Theology in Fiction

TIME was when a strict religionist regarded fiction as under a ban; perhaps we are entering on a period when the timid novel-reader will ask, as he takes up the latest piece of fiction, You are quite sure this will do me no good ? At any rate, it is a little singular that the two novels just now most talked about in England and America have for their motifs the effect of theological speculation upon character, and that in each the old theme of the novel, a man and woman in love with each other, is inextricably involved with doctrinal contention. The old dilemmas raised by Miss Yonge and her school, when disbelief in baptismal regeneration and the like was held to forbid the bans, shrink into mere pin-points beside the fierce horns which impale humanity in Mrs. Humphry Ward’s and Mrs. Deland’s delineations of life. Even the critic, compelled by his vocation to a cool observation of the struggle for life which goes on among the paper dolls of literature, has an uneasy feeling, as he witnesses the mortal agony of Robert Elsmere and John Ward, that he must regard the books which record these experiences as contributions to theology, and not merely as works of art.

Nevertheless he returns to his senses, and remembers that every work of art must be judged by the laws of art; and if the appeal from his criticism is to another court, the terms of defense must also be changed. Laocoön is not first to be considered as a study in superstition, and a modern novel which aims to reflect the action and interaction of human beings in a microcosm cannot be excused for imperfection on the ground that the author was more interested in the effect of her novel upon certain minds than she was in producing a perfect work of art.

Say what we will about the novel as an engine of thought or an instrument of torture, its primary end is as a creation on which its maker may look and say with satisfaction that it is good, even if he begin again immediately to make a better. Permanence is one of the attributes of a work of literary art; and though the test of time is essential to an assurance of this condition, it is quite possible, in reading a novel of the times, to say if it has not the promise of endurance. When an author deliberately uses fiction to accomplish certain results, it is clear that when the occasion passes the use of the book has departed. It may have been a good missile, but abandoned missiles serve only the uses of the collector and historian. Homer’s shield is as beautiful to-day as it was when it left the workshop of Hephaistos.

These principles are somewhat elementary, but it is worth while to recur to them now and then when literature is in question, since a forgetfulness of them is apt to lead us into a confusion of thought respecting the claims upon our interest of some new book which has all the form of good literature, yet serves other ends than are served by good literature. It would be mere pedantry to say that Robert Elsmere¹ is not a novel, because the author employs the novelform to press certain views which she has appropriated; but it would be quite as far from good criticism to praise an author for ingenuity in bringing great and profound subjects to the attention of readers by involving them in the fortunes of imaginary men and women, and dexterously hinting that the men and women are more real than imaginary. Real in the sense of being persons of the author’s acquaintance under disguised names and conditions they may be, but real in the sense of being thoroughly conceived in the imagination and brought forth in words they are not. The whole book has a singularly refined air of remoteness from real life. To be sure, it is removed only by one degree, but that degree is fatal. In other words, the characters have all passed through the literary phase before they have reached Mrs. Ward. We do not mean that she has drawn her figures from copies which she has found in books, but that her attitude toward her work is determined by the literary habit, not the habit of observation of life. It is amusing to see what a part books play in this story. All the main characters either have written, are writing, or are likely to write. The hero is always passing through crises, and the crises are brought on by some book or article which he has just read. The character which impresses the reader as closest to life, Catherine, the wife of the hero, does not read at all, and the women in the book generally are not greatly troubled with their educated minds; but the womankind of the novel is mainly within the field of a society which finds its highest life in intellectual stir. In brief, the book is a product of literature, and appeals mainly, if not exclusively, to religious Athenians. It illustrates the scope of the current literary interest which takes in science and religion, and it illustrates also, though not intentionally, the futility of the patronage of science and religion by literature.

Robert Elsmere appears first in the story as a bright, docile, popular, keen English schoolboy. “ Very early in his school career the literary instincts, which had always been present in him, and which his mother had largely helped to develop by her own restless, imaginative ways of approaching life and the world, made themselves felt with considerable force. Some time before his cousin’s letter arrived, he had been taken with a craze for English poetry, and but for the corrective influence of a favorite tutor would probably have thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion as he had shown for subject after subject in his eager, ebullient childhood.” Mrs. Ward pleases herself with treating her hero’s career in a semibiographical fashion, and has the air of vitalizing the character by this means. She is more or less successful in persuading her readers as well as herself, but since her power is largely in the analysis of spiritual forces, her most effective hits in these biographic passages are the clever phrases with which she criticises her own creations. Thus she offers the reader a capital catchword with which to keep a hold upon her hero through all his after-turnings, when she says that “ he had been taken with a craze.” The development of Elsmere’s nature is through a succession of crazes.

