Why Literature Declines

I

FEW people nowadays believe in the inevitability of progress as confidently as their grandfathers believed in it. The theory of evolution is still accepted, not only by Bishop Barnes, but by the majority of white men who understand it, and even of those who don’t; but we no longer apply the theory generally to the affairs of mankind or see any certainty of an orderly progress in civilization itself. There has been steady progress, it is true, in the accumulation of knowledge and in the perfecting of inventions. There is no reason why science should not add story upon story to the tower of human knowledge till it has outgrown the tower of Babel, and there is no reason why, among inventions, wireless should not go on progressing till it has put men in touch with the inhabitants of other planets. But in other spheres of human activity we feel increasing doubts about the future. Prophets who believe that European society will progress slowly toward Utopia are more than balanced by those who believe that it is already in the first stages, or even at an advanced stage, of decay. And when we come to the arts, which are the graces of civilization, not even the professional optimist can see traces of any law of progress at work. Painting, sculpture, music, and literature seem to flourish for a few generations or a few centuries, and then to wither. Golden ages are succeeded by silver ages. Pegasus loses his wings and ambles on his feet. Homer is not followed by greater writers of epics, but, after nearly three thousand years, is still without an equal or a rival. Three great tragic dramatists appear in Athens, and there is no other dramatist fit to be named with them till more than two thousand years later Shakespeare begins to write in England. Phidias is still the greatest sculptor, Plutarch the greatest biographer, as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are the greatest composers of music. Nowhere is there any sign of progress. ’If Art was progressive,’ said Blake in his ‘Annotations to Reynolds,’ ‘we should have had Michelangelos and Raphaels to succeed each other. But it is not so. Genius dies with its possessor and comes not again till another is born with it.’

Blake, perhaps, went too far in his denial of progress in the arts. Undoubtedly the Greek drama progressed in the hands of Æschylus, and the English drama progressed in the hands of Shakespeare. At the same time, it is true that in literature we do not inevitably pass from peak to higher peak of genius. Literature is just as likely to take a downward direction as an upward. It is supposed to be the mark of a pessimist to say that anything is going to the dogs, and I should not like to say that literature is going to the dogs at present; but so many literatures have gone to the dogs in the past that it is worth inquiring what are the causes and whether these causes are perceptible to-day.

II

My own belief — and there is some evidence for it — is that literature begins to go to the dogs as soon as Earth becomes restive and declares its independence of Heaven. In the great ages of literature, Earth was, if not a suburb of Heaven, a subject kingdom. Heaven and Earth were places on the same cosmic map; civilized men believed in the existence of Heaven centuries before they believed in the existence of America, and believed in it just as firmly as we do in the existence of America to-day. Possibly their ideas of Heaven were even more mistaken than the modern European’s ideas of America. But at least the life of mortals was lit up for them by the presence of the immortals, and the gods presided over human destinies. To me it seems impossible to believe that it is a mere accident that all the supremely great epics, from Homer’s to Milton’s, were written by poets who not only accepted the heavenly background, but wove it into the theme of their narratives. The gods may not be the most interesting of the characters in the Iliad, but the mortal characters seem to borrow a radiance from them, and to take part in larger wars than those of which historians write in prose. Take the gods out of the Iliad, and you diminish the heroes. The battlefield of Greek and Trojan would, in the absence of the gods, seem as petty as a lamp-lit town over which hung no firmament of stars. We may not be able to explain why this is so, but we know that it is so. We know that in the presence of the stars we feel an exaltation and liberation of the spirit such as we do not feel in the light of the lamps in a street. It is as though the stars enlarged our world and gave us the freedom of the universe. If we could imagine the extinction of the stars, we should think of the world as an infinitely impoverished place. Literature, I believe, would suffer an equal impoverishment as a result of the death of the gods.

