A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 / Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes

by J. M. Robertson

Section 3.—Poetry and General Literature

1. The whole imaginative literature of Europe, in the generation after the French Revolution, reveals directly or indirectly the transmutation that the eighteenth century had worked in religious thought. Either it reacts against or it develops the rationalistic movement. In France the literary reaction is one of the first factors in the orthodox revival. Its leader and type was Chateaubriand, in whose typical work, the Génie du Christianisme (1802), lies the proof that, whatever might be the “shallowness” of Voltairism, it was profundity beside the philosophy of the majority who repelled it. On one who now reads it with the slightest scientific preparation, the book makes an impression in parts of something like fatuity. The handling of the scientific question at the threshold of the inquiry is that of a man incapable of a scientific idea. All the accumulating evidence of geology and palæontology is disposed of by the grotesque theorem that God made the world out of nothing with all the marks of antiquity upon it—the oaks at the start bearing “last year’s nests”—on the ground that, “if the world were not at once young and old, the great, the serious, the moral would disappear from nature, for these sentiments by their essence attach to antique things.”[168] In the same fashion the fable of the serpent is with perfect gravity homologated as a literal truth, on the strength of an anecdote about the charming of a rattlesnake with music.[169] It is humiliating, but instructive, to realize that only a century ago a “Christian reaction,” in a civilized country, was inspired by such an order of ideas; and that in the nation of Laplace, with his theory in view, it was the fashion thus to prattle in the taste of the Dark Ages.[170] The book is merely the eloquent expression of a nervous recoil from everything savouring of cool reason and clear thought, a recoil partly initiated by the sheer stress of excitement of the near past; partly fostered by the vague belief that freethinking in religion had caused the Revolution; partly enhanced by the tendency of every warlike period to develop emotional rather than reflective life. What was really masterly in Chateaubriand was the style; and sentimental pietism had now the prestige of fine writing, so long the specialty of the other side. Yet a generation of monarchism served to wear out the ill-based credit of the literary reaction; and belles lettres began to be rationalistic as soon as politics began again to be radical. Thus the prestige of the neo-Christian school was already spent before the revolution of 1848;[171] and the inordinate vanity of Chateaubriand, who died in that year, had undone his special influence still earlier. He had created merely a literary mode and sentiment.

2. The literary history of France since his death decides the question, so far as it can be thus decided. From 1848 till our own day it has been predominantly naturalistic and non-religious. After Guizot and the Thierrys, the nearest approach to Christianity by an influential French historian is perhaps in the case of the very heterodox Edgar Quinet. Michelet was a mere heretic in the eyes of the faithful, Saisset describing his book Du Prêtre, de la Femme, et de la Famille (1845), as a “renaissance of Voltaireanism.”[172] His whole brilliant History, indeed, is from beginning to end rationalistic, challenging as it does all the decorous traditions, exposing the failure of the faith to civilize, pronouncing that “the monastic Middle Age is an age of idiots” and the scholastic world which followed it an age of artificially formed fools,[173] flouting dogma and discrediting creed over each of their miscarriages.[174] And he was popular, withal, not only because of his vividness and unfailing freshness, but because his convictions were those of the best intelligence around him. In poetry and fiction the predominance of one or other shade of freethinking is signal. Balzac, who grew up in the age of reaction, makes essentially for rationalism by his intense analysis; and after him the difficulty is to find a great French novelist who is not frankly rationalistic. George Sand will probably not be claimed by orthodoxy; and Beyle, Constant, Flaubert, Mérimée, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and the De Goncourts make a list against which can be set only the names of M. Bourget, an artist of the second order, and of the distinguished décadent Huysmans, who became a Trappist after a life marked by a philosophy and practice of an extremely different complexion.

