This paper was written for Kenneth H. Cousland, professor of Church history at Emmanuel College. It was submitted to fulfil the requirements for Church History 3, “History of the Church from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day,” which Frye took during his final year at Emmanuel (1935–36). Frye received a grade of “A+” for the essay, the typescript of which is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 13.
So Christian turned out of his way to go to Mr. Legality’s house for help; but, behold, when he was got now hard by the hill, it seemed so high, and also that side of it that was next the wayside did hang so much over, that Christian was afraid to venture further, lest the hill should fall on his head; wherefore there he stood still, and wotted not what to do. Also his burden now seemed heavier to him than while he was in his way. There came also flashes of fire out of the hill, that made Christian afraid that he should be burned. … Here, therefore, he sweat and did quake for fear. … And now he began to be sorry that he had taken Mr. Worldly Wiseman’s counsel. And with that he saw Evangelist coming to meet him; at the sight also of whom he began to blush for shame.
Bunyan1
In this essay I propose to let a few of the more accredited representatives of the nineteenth century speak, as far as possible, for themselves. Whatever connective tissue I can supply will perhaps serve to form a pattern and a background. With the nineteenth century cultural means, when brought into any connection with the Church, literary and philosophical. Musically, the Victorian Age was as tone-deaf as the petrified city in the Arabian Nights, its sculpture being presumably much inferior. Architecture has a certain negative interest we shall touch on later; painting has a religious connotation only in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In arranging this cento of quotations from the literature and philosophy of the age, I am not concerned to show, or to attempt to show, that there were any causal connections between the growth of culture and the development of the Church. There are no causal connections anywhere in history, other than the most superficial and haphazard. Literature, philosophy, and religion do not react on each other: they are reacted on by a definite group of people born in a certain age. In the nineteenth century we have an era as important and interesting as any of the three centuries preceding it, though in all branches of culture it marks an abrupt decline from them. It made up, to some extent, in variety what it lacked in intensity; and if it is a period of confusion rather than coherence, it is, for that very reason, one of analysis rather than growth, with a cultural pattern more explicit than civilization had yet seen. Culture, denied the height and depth of great inspiration, broke out and overflowed on all sides.
The nineteenth century was the offspring of the Industrial Revolution, of the movement towards national democracy which produced the French and American Revolutions, and in general the change described by Spengler as a change from culture to civilization, the entry into the last phase of growth possible to the Western world. Fundamentally, it represented a shift in social economy to the metropolis. Now the metropolis is the one completely individualized form of society. Everyone depends on his social environment in a completely impersonal way; his friends are not his neighbours, they are selected by his temperament.2 The rise of technical and engineering developments brought about a sense of human sufficiency and power which made for a completely antinomian attitude to religion. Carlyle gives us both elements of the situation, looking at one objectively and presenting the other as his own belief:
This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us.… Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.3
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself. (Signs of the Times)4
Which gives us two of our leading motives: the idea of the inherent power of humanity to achieve its own ends, and the sense that humanity is an aggregation of individuals.
As Kant was the only thinker who grasped the nature of this rise of antinomianism, it is to Kant we must turn in order to understand what is happening. Everything we know, said Kant, is the product of an object and a subject: we operate by mental forms on everything we perceive. Consequently, the world, as an object of understanding, is a phenomenal world, not the real world. The real or purely objective world eludes us. The difference between these worlds is a difference of essence, or subjective apprehension of a thing, and existence, or the thing-in-itself. All proofs of God’s existence imply that his essence involves it, which is impossible. We cannot rationalize our religion: it is something we feel and experience.5
The romantic philosophers who followed Kant asserted that the world of understanding was essentially a space-world; we cannot understand the process of change. On the other hand, what we do not understand, we feel and experience, and experience belongs to the world of existence, which is similarly a time-world. This gives us the key to our problem, for romanticism provides the general background for all forms of nineteenth-century culture. The various religious impulses of the period can be classified according to the attitude they took to the pervading assumptions that time was existence or life and that life was the ultimately real world. For the purposes of discussion, we shall divide them into four. First, the negative attitude of pessimism and scepticism, rising from the feeling that, as life entails more suffering than happiness, it must be, because there is no higher reality, evil rather than good. This we call the agnostic movement, or the identification of religion with illusion. Second, the slightly less negative inference from the doctrine that religion is inner feeling rather than reason, that one should preserve the emotional kick of religion while repudiating its dogma. This we call the aesthetic movement, or the identification of religion with art. Third, the more positive attempt to strive toward a higher reality in the only possible way: by improving life. This we call the pragmatic movement, or the identification of religion with morality. Fourth, the gathering together of these elements into a coherent religious point of view. This, of course, is the synthetic movement, or identification of religion with life.
It is quite impossible to identify any of these with the ordinary sectarian divisions of Christianity. The Catholic Church, standing out for a genuine communal appeal in religion, gained the respect of those dissatisfied with the attempts of their own age, and, consequently, provided a fifth movement we shall glance at later on. The Protestant sects were less fortunate. Everyone took for granted, as a necessary axiom of civilization, the separation of Church and state; the idea, given currency by Edmund Burke, of supporting the established Church because it was established, was very widespread among the Tories, but made little headway in culture. Coleridge is the one prominent name to be associated with the Protestant Anglican Church, and if he meant what he said when he defined religion as “only reason, seen perspectively by a finite intellect,”6 he was standing for a rationalist tradition which goes beyond Thomism itself and was a complete anachronism for the nineteenth century. There is little to choose between Anglican and dissenting Churches; they were seething in a curious hellbroth of morality and respectability which owed something to Calvinism, something to Arminianism, and much more to deism; which latter, by its withdrawal of God from human experience, had cleared the ground for the immanent life-religions of the time. The separation of divine and human activity in Calvinism was the remote source of this perhaps, but the Industrial Revolution had knocked the underpinning from genuine Calvinism by its bolstering up of man’s confidence in his own powers, as we have seen in the quotation from Carlyle given above. Consequently, religion came to be identified with various kinds of human activity. The doctrines of justification by faith and the working of divine grace in the human soul were almost unheard of during the nineteenth century.