There is, I take it, no need to prove by evidence the existence of the religious background in epic poetry. It is too obvious to be overlooked, whether we think of the Odyssey, as Poseidon drives Odysseus hither and thither, ‘a wanderer from his native land,’ and Athene pleads with Zeus to permit his return, or of Paradise Lost, in which the poet avows it as his object to ‘justify the ways of God to men.’ Virgil and Dante see life in the same divine setting. ‘Sing, Heavenly Muse’ — so Milton invokes inspiration as he writes, and the adjective is not meaningless. There is no other Muse but a Heavenly Muse that has ever produced great epic poetry. According to the Greek legend, the Muses were the daughters of Zeus, and thus song has a heavenly descent. Even in the legendary ages, however, there appear to have been singers who disputed the supremacy of Heaven in poetry. There was at least one mortal who not only attempted to sing without the aid of the daughters of Zeus, but who boasted that he could conquer them in singing, and Homer in the Catalogue of the Ships tells us of his melancholy fate. Thamyris, says Homer, ‘averred with boasting that he would conquer, even did the Muses themselves sing against him, the daughters of ægis-bearing Zeus; but they in their anger maimed him, moreover they took from him the high gift of song and made him to forget his harping.’ There, I think, we have a fable of the eternal dependence of literature for its highest inspiration on a world larger than a world inhabited by none but mortal men and women. Without this inspiration men lose the high gift of song. I do not mean by this that a man who is intellectually an atheist or an agnostic cannot write great literature. What I do contend is that the literary imagination is akin to the religious imagination, and that literature, while it has its roots in earth, flourishes in its greatest splendor when its branches are stirred by some air from Heaven.

And literature is not unique among the arts in having such close associations with religion. Architecture, sculpture, painting, and music, in at least as great a measure, seem to flower most abundantly when they are in the precincts of the temple or the church. There are no buildings of the Christian era which, either individually or in the mass, reveal imaginative genius in anything like the same degree as the great churches. The age of the most beautiful painting was the age in which men painted the Madonna and the Child, and in which they did not make them lose their divinity in their humanity. Critics differ as to who were the greatest composers, but ordinary men find a pleasure in listening to the music of Handel and Bach, written when music and religion were closely associated, such as they do not find in listening to the music of to-day. I know that, on the other hand, there are critics who explain that the music of Bach is not spiritual, just as there arc critics who explain that the poetry of Milton is not Christian. There are critics, again, who deny that there is anything spiritual in the architecture of St. Peter’s. Even if we admit this, however, we shall also have to admit that it is a remarkable coincidence that music like Bach’s, epic poetry like Milton’s, or architecture like that of St. Peter’s, has never been produced by artists indifferent to the religious tradition of mankind.

It may be contended that it is a mere accident that the great poets, the great painters, and the great composers belonged to an age more superstitious and less rational than our own, and that, naturally enough, these men of genius reflected in their work the theology of their time, as the younger novelists of our own time reflect the psychology of Freud. There has never yet, it may be urged, been an age of reason, in which men free from the ancient superstitions have had an opportunity of producing work to rival the ancient masterpieces. We constantly hear to-day of literature’s breaking new ground and creating new forms, as though we had only to be patient in order to find a better Homer and a better Milton waiting for us round the corner. All talk of this kind, I believe, is based on a profound illusion — the illusion of progress in the arts. We shall never have another Homer until we have a great poet who believes in Olympus. We shall never have another Milton till we have a great poet who believes in the war between Heaven and Hell. It is arguable that these beliefs are superstitions, and that the human race will be both wiser and happier for having abandoned them. But literature, at least, will be the poorer. Literature will always have to return for inspiration to Olympus, though it may be an Olympus transformed. The future of literature is in the past. It is in the recovery and resurrection of the vanished faith of vanished ages.

III

When Thomas Love Peacock wrote mockingly of poetry a century ago, as a kind of literature unsuitable to men in an age of reason, he may have written in jesting fashion, but what he said was fundamentally true. ‘A poet,’ he declared, ‘in our times is a semibarbarian in a civilized community.

He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward. The brighter the light diffused around him by the progress of reason, the thicker is the darkness of antiquated barbarism, in which he buries himself like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian labors.’ There you have the truth put in a hostile fashion, but it is none the less truth. The march of a great poet’s intellect is, like that of a crab, backward — or would be except for the fact that a crab walks sideward. If the belief in Olympus, or in something corresponding to Olympus, is the mark of a semibarbarian, then a modern poet will necessarily be a semibarbarian. He will probably be more at home in the Dark Ages than at a contemporary meeting of shareholders.