3. In French poetry the case is hardly otherwise. Béranger, who passed for a Voltairean, did indeed claim to have “saved from the wreck an indestructible belief”;[175] and Lamartine goes to the side of Christianity; but de Musset, the most inspired of décadents, was no more Christian than Heine, save for what a critic has called “la banale religiosité de l’Espoir en Dieu”,[176] and the pessimist Baudelaire had not even that to show. De Musset’s absurd attack on Voltaire in his Byronic poem, Rolla, well deserves the same epithets. It is a mere product of hysteria, representing neither knowledge nor reflection. The grandiose theism of Victor Hugo, again, is stamped only with his own image and superscription; and in his great contemporary Leconte de Lisle we have one of the most convinced and aggressive freethinkers of the century, a fine scholar and a self-controlled pessimist, who felt it well worth his while to write a little Popular History of Christianity (1871) which would have delighted d’Holbach. It is significant, on the other hand, that the exquisite religious verse of Verlaine was the product of an incurable neuropath, like the later work of Huysmans, and stands for decadence pure and simple. While French belles lettres thus in general made for rationalism, criticism was naturally not behindhand. Sainte-Beuve, the most widely appreciative though not the most scientific or just of critics, had only a literary sympathy with the religious types over whom he spent so much effusive research;[177] Edmond Scherer was an unbeliever almost against his will; Taine, though reactionary on political grounds in his latter years, was the typical French rationalist of his time; and though M. Brunetière, whose preferences were all for Bossuet, made “the bankruptcy of science” the text of his very facile philosophy, the most scientific and philosophic head in the whole line of French critics, the late Émile Hennequin, was wholly a rationalist; and even the rather reactionary Jules Lemaître did not maintain his early attitude of austerity towards Renan.

4. In England it was due above all to Shelley that the very age of reaction was confronted with unbelief in lyric form. His immature Queen Mab was vital enough with conviction to serve as an inspiration to a whole host of unlettered freethinkers not only in its own generation but in the next. Its notes preserved, and greatly expanded, the tract entitled The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled from Oxford; and against his will it became a people’s book, the law refusing him copyright in his own work, on the memorable principle that there could be no “protection” for a book setting forth pernicious opinions. Whether he might not in later life, had he survived, have passed to a species of mystic Christianity, reacting like Coleridge, but with a necessary difference, is a question raised by parts of the Hellas. Gladstone seems to have thought that he had in him such a potentiality. But Shelley’s work, as done, sufficed to keep for radicalism and rationalism the crown of song as against the final Tory orthodoxy[178] of the elderly Wordsworth and of Southey; and Coleridge’s zeal for (amended) dogma came upon him after his hour of poetic transfiguration was past.

And even Coleridge, who held the heresies of a modal Trinity and the non-expiatory character of the death of Christ, was widely distrusted by the pious, and expressed himself privately in terms which would have outraged them. Miracles, he declared, “are supererogatory. The law of God and the great principles of the Christian religion would have been the same had Christ never assumed humanity. It is for these things, and for such as these, for telling unwelcome truths, that I have been termed an atheist. It is for these opinions that William Smith assured the Archbishop of Canterbury that I was (what half the clergy are in their lives) an atheist. Little do these men know what atheism is. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an atheist.” Allsopp’s Letters, etc., as cited, p. 47. But at other times Coleridge was a defender of the faith, while contemning the methods of the evidential school. Id. pp. 13–14, 31.

On the other side, Scott’s honest but unintellectual romanticism, as we know from Newman, certainly favoured the Tractarian reaction, to which it was æsthetically though hardly emotionally akin. Yet George Eliot could say in later life that it was the influence of Scott that first unsettled her orthodoxy;[179] meaning, doubtless, that the prevailing secularity of his view of life and his objective handling of sects and faiths excluded even a theistic solution. Scott’s orthodoxy was in fact nearly on all fours with his Jacobitism—a matter of temperamental loyalty to a tradition.[180] But the far more potent influence of Byron, too wayward to hold a firm philosophy, but too intensely alive to realities to be capable of Scott’s feudal orthodoxy, must have counted much for heresy even in England, and was one of the literary forces of revolutionary revival for the whole of Europe. Though he never came to a clear atheistical decision as did Shelley,[181] and often in private gave himself out for a Calvinist, he so handled theological problems in his Cain that he, like Shelley, was refused copyright in his work;[182] and it was widely appropriated for freethinkers’ purposes. The orthodox Southey was on the same grounds denied the right to suppress his early revolutionary drama, Wat Tyler, which accordingly was made to do duty in Radical propaganda by freethinking publishers. Keats, again, though he melodiously declaimed, in a boyish mood, against the scientific analysis of the rainbow, and though he never assented to Shelley’s impeachments of Christianity, was in no active sense a believer in it, and after his long sickness met death gladly without the “consolations” ascribed to creed.[183]

