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Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel
George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler
By U. C. Knoepflmacher PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1965 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06112-2
CHAPTER 1
Religion, Evolution, and the Novel
Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait Pinventer. — Voltaire
My dear friend, the problem of the world at this moment is — how to find a religion? — some great conception which shall be once more cafable, as the old were capable, of welding societies, and keeping man's brutish elements in check. — Mrs. Humphry Ward
I. 1888 and a Look Backwards
Writing in the Guardian, Walter Pater demanded: "Who will deny that to trace the influence of religion upon human character is one of the legitimate functions of the novel?" "In truth," he added, "the modern 'novel of character' needs some such interest, to lift it sufficiently above the humdrum of life." The date was March 28, 1888; the occasion, the publication of Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Matthew Arnold's niece, who until recently had been Pater's neighbor at Oxford. Pater's exhortation hardly seemed necessary: Mrs. Ward had been preceded by a host of nineteenth-century writers who, usually with greater earnestness than artistry, had portrayed "the influence of religion upon human character" in order to disseminate their own sectarian preferences for any one of the many cults warring within and without the Church of England. The genre defended by Pater was neither new nor was its propagandistic use in need of vindication. Still, Mrs. Ward's own defiant plea for a new secular church, to be called "the brotherhood of Jesus," stirred the minds of the Victorian reading public, which was receptive yet distrustful of her extreme liberalism in matters of faith.
Spokesmen for the State, the Church, and that new power, Science, soon became embroiled in a public controversy over Mrs. Ward's melodramatic depiction of the religious doubts of Elsmere, the novel's clergyman hero. W. E. Gladstone, supported somewhat belatedly by the Bishop of Peterborough and the Reverend Dr. Henry Wace, Principal of King's College, attacked the book for its unbelief; T. H. Huxley, eager for a polemical showdown with the forces of religious orthodoxy, rushed to its rescue. In the year following the publication of the novel, a heated but decorously fought battle was waged in the pages of the Nineteenth Century. Mrs. Ward herself participated briefly by outlining the various trends in biblical criticism which had made orthodox belief so impossible for her novel's empirical-minded hero. But it was Huxley, the man who had once crowned Darwin and who now wore his mantle, who carried the day under the new watchword of "agnosticism." Years later, Mrs. Ward gratefully remembered "the dear and famous Professor" (he was her sister's father-in-law) "who, like my uncle, fought half the world and scarcely made an enemy."
The controversy over Robert Elsmere was symptomatic: the book's historic significance exceeded by far its intrinsic merits. For Mrs. Ward's novel was but the culmination of two distinct though overlapping phases of Victorian speculative thought: the one expressed in the writings of evolutionists or thinkers of a "scientific" cast of mind, the other contained in inventive attempts at reconciling the new beliefs with the old. The 1850's and the early 1860's had seen the final consolidation of an empirical spirit which challenged, quite tentatively at first and then more directly, the old Mosaic cosmogony, as well as the miraculous element, in the Scripture. The assumptions of natural scientists and historians were quickly — though often quite superficially — assimilated by a small elite of intellectuals. In the 1860's, but above all in the 1870's and 1880's, there was a proliferation of imaginative efforts to reconcile the new findings with the moral verities of the old religion. Writers such as Mrs. Ward's famous uncle accepted the empiricist premise that "miracles did not exist," but they enlisted their creative talents in the fashioning of "essences" of Christianity based on a "scientific appreciation of the facts of religion."* "The thing," in Arnold's words, was "to recast religion.'"
Through the process of a dialectical balancing of the factual and the potential, the relative and the absolute, the "sweet" and the "reasonable," the prosaic and the poetical, the "Hebraic" and the "Hellenic," Victorian critics of culture and religion hoped to amass truths untainted by error and to weld them into a "natural," if necessarily eclectic, faith. Their humanist creeds were intended as a compromise between the orthodoxies of religion and science; actually, they resulted in a reduction of both. Their relativism was branded as atheistic by the Church; the conversion of this relativism into personal cults was denounced by the genuine scientist as being tantamount to the transformation of old myths into new allegories.
Its negative aspects notwithstanding, the "spirit of the relative" was initially hailed by a number of writers, who saw in its applications a break with the tyranny of the absolute. In 1853 Marian Evans told herself in a rare outburst of confidence: "Heaven help us! said the old religions — the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another." Yet the future George Eliot was to rectify this initial optimism by painfully reappraising and refining her humanist convictions throughout the entire corpus of her novels. She was not the only one to find relativism a self-divisive tool. As if anticipating the desperate mockery of an Oscar Wilde, many an "earnest" seeker exercised his irony in fruitless public debates or yielded to the allurements of paradox in a prolonged dialogue with himself: "Let us tell the truth about ourselves, even if the truth be only that there is no truth to tell."
