Such are indications of a possible escape from a literature that appears in the bulk in active warfare against “progress,” as the word is understood in twentieth-century England. The critics and the novelists, no less than the poets, would seem to have deserved Plato’s rigorous sentence of expulsion from a civilisation against which they are openly at war. They cry pitifully or passionately over the huge ant-heap of modern industry, “What shall it profit?” Those who listen to their crying will probably drop under in the struggle, from mere inability—when the choice is offered—to fashion any intelligible goal of attainment. They exhibit progress making inevitable more men, but by no means better men. They demonstrate, as with the physical accuracy of the dissector’s scalpel, the same selfishnesses and superstitions and weaknesses and impulses of lust and cowardice and greed, multiplying to-day as yesterday. They reveal in the few, as conspicuously as in the many, life directed by prejudice rather than by reason, arrogance and avarice and blindness exercising their ancient empire. They ask sometimes with impatience, sometimes with deliberation, if this be the final word in the matter: if the desirable things which are possible to human experience are always to be sacrificed to Accumulation or Acceleration, or a joyless extravagance, or (at the bottom) a mere animal struggle for food and shelter. And Civilisation, in reply to these “Anarchists,” speaks with voice less certain than in former days; being itself perplexed why, after the long journey has been attempted and all the miracle achieved, it cannot at last see clearly on the horizon the walls and towers of the Golden City of men’s dreams.
CHAPTER IX
RELIGION AND PROGRESS
LITERATURE—at its highest estimate—is, however, only the luxury of the few. It influences a strictly limited class. It is produced by a still more limited class. It is so little operative upon the general life of the nation that its very claim to be considered in a survey of the “Condition of England” is doubtful. The published writings which in the least degree influence the life and opinion of the majority are the published writings not of the present but of the past. In so far as such existence occupies itself with anything beyond the newspapers or the sensational and generally excellent cheap fiction of the day, it is with the “World’s Classics,” or the reprints of established authors, which now are so plentifully provided in portable form by the various contemporary publishers. Whatever evidence of weariness or revolt may be exhibited by the tiny group of practising authors makes no impression upon the contented, boisterous spirit of Middle Class England; which is inclined to attribute all such criticism to a temper soured by disappointment or a disordered digestion. And below such classes lie the huge and inarticulate multitudes of the city people, who find what spiritual and emotional satisfactions “literature” can bring in the journals and popular writings which they consume with ever-increasing avidity. They seek romance—and find it—in a complex murder case, in stories of crime which seem to the fastidious sordid and disgusting, in stories dependent in their appeal upon sudden vicissitudes of fortune, in which chance or resolution are always breaking down the insupportable sequences of cause and effect. That a man shall reap as he has sown, that to-morrow shall be as yesterday, that inevitable law shall bind and control the revolt of human passion against circumstance—these are the affirmations of moralist and philosopher against which the popular spirit is in continual rebellion. Rebellion will endure so long as the human will affirms itself free, and passion can draw its inspiration from some fire beyond the boundaries of the world. That fire descends in the Divine fury of all revolutions; which burn up and suddenly consume the civilisation which has become orderly and comfortable and weary of it all. It descends also when to some remote obscure human being, set in the enormous city, life suddenly acquires significance and high meaning, in utter devotion to a person or a cause.
To such the optimism and rejoicing of Jefferies or Morris is as much an enigma as the questionings and denials of Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr. Bernard Shaw. They experience no exultation in Nature because they are cut off from the experience of Nature. They are untroubled by the question of the goal of the industrial process because their own particular part in it—the daily labour, the maintenance of the home, the occasional recreation of Saturday Sport or Sunday Excursion—absorbs all their available energies. “In June 1902,” says Mr. Ensor, “the writer piloted four crippled workmen from a working-class district in Manchester about some grounds on the edge of the suburbs, and put to them a practical flower catechism. Three of them, be it noted, had, before the events which left them cripples, enjoyed high wages and relative prosperity. None of them knew or could name forget-me-nots, daisies, dandelions, clover, pansies, or lilies of the valley, three of them were baffled by a poppy, the fourth felt confident that it was ‘a rose.’”[26] Of what avail, to such a company, to proclaim the exultation of the pageant of Summer, or the joy in old walled gardens under the apple trees “at the right time of the year.” And the crowd which grows delirious over the spectacle of the football contests, and frankly sets itself to enjoyment, in its own jolly fashion, in the Election scrimmage or on an August Bank Holiday, is not likely to find either inspiration or sadness in the problem of what is to be the fate of the human race when economic stability is finally secured.
