Citation
The theological reactions of the Victorian poets to the natural sciences and evolutionism ..

Material Information

Title:
The theological reactions of the Victorian poets to the natural sciences and evolutionism ..
Creator:
McCracken, Andrew Vance, 1897-
Place of Publication:
Chicago Ill
Publisher:
[s.n.]
Publication Date:
Language:
English
Physical Description:
1 p.l., 21 p. : ; 24 cm.

Subjects

Subjects / Keywords:
English poetry -- History and criticism -- 19th century ( lcsh )
Religion and science -- History ( lcsh )
Religious thought -- Great Britain ( lcsh )

Record Information

Source Institution:
University of Florida
Rights Management:
All applicable rights reserved by the source institution and holding location.
Resource Identifier:
000642277 ( ALEPH )
ADH2080 ( NOTIS )
35008465 ( LCCN )

UFDC Membership

Aggregations:
Theology Collections
University of Florida

Downloads

This item has the following downloads:


Full Text




U`be Universitt of Cbhcago


THE THEOLOGICAL REACTIONS
OF THE VICTORIAN POET'S TO
THE NATURAL SCIENCES
AND EVOLUTIONISM


A PART OF A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
DEPARTMENT OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
AND ETHICS
1932



BY
ANDREW VANCE McCRACKEN










Private Edition, Distributed by
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARIES
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
I935


821.09

M132Z











cbe Stncur ttu of Mbtcao






THE THEOLOGICAL REACTIONS

OF THE VICTORIAN POETS TO

THE NATURAL SCIENCES

AND EVOLUTIONISM



A PART OF A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
AND ETHICS
1932


ANDREW VANCE MCRACKEN


Private Edition, Distributed by
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARIES
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
'935


L,
~

" .1
;
'r
i


i
















CHAPTER I
"A DARBLING PLAIN"
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies olash by night.

Conflicting alarms did distract Victorian England. The
established social order was in a process of being recast. The

traditional mores and patterns of behavior, the inherited mechan-
isms of social control were in an accelerated state of alteration.
Public opinion, political and economic creeds, custom found them-

selves subject to a hurried modification. And yet paradoxically,
we mo eis think of the Victorians in terms of smugness, of de-

cidedly conventional standards and Prince Albert coats.
The inherited religious faith was fast losing its his-
torio prestige. In the eighteenth century it had been possible

and altogether appropriate for an earnest German sculptor to re-
present the revered founder of Christianity as a most gentlemanly
person adorned with a wig. But in the mid-decades of the nine-

teenth century, even the supernatural retreats of the Divine were

being assailed. Truly Victorian life was being lived, as Matthew

Arnold wrote, upon "a darkling plain," a baffling, shifting

world, lighted by flashes of a naive optimism, but a world in
which powerful though obscure social forces tugged aye resisted

each other far below the surface wavelets that played in the sun.

A few of the prescient had possibly sensed the gathering

storm. Developing interests and tendencies, long on the horizon,
had been slowly assuming a threatening importance.o B 1837, when

Victoria oame to the throne, these converging influences had not
only altered, but had begun to create a wholly new environmental
-1-


202476









-2-
complex to which adjustment of some sort had to be made. Grounded

in the push and resistance of groups and individuals, these mani-

fold pressures created tension situation out of which arose a
totally new kind of culture, and along with it a changing system
of religious thought for the social organization has consistently
been more than just the 'milieu* in which religion has operated,
Religion has invariably been indebted to the social a s

plex for more than just its color-tone. This has been partiou-
larly true of Christianity in the western world. When studied

historically, the Christian movement is seen always to have been
a phase of the sooial process and not, as frequently represented,

an isolated and environmentally unrelated quantum of revealed

truth. With very few exceptions, the ohangc that have taken
place in religious dogma and practice have developed out of ten-

sion situations oreated-by the impact of new intellectual, polit-
ioal and eooa 0g prersueupeonthe taberited and established

system.

