9.
Some Dream-Country
Mostly 1859–1910
Humanism turns scientific—Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley—on being an agnostic—Leslie Stephen’s five minutes in the Alps—“vicars with problems, vicars with doubts”—Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere—some strange answers to the problem of humanity—Ernest Renan and Auguste Comte—a transformative period.
Some of the new discoveries reaching the public in the era of Mill and Arnold carried such major implications for how we think about humanity that religious authorities had a hard time keeping up. First the geologists came for them, brandishing evidence that the Earth was both older than the Bible implied and in a state of constant movement and transition that did not fit with the one-off Creation story. Then the paleontologists came for them, with their fossils of vanished or altered species. Even the speleologists came for them, finding remains of an extinct hominid type in Neander Valley caves in Germany.
Then it was the turn of Charles Darwin, with his 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. His theory of the variety of life was elegant: as members of a species reproduce themselves over an immense period of time, random variations occur, generating a bigger beak, a longer toe, or some new, fluffy ear hair. These can be passed on to offspring. If the variation works well in their environment, those individuals thrive and go on to produce more such offspring. If it does not work, they often die without issue. This is how, as he concluded the book, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” It is a vision of majesty, but also of horror, since Darwin admits that it all depends on cycles of failure and suffering. “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” Not only does this tell us that life comes from death but also that we might be those “higher animals,” and thus results of such a process, too. At this stage, he says nothing more overt about us than that. He would not do so until 1871, with The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, and that was amid much distracting material about the last-named topic. It could have been even more distracting: Darwin wanted to use the more economical “sexual selection” in the title but was stopped by the publisher, who thought “sexual” sounded more shocking than “sex.” Still, even at the first appearance of the Origin, the implications for humanity were not hard to see.
The Origin found a wide readership, in Britain especially because it was made a featured title at Mudie’s, one of the most important of the new circulating libraries. John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty appeared in the same year, read it with interest. So did George Eliot: she and her partner, George Henry Lewes, were intrigued by Darwin not least because they were keen natural historians and had recently spent the summer of 1856 exploring seaside areas and writing about rock pools and fossils. A different kind of reader was Karl Marx, who thought he could see connections between Darwin’s ideas and his own theory of the struggle between social classes. “Although developed in the crude English fashion,” he commented to Friedrich Engels, “this is the book which in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views.” Later, having published Das Kapital, he sent Darwin a copy, which then remained with uncut pages on the naturalist’s shelf, although he did write Marx a warm thank-you letter.
Another reader saw immediately that the Origin was going to originate a fight: Thomas Henry Huxley. As a zoologist, an educator, and an eloquent essayist and polemicist, he would do more than anyone else in that period to promote Darwinism, and, in the process, to bring together two great nineteenth-century currents: the boom in education and freethinking, and the turn toward science-based ways of thinking about ourselves. He thus inaugurated a new type: the scientific humanist.
In this chapter, we shall see what came out of that merging of humanistic currents and what effects it had on people, especially in Britain. It brought responses from vicars and poets, from novelists and naturalists, from those who wanted to make humanity divine, and from those who, conversely, wanted to make divinity more human. We will meet a few of all these types. But first: Huxley and the fight. Fortunately for the Darwinist theory, fighting was exactly what Huxley was good at—far more so than Darwin himself, who hated such things.
Huxley’s friendship with Darwin had started a little earlier, when Darwin invited him to Down House, his home in Kent, to see his collection of sea squirts.
Huxley loved sea squirts. A naturalist who had originally trained as a physician, he had just returned to Britain after a four-year voyage around the Pacific in the official post of ship’s doctor. Having devoted his time on the voyage to collecting marine and other species, he had now been taken on to produce the British Museum’s catalog of its sea squirt specimens. So he eagerly accepted Darwin’s invitation, and enjoyed his tour of the house’s grounds, with their plantings and greenhouses, their exotic pigeon breeds, and their many experiments and collections in constant expansion. Darwin seemed to be a harmless, diligent enthusiast. Huxley, like almost everyone else, had no idea that he was using all this as material for a dramatic new theory of life.
When the book was unveiled and Huxley realized what Darwin had been up to all that time, he was keen to help. Unlike the gentlemanly Darwin, Huxley was of more socially modest origins, and everything in his career had been a fight for him. First, he reviewed the book, raising the drama level to the maximum with remarks such as: “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.” Then he gave lectures, making use of newsworthy props: at the Royal Institution, to show the effects of selection processes in breeding, he released a range of live pigeons from a basket before the audience’s eyes, like a magician in a stage show.
Next came the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at the beautiful new Museum of Natural History in Oxford. Darwin did not attend: he made his excuses after an attack of a recurring stomach ailment, thus saving himself from having to confront anyone. Representatives arrived from the worlds of religion, culture, and science, all with their witty sallies at the ready. Robert FitzRoy, former captain on Darwin’s Beagle voyage, was there; he had written to Darwin saying, “My dear old friend, I, at least, cannot find anything ‘ennobling’ in the thought of being a descendant of even the most ancient Ape.” A similar remark was made at the meeting itself by Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, a bluff, beefy man so renowned for his quips that people often started laughing even before he opened his mouth. That, presumably, was what they did when he stood up ready to present his question to Huxley: Is it through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim simian heritage?
Huxley replied neatly that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a person who used his merit and influence only to introduce ridicule into a scientific discussion. At least, that was Huxley’s account of it—and he described the room as erupting into laughter. As usual with much-told tales, versions differed. The botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker thought he was the one who had “smashed” Wilberforce with a smart response, while Wilberforce himself left the meeting elated, apparently feeling he had come out on top. Darwin was grateful to Huxley for all this partisanship, but also nervous. “For heaven’s sake don’t write an anti-Darwinian article,” he said. “You would do it so confoundedly well.”