Among all of these—and they comprise in all classes the overwhelming majority—the place of a Philosophy or a Literature must be taken by a Religion. And the question of the survival of a Religion—in the most liberal interpretation of the term—is the question of the survival of any extra-material ideal in the civilisation of the twentieth century. In this, the last of our researches into “the Condition of England,” generalisation is more than ever difficult. Religions which appear dead are so often discovered to be only sleeping, variations in faiths and devotions are so frequent between youth and age, a dark fortune and a bright, that it is quite impossible to accept any mere superficial demonstration of development or decay. Statistics of church-going, varying from generation to generation, such as those of a recent census in London, may indicate a fluctuation in faith, or an alteration in social custom. Impressions of individual observers, such as the researches of Mr. Charles Booth and his assistants into the religious life of the Capital, may at the best be the impressions gathered from various separated workers set in the midst of silent untestifying millions. In every age the sterner moralist has proclaimed a national apostasy, and witnessed with astonishment a world repudiating its ancient pieties. In every age the prophecy of immediate collapse has been falsified by the events of history. More than a hundred and fifty years ago the least sensational of all great Christian apologists declared that in England “it is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted that Christianity is not so much a subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious.” “And accordingly,” he continues in famous words, “they treat it as if, in the present age, this was an agreed point amongst all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule as it were, by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.” Yet the “pleasures of the world” find themselves still interrupted by a faith which, with its grave dug and its epitaph set up, unexpectedly refuses to expire. Any variation or section of it, whose end has been confidently predicted, will suddenly flare up again into violent life and upset all the calculations of its undertakers. In 1830 “the acutest characters of the time,” says Mr. Wilfred Ward, “considered that the Church of England was on its death-bed.” “It was folding its robes,” was Mozley’s verdict, “to die with what decency it could.” “The Church as it now stands,” wrote Arnold, “no human power could save.” But to-day on any impartial judgment the “Established Church” whatever gains or losses it may have received in the long struggle with indifference and unbelief, would never be threatened with any such suggestions of immediate destruction. Sidney Smith in 1827 could plead for toleration to Roman Catholics not because they were strong but because they were weak. The power of the Papacy was obviously a dead thing, in the future so conspicuously to become impotent, that he could exhort his fellow-countrymen to some charity towards a forlorn and piteous supplicant. “There is no Court of Rome,” he could assert, “and no Pope. There is a waxwork Pope and a waxwork Court of Rome. Popes of flesh and blood have long since disappeared. The follies of one century,” he proclaimed, “are scarcely credible to that which succeeds it; what will be said of all the intolerable trash which is issued forth at public meetings of ‘No Popery’? If the world lasts till 1927, this childish nonsense will have got out of the drawing-room and passed through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen.” “If the world lasts till 1927,” there will probably be still orators of “No Popery,” and scornful critics of the same. But he would be a rash prophet to-day who would endorse Sidney Smith’s argument for toleration of a Pope and Court of Rome as being “waxworks,” when these “waxworks” have revealed themselves, in the interval, so amazingly alive.
Yet I think there can be no doubt that apart from any questions of future revival, present belief in religion, as a conception of life dependent upon supernatural sanctions or as a revelation of a purpose and meaning beyond the actual business of the day, is slowly but steadily fading from the modern city race. Tolerance, kindliness, sympathy, civilisation continually improve. Affirmation of any responsibility, beyond that to self and to humanity, continually declines. Life therefore gradually ceases to be influenced or coloured by any atmosphere of “other worldliness.” Present disabilities find no compensation in the hope of a future redress, which makes the present endurable. The general standard of humanitarian sentiment is probably higher in the cities than ever before, certainly exhibiting immense advance from that in the rude squalid barbarism of the submerged eighteenth-century life, or the vast penury and discontent of the early nineteenth. But a “background” was implied or assumed practically by the whole population, in these troublous days. Men lived as the beasts, and as the beasts perished. Yet few of them would have definitely denied that there existed a Creator and there awaited for them a judgment. The “Atheist” was as unpopular a figure as the Republican; and the sacking of the house of a “Unitarian” as congenial an occupation as a “No Popery” riot. To-day that “background” has vanished. The Churches are extraordinarily active, endeavouring in this way and in that to influence the lives of the people. Their humanitarian and social efforts are widely appreciated. Their definite dogmatic teachings seem to count for little at all. They labour on steadily amid a huge indifference. The very material of their appeal is vanishing. Fear which is the beginning of wisdom no longer terrifies a society which sees orderly arrangements everywhere accepting the secure as the normal. It cannot believe that, even if any future world exists at all—of which existence it is becoming increasingly doubtful—that future world will not in essence re-establish the decencies and commonplaces of the modern city state. There is less material therefore to-day for the appeal—to the general—of the revivalist preacher, with which Wesley and Whitefield changed the face of eighteenth-century England. The fleeing from the city of Destruction, the crying out against the “burden” of sin, the vision of the flames of hell flaring close to the Celestial City, represent an apparatus of experience that is alien to the present. “Religion,” was Dolling’s testimony from Poplar, “has, so to speak, gone to pieces. There is no opposition. We do not care enough to oppose. God is not in any of our thoughts: we do not even fear Him. We face death with perfect composure, for we have nothing to give up and nothing to look forward to. Heaven has no attraction, because we should be out of place there. And Hell has no terrors.”