The age was completely in the hands of the competitive, individualistic middle class. The aristocracy which had produced Chesterfield, Walpole, Gibbon, Scott, Byron, and Shelley did not, after the Reform Bill of 1832, write down a single line worth rereading, such elevated bourgeois parvenus as Disraeli and Tennyson being exceptions which go a long way to prove the rule. Religion, however, is inexorably, in the end, a community of believers; it can never be entirely individualized, and so the various communities of artists, reformers, and human beings in general we have mentioned above became, for the majority of people, the established social order, and religion a gesture towards its perpetuation. Methodism, by throwing in its lot with the expanding mercantile activity of the time, had prevented a no doubt premature revolution of the proletariat and had, in fact, been largely instrumental in enlisting the proletariat in the service of the capitalist system. Its doctrine of immanent and universal grace, contemporary with the German pietism which had nourished Kant, provided a nucleus for the life-religion developments of the time and a spearhead of reforming activity for both Dissenters and Anglicans. But for the most part, the really independent minds who did some original thinking on the subject of religion encountered an apathetic, maladjusted, usually openly hostile Church, and in studying the impact of one on the other, we must keep in mind the fact that the Church was for the most part very unwilling to suffer any impact at all, and what influence there is is indirect and largely post-humous.
One of the most important of the romantics who followed Kant was, of course, Schopenhauer. For him the thing-in-itself became a part of the world of experience, antithetical to the world of understanding. He called it the world-as-will. This, not being accessible to the intelligence, could not be conscious; it must be then a blind unconscious force, causing infinite pain with spasmodic flashes of happiness. Life is essentially evil; no conscious purpose in the world can be postulated, and the sole remedy, for most at any rate of Schopenhauer’s followers, is spiritual isolation.
This doctrine, in most of the forms it takes, is too close to Buddhism, incomparably the greatest religion outside our own tradition, for us to deny that it is a positive religious attitude in itself. But no other age has ever sounded quite so despondent a note as the nineteenth. An age of bourgeois individualism isolates the genius, by shattering the implicit sense of a communal unity which the great artist evokes, and the constant bitter fight of artist and bourgeois produces some sinister results. The figure of the misunderstood, persecuted genius starving in a garret is a myth belonging to the nineteenth century. First there are the gloomy romantic heroes of the Byronic school: then, as the conflict sharpens, come the demoniacs or wilful eccentrics whose motto is épater le bourgeois,7 the followers of Baudelaire in France; then the sadists with their association of beauty with pain; then the pathological cases of geniuses whose horror of society has driven them to lunacy or suicide, such as Laforgue, Strindberg, Nietzsche, or Van Gogh; then a dissolution in decadence as the hostile society breaks up, with Wilde and the Beardsley period in England, Zola and his followers in France. This development has been brilliantly traced by M. Praz in his book on The Romantic Agony.8 It is a development which touches England chiefly at the points indicated, and, as it regards religion as a product of society, it repudiates religion by reversing it. For this kind of artist is merely a bourgeois turned inside out. Sadism produces a new black mass, a devil worship of the kind of Swinburne’s blasphemous parody of a hymn to the Virgin:
O garment not golden but gilded,
O garden where all men may dwell,
O tower not of ivory, but builded
By hands that reach heaven from hell;
O mystical rose of the mire,
O house not of gold but of gain;
O house of unquenchable fire,
Our Lady of Pain!
(Dolores: Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs, [lines 17–24])
But we are more interested at the moment in tracing out the positive quasi-Buddhist religious attitude. In James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night we have the full horror of absolute pessimism, complete rejection of society and the forms it evolves, utter renunciation which moans to itself the refrain “No hope could have no fear” with a cumulative power to which no quotation can do justice.9 John Davidson is more explicit:
It has been said: Ye must be born again.
1 say to you: Men must be that they are....
Religion, Art, Philosophy—this God,
This Beauty, this Idea men have filled
The world with, study still, and still adore,
Are only segments of the spirit’s tail
We must outgrow, if spirit would ascend ...
To reign untailed in heaven hereafter.
(Testament of a Man Forbid, [lines 80–1, 97–101, 106])
Here, of course, is an English echo of Zarathustra on the mountain top. The answer of the artist to bourgeois civilization is couched in bourgeois terms, for the artist cannot avoid expressing his own age, however he may hate it. Individualism is the message both of despairing poet and confident economist. It may be objected that pessimists like Thomson and Davidson, however important in themselves, are not typical of the Victorian age. So let us storm the inner citadel of Victorian respectability and see what Tennyson says:
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains—
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?
Is not the Vision He, tho’ He be not that which He seems?
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams? ...
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision—were it not He?
(The Higher Pantheism, [lines 1–4, 17–18])
In this pleading wistfulness we catch what is assuredly the same feeling of profound distrust in the possibility of the existence of anything like a conscious or personal God. Tennyson’s attitude is hardly dogmatic enough to be anything more than a tendency. Let us turn to the most representative philosopher of the age, who can hardly count lack of self-confidence among his weaknesses:
We see that Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism, when rigorously analysed (i.e., after a discussion of twenty pages), severally prove to be absolutely unthinkable.… A religious creed is defined as an a priori theory of the Universe.… Religions diametrically opposed in their overt dogmas, are yet perfectly at one in the tacit conviction that the existence of the world with all it contains and all which surrounds it, is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation. On this point... there is entire unanimity. (Synthetic Philosophy)10
Herbert Spencer claims that the kernel of truth in religion is that God is unknowable. In him this agnosticism became the basis of an evolutionary philosophy we shall deal with later. A far greater philosopher, F.H. Bradley, voices a similar conviction, but with a more unified point of view:
The religious consciousness rests in the felt unity of unreduced opposites; and either to combine these consistently, or upon the other hand to transform them is impossible for religion. And hence self-contradiction in theory, and oscillation in sentiment, is inseparable from its essence. Its dogmas must end in one-sided error, or else in senseless compromise. (Appearance and Reality, 443)11
And in Bradley’s scepticism we touch the very core of the nineteenth-century attitude. For it is associated with a spiritual isolation, a subjectivity of perception and thought, almost amounting to solipsism:
My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. … In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul. (Ibid., 346)12
But the culmination of this sceptical pessimist agnosticism is in the work of Thomas Hardy. In his greatest production, The Dynasts, there, is significantly, the explicit influence of Schopenhauer; and there is the combination of the belief in an impersonal universe and in the isolation of the intelligent individual from an unconscious environment. Let us take a great tableau from the drama:
(S.D.): A new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle, enduing men and things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as one organism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity and vitalized matter included in the display.