5. One of the best-beloved names in English literature, Charles Lamb, is on several counts to be numbered with those of the freethinkers of his day—who included Godwin and Hazlitt—though he had no part in any direct propaganda. Himself at most a Unitarian, but not at all given to argument on points of faith, he did his work for reason partly by way of the subtle and winning humanism of such an essay as New Year’s Eve, which seems to have been what brought upon him the pedantically pious censure of Southey, apparently for its lack of allusion to a future state; partly by his delicately-entitled letter, The Tombs in the Abbey, in which he replied to Southey’s stricture. “A book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original” had been Southey’s pompous criticism, in a paper on Infidelity.[184] In his reply, Lamb commented on Southey’s life-long habit of scoffing at the Church of Rome, and gravely repudiated the test of orthodoxy for human character.

Lamb’s words are not generally known, and are worth remembering. “I own,” he wrote, “I never could think so considerably of myself as to decline the society of an agreeable or worthy man upon difference of opinion only. The impediments and the facilitations to a sound belief are various and inscrutable as the heart of man. Some believe upon weak principles; others cannot feel the efficacy of the strongest. One of the most candid, most upright, and single-meaning men I ever knew was the late Thomas Holcroft. I believe he never said one thing and meant another in his life; and, as near as I can guess, he never acted otherwise than with the most scrupulous attention to conscience. Ought we to wish the character false for the sake of a hollow compliment to Christianity?” Of the freethinking and unpopular Hazlitt, who had soured towards Lamb in his perverse way, the essayist spoke still more generously. Of Leigh Hunt he speaks more critically, but with the same resolution to stand by a man known as a heretic. But the severest flout to Southey and his Church is in the next paragraph, where, after the avowal that “the last sect with which you can remember me to have made common profession were the Unitarians,” he tells how, on the previous Easter Sunday, he had attended the service in Westminster Abbey, and when he would have lingered afterwards among the tombs to meditate, was “turned, like a dog or some profane person, out into the common street, with feelings which I could not help, but not very congenial to the day or the discourse. I do not know,” he adds, “that I shall ever venture myself again into one of your churches.”

These words were published in the London Magazine in 1825; but in the posthumous collected edition of the Essays of Elia all the portions above cited were dropped, and the paragraph last quoted from was modified, leaving out the last words. The essay does not seem to have been reprinted in full till it appeared in R. H. Shepherd’s edition of 1878. But the original issue in the London Magazine created a tradition among the lovers of Lamb, and his name has always been associated with some repute for freethinking. There is further very important testimony as to Lamb’s opinions in one of Allsopp’s records of the conversation of Coleridge:—

“No, no; Lamb’s skepticism has not come lightly, nor is he a skeptic [sic: Query, scoffer?]. The harsh reproof to Godwin for his contemptuous allusion to Christ before a well-trained child proves that he is not a skeptic [? scoffer]. His mind, never prone to analysis, seems to have been disgusted with the hollow pretences, the false reasonings and absurdities of the rogues and fools with whom all establishments, and all creeds seeking to become established, abound. I look upon Lamb as one hovering between earth and heaven; neither hoping much nor fearing anything. It is curious that he should retain many usages which he learnt or adopted in the fervour of his early religious feelings, now that his faith is in a state of suspended animation. Believe me, who know him well, that Lamb, say what he will, has more of the essentials of Christianity than ninety-nine out of a hundred professing Christians. He has all that would still have been Christian had Christ never lived or been made manifest upon earth.” (Allsopp’s Letters, etc., as cited, p. 46.) In connection with the frequently cited anecdote as to Lamb’s religious feeling given in Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography (rep. p. 253), also by Hazlitt (Winterslow, essay ii, ed. 1902, p. 39), may be noted the following, given by Allsopp: “After a visit to Coleridge, during which the conversation had taken a religious turn, Leigh Hunt ... expressed his surprise that such a man as Coleridge should, when speaking of Christ, always call him Our Saviour. Lamb, who had been exhilarated by one glass of that gooseberry or raisin cordial which he has so often anathematized, stammered out: ‘Ne-ne-never mind what Coleridge says; he is full of fun.’”

