A novel is simply this: it is a certain portion of the lives of certain people imagined by the author and seen through his temperament. Very well then; let me proceed to prove that the modern nonsense which would have people believe that Christianity in fiction is against the canons of art, is simply a lie.
The life of every single human being in England is punctuated and impinged upon by Christianity. As I pointed out in my first essay, the usual modern novel never mentions—never even mentions!—Sunday. Yet on Sunday, the shops, factories, theatres and public-houses close. The drunkard has as much reason to find Sunday the most dismal day in the week as the saint to know it the happiest and best. For half-an-hour in every town and village the bells of church and chapel ring—if indeed chapels are “ritualistic” enough to have bells, a point upon which I am not informed!
And again, speaking of the constant reminder we all have of religion, every coin we have in our pockets bears the inscription rex fid. def.—our King is officially known as the Defender of the Christian Faith. Every day as I write, the newspapers are full of the controversy—the religious controversy—of the Education Bill. Each time you and I go to a concert we finish it with the music of the National Anthem, which is a prayer to God that he will bless and preserve the Dynasty. Is it necessary to multiply instances? I think not.
How can any one say, as the literary critics have sometimes said of my own books and of others much more important, that “religion” is out of place in a novel?
As I have pointed out at some length, the greatest novels are one and all permeated with the sense of religion. Take your Thackeray and read in Vanity Fair of George Osborne going out to battle and first saying “Our Father” with his wife. Read the works of this great writer and regard how, whenever a great emotion, a poignant situation occurs, so surely the author sends up a prayer to Almighty God either in his own person or that of his characters. In that almost greatest of English novels, Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, the hero dies with the holy name of Jesus on his lips. There is religion in Pickwick!—we read of the Christmas of Dingley Dell. In Les Misérables, that huge epic novel, Victor Hugo has drawn more than one saint of God, has made Christianity the motive of his drama.
It is so in life, be certain that it is and always will be. Christianity is the central thing, the only important thing, and the attempt to minimize its importance and influence is as the chirping of a linnet on the roadside as some stately procession passes by.
They say. What say they? Let them say!
But let no one be deluded into believing that the printed sneers of those who are afraid to recognize our Lord represent any real opinion, any weight of opinion, as to the public distaste to Christianity as an integral part of the fiction which they buy.
Sir Arthur Helps once said, “The influence of works of fiction is unbounded. Even the minds of well-informed people are more often stored with characters from acknowledged fiction than from history or biography, or the real life around them. We dispute about these characters as if they were realities. Their experience is our experience; we adopt their feelings and imitate their acts. Shakespeare’s Plays were the only history to the Duke of Marlborough. Thousands of Greeks acted under the influence of what Achilles or Ulysses did in Homer.”
All this is entirely true. As a young American novelist once put it to me, “To-day is the day of the novel.” In no other day and by no other vehicle is contemporaneous life so adequately expressed, and the critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing our times, striving to reconstruct our civilization, will look not to the painters, not to the architects nor dramatists, but to the novelists to find our idiosyncrasy.