Spirit of the Pities (after a pause):
Amid this scene of bodies substantive
Strange waves I sight like wings grown visible,
Which bear men’s forms on their innumerous coils,
Twining and serpentining round and through.
Also retracting threads like gossamers—
Except in being irresistible—
Which complicate with some, and balance all.
These are the Prime Volitions,—fibrils, veins,
Will-tissues, nerves and pulses of the Cause,
That heave throughout the Earth’s compositure.
Their sum is like the lobule of a Brain
Evolving always that it wots not of;
A Brain whose whole connotes the Everywhere,
And whose procedure may but be discerned
By phantom eyes like ours; the while unguessed
Of those it stirs, who (even as ye do) dream
Their motions free, their orderings supreme;
Each life apart from each, with power to mete
Its own day’s measures; balanced, self-complete;
Though they subsist but atoms of the One
Labouring through all, divisible from none;
But this no further now. Deem yet man’s deeds self-done.
(S.D.): The anatomy of the Immanent Will disappears.13
We may regard this as a complete expression of the negative side of the time-religion evolved by the nineteenth century. Its Protestant ancestry is uncomfortably self-evident: Luther’s justification by faith, Calvin’s separation of divine and human activity, deism’s separation of divine activity from the world; the descent to nineteenth-century pessimism is swift and inevitable.
Just as the preceding development can be associated with Schopenhauer, so this one can to some extent be associated with Schleiermacher. For in Schleiermacher’s theology the individual soul apprehends God through a synthesis of subjective factors in which feeling or emotion predominates; the same thing happens in art, and so the realities of religion and art become, by a ready inference, united in a basis of symbolism. This implies that all approaches to the good are united alike in religion and in art, as in Keats’s identification of truth and beauty.14 It also implies a historical basis for the consideration of religion, as so integral a connection with art implies that both are products of a culture, and a culture is a historical phenomenon. In Ruskin, the greatest name of the period associated with the philosophy of art, this point of view is more or less taken for granted. He says in The Crown of Wild Olive:
Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, which was essentially the religion of Comfort. Its great doctrine is the remission of sins; for which cause it happens, too often, in certain phases of Christianity, that sin and sickness themselves are partly glorified. … The practical result of this doctrine, in art, is a continual contemplation of sin and disease, and of imaginary states of purification from them; thus we have an architecture conceived in a mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration. (Traffic)15
There are several important inferences from this extract. In the first place, Ruskin evidently believes that, as Christianity is a cultural product, it can be said essentially to exist only in that historical period in which it explicitly dominated and unified men’s lives, that is, in the Middle Ages. Thus, Christianity is to a large extent identified, not with the New Testament, but with the medieval world. The medieval world has passed, and Christianity has passed with it; but the religion survives in the works of art which remain, in the Gothic cathedrals, in the painting of Giotto and Cimabue, in the plain chants. Ruskin assumes without discussion that works of art are expressions of a contemporary religious impulse. Art is the permanent truth of religion.
Matthew Arnold carries a step further this approach to Christianity. To him, Christianity is still essentially a cultural product. But he is less interested in art than Ruskin and more interested in personality. Now probably to anyone with a time-philosophy, and certainly to a Victorian, the individual will appear as an organism struggling to achieve consolidation, order, balance, integration, while being pushed along at the end of a propelling historical movement. The more cultured a man becomes, the more he absorbs of his tradition, and the more his tradition becomes internal, the less it becomes external, and the less, therefore, a propelling force. Arnold, like most of the easygoing Hegelians of his time, saw the historical process as a continuous thrust and counterthrust of an antithesis, which it was the business of the individual to resolve:
Puritanism … was originally the reaction in the seventeenth century of the conscience and moral sense of our race, against the moral indifference and lax rule of conduct which in the sixteenth century came in with the Renascence.It was a reaction of Hebraism against Hellenism. … Yet there is a very important difference between the defeat inflicted on Hellenism by Christianity eighteen hundred years ago, and the check given to the Renascence by Puritanism.… Eighteen hundred years ago it was altogether the hour of Hebraism. Primitive Christianity was legitimately and truly the ascendant force in the world at that time and the way of mankind’s progress lay through its full development. Another hour in man’s development began in the fifteenth century, and the main road of his progress then lay for a time through Hellenism. Puritanism was no longer the central current of the world’s progress, it was a side stream crossing the central current and checking it. (Culture and Anarchy)16
This peculiar dislike of the antinomian Victorian for Calvinism will meet us again in Mill. Arnold makes it abundantly clear that for him the Puritans destroyed what elusive boundary line did exist between the Hebrews and the Philistines—this idea is found again in Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism.17 There is also another Victorian stereotype in this extract: the belief that in the Greek pagan world all was dignity, self-expression, and culture, and that in the heyday of Christianity all was asceticism, humility, and masochism. We have already found this in Ruskin’s rather silly remarks about medieval Christianity. It is not until William Morris that we find medievalism treated as something healthy and young rather than as material for decadents and amateurs of sadism such as Huysmans, who died in the bosom of the Church after a profound study of diabolism.18
Ruskin was the prophet of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art, one of the rare associations of art and literature made in that century of anarchy and technical specialization. Nothing, however, in the poetry of Rossetti gives the quality of his painting, or of Beardsley’s illustrations to Malory: the symbolic decorations of lilies, the waxen, languorous figures with corpselike skin and staring eyes, the saprophitic aroma of a ghoulish eroticism—all this testifies to what extent the Pre-Raphaelites carried out Ruskin’s implications.19 To anyone who tends to identify religion with human life and activity the supernatural world is only too likely to become very rapidly the world of the dead. In poetry, there are Rossetti’s Sister Helen and John Davidson’s Ballad of a Nun20 to illustrate this curious perspective of Christianity as the Middle Ages in Madame Tussaud’s.21
The humanism of Arnold was carried a step further by the thorough-going aestheticism of Walter Pater. Arnold wanted merely to abolish dogma and preserve artistic feeling; his definition of religion as “morality tinged with emotion” is a compromise with the Philistines.22 Pater was not interested in morality, but only in the tinge. In Marius the Epicurean Pater presents a conflict of pagan and Christian traditions for the soul of Marius, the latter winning out, with a result well described by his biographer:
But the weakness of the case is, that instead of emphasizing the power of sympathy, the Christian conception of Love, which differentiates Christianity from all other religious systems, Marius is after all converted, or brought near to the threshold of the faith, more by its sensuous appeal, its liturgical solemnities; the element, that is to say, which Christianity has in common with all religions, and which is essentially human in character. And more than that, even the very peace which Marius discerns in Christianity is the old philosophical peace over again.23
In Gaston de Latour, his last unfinished work, Pater describes another conflict, this time with Renaissance humanism and scepticism as incarnate in Montaigne.24 But there is in his work no appreciation of dogma or of abstract thinking: he speaks constantly of “Christian sentiment” as opposed to pagan philosophy. Reading his essay on Pico della Mirandola, a typical product of his Renaissance studies, one becomes doubtful whether he can distinguish Plato from Aristotle and certain that he does not know what role either has played in Christian theology.25 Pater, like Newman, died a Catholic, but the contrast is cruel between Pater’s haziness and Newman’s crisp incisiveness on anything remotely connected with Catholic thought. But give Pater a work of art like La Gioconda, and he immediately expands it into a microcosm of the universe.26 This is obviously what helps Pater to make sense of the world; that is, in other words, his religion: the emotional response to the beauty which the dignity and strength of a great religious tradition has evoked.
We have mentioned in the Pre-Raphaelite discussion the connection of a sentimental, vaguely Catholic medievalism related to the other movement mentioned earlier, the diabolism and sadism of the decadents who revolted against bourgeois society. The business of “uttering platitudes in stained-glass attitudes” ridiculed by Gilbert in Patience27 was a prominent feature of the decadent period of the nineties dominated by Wilde. True, Wilde appealed more to Greek culture for historical justification of his personal life. After his conversion he talks in this vein:
I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist. … Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history. … To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed. … But while Christ did not say to men, “Live for others,” he pointed out that there was no difference at all between the lives of others and one’s own life. By this means he gave to man an extended, a Titan personality… . Wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. (De Profundis, 68–93)28
We are not quoting these extraordinary statements for the purpose of ridiculing, or providing a reductio ad absurdum for the aesthetic movement. They form a genuine culmination of the various influences we have been dealing with. Out of a romantic philosophy comes a romantic religion, claiming Christ the prophet of the romantic movement. Out of the subjective idealism, which the individualism of the age necessitated, comes this microcosmic soul which, by absorbing the universe within itself, does indeed become a “Titan personality.”
The germ of truth in this identification of religion and art had been provided by Blake, or would have been provided by him if anyone had listened to him. According to Blake, the artist is the man who selects experiences and welds them into a significant, that is, symbolic, unity. But this synthetic, consolidating activity is a necessary and fundamental impulse in every man, the artist proper merely being a man with specialized abilities. All the inner impulses of man towards self-improvement or betterment of society, toward communion with God, toward any creative or constructive activity whatever, are at bottom artistic impulses, and religion is only the social expression of this impulse. But Blake is not a mere aesthete; he does not infer that the essential good is beauty rather than justice or truth. He says that good is good only when these three approaches to it are held in synthesis. The arts, however, express and symbolize the central essence of this artistic-religious impulse which Blake calls the “Poetic Genius.”29
This is a doctrine Christian theology will have to reckon with; has had to reckon with ever since the time of Schleiermacher. The critical attitude of the nineteenth century became possible only through the expiration of a good deal of creative energy, but it made possible a consciousness of cultural tradition, particularly as regards the Christian Church, which is a factor in contemporary thinking both permanent and comparatively new. It is only one aspect, however, of the entire contribution of the nineteenth century to religious development; we shall proceed to examine two others.
The antinomian development of the nineteenth century was, of course, like all overemphases on the human side of reality, optimistic. It believed in the worth of human activity, human activity being the only thing left to believe in; it believed in social reform and improvement of the material conditions of life. Cut off from anything like Christian humility or surrender of the will to God, it launched out on a program of conquest of the material world with immense energy and industry. The gospel of work, work for its own sake, was preached:
I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work. (Sartor Resartus)30
How all this production is to be distributed Carlyle does not say; that was a problem left for the twentieth century to worry about. Notice the doctrine of the microcosmic individual and the overtone of agnosticism. But why should one work? or, if that be too impertinent a question, what is work and what is misapplied energy?
The utilitarians first tried to answer this question. Starting from the premises of contemporary economists, that the sum of happiness in all individuals of a given social unit equalled the social good, Bentham evolved the well-known and well-worn criterion of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.”31 This is, of course, a purely quantitative standard of happiness: to Bentham there was no real difference of kind between the pleasures of a philosopher and the pleasures of a fool. When Mill raised the qualitative issue the utilitarian thesis collapsed at once, the more readily through Bentham’s own incredible ignorance and Philistinism. Mill said of Bentham in his essay on him: “Man is never recognised by him as a being capable of pursuing spiritual perfection as an end.”32 Religion has, therefore, no place whatever in the utilitarian scheme except as a source of self-satisfaction, which religion seldom is. There is no space here to deal with the philosophy of utilitarianism; theoretically the most fuddled system of thought ever evolved by man at a presumably high level of civilization, in practice it did a great deal of good, as it was never intended to be a philosophy but a program of social reform. Its childish idea of happiness is more easily explained when we remember what is too often forgotten, that it was an instinctive product of an antirevolutionary society, and was a program of reform as opposed to a program of revolution. Its whole case depended on whether all social evils could be cured by palliatives or not.