Western Christianity, quite contrary to a popular impres-

sion, has always been a part of the contemporary social structure

and its mores. This has been its strength and, at the same time,
its weakness. Christianity was not conceived and has not existed

"in vaouo." And for this reason it has not for long remained

station and unchanged. The social order has consistently furnished
the patterns for religious ideas and teachings. In all
forms of thought analogy is the first means of getting
intellectual unity. The history of religious thought is
really the history of patterns by which religious behavior
is shown to be rational.1
Dean Shailer Mathews emphasizes the faot in his The Atonement and
the aooial Prooess and elsewhere that doctrinal formulae have been

1Dean Shailer Mathews, "Social Patterns and the Idea of
God," The Journal of Religion, April, 1931.










-3-
with few exceptions clothed in terms and analogies borrowed from
S--
the current sooial complex./ And a lose reading of the history
of western Christianity ind oates clearly that wherever and when-

ever in the western world decisive changes of the cultural environ-

ment have taken plaoe, tension situations have arisen that have
demanded a restatement of religious faith. Out of those tension
situations, Christianity has emerged, re-expressing itself in an
attempt to be intellectually respectable in the new culture.

mConfusion and bewilderment have been inevitable in-4neh

periods. POw minds have been nwd A athe _apaoity of making
swift and radioat -s at the same time, constructive adjustments
in the serious matters of the soul. Most of us are conservative

at this point, and then, too, there are always the deoenoies, the

reservations that have to be taken into aocount. Every age in

whioh the culture emphases h"p shifted haa been oharacteris l by

mental stress and strain, anxious inseourity in the realm of the

soul, compromising adjustments that in the end proved inadequate.
suoh times turn life topsy-turvy with question marks.

And Viotorian England was just suoh a time.
The transitional process was neither sudden nor steady as

often represented by naive Victorian optimism. Adjustments of
suoh proportions and the Viotorian period was a day of colossal
adjustments are not swiftly consummated. Time is inexorably a

part of any radical adjustment that has its sources aiar off in
the historic stream. IAlready in Victorian England, the inherited
t_--
order had become so complex and stable, supported as it was by
vast institutional and traditional controls, that change could not
have been other than violent and slow. But the middle olass, self-
confident, vital with a new found enthusiasmrevelled in the










-4-
meohanioal progress, the industrial developments, the multiplying

wealth, their far-flung oommeroe, the hopes pregnant in the evolu- .

tionary hypotheeis, and saw themselves well on the road to Utopia.
Por these exoeesively confident spirits, the legend of

Time was read with a smile and that whioh they read was "Rejoioe."2
But for the more oautious and thoughtful, the age was dark with

grave misgivings.
It is a platitude to add that the slow but growing aooep-
tance of the idea of evolution had far-reaohing and momentous re-
sults in all fields of thought. It introduced, as Professor John

Dewey has written, *a mode of thinking that in the end was bound
to transform the logic of knowledge and heno he treatment
morals, polities and religion."3
The view of life prevailing immediately before the nine-
teenth century had quite consistently oonoeived the universe to be
a reflection of a tranosendent world that was ruled despotioally
by a sovereign God. Theology in that period had been what Dean
Shailer Mathews has aptly called "a transoendentalised politioe*"
for it had olothed itself in the patterns derived from the sooio-
potliocal experience of the day.

But in the Viotorian period, the theology that had borrowed
ite vocabulary and general formulae from the sooial patterns of a /
monarchical sooety was engaged in its death struggle. The polltio
al organisation that supplied thoee categories had passed. And for
the beet informed, the traditional religion had lost its oogenoy

2The thought of thief sentence was suggested by a line of
verse written by air Lewis Morrie and quoted by Alfred R. Wallaoe
In The Wonderful Century, (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898)o
S hn Dewey, Influences of Darwin on Philosophy an Other
AMID, (Henry Molt, 1910) .
8hailer Mathews, The Atonement and the Vooial Prooees
(Macmillan, 1930).









-5-
because of the shifts that had taken place in the political thought)
and organisation. The Victorian mind was being increasingly con-
trolled by the natural soienoes. The evolutionary theory was
fashioning new categories of thought, new intellectual patterns.

