The Passions of Polite Society : THE CULTIVATION OF HATRED: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, <i> By Peter Gay (W. W. Norton: $29.95; 704 pp.) </i>

During the last decade Peter Gay has given us an entirely new picture of our great-grandparents. While we may have envisioned them as living in the soft-focus gentility of a Merchant-Ivory film, the Yale historian has shown them to have been far more open to erotic and violent experience. Gay has done so in three volumes which began, in 1984, with a study of Victorian sensuality; two years later Gay published a book on the ways of love in the 19th Century. This new book concerns the opposite side of the coin: hatred.

Gay’s history ranges from the development of dueling clubs in Germany to aggressive political rhetoric in the Dreyfus Affair, from the compulsive ferocity of President Theodore Roosevelt to the crafty brutality of the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, from the distortion of Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest to the construction of dangerous “Others”--Jews, homosexuals, Indians--in order to justify Victorian desires to hate.

The book opens with a short portrait of what Gay sees as an emblem for 19th-Century experiences of violent aggression: the dueling club. This picture of boys scarring one another with swords, their wounds purposely roughly sutured so that throughout their lives the scars will show as badges of honor, tells us at once that the word hatred in the book’s title covers a wide range of aggressive and violent experiences, not just the desire to kill an enemy.

In five large chapters, almost books in themselves, Gay looks first at the alibis for aggression contrived in the 19th Century, the stories of survival of the fittest or personal manliness people told to legitimate their aggressions. Then he explores pathological forms of aggression, from the harsh prison disciplines of the 19th Century to the practice of caning children in schools. Next he recounts the expression of hatred in politics and its relation to a new kind of leader: a leader who hates others well .

In a chapter on how the ideal of aggressive manliness related to fears of women, Gay ties the themes of this book to his two early studies. He then writes about the way the 19th Century expressed aggression through cruel jokes and wit. The book concludes with another large essay on the morality of aggression and a short, brilliant epilogue about how this culture of aggression and hatred helped lead to World War I.

The “three-decker novel” was a favored literary form of the 19th Century, a sprawling and loosely joined fiction crossed by innumerable subplots and a host of disparate characters; Gay has written something like a three-decker history in this and his previous books. He moves from one country to another, from the early 19th Century to the outbreak of World War I in prose that shifts suddenly and without preparation. Gay’s distinctive way of writing history seems to have become more pronounced in “The Cultivation of Hatred,” swerving within chapters and often on the same page, as when the historian moves abruptly from discussing Bismarck’s character to 19th-Century arguments about enfranchising the masses to expressions of rage in political debate. Yet the shifts come not from a distracted mind but from a historian inclined to theory, in Gay’s case psychoanalytic theory; the theory requires Gay to tell something other than a straight-forward story.

The word cultivation in the title of this book is a play on words. The young German students viciously dueling with sabers, hoping to be scarred as well as to scar their opponents, nourished their aggressive impulses; they also, Gay argues, cultivated violence in the sense of submitting bloodletting to elaborate rules, making violent display into an elaborate adolescent ballet, which would later free them as adults to lead more peaceful, domestic lives. A trained psychoanalyst, Gay wants to know how people express their passions; specifically, whether expressing aggression can liberate someone from living aggressively. The more “cultivated” aggression becomes, Gay believes, the less people are blindly and permanently subjected to it.

In his view, the great Victorian drama of both love and hate thus lay in finding ways to cultivate emotions that otherwise would grip a human being in a lifelong vise. The more the Victorians could both vent and master their passions, the more they passed through the stages of life looking forward rather than backward. Modern victim-speak or the language of co-dependency would have seemed to them moral weakness; strength lay in that movement forward. Thus, while we conventionally think about the Victorians repressing their emotions or their past, Gay interprets them as at their best asserting the will to live, no matter what had already happened. The parts of their lives did not neatly or linearly connect because they, much more than we, emphasized the word now .

This seems to me a brilliant insight, played out in this trilogy of books in prose which reads something like the flow of free-association in a psychoanalytic session. My difficulties in reading Gay come from knowing who he is writing about. The series title he has chosen for his books is “The Bourgeois Experience.” In the nit-picking way of historians, one could fault him for sometimes writing about the elite, sometimes about the poor when it serves his purposes, but my worry is a different one.

Unlike our own time, 19th-Century culture had a sharply etched sense of where people stood in the social hierarchy, a sense of place etched into their bodies in the sounds of their speech, how they walked, the way they gestured with their hands, how they dressed. Class seemed a fact of nature, overwhelming in its power. The high-minded bourgeois women who appeared in E. M. Forster’s “Howards End,” for instance, find the bodily sensations of working-class women mysterious, as though the poor belonged to another species. Peter Gay’s books give us very little sense of such conjunctions between class and bodily experience. More particularly, in reading him it is hard to know how the physical ways in which people made love or hated helped define where they stood in the social hierarchy.

This was exactly where the repressiveness of that age lay: social class held the emotions, as much as bodily sensations, in an iron vise. One of the great bourgeois fears of the 19th Century lay, for instance, in the conviction that mobs of the poor were so incapable of controlling their instinctual aggressions that they had to be rigidly, inhumanly disciplined for their own good. Conversely, the upper-classes drew a line between themselves and the bourgeoisie in feeling, in the very security of their privilege--more spontaneous and expressive than the hard-working burghers. Gay knows all this, but somehow in his writing can’t come to grips with the lived emotional experience of class.

Nonetheless, Peter Gay’s books, especially this third, provide a magisterial portrait of the fragments and willed meanings that created the culture of the era. Like a Victorian, Gay has put his intelligence and literary gifts to a moral purpose; Gay makes historically palpable Freud’s fear that civilization hangs by a thread. In this volume we begin to understand the complex balance of aggressions contained in the 19th-Century cultivation of hatred, a balance which could be so easily upset; Gay makes comprehensible, as no other recent history I have read does, how a seemingly remote assassination in Sarajevo could tip over an entire civilization. It has been said of psychoanalysis that it is long on soul-talk and short on lived reality. Gay’s writings redeem psychoanalytic history from that charge; they make the past make emotional sense.