Huxley himself became ever more famous, thanks to such performances. He went on to write successful popularizations of Darwinian theory, notably his Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature of 1863, with a frontispiece showing a series of skeletons of apes marching along in formation and culminating in a human figure.
Less well remembered now is his role as an all-round public intellectual and a communicator of humanistic as well as scientific ideas. He took a great interest in education. Like Arnold, he was adamant that all social classes should have access to good-quality material; like Humboldt, he believed that learning should continue throughout life. In accordance with these ideas, he helped found the South London Working Men’s College in 1868—and it would be to workers’ educational institutions like this, not to elite or professional audiences, that he delivered some of his own most important lectures.
In one talk to the South London Working Men’s College that same year, “A Liberal Education and Where to Find It,” he presented his views on education itself. First, he criticized the way schools currently seemed to feel they had done their job if they imparted a few simple moral precepts, along with Middle Eastern history and geography, because the latter related to the Bible. (In Bleak House, Charles Dickens also wrote ironically of how the education of the poor seemed to consist mainly of a course in the history of the ancient Amorites and Hittites.) For Huxley, this did not even make a good grounding for the humanities, never mind the rest of human knowledge. It was not that he disliked such studies: he said that he loved learning about ancient cultures himself, because it formed part of the whole story of studying the traces of the human past. And elsewhere he cited Terence: nothing human could ever be alien to him—or uninteresting.
It was just that he had a wider perspective on human studies. He agreed with Arnold and Humboldt that the purpose of education was to produce well-rounded human beings with a rich mental life and an insightful understanding of the world. He did not agree with them about the humanities being the only place to start. Instead he suggested that a better foundation might lie in studying the sciences. These taught children the basics of the physical world and also gave them humanistic skills, in the form of an inquiring attitude. It taught them to observe phenomena closely and to learn actively through experiments, as opposed to taking everything from the authority of ancient texts—or even of teachers. It would therefore also equip them better for understanding those texts and teachers. John Stuart Mill had once said that studying classical literature and dialectics provided a good training in general critical thinking. Huxley, in another lecture, quoted Mill’s remarks—but with a difference: he took every mention of “dialectics” and the like, and changed it to “science.” The love of free thought and investigation was the same; the means were different.
After an 1880 talk by Huxley, again giving his arguments for starting education with a scientific foundation, Matthew Arnold came back with the essay “Literature and Science.” Science was indeed important, he said, but the humanities were even more so, not least because they held the key to making human sense out of science’s discoveries. For example, if we hear science telling us that our ancestors resembled monkeys, we will leap (sorry) to conclusions about ourselves and our human nature. If we are not guided in more constructive directions, those conclusions might be dangerous and negative. For example, we might think: Well, we are only animals anyway—we cannot expect high moral standards of ourselves. Instead, wrote Arnold, a good education founded on ethics and the humanities helps us to deal more subtly with the human and ethical world. It also provides us with high standards to live up to.
It is a good argument, in fact. Arnold is not anti-science; he does not say that the scientific way of thinking about ourselves is wrong. He only says that we need a good armory of cultural understanding to respond to it in the best way. Few would disagree with him.
But Huxley’s argument is good, too. For him, we will do a better job of coming up with such moral and human responses if we also start with a good grounding in science itself, so that we know what we are talking about. A little scientific training protects us against a tendency to go storming off into foolish interpretations based on misunderstandings of the facts, or of how matters of evidence or experiment work. I find this very convincing, having written a lot of this book during a global pandemic characterized by waves of misinformation and superstition, which had damaging effects on such lifesaving factors as the acceptance of vaccines. Better education in science could have helped flatten those waves. But an Arnoldian could argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has equally shown the importance of such classically humanistic matters as good government and moral engagement with others. In truth, we need both.
The Arnold and Huxley debate, playing out between two cultured and eloquent writers, each imbued (if in slightly different ways) with the spirit of their time, captures a moment when the atmosphere was changing in humanistic thought. From now on, both “humanities-humanism” and the meliorist humanism of the Enlightenment would find themselves in the company of the new arrival, scientific humanism. The principles of the latter—an interest in modern scientific methods and reasoning, along with a naturalistic interpretation of how humans fit into the picture—would remain a part of the larger humanist worldview into our own time.
Humanities-based, ethical forms of humanism remind us that we are spiritual, cultured, and moral beings: we are formed by our human environment as well as by our physical nature. Scientific humanism reminds us that we are animals, too, and that we live in a constant process of transition on a changing Earth, in a very large universe. If everything is in a good balance, these visions of ourselves do not work at cross-purposes; they inform and enhance one another.
In the closing passage of the Origin, Darwin had marveled at the way simple natural processes could produce extraordinary and beautiful results. But he also realized that his theory of natural selection and survival did not provide an obvious basis for human morality.
It provided no direct basis, that is, but in The Descent of Man he did come up with a possible, indirect explanation for how morality entered our human world. His theory owed a lot to humanists of the Enlightenment era, such as David Hume, because he thought—as they did—that morality probably emerged from our tendencies to fellow feeling and “sympathy.” These in turn emerged from our nature as group animals. Like all social species, early humans had to negotiate the interpersonal challenges of the group; this has made us sensitive to others’ responses. When they treat us positively, we feel good. Other animals share such sensitivity, but in our case, we also have language, so we can go further in expressing feelings in terms of praise or blame. Our moral world deepens, because we can also look back on past situations to make comparisons between the things we have done before and the responses they evoked. Out of this, general ethical opinions begin to form, and these are shared with others. Thus, emerging from a combination of “habit, example, instruction, and reflection,” a moral system comes into being.