Slowly there had developed a oonfidenoe that human Intel-

ligenoe, guided by the newly fashioned eoientifio teohniques, was
capable of piercing to the essence of things and extracting all
the understanding of the universe requisite for human living.
Sense experience was slowly usurping the traditional role of the
supernatural. The desire to know, to take control of the orderly /
processes of reality in the interest of human welfare had become

quite widespread, as had the protest against the naive, super-
naturalistio acoounts of the ways of the universe inherited from
the traditional thought. That all things were the work of an 4ll1
powerful arbitrary God was not explanation enough.
Eapirical knowledge was the *summum bonum" for the very
critical Viotorian. Already LaPlaoe had dispensed with the ser-
vioes of a Creator and had employed his nebular hypothesis to des-
oribe the process by which the world had evolved mechanically out

of the primeval ohaos. Lyell and Hutton had accounted for our
planet in terms of physical laws alone and in such a way that the

process fitted Into the ooemio history of the universe. The *habits
of matter" were traced and the "laws of order" were searched out as
there developed a growing oonfidenoe in man's power to live by em-
pirical knowledge alone. There appeared no need and indeed no way
for man to reach out beyond the inexorable circle of his individual
experience, experience defined in an arbitrarily limited sense.
And this type of naturalism increasingly threatened the hitherto
inviolable realm of theology, culminating, as it were, in the ae-
sertion of John Tyndall in 1874: -










-6-
....We olaim, and we shall wrest, from theology, the
entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and
systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science,
must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control
and relinquish all thought of controlling it."
/ nowhere has this conflict between the new creative forces
that were shaping men's thinking and the inherited religious sys-

tem been more clearly portrayed than in the Victorian poetry.

L Religion and poetry have long gone hand in hand. The poet
has always possessed a peculiar sensitiveness to the problems that

perplex the human mind, to the currents of movements that impinge
upon the inner life, to the loftiest aspirations and the most

tragic spiritual struggles of the heart. The mind of the poet has
been a sensitive plate upon which the most subtle movements of the

spirit register themselves.

As this new world of thought was dawning and before the
impact of the scientific movement had been seriously felt, Words-
worth had confidently written that
The objects of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though
the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite
guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an
atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings.....If
the labours of Men of Science should ever create any
material revolution direct or indirect, in our condition,
and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the
Poet will sleep then no more than at present.6
The men of science did create a revolution. The Victorian
poets were on the scene of battle. What part did they play? Are
we able to discern in their poetry their reactions, their relig-
ious adjustments? What were the theological implications of the

natural sciences and evolutionism in the Victorian poetry?

Tyndall, Fragments o Scienoe, "The Belfast Address."
6Preface to the second edition of The Lyrical Ballads.












OKAPTER II
"ZARTH BOBRLOR
between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.

Whenever and wherever men have been caught in tension

situations created by the impact of the new set of conditions in

which they live upon their traditional religious heritage, one of

the most common of their reactions is the total abandonment of the

old religious inheritance, its values, its assurances. But the

past has a way of making its indelible impress and human nature

being what it is, the attempts to break with the social heritage -

to live without reference to the experienced values of the dis-

oarded aside from their wisdom have invariably resulted in a

disillusioned skepticism, a tormenting doubt and a wistful yearn-

ing for the religious certainty that had onoe prevailed.

The Victorian stage was set for this very reaction. The

universe of the Victorians, as interpreted by the natural sciences
and evolutionism, was becoming an objective affair, seemingly in-

different to human values and governed by iron laws. For a minor- L

ity, at least, the basic lines of things had been drawn. Funda-

mentals had been established. Matter, energy, ether were known in

broad outline as were the astronomical and geological processes.
The labyrinthine journey from the amoeba to man had been boldly

sketched and there seemed to remain for the future generations

nothing more than to supply the more precise details by continued

observation and experimentation.

A definite type of naturalism came into vogue a natural-
ism based upon the physical sciences, refusing to carry philosophy
-7-











and thought beyond the limits of these sciences. Its major em-

phasis was upon the strictly mechanical character of the world

process, employing the terms force and energy to designate the
substantial ground of the universe. It is well to remember, how-

ever, for the sake of aoouraoy, that the naturalism of the nine-

teenth century, based entirely upon the natural sciences, was not

the naturalism of our day which takes into amount all of the
sciences and particularly, the social and psychological.

