I accepted, but, the project being a new one, some difficulty arose as to the manner in which it might best be carried out – whether the speeches or lectures should in each case be new, dealing with some fresh aspect of the subject, or whether they should be arranged in a single series to be repeated without substantial alteration in each of the cities visited by me. The latter plan was ultimately adopted, as tending to render the discussion of the subject more generally comprehensible to each local audience. A series of five lectures, substantially the same, was accordingly delivered by me in New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

Among his anti-socialist works should be classed his novel, The Old Order Changes (1886). His other novels are A Romance of the Nineteenth Century (1881), A Human Document (1892), The Heart of Life (1895), Tristram Lacy (1899), The Veil of the Temple (1904), and An Immortal Soul (1908).

Mallock is given prominent space in Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind:

How is one to sum up the work of W. H. Mallock, which fills twenty-seven volumes, exclusive of ephemerae? Mallock is remembered chiefly for one book, The New Republic, and that his first, composed while he still was at Oxford – "the most brilliant novel ever written by an undergraduate," says Professor Tillotson, justly. (It is also the most brilliant accomplishment in its genre, after Thomas Love Peacock; and perhaps it is equal to Peacock at his best.) But other books of Mallock's are worth looking into still — his theological and philosophical studies, his didactic novels, his zealous volumes of political expostulation and social statistics, even his books of verse.

"He had astonishing acuteness, great argumentative power, wide and accurate knowledge, excellent style," Saintsbury says of Mallock. "He might have seemed — he did seem, I believe, to some – to have in him the making of an Aristophanes or a Swift of not so much lessened degree... And yet after the chiefly scandalous success of The New Republic he never 'came off.' To attribute this to the principles he advocated is to nail on those who dislike those principles their own favourite gibe of 'the stupid party.' We know brains when we see them, even if they belong to the enemy. Exactly what was the flaw, the rot, the 'dram of eale,' I do not know – it lay in faults of taste and temper, perhaps." In the past two or three years, interest in Mallock has revived somewhat, probably stimulated by that conservative revival for which Mallock hoped, and the lines of which he predicted. Is Life Worth Living?, Social Equality, and The Limits of Pure Democracy, together with Mallock's charming autobiography, are especially deserving of attention from anyone interested in the conservative mind. Mallock died in 1923, half forgotten even then; but he has had no equal among English conservative thinkers since. He spent his life in a struggle against moral and political radicalism: for bulk and thoroughness, quite aside from Mallock's gifts of wit and style, his work is unexcelled among the body of conservative writings in any country.

By inheritance a country gentleman of ancient family, by inclination a poet, Mallock turned himself into a pamphleteer and a statistician on the Benthamite pattern, all for the sake of the old English life that he describes lovingly in his Memoirs of Life and Literature – the splendid houses, the good talk, the wines and dinners, the tranquillity of immemorial ways. This may be the conservatism of enjoyment, but Mallock defended it by the conservatism of the intellect. For its sake he spent his life among blue-books and reports of the income-tax commissioners; he accomplished unassisted what the research staff of the Conservative Political Centre now carries on as a body. "Throughout almost all his books is to be noticed the aspiration after a Truth which will give the soul something more than 'a dusty answer'; it is everywhere evident," says Sir John Squire. In the search for this truth, he assailed some of the most formidable personages of his day – Huxley, Spencer, Jowett, Kidd, Webb, Shaw. And none of these writers, not even Bernard Shaw, came off well from a bout with Mallock.

He published a volume of Poems in 1880. His 1878 book Lucretius included some verse translations from the Roman poet, which he followed with Lucretius on Life and Death in 1900, a book of verse paraphrases in a style modeled after the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald. (A second edition was issued in 1910.)

Ironically, this last work came to be highly regarded by freethinkers and other religious skeptics. Corliss Lamont includes portions of the third canto in his A Humanist Funeral Service. Mallock himself, in his introduction, seems to be offering it, somewhat condescendingly, for the use of such non-Christians when he writes:

Those, however, who... are adherents of the principles which [Lucretius] shares with the latest scientists of to-day, can hardly find the only hope which is open to them expressed by any writer with a loftier and more poignant dignity than that with which they will find it expressed by the Roman disciple of Epicurus.

Artist Tom Phillips used Mallock's A Human Document as the basis for his project A Humument, in which he took a copy of the novel and constructed a work of art using its pages.

Trivia

The popular English novelist Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé) dedicated her book of essays Views and Opinions (1895) to Mallock — "To W. H. Mallock. As a slight token of personal regard and intellectual admiration."

Works

As editor

Articles

Translations