6. While a semi-Bohemian like Lamb could thus dare to challenge the reigning bigotry, the graver English writers of the first half of the century who had abandoned or never accepted orthodoxy felt themselves for the most part compelled to silence or ostensible compliance. It was made clear by Carlyle’s posthumous Reminiscences that he had early turned away from Christian dogma, having in fact given up a clerical career because of unbelief. Later evidence abounds. At the age of fifteen, by his own account, he had horrified his mother with the question: “Did God Almighty come down and make wheel-barrows in a shop?”[185] Of his college life he told: “I studied the evidences of Christianity for several years, with the greatest desire to be convinced, but in vain. I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true. Then came the most trying time of my life.”[186] Goethe, he claimed, led him to peace; but philosophic peace he never attained. “He was contemptuous to those who held to Christian dogmas; he was angry with those who gave them up; he was furious with those who attacked them. If equanimity be the mark of a Philosopher, he was of all great-minded men the least of a Philosopher.”[187] To all freethinking work, scholarly or other, he was hostile with the hostility of a man consciously in a false position. Strauss’s Leben Jesu he pronounced, quite late in life, “a revolutionary and ill-advised enterprise, setting forth in words what all wise men had in their minds for fifty years past, and thought it fittest to hold their peace about.”[188] He was, in fact, so false to his own doctrine of veracity as to disparage all who spoke out; while privately agreeing with Mill as to the need for speaking out.[189] Even Mill did so only partially in his lifetime, as in his address to the St. Andrews students (1867), when, “in the reception given to the Address, he was most struck by the vociferous applause of the divinity students at the freethought passage.”[190] In the first half of the century such displays of courage were rare indeed. Only after the death of Romilly was it tacitly avowed, by the publication of a deistic prayer found among his papers, that he had had no belief in revelation.[191] Much later in the century, Harriet Martineau, for openly avowing her unbelief, incurred the angry public censure of her own brother.

Despite his anxious caution, Carlyle’s writing conveyed to susceptible readers a non-Christian view of things. We know from a posthumous writing of Mr. Froude’s that, when that writer had gone through the university and taken holy orders without ever having had a single doubt as to his creed, Carlyle’s books “taught him that the religion in which he had been reared was but one of many dresses in which spiritual truth had arrayed itself, and that the creed was not literally true so far as it was a narrative of facts.”[192] It was presumably from the Sartor Resartus and some of the Essays, such as that on Voltaire—perhaps, also, negatively from the general absence of Christian sentiment in Carlyle’s works—that such lessons were learned; and though it is certain that many non-zealous Christians saw no harm in Carlyle, there is reason to believe that for multitudes of readers he had the same awakening virtue. It need hardly be said that his friend Emerson exercised it in no less degree. Mr. Froude was remarkable in his youth for his surrender of the clerical profession, in the teeth of a bitter opposition from his family, and further for his publication of a freethinking romance, The Nemesis of Faith (1849); but he went far to conciliate Anglican orthodoxy by his History. The romance had a temporary vogue rather above its artistic merits as a result of being publicly burned by the authorities of Exeter College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow.[193]

7. This attitude of orthodoxy, threatening ostracism to any avowed freethinker who had a position to lose, must be kept in mind in estimating the English evolution of that time. A professed man of science could write in 1838 that “the new mode of interpreting the Scriptures which has sprung up in Germany is the darkest cloud which lowers upon the horizon of that country.... The Germans have been conducted by some of their teachers to the borders of a precipice, one leap from which will plunge them into deism.” He added that in various parts of Europe “the heaviest calamity impending over the whole fabric of society in our time is the lengthening stride of bold skepticism in some parts, and the more stealthy onwards-creeping step of critical cavil in others.”[194] Such declamation could terrorize the timid and constrain the prudent in such a society as that of early Victorian England. The prevailing note is struck in Macaulay’s description of Charles Blount as “an infidel, and the head of a small school of infidels who were troubled with a morbid desire to make converts.”[195] All the while, Macaulay was himself privately “infidel”;[196] but he cleared his conscience by thus denouncing those who had the courage of their opinions. In this simple fashion some of the sanest writers in history were complacently put below the level of the commonplace dissemblers who aspersed them; and the average educated man saw no baseness in the procedure.