The political pattern, hitherto operative in theology, no
longer held full sway. A wholly new pattern, derived from the con-

cept of evolutionism, was in the making.

The bewildered Clough spoke for the uncounted numbers of

his own age as soienoe and criticism were set in array against the

out-moded theology. His poetry was the expression of a soul at
debate with itself and the forces of life, of a mind divided and,

at times, tired of questioning the object and end in living.

/ To spend uncounted years of pain,
Again, again and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here:
To gather faots from far and near,
/ Upon the mind to hold them clear,
/And, knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one's latest breath to fear,
The premature result to draw -
Is this the object, end, and law,
And purpose of our being here?1
Clough had lost the God, the religious faith of his younger
days. At the same time, the poet had, so far as we can see, no
training in the sciences. How much of the literature that led up

to Darwin he had read we do not know probably not much. If for
the abandoned God of his early training he had been able to sub-

1Olough, "Perohe Pensa? Pensando S'Inveochia."









-9-
stitute Nvolution, his life would probably have been character-

ized by the kind of assurance and integration we shall find toward
the lose of this chapter. Clough had no targeted enthusiasm, no
supreme loyalty to whioh his reverent soul oould give itself in
total abandonment. And so his life was filled with deadly dis-
oords. Be got nowhere. How often his readers wait expectantly
for something to happen, for an adjustment to be consummated, as
for instance in Dipayohus. But nothing oomee of it all.
An intimate friend of Clough's was Matthew Arnold (1822-

1888). Their lives and experiences were closely related. School-

mates at Rugby and then together at Oxford, they had much in common
- friendships, ideal, reactions. Arnold, too, knew the uncertain-

ty of the age in which he lived and confessed himself to be
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.2
How worried Arnold was: How tormented in his doubts: He

had so little upon which he oould actually count. oience had
wiped out the religious certitudes of his youth. And he, like his
fellow-poet Clough, had found nothing to take this place. Follow
Arnold in his "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" as slowly he
rode "through forest, up the mountain-side" to the silent courts

of the monastery on its Alpine heights, "where ghost-like in the
deepening night oowl'd forms brushed by in gleaming white" and
hear his sad answer as he stopped to ask what was he, that he was
there in that place.
Tragedy is the most appropriate word I can summon for these

lines. Ais "masters of the mind" had made impossible for him the

*8'tanzas from the Grand Chartreuse," Arnold's Poetical
Works (Oxford ed., 1922).









-10-
Christian certitude that had sustained his forbears. In itself,
that would not necessarily have been tragic. What thoughtful man

lives today who has not known the very same experience! But the

tragedy lay in the faot that those "rigorous teachers" had substi-

tuted no other compelling, gripping faith, nothing upon which

Arnold could absolutely count, nothing to which he could give

himself in abandonment and complete devotion. Of course, there '

were the values of human organization and fellowship and how

modern that sounds. But Arnold was not too hopeful of these, for

in the sea of life enisl'd
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.

'betwixt their shores' lay
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.3
But it was the highest sustaining loyalty to which Arnold could
give himself. Uncertain as it did seem to him, it was better than
none.

Arnold was deeply sensitive to the storms and strains of

his time. He felt the main movements of the day, their implica-

tions for the future. He aooepted the scientific approach and

pattern: knowledge was limited to the methods and techniques of

the natural sciences as developed at his time; verifiable exper-

ience formed the outposts of all man could know; man was organ-
ioally an inexorable part of the natural order; and as one expres-
sion of the central law of things, the all pervading spirit.

The development of thought that we have been tracing in
this chapter reaches its culmination in Thomas hardy. .'rardy, born
n: 1840, live in an atmosphere heavy with a cook-sure system of
thought a sort of mechanical philosophy that had the unequal-


3rnold, "To Marguerite."










-11-
ified backing of the natural solenoes, speaking confidently and

naively with an infallible authority. I dare say that nowhere in

poetry has the inductive, empirical method of science been em-

ployed with more exactness, oonsistenoy and fearlessness than lir
Thomas Hardy.