Humanism inevitably placed a burden on the individual by doing away with the security provided by established doctrines and usages. "As faith loses in extent it must gain in intensity," professed Benjamin Jowett. Yet each Victorian reconciler had a different conception of this "intensity." To Matthew Arnold it was equivalent to the absorption of a literary "sweetness and light" based on the best that had been thought and said; to John Ruskin it was to be obtained through the moral influence of the forms of Nature or of a society modeled on Nature; to Walter Pater it became analogous to the "quickened sense of life" brought on by the sensual appreciation of art.10 To many others "intensity" was to be found in an active creed of social sympathy and humanitarianism. Yet the starting point for all the new creeds was the human "heart." "To gain religious starting points," argued none other than John Henry Newman, aware that humanist doubt could well lead to orthodox assent, "we must ... interrogate our hearts, and (since it is a personal individual matter) our own hearts."
What had begun as a disparagement of the old religion two decades before, ended in the 1870's and 1880's as a conservative clinging to its remains. Shortly after attacking the unscientific side of Protestant theology, Matthew Arnold found it necessary to profess in a "palinode" that Hebraic conduct, and not cultural Hellenism, was after all "three-fourths of human life." George Eliot, who, in her early essays on the poet Young and the preacher Dr. Cumming, had acidly denounced the "other-worldliness" of a scriptural bibliolatry, depicted in her last novel an Old Testament righteousness based on the workings of an unknown and providential power. Walter Pater revoked the Hellenism of The Renaissance in order to worship in the religious "atmospheres" of Amiens and Vezelay. Samuel Butler, increasingly dissatisfied with the mechanistic world of the Darwinians, endowed it with a teleology of his own. Other writers unconsciously echoed Voltaire's famous epigram about the necessity of inventing God. "Perhaps a hypothetical religion is better than none at all," wrote Frederic Harrison, looking backward defensively at Positivism and its detractors. And Stopford Brooke, likewise taking a retrospective look, mused in self-amazement about the times "when we threw everything into the seething pot and wondered what would emerge."
Robert Elsmere thus arrived on the scene late enough for Mrs. Ward to capitalize on the practice of previous and more distinguished "reconcilers," but still early enough for her to believe in the efficacy of its prescriptions. Like her uncle, she intends nothing less than to "recast religion"; the search for a new binding faith still remains to her, as to Elsmere, "the problem of the world at this moment." Mrs. Ward also accepts the "scientific" spirit of her predecessors. Elsmere, we are informed along the way, read Darwin's Earthworms and The Origin of Species shortly after his ordination and marriage; Mrs. Ward takes it for granted that her readers understand the significance of such an act. For soon the young clergyman lets "himself drift" into a dangerous "intellectual intimacy with one of the most distinguished of anti-Christian thinkers," the Squire Wendover. Elsmere's perusal of the Squire's major work, The Idols of the Market Place, leads him to the writings of the German biblical critics and stimulates him to an awareness of the analogous predicament of "M. Renan." The young man's religion collapses like a house of cards. His wife's broken pleas are futile, though fully exploited for their pathetic effect: "'Do you think nothing is true because something may be false? Did not — did not — Jesus still live, and die, and rise again? — can you doubt — do you doubt — that He rose — that He is God — that He is in heaven — that we shall see Him?'" Elsmere does not flinch from his wife's orthodox "intensity." For, unknown to her, Catherine has raised precisely those points challenged by the "Higher Criticism" in Germany and in England. Elsmere answers calmly: "I can believe no longer in an Incarnation and Resurrection ... Miracle is a natural product of human feeling and imagination."
In the words of W. H. Mallock, the popularity of Robert Elsmere illustrated "first, the amount of unformulated scepticism prevalent amongst the Christian public; secondly, the eagerness of this public to understand its own scepticism more clearly; and lastly, its eagerness to discover that, whatever its scepticism might take from it, something would still be left it, which was really the essence of Christianity. In other words, the popularity of Robert Elsmere is mainly the expression of the devout idea that the essence of Christianity will somehow survive its doctrines." Though Mallock directed his criticism at the drab Christian socialism preached by Mrs. Ward's renegade minister, his criticism applied also to Elsmere's more eminent prototypes. For if Mrs. Ward's attempt to "recast religion" had become a time-honored practice by 1888, her use of fiction as a vehicle for this attempt had likewise acquired a venerable ancestry. As Pater well knew in framing his question, "the influence of religion upon human character" had, in effect, become a "legitimate function" of the English novel through the efforts of a small group of writers who had preceded her in the search for a Christian "essence."