This is not to say that either the great poets or the great prose writers of the future will be occupied mainly with religious themes. Religion in itself, in the ordinary sense of the word, is no more likely to produce great literature than party politics. If you look around the shelves of a theological library, you will probably find even less good literature than on the shelves of a purely secular library. Glance through a hymn book, and you will come on very few poems that you feel ought to be included in the Oxford Book of English Verse. One of the most astounding facts in literary history is, indeed, that while so many passionately sincere men and women have written religious verse, so few of them have written poems as inspired as the poems that other men have written about nightingales and daffodils. Wordsworth declared that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’ Well, here among the hymn writers you have surely the spontaneous overflow’ of powerful feelings, — feelings for which the writers would have been prepared to go to the stake, — yet, as literature, their verses are little better than the sort of verses that could be written in favor of the policy of Mr. Coolidgc or Mr. Lloyd George. This does not mean that hymns are not good for their own purposes, which are conceivably as noble as the purposes of literature, or more so. It would be as absurd to complain of the literary quality of hymns as it would be to complain of the literary quality of ‘God Save the King.’ These hymns move most of us as patriotic songs move us, but they seldom give us the double delight of great poetry — the delight in the thing expressed and the delight in the way in which it is expressed. It may be that the ordinary poet, in writing hymns as in writing patriotic poetry, depersonalizes himself and writes in order to express the emotions of human beings in general rather than his own personal vision of the world. That, I think, is the most reasonable explanation of the mediocrity of most religious verse. When we read Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils,’ we feel that we have been admitted into the intimate secrets of Wordsworth’s soul. When we read Bishop Heber’s ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,’ however, we do not feel that we have been admitted into the inner sanctuary of Bishop Heber’s imagination. He has not re-created the world for us; he has only exhorted us. We suspect him of writing, not in order to communicate his vision of life to us, but in order to do us good. He writes as the advocate of a cause, and not in the pure delight of the imagination. It may be said that the real failure of the hymn lies in the fact that Bishop Heber was not a man of consummate genius, whereas Wordsworth was. And that is partly the explanation. But, apart from this, we have to face the fact that a number of men of genius have written both religious and secular verse, and that, while the secular verse is beautiful poetry, the religious verse is scarcely worth reading. Campion wrote both profane and religious verse, and, though his religious verse is not entirely negligible, how uninspired most of it is compared with ‘Hark all you ladies that do sleep,’ or ‘Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow’! Donne, again, though Dean of St. Paul’s, wrote with nobler inspiration of love than of Paradise. Herrick, another clergyman, was happier when singing ‘Gather ye rosebuds’ or ‘Fair daffadills’ than when singing the praises of his Creator. He did, indeed, write a charming thanksgiving to God for his house — in which he recounts his blessings in detail in such simple lines as

but the charm of the poem lies in the picture it gives us of Herrick in his earthly house, rather than in opening up to us a vision of the world transfigured by the light of Paradise. It is as though all these poets wrote of love and earthly things with free imaginations, but of religion under some conventional restraint. You will find a parallel to this if you try to imagine what would happen if all the living poets of genius sat down to write poems about the League of Nations. Probably most of them believe in the ideals of the League of Nations, but, however ardently they believed in them, it is almost certain that they would write about it conventionally and without inspiration. They would write, not from the privacy of their souls, but like public speakers, bent upon influencing an audience. And no great literature comes except from the privacy of the soul. Genius, indeed, demands the same freedom and fullness of expression in religious poetry as in secular poetry.

