Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England: Volume 3, Accommodations (Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics)

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England Volume III: Accommodations The first two volumes of this magisterial sequence discussed a conflict between bodies of thought operative in England in the last century and a half – the aggressive defence of Christianity which has been made from Newman onwards, and the aggressive assault on Christianity which has been made from Spencer onwards. The third and concluding volume of Religion and Public Doctrine examines three related strands of thought – the latitudinarianism which has assumed that Christianity should be accommodated to modern thought and knowledge, the Christian thought which has assumed that latitudinarianism gives away too much and the post-Christian thought which has assumed that Christianity is irrelevant or anachronistic. As in previous volumes, Maurice Cowling conducts his argument through a series of close encounters with individual thinkers, including Burke, Disraeli, the Arnolds, Tennyson and Tawney among many others in the first half, and Darwin, Keynes, Orwell, Leavis and Berlin among many others in the second. Central to the whole is Mr Cowling’s contention that the modern mind cannot escape from religion, and that there is a defiant continuity between Christianity, post-Christianity and those anti-Christian religions which deny continuity within Christianity. Religion and Public Doctrine is an ironic, polemical and (from certain perspectives) venomous work, in the echoes it brings from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and Macaulay’s History of England. It is not intended to be a definitive history of English thought from Edmund Burke to Terry Eagleton, although its three volumes provide the most extensive analysis yet undertaken of the trajectories English thought has taken in confronting its central questions of cultural meaning, value and import in a Christian, anti-Christian and post-Christian society. Mr Cowling makes no closing prediction, and recognizes that the Christian phase of European civilization may be over. Nonetheless he concludes that the religious instinct which lurks beneath the indifference of the English public mind may yet surprise by its willingness to yield again to Christianity. Religion and Public Doctrine represents a massive contribution to the intellectual, cultural and political history of modern England. It will interest historians, literary and cultural critics on both sides of the Atlantic, theologians, philosophers, economists, as well as that broader reading public with a serious interest in the making of the English mental landscape.     was born in London in 1926. He was educated at Battersea Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read history. He did military service between 1944 and 1948 in the British and Indian armies. He was a Fellow of Jesus College from 1950 to 1953 and, after a period spent chiefly in London, returned to Jesus as a Fellow in 1961. From 1963 to 1993 he was a teaching Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and for part of that time was University Reader in Modern English History. He has written books entitled The Nature and Limits of Political Science; Mill and Liberalism; 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution; The Impact of Labour; The Impact of Hitler and Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Volumes I and II), all of which have been published by Cambridge University Press. Mr Cowling was a Conservative parliamentary candidate at the general election of 1959, a member of the Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely County Council from 1966 to 1970, and Literary Editor of The Spectator in 1970 and 1971. In 1978 he edited Conservative Essays. On his retirement from Cambridge in 1993, Mr Cowling taught for a time in the United States. He now lives partly in a flat in London and partly in his wife’s flat in the Gower Peninsula.

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England Volume III: Accommodations

Maurice Cowling Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011–4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 First paperback edition 2004 Typeface Monotype Times New Roman 9.5/11.75 pt

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To Patricia

Contents

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Foreword and acknowledgements Introduction

I The Christian intellect and modern thought in modern England 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

II 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

The reanimation of Protestantism I Christianity and literature I The reanimation of Protestantism II The enlargement of Christianity Christianity and literature II Christianity and modern knowledge I Whiggism, Liberalism and Christianity I Whiggism, Liberalism and Christianity II Christianity and modern knowledge II Christianity in an unfriendly world I Christianity in an unfriendly world II Christianity in an unfriendly world III Christianity in an unfriendly world IV Christianity in an unfriendly world V

3 24 45 75 104 130 151 174 217 247 292 319 337 371

The post-Christian consensus Modern knowledge and the post-Christian consensus I Modern knowledge and the post-Christian consensus II Modern knowledge and the post-Christian consensus III Modern knowledge and the post-Christian consensus IV English Socialism as English religion Literature and the post-Christian consensus Modern knowledge and the post-Christian consensus V Modern knowledge and the post-Christian consensus VI Judaism and the post-Christian consensus vii

391 411 438 468 501 544 571 594 634

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Conclusion: religion and public doctrine in modern England

24 Complication and dilapidation 25 The author and the argument

677 694

Notes Index of proper names

702 760

Foreword and acknowledgements

For support in the preparation of this volume, the author is grateful to the Olin, Leverhulme and Earhart Foundations, to the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge and to President Peter Diamandopoulos, late of Adelphi University, Long Island. For information, conversation or access to sources, he is grateful to Mr Bruce Anderson, Professor John Beer, Father Dominic Bellenger, Professor Michael Bentley, Mr Michael Black, Professor Mark Blitz, Rev. Professor Henry Chadwick, the late Mr Louis Claiborne, Mr David Cooper, Dr Charles Covell, Lord Dacre of Glanton, Rev. Dr Dermot Fenlon, Dr Niall Ferguson, Miss Sibylla-Jane Flower, the late Mr Peter Fuller, Professor Timothy Fuller, Dr Peter Ghosh, Mr Martin Golding, Dr Simon Green, Mr Simon Heffer, Dr Boyd Hilton, Professor Harold James, Mr Frank Johnson, Mr Roger Kimball, Mr Hilton Kramer, Dr Sheila Lawlor, Dr Oliver Letwin MP, the late Mr Samuel Lipman, Professor Carnes Lord, Dr Roger Lovatt, Professor Alasdair MacIntyre, Dr W. J. MacPherson, Dr and Mrs James McGeachie, Mr James McNamara, Dr John Milbank, Rev. Dr Edward Norman, Dr J. P. Parry, Professor Roger Scruton, Dr Brendan Simms, Dr Stephen Taylor, Mrs John Vincent, Miss Sally Vincent, Dr John Walsh, Dr David Watkin, Mr Hywel Williams, Professor Philip Williamson, the late Professor Charles Wilson, Professor Blair Worden, Mr Brian Wormald, Dr Patrick Wormald and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. He is grateful to Professor E. J. Kenney for a quotation on page 693, Mr Edward Lipman for conversation and assistance, to Mr D. C. Sutherland and Miss Teresa Sheppard for valuable help at a late stage, to Mr James Alexander for searching comments on the text, to Professor J. R. Vincent, Dr Andrew Jones and Dr Ian Harris for cynical advice over many years, to Professor J. C. D. Clark for both a distinguished attachment and a distinguished detachment at successive stages in his life, and to Mr Richard Fisher for an attention which has gone far beyond a publisher’s ordinary duty. For access to books the author is grateful to Cambridge University Library, Columbia University Library, the Library of Peterhouse, Cambridge, the London Library, Mrs George Steiner and Dr John Milbank. For typing or checking, he is grateful to Mrs M. Ashby, Miss Yvonne Burwell, Mr and Mrs ix

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Tony Cottle, Mrs J. G. W. Davies, Mrs P. Denny, Mr Jonathan Duncan, Mrs E. Giron, Miss J. Inkamp and Mrs M. Mandell. He owes a large debt to Mrs Audrey Cotterell for copy-editing, for removing unnecessary italics and for drawing attention, often unsuccessfully, to the eccentric construction of sentences. To Mrs H. M. Dunn and Mrs M. Jones he is grateful for typing and for an attention to meaning without which Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England would have been less satisfactory than it is. Mr John Gale very kindly made the Index after many years of commenting on the text. It was originally intended to end this volume with a bibliographical essay which would have surveyed the literature of the subject. To add to a work which is already long seemed in the end undesirable so, instead of such an essay, the author records his debt to the innumerable thinkers who, in offering their understandings of English thought in the last couple of centuries, have not only been contributing to it but have also given it a character which it would not have had without them. Finally, the author cannot state too strongly that, though Christianity has become a political religion, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England is not primarily a political work and is to be distinguished very sharply both from the author’s three works of political history1 and from the polemical Conservatism to which he gave expression in Conservative Essays in 1978, in casual journalism before and after 1978 and in the long preface to the paperback edition of Mill and Liberalism in 1990. The main text of the paperback edition of Mill and Liberalism was more or less a reprint of the main text of the first edition (1963). It was there that the author first approached the problems with which all three volumes of Religion and Public Doctrine deal: to show that secularization, and de-Christianization, are intellectual and religious rather than mechanical, inevitable or sociological processes; to describe the lines of argument by which they have established their hold on the English public mind; and to establish that they have often arrived so innocently and surreptitiously that their coming has passed unnoticed. The author sees the point of an Erastian establishment as a way of diffusing a Christian mentality into the nation’s life, of an independent, world-wide church like the Roman Catholic Church in embodying Christianity’s autonomy in relation to secular powers, and of dissent insofar as dissent registers the resolve to do nothing, in liturgy, ritual and church-government which is not, according to precisionist principles, exactly what should be done. Though the English monarchy in a sense has, the Conservative Party no longer has, as one of its main purposes, the preservation of the Anglican Establishment, and it must be an open question whether Christianity’s preeminence can survive in an Anglican form; whether in order to survive in a 11

1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution (1967), The Impact of Labour 1920–1924 (1971), and The Impact of Hitler 1933–1940 (1975).

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secularized society, Christianity does not need an independent ecclesiastical power; and whether, after the doubt and turmoil they underwent in the 1960s and 1970s, the Anglican, the Roman Catholic or the dissenting clergy in England have the requisite normality, serenity and self-confidence to address the Christianity which is latent in English life. November 2000

Maurice Cowling

Introduction

Introduction

Earlier volumes of this work1 discussed a conflict between two bodies of thought operative in England in the last century and a half – the aggressive defence of Christianity which has been made from Newman onwards and the aggressive assaults on Christianity which has been made from Spencer onwards. Volume I took the form of an intellectual autobiography in which the thinkers who influenced the author most between the 1940s and the 1960s were discussed as exponents of literature, morality, politics and religion. Volume II was historical, not autobiographical; it organized the thinkers it discussed not only as contributors to the resistance offered by Tractarianism and Roman Catholicism to liberalism, latitudinarianism and infidelity, but also as contributors to the dethroning of Christianity and its replacement by explicit types of anti-Christian doctrine. Volume II described a polarized conflict in which hostages were not taken and there was little attempt at mutual understanding. It contrasted the secular attack on Christianity with the Christian counter-attack, made an historic crux of the contrast, and grouped the thinkers that it discussed around it. Thus Spencer, Lewes, Tyndall, Wells, Shaw, Murray, Morley, Frazer and D. H. Lawrence were leading representatives of the first; Newman, Gladstone, Keble, Liddon, Mansel, Manning, Pusey, Chesterton, Belloc, Mallock and Graham Greene were leading representatives of the second and would have been strengthened by Eliot, Salisbury, Waugh and Knowles if these had not already been discussed in Volume I. Volume I had included thinkers who did not fit into either of these categories. Norman had a Tractarian nose for backsliding but was neither a Roman Catholic nor a High-Churchman. Kedourie was an anti-liberal Jew and Butterfield a Dissenter who became a virtual Anglican. Whitehead and Churchill teetered on the brink of secular liberalism; Toynbee and Collingwood were well over the brink; and Oakeshott, though disrespectful of religion, wrote in the main as a secular conservative. To anyone who 11

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England I, 1980 and Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England II, 1985.

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thought seriously about the connection between Volume I and Volume II, it was obvious that the structure of Volume II was too simple. In this volume we shall examine three bodies of thought – the latitudinarianism which has assumed that Christianity should be accommodated to modern thought and knowledge, the Christian thought which has assumed that latitudinarianism gives away too much and the post-Christian thought which has assumed that Christianity is irrelevant or anachronistic. These classifications relate to the question, central to all three volumes, whether the modern mind can escape from religion. The argument is that it cannot escape, that Christianity’s retreat has not entailed the retreat of religion and that religion will still be found in the crevices of thought wherever investigation looks for it. Whatever post-Christian and anti-Christian thinkers may have thought they were doing, they were in fact contributing to a transformation within religion. Those thinkers who believed that religion could be eliminated were victims of an especially modern type of false consciousness, the existence of which can best be established by a certain procrusteanism of organization and the high duty the historian is under to compel the historical material to tell him what he wants to be told. What the author wants to be told was disclosed to some degree in Volume I and will be disclosed more fully in the Conclusion to this volume. What is disclosed in the main parts of this volume is the tension between the ‘normal’ and the ‘latitudinarian’, a rancour about the future direction of Christian thinking, and the weakening of intellectual and institutional Christianity as a consequence. Among ‘normal’ attitudes, the content has varied from generation to generation. But ‘normal’ attitudes persist and assume a continuity which is impervious to fashion and avoids latitudinarian erosion and exaggeration. Continuity and imperviousness have taken many forms – the form of Whewell, Shaftesbury and Stubbs, for example, among thinkers who are discussed at length, the forms, among thinkers who are not discussed at length, of Headlam’s Christian Theology, Hailsham’s Door Wherein I Went, A. E. Taylor’s Vindication of Religion, Hensley Henson when not writing theologically, the younger Chadwick as both critic and Church-historian, and the first Earl of Selborne in Letters To His Son on Religion. By latitudinarianism is meant the conviction that, without a reduction or rearrangement, Christianity will not deserve to survive. This has been designed to bring Christianity into line with progress in science and history or with fashion in literature, to disassociate it from extremes, ancien régimes and counter-revolutions, and to ensure that, by avoiding confrontation with modern knowledge and being amalgamated with modern liberation, morality or the historical and scientific spirit, it will become as natural a part of modern life and knowledge as it can be without ceasing to be Christian.

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Latitudinarianizing in this sense is what Carlyle and Coleridge were doing to Christianity and Disraeli to both Christianity and Judaism. It is what F. D. Maurice did in spite of an ostensible resistance to doing it, what Caird, Green and Wallace did in spite of doubts about what they were doing, and what Seeley did in turning the anti-ecclesiastical Christian toughness of Ecce Homo into Natural Religion and The Expansion of England. It is what Bunsen, the great savant, and Thomas Arnold’s comforter, brought with him as Prussian Minister to London in the 1840s, what Max Müller, Bunsen’s protégé, brought with him to Oxford in the 1850s, what Lecky brought with him from Ireland in the 1860s, and what the eighth Duke of Argyll, one of Thomas Arnold’s most prolific admirers, and A. M. Fairbairn, one of Max Müller’s most prolific admirers, brought with them from Scotland between 1860 and 1900. Most important of all, it is what Jowett and Dean Stanley stood for, and what Thomas Arnold had stood for, tendentiously and offensively, in the 1830s when, in addition to inventing the Arnoldian public school, he defined the principles of Biblical criticism, looked forward to Catholic emancipation protestantizing Catholic Ireland, and argued that the Church of England would be well able to resume its historic place as the national Church if only it would criticize capitalism and alter its creeds, prayers and view of ordination so as to reflect the fact that ‘all moderate and reasonable men’ were agreed in ‘essentials’. The rearrangement of a religion is a formidable undertaking and some approaches to rearrangement were unconscious or indirect. Wordsworth approached it through The Prelude and The Excursion and Tennyson through In Memoriam. Lecky approached it through the replacement of ascetic and monastic Catholicism by the ‘industrial’ spirit after the seventeenth century, Seeley through the belief that science, culture and liberalism since 1789 had been doing the same good as Christianity, and Bunsen through the history of Egypt, Egypt’s affiliations with central Asia, and central Asia as the ‘startingpoint of all religion’. Max Müller approached it through India and Sanskrit, through the language of the Aryans and the ‘purity of the Vedas’, and through the need to Aryanize Semitic Christianity. Carlyle’s approach was through the modern ruler and the modern man-of-letters, Macaulay’s through the judgement that the English Reformation had been effected by ‘men who cared little about religion’, and the Oxford Idealists through a shift from the sensationalism of Locke and Hume to the Idealism of Kant and Hegel. The idioms in which these intuitions have been expressed have been as varied as the ways of expressing them. In Froude ‘the speculations of socalled divines were ropes of sea-slime leading to the moon’ and the Church of England was to be supported because only an established Church could do away with dogma. Kingsley treated dogma as concealing through ‘pride and conceit’ what Bacon’s God had revealed to the ‘gentle and simple-hearted’, and in Westward Ho!, had a tragic hero who ‘understood nothing more of

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theology . . . than was contained in the Church Catechism’. Green’s God was ‘the one spiritual self-conscious Being’ to which men were related as ‘partakers’ and the clouds of darkness by which He was occluded included the failure of the educated classes to bring spiritual and economic freedom to the vast numbers of new souls who had been created by the Industrial Revolution. Stanley likewise, in addressing the modern world, connected Abraham’s religion with Christianity’s primordial freedom from dogma and superstition and called up a vast cloud of latitudinarian witnesses which included Jowett, Kingsley, Bunsen, Seeley, Max Müller, Acton, Bacon, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Christ, and Thomas and Matthew Arnold. Latitudinarianism is sometimes thought of as a nineteenth-century phenomenon which passed away once modern knowledge had been accepted as a Christian accomplishment. This is misleading. Eddington, a Quaker, Whitehead, an Anglican (in America an Episcopalian) and Toynbee, though he flirted with Roman Catholicism, were certainly latitudinarian. So were Inge, and Collingwood and, from some points of view, Balfour and Temple. Zaehner in certain respects was a hard-line Roman Catholic but could be as eclectic and ecumenical as Pope John XXIII. C. S. Lewis had a Protestant sense of moral danger while transposing his Protestantism into fiction, literary criticism and a sort of natural theology. And there have been innumerable others – not only Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, who in his twenties wrote five works of liberationist Catholicism in which Roman Catholics were to help ‘Marxist, third-world, black-power and hippie intensity’ convert ‘monopoly capitalism’ into a ‘just community’, but also Needham who spent forty-five years transposing his fluent and prolific mixture of Marxism, Anglo-Catholicism and bio-chemical evolutionism on to the history of Chinese science, contrasting Taoism’s receptivity to science with theological Christianity’s resistance to it, and demanding of Christians a willingness to ‘sit down in the lowest room’ and listen to Mao-Tse-Tung on the ground that he was a ‘social and ethical philosopher rather than a military man’. Nor have Barthianism, Kierkegaardianism or deconstruction killed the latitudinarian mentality which lived on in the Barthian, Wittgensteinian, Christian Marxism of the young MacIntyre, whose Marxism criticized orthodox Christianity from a more Christian standpoint than he believed orthodox Christianity was capable of achieving by itself; and in Zaehner’s Roman Catholicism, which subverted orthodoxy and theology by marrying Christ, Marx and Teilhard de Chardin and listening to as well as correcting the so-called youth mysticism and drug-culture of the late 1960s. Some of the thinkers discussed in the first half of this volume were reacting against latitudinarianism while being in limited respects, like Acton or Forsyth, latitudinarian themselves. Early Pater was disrespectful about historic Christianity and Wilde dismissive of Christian respectability. Stirling translated Christian theology into the Hegelian language which some of

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Christianity’s enemies had used in order to subvert it. Even Stubbs, a conservative enemy of latitudinarianism, made his own. A latitudinarian reconstruction was necessary according to its proponents because Christianity could only be made compatible with science and culture by adopting a manner to which these could respond. At its best, this reaction was subtle and suggestive. At its worst, it became a routine reaction. Latitudinarianism has been contested by the Tractarian and Roman Catholic thinkers who were described in Volume II, by ‘normal’ Anglicans who combined aversion to Rome with Newman’s aversion to liberalism and infidelity and by ‘normal’ Nonconformists who claimed to embody the only answer to Rome and infidelity, and the only real defence of Christianity. During the last century and a half, ‘normal’ Christianity has incorporated many elements of latitudinarian reconstruction but has been differentiated from latitudinarianism by Nonconformity’s inherited suspicion of any attempt to accommodate Christ’s message to the world, by the Anglican conviction that the Church of England needed to draw lines and display a renewed conviction of incontestability, and by the belief, expressed tactically by Bishop Gore and others, that rational assent to Christianity depends on antecedent probability. The second half of the volume – ‘The post-Christian consensus’ – gives critical attention to Darwin, F. H. Bradley, Ramsay Macdonald, Beatrice Webb and Anthony Kenny who did not really get away from Christianity; to Galton, Bosanquet, A. C. Bradley, Sidney Webb, R. B. Haldane, Maitland, L. T. Hobhouse, Keynes, Crossman and Orwell who did (more or less); to Roger Scruton whose rehabilitation of ‘religion’ has led him to replace Christianity by high culture; and to Pearson’s marriage of science, Marxism and freethinking, Parry’s marriage of free-thinking, music and spirituality, Julian Huxley’s ‘religion without revelation’, and Richards’s, Leavis’s, Williams’s, Popper’s and Dawkins’s moral, literary and scientific secularities. Apart from Scruton, these have been deliberately ‘modern thinkers’ who may, like Haeckel, have regretted ‘the death of the gods’ that were ‘so much’ to their ‘parents and ancestors’ but have treated Christianity as an optional extra which makes no difference to thought. In the concluding chapter (as in discussing Laski in chapter 20), similar modernities will be examined in Jewish thought, including Koestler’s Zionist and post-Zionist secularity and the Heideggerian Arnoldianism through which Steiner’s abandonment of Judaism as a religion and retention of Judaism as grievance have carried forward into the new millennium, with all the unbearableness of a barbarous idiom, a post-Judaic version of that identification of culture with religion which Arnold had begun to develop in the 1860s. In the second half of the volume the dominant idea is not science but modern knowledge since the idea of a post-Christian, or post-Judaic, consensus has been as prominent in history, psychology, philosophy, criticism and literature as in the natural sciences, and the line of thinkers which has led up

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to Leavis or Eagleton has been as important as the line of thinkers which has led down from Darwin to Dawkins. In England in the last century and a half, three types of modern knowledge may be distinguished. There has been knowledge acquired by scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, historians and critics within the framework of whatever assumptions they have made at any particular time about the proper objects of their attention. There has been thinking which has modified these assumptions or brought into play assumptions which have integrated all types of argument or investigation into the total conspectus of knowledge and action. And there has been thinking which has used the idea of science, mathematics, philosophy, history or criticism as a basis for public doctrine. These types of thinking (and writing) have overlapped. But there can be no doubting the separateness of the third type, the talent and versatility with which it has been pursued, or the exigence of the claim it has made on behalf of the centrality of modern knowledge to public thought. In examining the post-Christian consensus, the argument will be that the intensity of assumption which in England went previously into Christian thought now goes into post-Christian thought, and that the normal assumption in very modern England (certainly since the late 1960s) is that public statement should be silently secular, whether the secularism is academic, aesthetic, scientific, political or religious. Not all the thinkers who make this assumption recognize that they are making it. That they are making it is an important feature of very modern English thought, an important source of both intellectual insensitivity and intellectual achievement, and a demonstration of the fact that it is difficult for a thinking person to avoid religion. By religion is meant the attribution of sanctity to existence and a duty to maximize sanctity into practice, whether the practice is personal, liturgical or political. Religion ratifies or condemns practice by reference to the nature of existence, and it does this whether duty is conceived of as subject to divine, human or natural control, and whether or not individuals believe themselves to have been liberated from religion. Christian characteristics vary and the name Christian should not in analysis be denied too readily to those who claim it. But the important question is not about Christianity but about whether any ratification of belief and practice can avoid being religious, and whether thinkers who disclaim a religious character are not so obviously filling the space filled previously by historic religion that mere disclaimer cannot effect a disengagement. This is a major question. It demands critical consideration of the content of modern English thought, Christianity’s failure to remain central to it, and the myriads of uncapturable personal dramas which have turned England into the modern, para-Christian society that she is. The tension between average opinion and the intellectual John-the-Baptists who have run ahead of average opinion on both sides in Volume II and in both parts of the present

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volume is operative throughout. The ‘public moralists’ who have written in the wake of Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin, Gladstone, Disraeli and Salisbury, so far from thinking and acting like ‘conventionally-educated, comfortablysituated male readers sitting in their clubs at the social and political heart of the most important city in the world’, have been shown to be sensitive and inventive intelligences whose religion has been pivotal to the duty to mediate between the thinking classes and the new democratic public, and to ease the way of the most powerful nation on earth past the disintegration threatened by class-conflict, world-conflict and the dissolution of historic Christianity. Two questions arise. First, whether post-Christian religions can be said to have rituals and liturgies in the way in which Christianity has them; to which the answer is that they can, that it is only the passage of the centuries which has disconnected Christian liturgy and ritual from normal life and knowledge, and that one of the acid tests of a really modern Christian sensibility is that it accepts the disconnection and denies the duty to be rid of it. Second, whether men do not necessarily live divided lives, with science, say, being governed by one language and set of assumptions and religion, say, by another language and set of assumptions; to which it must be replied that they do but that the umbilical cord between Christian and post- and anti-Christian perceptions is religious, whatever the ‘non-religious’ may claim to the contrary. The belief that the umbilical cord can be broken will not survive the critical exposition of individual thinkers who, whether they have addressed England from Chartwell or The Oratory at Egbaston, from St Paul’s Cathedral or the Metropolitan Tabernacle, from the Royal Albert Hall, the London School of Economics or the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge; or from Hawarden, Rydal, Hatfield, Eversley, Highbury, Balliol College, Oxford, Hackney Congregationalist College, Fleet Street, Broadcasting House, the Television Centre at Wood Green or the Royal College of Music, have done so in the shadow of an historic interdependence between politics, science, morality, culture and religion. From one standpoint, English intellectual life has been the work of groups of friends who have shared assumptions, beliefs and enthusiasms, and have used whatever instruments they have had to hand to propagate these for the benefit of the nation. From another point of view, it has been conducted by self-ratifying élites which have used such power as they have had to make the nation what they have wanted to make it – not only the élites which centred around landed society, the City, the armed services, the public schools, Cambridge, Oxford, Parliament, the monarchy, the Inns of Court and the Church of England, but also the élites which centred around Manchester, Birmingham and Nonconformity, the trade-unions, the grammar schools, laboratory science and further education, and the civic and plate-glass universities. All of these have been important, but it is the encounter between them and the effect of the first set of élites on the rest which has been crucial since

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‘the aristocracy’ was ‘sent to the laundry’ and its ‘dye’ allowed to ‘run out into the washing’. In these volumes the subject is the opinions of élites and their attempts to define and justify the authority they claim. The teaching of élites, and the tensions between them, have impinged continuously on the nation and have affected its judgements of practicability. Not all élites, however, have been equally well known. The Evangelical élite, the dissenting élites which attacked the Church of England, and the élites which made England the workshop of the world, are well-known. So are the royal élite, the Whig élite, the Tractarian élite, the Cecilian élite, the élite which flexed its muscles after the demise of the clerical university in the 1870s, the imperialist élite of the early twentieth century, the élite of Balliol Idealists and the Fabian, Bloomsbury and King’s élites. But less is known about the Carlylean, Byronic and Tennysonian élites, the élites which admired Browning and T. S. Eliot, the mathematical and philosophical élite of Trinity College, Cambridge, the optimistic student élite of the 1930s, the élite of grammar-school boys who made their way after 1940, the resentful student-revolutionary élite of the 1960s, and the élite of public servants, judges and lawyers which has been present throughout. The arguments with which élites have convinced themselves that they have authority are to be found in every chapter of this work. But so is the wish to disguise authority by making it seem natural or unavoidable, even when this has involved self-deception or the conscious deception entailed by the attempt to please, or at least not to offend, a democratic public. The ratification of authority is no less central in a democratic society than in the less open societies of the past, and we should not be surprised either that subterfuge and exaggeration are as common as frankness and sincerity or that the community of sentiment which binds élites to peoples is often random and imperfect. The thinkers we are discussing have borne witness to the matters they address with a weight, length and self-confidence which suggests that the truths to be conveyed are so significant that they can be conveyed again and again in as many variants as the situation requires and the exponents of critical sifting judge that it should be. Writing is not necessarily self-conscious or coherent; some writers just write, as Dickens wrote, or write what they feel able or obliged to write ex animo. Indeed, even ‘great writers’ bring together thoughts which have no necessary connection with one another and conceal the tenuousness of the connections by means of style or eloquence. These volumes attend primarily to meaning and to content insofar as it illuminates meaning. The meanings they discuss are reactions to subjective crises among the thinkers, generations and institutions concerned and to the external crises which have transformed the maritime, agrarian, insanitary England of the eighteenth century into the industrial-suburban, technologically advanced England of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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Some thinkers confine themselves to the reiterations of simple conceptions. Some dazzle, as Newman and Macaulay dazzled, by the intensity of their perceptions and their power to marry message to medium. But, since few have avoided the balkanization of thought, our subject-matter consists of specialist exhibits – the work of historians, lawyers, scientists, philosophers, politicians, journalists, dons, schoolmasters, theologians, novelists, musicians, architects and poets. To these could have been added civil servants, soldiers, explorers, missionaries, doctors, painters, engineers, film-directors, townplanners, impresarios, entertainers, managers of finance, commerce and industry, and the controllers of newspapers, wireless and television who have all contributed to the transformation from a predominantly Anglican and landed-aristocratic, via a bourgeois-dissenting, to a meritocratically ‘democratic’ England, as the second British Empire and the strongest capitalist economy in the world have risen and declined, an illiterate people has become a literate people, and a nation which found itself in Victorian prosperity, religion and respectability, and in duty, decency and death in two world wars, has lost itself in liberation, denigration, moral uncertainty and an over-heavy State.