Darwin’s explanation for morality is a thoroughly humanistic one: it emerges from social feelings and behavior, and need not rely on anything coming from God. If anything, he sees the process as operating in the reverse direction; he speculates that, at some later stage of cultural development, the general moral gaze of others becomes identified with an imagined figure: that of “an all-seeing Deity.”
Darwin took humanistic morality as a guide in his own life, too. He had lost his Christian belief as a young man, not least because he could not bear the thought of there being a Hell—that most unempathetic of ideas. Writing private notes, he reflected that he had always felt his deepest satisfactions when he had helped others, and then when they had thought well of him because of it—especially if they were people to whom he was close. For him, these feelings amply compensated for the lost idea of God. He did not go so far as to call himself an atheist, even in private notes, but he did call himself an agnostic.
The person who did the most to popularize this term was, again, T. H. Huxley. He wrote an essay headed simply “Agnosticism” in 1889, and there explained that he had arrived at this label after going through other possible ways of describing himself. Was he, perhaps, “an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker”? None of these felt right, although the last one was not bad. The rest all seemed to name some definite belief in how the world was, but he had no such belief. He settled on “agnostic,” because it was the opposite of a “gnostic”—that is, someone who claims gnosis, or knowledge.
Actually, agnosticism is more of a definite and positive position than Huxley makes it sound. His contemporary Richard Bithell stressed in a book titled The Creed of a Modern Agnostic that it did not mean floating off into a mystical cloud of unknowing. For him, agnostics do think that humans can have definite moral principles. They also believe that they can learn things about the world, by trusting the scientific method of advancing hypotheses and testing them against evidence. It is just that they retain more modesty than usual about the results. More recently, another agnostic, the philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee, wrote in his short final testament, Ultimate Questions, that the word meant to him “an openness to the fact that we do not know, followed by intellectually honest enquiry in full receptivity of mind.”
Another noted agnostic of the nineteenth century, Sir Leslie Stephen, was more flippant about his reasons for choosing the term: he said he preferred agnostic because atheist still savored too much of “the stake in this world and hell-fire in the next.” But agnostics could carry a whiff of that destination as well: the educational reformer Frederick James Gould recalled once chatting about the afterlife with an amiable Salvation Army officer over tea and sandwiches: “I asked him what became of sincere Agnostics. He pointed dramatically to the floor, and calmly munched bread-and-butter and water-cress.”
Sir Leslie Stephen was known as the compiler of the very Victorian Dictionary of National Biography; he would also later be remembered as the father of the resolutely non-Victorian experimental novelist Virginia Woolf. He also found time to be a noted mountaineer. One of his Alpine experiences became the basis for an entertaining essay of 1872, “A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps.” It sums up his mental tour of possible beliefs, and the conclusions he reached about them, all while telling a literally cliff-hanging story.
One Sunday, he says, while staying in one of the mountain resorts there, he went out for a bracing pre-lunch walk. It was windy, and then it started to rain. Trying to return, Stephen took what he thought would be a shortcut. At one point on it, the track seemed to disappear on a stretch of rock face above a torrential stream, before resuming visibly on the other side. He decided to risk it and started scrambling across. At first it was easy, but as he took a large step and reached for an outcrop above him to steady himself, he slipped. As he slid down toward the stream far below, he had time for just one thought, and it was, “At last!” He had feared and wondered about death for so long; now it was upon him.
But he flung out a hand just in time and managed to grab the ledge his feet had been on, stopping his fall. Then he managed to get the tip of his right foot onto another jutting rock, for more support, but he could neither pull nor push himself any farther up. He hung there, by a hand and a foot—and they were already beginning to tire. It seemed that he would have about twenty minutes before his strength gave way. There was no point in shouting, as no one would hear, and it would weaken him faster. He imagined his fellow guests entering the dining room, sitting down and joking about his absence. By the time anyone became worried enough to come look for him, he would be rolling down the stream as “a ghastly mass.”
Since he appeared to be doomed, Stephen applied himself to seeking a suitable state of mind for dying in. But none of what he had been taught about this solemn process seemed to work. His mind wandered; mainly he just felt annoyed at himself for making such a mistake. He reminded himself that he had about a quarter of an hour to answer the questions of life: What is the universe? What part should we play in it?
All the religions and denominations he had come across—Protestantism, Catholicism, Pantheism—pointed in different directions. He ran through them in his mind, one by one, and had a terrible thought: what if they were all true and he was supposed to believe in all of them at once, but had accidentally failed to believe in one single clause in, say, the Athanasian Creed? God would greet him by saying: Sorry, you have been good and kind, but you forgot that clause and must now go to Hell.
Fortunately, Stephen reflected, such uncompromising rules were now out of fashion, like other old ideas, such as the view that human life was vile and despicable. But too much Panglossian positivity seemed wrong, too. Did it even matter? Was Leslie Stephen a mere grain of dust in the universe, about to be thrown aside with indifference? He knew that the atoms of his flesh would be dispersed through the stream and would recombine to form other things: the Epicurean view. But it was hard to feel much personal involvement in this. Nor could he find comfort in the thought that a general shared “humanity,” of which he had been a part, would go on without him. Still, he craved “something like a blessing to soothe the parting moment—some sense of sanctification.”
