ENGLISH LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT WITH RELIGION CHAPTER I RELIGION AND LITERATURE MAZZINI, upon being asked what he would have taught in school, is said to have replied: "Some knowledge of Astronomy. A man learns nothing if he has n't learned to wonder, and Astronomy better than any science teaches him something of the mystery and grandeur of the universe." 1 He spoke with the insight and the exaggeration of genius. As a suggestion his dictum is profoundly true; and its truth is as significant for criticism as for education. Great literature takes account of the Universe with its mystery and grandeur; not of course in any pedantic or grandiloquent fashion, but with an implicit realization of it. The genuine poet or creative novelist always writes with a keen sense of the interrelation of events. To say this is in no sense to imply that literature is usually the product of a bland and contented acceptance of the scheme of things; great literature almost never 1 Letters of J. R. Green, Leslie Stephen, editor, p. 326. springs of such lineage, but it none the less relates itself vitally to the scheme of things; it may be by way of acceptance and illustration; it may be by way of refusal and revolt; it may be even more often by way of quest and search and wonder. A small man is prone to be effusive in emphasizing his acceptance and professing his allegiance. The sense of the universal finds quick and cheap utterance at his lips. The great man is less easily moved to confession of the faith which animates him because of its very greatness and his sense of the world's inevitableness and mystery. "I accept the Universe," cried Margaret Fuller in a moment of ecstasy. They told Carlyle. "Gad!" growled he, with characteristic grimness; "Gad! she'd better." In all this the path of literature lies parallel to that of religion. They are old and dear companions brethren indeed of one blood; not always agreeing, to be sure; squabbling rather in true brotherly fashion now and then; occasionally falling out very seriously and bitterly; but still interdependent and necessary to each other. It is my purpose in the following chapters to illustrate this interrelation from the literary history of the last century. This seems worth doing for several reasons: in the first place the period covered by our proposed study was in a very notable degree a period of unrest and transition in religious thought. The third and perhaps most characteristic quarter of the century might properly be designated, indeed, as a time of theological revolution. The foundations of faith were shaken. Sober-minded men to whom the past was sacred, the long-established institutions of the present dear, and who felt an unselfish responsibility for the future, looked out upon a scene which gave them grave concern. Even some champions of the new order of things in the realm of thought, grew serious as they contemplated the possible extent of their own influence. They were by no means men of destructive habit or ambition; but it seemed for a time during those five and twenty years as though the negative result of their work might prove to be so mordant and far-reaching as to preclude the chance of reconstruction in the realms of ethics and religion. The last quarter of a century was characterized by a temper somewhat less truculent on the one side and less anxious on the other. Neither the priests of 'natural' science nor those of 'revealed 'religion were quite so much inclined to dogmatism in their mutual affirmations and denials. Thus, by the year of grace 1900, it had become pretty evident that religion's lease of life was to be a longer one than the secularist of 1875 had been disposed to admit. This general agreement that religion is likely to prove a permanent concern of mankind constitutes a second reason for undertaking such a study as I propose. Instead of attempting to explain religion away, the scientific spirit of to-day would seem to require that we observe it, that we make record of its experience, that we account for it at least to the extent of tracing its secondary causes, and that we make some attempt to determine its probable course in the future. mous It is to be noted, furthermore, that a study of the religious import of English literature during this extraordinary transition century is likely to prove of especial significance. In the first place the range and wealth of this literature have been enorgreater probably than those of any other period in any language; though the Elizabethan age may have surpassed it in the intrinsic worth of its relatively restricted product, and Goethe's marvellously long day sufficed for a work by himself and his contemporaries of two generations comparable to it. In the second place, this English literature has been a literature of the people in a new and significant measure. It has appealed to a public numerically greater than any other literature has known; and that public has been avid and acquisitive of knowledge in a unique degree. A very large and appreciative section of this public, distinctly the most alert and plastic portion of it, has spent the century in one of the noblest of human adventures the building of a nation. It has conquered a wilderness; founded and brought to maturity commonwealths of vast extent, population, and wealth; fought the greatest of civil wars for the sake of an idea, and survived the conflict because of that idea's vital force; devoted itself with un |