By 1888 Mrs. Ward had a variety of immediate models to choose from even without looking to America or to the Continent. Among the more important there was John Inglesant (1880), the religio-historical novel by J. H. Shorthouse. There were also the two parts of "Mark Rutherford's" Autobiography (1881, 1885), written in the genre adopted by seekers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, J. A. Froude, John Henry Newman, and William Delafield Arnold, Mrs. Ward's younger uncle, who had died in 1859. And there was the combination of the historical novel with the spiritual "autobiography" in Walter Pater's own Marius the Epicurean (1885), a work reviewed by Mrs. Ward, who noted at that time that books such as "Sartor Resartus, or The Nemesis of Faith, Alton Locke or Marius" would one day reveal to the student of the nineteenth century "what was deepest, most intimate, and most real in its personal experience." Though unaware that a satirical version of the spiritual "autobiography" had been completed two years before and lay stowed away in Samuel Butler's desk, Mrs. Ward shunned the autobiographical form in general, possibly because she distrusted it for its "intimate" and revelatory qualities (The Way of All Flesh would be read by future generations as its author's self-catharsis). At any rate, Mrs. Ward could avail herself of an even more commanding model.
This model was none other than George Eliot, already revered as a literary classic eight years after her death. Unlike Mrs. Ward's somewhat easy acceptance of the skepticism of an earlier generation, George Eliot's religious and intellectual scrutinies had been prompted by her own intimate experience. The multiple position of novelist, reviewer, poet, oracle, and observer had been arduously attained. Her scarring but fortifying encounter with the new "development hypothesis" in the "Higher Criticism" of Hennell, Strauss, and Feuerbach, as well as an almost masculine mastery of the physical sciences, made her eminently fitted for the role of Victorian authoress-sage. At first addressing herself to the audiences of Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot later included the public sought out by Matthew Arnold and other prophets of culture and religion, an intelligentsia composed of those increasingly disenchanted unbelievers "who now throw the Bible aside, not those who receive it on the ground supplied either by popular theology or by metaphysical theology." It was this later George Eliot (as well as her uncle) whom Mrs. Ward was consciously emulating in Robert Elsmere.
Unlike her earlier Wordsworthian reinterpretations of a rural English past, George Eliot's later novels reflect the more discursive climate of the seventies. In 1859 Adam Bede illustrated a covertly recast Adamic myth in light of the still unpopular theories of Feuerbach; the same novel also portrayed an "evolutionary ethic" several months before the publication of The Origin of Species launched other Victorian writers on a similar search.28 In the seventies, however, George Eliot's novels reflect the firm entrenchment of a scientific materialism and the widespread acceptance of a variety of humanist creeds. As a consequence, there is a change both in tone and in emphasis. Middlemarch (1871-1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) are above all novels, but they are also compendia of contemporary allusions and prophetic pronouncements by a writer desirous of expanding the standard form of fiction. They are "criticism" in the fullest Victorian sense of the word and belong to a period marked by Arnold's theological essays, Morley's On Compromise, Huxley's lectures on the self-sufficiency of science, and Mill's posthumous Essays in Religion. They form part of a decade of reassessment and controversy — of debates conducted in lecture halls, journals, pamphlets, or on the premises of the "Metaphysical Society."
Unlike Mrs. Ward, George Eliot never yielded to the temptation of writing fictionalized "criticism," or, what is the same, of resorting to the roman à thèse. Though coming perilously close to a propagandists use of the novel in Daniel Deronda, she was one of the few Victorian reconcilers who managed to preserve an artistic integrity. Two years after the publication of Daniel Deronda and ten years before the appearance of Mrs. Ward's novel, she protested, perhaps a trifle too much, that her role was not that of the didacticist or social reformer: "My function is that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher — the rousing of nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of special measures." It was this quality that Henry James undoubtedly had in mind when he commented, not without some reservations, on George Eliot's contribution to the development of English fiction: "Fielding was didactic — the author of Middlemarch is really philosophic."
2. George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler: Three Types of Search
To understand how three major writers tried to present through the medium of fiction "the legitimate function" demanded by Pater without abandoning the "aesthetic function" postulated by George Eliot is the main aim of this study. Like the work of many a Victorian "reconciler," its format is the result of a compromise. Modern literary scholars tend to fall into two distinct camps. The one regards a work as a repository of ideologies and intellectual issues; the other denies the validity of an historical approach. The dangers of either extreme are evident. A study which would treat a novel like Robert Elsmere as the culmination of the history of an "idea" conveniently ignores the book's artistic demerits. On the other hand, the failure to apply an "ideological" type of criticism to works which, like Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Marius the Epicurean, and The Way of All Flesh, were intended to be "really philosophic" robs them of much of their richness. Throughout this study, therefore, an equal emphasis is given to ideas and to their artistic transmutation into a peculiar type of novel — a novel advocating a religious humanism based on the fusion of science, morality, and historicism, but essentially one prompted by "religious yearning without a religious object."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel by U. C. Knoepflmacher. Copyright © 1965 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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