Thinking this, he found a memory arising of a time when he was taking part in a boat race on the Thames, and his boat was well behind the others. As they neared the finish line, it was obvious that he could not win. Yet he continued to row as hard as ever, out of an obscure sense that it was his “duty” to try his very best. Now, hanging on the rock, he had the same feeling. The game was up, yet he must cling on until the last moment, resisting. This gave him a moral foundation of sorts: one that required no God, nor even any sense of meaning in the universe. It was his own human need to do his duty.
The Victorians had a great feeling for “duty” as something almost transcendental. George Eliot held it in high regard, too: one day, out strolling with a companion, she remarked that out of the three words “God, Immortality, Duty,” she considered the first inconceivable and the second unbelievable, but the third was “peremptory and absolute.” Darwin also wrote of the “deep feeling of right or duty” as the “most noble of all the attributes of man” (and, as with moral attributes in general, he speculated about its origins in the social group). Leslie Stephen himself seems to have been thinking of something similar when he noted, some years earlier and à propos his loss of faith: “I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality.” He added, “I mean to live and die like a gentleman if possible.”
Today, many of us feel strongly about duty, but it is more likely to be in the context of a specific situation, perhaps in relation to the needs of family or work. To the Victorians, it was almost an entity in itself. Yet it was essentially humanistic: it needed no God to guarantee it but emerged from our own moral nature. It was a human-centered wish to do the right thing, not just by each other, but by our own lives—our own humanity.
The ending to the Alpine story (as one might guess from the author’s being alive to tell it) was a happy one. Having had his epiphany about duty, Stephen noticed that he might just be able to reach for another handhold if he lunged for it. It would mean taking a swing and abandoning his existing handhold. Still, he had nothing to lose. He reached—missed—and began sliding downward. But almost immediately, he came to a halt. It turned out that another ledge had been there all the time, just below him; it supported him more firmly, and he could step back onto the path again from there. Looking at his watch, he saw that the whole drama had taken five minutes—a bad five minutes in the Alps—and that he would be in time for lunch.
At the end of the story, Leslie Stephen hints that it was just that: a story. His account may also have inspired a more overtly fictional scene: an incident in a novel by Thomas Hardy. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, which began to appear in serial form that year, 1872, Hardy has his character Stephen Smith go out for a walk on a coastal clifftop with the young woman he fancies, Elfride Swancourt. Smith misses his footing and slips off the edge, but catches himself on an outcrop, where he remains hanging over the beach. Elfride leaves—to get help, it seems, which is likely to mean a long wait as there is no one else anywhere nearby. Dangling there, his grip gradually loosening, Stephen notices a fossil of a trilobite, embedded in the rock just before his eyes. Here we both are, he thinks, separated by millions of years, yet brought close in this moment of death.
In fact, Elfride reappears almost immediately. Instead of going for help, she has merely gone behind a bush to remove her long knickers. She knots them into a rope, throws the end down, and rescues him very efficiently, thus proving that underwear is not just for making manuscripts.
Hardy was a poet as well as a novelist, and several of his poems touch on the gradual withdrawal of God from the human mental landscape. He wrote some verses that are filled with yearning for the old certainties—the cozy village church, the hymns—as well as other poems that suggest a great liberation. “God’s Funeral” and “A Plaint to Man” show God fading away, like the picture cast by a magic-lantern slide when the light behind it is turned down. Of course, the light was of human origin all along. As he goes, God tells Man to seek strength and consolation in human fellowship instead:
In brotherhood bonded close and graced
With loving-kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.
Other poets also captured this sense of something fading from view, including Matthew Arnold. In his poem “Dover Beach,” started around 1851 and published in 1867, the poet looks out of a window onto a beach at night. He hears the pebbles rolling as the tide goes out, and imagines it as a Sea of Faith, similarly receding and leaving a conflict-ridden world lacking sense or meaning: “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” If there is some faint hope, he concludes, it can be found only in our fidelity to one another. (Apparently, he was inspired by the view from the bedroom window on his seaside honeymoon, which makes you wonder whether that was an entirely heartening experience.) Elsewhere, Arnold took a more pragmatic view: in Culture and Anarchy he advised sticking with the Church of England faith because it was nicely bland, and also officially established as the national religion, so it could safely be ignored most of the time, leaving one free to think about other things.
Other writers were more earnest and more violent in their imagination. If God was dead, suggested some, then a murder must have taken place. The English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a “Hymn of Man” in 1869–1870, depicting humans as first making God, then sitting in judgment against him, and finally killing him. This calls to mind a better-known passage by Friedrich Nietzsche, not published until 1882: A madman runs through a marketplace with a lantern, looking for God, and crying, “We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? . . . Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?” This is not the kind of murder for which one is condemned to prison or execution; it is the kind for which one is condemned to take over the task formerly belonging to the murderee.
Other nineteenth-century metaphors for describing loss of faith evoked feelings of vertigo or disorientation. The novelist and biographer J. A. Froude described his generation as finding “the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars.” He had been through a disorienting experience himself: as a young fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, he had published a novel about the complexities of religious doubt, The Nemesis of Faith. A colleague at the college built a bonfire and staged a public book burning; Froude was forced to resign as fellow. The Oxford and Cambridge colleges were, in general, difficult places to come out as a skeptic about religion. Little changed during the nineteenth century. At the beginning of it, Percy Bysshe Shelley had been sent down from University College, Oxford, for coauthoring a tract called The Necessity of Atheism; at the end of it, Bertrand Russell would find himself blocked from becoming a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, because his atheism was well known. Since some colleges were designed as training institutions for the Anglican clergy, losing your faith would also mean the abandonment of your career. If you admitted to it after becoming a clergyman, you lost your livelihood and could even face prosecution. In 1860, six clergymen contributed to a collection of critical reflections on religious matters, Essays and Reviews; at the instigation of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, two were convicted in ecclesiastical court on charges of heresy (although the verdict was later overturned).