The opinion deliberately expressed in this connection by the late Professor Bain is worth noting:—

“It can at last be clearly seen what was the motive of Carlyle’s perplexing style of composition. We now know what his opinions were when he began to write, and that to express them would have been fatal to his success; yet he was not a man to indulge in rank hypocrisy. He accordingly adopted a studied and ambiguous phraseology, which for long imposed upon the religious public, who put their own interpretation upon his mystical utterances, and gave him the benefit of any doubt. In the Life of Sterling he threw off the mask, but still was not taken at his word. Had there been a perfect tolerance of all opinions, he would have begun as he ended; and his strain of composition, while still mystical and high-flown, would never have been identified with our national orthodoxy.

“I have grave doubts as to whether we possess Macaulay’s real opinions on religion. His way of dealing with the subject is so like the hedging of an unbeliever that, without some good assurance to the contrary, I must include him also among the imitators of Aristotle’s ‘caution.’...

“When Sir Charles Lyell brought out his Antiquity of Man, he too was cautious. Knowing the dangers of his footing, he abstained from giving an estimate of the extension of time required by the evidences of human remains. Society in London, however, would not put up with this reticence, and he had to disclose at dinner parties what he had withheld from the public—namely, that in his opinion the duration of man could not be less than 50,000 years” (Practical Essays, p. 274.)

8. Thus for a whole generation honest and narrow-minded believers were trained to suppose that their views were triumphant over all attacks,[197] and to see in “infidelity” a disease of an ill-informed past; and as the Church had really gained in conventional culture as well as in wealth and prestige in the period of reaction, the power of mere convention to override ideas was still enormous. But through the whole stress of reaction and conservatism, even apart from the positive criticism of creed which from time to time forced its head up, there is a visible play of a new spirit in the most notable of the serious writing of the time. Carlyle undermined orthodoxy even in his asseveration of unreasoned theism; Emerson disturbs it alike when he acclaims mystics and welcomes evolutionary science; and the whole inspiration of Mill’s Logic no less than of his Liberty is something alien to the principle of authority. Of Ruskin, again, the same may be asserted in respect of his many searching thrusts at clerical and lay practice, his defence of Colenso, and the obvious disappearance from his later books of the evangelical orthodoxy of the earlier.[198] Thus the most celebrated writers of serious English prose in the latter half of the century were in a measure associated with the spirit of critical thought on matters religious. In a much stronger degree the same thing may be predicated finally of the writer who in the field of English belles lettres, apart from fiction, came nearest them in fame and influence. Matthew Arnold, passing insensibly from the English attitude of academic orthodoxy to that of the humanist for whom Christ is but an admirable teacher and God a “Something not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” became for the England of his later years the favourite pilot across the bar between supernaturalism and naturalism. Only in England, perhaps, could his curious gospel of church-going and Bible-reading atheism have prospered, but there it prospered exceedingly. Alike as poet and as essayist, even when essaying to disparage Colenso or to confute the Germans where they jostled his predilection for the Fourth Gospel, he was a disintegrator of tradition, and, in his dogmatic way, a dissolver of dogmatism. When, therefore, beside the four names just mentioned the British public placed those of the philosophers Spencer, Lewes, and Mill, and the scientists Darwin, Huxley, Clifford, and Tyndall, they could not but recognize that the mind of the age was divorced from the nominal faith of the Church.

9. In English fiction, the beginning of the end of genuine faith was apparent to the prophetic eyes of Wilberforce and Robert Hall, of whom the former lamented the total absence of Christian sentiment from nearly all the successful fiction even of his day;[199] and the latter avowed the pain with which he noted that Miss Edgeworth, whom he admired for her style and art, put absolutely no religion in her books,[200] while Hannah More, whose principles were so excellent, had such a vicious style. With Thackeray and Dickens, indeed, serious fiction might seem to be on the side of faith, both being liberally orthodox, though neither ventured on religious romance; but with George Eliot the balance began to lean the other way, her sympathetic treatment of religious types counting for little as against her known rationalism. At the end of the century almost all of the leading writers of the higher fiction were known to be either rationalists or simple theists; and against the heavy metal of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Hardy, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Moore (whose sympathetic handling of religious motives suggests the influence of Huysmans), and the didactic-deistic Mrs. Humphry-Ward, orthodoxy can but claim artists of the third or lower grades. The championship of some of the latter may be regarded as the last humiliation of faith.