Criticism of earlier volumes of this work has been implied on three grounds – that it offers venom and polemic where scholarly modesty suggests the need for analysis; that it misrepresents the English intelligentsia by concentrating on its arguments rather than on the milieux in which its arguments were developed; and that it infringes the rule that ‘judgement’ on an historical subject involves ‘assumptions and values’ which are ‘outside the province of the historian’. The assumptions in this work are that venom and polemic can disclose the historical process as readily as modesty and analysis can, that Religion and Public Doctrine resembles Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire and Macaulay’s History of England in making venom and polemic central to its argument, and that contraction in the scope of historical statement will in any case be powerless against historians who will not be persuaded by professional modesty into removing ideological ‘assumptions and values’ from their history. Historical thinking is not the only form of thinking which needs to be rescued from ideological correctness. But because historical writing is central to modern culture, it is true especially of historical thinking that the best way to level the field between correctness and its enemies is through a conservative deconstruction which understands that all historical writing is subjective, that it is all the invention of a past out of material which is present, and that the past owes its vitality to the historian’s present interests and sympathies as much as it owes its plausibility to his power to meet the requirements of professional verification. Even when the past in this sense emerges unasked, or is presented ironically, it discloses the

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Introduction

deepest layers of the historian’s mind, operates at levels where assumptions are generated prior to explicit consideration, and enables history to unfold itself as a subtle experience in which problems resolve themselves into that ceaseless flow of felt comprehension which is arrived at when, as T. K. Cheyne put it over a hundred years ago, the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ histories coincide. This felt comprehension is what this work discloses and, though it gives due weight to differences between thinkers from the same milieu, it reaches down to a primordial unity of thought – a unity in which poets, novelists or theologians of a particular experience, formation and generation, display the same pre-specialized mentalities as historians of the same experience, formation or generation and all mentalities are religious, if only in the sense, which F. M. Cornford as a post-Christian rationalist mistrusted, of a ‘history . . . which, long before . . . a . . . work was even contemplated, was already inwrought into the very structure of the author’s mind’ and reflected an intimacy the ‘modern mind’ had difficulty recapturing between ‘departments of thought’ which had come to be ‘completely dissociated’ since Plato and Pythagoras. What is being proposed is a perspective in which religion is indestructible and there is a continuity between Christianity and the post-Christian and anti-Christian religions which deny continuity with it. This is not an original perception. But it is crucial in encouraging an equality of consideration between Christianity and its enemies and in demolishing the claim to selfratifying superiority which has been so central a feature of both postChristian and anti-Christian thought in modern England.

This Introduction has sketched, in outline, some of the opinions which have constituted English thinking about religion in the last century and a half. The indication of parameters and the contrast between thinkers who have wished to know about religion and thinkers who have wished not to know about it, will make it easier to evaluate the indubitably religious thought which we are to discuss in the next twenty-three chapters, beginning in the first ten or so chapters with the advocates of a reanimated or reconstructed Christianity.

I The Christian intellect and modern thought in modern England

1 The reanimation of Protestantism I

The present aspect of spiritual Europe might fill a melancholic observer with doubt and foreboding. It is mournful to see so many noble, tender and high-aspiring minds deserted of that religious light which once guided all such: standing sorrowful on the scene of past convulsions and controversies, as on a scene blackened and burnt-up with fire; mourning in the darkness, because there is desolation, and no home for the soul; or what is worse, pitching tents among the ashes, and kindling weak earthly lamps which we are to take for stars. This darkness is but transitory obscuration: these ashes are the soil of future herbage and richer harvests. Religion, poetry, is not dead; it will never die. (Thomas Carlyle, The State of German Literature, 1827, in Miscellaneous and Critical Essays, vol. I, 1899, pp. 85–6) If the convulsive struggles of the last Half Century have taught poor struggling convulsed Europe any truth, it may perhaps be this as the essence of innumerable others: that Europe requires a real Aristocracy, a real Priesthood, or it cannot continue to exist. (Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 1843, p. 241) Of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. (Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship, 1840 (Everyman edition, p. 396))

In this chapter a ‘reanimated’ Protestantism will be presented as a continuation of Reformation-virtue and Reformation-autonomy, as an heir to mediaeval Christianity insofar as mediaeval Christianity had not been abnormal, and as the religion for which the modern world had been waiting. Stanley, Jowett, Matthew Arnold, Seeley and others who will be discussed in subsequent chapters, though they were not individually boring, turned Protestantism into a liberal and faintly boring ideology. ‘Reanimation’ did not begin like that and in Carlyle, Froude and Kingsley was only in the most problematical sense liberal. Carlyle was a semi-detached critic of English society and the author of a cosmic condemnation of it. There is a great deal of Carlyle in Froude and Kingsley and a belief – more consistently Christian in Kingsley than in Froude – that England required a religious reorientation and the adoption, if not of Carlyle’s Cromwellianism, then of an untheological variant of Elizabethan Protestantism. Kingsley was a Protestant and a churchman; Froude was a secularized establishmentarian; Carlyle’s Protestantism carried with it an intense secularity in politics, literature and religion. But all three shared the desire to see off 3

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Byronism, cynicism, Whiggism and Tractarianism, and to insert a new virtue into English public life and thought. I Carlyle1 was born into a Scottish peasant family from which, as its clever boy, he was sent to Edinburgh University at the age of fourteen. By the time he was twenty he had taken a degree, had rejected both the family Calvinism and the family desire for ordination, and had begun to teach in preparation for a life dedicated to literature. After failing in a school he had set up with a friend, he had settled in Edinburgh as a freelance teacher but had produced only encyclopaedia articles by the time his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister was published when he was twenty-eight. With The Life of Schiller a year later, a decade of thought achieved a constructive outcome. In 1825 Carlyle was still a Scottish author, and essentially an aspirant rather than a success. On The Life of Schiller and the essays which he published by 1833, he then erected a scaffolding which was to stand up under all the strains he was to put it to after his removal to London as fame came between 1835 and 1850. Carlyle died in 1881 at the age of eighty-six, his monument being a massive biography of Frederick the Great which was concluded when he was seventy; and his last significant works, apart from that, being The Nigger Question, which was an attack on missionary sentimentality, The Life of John Sterling, which was an attack on ecclesiastical Anglicanism, and Latter-Day Pamphlets and Shooting Niagara which between them attacked Tractarianism, the Jesuits and universal suffrage. Here we shall examine his thought as it developed between the essays of his early thirties and Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, which concluded the main phase of his writing life when he was fifty. Carlyle’s early essays asserted that political systems needed God, that the modern world could only be understood in terms of religion, and that it was the scepticism which the French aristocracy had borrowed from Voltaire, Shaftesbury and the Enlightenment which had blinded it to the ‘fire and blackness’ that had broken upon it in 1789. German literature was said, by

contrast, to be of first significance for religion as well as for politics, and the ‘profundity’ and ‘harmonious strength’ which linked it to Elizabethan literature to have ensured that German thinkers would be ‘set aside from oblivion’ and ‘claimed as instructors’ by the ‘great family of mankind’. In The Life of Schiller Carlyle wrote of literature as addressing the 11

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), educated Edinburgh University. Author of The Life of Schiller, 1825; Sartor Resartus, 1835; The French Revolution, 1837; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 1838; Chartism, 1840; On Heroes and Hero-Worship, 1840; Past and Present, 1844; Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, 1845; Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850; and The History of Frederick II of Prussia, 1858–65.

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‘immortal part of men’ and winning from the ‘formless Infinite’ a ‘possession for ever . . . to all the generations of the earth’. He shared the German belief that German criticism and poetry sprang ‘from the depths of thought’ and the ‘subtlest problems of philosophy’, and that in Germany ‘literary men’ were a ‘perpetual priesthood’ whose function was to ‘dispense God’s everlasting wisdom’. In the 1820s Goethe was his primary hero and the thinker on whom his teeth were toughened. In the decade which followed, he achievedthe main statements of his doctrine by taking out, brushing up and giving a higher version of the views he had expressed then about politics, culture and religion. Of the works of this central decade Sartor Resartus was fantastic and rhapsodic – a ‘noble philosophic poem’ (according to Emerson) which leaves no mark on the unsympathetic mind a century and a half later. The analysis it applied to the philosophy of clothes was less telling against Byronism than the dozen or so paragraphs about Byron which Carlyle had written between 1825 and 1829 and the conspiracy of virtue that he conducted with John Stuart Mill, who shared his sense both of religious crisis and of the need for religious reconstruction if the English polity and English mind were to stand up to the strains which were being put on them in the 1830s and 1840s. The political assumption of the past, as Carlyle (somewhat partially) perceived it, had been the normality of obedience. The political problem of the future would be to obtain obedience from the disobedient forces which had made themselves known in France and were making themselves known in England. In The French Revolution (which was published in 1837), the central subjects were the ‘masses’ as ‘persons who bled . . . if you pricked them’ and the new type of authority which would satisfy their natural desire for obedience. The problem of the ‘masses’ was that there were ‘twenty-five millions of them’, that, though ‘gaunt and hungry’, they had ‘sinews and indignation’ and that they could no longer be held by the ‘Lie’ the French monarchy had become once the ‘Earth-Rind’ of ‘Habit’ had been broken, the ‘fountains . . . of the deep’ had ‘boiled forth’, and France had started her ‘cheerful’ dance towards the ‘Ruleless Unknown’. Carlyle despised the Jacobins and the National Assembly for ‘spinning ropes of sand’ and turning the promise of 1789 into the ghastliness of the Terror. But the revolution was ‘the crowning phenomenon of modern times’ and had held within itself the bases of a ‘New Order’. Mirabeau had been a ‘titanic . . . reality’. His ‘sincerity and earnestness’ had rendered the ‘Untruth’ of French existence ‘insupportable’. He had seen through the ‘near-machiavellic pretence of belief’, and, in exposing a ‘buckram-world’ based on ‘consecrated dough-wafers and the godhead of a poor old Italian man’, had ‘burnt out’ the ‘church-woodwork’ that was helping to rot French life. Sansculottism, moreover, had had two faces. On the one hand it was a ‘frightful thing’ – the

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‘frightfullest thing born of Time’ – and Napoleon’s ending of it the proper occasion for ‘deafening jubilation’. On the other hand, it had been ‘of God’, its soul had not died with the death of its body: ‘in some perfected shape’ it would embrace the circuit of the ‘whole world’, reminding ‘wise men everywhere’ to ground their lives neither in ‘garnitures’ and ‘formulas’ nor in the ‘old cloth and sheepskins’ of the past but in their own ‘manhood’ and the ‘symbolic representations’ which it needed. Carlyle wanted history to stop ‘shrieking’ at the revolution, to adopt his gnarled, granite belief that societies which failed to believe deserved to be destroyed, and to indicate the content of the new beliefs which would hold the ‘unwashed millions’ whom it showed being brought to life in France. In Chartism he expatiated on the ‘wild souls’ of the English poor, their ‘torments’ as the ‘inarticulate’ sufferings of ‘dumb creatures’ who were ‘in pain’ because they were not being governed, and parliamentary government and Whig progress as inadequate responses to their needs. On Heroes and Hero-Worship and Past and Present, explained what this meant. Past and Present was an account of the twelfth-century abbot of an English monastery and of the life that went on in and around the monastery. Its main argument was relativistic – that one type of politics or religion might be suitable to one age or nation without being suitable to another but that mediaeval politics and religion, though as unsuitable to modern England as feudalism and Catholicism had been to eighteenth-century France, had been based on a reality which modern England would go on ignoring at its peril. In Past and Present, the message was that the English aristocracy had become idle and dilettante, that English Moneybags suffered the defects of French Moneybags and that neither greed nor an idle aristocracy could supply a proper basis for a modern politics. The poor were suffering not just from hunger but also from unemployment, which could not be remedied either through supply and demand as conceived of by the industrial aristocracy nor through a landed economy as conceived of by the landed aristocracy. Work was a political issue – the work which had made England the workshop of the world, the work which was required by the English Poor Law, the lack of work which was hitting the poor in contemporary society; and it raised the question whether existing society could go on being governed so long as large numbers of its citizens were either without work or were compelled to engage in work without tenure or contract. Carlyle had a peasant mistrust of luxury and wealth. But he was neither a Luddite nor an enemy of machinery; he admired the ‘work’ which had been done by Arkwright and the leaders of the Industrial Revolution; and he looked to them to restore the cohesion which the leaders of feudal Catholicism had established in the Middle Ages. Obedience, not liberty, was the crucial political experience, the creation of conditions in which obedience could be given was the crucial political problem, and the idle injustice of a

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landed, and the ‘isolated’ injustice of a laissez-faire, society were the chief respects in which modern political systems were defective. Carlyle wanted to infuse ‘soul’ into the landed and industrial aristocracies, to make them understand that ‘morality’ was ‘the very centre of the existence of man’, and to persuade them that parliamentary government was an obfuscation. He called on the landed aristocracy to perform the ‘sacred duties of its station’, and on the industrial aristocracy to replace the ‘Chivalry of Fighting’ and Mammonistical greed by ‘Chivalry of Work’ and ‘nobility’ of mind. He was particularly anxious to show that Nature hated ‘shams’, that she showed ‘the face of a Goddess’ to those who obeyed her and ‘the claws of a Lioness’ to those who did not, and that her truths would be indispensable if a ‘regimented mass’ was to be made out of the ‘bewildered mob’ of industrial society. What Carlyle wanted was a descent into the soul, the recognition that ‘scepticism’ was a ‘disease’, and an understanding of the corruption which Voltaire, Shaftesbury and the philosophes had sown in the minds of the English governing classes. He wanted corruption to be exposed, errors to be confessed and a litany to be recited because, unless they were, there would be no understanding of the fact that the poor were being neither guided nor governed. Carlyle respected the poor, but was not a democrat. He identified democracy with destructiveness and demanded from the poor what he also demanded from the aristocracy – an attempt to negotiate proper grounds for obedience. Choice of ruler was the ‘soul of all social business among men’, it was in ‘man’s . . . nature’ to ‘honour and love’ the best of his kind, and the ‘relation of the taught to their teacher’ was the ‘vital element’ of ‘human society’ without which it would ‘fall down into death and . . . disappear’. Carlyle wrote on behalf of ‘Worth against Unworth’ and with a Jacobinical ardour against the deference which English talent had had to give to hereditary position. He wanted an aristocracy of talent to replace the aristocracy of birth and a missionary duty to replace the ‘flunkeyism’, ‘Midas-eared Mammonism’ and ‘double-barrelled dilettantism’ which had been failing to rule England in the recent past. ‘Great’ souls went about ‘under all manner of disguises’; ‘true’ governors were chosen ‘differently’ in ‘every . . . epoch of the world’: and what was needed in the nineteenth century was a new order to relate these facts, and the facts and realities of nature, to the deep truths of God. II For Carlyle the problem was to replace the ‘pestilence’ of disorder created by Sansculottism and the Chartists, to avoid sentimental squeamishness in the process, and to acknowledge the importance of force, as Mohammed, Charlemagne and Cromwell had acknowledged it. But essentially and primarily, the problem was that there had to be a religious revolution.

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Carlyle had a narrow upbringing against which he rebelled; by the time he became a significant thinker, he identified liberation from Calvinism with the practice of literature, which not only displayed the thoughts of ‘the great spirits of our western world’ but also showed that nature was ordered, that nature was God’s, and that men were missionaries of order who thirsted for God and for Nature’s ‘still small voice’ within them. It was God who had ‘breathed life’ into men, God who had created the ‘immensity’ and ‘eternity’ of the right which each man had to make himself what he had it in him to become, God who reminded all régimes and systems of thought that there was an ‘Adamant Table’, that nature had ‘terrible forceps’, and that His ‘absolute laws’ were ‘sanctioned by . . . Heaven and Hell’. In Carlyle work and silence were interrelated. Man was the Word ‘Incarnate’ and ‘Labour’ survived to eternity where pleasure did not. The tongue was a ‘sacred organ’ and ought not to be abused, as it had been, by the ‘insincerity’ of parliamentary oratory. Insincere speech was the ‘prime material of insincere action’, and it was the ‘gospel of work’ which taught men to bring ‘method’ to bear on the ‘unmethodic’ and to smite ‘Ignorance, Stupidity and Brutemindedness’ wherever it might find them. This was what God had commanded, what He had spoken without ‘syllabled-speech’ out of the ‘silence of deep eternities’, and what the ‘unborn ages, . . . deep DeathKingdoms and . . . all Space and Time’ had proclaimed – that men must work ‘while it is called Today’ since ‘Night’ would come ‘wherein no man could work’. A convergence of theory and practice, the amalgamation of religion and work, and the need for objects which men could honour and respect, were central aspects of Carlyle’s doctrine. They dominated his conception of historical writing not only because of its status as ‘epic’ (unlike the ‘godless . . . philosophic history of the eighteenth century’) but also because it recorded God’s law as a necessary antidote to the ‘social gangrene’, worship of ‘money . . . and . . . success’ and practical atheism which the Restoration of 1660 had established in the English body politic. It was the Restoration which had signalled the failure of Puritanism and of Cromwell’s attempt to give practical effect to the gospel. And it was the Restoration mentality which had to be destroyed if Cromwell’s greatness was to be re-established. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches argued that Cromwell had been greater than Napoleon because he had ‘walked through long years with the Awful Unameable of the universe’ and had made himself the ‘strongest and terriblest’, as well as the ‘most English’, of Englishmen. He had been both a convinced Calvinist and a ‘Christian heroic man’ and, though thwarted by the ‘greediness, cowardice . . . and opacity’ of the ‘millions’ who were against him in the 1650s, was still the point from which ‘England would have to start . . . if she was . . . to struggle Godward . . . instead of . . . Devilward and Mammonward’, to allow labour – ‘noble Labour’ – to ‘take its place’ as the

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‘King of the earth’, and to destroy the servility and religious insincerity which arose when the aristocracy was only apparently best and only appeared to provide the governance which the best men gave in On Heroes and Hero-Worship. On Heroes and Hero-Worship located religion in man’s inmost heart and emphasized its ubiquity and indestructibility. Religion, properly conceived and understood, was neither quackery and allegory, an ‘opium for the people’, nor an illusion of false consciousness. Religion was true consciousness, accurate perception of the facts of nature, and illusionless knowledge of the duties which were indicated by them. Religion, in this sense, though it could issue in, did not require, theological expression. What it required was consonance with God and the silent practice by which great men left their marks on world-history. Odin had been a god, Mohammed a prophet, Luther and Knox priests, Dante and Shakespeare poets, Rousseau, Burns and Johnson men-of-letters, and Cromwell and Napoleon in effect kings. But all were of the same ‘stuff’ and differed from each other only in the ‘shapes they assumed’ under the conditions in which they appeared, looking through the ‘show of things’ into things themselves, and bringing a ‘cosmic sincerity’ for which the ‘World’s Soul was just’ and the Universe ‘made by . . . a law’ which it was man’s business to follow. In all these respects, Carlyle’s engagements were emphatic. But they were also ambivalent and his heroes oblique. Great men were ‘geniuses’ but part of their genius was to expose the fact that God’s word was ‘deep beyond man’s soundings’, displayed itself as a ‘mystery’, and was conveyed to those who understood it without ‘consent . . . being . . . asked of them’. On Heroes and Hero-Worship described Protestantism’s invitation to every man to be a hero, the subtlety of the relationship between the heroism of Carlyle’s heroes and the heroism of all believers, and the continuity between the gods, prophets and priests of the past and the poets, men-of-letters and rulers of the present and future. In the concluding lecture of On Heroes and Hero-Worship, the ruler was the ultimate hero; ‘getting . . . the truest-hearted . . . or . . . noblest men’ invested with the ‘symbols of authority’ was the ultimate problem; and the outcome, when fully achieved, was a ‘divine right’ – not the ‘divine right of kings’, which had been ‘mouldering in public libraries since the seventeenth century’ but the divine right of the ‘true king’ who was at once ‘missionary of order’ and guide of ‘the spiritual’ from which ‘all practice took its rise’. None of the great men discussed in On Heroes and Hero-Worship were scientists, though there was no reason why they should not have been. It was only because Carlyle wished to establish a parity of esteem for art, religion and morality that The Hero as Man-of-Letters concentrated on the modern manof-letters who ‘lived apart’, spoke the ‘inspiration that was in him’ through the printing press, and ruled ‘from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living’.

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By man-of-letters Carlyle did not mean any old author and he certainly did not mean the ‘prurient, noisy’ authors whom he castigated in Lectures on The History of Literature. He meant the ‘heroic’ author like Shakespeare who was a ‘piece of the everlasting Heart of Nature’ and disclosed the ‘Divine and Eternal’ in the ‘temporary and trivial’. The man-of-letters – a symbol of the passing of the verbal culture of the Middle Ages – was a man sent to remind modern men of God’s presence in the world, of the ‘perpetual priesthood’ which reached from the Old Testament to Goethe, and of a blessed poverty which resembled the blessed poverty of the mendicant orders of the Middle Ages. But the real point was neither about poverty, the replacement of a verbal culture by a book culture, nor the desirability of establishing a Coleridgean, Chinese or Millite aristocracy of talent. The real point was that ‘newspapers, pamphlets, poems and books’ were both a book-parliament which mattered more than the elected parliament, and a ‘real church’ which ‘guided’ men’s souls and ‘touched all hearts . . . with a coal . . . live . . . from the altar’. This was an account of an alternative hierarchy or source of authority, and Carlyle made large claims for it – that everything which came to pass was the ‘vesture of a thought’, that the Hebrew prophets could be said to have ‘made’ St Paul’s Cathedral and that London’s ‘houses, palaces, steam-engines and cathedrals’ were ‘millions’ of ‘thoughts made into One’. In the 1830s and 1840s Carlyle was concerned with total history – the history of the whole nation and the thoughts or mentalities which had caused it. He was also concerned with religion as the ‘chief fact’ about a man or a nation, ‘great men’ as its primary embodiment, and the greatness of nations as its consequence. And the question this raises is, was the religion that he was describing necessarily Christian? That Carlyle intended it to be thought Christian and treated the Christian sense of heaven and hell as the ‘memorablest achievement of our species’ is not in doubt. Neither is the regard he expressed for the non-credal version of mediaeval Catholicism that he described in Past and Present. The problem is to know whether he was praising Christianity rather than religion in general. Carlyle’s God, in theory, was a God of love. But He was also a God of nature, and it is necessary to tread carefully in relating the one to the other. The God of love avoided individualistic isolation and was a God of sorrow, whose pre-eminent decoration had been a ‘crown of thorns’. In many respects, moreover, He was an Old Testament God whose justice had been ‘ordained from the foundations of the world’. Carlyle aimed to bring God back into public discourse and to use Him, as Byron had used his own misery, to destroy the complacency of contemporary respectability. A ‘splendour of God’ had to emerge from industrial society as it had from feudal society and, since the object was to obey only ‘God-made superiors’, the first step was to ‘sweep out the tailor-made ones’.

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Carlyle did not advocate talk about God. He wanted to avoid talk, about God as about everything else, because he connected action with silence, and the immense stream of theological words which had been overwhelming Europe since Luther with a disregard for religion. From one point of view Carlyle was unequivocally Christian; he was trying to broaden the Protestant consciousness by relating it to world-history. This was why Puritanism provided only part of a ‘Complete Theory of the Universe’, why the French Revolution was Protestantism’s ‘third . . . act’, and why mediaeval Christianity was to be understood not in terms of ‘Articles of Faith’ and ‘Church creeds’ but as the uncomplicated religion which had been natural to the life of the Middle Ages. The life of the Middle Ages of course had been Catholic, and Carlyle recognized this. But in discussing it he not only said nothing very much about Christ, he also said nothing very much about St Paul, St Augustine, Gregory the Great or Hildebrand, and left it uncertain whether an eclectic Protestantism, once disentangled from the ‘jingle-jangle’ of historic theology and the ‘rituals, liturgies, creeds and hierarchies’ with which it had been connected, would be anything more than the most general affirmation that religion was what men ‘believed practically’ about their ‘vital relations’ to their ‘duty and destiny’ in the universe. To this the answer must remain vague, not only because the doctrine of silence enjoined silence about Christ, who might have been the archetype of the hero, but also because Carlyle’s Christian affirmations were sparse and infrequent. His Luther, Cromwell, Knox and Johnson were indubitably Christian, just as Shakespeare was the priest of the ‘true Catholicism of the Future’ and Dante the priest of the true Catholicism of the past. But the rest of the heroes, including Mohammed and Odin, were servants of Nature, not servants of Christ, while Goethean culture, which was more than capable of existing without Christianity, was not discussed in On Heroes and HeroWorship at all. Carlyle made many references to God’s love for man and the ‘sublime forgiveness’ involved in Christianity’s ‘turning of the other cheek’. In addition, he claimed that ‘religion would never die’, that the government of God was ‘the thing to be struggled for’, and that there was truth in any religion by which ‘men . . . had striven to walk in the world’. But this was due less to a conviction of the truth of Christianity than to nostalgia for a past in which ‘religion’ had been central to life. Carlyle saw the world in his own image, and imagined, because he proposed to rise through journalism and literature, that these (apart from governing) were the most important activities open to men. He combined a streak of violence with cynicism, irony and hatred of sentimentality, and poured out vast buckets of nonsense about the odiousness of the cash-nexus. But, along with a sense of God’s Providence, he had little sense of God’s guile and, in

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sanctifying the whole of life as God’s work, deconsecrated his Protestantism while resembling Ruskin in making God indistinguishable from nature and converting Christianity into a very rough form of ethical earnestness. In many respects, in spite of a Newmanite formation, Froude was his follower. III Froude’s2 analysis of England in the 1870s was class-ridden and nostalgic, and condemned the future that was being willed by the rich. It looked forward without pleasure to workmen being neutered politically by the beer-house, the music-hall and the gin-palace, to a downward pressure on wages being exerted by a surplus population, and to the impossibility that ‘the great mass of the people’, however patriotic, would go on defending the State once the loss of peasant proprietorship had deprived them of a stake in it. In the ‘squalid lanes’ and ‘identical houses’ of the suburbs and the ‘cesspools of filth’ of the cities, it saw not the promise of an acceptable substitute for peasant proprietorship but a ‘customary’ rural order being replaced by an urban disorder whose people were so totally dominated by ‘competition’ that they could not ‘carry on the great traditions of our country’. Only emigration to the colonies would remove the detritus of the cities, give the city-population renewed acquaintance with the soil, and prevent working-class revolution by giving those workmen who remained in England a more equitable relationship with employers. For Froude the colonial question was a ‘matter of life and death’ involving the deteriorating physique of a ‘town-bred’ nation, the settlement of a healthy and loyal working class in the unspoilt territories of the world, and a transformation of Parliament which, under the enlarged constituency of 1867, had become the richest ‘that had ever sat in England’ and cared more for the unearned increment on its property than for the duties which the unreformed Parliament had performed towards ‘the English Commonwealth’. ‘Never was . . . there . . . in any country’, Froude wrote in 1870, ‘so much productiveness’; but never has there been a country which recognized ‘less obligation’ to those through whose ‘loins and sinews’ this productiveness had been achieved or in which wealth – especially suburban wealth – had been so selfishly determined to ‘blind the working-man’ to his own interests. ‘If . . . religion and morals’ had not ‘grown to be unmeaning words’, it must, moreover, he believed, ‘be of the utmost significance that the growing population’ had become the despair not only of ‘schoolmaster . . . and policeman’ but also of ‘minister and priest’ as ‘hundreds of thousands were added annually’ to those who grew up ‘heathens in a country calling itself Christian’. 12

James Anthony Froude (1818–94), educated Westminster School and Oriel College, Oxford. Fellow of Exeter College. Ordained in the Church of England but renounced orders. Author of The Nemesis of Faith, 1848; History of England From the Fall of Wolsey To the Spanish Armada, 1856–70; Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1867; The English in Ireland in The Eighteenth Century, 1872–4; Thomas Carlyle, 1882–4; Oceana, 1886; The Earl of Beaconsfield, 1890; and Lectures on The Council of Trent, 1893.