Outside that rarefied world, admitting to doubts was likely to cause a traumatic break with family. When the young Robert Louis Stevenson told his father he had lost his religion, his father responded with the terrible words: “You have rendered my whole life a failure.” Another writer, Edmund Gosse, took years to extricate himself from the austerities of the Plymouth Brethren, of which his father, Philip Henry Gosse, was a member. In its most extreme phase, Edmund’s childhood had been devoid of visitors, or games, or any books apart from the Bible. As he wrote, alluding both to humanistic culture and to companionship: “I had no humanity; I had been carefully shielded from the chance of ‘catching’ it, as though it were the most dangerous of microbes.” He later looked back in sorrow on the affection he and his father could have had without that belief system, especially since they both enjoyed that great pursuit of the time: exploring seaside rock pools and collecting specimens. Indeed, the elder Gosse was far more than an amateur in these activities: he was a renowned naturalist, but he used his books to put forward bizarre explanations of how the biblical Creation story and the discoveries of paleontologists and geologists might both be true. His theory was that God had created the world to look ancient even though it wasn’t. He was hurt when even devout clergymen failed to find this convincing, or took umbrage at the idea of God as a deliberate deceiver.
In the Church of England, many of these clergymen in fact showed a more open-minded interest in Darwin and other new ideas than one might expect. They were educated men and thoughtful readers of literature of all kinds. Besides, they often had their own butterfly-collecting or rock-pool-dabbling interests. They may well have been the first in line at the bookshop or lending library for Darwin’s books.
Still, those books did not make peaceful reading, and the butterfly nets sometimes became entangled on the horns of a dilemma. As Huxley’s biographer Adrian Desmond has put it, “Letter after letter dropped through Huxley’s mailbox from vicars with problems, vicars with doubts, vicars who held him responsible.” Some of them were swept back and forth by changes of heart, like the clergyman father of the family in Rose Macaulay’s novel Told by an Idiot. The book opens with the mother announcing to her six children: “Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.”
“Oh, I do think papa is too bad,” laments one of the daughters. “Mamma, must he lose it just this winter—his faith, I mean? Can’t he wait till next?”
The family’s problem is, of course, that if he admits to loss of religion, he will become unemployed, and they will all suffer. But another daughter is more hopeful: “By next winter he may have found it again.”
The nineteenth century was the great era of the long, in-depth, socially responsible novel, and so many such books included these themes of doubt and Darwin-reading that they amounted to an identifiable literary genre. Let us take one example as representative of them all: the 1888 novel Robert Elsmere, by Mary Augusta Ward—a prolific author who demurely chose to write under her full married name of Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was actually an Arnold. Matthew Arnold was her uncle, and she also became linked to the Huxley family when her sister married T. H. Huxley’s son.
As for being demure, that would not have been the first word to come to mind when you saw her grand, formidable Victorian figure sailing around a corner. On seeing just that, Virginia Woolf (formidable enough herself), once hid behind a nearby post. Part of the reason for her avoidance was that Mary Ward disagreed with her on the subject of women having the vote. Woolf was very pro, whereas Ward opposed it, and was a force in the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League. Yet she campaigned for women’s education, cofounding the Association for the Education of Women and giving support for women studying at Oxford. In the Arnoldian spirit, she also believed in better education for the poor; a Mary Ward Centre for adult education can still be found in London.
Ward was by no means irreligious, but she was fascinated by the developmental stages of doubt and by its consequences in people’s lives. Robert Elsmere—the most durable of her twenty-six novels—concerns the title character, who is a clergyman, and his wife, Catherine, a fervent believer. Their marriage is a happy one, but Robert undergoes a long slow alteration in his faith. Neglecting his sermons, he instead spends time providing medicines for the sick of his parish and trying to improve unhealthy living conditions. Catherine calls this work his “dirt and drains.” He also entertains his flock with stories, retelling the plots of Shakespeare and Dumas for their enjoyment, introducing them to a new experience of literature and allowing them to “live someone else’s life” for half an hour. Without yet having become a doubter, he is becoming a humanist. The process continues. Elsmere reads Darwin. He studies history and is troubled by the way Christianity seems to have caused more violence and suffering than it has prevented. He wonders what a Christ who was only human would be like, and imagines “a purely human, explicable, yet always wonderful Christianity. It broke his heart, but the spell of it was like some dream-country wherein we see all the familiar objects of life in new relations and perspectives.”
This “purely human” world was the dream-country, or alternative wonderland, into which, like Alice, many thoughtful people were now venturing. The world looked different after reading Darwin or Huxley. Yet everyone’s human needs continued to be the same: people still required medicines and drains; they still longed for reassurance and meaning. For those following Robert’s path, it began to seem that humanist values or a “human Christ” could provide those things just as well as traditional theology, and perhaps better.
Thus, performing a “catechism of himself,” Robert concludes that he believes in Jesus, but only as a wise man and teacher, not as a miracle worker or direct mediator with the Deity. Even God, he feels, should be thought of as a synonym for “the good”: the quality that emerges whenever people help their fellows, or sacrifice themselves for others. These thoughts build in him, until he decides: “Every human soul in which the voice of God makes itself felt, enjoys, equally with Jesus of Nazareth, the divine sonship, and ‘miracles do not happen!’ ” There. “It was done.”