The "Immanent Will" is a key-word to the thought of Hardy.
Over and over again it emerges. At times the impersonal pronoun
"It" is employed in its tead, again the lifeless pronoun "That."

"The Immanent Will" is all-embracing, all sustaining. Energy of
an inherent and indivisible type is suggested by the phrase, im-

plying, therefore, self-organization, self-development, self-suf-

ficienoy. The natural world and the human are not separable. They

are one. The world of nature is not exterior to man. The same

Will pervades all. -*It is the basis of all organization, the

creative principle underlying and determining all natural and

social process. Jife, both individual and social, as well as that

of nature is but a distributive aspect of the comprehending pro-

oees. sohopenhaueri

The theory was in direct line with the evolutionary teach-
ing of the day. Hardy did not arbitrarily separate man from na-

ture as had been the practice. There was a oneness in the uni-
verse and Hardy set forth in his poetry and in his novels this es-
sential nature of man as a product of the creative, germinative

forces inherent in the very nature of the universe. Of course,

the acceptance of this cosmic theory based upon evolutionism

forced the poet to take cognizance of the ruthlessness, the "in-

humanity" of nature, her "unconscious not of essential laws, but
of those laws framed merely as social expedients by humanity, with-

out a basis in the heart of things" as the poet himself put it.










-12-


Por other serious-minded men, this inconsistency of nature had

forced them to abandon the monistic interpretation in favor of
the dualistio or pluralistic. But to Monism the poet held true
though he recognized clearly nature's "inhumanity* to her ohili,
man.



CBAPTIR III

DREuAMr OF DREZ&S*
Let lore of all Theology
Be to thy soul what it can be:
But know, -that Power thiV fashions man
Measured not out thy little span
For thee to take the meting-rod
In turn, and so approve on God
Thy science of Theometry.

Prepare now to enter a world wholly different from that
presented in the preceding chapter a world of poetry in which

the substantial present dissolved into dreams of the past a
poetry oharacterised by an extravagant presence of spiritual eo-
stasy, of an intense ardour that often exhausted the reader's em-
otions.
/c-' In the face of the crises between a traditional belief and

/the new revolutionary conditions of living, there have always been

those who have become fixated upon an earlier cultural level or
' better who have found refuge in the patterns of a day before
the new conflict situations had arisen. And such were the Pre-

Raphaelites. Their verse provided an escape, or more accurately,
expressed their escape from the turmoil and disturbances of the
mid-decades.
The Pre-Raphaelites went back to the Middle Ages, or to
some period of simple and familiar reactions for a type of expres-










-13-
sion untouched by the contemporary questioning. The doubts that

fought without cessation in the mind and heart of Clough the
theological worriments that tossed the confused Arnold as upon a

storm-ewept sea the unfriendly mechanistic universe that hemmed

in the poet Hardy did not interest the members of the Pre-Raphael-
ite Brotherhood and those spirits identified with the romantic re-

vival of the middle nineteenth century. They lived apart from it,

beyond it in an atmosphere charged with symbolism and mysticism.

Conceptual knowledge the product of the infant natural
sciences was for them entirely unsatisfying. It touched no more

than the superficial aspects of life, the periphery of their deep-

eat interests. Intuitive knowledge, a faculty employed by the
mystics of all ages, constituted for the Pre-Raphaelites the only 7

trustworthy and reliable guide.

Who were the Pre-Raphaelites singing lines of verse so un-

like that of Clough, Arnold and HardyPrle-Raphaelitism was built
around Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), and associated with him \

at the founding of the Brotherhood were John Everett lillais,
William Michael Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Frederick George

Stephens, Charles Collinson and Thomas Woolner. An earlier Pre-

Raphaelite group had existed, which, following its expulsion from

the Vienna Academy in 1810, had been established in a deserted

Franoisoan convent at Rome under the leadership of Overbaok, but

with this movement we are not concerned. Of the Brotherhood found-
ed in 1848, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the movie pi'rit and the

figure which has achieved the greatest prominence.