In 1905 there was current a vulgar novel entitled When it was Dark, wherein was said to be drawn a blood-curdling picture of what would happen in the event of a general surrender of Christian faith. Despite some episcopal approbation, the book excited much disgust among the more enlightened clergy. The preface to Miss Marie Corelli’s Mighty Atom may serve to convey to the many readers who cannot peruse the works of that lady an idea of the temper in which she vindicates her faith. Another popular novelist of a low artistic grade, the late Mr. Seton-Merriman, has avowed his religious soundness in a romance with a Russian plot, entitled The Sowers. Referring to the impressions produced by great scenes of Nature, he writes: “These places and these times are good for convalescent atheists and such as pose as unbelievers—the cheapest form of notoriety” (p. 168). The novelist’s own Christian ethic is thus indicated: “He had Jewish blood in his veins, which ... carried with it the usual tendency to cringe. It is in the blood; it is part of that which the people who stood without Pilate’s palace took upon themselves and their children” (p. 59). But the enormous mass of modern novels includes some tolerable pleas for faith, as well as many manifestoes of agnosticism. One of the works of the late “Edna Lyall,” We Two, was notable as the expression of the sympathy of a devout, generous, and amiable Christian lady with the personality and career of Mr. Bradlaugh.

10. Among the most artistically gifted of the English story-writers and essayists of the last generation of the century was Richard Jefferies (d. 1887), who in The Story of My Heart (1883) has told how “the last traces and relics of superstitions acquired compulsorily in childhood” finally passed away from his mind, leaving him a Naturalist in every sense of the word. In the Eulogy of Richard Jefferies published by Sir Walter Besant in 1888 it is asserted that on his deathbed Jefferies returned to his faith, and “died listening with faith and love to the words contained in the Old Book.” A popular account of this “conversion” accordingly became current, and was employed to the usual purpose. As has been shown by a careful student, and as was admitted on inquiry by Sir Walter Besant, there had been no conversion whatever, Jefferies having simply listened to his wife’s reading without hinting at any change in his convictions.[201] Despite his biographer’s express admission of his error, Christian journals, such as the Spectator, have burked the facts; one, the Christian, has piously charged dishonesty on the writer who brought them to light; and a third, the Salvationist War Cry, has pronounced his action “the basest form of chicanery and falsehood.”[202] The episode is worth noting as indicating the qualities which still attach to orthodox propaganda.

11. Though Shelley was anathema to English Christians in his own clay, his fame and standing steadily rose in the generations after his death. Nor has the balance of English poetry ever reverted to the side of faith. Even Tennyson, who more than once struck at rationalism below the belt, is in his own despite the poet of doubt as much as of credence, however he might wilfully attune himself to the key of faith; and the unparalleled optimism of Browning evolved a form of Christianity sufficiently alien to the historic creed.[203] In Clough and Matthew Arnold, again, we have the positive record of surrendered faith. Alongside of Arnold, Swinburne put into his verse the freethinking temper that Leconte de Lisle reserved for prose; and the ill-starred but finely gifted James Thomson (“B.V.”) was no less definitely though despairingly an unbeliever. Among our later poets, finally, the balance is pretty much the same. Mr. Watson has declared in worthily noble diction for a high agnosticism, and the late John Davidson defied orthodox ethics in the name of his very antinomian theology;[204] while on the side of the regulation religion—since Mr. Yeats is but a stray Druid—can be cited at best the regimental psalmody of Mr. Kipling, lyrist of trumpet and drum; the stained-glass Mariolatries of the late Francis Thompson; the declamatory orthodoxy of Mr. Noyes; and the Godism of W. E. Henley, whereat the prosaic godly look askance.

12. Of the imaginative literature of the United States, as of that of England, the same generalization broadly holds good. The incomparable Hawthorne, whatever his psychological sympathy with the Puritan past, wrought inevitably by his art for the loosening of its intellectual hold; Poe, though he did not venture till his days of downfall to write his Eureka, thereby proves himself an entirely non-Christian theist; and Emerson’s poetry, no less than his prose, constantly expresses his pantheism; while his gifted disciple Thoreau, in some ways a more stringent thinker than his master, was either a pantheist or a Lucretian theist, standing aloof from all churches.[205] The economic conditions of American life have till recently been unfavourable to the higher literature, as apart from fiction; but the unique figure of Walt Whitman stands for a thoroughly naturalistic view of life;[206] Mr. Howells appears to be at most a theist; Mr. Henry James has not even exhibited the bias of his gifted brother to the theism of their no less gifted father; and some of the most esteemed men of letters since the Civil War, as Dr. Wendell Holmes and Colonel Wentworth Higginson, have been avowedly on the side of rationalism, or, as the term goes in the States, “liberalism.” Though the tone of ordinary conversation is more often reminiscent of religion in the United States than in England, the novel and the newspaper have been perhaps more thoroughly secularized there than here; and in the public honour done to so thorough a rationalist as the late Dr. Moncure Conway at the hands of his alma mater, the Dickinson College, West Virginia, may be seen the proof that the official orthodoxy of his youth has disappeared from the region of his birth.

