Stopford A. Brooke

Page 2

What, then, does the poetry of the last eighty years tell us about the religion or the religions of the land?  How does religion, as defined, appear in this highest form of literature?  Religion, as defined, but sometimes religion as mere theology, played a great part in the new poetry which arose in Scotland and England about 1780.  A good deal of the poetry of Burns was due to the impassioned revolt in him of the "religion of nature" and of the human heart, against the terrible religion of Calvinism.  He established the spirit of humanity in poetry.  All the out-goings of love were divine, and nothing which was not loving could belong to God, or ought to belong to man.  In this warm air of lovingness Burns wrapt the whole universe, from the lowest animal to the highest man, from the devil whom he pitied to God, who, he thought, shared his pity.  It was a great revelation, and it has never, since his day, ceased to live in fine literature.  It is now part of the religion of all high poets, and is alive, in fire and light, in all literature which is destined to continue and to grow.

This religion in poetry was well fitted to absorb the main and undegraded ideas of the French Revolution--the freedom, equality, and fraternity of man, and the return to a simple life lived close to nature--and it did absorb them.  Wordsworth took up this religion, worked it out, and made it the master spirit of his song.  Full of the love which Burns had preached; extending that love by the impassioned spirit he gained from France to all mankind; citizen and lover not of one country but of the country of humanity; he shed on the life of the peasant and the unknown poor the light of heaven and of imagination, and made musical all the natural and simple life of the human heart in sorrow and joy by the glory and tenderness of song.   And then he added to nature a human heart, loved it, and said that it loved us.   And this, embodied by him, and varied through a hundred forms, has had a power on us which resembles that which the religion of Christ has on the heart and life of man.   It has healed and comforted, exalted, impelled, and dignified our love of one another and our love of our country.  It has penetrated the religion of church and sect; it has poured into the individual religion of thousands a spirit of beauty and tenderness.  It has entered into the life of nature, and we worship God in nature with a new reverence and a new joy.

Then a change took place.  The enthusiasm of spirit, the joy in a new life of the imagination, which accompanied this development of pure literature, faded away after 1815.  The increase of wealth, the development of the industrial revolution, the materialism of the country, the corruption and luxury which ate into the "upper classes" of society, overwhelmed the ideal life and the simple religiousness of the poetry of Wordsworth; and the cynicism and self-consideration of Byron expressed only too clearly how little of the religion of love and joy was left in this country.  There was a religion, but it was worship of self.   The binding power of men was self-interest; the gods of the country were hypocrisy and Mammon and sensual pleasure; and Byron, who, as a poet, could not altogether belong to this slavish crew, added to his religion of self-worship the mockery, contempt, and slashing of the base gods of his people.  Like Elijah on Carmel, he satirized the worshippers of Baalim, and on the whole, though his manner of doing this was bad, he stood for truth and honesty against lies in society, church, and state.  To know what Britain was then, and to know the fury with which all high-hearted men regarded its spiritual condition, read the satirical poems of Byron.  If he, who was himself a sinner, felt in that way, how did others, nobler of spirit, feel?

Nevertheless, he was the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and the materialism of life, the corruption in the state, and the worthless conventionality of religion, accompanied, as it always is, with cruel doctrines and with the image of a God who thinks that injustice is a form of love, went steadily on.  Its doom had not yet come.  But poetry was not voiceless, and by Shelley's lips the religion which is the masterhood of love was again revealed to the world.  Love was, in his thought, the Being of the Universe, the source, the life, the end of all things.  All that contradicted love was doomed to perish.  This was the root of Shelley's religion, and it is the root of all true religion; the essence of the true idea of God; the thought which rules all the doings of God with man, to which all the thoughts and feelings which bind man to God and God to man must conform; the foundation of Christianity; the idea which never ceases to protest against the material, selfish, and sensual life; the mighty power which stands, embattled, against those who worship self-interest as the master of human life--and Shelley, in a world which had forgotten self-forgetfulness, called on it as the prophet called on the four winds, and bade it blow over the plains of our country and awake the dead.  And he joined with this two other ideas which are its children--the idea of infinite forgiveness of wrong and the idea of the future regeneration of the human race--both of them vital conception in the wider religion which has of late taken substance among mankind.

Curious that one called an atheist should do this--and it sheds a lurid light on the theology of that day that churches and sects alike combined to force one, who proclaimed, in all that related to man, the ideas of Jesus Christ, into the realm of atheism.  But if priests and presbyters will set up, as they did in Palestine when Jesus was alive, as for centuries they have done, in order to keep their tyranny over the souls and thoughts of men, a god of unforgiveness, a god who dooms his children to everlasting torture, a god who loves, for his own self-glory, only a few out of the millions he hates, what is a man to do?  He must say, "It is a hateful lie," and take the consequences.  Theology has changed since then, but England was not fit for this prophet, and she had sunk so low into a worldly life and an intolerant and lazy imitation of religion, that she drove him out of her borders in the name of religion.