Living in an age disturbed by doubt, nominated by the too
hasty conclusions of an immature science, in an age which expressed

itself in an art controlled by peeudo-olassioism, the Pre-Raphael-










-14-


items sought their inspiration in the age preceding Raphael in

which life and art were simple, sincere and spiritually naive.

And one immediate objective was the restoration of this spirit \/
which had all but perished in the mid-decades of the nineteenth
century.



CHAPTER IV
"INPEETRABLE TRACTS"
And if there is a god beyond our thought
(How could he be within its compass brought?)

The Pre-Baphaelites fled from the embattled forces of -

their milieu with its sooio-psychic pressures, but the social com-

plex was such that it challenged with fundamental questions those
"of the sighting brain.*
Was there a Divine Being who found his self-expression in
the labyrinthine procession of growth and development portrayed by
evolutionism? Was there resident in this boundless and mysterious

universe an Intelligent Mind? These were burning questions which

some men could not escape. Answers were varied.
The natural sciences had led men to believe that they
promised all knowledge. Ironically, they had revealed the impos-
sibility of knowledge! The inherited scale of values had been
overthrown. The traditional religious systems were conceived in
increasing quarters as no more than poetic fiction. soule had

been set adrift.
Man lived no longer at the fooal point of the universe.
Earth was not the center of the cosmic realms. It possessed no

monopoly on the divine solicitude, if any there was. Xan,










-15-
himself, lost his theological significance and took on the biolog-

loal. He did not stand separate from the animal kingdom, but had

become a member of it. He was the dominant and most advanced ani-

mal no more. Tradition had led the devout to believe that the
material universe had been provided for the welfare of mankind.

But the natural sciences reduced it to an arena of struggle for
existence.

The poet of the nineteenth century whose verse has been
popularly associated with the Agnostio movement and its related
Epioureanism, was Edward FitsGerald, best known by his Rubaiyat of

Omar Khayyam. Fitzgerald (1809-1883) was a most eccentric man of

genius, living a peaceful life far removed from the cross-currents

of social and industrial rngland.

Although living a languid existence in life's more aloof
oiroles, "old Fits," as Thackeray and others loved to call him,

was not unacquainted with the contemporary scientific and philo-
sophical speculations.i

And so to the wine-jar Omar went, representative of many

living in FitsGerald's day, to drown the awfulness of his plight,
to forget the misery and bewilderment of his existence and to have

revived the compensating memories that filled the heart with sweet-

ness. Their experience was not unlike that of the author of -o-
olesiastee, who, too, had known the dark burden of life, the de-
oeiving sLadows that flitted across the path of mortal existence.'
Vanity everything seemed to crumble as unnumbered souls walked
in the valley of darkness to death. As PitzGerald wrote to
Laurence, a friend, in 1877: "It is a desperate sort of thing,
unfortunately at the bottom of thinking men's minds."

Toward the end of the century, there arose a group of
poets, John Davidson (1857-1909) among them, who reacted violently










-16-
to the mid-Victorian literature, deeoribing it as oomplaoent, mild

and narrow.1

In London poetry of Davidson, the materialistio philosophy,
touched in ohemioal terminology, took positive form. Py thil time,
the influence of Iietseohe and Sohopenhauer became pronounced and

so, as in "uamuon and Hil Message," the universe was presented as
all one substance, an integration of ohemioal constituents. There

was no other world for Daridson. There was nothing immaterial.
Man was the noblest expression of the self-oonscious material order
and the strongest man, the moet aggressive was the highest. sin,
god, immortality, who knew anything of them? The ohemioal con-
stituents of the universe possessed the power of memory and a dim

sort of oonsoiousness of their state before their incarnation in
man. It was this oonsoiousness inherent in the elements that had
led man to the oonoeptions of Bell, Heaven and God. Davidson had
to have a world that was in harmony with the nature of things as
revealed by the natural scienoea.
God, immortality, the soul were more than Just unknowable.
Denial orept into his mind and heart. He went farther than Henley
and those poets we have considered so far in this chapter. And
so, depressed, and, I fancy, bewildered, John Davidson, in mid-
life, faced to the open sea, his feet bathed in the laughing
waters and directed a shot of lead into his tired brain.

