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.