Whenever a great writer tells us as much of the tumult of his soul in a hymn as Shakespeare tells us of the tumult of his soul in his sonnets, we shall have great religious literature. This is no mere prophecy; the miracle has happened in the past. There has been great religious poetry written in one century after another, in which we wander in new fields of the imagination. When we read Henry Vaughan’s ‘They are all gone into the world of light’ or ‘My soul, there is a country, Far beyond the stars,’ we become sharers in the deepest experiences of a great writer’s soul. Here, we feel, are his profoundest confessions, his autobiography. Here he does not disguise his ‘powerful feelings’ in the language of convention and restraint. He writes of heavenly things, not as an awkward intruder on his best behavior, but as one who is as familiar with them as Shelley with the song of the skylark. We find the same familiarity and fullness of expression in Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, and in those verses in which he turns the eyes of men to the vision of

The religious poets, as a rule, close their eyes to the fact that, even to a religious man, Charing Cross is at least as real as Heaven. They forget that, by making Charing Cross more real, they also make Heaven more real, and that a Heaven that is not related somehow to Charing Cross and the fields of earth is to the imagination merely a vague formula. Literature must be human even when it is divine: otherwise it is not literature, but only divinity.

IV

It is not only in religious poetry, but in religious prose, that you find this deficiency of humanity. The inhumanity of the mass of pious books is, as we say, ‘notorious.’ Thackeray made fun of the worst kind of them in Vanity Fair in his references to Lady Emily Sheepshanks and her ‘sweet tracts,’ ‘The Sailor’s True Bivouack,’ ‘The Applewoman of Finchley Common,’ ‘Thrump’s Legacy,’ and ‘The Blind Washerwoman of Moorfields.’ It is possible, even probable, that works of this kind have helped tens of thousands of people to live happier and better lives, but no one has ever claimed that they possess literary value. They are argumentative in purpose, not imaginative. They are as little literary either in motive or in achievement as a pamphlet in favor of or in opposition to vivisection. On the other hand, let an imaginative man begin to write of religion in terms of his own experiences, and immediately we are in a world as enchanting as the world of the great story-tellers. Bunyan had an edifying, as well as a literary, motive in writing Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress, but he obeyed every rule of imaginative literature as he wrote. He founded his books on human life, and on the passions and experiences that were the most wonderful things that he had known. The ordinary religious story tells us that the salvation of a human soul is wonderful, but it does not make us experience the wonder in our own imaginations. Bunyan does this, and he does it, not only because he is a man of genius, but because he can be true to Heaven without being false to Bedfordshire. Like all great religious writers, he is the inhabitant of two worlds. You see how naturally they interpenetrate one another in that beautiful sentence in Grace Abounding describing his conversion: ‘But upon a day the good providence of God called me to Bedford to work at my calling, and in one of the streets of that town I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, telling about the things of God.’ How full of light, of grace, of the loveliness of earth, that sentence is, as well as of edification! No one can read it without realizing that the human background is as necessary to religious literature as the religious background is to literature in general.

I have referred to the position of the hymn and the tract in literature chiefly in order to make it clear that, in emphasizing the importance of the religious background in poetry and imaginative prose, I am not contending that men of letters are, or should become, the rivals of preachers, or that they have any kind of propagandist function. I am merely proposing an investigation of one of the chief tributaries that feed the river of great literature, and raising the question of how much literature owes to the acceptance of a larger world than the world we touch with our hands and see with our eyes. So far as epic poetry is concerned, the facts undoubtedly suggest that great epics cannot be written of a world deserted by the gods. The importance of the religious background is not quite so clear, however, when we turn from the epic to drama, lyric poetry, and the novel. Most critics affirm that modern literature flowered into genius largely as a result of breaking free from the authority of religion, and the movement of humanism is praised because it released the human mind from the despotism of theology and enabled it to think and to express itself boldly.