At the university he comes under the influence of two men, one of whom, Mr. Grey, is by the author’s confession a transparently veiled simulacrum of the late T. H. Green, whose writings appear to have supplied Mrs. Ward with the substance of such religious philosophy as constitutes her standing-ground. The other is a very skillfully constructed character, Mr. Langham, who, whether copied or not from some don, is the most effective and original figure in the book. Indeed, the reader, when he has finished Robert Elsmere, is likely to recur to Langham as carrying the most complete logical conclusion of the author’s theory of religion, for her gospel of criticism offers no more perfect example of its central principle than this mental suicide. Under the advice of these two men, Elsmere remains awhile at Oxford after winning a fellowship. “ ‘ Stay here for a year or two,’ Grey said bluntly ; ‘ you are at the beginning of your best learning time, and you are not one of the natures who can do without books.’ ”

At the end of three years, the young man, in an hour of depression resulting from overwork, accepts an offer which he had before refused somewhat scornfully, and becomes the rector of a country parish. He had had his vision of work in the jungle of a great city, among the wild beasts of poverty, brutality, ignorance, and despair, and it was with a sense of defeat that he permitted himself to put up with what seemed a less heroic condition of living. Before entering upon his work he takes a six weeks’ holiday with relatives in Westmoreland, and there meets the heroine of the tale, Catherine Leyburn, the eldest of three sisters who are living with their widowed mother in the seclusion of a mountain home.

The first book of the tale is occupied with introducing the hero and heroine to each other and to the reader, and many will find in this single section, the first quarter of the whole volume, a complete and satisfying idyl. We think a defect of Mrs. Ward’s art is in the elaborateness with which she has performed the simple function of introduction. It was necessary to her purpose to set forth the spiritual relation of her hero to his surroundings, and of the heroine to hers, and of both to each other; but by the time this is done the reader is tolerably satisfied, and he sees in the marriage of Robert and Catherine a graceful conclusion to a spiritual drama. Not so Mrs. Ward, who has only just begun her task. She misreads the canon ars longa, vita brevis, as if it were intended to intimate that the object of art was to be as long as possible in detailing the events of a short life. In nothing is the subjection of her artistic to her literary sense more clearly shown than in the necessity she is under to follow the ramifications of character, and to find completeness not in a strong, well-knit web of incident and speech, but in an endless chain of circumstance. She is at the mercy of her characters ; she is never quite sure but she has omitted some explanatory passage, and her really critical situations lose their significance by the care not only with which they are approached, but with which they are left behind. She has, moreover, the unfortunate trick of intimating to the reader from time to time that this or that character is now undergoing a crisis, and will look back upon the moment as an epoch in his or her life. She is, in short, so interested in the problems she is working out that she covers her paper with all the processes, and forgets that the result is after all the main thing.

The lack of proportion, which is the great defect of the book, is rendered more apparent by the means which Mrs. Ward has taken to correct the defect. Catherine is presented as possessed with a sense of her sacred responsibility to her mother and sisters, but chiefly to the brilliant and erratic Rose, who rebels against this calm assumption of sisterly government. In drawing the character of Catherine the author has availed herself of the foil offered by Rose, but, having elaborated this second figure, she finds it necessary to give her, throughout the book, a position which is barely secondary. Consequently the reader is bidden concern himself to so great an extent with the fortunes of Rose and her successive lovers that his interest in the book is dissipated; and when he is called upon to witness the intensity of Robert Elsmere’s passion, he finds that his mind has been withdrawn, not with a relief which permits a greater rebound, but with a new interest which has absorbed and fatigued. In vain Mrs. Ward calls on us to sympathize with her hero in his rapid succession of spiritual travailings; she has jaded us with other passions, and exhausted our power of sympathy. It is not enough to assert the intensity of a hero’s struggle ; there must be a corresponding swiftness of movement in the tale, else the reader will refuse to respond to the situation when the author bids him take note of it.

In the little village where Robert and Catherine Elsmere begin their married life the second act of the drama is enacted. Elsmere might be defined as a liberal Churchman, with his ardor equally divided in the pursuit of a reformation of the world about him on sanitary principles, and a readjustment of theology to the demands of critical scholarship. Catherine is impregnably intrenched in an evangelical faith, inherited from her father, and held with the devotion of a loyal, high-minded woman. The squire of the village is a certain Roger Wendover, known in literature as an uncompromising critic of Christianity ; a humanist, it may be, but, above all, a scholar who has rid his mind of all taint of supernaturalism. The intellectual companionship which springs up between the squire and the rector results finally in the undermining of the rector’s theological position, though Mrs. Ward wishes us to understand that every movement in Elsmere’s development springs primarily from his own thought, and is only accelerated by his connection with other men. We confess frankly to an uncertainty as to how far she means to represent her hero’s mind as his own, and how far the sport of stronger minds. It is true that in the end she makes Elsmere the head and centre of a constructive scheme, but that seems necessary in order to justify her faith in the philosophy which he embodies. If it were not for this close, Elsmere would be, throughout the book, a consistent character, and one painfully typical of a phase of current thought; a character, that is, which in its religious life occupies an old fortified position, but through its very openness and hospitality exposes itself to attack from without and within, until finally it suffers melancholy defeat.

