What do you think? It's hard not to take the question seriously even though it might seem to hardened scholars – and sophisticated modernists and postmodernists – a rather obvious, overserious, blunt, sophomoric Victorian sort of thing, still addressing with adolescent energy those great existential problems but not sufficiently noting the material conditions that some might say were really at stake – questions of political power, of economic want, of cultural authority. Victorian sophomoric questions usually turn out, however, to have been vital ones, and to have a post-Victorian life. Condescending to the Victorians, assuming that we have got past their questions and that their labors of thought and expense of spirit in working through them are of merely antiquarian interest, is a mistake.

The question, “Is life worth living,” as the Victorians framed it, offers evidence for and anticipates that condition of “disenchantment” that Max Weber, borrowing the term from Schiller, saw as a mark of modernity. I want to get Victorianly serious about this idea of enchantment and suggest that for the Victorians, on the whole, belonging to modernity seemed almost inevitably to entail disenchantment, in just Weber's sense. Victorian modernity was marked by the growing authority of science and by the growing “rationalization” of experience. And science, Weber argued, quoting Tolstoy, simply cannot answer the “only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’” That science “does not give an answer to this is indisputable” (143).