The World Set Free

Section 12

As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one begins for the first time to see them clearly.  From the perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and widening stream of literature with a complete understanding.  Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in the statement of a gigantic problem.  An enormous bulk of the sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow imaginations on the one hand, against the growing sense of wider necessities and a possible, more spacious life.

That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire’s Candide, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at last in a forced and inconclusive contentment with little things.  Candide was but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was presently an innumerable multitude of books.  The novels more particularly of the nineteenth century, if one excludes the mere story-tellers from our consideration, witness to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for effort and of the lack of that effort.  In a thousand aspects, now tragically, now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine detachment, a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting between dreams and limitations.  Now one laughs, now one weeps, now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now warily, now eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems, unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of its patched and ancient garments.  And always in these books as one draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a disconcerting evasion.  It was the fantastic convention of the time that a writer should not touch upon religion.  To do so was to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude of professional religious teachers.  It was permitted to state the discord, but it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation.  Religion was the privilege of the pulpit….

It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted.  It was ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and apologetic part in public affairs.  And this was done not out of contempt but respect.  The hold of the old religious organisations upon men’s respect was still enormous, so enormous that there seemed to be a quality of irreverence in applying religion to the developments of every day.  This strange suspension of religion lasted over into the beginnings of the new age.  It was the clear vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any other contemporary influence which brought it back into the texture of human life.  He saw religion without hallucinations, without superstitious reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and air, as land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the Republic.  He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from the temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought to imprison it, that it was already at work anonymously and obscurely in the universal acceptance of the greater state.  He gave it clearer expression, rephrased it to the lights and perspectives of the new dawn….

But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of the times it becomes evident as one reads them in their chronological order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as one comes to the latter nineteenth and the earlier twentieth century the writers are much more acutely aware of secular change than their predecessors were.  The earlier novelists tried to show ‘life as it is,’ the latter showed life as it changes.  More and more of their characters are engaged in adaptation to change or suffering from the effects of world changes.  And as we come up to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is continually more manifest.  Barnet’s book, which has served us so well, is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship that sails into the wind.  Our later novelists give a vast gallery of individual conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted against this great opening out of life that has happened to us.  They tell us of the feelings of old people who have been wrenched away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to make peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still strange to them.  They give us the discord between the opening egotisms of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing social life.  They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to capture and cripple our souls, of romantic failures and tragical misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spirit of adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the universal drift.  And all their stories lead in the end either to happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation.  The clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation for all the world.  For any road in life leads to religion for those upon it who will follow it far enough….

It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former time that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether the world is wholly Christian or not Christian at all.  But assuredly we have the spirit, and as surely have we left many temporary forms behind.  Christianity was the first expression of world religion, the first complete repudiation of tribalism and war and disputation.  That it fell presently into the ways of more ancient rituals cannot alter that.  The common sense of mankind has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience to find at last how sound a meaning attaches to the familiar phrases of the Christian faith.  The scientific thinker as he widens out to the moral problems of the collective life, comes inevitably upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the Christian, as his thought grows clearer, arrive at the world republic.  As for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from such claims and consistencies.