Of all the many accusations brought against our much abused young
twentieth century, there is none more popular than that of
materialism. For all its deficiencies, whether artistic, social or
ethical, this parrot-cry furnishes a convenient explanation; but
unfortunately for those who welcome such catch-phrases as a ready
means of avoiding any necessity for trying to exercise their disused
and rusty thinking apparatus, convenient and accurate are
seldom—perhaps never—synonymous. If this age of ours really is what
it has so frequently been called by capable judges, the Age of the
Social Conscience, that fact is in itself ample disproof of
materialism; for if conscience in its every manifestation be not
spiritual, what is? True, we have done away with the old scorn of the
body and of that generality once known as “the world,” but this is
simply the natural result of an increased knowledge which has
compelled an altered point of view, making such contempt appear rather
childish. And because the new social conscience has developed so
largely outside the orthodox church, it is not therefore any the less
religious. Indeed, it is in very great measure the immediate cause of
that re-awakened interest in what may for clearness’ sake be defined
as strictly religious ideas which is now showing itself in so many
ways and places, and especially in the modern novel.
That this new religious interest seldom takes a dogmatic form is
probably one reason why the average reader has been and still is so
slow to recognize it—of course we are in no way concerned here with
those latter-day successors to the Elsie books which provide psychic
water-gruel for the senile-minded of all ages—yet in the stirrings of
a more or less vague discomfort he has become aware of those electric
currents of spiritual unrest which are penetrating down even to the
most respectable of the quarter-educated well-to-do. There is
something more than a little pathetic in the way these latter welcome
such an attempt to manipulate words, to stretch the ancient formulas
and render them broad enough to contain modern ethics and modern
knowledge, as was shown in Mr. Winston Churchill’s _The Inside of The
Cup_—a novel whose popularity was due at least as much to its
discussion of religious as to its treatment of social problems. For there
is no class in the community whose size, the multiplicity of books and
opportunities for learning taken into consideration, is so astonishingly
great as is that of the half and quarter educated well-to-do.
The best of those modern novels in which the present-day religious
interest reveals itself in its most significant aspect often treat it
shyly, almost timidly. For with the crumbling of the ancient cosmogony
and its dependent beliefs the old cock-sure attitude became obsolete. The
writer no longer says, “This is the truth; no decent or sensible person
will deny it”; but instead: “This is my opinion—what experience has
given me; take it for what it is or may be worth.” Very frequently it is
only the consciousness of things spiritual which is clearly shown; their
nature, with a deeper reverence than that of yore, is left indeterminate.
Here and there appears an author whose belief is as detailed as that of
Will Levington Comfort: usually, however, it is rather a reaching out, a
sense of things unseen, the mental attitude one of obedience to Abt
Vogler’s advice: “Consider, and bow the head.”
In this as in so many other phases of our modern thought and experience
H. G. Wells has succeeded in stating lucidly that of which the majority
of people are but more or less dimly aware. It is indeed particularly
interesting to note the growth of spiritual and religious interest in Mr.
Wells. Decidedly materialistic in much of his earlier work, it is only
when _Marriage_ is reached that we find the hero, Trafford, deploring
the fact that his wife and himself have won “no religion to give
them”—i. e. their children—“no sense of a general purpose.” And,
though foreshadowed in other stories, not until _The Passionate Friends_
of last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious
experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that
sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in
faltering, merely human speech, which is often—it might be safe to
say, always—the very crux of the religious spirit as it appears in
the modern novel. Stephen Stratton, who relates the experience, has
reached the crisis of his life and knows not where to go nor what to
do when, as he phrases it: “The great stillness that is behind and
above and around the world of sense did in some way communicate with
me … commanding me to turn my face now to the great work that lies
before mankind.” And having told him what his share in this work is to
be, “the stillness” bids him: “Make use of that confusedly striving
brain that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter.”
And Stephen, though he cries out, “But who are you?” obeys.
Detailed at greater or less length, it is this occasional awareness of
communication with the Power outside and beyond “the world of sense”
which is the shape in which religion is most likely to appear in the
modern novel. Sometimes, as in _John Ward, M. D._, this awareness,
usually touched upon lightly, almost furtively, is clearly and
strongly emphasized, but very seldom, and then under a slightly
different aspect. The destruction of the old formulas has resulted in
an instinctive distrust of creeds, an instinctive shrinking from
anything which bears even the least appearance of an attempt to make
new ones. The situation portrayed in William Arkwright’s able, yet
curiously uneven book, _The Trend_, wherein he shows his mystic,
purely spiritual singer as escaping, horror-stricken, from an orthodox
church service and denouncing it as an insult to God, is typical,
though extreme. For the revolt against the materialism of Haeckel and
his followers—not of Darwin and Huxley, who were not materialists and
repudiated the name with the utmost vigor—has been accompanied by a
revolt against the materialism in religion which rendered it
vulnerable to the onslaughts of historical and scientific criticism.
