in direct opposition to, Romantic ideals, the philosophical basis for a Victorian writer's staunch belief in his own views did not necessarily emerge as unique to Victorianism. He writes:[The confidence of Victorian writers in their own sense of absolute law was founded] on the possession of an infallible power of insight: either reason or intuition. Both faculties may be used, of course, and were used by the Victorians, with modesty, but the extreme exaltation of both, which was inherited, respectfully, from eighteenth-century Rationalism and nineteenth-century Romanticism, provided an epistemological basis for dogmatism. (149-50)While it most simply may be said that what at least in part ushered in the Victorian era was the waning power and excitement of the Romantic revolution in poetry, Houghton, however, notes that part of that power and excitement was still working for the Victorian writers. Such power comes in the form of a dogmatism that was not necessarily new to the age, but perhaps more pronounced than ever before because of its inheritance from the Romantic writers and even their predecessors. Houghton explains:a [Victorian] writer could hardly escape becoming a fine dogmatist, was created by the transformation, under philosophical or mystical influence, of the natural genius of the eighteenth-century - the poet who wrote spontaneously without knowledge of classical literature or the rules of art - into the Romantic Genius of the nineteenth whose imagination was an oracular organ of Truth. This heady doctrine, preached by Wordsworth and Shelley as well as by Goethe and Fichte, was adopted from those sources by the Cambridge Apostles. (152)Houghton examines the dogmatic tone of works by Victorian writers such as Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Newman, and especially Carlyle (151-54) and comments on its attraction during the Victorian era which may, in part, account for its seeming more-pronounced presence when compared to ...