13. Of the vast modern output of belles lettres in continental Europe, finally, a similar account is to be given. The supreme poet of modern Italy, Leopardi, is one of the most definitely rationalistic as well as one of the greatest philosophic poets in literature; Carducci, the greatest of his successors, was explicitly anti-Christian; and despite all the claims of the Catholic socialists, there is little modern Catholic literature in Italy of any European value. One of the most distinguished of modern Italian scholars, Professor A. de Gubernatis, has in his Letture sopra la mitologia vedica (1874) explicitly treated the Christian legend as a myth. In Germany we have seen Goethe and Schiller distinctly counting for naturalism; and of Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825) an orthodox historian declares that his “religion was a chaotic fermenting of the mind, out of which now deism, then Christianity, then a new religion, seems to come forth.”[207] The naturalistic line is found to be continued in Heinrich von Kleist, the unhappy but masterly dramatist of Der Zerbrochene Krug, one of the truest geniuses of his time; and above all in Heine, whose characteristic profession of reconciling himself on his deathbed with the deity he imaged as “the Aristophanes of heaven”[208] serves so scantily to console the orthodox lovers of his matchless song. His criticism of Kant and Fichte is a sufficient clue to his serious convictions; and that “God is all that there is”[209] is the sufficient expression of his pantheism. The whole purport of his brilliant sketch of the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834; 2nd ed. 1852) is a propaganda of the very spirit of freethinking, which constitutes for Germany at once a literary classic and a manifesto of rationalism. As he himself said of the return of the aged Schelling to Catholicism, we may say of Heine, that a deathbed reversion to early beliefs is a pathological phenomenon.

The use latterly made of Heine’s deathbed re-conversion by orthodoxy in England is characteristic. The late letters and conversations in which he said edifying things of God and the Bible are cited for readers who know nothing of the context, and almost as little of the speaker. He had similarly praised the Bible in 1830 (Letter of July, in B. iii of his volume on Börne—Werke, vii, 160). To the reader of the whole it is clear that, while Heine’s verbal renunciation of his former pantheism, and his characterization of the pantheistic position as a “timid atheism,” might have been made independently of his physical prostration, his profession of the theism at which he had formerly scoffed is only momentarily serious, even at a time when such a reversion would have been in no way surprising. His return to and praise of the Bible, the book of his childhood, during years of extreme suffering and utter helplessness, was in the ordinary way of physiological reaction. But inasmuch as his thinking faculty was never extinguished by his tortures, he chronically indicated that his religious talk was a half-conscious indulgence of the overstrained emotional nature, and substantially an exercise of his poetic feeling—always as large a part of his psychosis as his reasoning faculty. Even in deathbed profession he was neither a Jew nor a Christian, his language being that of a deism “scarcely distinguishable in any essential element from that of Voltaire or Diderot” (Strodtmann, Heine’s Leben und Werke, 2te Aufl. ii, 386). “My religious convictions and views,” he writes in the preface to the late Romancero, “remain free of all churchism.... I have abjured nothing, not even my old heathen Gods, from whom I have parted in love and friendship.” In his will he peremptorily forbade any clerical procedure at his funeral; and his feeling on that side is revealed in his sad jests to his friend Meissner in 1850. “If I could only go out on crutches!” he exclaimed; adding: “Do you know where I should go? Straight to church.” On his friends expressing disbelief, he went on: “Certainly, to church! Where should a man go on crutches? Naturally, if I could walk without crutches, I should go to the laughing boulevards or the Jardin Mabille.” The story is told in England without the conclusion, as a piece of “Christian Evidence.”