1Bee Hayim Pinoman, John Davidson (Philadelphia, 1916),
for a study of the relation ofT'avidson's ideas to his poetry;
also R. 1. Olson, John Davidson (Chicago, 1927), for a study of
the poetry.













CHAPTER V
"TEE GRAND PERHAPS"

God'a in his heaven,
All's right with the world.

We have witnessed a discordant perplexity of emotions and

thought in the poetry which reflected the workings of the protean

Viotorian mind. There was the dull despair of those groping hearts

on "the sunless gulfs of doubt" and their sad, wistful yearning for
the assuranoes lost. we have heard the eostatio song of those who

turned baok to the simplicities of a day which knew not the olash

of nineteenth century forces, who escaped the oonfliot of mind and

heart whioh wore down the strength of their contemporaries. We

have listened to the gay but hollow laughter of men who discerned
no meaning in the "sorry scheme of Things" and so abandoned them-

selves to "the Cypreses-lender minister of Wine," perchance, to

forget and to dream. How tragic were those lives as they groped
in "the darkness of the pall" with blaok silence the only answer

to their questioning ories for light:

Why was it so? It seems inevitable: Men have always re-
acted along somewhat similar lines in clashes between the inherit-
ed and new patterns.

But the Victorian difficulty was enhanced because the new

pattern in whioh men were beginning to think was derived wholly

from the physical solences. It was not adequate to deal with phe-
nomena other than the physical. The materials of the new soienoes
were those forces observed in the natural processes, and it was not

long before the theory of the correlation of these activities was

quite generally aooepted. When unoritically applied to life and

mind, as it was, this theory led directly into Materialism and
-17-


e w H e' "q w .










-18-
raised serious questions as to the existence of the God-spirit and

as to whether human life was anything more than the result of an

accidental oollooation of material forces.

Soientifio methodology was being haltingly applied to the
social relationships of man, and even today soolology has not been

granted the full status of a solenoe by the physical scientists.
Psychologists are likewise dismissed in the same quarter with a
smile because they deal with data other than the phvsioal. The
data in the area of human reactions are so infinitely more complex
than those pertaining to physical phenomena that progress will be

exceedingly slow.1
As for a scientific theology shade of our anoestors: Al-
though theological seminaries are today granting degrees In Soientia

Theologioa, scientific methodology has progressed little farther
than to scratch the surface of the major objects experienced in

worship and prayer. The datum of the religious experience is so

much more complex than that of beetles and vegetables. In the nine-

teenth century, it was still held, as we shall see in the poetry
reviewed in this chapter, that man had been fashioned with one sense
to know the mineral constituents of plants and a wholly different
one intuition, faith, love for the knowing of God. It has been
only recently that progress has been made in subjecting the mater-
ial of the religious experience to scientific scrutiny. And a long
sea mile is yet to be travelled.
However, there were two poets who did make an attempt to
preserve the values of the traditional religious thought and ex-
perience in the categories and patterns furnished by the natural
soienoes. Together, they performed herculean service in the sue-

1ee Benry Nelson Wieman, Religious Uxperience and Soien-
tifio Method, (Maomillan, 1927) for a complete disoeusi -orTofTET
Relationship between solenoe and religion.









-19-
taining of men's Christian faith in those days of distress.
The lives of Tennyson (1809-92) and Browning (1812-89) al-

most spanned the period in which we are interested.
Tennyson's position was essentially that of Kant as it had
oome down through Jacobi, Hamilton and Mansell. rant held that
knowledge was possible, of course, but it was a knowledge of phenom-
ena alone. We know things asthey present themselves to us and conse-
quently our knowledge is subjective. Dea Ding an sioh could.never

be known. It was beyond the reach of human knowability. Knowledge
is of reality as it appears to man, not of reality as it actually
is. But there was another aspect of mind, Kant argued, other than
that of "Reason" or "Understanding." It was the "Practical Reason,"
and *Intuitive Reason," or "Faith" and through this function of the

mind, reality was aooessible.
Tennyson held the same position in its essentials. For him,
knowledge dealt with the phenomenal and faith with the noumenal.
Faith transcended knowledge, for the latter, in the mind of Tenny-

son, was confined to the objects of sense. The prologue of "In
Kemoriamn written after the poem was completed, summed up his
thought on the distinction between knowledge and faith. It oulmin-

ated in a form of agnosticism not unlike that of Herbert Spencer
with his Inscrutable Reality.