He has to leave the church, but as a replacement he becomes involved with a non-theological Sunday school for working-class boys. He teaches classes demonstrating the marvels of electricity or chemistry, or introducing the children to natural history collections. He gives talks at working-men’s clubs. In short, he becomes very much like T. H. Huxley, or even Mary Ward herself—except that he goes further and sets up an alternative churchlike organization, based on meliorism and reform of conditions for the poor. Ward here was inspired by the real-life ideas of a social reformer named Thomas Hill Green, called “Grey” in the novel.
Robert Elsmere’s conversion (as it were) gives the book its long but clear narrative line. Along the way, other characters are woven in, each showing a different perspective on the same questions. Catherine’s sister Rose is a talented musician who chooses, life-affirmingly, not to give up her art for the sake of religious self-denial, as Catherine would have preferred her to do. Robert’s old Oxford friend Langham, who falls in love with Rose, is a freethinker, too, but he is more disturbed by his doubt than the more robust Elsmere. At the other end of the spectrum entirely is Mr. Newcome, a clergyman of the “Ritualist” tendency, which was obsessed with strict ceremonial practices. Confronted with Elsmere’s idea that different beliefs might all be tolerated together, he fulminates: how can we go around idly choosing what to believe, as if it were a game, when all the time we are in desperate danger, pursued by the two “sleuth-hounds” of Sin and Satan? He says, “I see life always as a threadlike path between abysses along which man creeps . . . with bleeding hands and feet towards one—narrow—solitary outlet.” He illustrates the word creeps with clawlike hand gestures as he speaks. “What a maimed life!” thinks Elsmere calmly.
His wife, Catherine, is, I think, the most moving of the characters. She is never fanatical in the ugly way of Newcome. She even tries to tolerate Robert’s change of views, but she finds it hard for the most loving of reasons: fear of what will happen to him after death. The same concern was felt by Darwin’s wife, Emma: Charles had warned her before the marriage that he was not a believer. She thanked him for his honesty but was afraid because it meant she would never see him in the afterlife. The Christianity of a Tertullian or Bernard of Cluny has come a long way: the prospect of one’s nearest and dearest going to hell is not so delightful after all.
Catherine Elsmere grieves for her husband’s future, and in more immediate terms she also has to cope with his losing his job. Ward conveys these spiritual and practical perils vividly. How can anyone who loves her husband look at him, across the hearthrug, and know with all one’s being that he is going to end up in Hell? Yet this was the drama of many Victorian households.
Robert Elsmere is not short, even by the standards of its time, and it met with exasperated reviews from such highly respected critics as William Gladstone, who found it religiously disturbing as well as overdidactic. Henry James compared it to a slow-moving ship with a close-packed cargo—and he should know!
In fact, having approached it with trepidation, I was surprised by how engrossed I became in it. Perhaps it helps if you have a prior interest in that era’s crisis of belief and doubt. But I’m not alone. Robert Elsmere became a word-of-mouth success on publication, selling around forty thousand copies in Britain and two hundred thousand in America in its first year alone. Some of these were pirated editions—so many of them that the book became a test case for campaigners trying to introduce international copyright protections for authors and publishers. They succeeded, and the protections were won in 1891: a small humanistic victory in itself.
Most interesting, from a humanist point of view, is that Robert does much more than fall into doubt’s sea, or lose himself on the darkling plain. He loses one version of himself, but that is not what the story is finally about. It is about finding a positive, humanistic set of values to take its place. For him, those values are worthy of being called a new religion.
Others were in search of a new, humanized religion as well. Some of the results of that quest were distinctly strange.
One approach, if you wanted to redesign Christianity to fit the new ideas of humanity, was to take the existing Jesus story and strip it of everything supernatural, leaving only an inspiring story about a great moral teacher who lived long ago. There were already precedents for this, the most notable operation having been done by the American founding father Thomas Jefferson. In 1819, he literally cut up copies of the New Testament and reassembled selected passages to form a single account of Jesus’s life, relieved of elements such as the Virgin Birth, the miracles, and the Resurrection. The remaining text allowed more emphasis to remain on Jesus’s moral teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Jefferson called the new text The Life and Morals of Jesus Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. Once it was published, it became known more handily as the Jefferson Bible. His intention, as he had said in a letter, was to isolate “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man,” by removing what he called “amphibologisms,” or ambiguous elements, including stories that he suspected had been added by various hands or were generally bogus. In a way, he was working in the tradition of a Valla or an Erasmus: questioning texts and trying to get back to something purer and more beneficial. He just took the idea a good deal further.
Others did not actually slice up pages, but they did consider ways of retaining the Bible’s uplifting ideas and stories while liberating it from its supernatural part. One such person was Matthew Arnold, whose long essay Literature and Dogma argued for approaching the sacred texts mainly as literature—thus, as purely human sources of cultural sweetness and light. He hoped that this might be a way to lure back some of the people who had drifted away from religion, and stop even more from leaving. But what would they be lured back to, without the supernatural material? Merely to the materials of good literature: a fine moral message and a memorable central character.
For some, Jesus was of such mesmerizing interest as a protagonist that this took over even from the moral purpose. Two influential biographies were written of him in the mid-nineteenth century, placing him in his own historical context as well as examining his life and its meaning as myth. The more heavyweight of the two was German historian David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus of 1835 (translated into English by George Eliot). The more readable was by a Frenchman, Ernest Renan: his Life of Jesus appeared in 1863.