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Froude’s imperial writings, so far from being merely a reaction to the politics of the 1870s, were the outcome of a religious experience and the conclusion of a religious argument. They looked forward to restoring in a ‘colonial Commonwealth’ some of the features which had been present in England between 1588 and 1829, including the rural order embodied in the Church–State Anglicanism of which the Tractarians, including Froude’s elder brother, Hurrell, had made themselves the enemies. When Froude died in 1894 he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and had had more than thirty years as a significant public figure. He had produced a continuous output of articles and books about religion, about contemporary England and about English and Irish history, had spent more than a decade as editor of Fraser’s Magazine, and could probably have been either a Liberal or a Conservative MP if he had been willing. He was an amateur sailor and had published English Seamen In The Sixteenth Century. He had taken part in an official mission to South Africa in the 1870s and had written Oceana after a visit to South Africa, Australasia and the United States in the 1880s. In 1890 he had published The Earl of Beaconsfield which compared Disraeli with Carlyle, from whom the four volumes of Thomas Carlyle had already pulled back the veil in a frank and revealing fashion. Froude was born in Devon in 1818 and, after being unhappy to a point of desperation as a schoolboy at Westminster, arrived in Oriel College, Oxford in 1836 just after Hurrell Froude,3 had died. At Oriel, though taken up by Newman, he kept his distance. Eventually he capitulated and was helped towards ordination by Newman’s belief that Anglican formularies were loose and flexible. At home, before Hurrell Froude went to the West Indies for his health, and at Oriel in Newman’s shadow, Froude was encouraged to see good in mediaeval Catholicism and to be contemptuous of Evangelicalism and the Reformation. The decision to contribute to Newman’s Lives of The Saints and to take deacon’s orders in the Church of England in 1845 did not mean, however, that he had swallowed Tractarianism whole. In the course of the anti-Tractarian development that he underwent in the decade after ordination, he was conscious chiefly of crisis. Froude’s crisis was given weight and point by two difficult love affairs, by his expectation of death after the deaths that occurred in his family in the 1830s, by the familiarity he acquired with cultured Evangelicalism in the home of a Wicklow clergyman during vacation work while he was an undergraduate, by the sympathy and support he received from a Manchester Unitarian lawyer who took him into his home after he resigned his fellowship at Exeter College in 1849 and by the dissatisfaction he had experienced as a Fellow of Exeter in the course of immersing himself in German theology and in Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson and Spinoza. The conclusion at which he arrived was Carlyle’s 3

See above Religion and Public Doctrine II, pp. 8–11.

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conclusion that something had to be done to establish a new religious consciousness in view of the irrelevance of the existing Anglican consciousness. After leaving Oxford, Froude married and achieved a measure of financial stability. But it was not certain, even then, that he would become a man-ofletters; if ordination had not debarred him from the professions, it is likely that financial anxiety and religious doubt would have led him to renounce his orders in favour of medicine or the bar, whether his novel The Nemesis of Faith had been thrown on the fire by the Rector of his College or not. The Nemesis of Faith took the form of half-a-dozen fictional letters and a confession of faith which registered the frame of mind of a young man, Markham Sutherland, who had accepted ordination in spite of doubts about Christianity’s truth, and whose insincerity had been rewarded by uncertainty as to his role as a clergyman, withdrawal from the ministry and infatuation with a married woman, the death of whose daughter was represented as the reward for sin. Sutherland’s ‘nemesis’ was the nemesis which accompanied religious insincerity, the inroads which insincerity made on moral resolve and the degenerative nature of the self-immolation which took him into a monastery. Froude’s moral was that Christianity had become identified with an anachronistic Hebrew mythology and would go on causing the anguish which Sutherland had suffered so long as it was expressed through Articles of Religion which could no longer be believed in their ordinary meaning. The Nemesis of Faith was both Carlylean and residually Tractarian insofar as it attacked middle-class Protestant respectability, contrasted mediaeval belief with modern insincerity and accused the Anglican clergy not only of disbelief but also of worldliness. God had to be understood as loving the poor ‘beyond the power of the heart to conceive’, Christianity as being a ‘poor man’s gospel’ which comforted the ‘millions’ who were ‘starved into sin by . . . hunger and privation’, and the poor themselves as having ‘enough knowledge to feel the deep injustice under which they were pining’. In The Nemesis of Faith, therefore, it was a clergyman’s office to pour ‘sweetness’ into the ‘bitterness’ of ‘injustice’, to stop Christianity ‘thrashing over . . . the . . . withered straw’ of the past, and to see ‘every field . . . waving with fresh, quite other, crops craving for its hand’. The objection which The Nemesis of Faith raised to credal Christianity was partly to its content and partly to the evil that was done when the Bible became an ‘idol’ and doctrines were built out of poetic metaphors. The Vedas, the Koran and the Zendavesta had enabled men to ‘live, pray and die’ no less than the Bible had done, and the Bible’s superiority consisted not in the doctrines which had been imposed on it by subsequent interpretation but in the ‘unconscionable stock of sweet and blessed thoughts’ characteristic of that natural, domestic, peasant religion which had survived all the changes of fashion to which ecclesiastical history bore witness. The Nemesis of Faith rejected almost all the doctrines of historic Christianity, while being as sceptical of new doctrine as of old. In addressing itself to a dislike of doctrine as well as of ‘the race for wealth’, it moved

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towards the position Froude had arrived at by the time he published volumes I and II of his History of England, where he not only followed Carlyle in seeing in printing-presses, reading-rooms, lecture-rooms and the bars of public houses God-given agencies for the opinion-forming capability which had once been the monopoly of churches, but also, through England’s experience as he described it in From the fall of Wolsey To the Spanish Armada, relived the experience he had lived through in the previous twenty years, including the experience of Chartism in England and the revolutions of 1848 on the Continent. Froude was not a Chartist and was aware that Chartism had failed. But he had been exercised by its progress and believed that it had challenged the Church of England to resist materialism, stretch its limbs in independence of the state and act as the ‘soul and conscience of the body politic’. These were the terms in which he abandoned The Nemesis of Faith – because the Anglican establishment would be better able than Tractarianism or Evangelicalism to restore that purity of intention which Christ had embodied, because an establishment was better able than dissent to treat theological questions as closed, and because a non-theological establishment would be likely to succeed where the ‘thousands upon thousands of sermons and theologies and philosophies’ which had descended upon Europe since the Reformation had failed.

After his departure from Oxford, Froude was taken into their homes by the Unitarian admirer who has been mentioned already, and by Kingsley, whose sister-in-law he married in 1849. Like Kingsley’s, Froude’s wife came from a family of sisters who had formed a Puseyite sorority and whose domestic Tractarianism and sympathy for Catholicism reinforced the resistance which both husbands were to offer to Tractarianism in the Church of England. Froude and Kingsley were close to each other from the point at which Froude read The Saint’s Tragedy. They discussed Froude’s History while it was being written and Kingsley reviewed volumes I and II when they appeared. In Westward Ho! a year earlier, he had paid the ultimate compliment of providing a fictional version of their shared conception of the Protestant heroism of the age of Elizabeth. IV When Westward Ho! was published in 1855, it was Kingsley’s4 fourth novel and marked the beginning of the change he was to effect in the future from 14

Rev. Charles Kingsley (1819–75), educated Helston Grammar School, King’s College, London and Magdalene College, Cambridge. Anglican parish clergyman. Author of The Saint’s Tragedy, 1848; Alton Locke, 1850; Yeast, 1851; Hypatia, 1853; Alexandria and Her Schools, 1854; Westward Ho!, 1855; The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History, 1860; The Water Babies, 1863; The Roman and the Teuton, 1864; Mr Kingsley and Dr Newman, 1864; Three Lectures on the Ancien Régime, 1867; Poems, 1872; and many sermons and pamphlets.

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being an Anglican-Socialist gadfly into sustaining a virtuous monarchy and muscular Christianity. ‘Muscular Christianity’ was a phrase that Kingsley questioned; it is not a crucial phrase here. Kingsley was a muscular Christian, as well as having a number of well-attested sexual peculiarities. But his central theme was neither monarchy nor muscular Christianity but the conflict of ideas which was described in Yeast, Alton Locke, Westward Ho!, Hypatia and Alexandria and Her Schools, all of which were published between 1849 and 1855 along with many significant essays and sermons about literature, sociology and religion. Like Froude, Kingsley was born in Devon – the son of a Tory Evangelical who, after frittering away a landed inheritance, had been ordained in his middle thirties. Kingsley was at school at Helston Grammar School – known under its headmaster, Derwent Coleridge, as ‘the Eton of the West’ – and was an undergraduate at King’s College, London and Magdalene College, Cambridge. At King’s and Magdalene in the late 1830s and early 1840s, Kingsley was influenced by Coleridge and Carlyle and developed a deep regard for Plato, Shelley, Southey, Mallory and The Faerie Queene. He experienced religious doubt, became a materialistic pantheist, and after an encounter with a prostitute, felt a hankering after Catholic monasticism. At one point he thought of emigrating to the American prairies. Eventually, after rejecting the law as a profession, he was ordained to a curacy at Eversley in Hampshire where, having married and had a family, he remained with one brief interlude and concurrent appointments in Cambridge, Windsor and elsewhere, either as curate or as rector until his death in 1875. Kingsley was shy and overworked, was worried for a long time about money and died prematurely after a number of breakdowns. In spite of this, he achieved fame by many routes, not only as poet and novelist, and author of The Argonauts, The Heroes and The Water Babies but also as horseman and walker, naturalist and fisherman, sanitary reformer, literary critic and critic of the universities, and Parson Lot in Politics For The People. He was an enemy of feminism and the feminist unsexing of women, believed in the Englishwoman’s duty to develop English feminine characteristics, and supported the extension of women’s as well as of working-men’s education. His activities, indeed, were so varied that it is often assumed that his thought must have been imbecile, if not in Three Lectures on the Ancien Régime which he delivered at the Royal Institution in 1867, then certainly in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and in The Roman and the Teuton which, though riveting when delivered as lectures, embarrassed Max Müller when he prepared an edition after Kingsley’s death. In the 1860s Kingsley was to identify himself with the ‘conservative’ disposition of the English, welcoming working-class enfranchisement because it could be effected safely, and arguing, as a long-term friend of the poor, that

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their condition had improved immeasurably since he had begun writing twenty years earlier. Kingsley’s mind was clogged with rubbish. But not more than the minds he was attacking, and not unreasonably in view of the aggression with which Protestantism was being challenged. It is difficult to recover the hatred the Tractarians felt for the fraudulence of the religious world they were attacking, for the socio-industrial structure which historic Anglicanism was incapable of controlling, and for the broadening and attenuation which was judged necessary if Christianity’s indefeasability was to be restored. Once Tractarian hatred has been recovered, however, it is an open question whether, after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, a united English Christendom would have been better able than the mid- and post-Victorian churches to effect a recovery in face of the institutional defeats which were to be suffered after 1828. In criticizing Newman in 1864, Kingsley was at his worst and Newman turned his defects to advantage. But Kingsley by then had for fifteen years been associating the Tractarians with theatrical celibacy, clerical effeminacy, sexual manicheism, ecclesiastical ‘Wertherism’, disregard for truth, and a ‘poetry of despair’, and had no intention of excusing them in pursuit of a higher purpose. Kingsley made it as easy for the biographer to show him up psychologically as George Eliot to show him up morally. What needs to be examined is the hard core of positive intellectuality which he displayed in his critical, imaginative and sociological writings, and in making it more difficult than it need have been to set up the alliance, which was to be set up later, between Protestant and Catholic Anglicanism. Westward Ho! was an antidote to the belief, ‘now current among our railway essayists’, that ‘all persons . . . before the year 1688’ had been ‘either fools or hypocrites’; it was an argument about the centrality of 1588, about the heroism which had made ‘the British Salamis’ possible, and about the Protestant energy which was to be found in Hawkins, Grenville and Drake, and in Oxenham, Yeo, Brimblecombe and Amyas Leigh. Westward Ho! had three female heroines, included many pieties about ‘angelic women’, and adopted a tone which was both chivalric and Tennysonian. Its hero, Amyas Leigh, was a Protestant pin-up with ‘broad limbs, keen blue eyes, curling locks and round honest face’ who ‘never thought about thinking or felt about feeling’, understood ‘nothing more of theology or of his own soul than was contained in the Church Catechism’, and was a Froudian, or Carlylean, and also perhaps a Freudian, hero who became a Lear-, Samson- or Homer-like figure once blinded in his battle for revenge against Don Guzman. What Westward Ho! did negatively was to dissociate the nation from ‘crucifixes, confession and extreme Unction’. What it did positively was to

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associate the nation with endurance and heroism on the seas, with the triumph of ‘Protestantism and freedom’ over ‘Popery and despotism’, and with the gospel of work which was not, as Kingsley understood it, a competitive gospel but a trigger to duty, a relief from self-consciousness, and a guarantee that men could face death confident that God would reward them justly. Westward Ho! was illusionless about force. It was frank about English atrocities, about the connection between courage and leadership, and about the conflict between Amyas’s duty to his crew and his vendetta against Don Guzman. There was Verdi-like melodrama and in the elder Salterne a grinding operatic vengefulness. The death of Parracombe supplied the occasion for a warning against epicureanism and the degradation of the Indians for a warning that primitive man, so far from being ‘the two-handed ape’ of evolutionary theory, was a ‘fallen being’ with an ‘immortal’ soul. In describing the defeat of the Armada, there were arguments about the ‘hearts of Englishmen’, their freedom from ‘etiquette . . . and . . . routine’, and the ladder of promotion that had been open to the ‘brave and shrewd’, ‘whatever their rank, age or . . . birth’. English seamen were shown replicating the ‘fellowfeeling between commander and commanded’ which had been ‘frozen to death’ among the Spaniards since the early Conquistadors, and there were accounts of relations between the Spaniards and American natives, in which the Spaniards were ‘fetish-ridden idolators’, the Jesuit missions added ‘military tyranny to monastic’, and the spectacle of ‘Indians, negroes and Zambos naked, emaciated and scarred with whips and fetters’, drew from the English mariners who saw them a ‘murmur of indignation . . . worthy of . . . righteous hearts’ who knew that ‘freedom was the . . . voice of God’. What Leigh stood for publicly was decent Protestantism, and there were many reminders of the courage and naturalness of Brimblecombe, the ship’s chaplain, of the importance of church services to the life of a ship, and of the sinfulness of Leigh’s refusal of communion before the Armada when he ‘sat in his cabin sharpening his sword’ because he was ‘in love and charity with no man’. It was also important that his blindness was a ‘just judgement’ on his hatred and that ‘every man who hated his brother’ was doomed to live in darkness. Westward Ho! has had a long run as an adventure story. It was not, however, just an adventure story but was a further statement of the doctrine at which Kingsley had arrived in Hypatia in 1853. Hypatia was first and foremost a Hollywood spectacular, with violent crowds, murderous, buggering monks, and a love-theme which was both false and excruciating. Yet Hypatia was neither mindless nor merely sensationalist. Its characters illuminated religious mentalities and underlined the relationship between the religious history of fifth-century Alexandria and the religious history of nineteenth-century England. Kingsley had already found homosexuality under ‘coat and bonnet’ where

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monks and Puseyites were concerned, and in Hypatia went on about this at considerable length. Hypatia also had other themes – the intrigue and promiscuity that were to be found among the Alexandrians and the practical capability, childlike solidarity and chivalry towards women that were to be found among the rough, tough Goths. At its peak, it had Phillamon, the heterosexual desert-monk who persuaded his abbot to let him enter the world and who was taken on to his staff by Cyril of Alexandria – ‘the most powerful man south of the Mediterranean’ – who ‘in reality . . . sat on the throne of the Pharoahs’ and exemplified the truth that any attempt to set up a theocracy by intrigue or persecution disclosed a ‘secret’ denial of God’s providence. In permitting Phillamon first to beard Hypatia in her lecture-room and then to yield to her influence, Kingsley described the battle in the mind and on the streets between Christianity, Judaism and Neo-Platonism, the murder of Hypatia by the monks and the massacre of the Jews by Cyril’s mob who found in Jewish ‘usury’ (or political economy) a Kingsleyite reason to turn against them. Hypatia herself was a philosopher with a vision of a paganized Africa. She aimed to put political teeth into Neo-Platonism, which Kingsley saw as a relief from Lockean sensationalism, a link with Bunsen and Hindu philosophy and a confirmation of the belief that theological dogma concealed from pride and conceit what Bacon’s God revealed only to the ‘gentle and simple-hearted’. Hypatia, Alexandria and Her Schools and Westward Ho! gave complementary accounts of the ways in which Christianity had operated in the past and implied a view of the way in which it should operate in the future. None of them, however, was directly about contemporary England or made as thorough and detailed an application of Christianity to England’s problems as Kingsley’s writings about literature were to do throughout. Kingsley was an exponent of literature not only because the study of books offered a way out of the slums for the literate working man but also because, if he read the right books, a working man would be able to understand the importance of Christianity. ‘The literature of every nation was its autobiography’, the study of English literature was the ‘true spiritual history of England’, and authors had a ‘pressing duty’ to infuse the Gospel’s ‘eternal truths’ into the modern mind. In particular they had a duty to see through Byron’s sins to Byron’s ‘awful sense’ of ‘a law . . . external to himself’, to see in Shelley’s feminine preference for ‘private sentiment’ over ‘inductive reasoning’ the ‘downfall of English poetry’ and to look to Tennyson to repair the ravages which Shelley had effected. Kingsley disbelieved in ‘poetic diction’. He believed in a sacramental coherence between ‘metre and rhythm’ on the one hand and ‘inward and spiritual grace’ on the other. In Tennyson he found this coherence, a coherence between Christianity and modern mentalities, and a ‘willing and deliberate champion of vital . . . and . . . orthodox . . . Christianity’.

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Kingsley did not say what he meant by ‘vital . . . and orthodox . . . Christianity’, perhaps because his readers were to meditate ‘solemnly . . . in solitude . . . or by the side of those they loved’ in order to find out for themselves which parts of In Memoriam would ‘suit them best’. What he did say was that Tennyson had been led by as ‘mighty’ a ‘spirit’ as Dante had been led by, had ‘ascended to the heights . . . and . . . gone down into the depths’ and, ‘within the unseen and alone truly real world’ beneath the ‘mere time-shadow men miscalled the Real’, had recorded an experience which would revive ‘faith and hope’ in those who had lost them. It remains to analyse the ‘faith and hope’ he examined in Yeast and Alton Locke. Yeast was Kingsley’s equivalent to Froude’s Nemesis of Faith – a drama about the conflict between ‘the younger generation’ and the ‘pitiless . . . bigotry’ and adherence to the ‘outward letter’ with which ‘their elders’ were adhering to the ‘old creeds’ of English Protestantism. There were warnings against Roman Catholicism, Epicurean materialism and an ‘un-Christian Spiritualism’; against alcoholism and opium-eating; and against the blasé cynicism about women which led one of its characters through immorality to suicide. And there were Kingsley’s heroes – Tregarva, the ‘great-hearted . . . huge-limbed’ Cornish gamekeeper, and Smith, the clever young man of the merchant-turned-landed classes who had flirted with Byronism, Wertherism, Bulwerism and epicurean sex, and needed a good woman to make him wholesome. What Kingsley allowed Smith to get was Mellot, aesthete and painter, and Barnakill, the mystagogue, who eventually took him (with Tregarva) to Asia in order to examine the wisdom of the East. By the end of Yeast it had become obvious that what Smith wanted was a religion, though it was uncertain how much he had learnt from Boehme, the Vedas, the Neo-Platonists, the Catholic mystics and Coleridge’s borrowings from the Germans, and in what ways Asia would help him ‘unravel the tangled web of his strange time’ when he returned to England. What was certain was the impact of Tregarva’s Pauline conversion and ‘manful heart’ in persuading him that the rural poor were housed worse than the pigs they looked after. It was Tregarva who took Smith on a slumming tour of investigation, Tregarva who pointed out that Methodism and Carlyle’s Chartism alone had understood the age’s neglect of God, Tregarva who knew, as Froude and Joseph Chamberlain were to state later, that the rural poor would first have to be made men and women before they could be made Christians. Through Tregarva, Kingsley made a case for the rural poor. Through Alton Locke, he made a case for the urban poor, drawing the moral from the cholera-ridden hovels of Bermondsey that, if Christianity was to prevail, it would have to be reconstructed. Alton Locke enabled Kingsley to express his dislike of evangelical Calvinism, of the ‘delusive phantoms’ of 1789, and of the ‘exclusive mysta-

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gogues of the enlightened few’. It also enabled him to indicate a divine covenant which had been ‘growing and spreading’ since the first Whitsun and to deduce from the fact that Christ had died for the ‘outcast and profligate’, the ‘felon and the slave’, and the ‘ape-like’ black man, as well as for everyone else, the principle that universal suffrage could have been demanded in terms of the ‘universal priesthood of Christians’. Though Alton Locke showed in what ways the revolutionary mentality was reasonable, however, it was mainly an essay about the unreasonableness of revolution, about revolutionaries as people who ought not to lead the nation, and about the clergy as people who ought to lead the nation. Kingsley had as little sympathy for a Levitical or Tractarian priesthood as he had for the dead Whiggism of the past. But his view of the priesthood was not less demanding than the Tractarian view and was much more political. The people never can be themselves without co-operation with the priesthood, and the priesthood never can be themselves without co-operation with the people. They may help to make a sect-Church for the rich . . . or a sect-Church for paupers (which is also the most subtle form of a sect-Church for the rich) . . . but if they would be truly priests of God, and priests of the Universal Church, they must be priests of the people, priests of the masses, priests after the likeness of Him who died on the Cross. (Alton Locke, vol. II, pp. 282–5)

‘Him who died on the Cross’ was not exactly Froude’s language. Nor, even in the 1840s, did Froude follow the most imaginative of Kingsley’s gestures towards a restored Christian intellectuality. Froude had, nevertheless, as exact a sense as Kingsley of the religious crisis and was as explicit about the dangers which were involved. V In the early 1850s Froude’s view was that, though Puritanism had long since expelled the ‘devil of Catholicism’, England was in a condition of ‘utter spiritual disintegration’ from which she needed to be rescued. Catholicism had held up examples of human perfection in the Middle Ages, but the ‘age of the saints’ had gone, mediaeval saints were ‘no longer of any service’, and modern Englishmen, having been offered their biographies by Newman, had with ‘sufficient clearness expressed their opinion of them’. In showing what should replace them, Froude made a positive statement. At this time Froude was attacking wealth for buying the respect of which sanctity had been deprived and Protestantism for neglecting to build up ideals of sanctity which would be relevant to the ‘complicated’ conditions of modern life. England’s Forgotten Worthies and The History of England were contributions to the attempt to enable the Church of England to become relevant to the future. In the preface to the 1870 edition of The History of England Froude recalled that the first edition of volume I fourteen years earlier had defended the

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English Reformers against High Churchmen and Tractarians from the one side and against ‘Liberal statesmen and political philosophers’ from the other. He repeated as emphatically as in 1856 that ‘the Reformation was a good thing’ even if it had been ‘done . . . badly’, that it had been accomplished in England with ‘peculiar skill and success’, and that it had permitted the English to control the ‘passions’ called out by religious controversy in ways which had not been possible in France and Germany. Froude treated the defeat of the Armada as a ‘weapon of the Almighty’ and the ‘sermon’ which had completed England’s conversion. The Armada could perfectly well have suppressed Protestantism, left Europe defenceless before the Jesuits, and compelled ‘freedom’ to return, if at all, as in France after 1789, in the form of a ‘negation of all religion’. In Drake and Burleigh, Froude saw science and intelligence defending themselves against obscurantism and superstition, a form of progress which ‘in the long run’ was to ‘command the mind of the world’, and a resistance to reaction which, if Drake had lost, would have done what the Tractarians were trying to do in England and the Roman Cardinals were doing in Rome – restore the ‘magical theory of the priesthood’, divorce intelligence from Christianity, and ‘betray . . . life and the world to a godless secularity’ by turning Christianity into a ‘childish superstition’. In describing the condition of England up to the middle of the sixteenth century, Froude suggested that labour had not then been looked upon as a ‘market commodity’, that the ‘well-being of all classes’ had been preferred to the accumulation of capital and that the ‘laws of supply and demand’ had been subordinated both to ‘moral rule’ and to a ‘militancy’ against social injustice. In explaining why a Reformation had nevertheless been necessary, he fixed, with Kingsleyite insinuation, on the monarchy’s failure to control ‘wealthy, powerful and . . . faithless celibates’ who had been ‘cut off from the duties and . . . pleasures of ordinary life’. Froude saw in popular Protestantism a ‘craving for the higher life’, a protest against ‘effete paraphernalia’, and the ‘honest anger of honest men at a system which had passed the limits of toleration’. He praised the students and labourers who had brought it to fulfilment in the sixteenth century and attributed to them a Kingsleyite affirmation, as against contemporary ‘wealth, rank . . . and authority’, of the principle which lay at the root of all religion – that the service man owed to God was not ‘words . . . magic forms or ceremonies and opinions, but . . . holiness . . . purity and obedience to the everlasting laws of duty’. Volume I was one of the high points of the Protestant reanimation. It made illuminating statements of the view, which Froude had arrived at in the 1840s, that dogma was to be mistrusted, that primitive Protestantism’s sole dogma had been about man’s duty to ‘fear God and keep his commandments’, and that the ‘living-robe of life’ in which Christian truth had originally been clothed had become a ‘winding-sheet of corruption’ in the Middle Ages.

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Froude disliked the Ultramontanism of Mary and Pole and the sectarianism of the Marian exiles. Both had had to be resisted, and it was Burleigh, more even than Elizabeth, who had kept in touch with decency and common sense and led the way towards a non-fanatical, non-theological Protestantism which had been deeply suited to the situation. Froude’s History, though Protestant, was not crude. It had a documentary sense of the unilinear character of the historical process, of the accidental character of historical transitions, and of the importance of both force and inertia in the lives of peoples. Power-struggles and recessions in charity had enveloped the purity of the gospel once ‘the religion of Christ’ had become Christianity; and, if Tudor England had been ruled by universal suffrage, Catholicism would have survived, the ‘rope’ and the ‘faggot’ would have been made permanent features of English life; and ‘the father of lies’ who had invented theology would have given England a ‘God of Love . . . torturing in hell-fire . . . the souls of those who held wrong opinions on the composition of His Nature’. The ultimate message of Froude’s History was that Drake and Burleigh had enabled Catholics to become the High Anglicans of subsequent generations, that the Reformers had been turned into the party of ‘the pillory’, the ‘slit ears’ and the ‘bishop’s prison’, and that the disappearance of ‘theological doctrinalism’ after 1688 had enabled the Church of England to fulfil with moderate success the ‘wholesome functions of a religious establishment’ for a hundred and forty years longer. For the future it pointed in three directions – pessimistically, at the difficulty involved in persuading men who ‘believed it their highest duty to destroy each other’ that they should ‘respect each other’s opinions’ as well; accusingly, at all attempts to elevate the clergy into a ‘separate’, and the episcopate into a ‘supernatural’, order; historically, through the patriotic self-congratulation for which in England, ‘when it came to fighting at last’, the ‘acrid venom’ of theology had been tempered down and neither Roundhead nor Cavalier had dishonoured their causes and their country by the atrocities of a Tilly or a Guise. His History was Froude’s Ring, everything important that he had to say he said in it. The outcome was a Protestantism whose theology, however admiring of sixteenth-century martyrdom, was so much attenuated as to be almost indistinguishable from ethical hard-mindedness.