But even as to his theism Heine was never more than wilfully and poetically a believer. In 1849 we find him jesting about “God” and “the Gods,” declaring he will not offend the lieber Gott, whose vultures he knows and respects. “Opium is also a religion,” he writes in 1850. “Christianity is useless for the healthy ... for the sick it is a very good religion.” “If the German people in their need accept the King of Prussia, why should not I accept the personal God?” And in speaking of the postscript to the Romancero he writes in 1851: “Alas, I had neither time nor mood to say there what I wanted—namely, that I die as a Poet, who needs neither religion nor philosophy, and has nothing to do with either. The Poet understands very well the symbolic idiom of Religion, and the abstract jargon of Philosophy; but neither the religious gentry nor those of philosophy will ever understand the Poet.” A few weeks before his death he signs a New Year letter, “Nebuchadnezzar II, formerly Prussian Atheist, now Lotosflower-adorer.” At this time he was taking immense doses of morphia to make his tortures bearable. A few hours before his death a querying pietist got from him the answer: “God will pardon me; it is his business.” The Geständnisse, written in 1854, ends in absolute irony; and his alleged grounds for giving up atheism, sometimes quoted seriously, are purely humorous (Werke, iv, 33). If it be in any sense true, as he tells in the preface to the Romancero, that “the high clerisy of atheism pronounced its anathema” over him—that is to say, that former friends denounced him as a weak turncoat—it needed only the publication of his Life and Letters to enable freethinkers to take an entirely sympathetic view of his case, which may serve as a supreme example of “the martyrdom of man.” On the whole question see Strodtmann, as cited, ii, 372 sq., and the Geständnisse, which should be compared with the earlier written fragments of Briefe über Deutschland (Werke, iii, 110), where there are some significant variations in statements of fact.

Since Heine, German belles lettres has not been a first-rate influence in Europe; but some of the leading novelists, as Auerbach and Heyse, are well known to have shared in the rational philosophy of their age; and the Christianity of Wagner, whose precarious support to the cause of faith has been welcomed chiefly by its heteroclite adherents, counts for nothing in the critical scale.[210]

14. But perhaps the most considerable evidence, in belles lettres, of the predominance of rationalism in modern Europe is to be found in the literary history of the Scandinavian States and Russia. The Russian development indeed had gone far ere the modern Scandinavian literatures had well begun. Already in the first quarter of the century the poet Poushkine was an avowed heretic; and Gogol even let his art suffer from his preoccupations with the new humanitarian ideas; while the critic Biélinsky, classed by Tourguénief as the Lessing of Russia,[211] was pronouncedly rationalistic,[212] as was his contemporary the critic Granovsky,[213] reputed the finest Russian stylist of his day. At this period belles lettres stood for every form of intellectual influence in Russia,[214] and all educated thought was moulded by it. The most perfect artistic result is the fiction of the freethinker Tourguénief,[215] the Sophocles of the modern novel. His two great contemporaries, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, count indeed for supernaturalism; but the truly wonderful genius of the former was something apart from his philosophy, which was merely childlike; and the latter, the least masterly if the most strenuous artist of the three, made his religious converts in Russia chiefly among the uneducated, and was in any case sharply antagonistic to orthodox Christianity. It does not appear that the younger writer, Potapenko, a fine artist, is orthodox, despite his extremely sympathetic presentment of a superior priest; and the still younger Gorky is an absolute Naturalist.

15. In the Scandinavian States, again, there are hardly any exceptions to the freethinking tendency among the leading living men of letters. In the person of the abnormal religionist Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) a new force of criticism began to stir in Denmark. Setting out as a theologian, Kierkegaard gradually developed, always on quasi-religious lines, into a vehement assailant of conventional Christianity, somewhat in the spirit of Pascal, somewhat in that of Feuerbach, again in that of Ruskin; and in a temper recalling now a Berserker and now a Hebrew prophet. The general effect of his teaching may be gathered from the mass of the work of Henrik Ibsen, who was his disciple, and in particular from Ibsen’s Brand, of which the hero is partly modelled on Kierkegaard.[216] Ibsen, though his Brand was counted to him for righteousness by the Churches, showed himself a thorough-going naturalist in all his later work; Björnson was an active freethinker; the eminent Danish critic, Georg Brandes, early avowed himself to the same effect; and his brother, the dramatist, Edward Brandes, was elected to the Danish Parliament in 1871 despite his declaration that he believed in neither the Christian nor the Jewish God. Most of the younger littérateurs of Norway and Sweden seem to be of the same cast of thought.