It was reading Strauss’s book that had set Renan on this path: he came across it when he was a young man studying for the priesthood in his native Brittany. The impact was immediate: he decided to leave the seminary. He did remain a biblical scholar and historian, and more of a deist than an atheist—he believed that God had created the world and filled it with “the divine afflatus” before retiring from the scene. Jesus was merely a human being, but no ordinary one. Renan conjures up an extreme, visionary figure who gradually moves further and further from any attachment to the world and toward the drama of a heaven that only he can see. By the end, Jesus is no longer quite of this planet. Renan makes us feel why people were so enthralled by him; he uses the skills of a psychological novelist to show Jesus’s character as it develops away from normal humanity without ever fully leaving it. Yet he also uses his formidable erudition (and much traveling around the original sites) to keep Jesus rooted in his historical and geographical context. He vividly conveyed what it might have been like to grow up in a world so remote from the cultural worlds of Greece or Rome.
The book caused a furor (as Strauss’s had), even though Renan claimed he had toned it down before publication, to cause less offense. He fled Paris for Brittany but found his notoriety had preceded him. “I always thought you were reading too hard,” said one of his former teachers. Secretly, Renan seems to have quite enjoyed the fuss: a later witness to his lectures observed how his eyes would twinkle in his round face every time he opened his mouth (revealing a set of “very small teeth”) to say something more than usually daring. The American freethinker Robert G. Ingersoll, who knew him and shared his tendency to twinkle, was amused at the way bigots became incensed by Renan’s merry and modest demeanor: “Such cheerfulness, such good philosophy, with cap and bells, such banter and blasphemy, such sound and common sense,” wrote Ingersoll. “His mental manners were excellent.”
Ingersoll himself was of a different school of thought: he did not find Jesus either exciting or morally wise. For him, it was a personal failing in Jesus to have shown so little interest either in understanding the physical processes of the world or in improving the conditions of life in it. E. M. Forster would feel the same way: he admitted to disliking Jesus’s unworldliness and his rejection of intellectual curiosity, and found in him “such an absence of humour and fun that my blood’s chilled.” Forster did not think he would have liked Jesus as an individual, and that was a dealbreaker, since personal responses were everything to him. The problem, perhaps, was that something of the divine did still cling to Jesus, whether you believed in that divinity or not. One could try to make him “human, all too human,” but he remained the sort of human who was entirely dedicated to redemption in the beyond and to submission to and love of God the Father.
Another option, for those who preferred their religion even more humanized, was to set up humanity itself in the place of God or Jesus and worship that instead.
There were precedents for this, too. In France, just after the Revolution, a secular “religion” had briefly held sway, designed to replace the Catholic religion, which the revolutionaries hoped to eradicate. They began by ransacking the churches. They even briefly considered demolishing huge cathedrals, such as the one at Chartres, until an architect pointed out that the rubble of such a building would block the whole of the town center for years. But they were also aware that people might need a substitute, so they set up personifications such as Reason, Liberty, or Humanity as a focus for devotion. The altar at Paris’s Notre-Dame was replaced by one dedicated to Liberty, and the building hosted a Festival of Reason on November 10, 1793. This included a parade by the Goddess of Reason, played by Sophie Momoro, wife of the organizer Antoine-François Momoro. The year after that, the religions of humanity and reason fell out of favor with Maximilien Robespierre, who showed his disapproval by having Antoine-François Momoro and others guillotined, and then introducing his own, more deistic Cult of the Supreme Being instead. That continued until 1801, when Napoleon banned that, too, and brought back more conventional religious practices.
The idea of venerating abstractions of this sort lived on. In Germany, the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach suggested following a human religion in his 1841 book The Essence of Christianity (another work that would be translated into English by George Eliot). Feuerbach thought that monotheistic religion had anyway resulted from humans’ choosing their own best qualities, naming those qualities “God,” and worshipping them. So one might as well cut out the middlegod and worship Humanity directly, or at least our moral side. Feuerbach did not attempt to organize such a religion, but others did, notably the French thinker Auguste Comte.
Comte had some excellent ideas: he founded the discipline of sociology and coined the term positivism to describe his belief that our lives could be better governed if they were based on empirical (that is, “positive”) science. His scientific worldview led him to reject traditional religion, but his sociology told him that people seemed to need something ritualistic in their lives to replace it. He therefore designed what became known as the Positivist religion, or the Religion of Humanity. It was dedicated to an abstraction, but there was nothing abstract about its practices.
First, being a Catholic by upbringing, Comte was certain that this religion would need an idealized feminine figure to replace the Virgin Mary. He found such a figure in a woman with whom he happened to be personally fascinated: Clotilde de Vaux. After a life unhappily married to a man who abandoned her, she died young, all of which made her the perfect symbol of gentle, anguished female virtue. In the Religion of Humanity, she loomed larger than humanity itself, it sometimes seems. But for living women, Comte’s religion had less to offer: they were expected to devote themselves exclusively to bringing up children.
Then there had to be saints, to replace the Catholic ones. Comte chose a range of artists, writers, scientists, and even some religious thinkers who had shown outstanding human qualities, such as Moses. He named the months of the year after them—an idea borrowed from the Revolutionary calendar. And of course, there must be a pope at the head of it all. He seemed prepared to consider himself for this role, but had no time to make it official before he died, in 1857.