Carlyle was intense and prophetic in tearing the gut out of historic orthodoxy. Froude married Carlyle to Newman on the way to creating a secular Protestantism, while Kingsley, though disengaging from dogma, remained a more Christian thinker than either. In Burke and early Disraeli, the aim was to restore religion at least as much as it was to restore Christianity to the modern world.

2 Christianity and literature I

When any state, as such, shall not acknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world . . . when it shall abolish the Christian religion by a regular decree; when it shall persecute . . . all its ministers . . . with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty . . . when it shall generally shut up, or pull down, churches; when the few buildings which remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purpose of making a profane apotheosis of monsters, whose vices and crimes have no parallel amongst men, and whom all other men consider as objects of general detestation . . . when, in . . . mockery of all religion, they institute impious, blasphemous, indecent, theatrick rites, in honour of their vitiated, perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own corrupted and bloody republick; when schools and seminaries are founded at publick expense to poison mankind . . . with the horrible maxims of this impiety; when wearied out with incessant martyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting for religion, they permit it only as a tolerated evil . . . I call this atheism by establishment. (Edmund Burke, Three Letters . . . on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France 1796–7, in The Works of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, 1826, vol. VIII, pp. 170–1) Unhappy Asia, do you call it? It is the unhappiness of Europe over which I mourn. (Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred: or The New Crusade, 1847, 1881 edn, p. 309)

All the writing which deserves to be thought of as doctrinal in England in the last two hundred years deals directly or obliquely, with ‘the weightier matters of morality and religion’. In this chapter we shall examine two thinkers for whom these ‘weightier matters’ were approached by means of an eloquently literary account of religion and public duty. In modern England conceptions of public duty, where they do not go back to 1559, 1642 or 1688, go back to the French Revolution. It was in support of the revolution that Victorian liberalism was invented by Fox and Paine and in reaction against it, and against the English fifth-column which Fox and Paine had created, that the first version of the alliance between the Whig and Tory resistances created the ‘conservatisms’, both religious and secular, which have been such important aspects of English thought and politics since. Both of the writers we are concerned with in this chapter were self-consciously literary, were conservative in some practical political sense and gave a Romantic twist to their consideration of society and religion. Neither was self-consciously latitudinarian. But for Disraeli, Christianity was an adjunct to the Arabian religion of which Judaism had been a part, and Burke was not only the advocate of religion at least as much as he was the advocate of 24

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Christianity in relation to India but also left it uncertain whether his invention of the counter-revolutionary resistance to the Jacobin revolution in Europe was primarily religious or sociological. I Though eighteenth-century French opinion had long admired English government by contrast with French government, it had not expected a revolution in 1789. That there was a revolution was even more surprising to the English. To Gibbon, it was ‘amazing’. When the Revolution began, Gibbon was fifty-two and was living in Lausanne. When called upon to feel, he felt strongly. He felt that France had ‘dissolved’, that the nation was ‘mad’, and that the ‘dream’ of a ‘pure and perfect democracy’ would need a ‘Richelieu or Cromwell’ to control it. Though he noted the plundering of the Church, he noted it as a sign that property was under threat. By 1792 he had discerned in the ‘spirit of innovation’ in England as fearful a threat as had destroyed the monarchy in France. These fears, and Gibbon’s newfound interest in parliamentary history, were political, and were met when England’s ‘grief and indignation’ at the execution of Louis XVI made him ‘glory in the character of an Englishman’. Because the others were dead, Gibbon experienced the Revolution where his friends – Goldsmith, Garrick, Reynolds and Johnson – did not. Burke also experienced it, and Gibbon admired the ‘eloquence . . . and chivalry’ with which Burke reacted to it. What Gibbon did not admire was Burke’s ‘superstition’. In examining the ‘superstition’ which Burke propagated between 1790 and his death in 1797 we shall be examining a major statement about Christianity. When Burke1 heard of the events of July 1789, he was comparatively relaxed. Relaxation ended when an intensification of attention produced Speech on The Army Estimates and Reflections on The Revolution in France. Reflections ‘explained’ the Revolution and showed that it had nothing to do with the revolution of 1688. But even Reflections made no proposal for doing anything about it. It was not until after Reflections that Burke urged Pitt to mobilize British power to help Christian Europe defeat its enemy. 11

Edmund Burke (1728–97), educated Ballitore, County Kildare and Trinity College, Dublin. Literary career after reading for the Bar in London, 1750–9. Secretary to politicians, 1759–66. MP 1766–97. Minister, 1782 and 1783. Author of A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756; A Philosophical Enquiry into The Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful, 1756; Observations on ‘The Present State of the Nation’, 1769; Thoughts on The Cause of The Present Discontents, 1770; Speech on American Taxation, 1774; Speech on Conciliation with America, 1775; Reflections on The Revolution in France, 1790; Letter to a Member of The National Assembly, 1791; Appeal From The New To The Old Whigs, 1791; Letter to William Elliott, 1795; A Letter To A Noble Lord, 1796; Thoughts on French Affairs, 1797; and Letters on The Proposals for Peace with The Regicide Directory of France, 1796–7.

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Burke was a man-of-letters, with a self-conscious conception of the character of culture. In these years he worked this culture to the bone in expressing the meaning of a major world event, perceiving in the actions of the Jacobins in France a disintegration of Christendom and the removal of life from a ‘carcase’ enormous enough in death ‘to poison all Europe’. This perception embodied an understanding of existence which transcended parliamentary considerations. It was neither parliamentary calculation nor the needs of the House of Commons which induced a Wagnerian sense of destiny and an impregnation of day-to-day political conceptions with conceptions acquired from the classical combination of epic and tragedy to which Burke’s mind had been turned during thirty years’ consideration of the practice of literature.

Burke was the son of a Roman Catholic mother and a Protestant father, and had married a Roman Catholic. He was educated by a Quaker schoolmaster and at Trinity College, Dublin. On coming to London in his twenties, he had read for the Bar and taken the first steps towards a career as a lawyer and manof-letters. In A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), he gave an extended parody of Bolingbroke’s Tory atheism. He then published an essay on aesthetics. In the following decade he wrote most of the Annual Register and essays on English history, English law, the drama and so on. In the middle 1760s his literary career virtually ended when he undertook a political career. From then onwards he was a Whig politician and in the 1780s had an even briefer experience of office than Enoch Powell was to have in the twentieth century. Reflections, published when he was sixty-two – the age at which Hobbes had published Leviathan – was his reaction to events as striking and fundamental as the events to which Leviathan had been Hobbes’s reaction. Burke dropped his literary career because he found in Parliament the fame he had sought in writing. There was, however, a continuity between A Vindication of Natural Society and A Philosophical Enquiry into The Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful in the 1750s and Reflections and the counter-revolutionary writings of the 1790s, and a gap between them as more immediately political concerns were interposed. The speeches and pamphlets of the middle period were written, among other things, as literature. But A Vindication of Natural Society and A Philosophical Enquiry were more interesting and raise many of the questions to which Reflections and the counterrevolutionary writings provided answers. Reflections was first of all an attempt to prevent Whig opinion running after democracy and Whig leaders running after Fox. Secondly, it was a description of contemporary events, written at a distance and in some ignorance, but reacting to them as they occurred or were heard of. Thirdly, it was an interpretation of this description, structuring it historically and discern-

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ing in the sociological change it analysed a ‘tragic turn’ in a ‘monstrous drama’. Burke wrote an ornate, theatrical prose which did not argue. On the contrary, it demonstrated the tragedy he was describing. The tragedy as it unfolded after Reflections concerned the fall of a king and implied that all kings would fall if this one was allowed to. And it discerned in the execution of Louis XVI ‘the catastrophe of the tragedy . . . the necessary result of all the preceding parts’. Burke did not present Louis XVI as blameless. He did not conceal the errors of Marie Antoinette. Neither did he avoid the conclusion that ‘Pitt’s war in favour of the monarchy must be against the monarchs as well as against the rebels’. His view, nevertheless, was that the fall of the ancien régime had been tragic because it had been overcome by evil. Of evil as Burke understood it, the prime cause had been the conspiracies mounted by French men-of-letters against ‘the Christian religion’ and, on this view, Jacobinism was ‘dedicated’ and ‘shameful’, and displayed a ‘cold malignity of . . . spirit’ like that of the ‘principal of evil himself’. Before 1789 Burke had not given much attention to the Jacobinical writings. It was not until they were associated with the public actions of the National Assembly that he fixed on Diderot, Rousseau, Natural Rights, class conflict, and a European conspiracy against Christianity, as targets for attack. What Burke attacked in Reflections was not only assumptions but also consequences – the erosion of Bourbon authority and the replacement of the historic combination of King, Church and aristocracy by a disreputable alliance between men-of-letters and monied interests producing a régime run by stockjobbers, writers, lawyers and Jews. Reflections insisted that those who were borrowing majesty were incapable of wearing it, that there was an evil connection between the expropriation of church lands and the corruption of the currency, and that the ‘incompatibility’ of Jacobinism and civilization provided reasons for believing that the revolution would fail. It was the realization, soon after Reflections had been published, that the revolution was not going to fail, which made it necessary to become prophetic. What was prophetic was the claim that the French Revolution was the first occasion since the conversion of Constantine on which Christianity had been dethroned, and had shown what would happen if ‘impiety and barbarism’ were to effect as fundamental a transvaluation as that effected by Christianity and barbarism in the Roman Empire. In 1790 these were prophecies. By 1796 they had become ‘facts’. For the first time there had been a ‘complete revolution’ which was ‘the reverse of all the laws on which civil life had hitherto been upheld in all the governments of the world’ and had provided for the future ‘an inexhaustible repertory of one kind of example’ – a ‘cannibal philosophy . . . springing from night and hell [with]

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obscene harpies . . . decking themselves in divine attributes [and] polluting [everything] with the slime of their filthy offal’. This was a description of ‘Antichrist’, and Burke’s reaction was neither the cautious nor the empirical reaction it is sometimes presented as being. Burke asserted that Christianity was at risk, that its future depended on military power, and that Britain alone had the power to give a lead in defending it. During six years of theological and strategic severity, he denounced politicians in London, Vienna and elsewhere who preferred national, dynastic or imperial interests to the cultural and religious duty to prevent fanatical philosophers ‘sacrificing the . . . human race to . . . their experiments’. In the 1790s Burke did not confine his attack to Paine, Priestley and Fox, whom he regarded as Jacobinism’s agents in England, nor to the 80,000 members of the responsible classes who he believed, had been bamboozled by them. As Jacobin ‘energy’ became increasingly brilliant, he increasingly concluded that it was likely to triumph universally unless Britain won ideological space for the ‘contracted remains’ of Christendom to survive in. Burke identified Christendom as the ‘Ancient Order of Europe’ and treated Pitt’s leadership as necessary to it. But he criticized Pitt for blurring the aim and having a maritime instead of a continental strategy, and was much distressed by the ‘folly of aristocracy’ and the refusal of England’s ‘blood’ and ‘property’ to defend France against ‘faction’ in the ‘civil war’ in which Europe was being enveloped. By 1795 Burke’s landmarks had crumbled. ‘Noble blackguards’ was a new language for him to use about noblemen; in calling prophetically for a ‘true republican spirit’, he linked ‘religion’ to ‘virtue’ and ‘individuals’ to ‘authority’, and advocated a new public solidarity as the only way of ‘rescuing . . . monarchies [from the] imbecility of courts and the madness of crowds’. ‘The great’, he wrote in words of Cromwellian harshness, ‘must submit to the dominion of prudence and virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.’ What Burke wanted was the use of force to ‘civilize France in order to prevent the rest of Europe being barbarized’. He wanted Britain to give France back her monarchy, aristocracy and clergy and to treat the emigrant French nobility as France’s ‘natural, legal, constitutional’ embodiment. In arguing that the real desire of the French people was to ‘repossess themselves’ of their ‘dignity . . . religion . . . and property’, he looked forward to every village having its counter-revolution and to ‘the people at large in all countries’ understanding that ‘the symbols of public robbery’ could not have ‘the sanction and . . . currency that belonged exclusively to the symbols of public faith’. In thinking positively, Burke was mixing the terms of his Whiggism, enlarging its meaning, and giving its historic concern with Europe a Christian twist it had not had beforehand. By 1793 he was not only the apologist of Catholic

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as well as Protestant Europe, but was also supplying British policy with a raison d’être which transcended British history. Burke’s point, made early and repeated with increasing certainty in the 1790s, was that what had happened in France had had no parallel or precedent in history and that the ‘great, overbearing master calamity of the time was advancing’. The war itself bore no ‘resemblance to any other that had ever existed in the world’ and imposed a duty to convert the ‘Ancient Constitution’ and Whig tenets of the 1770s into the European symbol of a counter-revolutionary Christian alliance between Church, King and nobility. In Burke’s writings in the 1790s Europe’s political system had four salient characteristics. Its régimes were monarchial or, where they were republics, were ‘constituted upon ancient models’. It depended on the ownership of land, which also guaranteed the existence of a clergy. There was a ruling-class culture which, having been established by the time of the Renaissance, had survived the disruptions which had been caused by the Reformation. And, in face of Jacobinical and Voltarean atheism, the differences between its four great types of Christianity had become less important than the similarities. Burke had not treated these as important insights before the Revolution. They became important when contrasted with the Jacobinical régime and gave a new twist to the account he had given previously of Britain’s relations with Europe. The new twist was made possible by the damage which the Revolution had done to the French Constitution. The question this raised was whether British involvement was unavoidable. To this, Burke’s answer was that it was. Mediaeval England had been part of Europe; so had the England of Elizabeth. William III had made her Europe’s ‘arbiter’ and had established the Whig policy of defending the European balance of power. The Treaty of Utrecht had restored the balance and reaffirmed the ‘system’ which the Seven Years’ War and the Diplomatic Revolution had not succeeded in destroying. This was Burke’s answer in terms of the secular balance. But there was a duty to consider something more than the secular balance. The moral, cultural and religious structure which was being threatened in each of the states of Europe was being threatened, he believed, in Britain through insinuation, both open and concealed, of the diseased untruth characteristic of the Jacobinical doctrines in France and, in reaction to this, British statesmen were asked, in innumerable statements from 1791 onwards, to face up to Jacobinism and recognize that national interests were inseparably bound up in the fate of ‘civilization’. The national interest as a dominant conception was attacked and Pitt called on to call the nation to its ecumenical destiny in this ‘aweful crisis of the world’ where Christians must be supported if ‘all’ were not to ‘fall in the crash of a Common Ruin’. In the last two years of his life, Burke claimed that there was no longer a ‘people of France’, since ‘the community’ had been terrorized by ‘murderers’.

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At the same time he saw Jacobinism ‘penetrating’ into every ‘rank and class’ in Great Britain. His Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France offered reasons for predicting the ‘utter and irretrievable ruin of the ministry . . . crown . . . succession . . . importance . . . independence . . . and . . . very existence of this country’ if ostracization of the Jacobins was ended. II What Burke interpreted the Revolution as doing was to effect a major upheaval in historic relations between the professional and landed classes, and to give lawyers a power they had not had beforehand. It had replaced the clergy by men-of-letters, who had created a body of public teaching that had not been offered beforehand. Above all, it had transformed the public examples that were offered to the French people and had set its hand to the construction of a post-Christian public doctrine. The conception of a public doctrine was central to Burke’s conception of a polity, since it was only where men were given good examples that the virtues would be able to control the passions. Burke was not rich; he had little land and was not one of the ‘high and mighty’. He was a ‘man of talent’ with a pressing sensitivity about his role and a pressing desire to mark it off from the role played by ‘men of talent’ in France. In contrasting Christian modesty with Jacobinical arrogance, he sketched a view of the functions and limitations of public example. On Burke’s understanding, society involved a habit of ‘deference’ to ‘authority’. ‘Authority’, however, was dependent on opinion and belief. It was dependent also on obstructing the tendency of ‘talent’, unless indoctrinated, ‘naturally to gravitate towards Jacobinism’. One object in writing, one purpose behind the vast outpouring of the 1790s, was to persuade talent not to do this, to prevent it reproducing in Britain the calamity it had produced in France, and to show that compassion, humanity and belief in God were as necessary for it as for anyone else. Burke did not write about ‘talent’ as though it could manipulate the wielders of ostensible power in the way that both Mills were to do later. But he thought of it as giving promptings, and as so generally impregnating the context in which the aristocracy ruled that it might be said to be writing the aristocracy’s lines. The conception Burke was sketching was of a society in which the various types of disciplined intelligentsia (i.e. judges, politicians, teachers and the clergy) made prescription tolerable and obedience natural by contributing to a moral and intellectual cohesion superior to anything that could be ensured by stockjobbers, money-dealers or an undisciplined intelligentsia by itself. He offered no systematic doctrine and wrote no work of systematic theory. But his rhetoric was deliberate and his language systematically insistent. Between them they answered the questions, what should rulers believe? What should

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their public teaching consist of ? What, in other words, is true politically, and, if there is a difference, what should be taught? It is possible to extract from Burke’s post-revolutionary writings doctrines about God’s providence, God’s role as the author of the world, and God’s part in giving man the means to rescue himself from subservience to the brutal passions. God was important in Burke’s imagination and was a necessary rejoinder to the ‘atheism’ by which he was confronted. Moreover, Burke wrote often about the laws of nature as God’s handiwork and about the links which bound duty in the world to the eternal destinies of the universe. There is no difficulty in imputing a Natural Law doctrine to Burke if one wants to, and wants to call it that; it is easy to suggest that Burke’s view was that it was because God had given them that the laws of nature were to be obeyed. Though Burke can be found writing these things, he did not really emphasize them; where emphasis was given, it was less on God’s will or command than on men’s perception of God, and less on God’s power and externality than on the human need man has for sublime objects to which to offer honour and respect. The advantage of established institutions was attributed, in origin, to God’s grace, but their development over time was conceived of as the work of men, and Burke’s political writings will best be understood, not by describing his conception of God and deducing a politics from it but by seeing his politics as extended answers to the more Humean questions which Adam Smith had also answered: what is natural to man? And what political conventions and structure does man’s nature require? Burke wrote frequently about the ‘natural feelings of humanity’ and the ‘natural and unsuborned feelings of mankind’. But an important aspect of man’s ‘nature’ was his ‘brutal passions’, and these had to be restrained. At all relevant points in the 1790s, the emphasis was less on the importance of curbing the ‘vicious and desperate part of human nature’ than on the contrast between the ‘spirit of system’ and ‘modern philosophy’ which destroyed restraint and the ‘sentiments of natural humanity’ which wanted restraint. ‘Natural’ implied not only the maintenance of life and sociability (by creating a restraint upon the passions), but also a very specific range of connected characteristics. It excluded plutocracy and democracy, included inequality of property and rank, and recognized not only that certain occupations could not be a ‘matter of honour’ to anyone but also that it was ‘oppressive’ for a person of low or dishonourable occupation to rule. About these characteristics, four things should be noticed. First, although God was treated as though He was behind the needs of man’s nature, it was men’s needs that were predominant since society was a ‘benefit’ to which men had a ‘right’ (however ironically used). Second, the sort of society Burke was conceiving assumed a high degree of continuity between man’s ‘nature’ and his ‘achievements’, even when it was unclear whether Jacobinism’s ‘black and savage atrocity’ was or was not part of that nature. Third, since it was through

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social action over time that men made themselves what it was rationally possible to become, prescription had in some mystical manner a prior claim on their consent for the future, and produced public idols for men to honour and respect. Finally, although such idols were sufficient in normal times, in the 1790s something more was needed because the Revolution had shown what happened when idols were destroyed, and counter-revolutionary force alone could respond to the natural desire to restore them. What Burke was pin-pointing was Jacobinism’s destruction of objects to honour and respect, and the Revolution’s dependence on ‘terror’, ‘the gallows’ and the guillotine. What he wanted was a ‘decent drapery’ to spread over coercion – a symbolic representation which would induce ‘love and veneration’ for rulers, make it possible for power to be used gently, and express in the highest mode possible the way in which all men should think about their role in the social union. Burke’s psychology was sensationalist; ‘pleasing illusions’ were conceived of as operating through the senses. In Reflections he gave them not only a content – ‘the spirit of a gentleman’, ‘church establishments’ and a consciousness of sublimity – but also reminders – to rulers of their duty to remain independent of the ‘transparent praise of the vulgar’, to rulers and citizens alike that they would have to account for their freedom to the ‘Author of Society’. There are so many points in Burke’s writing after the Revolution at which he emphasized the Christian character of society that it scarcely seems necessary to gloss them. Yet it is possible to wonder. Was Christianity really central, or was it, in the conditions of 1789, merely an instrument for teaching the Whig doctrine that ‘true religion’ never taught men to ‘break into your house to take your plate’? Were ‘divine government’ and ‘divine providence’ more than tactical antidotes to the Jacobinical package-deal of untruth that Burke was controverting? These are difficult questions which may be answered by comparing Burke’s counter-revolutionary writings with his pre-revolutionary writings. III The difficulty in deducing specifically Christian opinions from Burke’s earlier writing is considerable. Burke did not claim, as he was to claim in the 1790s, that religion and government went hand in hand and would fall together if they fell separately. All he claimed was that the language which Bolingbroke and the Voltaireans were using to attack statesmen and priests could as easily be used to attack statesmen and kings, and that the consequence of doing so would be as damaging to civil society, which Bolingbroke as a Tory claimed to defend, as to the ecclesiastical religion which he had made it his business to attack. A Vindication was a satirical parody which implied without stating. The

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point of the parody – that political authority could be blamed for creating evils like war and civil conflict which political authority was designed to remedy – implied nothing more positive than that ecclesiastical religion had been unjustly blamed for evils, like the nature of man, which it had been designed to remedy. This was as far as Burke went. There were a few positive Christian affirmations in A Vindication and in A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of The Origins of The Sublime and Beautiful, and the latter included a distinct conception of the ‘dread’ and ‘awe’ surrounding kingship, of the sublimity of the social bond, and of the immensity and majesty of God. But A Philosophical Enquiry also made it clear that Burke’s development had taken him a very long way without inserting anything of importance which was explicitly Christian. Neither is this view altered by consideration of the pamphlets and political speeches from the 1770s and 1780s which, while referring frequently to religion and defining the basis of religious establishments, also stopped short of an explicitly Christian position. In fact, it is in the political pamphlets of these years that one finds Burke’s first real statement about the indefeasibility not of Christianity but of the natural constitution of society in Ireland and India. Burke’s earliest work about Ireland, written in the 1760s but not published until after his death, was an attack on the penal laws against Roman Catholicism – ‘the old religion of the country’ and the religion of the Irish family – on the ground that they abrogated ‘the rights of nature’, tampered with the ‘natural foundations of society’, and were a cause of ‘misery’ and ‘impiety’ in the nation. In the 1790s Burke’s position was that Catholic Ireland must be made an ally and Protestant hegemony modified because Jacobinism would take hold of the Irish people if they were not. This, from one point of view, was an application of the Christian principles suggested by the need to organize resistance to the Revolution in France. From another point of view, it was a continuation of Burke’s Indian framework in the 1780s which had covered the Irish framework of the 1760s with a top-coating of Hinduism and Islam. Burke’s account of the Indian problem was as follows. The original people were the Hindus, who had developed distinctive and inward-looking ‘manners, religion, customs and usages’. These had ‘connected the people with their land’, had united ‘blood . . . opinions and soil [into] a consistent piece’, and had formed a social basis uniting the rules of honour, law and religion in a single system which bound men by ‘eternal and indissoluble bonds to the rules of caste’. Once established, Hinduism had ‘made no converts’, nor made any attempt to do so. But the Hindu polity and ‘the spirit of a Hindu government’ had survived Mohammedan and Portuguese bigotry and Tartar and Arabian tyranny. It had supplied the historic model of Indian existence and the prescriptive guarantee of Indian felicity, and had survived

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intact until Hastings’s evil system of ‘maxims . . . and principles’, and a revolutionary disrespect for rank and religion, had destroyed it. When Burke told the House of Lords that Hastings’s crimes were ‘horrible’, therefore, and that he deserved to be impeached, he was not talking idly, nor meaning merely that Hastings was a ‘wild natural man’ whose ‘passions’ were ‘corrupted and . . . gangrened’. He was also reminding them, after the execution of Louis XVI, that ‘the fate of great personages’ spoke to ‘the heart’ because ‘men of great place . . . and hereditary authority could not fall without a horrible crash upon all about them’. The accusations Burke levelled at Hastings and ‘Indianism’ were the same as the accusations he levelled at Jacobinism and the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland in the 1760s; in all three cases he was asserting the moral and felicific primacy of the sociologically secure. By 1794 he had identified both Indianism and Jacobinism as threats to political stability in England, where the impeachment of Hastings was as important as the defeat of the Revolution since, unless it was shown to be odious to give power to ‘obscure people’ and wrong to ‘confiscate for the purposes of the state’, ‘generation after generation’ of Englishmen would be ‘tainted with these . . . detestable principles’ and their associated vices. So far as India was concerned, Burke’s writings had nothing to do with Christianity. They had to do with God insofar as God had given men society in order to direct and control their passions. But in India He had given it in the form of a Hindu or a Muslim polity and there can be no doubt that these were what Burke identified as God’s law there. Nor is it easy to see that his view was different anywhere else. In his writing religious establishments were justified on grounds which Hobbes would have approved; it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, until the Revolution disclosed the political possibilities of an alternative, his position was to be equated with the simple assertion that whatever religion is for long enough, is right. Burke’s Christian system, among other things, was, then, a bag of political opportunisms and a reaction to a political situation; and it might, therefore, be supposed that it is of little permanent interest. This supposition would be erroneous. Burke’s system was an attack, before they had prevailed, on almost all the assumptions which have dominated political discussion in the modern world. The attack was made from mixed motives in a political context. It is not for that reason less useful in reminding us that what has been held up for conservation by even Conservative thinkers since has been the Jacobinism which Burke attacked, and that Burke’s importance lies in the fact that he provided a massive indictment of the régime of the future before it had been established. Burke’s criticisms do not alter the fact of Jacobinism or the variety of mitigations which have been supplied by modern quiescence and inventiveness. Nor, to a contemporary intelligence, will they suggest the putting-back of

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clocks or the restoration of an ancien régime. They do suggest, however, in the manner of Pope Pius IX, that a certain diffidence and modesty is desirable about the merits of modern mentalities.

Disraeli and Burke have both achieved status as conservative thinkers and intellectual inspirations for English conservatism and the English Conservative Party. But, just as the ‘pragmatism’ of Burke’s ‘little platoon’ so much admired by modern Conservatives misunderstands the thrust of Burke’s argument, so ‘Disraelian social reform’ misunderstands the thrust of Disraeli’s argument which, more even than Burke’s argument, was the outcome of a peculiar, personal, religious history. IV Disraeli’s2 paternal grandfather was an Italian Jew who had come to England in the eighteenth century. Disraeli’s father had been enabled by his mother’s inheritance and his father’s stockbroking to lead the life of a man-of-letters, and Disraeli, before he was anything else, was a devoted Jewish son (and heir). Isaac Disraeli had Enlightenment, Rousseauvian and Byronic phases, and a phase as a literary controversialist and poet before settling down to writing the twenty or so prose works of his maturity. The most successful of these was Curiosities of Literature, but he also wrote an unreadable anti-Jesuit novel, a Tory account (in seven volumes) of James I, Charles I, Eliot, Pym and Hampden, and a latitudinarian anti-rabbinical account of Judaism in which he pleaded for an end to the persecution of Jews by Christians. Isaac Disraeli took hold of Disraeli’s mind and helped him towards the opinions he began to express in the 1820s. When Disraeli was thirteen, Isaac quarrelled with his synagogue, left the synagogue in the company of his wife and, while not becoming a Christian himself, had his children, who had been circumcised in infancy, baptised in the Church of England. Disraeli did not go to either an Anglican boarding-school or a university. He was brought up in Isaac’s library and at Nonconformist and Unitarian schools in the Greek and Latin classics, and was articled at the age of seventeen to a firm of London solicitors. Through Isaac’s friendship with John Murray, the publisher, he acquired an early acquaintance with London menof-letters, and at the age of twenty, wrote a satire on contemporary society which Murray declined to publish. He was then involved in unsuccessful 12

Benjamin Disraeli, first Earl of Beaconsfield (1804–81), educated Unitarian schools. MP, 1837–76. Cabinet Minister, 1852, 1858 and 1866–7. Prime Minister 1874–80. Author of Vivian Grey, 1826–7; The Voyage of Captain Popanilla, 1828; Contarini Fleming, 1832; The Wondrous Tales of Alroy and The Rise of Iskander, 1832; What Is He?, 1833; Peers and People, 1835; The Letters of Runnymede, 1836; The Spirit of Whiggism, 1836; Henrietta Temple, 1837; Venetia, 1837; Coningsby, 1844; Sybil, 1845; Tancred, 1847; Lord George Bentinck, 1852; Lothair, 1870; and Endymion, 1880.