But while Mill broke with much in Bentham, he remained essentially Bentham’s disciple, and retained the hedonistic standard of conduct in the name of a revived epicureanism. Naturally, therefore, he hated Calvinism, with its contempt of humanity, and he tended to see in Calvinism the essence of the whole Christian tradition. In his Essay on Liberty he says:
Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; Innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than the energetic Pursuit of Good.… It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience. … What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian.… I much fear that by attempting to form the mind and feelings on an exclusively religious type … there will result … a low, abject, servile type of character, which, submit itself as it may to what it deems the Supreme Will, is incapable of rising to or sympathizing in the conception of Supreme Goodness.33
In this quotation, which reminds us to a considerable extent of Arnold, the pagan-Christian antithesis is put in its strongest terms. Many nineteenth-century thinkers exalted the pagan world and its civilization in the name of reason, their ignorance of Christian theology and scholastic philosophy being for the most part almost absolute. It became an axiom with the freethinkers that religion was a matter of the emotions, and their age being an intellectual one, religion was swiftly becoming identified with superstition and was being superseded by science. In Herbert Spencer, in Huxley, even in the cautious Darwin, we find the assumption that society will in the future mould its conduct on the absolutely valid rational processes furnished by scientific experiment, while moral criteria were vaguely supposed to be based on the instincts of normal people. The utilitarians, of course, have the same view. The most elaborate philosophical product of this attitude, developing itself into a new religion, was the system of Comte, who founded, or tried to found, a sect of worshippers of humanity and the sciences. Comte’s interpretation of history as divided into periods of superstition, religion, and science finds an echo in Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough:
Thus the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had only been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events, which, if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly. In short, religion, regarded as an explanation of nature, is displaced by science … the hope of progress—moral and intellectual as well as material—in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science.… magic, religion and science are nothing but theories of thought; and as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis. … The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that for ever recedes.34
The first of these reckless generalizations, if taken literally, would imply that Herbert Spencer (who might have written the above passage had he been a better stylist) had a keener mind than Newman—not a proposition which many would regard as self-evident. There is in Frazer’s attitude the same Heraclitean gloom we have been meeting all along, the same belief that religion, which implies Christianity, was a cultural product passing with the culture. Carlyle was wise enough to see that the decline of religion brought disintegration and chaos along with a keener critical attitude, and those who followed Carlyle rather than Bentham were more chary of breaking with religion.
Browning, for instance, adopts what is essentially the moralistic emphasis we have been dealing with in this section. The Incarnation for him was not the will of a transcendent God, but the perfecting of an immanent one, and faith was a guide and a stimulus to moral action. Good works is Browning’s justification; he does not understand mysticism. The purest mystic in his portrait gallery is Johannes Agricola, who gibbers in a madhouse. The Grammarian, on the other hand, is extolled because he denied himself the pleasures of life in a cause, trusting to God for his reward without inquiring into the nature of that reward:
Earn the means first—God surely will contrive
Use for our earning.
Others mistrust and say, “But time escapes:
Live now or never!”
He said, “What’s time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.” …
Was it not great? did not he throw on God,
(He loves the burthen)—
God’s task to make the heavenly period
Perfect the earthen?
Did not he magnify the mind, show clear
Just what it all meant?
He would not discount life, as fools do here,
Paid by instalment.
He ventured neck or nothing—heaven’s success
Found, or earth’s failure:
“Wilt thou trust death or not?” He answered “Yes:
Hence with life’s pale lure!”
(A Grammarian’s Funeral, [lines 79–84, 101–12])
Rabbi Ben Ezra voices the same philosophy:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.35
Now when we combine Browning’s moralized attitude to Christianity with a Christian treatment of the Greek-medieval antithesis we have quoted so many examples of, we obtain one of the most significant pronouncements ever made in the nineteenth century about the Christian faith, from Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics:
Now, when we compare the life of service to mankind, involving so much sacrifice of pure pleasure, which is lived by men whom in our consciences we think best, and which they reproach themselves for not making one of more complete self-denial, with the life of free activity in bodily and intellectual exercises, in friendly converse, in civil debate, in the enjoyment of beautiful sights and sounds, which we commonly ascribe to the Greeks … we might be apt, on the first view, to think that, even though measured not merely by the quantity of pleasure incidental to it but by the fullness of the realisation of human capabilities implied in it, the latter kind of life was the higher of the two. Man for man, the Greek … might seem to be intrinsically a nobler being—one of more fully-developed powers—than the self-mortifying Christian, upon whom the sense of duty to a suffering world weighs too heavily to allow of his giving free play to enjoyable activities.36
This annihilating refutation of Mill is given an extreme, paradoxical, and in its expressed form obviously unacceptable formulation, but never has the conception of Christianity as a religion bringing a unique sense of the worth of every human soul under God, a religion bent on the conquest and reform of the world, been more pungently stated. Green was a philosopher of the revolutionary Hegelian school, and, if he were alive today, might restate his position by saying that apostolic Christianity was, in its relation to the Roman Empire, a proletariat religion, radical and uncompromising, wrecking and transforming the social structure to achieve an ideal. The Victorian age was an age of reform, but emphatically not one of revolution—it, therefore, had little conception of the power of primitive Christianity, nor did it think that such a power should ever be released. The Greeks, who took their social reform out in civil war and an occasional tyrannicide, were more acceptable. But by the end of the century Bernard Shaw could say:
Christ is not the lifeless harmless image he has hitherto been to you, but a rallying centre for revolutionary influences which all established States and Churches fight. (Preface to Androcles and the Lion, lviii)37
Now just as the germ of truth in the aesthetic movement can be found in Schleiermacher in a genuinely new form, so the germ of truth in the pragmatic movement can be found in Ritschl, also in a genuinely new form, in the doctrine of the kingdom of God as taught by Jesus. The great expansion of missionary activity in the nineteenth century, and the Church’s awakened social conscience today, are sure signs that as we move again into a period of metropolitan civilization paralleling that of the Roman Empire, we shall be forced more and more completely into the apostolic perspective.
