Religion in Literature

Stopford A. Brooke

It is well, when we talk of literature, to know what we mean by the term.  It is often used to mean any kind of clever writing on almost any subject.  Men talk of scientific, critical, theological, economic, journalistic literature, of historical and philosophical literature.  They ought to say "writing," not "literature," else the word literature has too universal a meaning.  When men speak of French, German, or English literature, they do not include under these titles all that is written in these several nations.  They only include writings which possess certain excellent qualities which differentiate them from the rest.  The first of these is that the subject should be noble, and the matter weighty with thought and feeling.  The second is that the manner should be graceful, temperate, and beautiful; and that the shaping of the subject--that is, the form given to it--should be so composed into a harmony of the parts with the whole, and of the whole with the parts, that it gives to the reader something of the pleasure of an unspoilt growth of nature.  If that be so, if the form is good, then the writing will have a certain divine clearness; a pleasant individual note, charged with the character of the writer; a happy choice of words; an "ornament" that exactly fits its place, and such surprising turns of thought and expression as suggests flexibility of thought, rapidity of fancy, and self-enjoyment in the writer.  In one word, he will have style.

Above all, the imagination must be at work in any writing which deserves the name of literature.  Imagination, the "shaping spirit," has much to do with the form of which I have spoken, perhaps as much as steady and slow-ordered thought, for it runs and spreads through all such thought as the blood runs through the body.  It is the life of literature.  But its main power is the power of creation--the power by which man draws nearest to the power of God--the making of a new thing in the world for the pleasure and praise of all the spirits of the universe.  It is not the making of a new thing out of nothing, as "creation" used to be defined; but it is the making out of existing elements, by re-combining them afresh, of a complete and rounded thing which did not exist before.   This is what imagination does in literature, sitting alone, like Prometheus, by the sea of human life, and in her hands turning old material into shapes as yet unknown.   And she does this moved by the passions; her blood, as she works, thrilling with sorrow or indignation, with love, joy, or pity, with awe or hope, according to her material; but chiefly with that passion of loving and divine joy which always accompanies, in noble excitement and intensity, the act of creation when accomplished either by God or man.

But the imagination, when it is not diseased, works in accordance with the laws of the universe; and the result is that its creation possesses truth.  What it paints, or builds, or carves, or sings, or writes, is true; goes down to the bottom rock of all its varied material in the natural world, and to the mother elements of the heart of man.

Then, out of the whole of this work of the imagination, out of the constant love which the writer has felt for the ideas he has to shape, and for the mould into which he has thrown them; out of the joy with which he has been thrilled while he wrote them into a creation--emerges beauty, the outward form of love and joy.  The thing is made, and beautifully made.

The last result is life.  Life beats in the book, the poem, the drama, like a tide; its force is always young, and passes from it like a spirit into men, pleasing and kindling them, bearing witness to truth and beauty.  Age after age, like a living voice, it loves to inspire and exalt, to console and bless.  The thing repels decay: it is as fresh this year as it was when first it spoke to man, it may be, centuries ago.

These are the qualities, some of which at least, in varying degrees of excellence, but in sameness of kind, must belong to all writing worthy of the name of fine literature.  The books, reviews, articles, in which none of these appear, may be useful or amusing, but they are not literature.   There are hosts of these, like the stars for multitude, but not for light and fire.   They are born, twinkle for a day, and die.  The book in which even one of them appears is verging towards literature.  It may last a year or two, and then it falls into the waste-paper basket of the universe.  Between this fleeting thing, which barely shares in one quality of true literature, and the books in which all the noble qualities of literature breathe and burn there is an ascending series of writings, more and more worthy of the great name of literature, till we come to noble poetry.   Except in good poetry, the combination of all these qualities is rarely found.   Whatever we may think of other kinds of writing, fine poetry stands at the head of literature.  No other kind of writing is to be named along with it, and if I am to discuss religion in literature in an hour's time (when the full treatment of such a subject would require a hundred hours), I will keep myself to religion as it appears during the last eighty years in poetry. . . .

Then as to the term religion, what I shall mean by that in this lecture also needs definition.  It cannot mean in this subject the inward spiritual life which man lives with God in the depths of his soul.  That is different in every writer of literature, if the writer have it at all; and we are speaking here, under the term religion, of something which belongs to classes of men; a generic, not an individual thing; a set of ideas, held by many in common, and expressed and represented by the poet.  Nor do I take it to mean the congeries of doctrines and ritual adopted by any church or sect or generally by a nation, such as we mean when we speak of the Protestant or the Roman Catholic religion.

I mean by it here that set of ideas, or that one idea, which a great writer, speaking as the mouthpiece of thousands of men, puts forward as the highest aim of life, as the expression of that which he desires to worship in thought and with passion, to which he desires to conform his own life, which he urges on others, and for the promotion of which he and all who think and feel with him bind themselves together into one body.  Such a set of ideas, or such a single idea is expressed in varied forms of writing, and breathes like a spirit through all the literature written by persons who have these ideas; but it is expressed in the closest, the most penetrative, and the most universal way in poetry.  Such an idea or set of ideas is not always expressed in poetry in clear intellectual form, for poetry does not proceed by logical demonstration, but it is a pervasive spirit in the poetry of those who live by these ideas, and they steal with more power, creeping into the study of imagination, into the hearts and lives of men, than they do by any philosophic or argumentative treatment of them in prose.