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stock-exchange speculation, wrote three pamphlets against State regulation of the American and Mexican mining-boom of the 1820s (in which he had a financial interest), and was employed by Murray, when not yet twenty-one, to visit Abbotsford in order to persuade J. G. Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott’s sonin-law, to edit a Canningite newspaper of which he, Disraeli was to be the manager. By the time The Representative ended its brief, unsuccessful career, Disraeli had alienated Murray by the publication of his first novel, Vivian Grey, in which Murray recognized an unfriendly portrait of himself. In the following decade Disraeli suffered recurrent depressions, read abortively for the Bar, and made two long journeys to Italy and the Middle East, on returning from which he established himself by the age of thirty-three as a fashionable novelist, an ornament of London society and a Conservative MP. In the final thirty years of his life Disraeli’s tactics and irony merged what he wished to express into what he felt obliged to express as a leader of the Conservative Party. As a novelist, a Jewish Christian, and the advocate of moral, political and religious reconstruction before 1850, his duties had been no less complicated. In the wake of his mental breakdown in the 1820s, Disraeli had become self-conscious about his role as a writer, and in Contarini Fleming had conceptualized the combination of Love, Art and Politics whch constituted the novelist’s (and, indeed, the artist’s) proper subject-matter. Contarini Fleming dwelt briefly on the character of a Christian, or rather a Roman Catholic, sensibility. The Rise of Iskander celebrated the Christian political heroism of its subject and Alroy the Jewish political heroism of its subject under the Turks. It was not until Disraeli had conceptualized a political crisis in the 1840s that he began to conceptualize a crisis in religion. As Disraeli presented it, the political problem was the transition from aristocracy and the duty incumbent on thinkers like himself to enquire how far and in what sense ‘the aristocratic principle’ had to be replaced by ‘the democratic principle’. Like Carlyle’s, Macaulay’s, Cobden’s, Newman’s, Arnold’s, Gladstone’s and Froude’s conceptions of aristocracy, Disraeli’s was an outsider’s conception – first, in Vivian Grey and The Young Duke as fantasy; then, with his social arrival, from observation, finally, as Bentinck’s and Derby’s functionary, from inside the political system. It was from the second of these phases, in the runup to the Reform Act of 1832, that his most perceptive political writing began. During seven years as first a Radical and then a Tory candidate for Parliament, he published pamphlets, speeches and articles. During the unwelcome freedom which Peel gave him by failing to offer office in 1841, he wrote not only Coningsby and Sybil but also Tancred, which, though published after the fall of Peel, belonged to the literary career which he still seemed to regard as his primary career.

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Disraeli’s political writings divide themselves according to the objects that they attacked. From The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828) onwards, he had attacked the ‘porous . . . logomachies’ of utilitarianism, Melbourne for ‘crawling in the dust’ as the ‘slave of O’Connell’, and O’Connell himself – the ‘vagabond-delegate of a foreign priesthood’ from whom Disraeli as a Radical had requested support at the High Wycombe election in 1832 – for a hatred of English ‘order . . . civilization . . . industry . . . courage . . . liberty [and] religion’ which had made him a ‘more terrible enemy’ than Robespierre or Napoleon. After his entry into Parliament at the General Election of 1837, Disraeli’s diatribes acquired a parliamentary pungency as a new manner made the points he was still making as a journalist – that the Whigs had lost the indestructibility of 1832 along with eight members of the 1832 Cabinet, that they had compromised the Queen by ‘intrigue . . . and . . . conspiracy during the Bedchamber Crisis’, and that they were ready to sacrifice, for the possession of a ‘power to which they [were] incompetent’, the ‘laws . . . Empire and . . . religion of England’. Disraeli praised the new authority which the Tory Party was supposed to have acquired since 1832, the ‘high lineage . . . and immaculate character’ of Lord Stanley, who had left the Whigs over the Irish Church question, and the ‘national temperament . . . wisdom . . . experience . . . moderation . . . chivalry . . . and . . . English . . . virtues’ of Sir Robert Peel, who was to be described very differently in Lord George Bentinck two years after Peel’s death. In the pamphlets of the 1830s English liberty was distinguished from French liberty and from the Genevan and Dutch Republicanism which had broken into England with Scottish assistance after the restoration of Plantagenet liberty in the first months of the Long Parliament. It was ‘the Plantagenet nobility’ which had guaranteed ‘our liberties’, and the Wars of the Roses which had deprived the nation of aristocratic leadership and permitted a ‘despotic power’ to be exercised by ‘two or three hundred individuals’ through ‘one estate of the realm’ after 1647. Disraeli’s constitutional argument was an argument about the ‘remedial’ nature of mediaeval representation, ‘the Commons’ as a ‘privileged class’ consisting of ‘a very limited section of our fellow subjects’, and the superior ability of the House of Lords to co-operate with ‘English history and hereditary sentiment’ in achieving that ‘mastery of detail and management of complicated commonplaces’ which constituted ‘businesslike habits’. The argument about the Whigs was that they had put on the ‘red cap’ as ‘disciples of Jacobinism’ after 1789, had effected a coup against ‘all the estates of the nation’ in 1832, and, in asserting the ‘divine right’ of the House of Commons, had inserted a ‘seed of tyranny and barbarism’ which was threatening ‘Trial by Jury, Habeas Corpus, the Court of King’s Bench, the Court of Quarter Sessions . . . compulsory provision for the poor . . . the franchises

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of municipal corporations’ and the ‘gentlemen of England’. It was the Whigs, moreover, who were insensitive to the truth that Britain’s ‘natural aristocracy’ would be strengthened by that ‘passion for accumulating wealth’ which had been ‘the salient point in our national psychology since the Reformation’. In Disraeli’s writings in the 1830s, Whiggism was a narrow target. In Coningsby in the 1840s, the target was socio-political in the broadest sense, with Eton and Cambridge, an elegant London house, grand country-houses, and the home and industrial establishment of one of England’s wealthiest manufacturers disclosing upper-class reactions to the poor and the peasantry. The hero, and the heart of the ‘New Generation’, was the ‘better mind of England’ as it had emerged from tension and reconciliation between the earnest schoolboy and undergraduate politics of Coningsby and his Etonian friends, including the young Millbank on the one hand, and the ‘self-made’ and ‘progressive’ resentments of Oswald Millbank, the great industrialist and father of young Millbank, on the other. In Coningsby there was an Aunt Sally called ‘sound Conservatism’ which, in Taper-speak, involved ‘Tory men and Whig measures’. In order to knock that down, the novel moved out from the young Etonians of the 1830s to the ‘grandeur of Manchester’, its ‘unprecedented partnership between capital and science’, and the prospect of a political partnership between landed and manufacturing wealth as a support for the new régime of the future. In describing the instinctive decency of the landed classes, Disraeli left the impression that they gave in too readily to liberal opinions and would need to be strengthened morally and intellectually if they were to stand out against ‘the Spirit of the Age’. It was of even greater importance that the three people who had influenced Coningsby most by the time he went to Cambridge – a landowner (Eustace Lyle) whose family had been Whig, the ‘most eminent manufacturer’ (the elder Millbank), and the ‘greatest capitalist in the Kingdom’ (Sidonia) – were all ‘in their hearts disaffected with the political constitution of the country’. Coningsby combined a distaste for party politics with a desire to defeat Whiggism not by the Conservative method of ‘embracing as much Liberalism as was necessary’ but by recognizing that the sovereign provided the only agency which could obstruct ‘class legislation’ and the ‘triumph . . . of Democracy’ in the not very distant future. What Disraeli meant was obscure but, even if it was his father’s Stuart, rather than the Victorian, monarchy that he had in mind, he certainly stated, in the political vacuum which he sensed before Chartism’s failure in 1848, that ‘representation’ was achieved more fully through the press than through Parliament and that ‘the proper leader of the people [was] the individual who [sat] upon the throne’. ‘If we are forced into revolutions’, went a remarkable statement

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let us propose to our consideration the idea of a free monarchy, established on fundamental laws, itself the apex of a vast pile of municipal and local government, ruling an educated people, represented by a free and intellectual press. Before such a royal authority, supported by such a national opinion, the sectional anomalies of our country would disappear . . . and government . . . become an object of national affection, which would terminate sectional anomalies, assuage religious heats, and extinguish Chartism. (B. Disraeli, Coningsby, 1844, 1881 edn, p. 355)

In Coningsby the problem was the Carlylean problem – whether the rich and powerful could offer the people anything which would ‘induce them to obey’. In Sybil the problem was that the rich were only too ready to believe the worst of the poor where what was needed was intuitive sympathy if the poor were to be understood. The poor were displayed through Dickensian soap-opera, a plot which denied any belief the rich might have in their own inherent superiority, and the character of Egremont, the younger brother of a peer who, through his love for Sybil, acquired an experience of the poor which he would not have acquired without it. Sybil’s plot and reversals of fortune were more improbable even than Coningsby’s. But Sybil was also suffused with a melancholy which, though expressed in Disraeli’s language rather than Carlyle’s, embraced Carlyle’s belief that the poor were real and would bleed ‘if you pricked them’ and contained many passages, like the passage of Arabian eloquence about the mines at the beginning of Book III, chapter 1, where ‘infants of four and five years, many of them girls, pretty and still soft and timid, . . . endured that punishment which philosophical philanthropy has invented for the dourest criminals, and which those criminals deem more terrible than the death for which it is substituted’ (B. Disraeli, Sybil, 1845, 1881 edn, pp. 161–2). Socially, Sybil ranged widely – from Egremont persuading Lord John Russell to release Sybil when she had been wrongly arrested on charges of seditious conspiracy, through a trade-union meeting at which a decent young agitator was initiated into the trade-union movement, to a Chartist riot at Mowbray Park which helped to kill de Mowbray and actually killed Gerard, Morley, Hatton the Liberator and Lord Marney, the leader of the yeomanry, who was also Egremont’s brother. The message, in the heyday of Chartism, was that revolution was a possibility, that Whiggism, Peelite Conservatism and calculating selfishness and indifference, whether self-made or entrenched, were politically dangerous as well as morally disreputable, and that Marney’s arrogance and cynicism and the snobbery and vanity of de Mowbray – the son of an ex-waiter who had made it into Pitt’s ‘plebeian aristocracy’ – had much to answer for. It was made even clearer not only that many of the leaders of the poor were men and women of good will but also that the real threat to order and peace came as much from the capitalistic reduction of the labourer to a ‘slave’ as from the ‘Hell-cats’ whose robbing and rioting ‘discarded all the trammels of civilization’.

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The defenders of civilization were found in diverse places: – a mill-owner who had ‘always recognized the rights of labour’; a Tractarian vicar who talked freely to rioters in the ‘squalid courts and cellars of Mowbray town’; Baptist Hatton, the Roman Catholic lawyer-antiquary and cousin of Hatton the Liberator who established Gerard’s claim to de Mowbray’s estate; Stephen Morley – book-lover, vegetarian, gardener and editor of the Mowbray Phalanx – who believed that the people’s rights could be established by ‘moral force’; Sybil’s father, Walter Gerard, a ‘son of the people’, whose aristocratic appearance anticipated the discovery that he was the rightful owner of Mowbray Park; Egremont’s ‘democratic’ belief that a ‘new dawn’ was breaking on the aristocracy’s conception of its duties; above all, the character of Sybil whose ‘still sweet life in a convent’ had helped her to the sad belief that the English people, which had once been ‘the freest . . . bravest . . . bestnatured . . . best-looking . . . happiest and most religious race upon the surface of the globe’, had now become ‘sour . . . stunted [and] slavish’. In Sybil property and wealth were threatened by the conversion of a free peasantry into disease-ridden serfs and by the wretchedness, populationincrease and want of ‘love’ and ‘community’ between classes and neighbours to which a ‘thoughtless civilization’ had condemned the urban poor. In lamenting the inadequacy of the ‘Parliamentary Church’ of the eighteenth century and the religious degradation which had driven the remains of a ‘Saxon peasantry’ into dissenting conventicles, Disraeli implied a Tractarian distaste for Erastian ‘frigidity’ and ‘Self-complacency’. He looked forward to a disestablished Church ridding itself of subservience to Greek textual scholarship, emulating the social mobility and cohesion which had produced ‘heads of [monastic] houses’ who were ‘of the people’ in the Middle Ages, and enabling the ‘despised and degraded classes’ to assert the ‘natural equality of man and . . . the rights and power of intellect’. There was no more precision in Coningsby and Sybil about the future of religion than there had been in The Vindication about the similarity between the Puritan attack on the Church of England in the seventeenth century and the Whig-Dissenting attack in the nineteenth century. Neither explained in what ways the Church of England had been defective in its consecration of the State, or how a disestablished Church would resist the ‘barbarising forces’ of the nineteenth century. What was made clear was that Establishment had resulted in disbelief, and that a restoration of belief would be central to national regeneration. In Tancred this allegation became the more general allegation that Europe had no religion. V Tancred was the story of the young Lord Montacute who, when expected by his father to take a family seat in Parliament, insisted instead on travelling to Palestine in order to ‘penetrate the great Asian mystery’.

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Montacute was a ‘visionary’ who was gifted, nevertheless, with ‘high reason and imagination’, and had been wrestling with religious gloom in the three years before the novel began. The novel was ironical about the uncomprehending reaction of his parents, the subterfuges employed to keep Montacute in England by Lord Eskdale, their man-of-the-world friend, and their embarrassment at Montacute’s need for a faith and philosophy of his own. This need, which was compared with the Apostles’ need, was for a ‘Comforter’ and was complicated a third of the way through the novel when, on arriving in Jerusalem, Montacute was mistaken for a brother of Queen Victoria and plunged into Levantine politics. The central themes of the novel were Montacute’s political, personal and religious history and the inseparability of love and religion from the financial and political ambitions which were present pre-eminently in Fakredeen’s romantic and duplicitous attachment to him. In addition to the points of view embodied in leading characters like Eva, Sidonia and Astarte of the Ansari, Disraeli stated the need for an ‘idea’ if Europe was to be rescued from ‘dynasticism . . . intrigue . . . and the anarchy of creeds’. Montacute disliked Vestiges of Creation, declined to believe that he had ever been a fish, and deplored the manifest fact that society, which had once been ‘regulated by God’, was now ‘regulated by man’. In deciding to go to Palestine, he was much influenced by the ‘three days and . . . nights’ which his Crusading ancestor had spent ‘kneeling at the tomb of [Man’s] Redeemer’. Tancred’s message about the modern world was that it was sunk in ‘materialism’ and ‘moral relativism’, lacked ‘soul’ as well as ‘faith’, and would have to return to its ‘common father’ if it was to neutralize its new-found belief in geology. In relation to England, the message was that the Established Church had failed, and that neither time-serving Anglican bishops nor the ‘publications of the Parker Society’ had anything of consequence to say. In the course of the narrative Tancred offered high thoughts about the fact that God had ‘never spoken’ to a European. In Sidonia – the vatic, bachelor, Rothschild-type Jewish financier who had appeared first in Coningsby – it found an insight, generosity, wealth and power which made him Disraeli’s ideal of the Jewish hero. But it was important that, when Sidonia, Eva and Disraeli talked, or wrote, about race being ‘all’, they did not always mean the Jewish race; as often as not they meant the Arabian race (including the Jews), which had invented both the moral law that Montacute obeyed and the religion he had been brought up as a Christian to profess. When Montacute urged prayer to God as a way of saving ‘tortured Europe’ from its unhappiness, it was from the ‘deserts of Arabia’ and the ‘Persian and Mesopotamian plains’, as well as from Galilee and Mount Sinai, that salvation was to come and through the patriarchalism, equality and ‘sublime devotion’ of the desert Arabs that the ‘great Asian movement’ was to conquer the world. And if, on the lips of Fakredeen, this sounded like a crookeder version

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of Buchan’s Greenmantle, it was still of the essence of the conception that Christ was a Galileean ‘Arab’ and that it was the intellect of ‘Arabia’ which had come from ‘the Most High’. In touching on Europe’s conversion to Christianity, Tancred had the Caesars ‘placing the Jews of Sinai on the throne of the Capitol’ and ‘one half of Christendom worshipping a Jew and the other half a Jewess’. But if we ask what Montacute wanted for ‘Arabia’ in the future, there is no clear answer, except that he was appalled, as Ruskin would have been appalled, by the prospect of a ‘railroad’ being built to Jerusalem and regarded Fakredeen’s attempt to raise a loan for ‘the redemption of Syria’ as a proof that the ‘poison of modern liberalism’ had ‘penetrated’ even the desert. In Tancred Christianity was the best religion. But it was of special significance that Abraham had been less a Jew than the leader of an Arabian tribe which had not yet been rigidified into Judaism, that Judaism, Christianity and Islam had had behind them a primitive unsophisticated Arabian race and religion which had avoided the contaminations of the modern world, and that the remedy for the atheistic fraternity of 1789 was an infusion of the Arabian doctrine of ‘theocratic equality’ under the ‘sway of a common father’. Where Montacute was the aristocratic parallel in religion to the political aristocracy in Coningsby, Sidonia personified a percipient Jewishness which enabled Disraeli, though an Anglican and a Christian by profession, to state what as a Jew he wished to state – that the persecution of the Jews and their exclusion from civil rights was an error and that Judaism, so far from being a sore thumb, as anti-Semitism had suggested, had made one of the most significant contributions to the religious history of the world. Tancred ended with the hero’s parents removing him from religious temptation and the question arising whether this was or was not intended to be an ironical comment on his innocence. But the novel also seemed unambiguous, leaving the impression that it was Disraeli’s, as much as Montacute’s, religion which was being displayed, and that the extraordinary passage towards the end of the novel about the ‘worship of the House of David’ that was going on ‘at every seat of great and growing empire in the world’ was a curtain-raiser for the even more extraordinary attempt which Lord George Bentinck was to make five years later to identify Judaism with both Conservatism and Christianity. Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography was a life of the silent aristocratic Tory backbencher through whom Disraeli had brought down Peel and who had become leader of the Conservative party in Peel’s place. Its most interesting passages concerned Bentinck’s vote in favour of Lionel de Rothschild, his fellow MP for the City of London who, ‘being a member of the Jewish Race’ but ‘unfortunately believing only in the first part of the Jewish religion’, had declined to swear the Christian oath necessary for voting in parliamentary divisions.

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In Lord George Bentinck the Jews, as a ‘Bedoueen’ race, were described in their relations to the ‘Teutonic, Slavonic and Celtic races’ which had ‘appropriated . . . the division of the globe’ out of which Europe had been formed and had extended to the Jews every sort of ‘obloquy and . . . persecution’. The question Disraeli asked was whether persecution was ‘a penalty . . . incurred . . . for the Crucifixion’. His answer was that it was not, that there had been more Jews outside Palestine at the time of the Crucifixion than there had been inside, and that ‘for many years’ no one had believed in the good tidings except the ‘Jew of Tarsus’ who had ‘changed every one of the Olympian temples into altars of the God of Sinai and . . . Calvary’. Since, moreover, there was ‘no passage in the sacred writings’ that warranted a penal assumption about the Jews, the question remained how it was that, ‘in all the great cities of Europe’, Jews had contributed ‘more than their proportion’ to the ‘aggregation of the vile’. In reply, there was praise for Jewish music, for the ‘sublime’ character of Jewish religion, and for the influence of the ‘beautiful Arabian traditions’ of which Jews were the guardians. It was not only denied that the Jews’ ‘limited degeneracy’ could justify ‘the prejudices and persecutions which [had] originated in barbarous or mediaeval superstitions’, it was also affirmed, as against Radical and liberal anti-Semitism, that Jewish ‘tendencies’ were so ‘conservative’ that Jews ought to be regarded as allies against the principles of 1789. Chapters XIV and XV of Lord George Bentinck contained Disraeli’s most explicit statements about the Jews’ rejection not only of the ‘equality of man’ but also of the ‘cosmopolitan fraternity’ which, if adopted in the United States, would enable the ‘negro and coloured populations’ to threaten the ‘Anglo-Saxon republic’. The ‘native tendency’ of the ‘Jewish race’ was to deny ‘equality’, to be ‘proud’ of its ‘blood’, and to ‘accumulate wealth’; and if, instead of being persecuted, its bias towards ‘religion, property and natural aristocracy’ had been ‘enlist[ed] in the cause of existing society’, Jews would not, Disraeli claimed, have given a lead in converting the 1848 revolution into a threat to European society. Disraeli made 1848 into a test-case, presenting the revolution as a revolution against the ‘semitic principle’ and the ‘Jewish religion’, whether in the Mosaic or the Christian form, and the ‘secret societies’ which had set it off as being led by ‘men of the Jewish race’ who, so far from wanting to support the ‘destructive party’, had been compelled by persecution to deprive Europe of the ‘conservative element’ which Metternich had recognized in Gentz, which the Rothschilds had been recognizing in themselves, and which Bentinck, obviously, had recognized in Disraeli. These were political claims. But beyond the political assimilations of Judaism to Conservatism, there was also the theological claim that, though ‘several millions of the Jewish race . . . persisted in believing only part of their religion’, time and a ‘different treatment’ might enable them, as Manin, a

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Jewish Christian, had been enabled in Venice, to profess not just Judaism but ‘the whole of the Jewish religion’, and that, the less they were persecuted, the more pleased Jews would be to learn that ‘the redemption of the human race had been effected by . . . a child of Israel’ who, in ‘conquering Europe’, had ‘far exceeded . . . the wildest dreams of the Rabbis’. The higher Disraeli rose in the Conservative Party, the more he wanted to provide a rationalization of what his Tory and Whig critics referred to as his ‘Hebrew’ character. To that extent, his religious writings may be said to have projected on to Europe a dilemma which was personal. But there was something more in Disraeli’s discussion of religion than a personal dilemma or a wish to oblige either an individual Rothschild or the Rothschild family. There was also an attempt to present both Judaism and Christianity as a single religion which, while being socially and politically Conservative, was not only as latitudinarian as Disraeli’s father had wished it to be but also merged naturally into ‘the religion of all sensible men’.

Burke and Disraeli were innovators. They left an impression of being conservative in religion while supporting an eclectic Christianity (Burke) and Disraeli’s ‘Arabian’ religion. At the same time, they were subtle, devious and political. In the thinkers whom we shall discuss next, the latitudinarian temper was almost offensively naïve.

3 The reanimation of Protestantism II

I know not whether this letter will find you at Berne, probably not, for I have just read the official account of the King of Prussia’s death; but . . . I would not willingly let a day pass without expressing my deep interest in the present crisis. That extract which you wrote out for me is indeed glorious, and fills one with thankfulness that God has raised up such a King in a great Protestant country at this momentous time; when the great enemy in his two forms at once, Satan and Antichrist, the blasphemy of the Epicurean Atheist, and the idolatry of the lying and formal spirit of Priestcraft, is assailing the Church with all his might. May Christ’s strength and blessing be with the King and with you, that Prussia may be as the mountain of the Lord, the city of God upon a hill, whose light cannot be hid. (Rev. Thomas Arnold to C. C. J. Bunsen, 13 June 1840, in A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, 1844, 1852 edn, p. 527) In all ages, those who undertake the difficult task of Samuel are still liable to the same kind of misunderstanding and misrepresentation. They are . . . charged with not going far enough, or going too far; they are charged with saying too much, or with saying too little; they are regarded from . . . a partial point of view, and not from one which takes in the whole . . . Whosoever they may be, and howsoever they may be . . . despised, they . . . are the silent healers who bind up the wounds of their age in spite of itself; they are the good physicians who knit together the dislocated bones of a disjointed time . . . They have but little praise and reward from the partisans . . . But, like Samuel, they have a far higher reward . . . in the glories of a new age which shall be ushered in peacefully and happily after they have been laid in the grave. (Rev. A. P. Stanley, History of The Jewish Church, vol. I, 1863, 1885 edn, pp. 357–8). Bunsen’s life was no ordinary life, and the memoirs of that life are more than an ordinary book. That book will tell in England and Germany far more than in the Middle Ages the life of a new Saint: nor are there many Saints whose real life, if sifted as the life of Bunsen has been, would bear comparison with that notable character of the nineteenth century. (F. Max Müller, Bunsen, 1868, in Chips from a German Workshop, vol. II, 1884, 1895 edn, p. 317)

The latitudinarianism that we examined in chapter 1, though designed to reanimate Protestantism and enable it to handle modern thought, came near to extinguishing Protestantism and leaving it indistinguishable from modern thought. Protestant appearances were kept up. But some of the enlargements were grotesque, and Froude at times came near to treating the British Empire as an extension to the whole world of a British consciousness in which conduct was three-fourths of life. In this chapter and the next, the Protestantism of Thomas Arnold, Bunsen, Stanley, Jowett and Max Müller will be seen sliding into the religion of culture and civilization as it was to appear in Seeley, Sidgwick, Wicksteed and Matthew Arnold. 45

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In the preface to volume III of Thomas Arnold’s1 History of Rome which Hare and Stanley published after Arnold’s death, Hare recalled that it was he who had introduced Arnold to the writings of Niebuhr nearly twenty years earlier, adding that when an ‘injudicious friend’ had suggested that he, Hare, should complete Niebuhr’s History of Rome on Niebuhr’s death in 1831, he had replied that ‘it would be as easy to complete Cologne Cathedral’. Hare did not pretend that Arnold’s death had been as disastrous as Niebuhr’s to ‘knowledge of antiquity’. But he gave Arnold’s History high praise, which was exceeded only by the higher praise he gave to Arnold’s influence as ‘demolisher of idols’ and enemy of the ‘prejudices’ with which an ‘idolatrous age’ had ‘carnalised and stifled’ itself, individually, ecclesiastically and nationally. ‘He did indeed yearn after truth and righteousness with yearnings that could hardly be uttered’ went the exordium, and he was so far superior to ordinary ‘theological or religious writers’ that his death had been felt ‘like a personal, as well as a national, loss, from one end of England to the other’. Hare had been an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge before becoming a Fellow in 1818. He had read for the bar and been ordained, and had then remained at Trinity as a classics tutor until moving to a family cure at Herstmonceux in Sussex in 1832. While at Trinity, Hare had contributed to Guesses at Truth, which had been written and published anonymously by his brother, Augustus, in 1826 and had collaborated with Thirwall, at that time also a Fellow of Trinity, in translating Niebuhr. In his Vindication of Niebuhr’s History of Rome (1829), he denied that Niebuhr had been the cause of student ‘turbulence’, related Niebuhr’s love of ‘justice, virtue and rational liberty’ to his dislike of ‘Jacobinical’ as well as ‘oligarchic’ opinions, and appealed to Schleiermacher for evidence that ‘profound . . . philosophy . . . pervading . . . piety . . . and . . . a fervent faith in Christianity’ could be combined with ‘doubts and scruples about the historical value of certain passages in Scripture’. Hare lived in a book-filled rectory at Herstmonceux for over thirty years, writing essays about philology, a defence of Coleridge, the life of John Sterling which Carlyle so much disliked, and sermons and Charges which vindicated the Reformation against the attacks which the Tractarians were making on it. In 1844 he married a sister of F. D. Maurice (whom he had taught when Maurice was an undergraduate at Trinity). Throughout these years he was in close touch with Arnold and with Niebuhr’s pupil, Bunsen, whose Five Letters to Archdeacon Hare shed new light on the apostolic 11

Rev. Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), educated Winchester and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Fellow of Oriel College. Headmaster of Rugby, 1827–42. Author of Thirteen Letters on our Social Conditions, 1822; Sermons, 1829–34; ed. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, 1830–5; Principles of Church Reform, 1833; History of Rome, 1838–42; Introductory Lectures on Modern History, 1842; Fragment on the Church, 1844 and Sermons Chiefly on the Interpretation of Scripture, 1845.