William Morris provides an interesting fusion of aesthetic and pragmatic interests, for he was both medievalist and socialist, and in his Dream of John Ball he enunciates a social ideal which must have sounded curiously in the ears of the imperialists and neo-Darwinians of the time: “Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death.”38 He goes on to describe his Utopia:
Ye shall not lack for the fields ye have tilled, nor the houses ye have built, nor the cloth ye have woven; all these shall be yours, and whatso ye will of all that the earth beareth; then shall no man mow the deep grass for another, while his own kine lack cow-meat; and he that soweth shall reap, and the reaper shall eat in fellowship the harvest that in fellowship he hath won; and he that buildeth a house shall dwell in it with those that he biddeth of his free will; and the tithe barn shall garner the wheat for all men to eat of when the seasons are untoward, and the rain-drift hideth the sheaves of August; and all shall be without money and without price. Faithfully and merrily then shall men keep the holidays of the Church in peace of body and joy of heart. And man shall help man, and the saints in heaven shall be glad, because men no more fear each other; and the churl shall be ashamed, and shall hide his churlishness till it be gone, and he be no more a churl; and fellowship shall be established in heaven and on the earth.39
The nineteenth century is, with one of its choicest spirits, waking up to the realization that the Middle Ages, when the Church ran things, was on the whole as progressive in its political and economic ideas as any period following it. The Church of John Ball’s dream may be the carefully washed and exquisitely posed object painted by the PreRaphaelites, but it is a Church with a social consciousness and an equal awareness of the religious value of beauty.
We have been insisting all along that the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly an antinomian century: its rapid development in physical prowess caused it to reject the transcendent God of Calvin, in practice if not always in theory. The most pervading religious sentiment of the time, among the greater minds, was a kind of animism. If one’s religious perspective is bounded by human experience, one naturally tends to identify a superior being with the life force that sweeps humanity along the time-progression. Besides, as Frazer pointed out in a passage immediately before the one quoted, magic and science are psychologically the same activity: magic postulates animism, religion develops out of the breakdown of magic, and science tinged by religion, therefore, becomes animistic too.40 Let us first look at the poets for hymns to the life force, for there is hardly a major poet of the time who did not believe in it. Without going back as far as Shelley’s Triumph of Life, we might first point out that Browning’s metaphysics implies a purely immanent God working in Nature:
I but open my eyes,—and perfection, no more and no less,
In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.
(Saul, [lines 248–50])
or again, from a very different poem:
We find great things are made of little things,
And little things go lessening till at last
Comes God behind them. Talk of mountains now?
We talk of mould that heaps the mountain, mites
That throng the mould, and God that makes the mites,
The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,
The simplest of creations, just a sac
That’s mouth, heart, legs and belly at once, yet lives
And feels, and could do neither, we conclude,
If simplified still further one degree:
The small becomes the dreadful and immense! (Sludge the Medium)41
God is always just one step away. Or take something of Swinburne, from a “pagan” point of view:
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul…
Where dead ages hide under
The live roots of the tree,
In my darkness the thunder
Make utterance of me:
In the clash of my boughs with each other ye hear the waves sound of the sea.
That noise is of Time,
As his feathers are spread
And his feet set to climb
Through the boughs overhead,
And my foliage rings round him and rustles, and branches are bent with his tread.
(Hertha, [lines 1–6, 133–44])
In Meredith the same worship of life and time is given a more explicitly chthonic twist:
Cry we for permanence fast,
Permanence hangs by the grave;
Sits on the grave green-grassed,
On the roll of the heaved grave-mound.
By Death, as by Life, are we fed:
The two are one spring; our bond
With the numbers; with whom to unite
Here feathers wings for beyond:
Only they can waft us in flight.
For they are Reality’s flower. (A Faith on Trial, [lines 417–26])
Even Hardy, for all his agnosticism, sometimes tends to substitute a similar earth-life-time worship for Christianity or anything that assumes a transcendent God. The conflict is sharp at the conclusion of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, when Tess has been executed as a sacrifice to Christian morality:
“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess… . The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.42
With this the prevailing religious attitude in poetry, it is hardly surprising that the science of the time should have developed, and the philosophy of the time elaborated, a theory of evolution. Evolution was no new concept in theology, but it had previously been a hierarchic evolution: in Thomism a development from matter to form, outside the time-process. In the conflict, alleged to be between religion and science, which raged around the Book of Genesis, we have a very definite impact of a cultural movement on the Church, but one so purely negative that we are not anxious to spend much time on it. It looks, from this perspective, like a squabble between clergymen who knew nothing of science and agnostic freethinkers who knew nothing of religion, the clergymen defending an untenable, exploded, obsolete religion and the freethinkers an equally dubious, equally outworn, equally superseded scientific attitude. The scientists undoubtedly shattered the prestige of the Church, but the Church needed a good deal of shattering; its pitiful collapse was only an outward symbol of its intellectual bankruptcy, which had been tacitly recognized all along. And yet, as we pass from Darwin’s evidence to Spencer’s speculations, thence to Seeley’s political theories, thence to Kipling’s poetry, thence to the Great War and the Great Depression, one wonders if the warnings of discredited moralists against substituting the law of the jungle animals for the law of love proper to civilized human beings should have gone unheeded after all.