Literature, these critics hold, is essentially heretical, the opponent of the standards of priest and presbyter, and Walter Pater maintained that one of the strongest characteristics of the literature even of the Middle Ages was a ‘spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and religious ideas of the time.’ As evidence of the heretical and skeptical character of mediæval literature, he quoted the memorable passage in Aucassin et Nicolette, in which Aucassin, threatened with the pains of Hell if he does not give up Nicolette, cries scornfully: ‘In Paradise what have I to do? I care not to enter, but only to have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, whom I love so dearly well. For into Paradise go none but such people as I will tell you of. There go those aged priests, and those old cripples, and the maimed, who all day long and all night cough before the altars and in the crypts beneath the churches; those who go in worn old mantles and old tattered habits; who are naked, and barefoot, and full of sores; who are dying of hunger and of thirst, of cold, and of wretchedness. Such as these enter in Paradise, and with them I have nought to do. But in Hell will I go. For to Hell go the fair clerks and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney and the great wars, and the stout archer and the loyal man. With them will I go. And there go the fair and courteous ladies, who have friends two or three, together with their wedded lords. And there pass the gold and the silver, the ermine and all rich furs, harpers and minstrels, and the happy of the world. With these will I go, so only that I have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, by my side.'

That is certainly not an orthodox speech, but it is a speech made in a world that believed in Heaven and in Hell. Again and again, even in those early days, we find the priest and the poet in conflict, but they carry on their quarrel against a background that contains other worlds than our own. We see another example of 1 his in mediaeval Irish literature, in the famous dialogue that took place between Saint Patrick and Oisin, the long-dead pagan hero, who returns from the Country of the Young to Ireland to find all the heroes dust and Christianity triumphant. To Oisin this Christian Ireland is an Ireland in ruins. He weeps for the vanished pagan world that he had known, and Patrick reproaches him for mourning for heathen companions who are now in Hell. ‘Leave off fretting, Oisin,’ says Patrick, ‘and shed your tears to the God of grace. Finn and the Fianna are black enough now, and they will get no help for ever.’ ‘It is a pity that would be,’ replies Oisin, ‘Finn to be in pain for ever; and who was it gained the victory over him, when his own hand had made an end of so many a hard fighter?’ ‘It is God gained the victory over Finn,’ Patrick tells him, ‘and not the strong hand of an enemy; and as to the Fianna, they are condemned to Hell along with him, and tormented for ever.’ ‘O Patrick,’ cries Oisin, ‘show me the place where Finn and his people are, and there is not a Hell or a Heaven there but I will put it down. And if Osgar, my own son, is there, the hero that was bravest in heavy battles, there is not in Hell or in the Heaven of God a troop so great that he could not destroy it.’

Here, again, we have a passage that seems to suggest that literature has an irreligious rather than a religious temper. But the conflict in this dialogue is not really between religion and irreligion, but between two different kinds of religion. Oisin, like Saint Patrick, has a vision of a world that is on no earthly map. He has the Country of the Young to set against the Saint’s Heaven. He cries to Patrick: ‘The Country of the Young, the Country of Victory, and, 0 Patrick, there is no lie in that name. If there are grandeurs in your Heaven the same as there are there, I would give my friendship to God. ...’ Not yet has literature reached that stage of post-humanism where the writer has no eyes except for the earth.

V

With the growth of the drama and the growth of the novel in later times, literature did undoubtedly become more exclusively human. But, even when it was reticent in regard to the religious life of man, it was at its greatest when it was written on the assumption that religion was true. Enthusiastic partisans have attempted to prove that Shakespeare was a Catholic or a Puritan, or that he had no religion at all. I do not know what his convictions were, but it is clear that his plays could never have been written except out of an imagination steeped in Christian conceptions, just as the Œdipus Rex could never have been written except out of an imagination steeped in Greek religious conceptions. That profound sense of sin which we find in the tragedies of Shakespeare is essentially a Christian sense. If Shakespeare had brought gods as well as ghosts on to the stage, he could not more clearly have made the life of man seem no mere trivial accident between life and death, but an event in a larger universe.

Take the religious conceptions out of Hamlet, and rewrite the play in terms of Freudian complexes, and you will lose almost as great a proportion of beauty as you would lose if you rationalized Paradise Lost. Hamlet’s cry: —

is no mere figure of speech. Hamlet’s actions are again and again governed by his sense of the existence of another world. There is scarcely a great scene in the play in which the divine background of life is not taken for granted. It is all the more interesting to discover that Professor Gilbert Murray, in his latest book, contends that the tragedy of Hamlet has even a quasireligious origin and that it is the perfection of an ancient myth, as is the tragedy of Orestes — that, in fact, both tragedies are sprung from the same mythical seed. ‘We finally,’ he declares, ‘run the Hamlet-saga to earth in the same ground as the Orestes-saga: in that prehistoric and world-wide ritual battle of Summer and Winter, of Life and Death, which has played so vast a part in the mental development of the human race and especially, as Sir E. K. Chambers has shown us, in the history of mediæval drama.’