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Christianity they were all in process of rediscovering. It was Bunsen who was Arnold’s prop and stay during Arnold’s period of greatest unpopularity. I Bunsen’s2 mother had been a governess in the Waldeck family; his father had spent many years as a soldier in the service of the Dutch. Bunsen went to Marburg University with financial support from the Waldecks, and to Göttingen, where he was a friend of Schopenhauer and language-tutor and travelling-companion to an early Astor. He then went to Berlin to absorb Schleiermacher and, after marrying a wealthy Englishwoman whom he had met in Rome, began diplomatic employment under Niebuhr, who was Prussian Minister in Rome and had been greatly impressed by both a Bunsen essay entitled ‘The Athenian Law of Inheritance’ and the ‘Plan of Intellectual Labour’ which Bunsen had sent him in 1825. Bunsen’s preference was for academic rather than diplomatic employment, but he stayed in Rome, succeeded Niebuhr as Prussian Minister, and used the opportunity to work on the history of Christianity and the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Bunsen was close to the Prussian royal family, as connoisseur of the arts, as supporter of its wish to reconcile Prussian Lutheranism and Prussian Calvinism within the Prussian Church, and in its attempt to improve relations with the Papacy after the annexation of the Rhenish provinces. In Rome, however, he burnt his fingers on Lutheran and Jesuit orthodoxy and was dismissed in 1838. He then had a period of leave in England, where he was lionized as a savant, and a short period as Minister in Switzerland, from which he hoped for a ministerial appointment in Berlin on the accession of the King who was to become the mad King Frederick William IV. Eventually, he was posted to London, first in order to conduct negotiations about the Jerusalem bishopric, then as Prussian Minister. Once appointed to London, Bunsen became an ingratiating and controversial figure in English religious and intellectual life, respecting Newman, while arousing suspicion among the Tractarians, and being much admired by the Whigs, by the Prince Consort and by Peel. He admired Maurice – ‘one of the . . . deepest minds . . . of England’ – and was a patron of Froude, in whose Nemesis of Faith he found similarities to the thinkers who had been trying ‘for seventy years’ to ‘pull down the old and erect the new Zion’ in Germany. 12

Christian Charles Josiah, Baron Bunsen (1791–1860), educated Gymnasium School, Corbach, Marburg, Göttingen and Berlin Universities; Prussian Diplomatic Service (Minister in Rome, Switzerland and London). Author of Hippolytus and His Age, 1852 and Life of Martin Luther (Encyclopaedia Brittanica), 1859. Author (in German) of numerous works of ecclesiastical history, religious polemic and Egyptology translated inter alia, as The Constitution of the Church of the Future 1845–7; Three Linguistic Dissertations, 1847; Egypt’s Place in Universal History, 1848–67; Christianity and Mankind, 1854; Signs of the Times, 1856; and God in History, 1868–70.

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Kingsley depicted him flatteringly in Alton Locke; he was ecstatic about Yeast and The Saint’s Tragedy; and he sketched for Kingsley a life-work as Shakespearean dramatist of English history since 1688. He was as sympathetic to Stanley and Max Müller from the next generation as to Hare, Thirlwall and Arnold from his own. Bunsen had met Arnold in Rome in the 1820s and was to dedicate volume II of Hippolytus and His Age to Arnold’s memory. Much of the sympathy they felt for each other derived from a shared regret that Niebuhr had not applied his historical methods to the Bible. From his earliest years in Rome Bunsen was obsessed by Christianity’s failure and, in particular, by Protestantism’s failure. He constructed a Protestant hymnology and Protestant liturgy, and affirmed to himself Christianity’s overriding importance as an antidote to ‘self-interest, sentimentality and self-contemplation’. Experience of the Papacy in Rome brought home to him the fact that ‘in Protestant Germany no church existed’ and suggested the duty to build up a Church there which would do in a Protestant idiom what Romantic spectacles enabled him to see the Roman Church doing in a Roman idiom in Rome. Bunsen’s interests were embodied over the years in an enormous œuvre of two main types. On the one hand, in addition to hymnological and liturgical studies, there was a body of writing about the history and nature of the Church which will be found chiefly in The Constitution of the Church of the Future and two of the four volumes of Hippolytus and His Age. On the other hand, there was a vast body of writing about Egyptian language and religion and the relation of all religions and languages to world-history which began with volume I of Egypt’s Place in Universal History and reached its climax in the impossible works that Bunsen published in his retirement. When Bunsen sent Niebuhr his ‘Plan of Intellectual Labour’ in 1825, he had intended to show that philology ‘treated historical facts in their individuality’, that history ‘discovered . . . their connection . . . in terms of development’, and that philosophy established the principles necessary for achieving a ‘secure method of mediation between fact and ideal conception’. By the time his major works began to be published in the 1840s, language was the ‘oldest authentic record’ of man’s ‘mental development’, Egyptian hieroglyphics had been brought from central Asia by colonization in the form of Khamism, and Khamism was as much the ‘mummified relic’ of language before the Flood and the ‘common root’ of the Aryan and Semitic languages as Egyptian myth and religion were a ‘mummy’ of the ‘oldest mythological belief of mankind’. From his earliest years, Bunsen had understood that the Egyptian monuments disclosed the whole history of Egypt as a nation, and made it possible to answer the most general questions about the unity of civilization, the ubiquity of religion and the primordial nature of man’s desire for ethical

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improvement. A materialistic dread of the ‘destruction of the body’ had been the motive force behind the ‘stupendous fabric of the Pyramids’ and the ‘perversities’ which were connected with an exaggerated appreciation of the value of the body. Even the ‘errors’ of the Egyptians, however, were based upon truth and their general attitude to life was far superior to that of the peoples of the Vedas. In Egypt ‘civil liberty’ and ‘constitutional government’ had been ‘old’ and despotism the ‘dynastic innovation’, priestly authority had been fused into royal authority, and the Egyptian legacy had been not only artistic brilliance but also movements of ‘deep ethic thought’ that deserved the gratitude and admiration of the world. The conclusions which Bunsen drew from the history of philology coincided with the conclusions he drew from the history of Christianity – that nations which ‘stuck to the letter and authority’ were more prone ‘sooner or later’ to ‘come to scepticism’ than nations which made ‘light of the letter and kept to the spirit’, and that Protestantism and the philosophy of history, in aiming to make reason prevail, should ensure that ‘myths . . . and symbols died’ when the development of the idea required them to. In Hippolytus and His Age Bunsen pointed apostolic Christianity at all subsequent Christianities. He emphasized the apostles’ proximity to Christ, the flexibility of apostolic dogma, and the philosophical distance that divided it from Burnet and Paley, from the Roman catechism, and from the ‘maimed Judaic Mohammedanism’ which still survived in the nineteenth century. He argued incautiously, even, that Hippolytus’ ‘pantheism’, if pantheism it was, ‘might well be thought an improvement’. What Bunsen claimed to want was to ‘break down the barriers’ which separated the modern Church from the primitive church and to face up to the ‘perplexity and doubt’ that this might entail. Even if it might entail the ‘abandonment of Christianity’ which had occurred among the upper classes in Latin countries, the risk was still worth taking now that the ‘abstract’ philosophy of the eighteenth century had been replaced by ‘historical’ philosophy and it had become the manifest destiny of Germany and England, and of England’s Protestant ‘scion . . . beyond the Atlantic . . . unweariedly and humbly to sweep the porch of the Temple . . . and . . . allow the light of heaven to penetrate within . . . its darkened chambers’. ‘It is the rubbish of false learning and conventional scholasticism which separates us from the Sanctuary’ went the central statement, ‘and it is high time to sweep it away, as the signs of the latter days have appeared, in which infidel superstition intends to usurp the altar and wilful falsehood the throne of truth’ (J. C. C. Bunsen, Hippolytus and His Age, 1852, vol. II, p. xi). The rhetoric of truth, as unctuous in Bunsen as in anyone else, led him to suitable conclusions. It led him to conclude that he was not ‘insinuating his own . . . convictions’ under the ‘cover of Hippolytus’, that the primitive Church had not been shackled by the ‘prejudices’ which were ‘impeding the

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march of Christianity’ in the modern world, and that historical scholarship, properly applied, would disclose the ‘open ocean of faith’ and the ‘stream of unity’ as it had rolled ‘uninterruptedly through eighteen centuries’. It also led him to conclude that salvation would not be found in ‘learned speculations’, ‘clerical forms’ or ‘sectarian schisms’, and that the ‘scientific consciousness’ had to ‘make itself conversant with the sufferings and sorrows of the lower classes of society’. Hippolytus and His Age reflected Bunsen’s admiration for English liberty, for the ‘self-responsibility of English Protestantism’ and for what he supposed to have been the relationship between the English Parliament and people since the revolution of 1688. Among the rich and educated, on the other hand, he saw chiefly ‘rationalistic’ thought and ‘spiritual slumber’, a ‘godless schism between spirit and form’, and a ‘lifeless’ public worship relieved only by the ‘moral principles’ that came from ‘fear of God’. Bunsen believed that orthodox Protestantism provided an easy target for secular attack and required a second Reformation to make the Church a ‘People’s’ rather than a ‘clergy’ Church. He differed from Arnold in asserting that a ‘merging of the church . . . with civil government’, had been ‘the way to . . . its death and burial’, at any rate in Prussia. Bunsen was a German of 1813 for whom Lessing, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Schelling and Hegel had been the brains behind Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Stein. His political aim was the unification of Germany under the Prussian King; it was only when Prussia missed the tide in 1848 that he fell back on the consolation that German Biblical criticism had reanimated Christianity, that German philosophy had given the modern world its first glimpse of moral freedom and that German science had established ‘indestructible’ foundations for a ‘new form’ of Christianity. When Bunsen proclaimed a destiny for Germany, England and America, he was not only thinking of English and American liberty and the Prussian enthusiasms of 1813, but also of a history in which the ‘prophetic religious consciousness’ brought into the Roman Empire by the German invaders and emasculated by the ‘priesthood and superstition’ of the ‘Roman races’ in the Middle Ages had been restored by Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, Luther, Leibniz and the ‘free cities’ of Germany. From Spinoza, Wesley, the Moravians and the Quakers, from the religious freedom of the Dutch, the British and the British overseas, and from the upheaval which the ‘Romanic’ nations had suffered in 1789, he looked forward apocalyptically to the ‘triumph’ of ‘Conscience and Reason’ to the ‘healing’ of the ‘wounds’ of our ‘present social state’, and to Christ’s ‘divine figure . . . rising majestically over the ruins of the greatest social fabric . . . the world had ever seen’. This was world-historical thinking which linked Pentecost, 1517 and 1789 with the German philosophical revolution, and attributed to the Semitic (or Aramaic) races on the one hand and the Japhetic (or Aryan) races on the

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other all the achievements of progress, civilization and religion. It was the Semitic races which had brought ‘ethical earnestness’, a ‘feeling of brotherhood’ and consciousness both of the ‘unity of the universe’ and of God as ‘creator . . . redeemer and illuminating principle of mankind’, and the Japhetic (or Aryan) races which had brought artistic understanding of the human form and a conception of epic in which human development was a ‘mirror’ of the ‘eternal laws’ of God’s government of the world. And this, for Bunsen, was a practical as well as an analytical truth which addressed the fact that Christianity, though Semitic in origin, had been established and propagated by nations which were Aryan or Japhetic. Bunsen advocated a recession in Semitism and an advance in Japhetism, and an attempt to translate the Semitism of Christ and the Apostles into ‘Japhetic language’. This was an enterprise of grandeur and bogusness which yet meant something, and chiefly that Christianity was a ‘rational’ religion as well as a ‘free’ one, that Biblical criticism was finding more truth in it than orthodoxy had found, and that Japhetic (or Aryan) Christianity, with England, Germany and America to guide it, was destined to dominate the world. It is uncertain whether Arnold would have signed himself up in these terms if he had been alive when Bunsen used them. What is certain is that, except about Church establishments, Arnold meant what Bunsen meant. Among those who comforted Arnold during his periods of unpopularity, others were geographically closer than Bunsen. But Bunsen had a special role, not just as Egyptologist and relict of Niebuhr for whose sake Arnold had learnt German and whom he believed to have done for ancient history what Bacon had done for inductive science, but also as an ecclesiastical statesman who, despite considerable unpopularity, was closer than Arnold was to the centres of power in Rome, London and Berlin. Arnold was aware of his own unpopularity and took steps to reduce it. Right up to the point at which Melbourne nominated him to the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1841, he looked on Bunsen as a guarantor. II Arnold had been a schoolboy at Winchester, an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, where he had doubts about ordination before eventually being ordained. On marrying in 1820, he set up a coaching establishment at Laleham for entry into the universities. From his appointment to Rugby in 1827, Arnold was a powerful, experimental and insinuating headmaster, as well as being a highly paid one. In addition, he wrote the million words which compulsive writers write, including an edition of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, a threevolume History of Rome, and two volumes on the History of the Roman Commonwealth, which originated in articles he had written before he had

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absorbed Niebuhr. For most of the 1830s, as well as being headmaster of Rugby, he was a traveller around England, and for a short time owned and published a newspaper. He made important statements about Biblical exegesis and projected the sort of critical edition of the Greek New Testament which was to be attempted by Jowett and Stanley and produced by Westcott and his collaborators later in the century. As Regius Professor in the winter of 1841, he wrote a series of Introductory Lectures on Modern History, which he travelled from Rugby to deliver to unusually large audiences in Oxford. Arnold wrote as ‘a man and a citizen’. His History of Rome was intended to be a high-toned refutation of Gibbon’s treatment of Christianity down to the coronation of Charlemagne. His notes to Thucydides considered relations between myth, history and religion and the nature of the class-struggle in England as well as Greece; his Oxford lectures discussed the sense of ‘right and wrong’ which constituted a nation’s ‘inner life’ and the ways in which the teachings of states had been communicated to peoples between the invasion of the Roman Empire and the ‘Germanic race’s’ creation of Australia, America and ‘half of Europe’ since the seventeenth century. Arnold disliked Jacobinism, trade unionism, Utilitarianism and the Physiocrats, but expressed feelings of Leibnizian security about the likelihood of a ‘communist revolution’. He presented the ‘political reforms’ he had begun to call for in the late 1820s as applications of the Reformation, and aimed to show that Christianity’s principles could justify both franchiseextension and a ‘sincere . . . desire to promote the welfare of the poor’. He wrote with extraordinary passion about the ‘separation of tastes and feelings’ between the poor and the rich, about the perversion of ‘reasonable minds’ and ‘immortal souls’ into ‘hired hands’, and about the crime ‘in the nation . . . the government . . . and all wealthy and intelligent parts of the English people’ when the multiplication of ‘hands’ in manufacturing towns during the previous fifty years had failed to ‘provide for the welfare of the human beings who had multiplied with them’. Arnold blamed the condition of the poor on ‘chivalry’s’ preference for ‘honour’ over ‘duty’, its ‘anti-Christian’ dislike of ‘equal brotherhood’, and the ‘historical liberty’ which had been left by the Middle Ages. Having been a Tory as well as a Jacobin in his youth, he crowed unctuously at the damage done to Toryism at the elections of 1831 and attacked it for the part it had played in ‘crucifying Christ’ and putting obstacles in the way of ‘God and goodness’. He did not, however, associate the 1832 Reform Bill with a radical transformation and wanted mainly a change of tone which would elevate the aristocracy, give ‘pious, manly, liberal Tories’ their heads, and ensure that the rich would come to understand that something could be done about poverty. In the winter of 1831 Arnold reviewed the literature of poverty, characterizing the slavery of the free labourer as abhorrent to Christianity and the population-increase of the Napoleonic Wars as blowing the bottom out of the

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living standards of the poor. Since, moreover, a Christian society had to provide for the welfare of ‘every human being’ that it found ‘within its pale’, it followed that emigration would be desirable if this duty was to be fulfilled. Arnold wished to reclaim for Christianity an area of life which he supposed had been alienated from it. But he judged the Church of England ill-equipped to assist in reclamation. In his pamphlet ‘The Christian Duty of Granting the Claims of Roman Catholics’, he set out from what he called ‘theory’, which criticized existing institutions by reference to a ‘presumption . . . in favour of . . . civil rights’, ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’, and concluded with the admission of Roman Catholics to Parliament as a ‘fulfilment’ of the Constitution which could not be resisted without great injustice in Ireland. Insistence on the ‘guilt’ which the English ought to feel about the ‘conquest’ of Ireland made Arnold unpopular among Tories. So did his claim that the exclusion of Roman Catholics from their civil rights was not a ‘lawful means’ of defending Protestantism. ‘The Christian Duty’ was riddled, nevertheless, with the ‘dreadfulness’ of Irish Catholicism and the ‘unpromising’ character of the Irish race, even when it assumed that emancipation would ‘purify’ Irish Catholicism and ‘assimilate’ it to Protestantism. Fourteen years before the accession of Pope Pius IX, its arguments were that Roman Catholicism was not necessarily averse to civil liberty or irreversibly dedicated to papal infallibility and that modern historical knowledge was likely to produce a ‘true Christian union’ in which Catholics and Protestants would renounce the belief that ‘the Church must be one society in a sense differing from that in which all mankind was one society’. The works that he wrote between 1827 and 1833 took a similarly hopeful view of relations between the Church of England and Dissent. In discussing the future of Dissent, Arnold agreed that its existence ‘impaired the usefulness’ of the Establishment. Since ‘extinction . . . by persecution’ was both ‘wicked and impossible’, however, extinction would have to be achieved by comprehension. And since the Church of England had many enemies, including the ‘very numerous class’ which wanted to use its endowments in order to reduce public spending, it should welcome the ‘thousands . . . of our countrymen’ who would respond to the ‘true Englishman’s’ wish to make ‘England . . . dearer than the peculiar forms of the Church of England’. Arnold claimed that this could be achieved without abandoning either Anglican ‘forms of worship’ or the ‘smallest portion’ of any Anglican’s faith. He wanted Anglicans to permit the addition of other forms of worship to their own, expected this to neutralize the alliance between nonconformity and popular feeling, and looked forward to a future in which the whole nation would applaud the duty the Church was performing of securing the ‘constant residence’ in ‘every parish’ of ‘one individual’ whose business it was to do ‘good to every kind of person’.

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Arnold was not advocating a secular establishment, merely alluding to the secular benefits which had been brought by the Anglican Establishment, the resistance the Anglican Establishment could offer to the ‘de-Christianizing of the Nation’, and the exemplification it gave of the historic condition in which, in all the civilizations of the world except the United States, States had sustained national worship. Since he believed, moreover, that de-Christianization in England, as distinct from Germany, had had little to do with theology and metaphysics and had left almost all English Christians agreed about essentials, he also believed that even Quakers, Unitarians and Roman Catholics – or rather ‘reasonable and moderate men’ amongst them – might be edged into line if Anglicans would frame ‘articles, creeds and public prayers’ which provoked the ‘least possible disagreement’. Arnold envisaged ‘comprehension’ as including diversification of the liturgy, the commutation of tithes, and the merging of Presbyterian election into episcopal ordination. He emphasized the need to involve the laity in any changes in the terms of communion and the importance of emulating the Roman Church’s success in embracing ‘every rank of society . . . from the prince to the peasant’. In conceptualizing the ‘sacredness’ of the parish church and the painfulness of the secessions which had removed dissenters from it, the only condition he imposed was the unrealistic condition that there should be no ‘base compromise of opinion on either side’. Fragment on the Church stated these positions with breadth and contentiousness. It criticized authoritarian élitism in the Protestant Churches as well as in the Roman Church, the separation of the sacred from the secular for reducing ‘nominally Christian . . . countries’ to a ‘lawlessness’ which was ‘worse than . . . heathenism’, and the similarity between the ‘idolatry’ of the priesthood and the Mass and the conception of Christianity as a matter of ‘outward rites and observances’. In the preface to his first volume of Sermons, which he published in the shadow of Milman’s History of the Jews in 1830, Arnold wrote of the importance of applying Christian principles to daily life, of the need to renovate homiletic language in order to do this, and of the primacy of method – by which he meant contextualization – in showing that God’s revelations had been ‘adapted’ gradually to man’s state ‘at the several periods at which they had been made’. Arnold was conscious of the ‘coldness’ and ‘irreverence’ of German Rationalism, its failure to see that the Bible disclosed man’s ‘personal relations with God’, and the ‘exclusively literary habits’ which had deprived it of social intercourse with the poor. He assumed that ‘ceremonial’ acts and a priesthood were ‘necessary’ for ‘intercourse with God’. But by comparing apostolic Christianity with historic orthodoxy, he found evidence that the ‘first and perfect’ state of an institution was one in which ‘forms’ were subordinate to ‘spirit’, that decay occurred when those whose mission it was to defend spirit were suppressed, and that the leading feature of the Apostolic

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age was that the sacraments had had no sacrificial function, priests and bishops had been bursars rather than mystics, and mediation had been provided by Christ directly to every man. Towards the end of the 1830s, Arnold toned down his acerbity and tried to turn himself into a unifying figure. In all fundamental respects he remained, nevertheless, an anti-Tractarian protagonist of the subversive comprehension which Dean Stanley was to extend, blandly and eirenically, into the middle of the century. III Stanley3 was Arnold’s favourite Rugbeian and, though twenty years younger, was a close friend of both Arnold and Arnold’s family. He was twenty-seven when Arnold died and twenty-nine when his Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold was published in 1844. Stanley came of a Whig family and was the son of a modernizing Bishop of Norwich. After Rugby, he spent a vacation with Hare and Sterling and then went to Balliol where he became an admirer of Newman, a pupil of Tait and Ward, and a friend of Jowett. Having decided, so it is said, that his opinions might be unacceptable in Balliol, he accepted a Fellowship at University College before Balliol, so it is also said, had had the opportunity to reject him. In his first phase in Oxford, Stanley lived through the Tractarian movement, first as an undergraduate, then as a young don. He left for Canterbury in 1851 in order to provide a home for his mother but returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History five years later. He left Oxford finally on becoming Dean of Westminster in 1863, having married the fifth daughter of an earl after his mother’s death. Stanley was a traveller in Russia and the Middle East and was well known to English politicians. He was secretary to the Oxford University Commission appointed by Russell in 1850, wrote much of the report which it published in 1852 and became a public advocate of the opinions he had been credited with from The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold onwards. Stanley’s Arnold was a work of piety which associated him with controversies he had not initiated. It was not until the works he published between 1847 and 1855 that he achieved contentiousness – as advocate of a less confessional Oxford and Cambridge, and as a friend and ally of Jowett. 13

Rev. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–81), educated Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of University College, Canon of Canterbury, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford and Dean of Westminster. Author of The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, 1844; Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, 1847; Historical Memorials of Canterbury, 1854; The Epistles of St Paul to the Corinthians, 1855; Sinai and Palestine, 1856; Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church, 1857–61; Sermons Preached Mostly in Canterbury Cathedral, 1859; History of the Jewish Church, 1861–79; Essays Chiefly on Questions of Church and State, 1870; Addresses and Sermons Delivered at St Andrews, 1872–7; Christian Institutions, 1881; and Addresses and Sermons Delivered in America, 1883.

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IV Jowett4 came from a cultured business family in central London and for most of his early life was short of money. He was at St Paul’s School before going to Balliol, where he formed a close friendship with Stanley and at an early age was elected to a Fellowship which he held continuously from 1838 until his election to the Mastership in 1870. As a young man Jowett became convinced that there was a ‘crisis’ in Christianity and thought of a Tractarian reconstruction as a possibility. Like Stanley, he weathered the crisis, reached the conclusion that a Tractarian reconstruction was undesirable, and spent the rest of his life justifying a latitudinarian reconstruction. As early as 1846, Ward’s first Tablet articles had convinced him that Ward was an ‘unnatural Catholic’ who not only ‘did not believe’ but was also ‘incapable of believing’ because he insisted on believing ‘everything’. Thereafter, Jowett edged away. He continued to admire Newman’s ‘extraordinary power’. But it was as a clergyman of the Established Church – independent of any congregation or clerical synod – that he engaged in both theological and university reconstruction about which he and Stanley had published an anonymous pamphlet and were collaborating on a book when Stanley’s appointment to the Commission of 1850 necessitated its postponement. Jowett wanted Parliament to propose changes which he believed that the public wanted but which Oxford would not make by itself. These included a lecturing or professorial system, the removal of clerical restrictions on fellowships and the establishment of a college for non-resident students (preferably with Stanley as its head) as ways of reducing clerical influence, making colleges ‘somewhat more dependent on the State’, and satisfying the needs of a modern nation. Jowett believed that Christ had a kingdom which was neither ‘manifested by outward signs’ nor ‘fought for by earthly weapons’, that it had been chiefly a ‘power in the hearts of men’, and that Christianity, where it operated politically, was most likely to operate through the statesman’s determination to do nothing as a public person which he would not do as a private person. Attention to facts, balancing of evils and the study of means, along with ‘experience . . . expediency’ and in-depth consideration of the ‘constitution of society’, were at least as central to just political action as ‘the standard of right and truth’, and Jowett’s emphasis, like Stanley’s emphasis, was a restrained continuation of the versions that had constituted resurgent Christianity between Wesley and Newman. 14

Rev. Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), educated St Paul’s School and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow, 1838–70 and Master, 1870–93. Author of The Epistles of St Paul to The Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans, 1855; Interpretation of Scripture in Essays and Reviews, 1860; The Dialogues of Plato, 1871; The Politics of Aristotle, 1885; ed. Fremantle, Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, 1901; and ed. Campbell, Theological Essays of the Late Benjamin Jowett, 1906.