The philosophers who developed the implications of Darwin’s theory, Huxley and Spencer, were themselves agnostics, but towards the end of the century the new scientific conception of the universe and the contemporary animistic attitude of the poets began to merge. A creative factor came into the evolutionary process, and God as life-force was finally pinned down and identified. The great name associated with this is, of course, Bergson; the first important figure in England was that of Samuel Butler:
The memories which all living forms prove by their actions that they possess—the memories of their common identity with a single person in whom they meet—this is incontestable proof of their being animated by a common soul. It is certain, therefore, that all living forms, whether animal or vegetable, are in reality one animal; we and the mosses being part of the same vast person in no figurative sense, but with as much bona fide literal truth as when we say that a man’s finger-nails and his eyes are parts of the same man. (God the Known and Unknown, 62)43
He goes on to say:
It is in this Person that we may see the Body of God—and in the evolution of this Person, the mystery of His Incarnation.44
After this it was an easy matter for Butler’s disciple Bernard Shaw to declare:
Creative Evolution is already a religion, and is indeed unmistakably the religion of the twentieth century, newly arisen from the ashes of pseudo-Christianity, of mere scepticism, and of the soulless affirmations and blind negations of the Mechanists and Neo-Darwinians. (Preface to Back to Methusaleh, lxxvii)45
And there is little doubt that creative evolution, as it eventually became, does represent the peculiar and unique contribution of this very peculiar and unique age to religion. In adding to philosophy a new interpretation of the time-process, it added to religion a new sense of the importance of the religious impulse in history. The first great wave of Christian thought, culminating in Augustine, had concentrated on the philosophy of history implied by the Incarnation and was essentially critical and empiric in character: there followed, as the Church established itself politically, a dogmatic period of systematization, in which the historical basis of Christian thinking was to some extent lost sight of. This culminates in Aquinas; and the Protestant revolt against scholastic thought was part of a pervasive and corroding scepticism which separated theology from philosophy and brought the former to the sterility of the Victorian age. The downfall of the ideals of that age has forced us to go back to history for the source of Christian doctrine; and the theory of evolution, along with the philosophies of history that have accompanied it, Hegelian, Marxian, Spencerian, Spenglerian, provides a basis for this. In re-establishing a Christian philosophy of history, we shall give a new shape and meaning to the activity of God in his immanent person, the Holy Spirit, and we shall integrate into the body of Jesus’ teaching the conception, neglected until Ritschl, of the kingdom of God being established on earth as it is in heaven. Thus, the nineteenth century has supplied a matrix for the development of thought Christianity must make if it is to survive. But it is here necessary to repeat what was said earlier, that in the nineteenth century the Church of the time was apathetic, and the impact of cultural movements upon it for the most part posthumous.
The Oxford Movement, no matter what importance we may ascribe to it in the history of the period, is logically outside our subject; as it was a movement within the Church itself, and had no very definite cultural connotations. It arose as the protest of the inner logic of religion itself, as a reaction against the fourfold confusion we have been surveying. The impulse that drove Newman to Rome was the conviction that religion was religion and that, while art and morality and history were excellent things in their ways, they were not religion, nor could they be substituted for it. Again, he felt the compulsion to unity on the part of true believers, in opposition to the easygoing assumption of the time that the more variety of opinions there were in society, the more interesting life would be. Mill’s Essay on Liberty is a typical product of this tendency to make heresy orthodox. Newman fought against this disintegrating tendency, insisting on the synthetic, unifying function of the intellect and the impersonal nature of truth:
a truly great intellect … is one which takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, near and far, and which has an insight into the influence of all these one on another; without which there is no whole, and no centre. (The Idea of a University)46
He saw the utilitarian philosophy of his own day as a direct product of English Protestantism, which evolved an empiric, epistemological mode of thought with Francis Bacon that could end only in scepticism, intellectual paralysis, and social chaos:
The Philosophy of Utility, you will say, gentlemen, has at least done its work; it aimed low, but it has fulfilled its aim. If that man of great intellect who has been its Prophet in the conduct of life played false to his own professions, he was not bound by his philosophy to be true to his friend or faithful in his trust… . His mission was the increase of physical enjoyment and social comfort; and most wonderfully, most awfully has he fulfilled his conception and his design. (Liberal Knowledge its Own End)47
Newman does not deal with art, and remains, as a cultural force, a representative of a religious tradition chiefly in literature. But there he is orthodox. He realizes that religion, when most vital, is most completely the unifying force of culture; that its dogmatic superstructures are the product of an age sufficiently disciplined and self-conscious to establish its own cultural pattern. We have said that the nineteenth century marks an abrupt decline in all the major arts, especially the plastic ones. The reason for this is largely to be found, as even Ruskin could have pointed out, and did point out in regard to architecture, in the fact that in the wake of romanticism came the assumption that a work of art was a product of self-expression and that the individual artist was arbiter of form and content. The classical tradition, inseparable from a strong religious basis, had insisted on objective standards of both.
Newman recognizes all this, but, feeling himself in the oddly paradoxical situation of a Catholic representing a minority group, he speaks very frequently, when discussing culture, with the voice of a sectarian. In his rather miserable essay on English Catholic literature, in The Idea of a University, he first admits:
I repeat, then, whatever we be able or unable to effect in the great problem which lies before us, anyhow we cannot undo the past. English Literature will ever have been Protestant. Swift and Addison, the most native and natural of our writers, Hooker and Milton, the most elaborate, never can become our co-religionists.48
and then adds naively:
I would not indeed say a word to extenuate the calamity, under which we lie, of having a literature formed in Protestantism; still, other literatures have disadvantages of their own; and, though in such matters comparisons are impossible, I doubt whether we should be better pleased if our English Classics were tainted with licentiousness, or defaced by infidelity or scepticism. I conceive we should not much mend matters if we were to exchange literatures with the French, Italians, or Germans.49
He goes on to review the dismally Protestant scene, gaining encouragement from the fact that Shakespeare never tells us what his religion is:
For instance, there surely is a call on us for thankfulness that the most illustrious amongst English writers has so little of a Protestant about him that Catholics have been able, without extravagance, to claim him as their own.50
He looks round for a champion:
A rival to Shakespeare, if not in genius, at least in copiousness and variety, is found in Pope; and he was actually a Catholic, though personally an unsatisfactory one.51
It is very obvious, from these quotations, that the one orthodox Christian movement of the nineteenth century which had definite cultural implications did not contain many fertile seeds of future development. With all respect to a great Church, Newman’s position is reactionary, stick-in-the mud. He says in praise of Shakespeare:
Often as he may offend against modesty, he is clear of a worse charge, sensuality, and hardly a passage can be instanced in all that he has written to seduce the imagination or to excite the passions.52
One thinks of the critic who seriously praised Tennyson for never having written a line that an English mother would wish unwritten or an English daughter blush to have read. One thinks of the Podsnap in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, whose intellectual energy was so largely absorbed in preventing blushes from coming to the cheeks of young persons.53 Newman was not a hypocrite, and Podsnap presumably was; but they concur in the same shibboleth password of nineteenth-century morality—aided, in Newman’s case, by the Catholic association of religion and morality from which Protestantism has freed itself. If I have been unfair to Newman in insisting on this unfortunate essay, it is only to illustrate that the Catholic was no more free than the Anglican or Dissenter from the limitations of an age in which religion sunk to a low ebb. Surely no intelligent Catholic today, let alone any Catholic with Newman’s intelligence, would repeat Newman’s shrinking nervousness about the wickedness of Montaigne or Voltaire, or concur so completely in his acceptance of the official condemnation of Dante’s De Monarchia or Machiavelli. Newman was a stout defender of religion, but in culture he was as sterile and Philistine as his contemporaries who defended other religious traditions, such as Carlyle or Wilberforce, and far more so than the sceptics, Arnold or Mill.