And although this fading of the background is perhaps less manifest in country than in town, and less in the industrial provinces than in the capital, its effect can be apprehended amongst all classes of the community and throughout the whole of the modern world. The meaning is gone from phrases which are still repeated, whose significance is becoming historical merely. The tide is ebbing within and without the Churches. The drift is towards a non-dogmatic affirmation of general kindliness and good fellowship, with an emphasis rather on the service of men than the fulfilment of the will of God. Most modern activities of the great religious bodies are coming more and more to enlarge themselves into efforts towards social or humanitarian reforms. Even the noisy warfare between the various denominations may be interpreted less as a sign of secure vitality than as evidence of uncertain position; a struggle excited less by confidence than by foreboding. Whirlpools of brave and often feverish energy are maintained amid the prevailing indifference. The children are everywhere persuaded to attend the centres of religious teaching; everywhere, as they struggle to manhood and womanhood in a world of such doubtful certainties, they exhibit a large falling away. The sternness and severity and compelling claims of the ancient injunctions to repentance and an ordered life become replaced by a general sense of vague and misty optimism, in which the former beliefs are less definitely denied than put aside as negligible and irrelevant to the business of the day. “The great bulk,” is one general verdict of Mr. Booth’s investigation, “seem to be incapable of attaining to that pressing sense of sin which is the common basis not only of these but of most other forms of Christian teaching.” “Those who have any definite convictions,” testifies a hospital chaplain, “are few and far between: they have for the most part put religion deliberately out of their lives, and dislike to be reminded of it.” Another observer finds “a very great variety of aim, but an almost universal sense of disappointment.” “All have empty churches,” is the sweeping verdict over one large industrial borough, “and the general attitude of the people is that of complete indifference.” “Those of the poor who attend religious services,” is another general verdict, “are mostly bought.” “They take their religion lightly,” is perhaps the final word upon twentieth-century England, “and are much inclined to believe that it will all come right in the end.”[27]
These changes amongst the wealthy and prosperous are perhaps negligible; because—with of course many exceptions—in no society have “they that have riches” ever entered but hardly into the kingdom of any God. But among the Middle Classes—the centre and historical support of England’s Protestant creed—the drift away is acknowledged by all to be conspicuous—by friend as well as by enemy. The country is here following the town; and amongst the industrial people the prophecy of Taine thirty years ago would appear to be fulfilling itself to-day: “By an insensible and slow backward movement, the great rural mass, like the great urban mass, is gradually going back to Paganism.”
It is a European movement, conspicuous even to the superficial observer. At intervals there are efforts at diagnosis, even random efforts at cure. Missions and revivals produce transitory tides invigorating the older faiths—like the Catholic reaction in France after the disasters of 1870, or the rise of the Salvation Army a little later in the great towns of England. Despite such rallies, however, the process continues. It continues without violence, continuously, steadily, as a kind of impersonal motion of secular change. It is the passing of a whole civilisation away from the faith in which it was founded and out of which it has been fashioned. Mr. Hueffer, in his Spirit of the People, tells the story of a neighbour who after a late evening service in the village church suddenly discovered that he no longer believed in the immortality of the soul. And that is typical of the change in the world of to-day. It is not becoming atheist. It is ceasing to believe, without being conscious of the process, until it suddenly wakes up to the fact that the process is complete.