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Jowett’s nation was a nation of ‘Education and Common Sense’ for which ‘ethics and politics’ were ‘inseparable’, the State was an embodiment of the same justice as the ‘justice of the individual’, and the revolutionary triad of 1789 would have to be replaced by the idea of ‘law and order’ if selfishness and subjectivity were to be transcended. In the 1840s, Peel was the appropriate leader; neither the ‘democratic party’ nor the ‘despotic aristocratic party’ should predominate; even after the Irish Famine had dealt a deathblow to political economy, the ideal was still a union of ‘plutocracy’ and ‘aristocracy’. By the 1850s Jowett had expanded his social and intellectual range. He had become a distinguished teacher and preacher and had begun to know everybody from Tennyson downwards. When passed over for the Mastership of Balliol in 1854, he had reacted badly but, after being elected, contentiously, to the Chair of Greek at about the same time, had stood up to the opprobrium he attracted for the ‘German’ character of his teaching. It was as a consequence of his appointment to the Chair of Greek just after The Epistles of St Paul had been impugned theologically that he devoted most of his teaching and writing in the next thirty years to Thucydides, Aristotle and Plato. Jowett admired Plato more than he admired Aristotle and wrote about both, among other reasons, in order to compare them. But he did not mistake either for a contemporary, showed in what ways they were not contemporaries and made a point of highlighting Aristotle’s ‘irregularity of structure’, ‘meagreness’ of ‘political information’, and almost total want of stylistic ‘charm’. He had no time for Plato’s approval of slavery, was ‘horrified’ by Plato’s eugenicism and, so far from implying that Plato had believed in the ‘duty of toleration’, implied rather that he had tended to ‘intolerance’. If Plato did ‘stumble’ across the idea of ‘constitutional monarchy’, he had not really believed in it and was censured for what he did believe in – that punishment should be more ‘vindictive’ than ‘corrective’ and ‘irreligion’ punished (as in The Laws) by an ‘inquisition into private life’. Jowett’s Socrates, with his ‘irony’ and ‘ignorance’, his ‘new science of interrogation’, and the ‘suffering goodness’ which resembled the suffering goodness of the other ‘man of sorrows’, was inseparable from Jowett’s Plato. But it was Plato with whom Jowett was concerned, Plato who had displayed an ‘exuberance of metaphysical imagination’, Plato who, in embracing myth and religion as well as philosophy, had been the author not of a closed, philosophical system but of a deliberate, dramatic, dialectical indefiniteness. Jowett did not assume that Plato had anticipated Christianity or should be thought of as a Christian thinker. He had, however, led philosophy in the right direction and, in his later emphasis on the ‘Providential . . . care’ shown by the ‘divine mind’ to ‘all creation’, had approximated more to a Christian mentality than either dogmatic Christian theology, or the dogmatic scientific rejection of dogmatic Christian theology, had done subsequently. In his classical lectures and books, Jowett examined the Greek origins of

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philosophy and brought a ‘spiritual’ mind to bear on them. But it is likely that he advised his better pupils to study Greek Idealism rather as a warning against sensualism and materialism than because he saw in it anticipations of the Hegelian dialectic. Though he used Hegel against Pusey and Maurice, in general, he derived from him less the systematic philosophy which was to appear in some of his pupils than the Hegelianism which had reached him through Biblical criticism. V Jowett and Stanley had been learning Hebrew together when, with introductions from Bunsen, they read Kant and met leading Hegelians during a visit to Germany in 1844. This convinced Jowett that Hegel, Schleiermacher and Lessing had said something which ought to be said in Oxford. But it did not make him a Hegelian; he did not publish the Hegelian essay he had intended to contribute to Stanley’s Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, and he remained in many important respects an imperfectly converted Lockean. Like Bunsen, Jowett wrote about the need for a ‘Second Reformation’ to correct the first. But he was not sure whether it would happen and was afraid that, if it did, it would not be very satisfactory. Moreover, he was cautious. It was much more in his correspondence than in public that ‘treachery to the clergy’ was ‘loyalty to the Church’ and religious men were ‘stupefied and isolated in their prejudices’. At times, Jowett was as uncertain about the desirability of his intimacy with Stanley as Stanley was about his intimacy with him. But though they had been ‘a little too intellectual and over-curious in [their] conversation about theology’, the intimacy survived Stanley’s departure to Canterbury in 1851. Their Biblical commentaries, when published in 1855, were published on the same day. Jowett’s best-known works were The Epistles of St Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans (1855) and his contribution to Essays and Reviews (1860) to which he had failed to persuade Stanley to contribute. It is through these works, and through the judgement that no passage of ‘four or five verses in length’ in the Synoptic Gospels was ‘without discrepancies’, that his intellectual contentiousness will be understood best. By Biblical criticism, Jowett meant a method of proceeding before he meant an attitude to doctrine. Contextualizing the Gospel and recovering its primordial ‘freshness’ was not merely clinical since it required vision and poetic sensibility. But it involved the same procedure as recovery of ‘the original meaning’ of any other literature, and interpreters, if they were to stop forcing their own ‘tastes and feelings’ on the ‘historical and grammatical sense’, would have to take seriously ‘differences of thought and character’ in ‘different ages and states of society’, as well as the differences between the use of language, especially abstract language, in philosophy and the use of language, especially abstract language, in religion.

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Jowett underlined the distance between Apostolic language and modes of thought and ‘our own’ language and modes of thought, and aired the possibility that, ‘in using the same words with St Paul . . . we might not be using them in precisely the same sense’. If St Paul was to be understood, therefore, it was necessary to be soaked in Alexandrian mentalities, to be ‘one with Christ’ and ‘alive . . . to the world within’, and to read the Bible, not as the poor read it, ‘humbly’ and ‘with prayer’, but ‘by turning . . . from the letter to the spirit’ and permitting metaphysics to be associated with interpretation in the hope of getting rid of both. This recipe went beyond the announcement of a method to the announcement of a crisis in which Comte had put an end to ‘metaphysical system’, willingness to think critically about the Bible was a symbol of willingness to think critically about Christianity, and refusal of criticism would ‘end in the withdrawal of the educated classes’ from religion. Jowett knew that the poor had not to be upset and that ‘no reasonable person would . . . lay before the illiterate such a question as that concerning the origin of the Gospel’. He was certain, on the other hand, that mechanics and artisans were picking up the objections to Christianity, that these could only be answered by a clergy which had considered the objections themselves, and that ‘freedom of thought . . . among the educated’ would be essential if England was not to follow France and Italy in having ‘doubt . . . come in at the window when Inquiry was denied at the door’. Both The Epistles and ‘The Interpretation of Scripture’ found it a ‘singular’ reversal of the ‘purposes for which Christ came into the world’ that, instead of aiming to ‘change men’s lives’, Christianity was now aiming to ‘prevent them changing their opinions’. They described the suspicions which would be aroused among the young if the Bible became ‘the only book’ the ‘fruit of whose knowledge’ the ‘able and . . . educated’ were ‘forbidden to taste’; they stated the need to put Christianity at its ‘ease’ with the ‘tendencies of knowledge’ and ‘the progress of ideas’ if it was to ‘win again the minds of intellectual men’ as it had won them in the ‘decaying world’ of the Roman Empire; and they announced a plan to reconcile history and science with ‘revealed religion’ by allowing ‘inductive . . . Hermeneutics’ to transform theology. In The Epistles of St Paul, there were differences between the ‘practical’ Paul of Thessalonians and the ‘spiritual’ and less ‘Jewish’ Paul of Galatians, as well as between the faith of the nineteenth century and the ‘faith of the first Christians’. At first, Jowett did not criticize ‘the faith of the nineteenth century’. But the Paul who eventually emerged had acquired very little of it, and had registered the difference between an ordinary Christian life in which ‘habit, custom and opinion were strong and faith and grace were weak’ and a life in which Christ called men to look upon himself ‘face to face’ without miracle, ‘outward sign’ or ‘irrefragable . . . historical evidence’.

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This was an uncomforting Paul who had had only minimal contact with ‘the princes of this world’ and looked like a mediaeval saint or visionary ‘waiting for the redemption of the body’. It was also a Paul who had little in common with either contemporary Protestant respectability or contemporary Protestant theology. Jowett made it a characteristic of the Gospel that it spoke neither merely of God, as natural theology did, nor merely of man, as moral philosophy did, but of the ‘communion of God and man’ which implied a contrast between its own ‘impulse’, ‘inwardness’ and ‘inspiration’ and the ‘gradual’ and ‘unconscious’ ways of established Christianity. He did not exactly denigrate the latter since in the modern world the ‘resolution’ of an ‘instant’ could still be transformative. But his emphasis was on the ‘inner’ life as remedy for the mechanism of habit and on religion as the ‘power of God’, ‘love of Christ’ and ‘efficacy of prayer’. ‘Judged by its effects’, indeed, ‘the power of religion’ thus conceived, was of ‘all powers the greatest’. ‘Knowledge itself’, went a central statement, is a weak instrument to stir the soul compared with religion; morality has no way to the heart of man; but the Gospel reaches the feelings and the intellect at once. In nations as well as individuals, in barbarous times as well as civilised, in the great crises of history especially, even in the latest ages, when the minds of men seem to wax cold, and all things remain the same as at the beginning, it has shown itself to be a reality without which human nature would cease to be what it is. Almost every one has had the witness of it in himself . . . Hardly any educated person in a Christian land has passed from youth to age without some aspiration after a better life, some thought of the country to which he is going. (Rev. B. Jowett, The Epistles of St Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans, 1855, vol. II, p. 218)

In the main chapters of volume II of The Epistles of St Paul, Jowett supplied a manifesto which was seen to be contentious when it was published and was rewritten for the second edition in 1859. In truth, however, in both editions, it was unavoidably contentious, arguing as it did that conversion of the Atonement and Predestination into ‘logical’ or ‘philosophical’ doctrines was to be regretted, and that it was desirable not only to get back behind a thousand years of ‘figures of speech’ to the Gospel’s original meaning but also to rid Protestantism of the scholasticism with which Luther and Calvin had been compelled to challenge the Counter-Reformation. Jowett’s rejection of theology was deliberate and far-reaching. It assumed that Christ’s status was a ‘mystery’ requiring an ‘indefiniteness’ of which theology had deprived it, and it freed God from both the taint of anger and injustice and responsibility for ‘interrupting the laws of nature for man’s sake’. In urging the religious relevance of ‘all true knowledge’ it referred not just to science but also to the non-Christian religions, especially the religions of the East, in which there had been an ‘order and design’ which constituted ‘steps in the education of mankind’. In his later years Jowett aimed, more placidly than in his early years, to rid

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Christianity of anachronistic encrustations and to make it more ‘natural’ and ‘onward-looking’ by freeing prayer of the miraculous and the anthropomorphic. He overcame his aversion to reunion with Dissent, attached the greatest weight to the role of the laity, and aimed to replace Strauss and Biblical criticism, which had ‘never got hold of the heart of the world’, by Renan and a ‘natural religion’ which would be so penetrating (without the phrase ‘natural religion’ ever appearing) that Christianity’s ‘doubtful points and doctrines’ would ‘drop off’ spontaneously. At times he sensed that ‘the ice . . . was breaking’. At other times he sensed that it was not breaking or was breaking down into ‘infidelity’, and blamed Gladstone for helping ‘to let in the deluge’ by which the breakdown would be completed. In his Oxford role, Jowett was typecast as a wordly cynic whose chief aim was to butter-up the aristocracy. But this does no justice to his intellectual intention. After his death, his religious writings were anthologized into a doctrine which looked blander than the doctrine he had taught in his lifetime, when his guiding principles had been intolerance of orthodoxy, a relaxed attitude to subscription, a locating of the Christian sensibility in the inner man, the destruction of the Anglican Oxford in which he had grown up and the conviction that he was avoiding theology when he attacked theology. Until his fifties, he showed little sympathy for the argument which Stanley had proposed in 1847 – that the strife of the Tractarian decade was over, that wounds would have to be healed if epicureanism was to be resisted, and that the ‘disruption of party’, whether achieved by Newman or Disraeli, made it necessary to ‘look around for some deeper and wider basis of sympathy’ than had been customary in the past. VI At the end of his life, Stanley remained optimistic in spite of ‘reverses’ and a revival of superstition, gratified at the abandonment of ‘crude’ versions of the Atonement, the Trinity, Biblical inspiration and eternal punishment, and persuaded that miracle as an ‘evidence’ of Christianity and the Athanasian Creed (to which he took particular exception) had gone for ever. As an advocate of the ‘moral’, and even more as a critic of the ‘portentous . . . dogmatic . . . and ceremonial’, Stanley took his stand on a marriage between German research and English practical religion, on St Paul as in a special sense ‘the apostle to the laity’ who spoke to the ‘secular professions and sciences’, and on Christ as speaking directly and emotionally to ‘shepherds, sailors, ploughmen, soldiers and fishermen’ in subjecting the conservatism of the learned to the roughness, simplicity and ‘streams of wisdom and faith’ that poured forth from the ‘cottages of the poor’. In defining its scope on taking up the Regius Chair of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, Stanley specified the history of God’s dealings with men, not through ecclesiastical churches but through the ‘Church of God’ for which he

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went back to the ‘call of Abraham’, to the ‘philosophical and critical’ revolution in the German universities, and to the Church of England’s achievement in ‘meeting, overcoming and absorbing’ the ‘new thoughts and feelings’ – indeed, the ‘new religion’ – which had flowed out of 1789. The ecclesiastical history that Stanley envisaged was a history of the ‘whole congregation of faithful men’, purged of Puritan and Tractarian religiosity, and proving, as Bede, Gibbon, Guizot, Grote, Froude and Macaulay had proved, that the doctrine of development had made it possible for ‘many a harsh expression’ to be ‘explained’, ‘many a . . . scruple of honest minds’ to be made ‘superfluous’, and ‘many a foolish controversy’ to be ‘extinguished for ever’. Stanley was also, he claimed, a new broom, sweeping away academic ‘stiffness’ and sweeping in ‘an ecclesiastical . . . warmth’ which would ‘enliven discourse and ministrations’ not only in the ‘free air of heaths and downs’ but also in the ‘dark corners of London alleys’. As an ecclesiastical historian, Stanley’s chief works were Sinai and Palestine, three sets of lectures – about the Eastern Church, the Jewish Church and the Church of Scotland – and fragments of a history of the English Church of which elements may be found in his historical guidebooks about Westminster and Canterbury. In all six volumes an attitude was revealed which was revealed best in Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church and The History of the Jewish Church. The History of the Eastern Church embodied a subtle malice, made sustained sneers at the Romanizing faction in England, and offered a countervailing insistence that the ‘Roman Church – so imposing when . . . the only Church which met our view’ – became less imposing when overshadowed by the ‘vaster, loftier, darker figure’ behind it. The History of the Jewish Church, on the other hand, was an attempt to fulfil Arnold’s injunction to ‘do for Judea . . . what Wolf and Niebuhr had done for Greece and Rome’, eliminating the ghetto of the sacred, humanizing the numinous, and placing Old Testament personages in secular settings. The contrast between ‘The Jewish Priesthood’ in volume II and ‘The Prophetical Order’ in volume I had the Levitical (or Tractarian) worship of the former being conducted by ‘butchers’ rather than ‘priests’ in temples which resembled ‘slaughter-houses’ rather than churches and had the latter being recruited, like modern scientists and men-of-letters, without ‘formal consecration’, as a ‘religious profession’ which encouraged ‘liberty and progress’ and discouraged the ‘prejudices . . . and . . . crimes’ by which most religious professions had been disfigured. The History of the Jewish Church repeated that the moral and spiritual were superior to the literal, ceremonial and dogmatic. It aimed to break down the narrowness of the uneducated, and to help everyone to see that a reanimated Anglicanism could provide a ‘national religion’ to replace the more limited religion it had provided in the different conditions of the past. In describing the changes which would be needed if Anglicanism was to be

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reanimated, Stanley’s pronouncements were of two connected kinds. On the one hand, there was a flood of articles about the government and formularies of the Church of England which began with The Gorham Judgement in 1850 and was still going on when Stanley died in 1881. On the other hand, there was the claim, explicit throughout, that restatement was indispensable if the Church of England was to accommodate itself both to the Christ disclosed by Biblical criticism and to the Apostolic Church disclosed by historical investigation. As a member of the ‘Liberal party’ in the Church of England, Stanley believed that the Church’s duty, as the national Church, was to embrace anyone able to receive its ministrations, that secular statesmen and the creators of art, science and literature were as important as the clergy and that the clerical contribution to national life and culture had become eccentric. The keynote of Stanley’s rhetoric was ‘sincerity’ and ‘truth’. Subscription was antiquated and anachronistic, and the ‘repulsion’ felt by the ‘higher . . . intelligences’ for formularies to which only uncertain or ‘poetic’ truth could be ascribed, entirely understandable. He contrasted the Thirty-Nine Articles, which presented their truths ‘in terms which most educated Christians . . . regarded as exaggerated and one-sided’ with the Prayer Book which put its ‘truths’ in ‘conciliatory and attractive forms’, and he concluded that, though a wide construction which ignored ‘the obvious meaning of words’ was ‘godless’ and ‘pernicious’, a rigid construction would exclude everyone ‘from the archbishop in his palace at Lambeth to the humblest curate in the wilds of Cumberland’. In the early 1870s Stanley was still on what he thought of as the fashion of the future and, as a member of the Ritual Commission of 1868, played a part in inserting a ‘sublime adiaphorism’ into the Church of England. It was only at the end of the decade that he began to doubt whether politicians would keep up the pressure. So far as disestablishment was concerned, he was counterrevolutionary throughout, aiming to liberalize the Church of England but repeating Thomas Arnold’s contention that it was ‘of inestimable advantage both to the clergy and to the State’ that the State should ‘do . . . good’ to the ‘people of England’ by ‘saving something out of the scramble for wealth’ and placing ‘men of education’ in ‘every part of the community’. Stanley stated his opinions with power and skill, doubting whether God’s kingdom was to be identified with any earthly organization, and attacking the ‘supposed inalienable privileges of ecclesiastical jurisdiction’ which linked the Free Churches of Scotland and England to the ‘Free Church of the Papacy’. In relation to the French rifles with which Pius IX was ‘suppressing the national and reforming tendencies of his own subjects’, Stanley’s dictum was that Popes were no more moral than statesmen, that the ‘changes’ which had done most to benefit Nonconformists in England had been effected by Parliament, and that clerical corporations, when unrestrained by law, as in the United States, were intolerant.

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Even at his most contentious, Stanley applied a mainly negative dialectic to historic dogma. If one asks what he meant positively, the clearest answers will be found first in an article entitled ‘Theology of the Nineteenth Century’ (1865) where it was hoped that Biblical criticism might create a common sentiment between the educated and the poor by employing scholarship’s ‘microscopic power’ to study the Bible ‘on the same general principles’ in all the churches, and then, in a book entitled Christian Institutions (1881), which attacked ecclesiasticism’s fossilization of primitive Christianity. Stanley shared Bunsen’s and Max Müller’s belief that a new theology would differ from historic theology in judging words by reference to things, renouncing finality where finality could not be achieved and employing constructive doubt in rejecting ‘inessentials’. In showing what God was, and bringing home the person of Jesus to the heart, it was, among modern works, Ecce Homo which for him was central since it was Ecce Homo which had drawn from Christ’s words and acts those principles of ‘freedom . . . justice . . . toleration . . . sympathy and truthfulness’ on which all sound theology had to take its stand.

Stanley thought of English ‘colonies . . . commerce and enterprise’ as the natural basis for a ‘Gentile Christendom’ which would learn from the battles that had been fought in the English Church, universities and law-courts in his lifetime. In almost every work that he wrote, he listed sympathizers with whom he agreed, his writings from that point of view being lists of the noble-hearted. These included Erasmus, Shakespeare, Bacon, Wordsworth, Lincoln, Tennyson, Goethe, Pascal, Bunsen and Renan, along with Anglican statesmen and churchmen from Edward the Confessor to Archbishop Tait, dissenting thinkers from Milton onwards, and those announcements of a liberalizing future which he found in Tulloch in Scotland, in Khomiakoff, the Russian, and in the Roman Catholicism of Döllinger, Gratry, Strossmayer and Acton. Most of all he found friends and allies in Thomas Arnold, Milman, Frederick Temple, Maurice, Kingsley, Jowett, Froude, Seeley, Matthew Arnold, Lecky and Max Müller. VII Max Müller5 came from a family of officials in the Court of Dessau and was related very distantly to the ruling family. As a student, he studied Greek, 15

Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), educated Leipzig and Berlin Universities. Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, 1858–1900. Author of Languages of The Seat of War, 1854; Rigveda Sanhita, 1856; Comparative Mythology, 1856; A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, 1859; Lectures on The Science of Language, 1861–4; Chips from a German Workshop, 1867–95; Rigveda Sanhita Translated and Explained, 1869; Introduction to The Science of Religion, 1870; India; What It Can Teach Us, 1873; The Origin and Growth of Religion, 1878; Introduction to The Upanishads, 1879; Language, Mythology and Religion, 1881; translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 1881; The Science of Thought, 1887; Theosophy or Psychological Religion, 1893; Ramakrishna; His Life and Sayings, 1898 and Last Essays, 1901.

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Latin and Sanskrit at Leipzig. After graduation, he encountered Lotze and Schopenhauer, was a pupil of Bopp and Schelling in Berlin, and then went to Burnouf in Paris, where he had a significant encounter with the Upanishads, which he was still describing thirty years later as ‘among the most astounding productions of the human mind in any age . . . in any country’. On arriving in England, Max Müller received East India Company employment in producing an edition and translation of the Rigveda. In the early 1850s he was naturalized, became Professor of Modern European Languages at the Taylorian Institute in Oxford and, after falling victim to a campaign against his appointment to the University Chair of Sanskrit which resembled the campaign against Jowett’s appointment to the Chair of Greek, occupied a Chair of Comparative Philology (until a rancorous resignation in 1878) and a Fellowship of All Souls College (until his death in 1900). Max Müller praised the classical scholarship through which the Oxford tutorial system had moulded the nation’s mind in the past but for the future was the advocate of an expanded professoriat which would break the mould by spearheading the imperial duty to encourage the study of Oriental languages and religions. As an ally of Stanley and Maurice, a relative by marriage of Froude and Kingsley and a friend also of Tylor, Tyndall, Gladstone and eventually (with reservations) Pusey, he became one of the most impregnably distinguished, and forward-looking, savants of his generation. Max Müller supported German unification under Prussian leadership and by and large approved of Bismarck’s methods. He admired Queen Victoria, was taken up by both the Prussian and the English royal families, and in English party terms was a Gladstonian Liberal whom Home Rule turned into a Liberal Unionist. Until the South African War, when he defended British policy against Mommsen, he believed in both the political and the religious affinities between Germany, England and the United States. It seems that, though he wanted to devote himself to the study of Hinduism, Max Müller felt obliged at first to teach philology and German literature in order to establish himself professionally. Philology then led back through the Vedas to comparative religion. It was as an exponent of comparative religion that he established his main foothold in the Victorian mind. Max Müller had written his first works about Indian religion before he arrived in London, his chief purpose in coming to London being to get access to material about the Vedas in the East India Company Library. In getting support from the East India Company, as in making his way in London society, he owed much to Bunsen, who, as well as being the friend and confidant of Thomas Arnold, was Max Müller’s mentor. At the time of Bunsen’s death, Max Müller was thirty-seven and in the previous decade had established a distinguished reputation as an editor of Sanskrit texts, a contributor to Bunsen’s Christianity and Mankind, and the

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author of a gloom-laden Victorian bestseller in which music, poetry, literature and nature, and an intense relationship between a penniless young man and a princely woman, had provided heartfelt statements about love’s ability to transcend differences of worldly station. These works constituted a formidable œuvre, the edition of the Rigveda in particular being the first complete systematized printing the Rigveda had received anywhere in the world and providing an authoritative basis for the editions of The Sacred Books of the East which the Clarendon Press encouraged Max Müller to edit with India Office support in the last twenty years of the century. Max Müller lived to be seventy-seven and went on writing right up to his death. In addition to a profusion of works about language and religion, he wrote important essays about Schiller, Niebuhr, Kingsley and Bunsen. His translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a tribute to ‘the greatest philosopher of modern times’, a corrective to the Kantianism of the Oxford Idealists, and a protest against physical science’s attempt to ‘grasp at the sceptre of philosophy’. Max Müller was an intellectual oilcan whose writings were fluent and mellifluous and claimed direct relevance to the world in which he lived. But he had his critics – Inge and Andrew Lang for his misunderstanding of mythology, W. D. Whitney, the American, who more or less accused him of sitting on the Rigveda in order to preserve his income from the East India Company, Sir Alfred Lyall for his ignorance of Hinduism and for defects of understanding which arose, like Buckle’s and Frazer’s defects of understanding, from an exclusive reliance on books.

Lyall6 was Scottish by descent, was the son of an Anglican clergyman, and nephew of a Dean of Canterbury and, after Eton and Haileybury, spent over thirty years mainly in the Indian Political Service. He distinguished himself during the Indian Mutiny and had a varied career first in Berar, then in Rajputana where, as he put it, the only really free Indian polity took the form of an unfree feudalism. After serving as head of the Government of India’s Home Office, and of the Foreign Office under Lytton during the second Afghan War, he ended his career as Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces. Lyall was a friend of Fitzjames Stephen and also of Maine – ‘one of the few men of first-class intellectual power to have taken part in Indian politics’. He admired Maine particularly – for his decisiveness and subtlety as Legal 16

Sir Alfred Comyns Lyall (1835–1911), educated Eton and Haileybury. Member of Indian Civil Service, 1856–7 (Lt. Governor of the North-Western Provinces, 1882–7). Privy Counsellor, 1902. Author of Asiatic Studies, 1882; Warren Hastings, 1889; Verses Written in India, 1889; The Rise of British Dominion in India, 1893; Tennyson, 1902; The Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, 1905; Some Aspects of Asiatic History, 1910 and Studies in Literature and History, 1915.

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Member of the Calcutta Council, for his insistence on the Indian government assisting the ‘consolidation of civil and religious liberty upon modern principles’, and for his rejection of the policy of propping up ‘decaying forms’ into which the British had been led by misunderstandings about the scope of Brahminical authority. In the 1870s Lyall began contributing to English quarterly-reviews as poet and as commentator on India. Under guidance from Morley, Spencer and others, he laid the foundations for authoritative authorship and, in retirement, after 1887, wrote a biography of Dufferin, a history of British India, books and essays about literature and extended accounts of Indian religion. Lyall’s literary criticism was evaluative as well as historical. He thought philosophy chiefly ‘destructive’ and believed that ‘great poets’ not only had a ‘divine vision’ but also knew more of the ‘Unknown Land’ than philosophers knew. He empathized with Tennyson as a cosmic thinker, regretted the ‘violence’ of Swinburne’s rejection of Christianity, and excused Byron in view of the ‘unsparing use that had been made of papers connected with the most intimate transactions of his . . . passage from youth to manhood’. About India, his considered judgements were that, though Dalhousie, Utilitarianism, the missionary lobby, the annexation of Oudh, and reactionary Hindu sentiment, had all been responsible for the mutiny, the Indian government had succeeded between the Sikh Wars and 1860 in ending India’s ‘military era’, inculcating a ‘critical and scientific spirit’ into Indian education, and ensuring that British rule would continue so long as it did not ‘bother’ the Indian people with the ‘new-fangled ideas’ which Tocqueville had accused the French monarchy of bothering the French people with before 1789. By origin Lyall was a Radical who had wanted an end of government by ‘comfortable country gentlemen’ in 1866, and had looked back to Metternich and Castlereagh as agents of ‘stifling repression’. By the time he voted Unionist at the second election of 1910, he was an anti-democratic Liberal who looked back on Ripon’s Viceroyalty as a disaster, wanted an understanding with Russia about Central Asia in order to prevent the ‘yellow races . . . breaking out westward’, and had come to dislike Gladstone for betraying Gordon at Khartoum and conniving at assassination in Ireland. Bengali democracy was a ‘sham’; the ‘competition-wallahs’ of the new Indian Civil Service not only preferred ‘respectable’ natives who had been educated as ‘dusky Englishmen’ to ‘semi-barbarian’ natives who had not had the experience, they had also allowed the English ‘faith in institutions’ to encourage among their Indian allies that ‘zealous habit of mind’ which Napoleon had termed idéologue. In religion, Lyall dismissed dogma and the supernatural, thought it unimportant whether a Christian was ‘Protestant, Roman Catholic or Greek’ and left the impression of assuming that, though everyone ought to have a religion, it did not matter whether the religion was Christian, Hindu or

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Mohammedan. He despised Mill’s religious writings almost as much as he despised Madame Blavatsky and ‘the Ritualists’, found Leslie Stephen a harmful influence on the English middle classes, and accused the Protestant missions of being too comfortable, rationalist and superficial, and of showing too little of Islam’s ‘dignity’ and ‘certitude’, to have an impact on Hinduism. In Letters from Vamadeo Shastri, he gave an imaginative account of conservative Brahminism’s reaction to Indian progress. In Shastri, Lyall invented a Hindu conservative who, though grateful for ‘railways, sound finance and an efficient police’, was more interested in religion than in the ‘spread of . . . luxuries among the commercial and professional classes’. In the last two of the Letters – published after his retirement – Lyall sneered at liberated Bengalis for capitulating to the ‘sensual side of European life’. Shastri’s Hinduism was far from being ‘cheerful’. Hindus had ‘little political capacity’, ‘endured life . . . quietly’, and hoped eventually to ‘slip altogether outside the pains and penalties of existence’. They did not accept the Christian doctrine of immortality and were unpersuaded by missionary propaganda; they were conscious of the ‘decline in religious belief’ caused by the Government of India’s identification of ‘moral’ with ‘material’ progress; and they were sure that Hinduism did not associate God with material progress and did not share Christianity’s and Islam’s belief in the connection between morality and religion. Shastri was not saying that such a connection was undesirable or that there was nothing to be said for a God who commanded and judged. What he said was that it was the absence of a God of this kind which was central to Hinduism, that the denigration of Brahminism and Brahminical education was the surest way to the deterioration of religion, and that religion was in any case the last thing that Hindus would wish to import from England. Shastri recognized in Mansel’s Bampton Lectures ‘passages that might have been taken textually from the Vedas’ and in Schopenhauer an ‘Indian . . . pessimism’ which was ‘supporting the foundations of Christianity’. But his dominant view was that the chief changes which were occurring in European religion were establishing the ‘supreme importance . . . of this life’, that, until these changes were reversed, the impact of even a transformed Christianity on Brahminism would be destructive, and that indeed the effect of contemporary European thought was in the direction of extinguishing religion as Hinduism understood it. In all three Shastri letters, Lyall gave a new twist to the views he had begun to express in the 1870s, saying through Shastri what he had been saying earlier about Brahminism’s dissimilarity from Islam and Christianity, and laying out the mechanics of the institution that experience of Indian religion had undermined any faith he may have had in Paley and Bishop Butler. Brahminism had

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known for many generations that its divinities were ‘signs of the incomprehensible’. But their removal, while ‘clearing away a harmless illusion’, would leave no ‘platform for a superior religion’ and, if replaced by positivism, would involve the extinction of religion. Even the improvement which might accrue from a more active God than Hinduism’s God was ruled out by doubts whether the Hindu scriptures could deliver a ‘Supreme Moral Ruler’, whether Brahminical theology could determine the ‘morality of . . . men’s . . . actions . . . in a single life’, and whether an ‘ethical doctrine’ could be extracted from ‘metempsychosis’ and ‘the soul’s transformation through incessant births and deaths’. Lyall aimed to bring the study of contemporary Hinduism down to earth and to avoid the simple condemnation which Max Müller had borrowed from Keshub Chander Sen. He made Hinduism mean what he had experienced as an administrator (where Max Müller had confined himself to texts) and claimed to discern what Max Müller had missed – a shapelessness like the shapelessness of the pre-Christian ‘supernaturalism’ which the Catholic Church had eradicated from Europe by the early Middle Ages. Hinduism, as Lyall understood it, differed from Islam and Christianity in having neither church, dogmas nor ‘definite conceptions of divinity’. Yet it continued to flourish because it had pre-dated religious and political organization, embraced an amazing variety of attitudes and practices from the worship of stones upwards and, even in the late nineteenth century, was still actively ‘creating new castes’. It was in no sense a ‘decaying survival’ and, though ‘deeply tinged’ by the Brahminism from which the ‘topmost classes’ claimed to ‘derive . . . its meaning’, was in fact the historic reaction of ordinary men, which put no ‘closures’ on ‘speculation’, and avoided the loss of credibility suffered by the ‘Christian mysteries’ when associated with ecclesiastical infallibility. For Hinduism’s porousness and freedom from theological tension, and for the resemblances between its pantheistic ‘adoration’ of natural forces and European science’s conception of nature as the operation of natural forces, Lyall felt the greatest respect. But his prognostications pulled in conflicting directions. The Brahmo-Samaj, of which Max Müller was an admirer, consisted of the ‘windy moralities of Baboos’ and would be likely to appeal to Dean Stanley. Western knowledge, on the other hand, would not only transform Brahminism as ‘the old gods died’ (in the way in which witchcraft had died in Europe) and were replaced by a more ‘mystical’ interpretation of the Hindu scriptures, it would also create a ‘spiritual interregnum’, and open a gap between the ‘mass of the people’ and the ‘ethical’ or Voltairean religion of the educated classes. Like Max Müller, Lyall wished to expel ritualism, ‘dogmatic theology’ and evangelical depravity, while preserving theism and prayer as mental necessities and aids to morality. But what he looked to mainly was an unproblematical,

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ingrained Hinduism to which his attitude was very much more sympathetic than Max Müller’s attitude.