It appears evident, from a general survey of the century, that it was, from the point of view of the history of religion, a period of criticism, of testing and sifting. Its greatest asset was the rigorous intellectual honesty that appears both in the conservatism of Newman and the agnosticism of Huxley; and it worked out several lines of thought, in its effort to arrive at a new religion, all of which may gain a new religious significance as a result of its treatment of them, even if no one of them ranks as a substitute for religion. The nineteenth century showed the value of honest scepticism, and the urgent necessity for clearing away the debris of a dead religion which needed revitalizing and reinterpretation. It showed the religious significance of art, the connection of its symbolism with religion, and the possibility of a unification of Plato’s three goods into a single religious consciousness, the just, the beautiful, and the true. It emphasized the importance of good works in religion, fought down a helpless quietism, got rid as far as it could of its own smugness and self-righteousness. It brought out a renewed sense of the activity of God in history, and began to develop a social ideal for Christianity which may yet make that religion an active and revolutionary historical force. It brought back something of the intellectual discipline and synthetic thinking of Catholic theology and philosophy. If we fail to make a unity out of these various contributions to our thinking, it is our fault, inherent in us and not our heritage.
The dilemma of the Catholic poet is perhaps the most acute example of the cultural disintegration we have been treating. Coventry Patmore is a comfortable, domesticated instance of the way in which the Catholic could accommodate himself to the outlook of the Victorian time:
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’ (The Toys, [lines 22–33])
The great spirits of the age we have been dealing with were all more or less, being geniuses, in revolt against their time: Patmore represents as perhaps no other name in the culture of the period represents (Christina Rossetti possibly excepted) the routine practice of Victorian religion. Nineteenth-century society was bourgeois, and that meant that it was organized on the basis of the family; the Fatherhood of God, and our own childlike relationship to him, was an extension from that perspective. It was far otherwise with the two Catholic poets who represent perhaps the most original poetic impetus of the period: Francis Thompson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. They had caught sight of a divine activity less benignant, not the household god, the lar or baal, of the “Providence” or “Lord” of contemporary parsons. Thompson brings into English poetry the first note of genuinely passionate mysticicsm, Blake excepted, heard since Crashaw. Compare the following with the Coventry Patmore extract:
How has thou merited—
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come! (The Hound of Heaven, [lines 165–76])
In Hopkins, the most profoundly original genius of the century, the feeling of separation between religion and culture is much sharper, for Thompson had in him a large amount of the sensuous ecstatic approach of the aesthetic movement, expressed sometimes almost in sadistic terms:
Therefore, O tender Lady, Queen Mary,
Thou gentleness that dost enmoss and drape
The Cross’s rigorous austerity,
Wipe thou the blood from wounds that needs must gape....
Oh, this Medusa-pleasure with her stings!
This essence of all suffering, which is joy!
I am not thankless for the spell it brings,
Though tears must be told down for the charmed toy.
(Ode to the Setting Sun: After-Strain, [lines 17–20, 29–32])
But Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, having, on the one hand, the whole intellectual completeness of a scholastic view of the world, in which everything was pigeon-holed and explained, and, on the other, a powerful emotional feeling of the boundless inexplicable variety of the natural world, presents explicitly what is only implicit in Newman, the dissociation of poet and worshipper. As a theologian, he forsook Thomism for Scotism because of the greater emphasis the latter philosophy placed on the principle of individuation of form, which is the basis of creative activity. He has curious liking for the irregular and untamed in Nature:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. (Inversnaid, [lines 13–16])
And the very vividness of his religious poetry derives in large measure from his sense of the inscrutable power of God: a sense more likely to be cultivated by Scotism than Thomism:
God, three-numbered form;
Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,
Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.
Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,
Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:
Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.
(The Wreck of the Deutschland, [lines 65–72])
Even here there is an unmistakable effort to break through the shackles of orthodoxy in search of a God immanent in experience, a God of the time-world. In his sonnet on St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, the doorkeeper saint, the moral is practically that of Browning’s Grammarian’s Funeral:
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door, [lines 9–14]
But everything great and fine in all the religious movements of the nineteenth century, the Catholic revival, the new worship of the Creator-God, the association of beauty with God, is caught up by Hopkins in one breathless sonnet with which we may close, as representing the purest concentration of the religious thought of the age, held for an instant in focus:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
(The Windhover, dedicated “To Christ our Lord”)
Carlyle: |
Sartor Resartus |
Ruskin: |
The Crown of Wild Olive |
Arnold: |
Literature and Dogma |
Pater: |
Marius the Epicurean |
Wilde: |
De Profundis |
Butler: |
God the Known and Unknown |
Bradley: |
Appearance and Reality |
Green: |
Prolegomena to Ethics |
Mill: |
Essay on Bentham |
Newman: |
The Idea of a University |
Spencer: |
Synthetic Philosophy |
Huxley: |
Administrative Nihilism |
Morley: |
Compromise |
Morris: |
Dream of John Ball |
Merz: |
History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 3 vols. |
Wingfield-Stratford: |
Those Earnest Victorians |
Chesterton: |
The Victorian Age in Literature |
Benson: |
Walter Pater |
Praz: |
The Romantic Agony |
Ward: |
The Oxford Movement |
de la Mare (ed.) |
The Eighteen-Eighties. (esp. Eliot, Essay on Pater).54 |
Also, of course, the poetical works of the poets quoted (Thomson, Davidson, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, Hardy, Meredith, Hopkins, Morris, etc.)
Prefaces of Bernard Shaw.