After this, the Positivist religion snowballed away and found followers in countries around the world. It had a lasting success in Brazil, because it was adopted by some of the new republic’s founders after their coup of 1889. They were attracted by the positivist philosophy of rationalism and its opposition to war and to slavery. A fine Templo da Humanidade was built in Rio de Janeiro, modeled on the Paris Panthéon and featuring a giant painting of Clotilde de Vaux holding a child. Sadly, its roof collapsed in a storm in 2009. Other Positivist churches are still standing in other parts of Brazil.
Another country where Positivists did well was Britain, where so many were already swimming in doubt’s boundless sea. In 1859—the year that also saw publication of both the Origin of Species and Mill’s On Liberty—Comte’s English translator Richard Congreve opened a London branch of the Religion of Humanity. Meetings were held mostly in his own home at first. A small congregation listened to sermons and recited the Positivist Creed, with lines such as “I believe in the coming of the reign of Humanity.” Congreve even spoke, in one sermon, of Humanity as the “Great Power whom we here acknowledge as the Highest.” Music was played; poetry was recited. One popular choice was “The Choir Invisible” by George Eliot, expressing her wish to live on in human memory rather than in a heavenly afterlife. The Positivists set it to music, so it could be sung as a hymn:
O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirr’d to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude . . .
George Eliot herself took a deep interest in humanist and secular ideas, as one can tell from her choice of books to translate. But having met some English adherents of the Positivist church, she steered clear of it. Partly this was because of the same difficulty Forster would have with Jesus Christ: she did not personally like its leader. She and Congreve were neighbors, but she felt that his superficial amiability hid a cold heart.
The other great intellectual figures engaged with themes of religion and science at the time were wary, too. John Stuart Mill wrote an exposé ridiculing the Comtist attachment to ritual. He singled out the way Comte made such a cult of femininity while showing no regard for women’s real-life opportunities. T. H. Huxley took one look and summed up the religion as “Catholicism minus Christianity.”
In fact, some members of the English church of Humanity also had reservations about the excess of ritual, and the result was that must-have feature of all religions: a schism. The split occurred at a meeting in 1881, with the joke going around that—according to T. R. Wright’s entertaining account The Religion of Humanity—“they had come to Church in one cab and left in two.”
The group that departed from Congreve’s was led by Frederic Harrison. He preferred a slightly less elaborate set of imagery and paraphernalia, and thought that “mumbling Catholic rites in a sordid hole” made Positivism look ridiculous. There would still be hymns: his wife, Ethel, edited an anthology of them, including numbers such as “Hail to Thee! Hail to Thee! Child of Humanity!” But they met in a physically brighter location, Newton Hall off Fetter Lane in London, and Harrison’s whole approach was warmer. No one called him coldhearted; he was exceptionally hearty and humorous. Having seen him out riding one day, Anthony Trollope described him as looking like “a jolly butcher on a hippopotamus.” Harrison’s son Austin left a wonderful portrait of him in his memoirs, recalling his father’s hilarious and melodramatic home performances of his favorite author, Shakespeare, continuing until the children had collapsed into too many giggles to go on. He also took on a tutor for them: the hard-up novelist George Gissing, who would enthrall them with horror stories from his own very different schooldays, complete with loud “Thwack!” sounds as he recalled the floggings.
Despite such appealing personalities and the pleasures of exuberant hymn-singing, the Religion of Humanity in general left an unfortunate legacy. Even today, a common view of humanists is that they just want to replace one religion with another and to make an idol out of humanity, looking down on all other species as inferior. These things were mostly true of Comte’s religious confection. But they do not feature in modern humanism, which rejects dogmatic systems of all kinds, and stresses its respect for non-human as well as human life.
It seems to me a pity that Comte’s perfectly good humanist ideas about reason and morality should have gone along with another, rather insulting one: the notion that human beings must have saints and virgins, or they will not be able to cope. Mill expressed this objection to Comte’s thinking when he asked, “Why this universal systematizing, systematizing, systematizing?” And why this attachment to ideologies, rites, and rules? Everything in Mill’s own philosophy of freedom, diversity, and “experiments in living” went against this. It appalled him to see that a philosophy starting out from a desire for human “evolution” had ended, instead, in subjugation to dogma.
The nineteenth century was such a transformative period, in the sciences and humanities alike, that it need not surprise us to see wayward responses emerging. The humanized Jesus and the Religion of Humanity were just two of them; many more possibilities existed. The memoir by Frederic’s son Austin Harrison has given us a vivid portrait of this free-roaming intellectual world of Victorian London in which he grew up. It was, he said, so full of radicals and evolutionists and freethinkers and agnostics and Positivists that not to be one of them “was to be just nobody at all.” The dramas of the “death of God,” the disorientation of losing faith, the wild attempts at substitution, the desire for moral mentors, the scientific excitement—it all went into the mix to form an extraordinary moment in the story of humanism.
Related dramas continue in our own time, too. We still ask similar questions, even if we formulate them in different ways: How do humans fit into the rest of the variety of life, or into the physical universe in general? How can we reconcile what emerges from scientific reasoning with what is offered by our heritage of religious thought? Do we need heroes, or saints, or moral leaders? What kind of entity is this humanity, anyway, which so dominates the planet that some have begun to call this the Anthropocene epoch? We certainly do not have answers yet, and perhaps never will. But as any agnostic would say, it is sometimes better not to be too sure about answers.
When the philosopher Bertrand Russell looked back on this period—which was that of his own nineteenth-century childhood, as viewed from the perspective of the very different century that followed—he wrote that it could seem naive and full of “humbug.” Yet it had a major advantage: people were driven more by hope than by fear. In his view, if humanity were to flourish, or even continue to survive at all, it would have to deal wisely with the fear and recover some trace of the hope.