This is not to say, of course, that Shakespeare consciously wrote Hamlet as a fable of the ritual battle of Summer and Winter, of Life and Death, the conception of which is one of the sources of both religion and literature. But it is interesting to discover that the plot he chose can tentatively be traced back to its origin in a myth of the battles of the gods. If this is true, Hamlet has a doubly religious lineage, and it would probably not be going too far to say that without the religious imagination it would have been as impossible for Hamlet to have been written as it would for the books of the Bible to have been written. And, if we turn to the work of later men of genius who have used the dramatic form, we shall find that the greatest of them, however heretical, have for some reason or other been unable to dispense with, or escape from, the supernatural. If it is possible to write dramatic poetry as great as Goethe’s Faust and Ibsen’s Brand and Peer Gynt without the assumption of a supernatural background — be it only for dramatic purposes—to men’s lives, how is it that no one has ever done so? My own theory is that without this assumption the doom of man loses most of its tragic grandeur, and that for this reason the dramatic, like the epic, poet is inevitably forced to return to a Heavenly Muse for inspiration. The more we consider the matter, indeed, the more we are compelled to the conclusion that literature, while often in revolt against orthodoxy, is inextricably bound up with the religious imagination. Literature might almost be said to be sprung from a seed dropped from the tree of religion. It would be possible, I imagine, to show good cause for believing that the novels of Dickens, no less than the Cathedral of Notre Dame, bear an essential relationship to the religious questionings and affirmations of mankind.

The religious element in literature, of course, is much more obvious in poetry than in the novel. ‘It utters somewhat above a mortal mouth,’ said Ben Jonson of poetry, and the practice of the great poets has endorsed his saying. They see the world transformed by a ‘light that never was, on sea or land.’ They release us from the actual, or lead us through it to the universal. ‘Poetry,’ declared Shelley, ‘defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident, of surrounding impressions.’ Modern fiction seldom defeats this curse. Many modern novelists devote themselves entirely to the description of surrounding impressions. They are content to observe rather than to imagine, and, as we read their realistic novels about some uninteresting young man or woman in revolt against the uninteresting atmosphere of an uninteresting home, we feel the world growing emptier. Life at its best in such novels is a Canterbury pilgrimage without Canterbury, and with the fun left out.

The aridity of most realistic — or, as it might be called, materialistic — fiction, I believe, is largely due to the fact that the realistic novelists are convinced that the world has outgrown Canterbury. Possibly it has, as it outgrew Olympus, but, just as Homer could not have written the Iliad without Olympus in the background, and Chaucer could not have written The Canterbury Tales without Canterbury in the background, so, in my opinion, a religious background, either expressed or implied, will always be necessary to the production of great literature. It may be a mere coincidence that the greatest fiction of recent times, the Russian, sprang from what rationalists would describe as the most superstitious soil in Europe; but I do not think so. Some people would deny that there is any religious background in Hardy’s work, but it is significant that in The Dynasts Hardy found himself compelled to imagine an overworld of spirits and angels as part of the setting of human hopes and fears. As we read the plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw, who invented the life force, again we realize the truth of the old saying that ‘if God had not existed, we should have had to invent him.’

Everywhere the imaginative man confronted with the mystery of life and death is forced to adopt a religious attitude to life—the attitude of awe before the eternal mysteries. Without it there can be neither the greatest poetry nor the greatest prose — neither the verse of Milton nor the prose of the Bible and Sir Thomas Browne. Great poetry will cease to be written when poets cease to be men for whom the invisible world exists. And if this is true of poetry, is it not reasonable to believe that it is also true of imaginative prose, which is only poetry in its week-day dress?