The tragedy of this portion of the story is not, however, in the struggle which goes on within Elsmere’s own breast, but in the strain which falls upon the relation of husband to wife. A deep, reverential love subsists between them ; but while Elsmere is parting with the beliefs which they both held outwardly in common, though with divergent minds, Catherine holds to the simple lines of her undoubted faith with firmer grasp. Her creed is summed up in love to her God and love to her husband ; but the former is translated into loyalty to the forms in which she was bred ; it is not the result of any philosophical adjustment, and is not in danger from any assault from without, because there is no treacherous thought within to aid in the breach. She is finely drawn in this regard, and the dignity with which she moves through the story compels the respect of the reader even when he is most ready to think her immovable Puritanism of mind an evidence of intellectual aridity. It was impossible that the relation between the husband and wife, under these conditions, should be other than painful to the last degree; and Mrs. Ward, with her fine sense of the play of spiritual forces, has done her most effective work in portraying the course of their true love in the period of religious estrangement. Her intellectual sympathy is plainly with the husband, but her woman’s nature goes out to the suffering Catherine ; and she is far more close to nature and to art in performing this part of her task than when disclosing the growth of Robert Elsmere’s mind.

The crisis of parting with the Church is followed, as we have intimated, by the final act of the drama, in which we are invited to witness the materialization of Robert Elsmere’s new faith; for a new faith he has, or rather, as his biographer would insist, a return to certain indestructible foundations, from which a crumbling superstructure had been swept away. In this part of her work Mrs. Ward shows her own convictions with a certain eagerness that emphasizes our assertion that she is less an artist than a student of literature and religion, who employs the vehicle of fiction for carrying her views. Such a sentence as this — “At a time when a religion which can no longer be believed clashes with a skepticism full of danger to conduct, every such witness as Grey to the power of a new and coming truth holds a special place in the hearts of men who can neither accept fairy-tales nor reconcile themselves to a world without faith” — provokes the reader to a degree of antagonism which far more radical utterances, dramatically expressed, fail to awaken. The breaking through of Mrs. Ward’s personal belief, so far from lending earnestness to the finale of the novel, serves to confuse the issue, and to make one begin to question the logical conclusion to Robert Elsmere’s personal struggle of faith.

Nor do the illustrations of Elsmere’s latest ministry wholly satisfy the reader who has been induced by Mrs. Ward’s earnestness to take a look into the religion of the future. In spite of assertions to the contrary, it is not a renascence of Christianity which is offered, a new, hopeful, living organism, but the note of criticism prevails. Elsmere has eliminated the supernatural from his creed, and thereby appears to have come into sympathy with the working class, which had already rejected not merely the supernatural, but the historical. He aims to build a new faith upon an historical basis, but what is to prevent his criticism, when he has passed through his present phase of faith, from undermining also his apparently secure foundations ? May not even his faith in God give way ? He is seen at the outset of his new career fusing the various elements about him into a new constructive design, and then he is taken away by death. If he had died at any earlier stage in his career, the reader might have felt a similar doubt as to the stability of his position. The nature of the man was essentially a shifting one, and by so creating it Mrs. Ward has unconsciously betrayed the weakness of her whole position as a theological novelist. If any religious moral is to be drawn from the book, it surely is to be found in the endurance of Catherine rather than in the restlessness of Elsmere. The novelist who aims to present the working of the element of religion in human life must remember that both historically and philosophically that element means the connection of human life with the origin of all life, and therefore presupposes changelessness in essence, however the form may vary. If, in depicting human character under the stress and strain of conflict arising from a revolution in religious thought, such a novelist chooses to convey the notion of stability in the person who is not moved from her rock of inherited and practiced faith, and the notion of uncertainty in the person who strays farthest from his original moorings, no fine-spun web of dream stuff, no airy reconstruction of religious forms into an æsthetic scheme, will avail to convince the reader that what is eternal in faith abides so surely in the drifting figure as in the more immovable one. New faiths require martyrs, but when the old shows such a martyr as Catherine one may be pardoned a little skepticism regarding the ripeness of the age for new faiths. The reader is moro likely to see in Robert the victim of a too exclusively intellectual and speculative study of Christianity than to find in Catherine the pitiable sign of a defunct religion.