“We claim and we shall wrest from theology,” said John Tyndall, “the
entire domain of cosmological theory.” The event has proved him a true
prophet—and helped men to disentangle religion from theology.
The whole movement of the modern novel, indeed, has been toward a
spiritualization which embodies within itself an essentially religious
feeling; only this spiritualization not being of the monastic and
ascetic kind which so long swayed the imaginations of men, but of a
social or humanistic order, has frequently been mistaken for other
than its real self. It constitutes, too, a force active in all the
affairs of life rather than one principally confined to certain of its
details, and this fact can be glimpsed, sometimes from one angle,
sometimes from another, in the more ephemeral as well as in the best
examples of our twentieth century fiction. In an article published in
the May issue of The Forum attention was called to the change which
has taken place in the character of the fiction hero, who has lost his
idle elegance and become a worker. That this work should so often be a
part of the struggle for human betterment or a joining in the endeavor
to right some especial wrong is both a portion of and a testimony to
the idealistic spirit which quickens the modern novel, as is also the
companion fact that its drama is in many notable instances mainly a
psychic one. More and more is the inward effect thrusting the outward
event into a position of subordinate interest; the story of a murder
becomes an account not of the efforts to trace the slayer, but of the
result of the deed upon his soul. The most interesting and important
chapter of _The Devil’s Garden_ is that wherein William Dale reviews
the inner life which has been so turbulent, while the outer was so
calm; _The Debit Account_ has little to say of Jeffries’s career in
the realm of finance but very much about his mental attitude toward
himself and that “world without trifles” in which he lived; despite a
charming heroine and an absorbing plot it is the influence of failure
upon the character of Ralph Lingham which is the matter of supreme
importance in _When Love Flies out o’ the Window_.
To call this confused mass of struggle and revolt and aspiration
“religion” may seem to many persons unjust and perhaps even a trifle
shocking; but that is because of the popular confounding of religions
which are many with religion, which is one in essence, whether it be
manifested under the Buddhistic form of quietism or the social service
activities within and without the present-day church. Modern thought
has made the old-time easy shifting of responsibility impossible, and
the changed belief which this involves, enforcing the conviction that
the world is to be saved and the Kingdom of God established on earth
not by miraculous intervention but by the earnest labor in well-doing
of many generations of devoted men and women, has had even among those
who deny it an incalculably powerful effect. It may be too that the
new humanitarianism which causes us to view with horror conditions
which our forefathers regarded with more or less equanimity and makes
reform one of the most familiar of words is to some extent due to the
desire to escape from any effort to measure and explain the Infinite
with mere finite instruments. Since the days when knowledge destroyed
the foundations of that ancient stately tower of faith and authority
which men had believed was based on truth’s very rock, this attempt to
find a working theory of life which shall not imply any dogmatic
response to the riddles of the universe has been made in directions
innumerable, and is being so made to-day; only, the way of escape by
“practical” social labor has become more popular than any other and is
a road along which travel in divers manners all sorts and conditions
of men—among them many who would vehemently and even indignantly deny
that religious and spiritual problems had anything whatever to do with
their chosen path.
In the modern novel as in the modern world religion has come to be
more and more a matter of service and aspiration; less and less a
matter of accordance with fixed rules and formulas. And upon this, as
upon so many other aspects of life, the writer of to-day can express
himself with a freedom which only a few years ago would have brought
down torrents of wrath upon his head. What in our parents’ time would
have been said of _The Trend_, for example, or even of _A Man’s World_?
Thus religion in the modern novel evinces itself principally in four
distinct ways: in revolt against the worn-out, cramping traditions; in
a broad humanitarianism which has increased sympathy and given a fresh
and vivid and impelling meaning to the word duty; in a quickened
spirituality that has removed punishment and reward from the hereafter
and even from the world of matter to the living human soul; and in a
reaching out, vaguely, gropingly, but never futilely, toward “the
stillness,” “the Ultimate Force,” “the Unknown Power,” or whatever
term men prefer to use in their desire to get away from the old
anthropomorphic conceptions, and yet express their consciousness of
the Infinite and Divine. For “the obstinate questioning of invisible
things” which began so soon as man developed from the primeval
ape-forms and became Man, still goes on and will go on, in all
probability, so long as the race endures; only the shape and manner of
the questioning has changed as humanity has slowly learned something
of its ability to mould its own destiny, the duty and privilege which
it possesses of working out its own salvation. There have been many
periods in the world’s history when that questioning found few to
voice it aloud, yet always after such a pause it has been renewed with
fresh and greater vigor. One of these pauses came in the last century;
to-day the questioning resounds all about us, and one of the means
through which it is being uttered most clearly is the modern novel.