Stopford A. Brooke

Page 5

A great deal of that weariness still lasts, still waits, and sometimes whines, in society and literature.  When it first arose in this century--it has made its appearance again and again in history--it was manlier than it is now, and it was expressed by two poets with courage, with something of a tragic dignity, and with a conclusion which, for the time being, was practical, of lasting worth to the progress of man.  Clough and Arnold were these poets, and they have both written some of the saddest verses in the world; verses steeped in a bewildered weariness of thought, ever inquiring and only touching with blind hands an impassable wall; longing but unable to find either order, or love, or calm in the universe, but always, like some noble Greek caught in the net of inexorable fate, holding to the duties which were yet clear, and resolved to die unsubdued by fear, or meanness, or the world.  If we wish to know what the age was to men of a high temper and a love of truth, we should read the two books published in 1849 by Clough and Arnold; and then read--observing how the bewilderment and weariness deepened, and how desperate men struggled to get to some life and light--the poems which Arnold published in 1853.  To these poets, save for vague hopes, expressed now and again with vague passion, there was no religion left but the religion of duty  "Do what lies before you, and leave the rest in other hands, if there are any; and bear the dry trouble of a life which has lost its stars as well and bravely as you can.  If there be a God in whom we shall live in love, if He cares for us, it is well; but if not, we will act honourably to the end of the tragedy, and make the best of it."  This was the temper of the time in noble literature, this the religion; and it was the only gospel which Carlyle and many others who had passed through those weary years, could give to us.  It lasts still; it is one of the elements which are at the root of those merely ethical religions of which so many desire our suffrages to-day, religion which, being devoid of the pursuit of the perfection which reaches beyond duty, can never produce, in a world like ours, which has learnt something of the illimitable and felt its passion, the spirit which creates the noblest literature.   The ethical religions consecrate finality.  Art of every kind, like Christianity, abhors it.

Now, while all this weary discussion had brought poets to the point where Arnold and Clough are found--science had also been at work and had dispersed, in the midst of endless disputes, a host of the old and venerable landmarks of thought and belief.  An example or two may show what it did to the ancient religion and therefore to religion in literature.  Geology destroyed belief in the orthodox doctrine of creation, in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, and before long in the separate creation of man, and in the Fall as told in Genesis.  Not only did that make a mighty change in theology; it wrought also--by blotting out a number of old authorities, emotional motives, and maps of thought--a great change in literature.   Then, Physiology, or a certain type of it, groping among the brain and nerves, found no trace, no proof of what we called the immortal soul.  Thought, passions, imagination, worship--many said, were nothing more than changes of matter in the brain.   "See, I press my fingers, here in a certain place behind the ears, and the soul, the immortal soul, is gone."  And a heated argument of support and denial sprang up, which yet goes on, concerning a matter which is at the roots of religion.   The ideas of God, of our being vitally connected with Him, of moral right, of a spiritual life, of immortality, were not given to us from without by a Being who loved and judged us, but evolved in the growth of man, by man himself.  Think of all the literary motives and emotions which perished--for those who believed this--in that cataclysm.

Political economy, getting more and more scientific, and talking of laws, based on the single premiss that self-interest was the only guide of life, gave us to understand that all the Christian ministry to the poor was merely sentimental, of no real use.  A mass of motives, hitherto largely used in poetry and fiction, vanished for all those who believed in economical laws of this type.   Then, the microscope revealed to us infinite worlds of the infinitely little, peopled by million myriads of living beings: the telescope revealed to us infinite worlds of the infinitely vast; inconceivable distances, inconceivable ages, in which time and space seemed merely names--and between these two enormous universes were we--a mere, despicable speck, a mote which flickered in the infinite; we who thought ourselves the centre of all things, the special care of the Godhead!  Then, to make our position still more contemptible, a scientific theory declared that everything we did and thought and loved was merely automatic, caused by things which had occurred at the very beginning of what was called life.  Men drew then the conclusion that there was no freewill, no real sin, no real righteousness, no struggle for goodness: we were bound in an iron net.   And for those who believed this, whole worlds of literature ceased to exist.   Then came the doctrine of the conservation of energy, and then about 1860 came the doctrine of Darwin; and all the supernatural--miracles, creation, the divine essence in man and beyond man--went overboard in the night for those who accepted, as explanations of the whole universe, these two doctrines.  It was a terrible upturning.

Historical Criticism then took up the play, and it was not long before it was applied to the Bible, first to the Old and then inevitably to the New Testament.  Beneath its scalpel, the great Protestant authority, the practical infallibility of our Book, was dissected away.  That too wrought a great change in literature.  It forced more than half of the writers of fine literature to change their front.  Tennyson, as I said, was much affected by these things, but he saved himself by his penetrating intelligence and spiritual imagination from thinking that because these things were true in physical science and in criticism, there was no other world for man that they displayed.  As to Browning, he was quite unaffected by all this wonderful discovery.  He disliked the whole business.  "It had nothing to do," he said, "with my world.   These are questions and answers which belong to mere phenomena: and I do not breathe in that world"; and he did not change a single belief, nor alter a single judgment.  This then was the state of the world, and we have not got out of it yet.   To the weariness which came of incessant arguments and discussion of all intellectual subjects, was now added a state of mind made by the habit of not even looking into things incapable of demonstration; which had no care for beauty, or for the forms of art under which beauty is represented; which tried to ignore the passions; which refused to look at ideals; and which ceased to have pleasure in Art or Nature except as phenomena to be subjected to investigation.  What Darwin said of himself--that he had lost all care for poetry--was true of a multitude of persons who filled their lives with nothing but science.  They had lost what I mean by the soul--that part of us which loves beauty, outreaches into the unknown, imagines new forms of loveliness, rejoices in simplicities of feeling, stirs into worship of God, paints the restitution of all things, cares for feeling more than knowledge, for the old as much as the new, and for romance more than investigating.