Mrs. Ward’s novel appeals strongly to that large class of modern readers which corresponds in nature with the restless horde of plutocrats that wander over the face of the earth seeking new sensations. There are multitudes of women and men who are gifted with intellectual and religious sensibilities, and are extremely impressionable. They have well-stocked minds, and, having no engrossing pursuits, think they can afford to indulge in the luxury of journeys in new fields of thought. They may not go very far, but they get new impressions, and their intellectual and emotional life is made up of a succession of new impressions. To read Robert Elsmere is for them to travel, by a comfortable conveyance, into a somewhat forbidding region, and as they look out of the window to draw back with a thrill of ecstasy at sight of the deep cañons over which their slim trestle-work permits them to cross in safety. It is to a somewhat simpler - minded public that the story of John Ward, Preacher,² appeals. Here the theologic motif is not so subtle and complex as in Robert Elsmere; there is no such wealth of thought, no such finesse in the handling of characters ; but we are bound to say that the American novelist has obeyed the canons of her art better than her English sister. To be sure, she has not set herself such a tremendous task, but then part of the success of a novelist lies in the fore-measurement of power and materials.

The core of this story is quickly reached. A young preacher, not only brought up in the strictest form of Calvinism, but voluntarily and heartily in accord with the creed, marries a girl whose religious training has been at the hands of an easy-going Episcopal rector, her uncle. The husband, strong in his love for his wife, and equally confident in the exclusive truthfulness of his creed, cannot doubt that his logic will prevail against her indifference, and that she will see the truth as he sees it. The test is made on the question of belief in the everlasting punishment of the wicked, — to put it more exactly, perhaps, in the everlasting punishment of those who do not believe in everlasting punishment. The skeptical reader who has not read John Ward will scout at this statement as too grotesque for belief. Let him read the book, and, though the grotesquerie will recur to his mind now and then, he will admit that the novelist has lived into her chief characters so effectively that there is nothing so very unreasonable in the story. Given the earlier history of John Ward and the very make of his mind, and it is easy to see how a single dogma may come to him to be the key-stone of the arch of religion, and that with its dislodgment not only the arch would fall, but in the ruin would be involved the destruction of all that is dear in life. Mrs. Deland aimed at a very difficult feat to make such a character humanly possible, and to make it respected by the reader and loved by the strong woman whom she has depicted in Helen Jeffrey. To be sure, she has had to sacrifice some probabilities in the premises, for it is reasonable to suppose that so severe a dialectician as the Rev. Mr. Ward would have satisfied himself, before he had gone too far, upon the subject of Helen’s religious faith, and would not have postponed such fundamental inquiries till after marriage. But granting the blindness of his premarital love, there can be no doubt that he is very true to himself after his eyes are opened, and that the agony of his experience is very real.

Surely the passion of love in conflict with a sense of duty to a divine Master is no trifling theme, and Mrs. Deland, in taking it for the motif of her story, lays siege to an interest which can always be counted on. Here is tragedy indeed, and if the reader, in the comfort of his own reasonable doubt, looks askance at a religious belief which can cause such a mighty tumult in a strong man’s heart, let him consider if there be not more things in heaven and earth than he has dreamt of in his philosophy. The character of John Ward as here drawn bears internal evidence of truthfulness, and does not need that the reader should be able to confirm it from the range of his acquaintance. In making it the central figure of her story, Mrs. Deland has achieved what may be regarded as the greatest success a novelist can attain : she has portrayed a type, and yet invested it with all the real properties of a person.

In taking note of her use of a religious motif, we must give Mrs. Deland a credit which we withheld from Mrs. Ward : she regards the element of religion solely in its relation to character. The doctrine in question is never attacked ab extra. The book is not an argument against a belief in the doctrine, except as this is involved in the very presentation of the characters. Indeed, we surmise that there will be found many who will pronounce it a defense of the doctrine, since its champion becomes a martyr to his faith ; and many doubtless will feel regret that the only opposition to John’s logical tenet is in Helen’s agnosticism. We think these last are mistaken, and that Mrs. Deland had in her thought the opposition made not with intellectual weapons, but with the light of a love which is equally steadfast, equally loyal to truth, and as insuperable as light always is.

In order to relieve the intensity of the central action of the tale, Mrs. Deland has introduced a subordinate lovetrial which is a little languid, and has sketched more effectively a little comedy of spinsters and bachelor tremulously aflame. The dubitation of Mr. Denner is carried perhaps a trifle too far, but the general handling of the minor characters in the book is capital. Indeed, the most successful scene in the book by all odds is the encounter of the rector with Mr. Denner at the deathbed of the latter. Mrs. Deland shows herself possessed of a real gift for the delineation of Cranford-like characters and scenes, but such a gift is of less consequence than the imagination which is willing to occupy itself with the main plot of this tale. We can only hope that when she tries her hand again at fiction she will not think it necessary to use as the religious element a theme so obnoxious to art as the doctrine of everlasting punishment.