Tennyson performed a priestly function for the troubled
minds of his day. Materialism, agnosticism, pessimism were rampant.
The natural sciences had befuddled men's minds. They groped for
certitudes and thought those securities lay in the beliefs of the
ancient pattern. Tennyson, well acquainted with the sciences but
not always understanding them, attempted to minister to their need.
He wrote to serve man. His art was primarily for man's sake and
not that of art. Was there a God? Could there be a future life?
Was man free? These were mooted questions and Tennyson strove










-20-
diligently to shed light upon them. He gave his answer and it was

written in faith.

In the very year in which Darwin, a young man of twenty-six

years, was collecting curious data in the neighborhood of Valparaiso
on the "Beagle," Robert Browning published his "Paracelsus," in
which he gave his evolutionary theory of the growth from the orig-
inal protoplasmic self-consoiousness through long vistas of time
to man, the consummate creation. The outline boldly foreshadowed
the theory later developed in detail by Darwin and Wallace.
Browning, though believing in evolutionism, did not at all
times agree with the evolutionists. Toward the close of his life,
his disagreement became so pointed as to be almost a rejection of
the theory. The point of difference lay in the fact that the soi-
entiste after Darwin seemed to Browning to be concerned chiefly
with the base origins of human personality and not with those spir-

itual aspects in which he was primarily concerned. The scientists
seemed to be leaving out the moral consciousness, the purpose, the
premeditated goal.
It was a heroic gospel Browning sang. How different in
spirit from most of the contemporary verse. Browning served his
generation in the capacity of spiritual advisor. Aware of and min-
istering to men's confused emotions and highest aspirations, he
condemned their compromises and urged them on to courageous living
as they groped their way through the long wildernesses.
SBut there remained a colossal difficulty that had to be
faced that of evil and its reality. The cause of the problem is

c lear. Browning banked everything on the goodness, the loving na-
/ ture of his omnipotent God. His entire system revolved around this
central conviction. And yet ghastly suffering did exist. Evil was

in the saddle. How was its existence to be reconciled with a loving








-21- '
God in a monistio universe? Was not evil inconsistent in a uni-
verse directed by a God of love? The problem was real. And this
apparent inconsistency has always embarrassed monistic idealism.
Browning did not compromise. He denied neither God nor man.
Denial of his God of love would have been unthinkable. To have com-
promised on the moral freedom of man in the attainment of perfection
would have negated his entire system. For the doctrine
that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly
Hie soul's wings never furled.2
was fundamental to his entire position.
Ignorance was an instrument of a divine plan which man could
not comprehend. Defeotive knowledge possessed moral significance.
Delusion lent itself to the building up of a moral life and, for
Browning, it was the moral consciousness that reveals od, that made
impossible for man the completed life which the whole evolutionary
process suggested as the goal. Ignorance played an important role
in his theory of a loving, all-powerful God, Man was destined to
possess little knowledge:
Ignorance overwraps his moral sense,
Winds him about, relaxing, as it wraps,
8o muoh and no more than lets through perhaps
The murmured knowledge "Ignorance exists.*o
Such was Browning's solution of the problem of evil in a
monistic universe operated on the principle of love. The solution
was an aspect of his general theory of knowledge.4 In revolt a-
gainst the claims presumptuous claims to the mind of Browning -
of the scientists, all knowledge was distrusted, with the exception
of a sort of subjective knowledge.

Browning, Poems.
3Browning, "With Francis Furini," ix (among the "Parleyings
with Certain Persons...."), Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works,
Cambridge edition.
Henry Jones, Brownin as a Philosopher and Religious
Teacher (James Maclehose & Son-,l'92;), Chapter IT







6