In Max Müller’s activity as an exponent of the Vedas, there were two overlapping phases – a phase, first, from the 1850s to the 1880s, when he was correcting earlier interpretations, confuting dismissive interpretations and arguing that the Vedas had a message for Christianity; a phase, secondly in the 1880s and 1890s, when he criticized Madame Blavatsky and Vedantist revivalism in India, Britain and the United States. In order to locate him, it is necessary to examine the staggering output he achieved in the thirty years which followed the publication of Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, Stanley’s Epistles of St Paul to the Corinthians, Jowett’s Epistles of St Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans, and volumes I and II of Froude’s History of England, all of which had inserted into historic Protestantism a tone and manner which Max Müller had begun, more obscurely, to insert through a review of Bopp’s Comparative Grammar in The Edinburgh Review in 1851, through the long essay on Comparative Mythology which he contributed to Oxford Essays in 1856, and through the six hundred pages of The History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature which he published in 1859. Like Bunsen and Bopp, Max Müller took off from comparative philology which, as he explained it to the English, was a nineteenth-century science, the superseder of classical narrowness, and a factual and historical corrective of the ingenious and implausible theorists of the Enlightenment who, in the course of misunderstanding religion, had also misunderstood language. Max Müller assumed that grammar was outside man’s conscious control, that the science of language could not be one of the ‘historic sciences’ which dealt with ‘the works of man’, and that it had, therefore, to be one of the physical sciences which ‘dealt with the works of God’. Since language went back through an ‘unbroken chain’ to ‘the very ancestors of the race’, comparative philology studied ‘all’ the languages spoken by man, established that ‘no new root’ had been added to language since the beginning, and found in grammar a disclosure both of language’s primordial condition and a law of phonetic decay. In lecturing to the Royal Institution in 1861, Max Müller was crying up his own wares, arguing that the linguistic researches of the last fifty years were imposing order on the subject, and claiming that they ‘deserved a larger share of public sympathy than they had . . . received . . . hitherto’ by comparison with the physical sciences. Language had its beginnings in dialect and the practical needs of primitive men. It was not to be identified with the stagnation suffered by literary languages when divorced from their roots, and it had the practical power to set ‘nations against dynasties’ in Europe and ‘white men against Negroes’ in America. In describing both the discovery by Jones and Colebrook of the ‘identity of grammatical forms in Greek, Latin and

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Sanskrit’ and the ‘poetic vision’ with which Schlegel had ‘riveted together’ the ‘Indo-Germanic’ or ‘Aryan’ languages, he showed comparative grammar enquiring whether or not the families of languages, including the Turanian family had, or had not, had separate and spontaneous origins. Turanianism mattered to Max Müller insofar as it supplied evidence for or against monogeneticism. But in spite of flatulence about the ‘sacred symphony’ which could be made out of the diversity of languages, he dismissed monogeneticism and postulated a world-historical struggle between Turanian languages and mentalities and Aryan and Semitic languages and mentalities in which the Turanian ‘residuum’ had fallen back, while the others had been as much agents of progress by contrast with it as the higher minds were in relation to the ‘residuum’ in nineteenth-century England. Semitism was the bond of language which proved the common ancestry of the Jews, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians and the Arabs, Aryanism the bond which proved the common ancestry of the ‘principal tongues of Europe, Asia Minor, Persia and India’. Max Müller preferred the Aryans to the Semites and became touchy when the Semites were preferred. Having agreed that the Japhetic, Indo-Germanic or Indo-European family of languages (‘it is . . . of no great importance . . . what it is called’) had a common structure, he showed what it had done since emerging from Asia in order to spread a sense of God and the ‘germs of civilization’ into Iran and India in the south and into Asia Minor and Europe in the north. Max Müller could but recognize that it was the Semitic races which had invented Christianity and Islam, just as it was the Aryans who had ‘unified’ mankind by means of ‘civilization, commerce and religion’. Like Bunsen and Stanley, however, he believed that Protestantism had become too heavily Semitic, and needed to be Aryanized, and that light would be shed by thinking of an Aryanized Protestantism as a latitudinarian analogue to both preBrahminical and reformed Hinduism. Max Müller’s praise of the non-Christian religions was never full-throated since, ‘by the side of so much that was . . . simple, beautiful and true’, they contained much that was ‘hideous . . . repellent and . . . sexually coarse’. Nor did he visit India and the Far East any more than Frazer visited contemporary savages. About Zoroastrianism, which was an Aryan religion, and about Judaism, Islam, Taoism and Confucianism, which were not Aryan religions, he wrote as an amateur. It was only about Hinduism that he wrote as a scholar, though about that his sympathies were confined to its modern critics, to the Buddha’s criticisms, and to the primitive religion of the Vedas. Last in time among Max Müller’s Hindu topics was the Brahmo-Samaj – the work of Ram Mohun Roy and Keshub Chander Sen in nineteenthcentury Calcutta – which he believed indicated India’s religious future where conventional Brahminism was a corruption from the past. Roy had died in 1833 but Max Müller corresponded with Sen, entertained him in Oxford

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and admired him for trying to provide ‘a pure but popular religion and philosophy for those who were still in the lowest stage of philosophical faith’. In his obituary of Sen, Max Müller described not only Sen’s social work, his success as a preacher, and the nationwide movement he had created out of the Brahmo-Samaj, but also the attention he had received from the Viceroy in India and the Queen in England, and the impression he had left in London, Cambridge and Oxford, not least on Pusey, during a visit in 1870. He praised Sen, not by reason of the reactions of the English in England and India, however, but for his continuation of Roy’s search for a ‘new religion’ in place of the ‘grovelling worship of cows and monkeys’ to which Hinduism had been reduced by Brahminism and the ‘idolatry of the priest-ridden masses’. For Max Müller, Roy was of historic importance. Roy had worked himself out of ritual, orthodoxy and polytheism, and had found in the Upanishads evidence that a Hindu could be both a monotheist and a Christian once Christianity had been purged of theology. In spite of suffering personally for his opposition to suttee and caste, he had reaffirmed the ‘ancient, national’ belief that the ‘One God . . . had been revealed in the Vedanta before He [had revealed] Himself in the Bible or . . . the Koran.’ Not only, moreover, had Roy set off ‘the Indian Reformation’, he had also been a ‘true Aryan nobleman’ whose native Bengali was ‘in a scientific sense . . . the same language as English’. His visit to England had shown him to be ‘one of ourselves, estranged by no greater changes than what some thousands of years [had] wrought in [the] language’, and he had achieved both a meeting of ‘the two great branches of the Aryan Race’ after the loss of their common faith and the prospect of restoring the ‘original brotherhood’ as ‘the best representative of the south-eastern Aryans . . . shook hands . . . with the most advanced outpost of the other Aryan family’. Roy was important because he had wished to get back behind historic Brahminism to the true religion which a study of Greek and Hebrew had also helped him to find in the Bible. In the Buddha’s rebellion against Brahminism, Max Müller saw a similar attempt to break the ‘pharisaical conceit’ and ‘intellectual tyranny’ which had made the Brahminical priesthood the ‘exclusive property of a class’, and to destroy the rigid ceremonial and monopoly of cult and religious education which had converted the caste system into a ‘poison’. Brahminism’s view of revelation had been ‘even more minute and elaborate’ than ‘the most active [theory] of verbal inspiration in Europe’; its imposition of a philosophical system on the ‘guesses at Truth’ of the earlier Upanishads had been deeply damaging; its falsification of the Vedas (in order to justify suttee) and the attribution to its own privileges of a divine authority to attack which was ‘heresy’ and deserving of suppression by the ‘laws of the State’, replicated features which forward-looking Christians disliked most in historic Christianity. The Buddha’s teaching, by contrast, had played up ‘equality . . . charity, kindness and . . . pity’, had disengaged the ‘code of morality’ from

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Nirvana, metempsychosis and the transmigration of souls, and had ensured that in the immediate future Buddhists would preach ‘in the language of the people’. Max Müller’s account of the Vedas began in earnest with the introduction to volume III of the Rigveda, where the hierarchical dogmatism and ‘philosophical hallucination’ of Brahminical interpretation had obscured a work which had had more of the poetry of man’s ‘ancient mythical speech’ and more of man’s oldest ‘thoughts . . . hopes . . . faith and errors’ than ‘all the inscriptions of Egypt and Nineveh’. The Rigveda was the ‘theogony’ of the Aryan races, disclosed a world into which no Semitic element had intruded, and revealed, in a way which anthropological study of ‘Bushmen and Hottentots’ could not reveal, ‘our fellow-workers’ constructing the ‘fundamental concepts’ of modern European religion. This was the sense in which the discovery of the ‘Indo-European family of speech’ had been one of the major discoveries of the nineteenth century, and had helped Europeans to see that the Aryan language which they carried on their lips was a testimony to the Aryan religion which they carried in their hearts; indeed, that what had been contributed to the ‘Education of the Human Race’ by the ‘dark-skinned inhabitants of India two or three thousand years ago’ was the ‘passive, meditative, philosophical’ mentality which, once settled in a ‘perpetual Sunday . . . along the Indus and the Ganges’, had edged out the ‘warlike Gods’ under whom the conquest of India had been effected. To some extent, this involved a romantic contrast between the ‘primitive . . . Hindu . . . homestead’ and the ‘monstrous proportions’, ‘manly vigour’ and ‘public spirit’ of the ‘North Aryans . . . of London or Paris’. To some extent, it involved an attempt to show, what Green was showing in Oxford at the same time about the Puritan character in the seventeenth century – that the ‘Indian character’ had a Wordsworthian capacity for ‘transcendence’. In primitive Vedism, Max Müller found the immortality of the soul and both the punishment of sin and the forgiveness of sins. He found philosophy as the ‘fulfilment of religion’, a Schopenhauerian awareness of the difference between Brahman as ‘the only true reality’ and the ‘dream-like . . . and perishable world of phenomena’, and the doctrine of karma as supplying a motive for goodness, intimations of solidarity, and reasons for resignation under suffering. This was the philosophy which was ‘breathed in by every Hindu from his earliest youth’, was known to some extent ‘in every . . . Indian . . . village’, and had formed the basis for Roy’s and Sen’s reformation. Though the exclusion of the Sudras was embarrassing, the four stages of life were less embarrassing than the four castes, and it was one of Hinduism’s merits that its sacred code contained not only ‘different phases of religious thought’ but also doctrines which were ‘almost diametrically opposed to one another’. Max Müller was well aware of the incompatibility between modern

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European life and the ‘ideal life of the ancient Aryans’. But he believed that the former had something ‘objective’ to learn – a lesson of ‘toleration’ or ‘sympathy’ leading to the prospect of much that was ‘worshipped and preached in Hindu temples . . . Buddhist biharas . . . Mohammedan mosques . . . Jewish synagogues and Christian churches’ being left behind, the ‘crypt of the past’ being ‘widened and brightened’ into ‘the Church of the future’, and the science of religion helping to show that the idea of God – ‘the foundation of a people’ – could be rediscovered behind the ‘rust of ages’, the ‘religion of the book’ and the ‘catechisms . . . articles and creeds’ by which God had been hidden. Every religion was ‘true’ insofar as it was ‘compatible with the language . . . thought and . . . sentiments’ of its generation, and the task of the future, as Max Müller explained it to the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, was to effect a fusion of creeds in which an undogmatic Christianity based on the Aryan logos, Greek philosophy and Christ’s personality, and turned into ‘mysticism’ by the Franciscans, the Dominicans, Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroeck and Eckhart, would give ‘the multitude’ its first experience of the ‘love’ which God could ‘pour into the human heart’. Max Müller was sensitive to criticism but did not really engage with it. He took high ground – the high ground of superior knowledge – which was softened by a rhetoric of fallibility and the questionable belief that a ‘chosen religion’ was ‘always stronger’ than an ‘inherited religion’. He made many statements of his deepest convictions, aiming in all of them to rid Christianity of features which were dividing it from other religions and modern thought. He knew that ‘some of [his] results had given pain to learned theologians . . .’ Still he replied, what would you say, if you saw a strong and powerful oak tree, enclosed by tiny props to keep it from falling, made hideous by scarecrows to drive away the birds, or shielded by flimsy screens to protect it from the air and the light of heaven? Would you not feel that it was an indignity to the giant of the forest? Would you not feel called upon to pull out the tiny props, and let the oak face the gales, and . . . send its roots more deeply into the rock beneath . . . This is what I feel about religion, yea about the Christian religion . . . It does not want these tiny props . . . hideous scarecrows or useless apologies. If they ever were wanted, they are not wanted now, whether you call them physical miracles, or literal inspiration, or papal infallibility; they are now an affront, a dishonour to the majesty of truth. (F. Max Müller, Theosophy, 1893, pp. 542–3)

4 The enlargement of Christianity

High culture or ardent intelligence, pervading a large body of the community, acquire a breadth of basis . . . an energy of central heat for radiating fervour which they can never possess when they pervade a small upper class only. It is . . . such a broad basis . . . that . . . is the secret of rich and beautiful epochs in national life . . . and . . . our actual middle class . . . has the forerunner, the preparer, the indispensable ferment . . . It . . . has real mental ardour, real curiosity and . . . widespread mental movement. (Matthew Arnold, A French Eton, 1864, pp. 105–6) If we abandoned our belief in the supernatural, it would be not only inanimate Nature that would be left to us . . . Nature including Humanity would be our God. We should read his character not merely in the earthquake and fire, but also in the still small voice; not merely in the destroying powers of the world, but . . . in the compassion that we feel for one another . . . not merely in the intricate laws that confound our prudence, but in the science that penetrates them and the art which makes them subservient to our purposes; not merely in the social evils that fill our towns with misery and cover our frontiers with war, but in the St Francis that makes himself the brother of the miserable, and in the Fox and Penn that proclaim principles of peace. (J. R. Seeley, Natural Religion, 1882, pp. 68–9) As for Spirit-rapping, I am exactly in the same mind towards it as towards Religion. I believe there is something in it: I don’t know what: have tried hard to discover, and find that I always paralyse the phenomena. (Henry Sidgwick to Frederic Myers, 30 October 1873, in E. M. and A. Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick;A Memoir, 1906, p. 284)

Carlyle, Froude, Kingsley, Thomas Arnold, Stanley, Jowett, Bunsen and Max Müller were all aiming to modernize Protestantism in order to make it acceptable to the modern world. On the whole, except in the case of Carlyle, they stopped short of accommodating Christianity to secularity. In Matthew Arnold, Seeley, Sidgwick and Wicksteed, a similar aim ended in absorptive accommodation. I Matthew Arnold1 was the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, was a schoolboy under his father at Rugby and at Balliol in the wake of Tract XC, sat at the 11

Matthew Arnold (1822–88), educated Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of Oriel College. Inspector of Schools. Author of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, 1849; Empedocles on Etna, 1852; Poems, 1853 and 1855; The Popular Education of France, 1861; On Translating Homer, 1861; A French Eton, 1864; Essays in Criticism, 1865 and 1888; On the Study of Celtic Literature, 1867; New Poems, 1867; Schools and Universities on the Continent, 1868; Culture and Anarchy, 1869; St Paul and Protestantism, 1870; Friendship’s Garland, 1871; Literature and Dogma, 1873; God and The Bible, 1875; and Last Essays on Church and Religion, 1877.

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feet of Jowett, Temple, Ward and Tait. He was much affected by his father’s death, by a sense of his father’s depth, and by the evidence he was given of his father’s life in Stanley’s Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold. After an extravagant life as an undergraduate, he did badly in his examinations but won the Newdigate prize for poetry, and became successively a Fellow of Oriel College, secretary to Lord Lansdowne’s Whig household, and an Inspector of Schools. At Balliol, Arnold abandoned belief in both the Atonement and the Resurrection. He remained an Anglican, however, went to church and usually turned to the East for the Nicene Creed. Whatever his admiration for mediaeval Catholicism and however little in the end he may have believed of historic Christian dogma, his attachment to the Church of England is not in question. Arnold achieved fame through poetry before achieving it through the prose essay. But the fame he achieved as a poet was less secure than the fame he was to achieve as a critic of life and society from Culture and Anarchy onwards.

By the time Culture and Anarchy was made a book in 1869, Arnold was fortyseven and had published a major statement of critical theory as well as a lot of literary essays and four lectures entitled On Translating Homer. He had written three books about the school and university system. He had described England’s political condition. And he had explained the historic crisis by which, as he took it, the age was confronted. In the late 1860s these merged into a common task – the reconstruction of the thought-world in which Englishmen were living. This task came slowly to the forefront of Arnold’s mind in the first two decades of his adult life. It had appeared in both prose and verse before he adopted the essay as a regular medium in the late 1850s, the virtual abandonment of verse after the Poems of 1867 almost certainly owing less to a waning of poetic talent than to a sense that prose would lead more directly to the destiny by which he felt himself to be confronted. In anticipating the future, Arnold adopted a stance. He was a critical Victorian addressing his fellow-countrymen about themselves. He was writing for a middle-class audience and aiming to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of its certainties. His account of the past was designed to diminish these certainties. Its message was that the English had virtues and a great many limitations which their lack of perspective prevented them understanding. This was so, he was saying, in a political, an intellectual and a literary sense. In the political sense the greatest event Arnold saw in the recent past was the French Revolution when ‘a whole nation’ had been ‘penetrated with . . . enthusiasm for pure reason’ and had attempted to give effect to the ideas which its leaders had persuaded ‘the multitude’ to ‘take for its law’. Arnold

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had reservations about the Revolution. But his writings were an apology for it. They praised Napoleon’s attempt to set up a new authority in place of the ancien régime and attributed both to him and to Louis Napoleon an instinctive sense of the inmost sentiments of a peasant nation which was at once post-feudal, soberly nationalistic and deeply conservative. Arnold had no wish to have an effect on French politics; he wished merely to point out that resistance to the Revolution had been led by Pitt and the English aristocracy, that the resistance’s negativity had dominated English politics ever since, and that the Revolution, though defeated in arms in 1815, had become so dominant since that it was ‘aristocratic ideas’, so far as there were any, which had become anachronistic. In the introduction to his first prose work Arnold referred at length to the ‘old political parties which had governed England’ since 1789, about which his points were that both were in process of dissolution (which they were not) and that the ‘growing power’ in contemporary Europe (a truer insight) was the ‘instinct pushing the masses towards expansion and a fuller life’. Arnold wrote with a Burkean respect for the ‘grandeur’, ‘high spirit’ and ‘sympathy with the common people’ which ‘aristocratical . . . institutions’ had exemplified in England in the past. But he was as insistent as Mill or Coleridge that aristocratic ideas were ‘losing their hold’ in the face of democracy and would have to be transformed if they were to play a part in the future. Though Arnold’s sympathies in the 1860s were liberal, he did not identify himself with a political party and made a point of writing with the high-flying independence of an intellectual. ‘Intellectual’ was not a word that he used; nor would he necessarily have thought of himself as a bourgeois intellectual. Neither would it be right to equate his values with bourgeois values since they were literary and para-clerical rather than bourgeois. He assumed bourgeois predominance just as he assumed that working-class power was going to increase and was more concerned to ensure that ‘right mentalities’ would prevail than that the right people would make them prevail. Bourgeois predominance, in this picture, was a nonconformist invention which had emerged with the Industrial Revolution and political economy, and had led to both ‘philistinism’ and ‘alienation from the State’. ‘Alienation from the State’ was a hangover from Anglican persecution in the seventeenth century and ‘philistinism’ a continuation of the insensitivity to ideas which had been borrowed from the aristocracy. But, since the middle classes were attracting none of the deference which the aristocracy attracted naturally and since ideas, improbably, were said to be ‘the life of the multitude’, it followed that the middle classes would find it difficult to attract deference unless they displayed greater intellectual curiosity. In the 1860s Arnold tried three ways of describing the defects of the middle classes – seriously and straight in his three educational works, indirectly in Essays in Criticism, and with bantering irony in the imaginary letters of

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Thunder-ten-Tronk which were published as magazine articles between 1865 and 1867 before they were made into Friendship’s Garland in 1871. In Friendship’s Garland Arnold ridiculed bourgeois complacency, the bourgeois belief in the sanctity of private property, and the bourgeois assumption that the poor could be educated compulsorily without the rich suffering compulsion too. He made fun of The Times and the Daily Telegraph, of Lowe’s panglossian Utilitarianism, and of the middle-class admiration for Palmerston. Whereas ‘the civil organizations . . . of France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Holland’ had been ‘framed with . . . design to meet the wants of the modern world’, the English state was said to resemble Austria and Rome in ‘ignoring . . . the right of reason to rule human affairs’. The comparison with Austria and Rome – the bêtes noires of the liberal mind – was meant to be offensive. But it was also meant to be serious and to make the point that the English mind was out of step with the most modern minds in Europe. This was true, Arnold argued, not only of politics but also of literature. It was true primarily in these earliest prose works of education. In the course of the 1860s Arnold’s view of European education was laid out in The Popular Education of France, A French Eton and Schools and Universities on the Continent, in which the argument was that the French had become pioneers in using State power for educational purposes since 1789 and that, in all the countries where their example had been followed, education had become extensive, compulsory and cheap. In relation to England, the argument was that State direction needed to do for middle-class education what had already been done on the Continent. Arnold knew that State direction would be unpopular with the middle-class electorate. Neither did he suggest that the middle classes should stop assimilating themselves through the great public schools. His complaint was that fear of State power had made the average middle-class school less adequate than it should be. About the content of elementary education, Arnold did not say much, except that the problem was less the content of the teaching than of finding a way to instil ‘feeling, gentleness and humanity’ into the poor. For secondary education his policy was a system of State schools to reproduce the feeling which Eton had created among the upper classes of belonging to a ‘great and honourable institution’, not, however, by the amateur methods which had been adopted at Eton but by making secondary schools an integral part of a national system to which universities would provide the ‘crown and complement’. Arnold did not exactly suggest that universities should ‘lead’ since leadership was to come from a broadened, professionalized education ministry. But existing ‘university instruction’ was ‘in the opinion of the best judges, the weakest part of our whole educational system’ both in quality and extent. ‘Barely one-half the proportion of England’s population came under

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superior instruction’ compared with France and Prussia; the ‘entire absence of the crowning of the structure’ was ‘obliterating in the whole nation the sense of the value and importance of human knowledge’; and it followed that universities had to be subjected to a ‘rationally planned and effective civil organization’ in which state action would play a part. For the ‘crowning of the edifice’ the idea was a greatly expanded university system aiming not at the character-training of the public schools but at the pursuit of systematic knowledge so that ‘the young man’, after his ‘general education was finished’, would ‘go on in the line where his special aptitudes led him’ and receive ‘systematic instruction’ of a type that the existing English student had to go to Paris, Heidelberg or Berlin to get. Arnold’s curricular preferences were not in any ordinary sense vocational. Neither were they primarily literary. Knowledge formed the basis, not the application of knowledge, however much it was applicable and however desirable it was to break the stranglehold of mathematics and philology. He expected the pursuit of knowledge to induce ‘largeness of soul and personal dignity’ as well as a ‘liberal culture’ and a ‘modern spirit’. And he hoped that knowledge would make the world a better place. But he did not prefer literature to science since education should enable a man to know not only himself but also the world – the ‘laws which governed nature’ at least as much as the ‘capabilities and performance of the human spirit’. It is necessary to insist on this. Arnold was the apostle of ‘sweetness and light’, but this did not make him think that the study of literature was superior to the study of nature, even when literature was central to pursuit of a modern standpoint. Arnold’s literary criticism was a response to the ‘modern’ spirit. From Essays in Criticism onwards, this was a major theme, along with the claim that literature, English or otherwise, in order to be anything more than entertainment, would have to respond to the situation created by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution which, having destroyed the world that had preceded them, had failed to create a new world to which assent could be given. Arnold’s account of the history of English literature began with a high culture standing on a ferment of ideas in the age of Shakespeare but degenerating as the ‘middle class . . . entered the prison of puritanism and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years’. Milton was on a pedestal but there was criticism of Shakespeare’s structureless ‘artificiality’, of the ‘eccentricity’ and ‘arbitrariness’ which early seventeenth-century prose had retained from the Elizabethans, and of the failure of the eighteenth-century reaction against it. About contemporary English literature there were three major criticisms – that it lacked ‘power’, that is had no interest in European literature and that English writers should have read more books and had more ideas. So far as ‘power’ was concerned, only Byron amongst nineteenth-century

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writers was credited with having had it to any serious extent. And Byron was praised for making ‘a titanic’ attempt to apply the ‘modern spirit’ to literature. Like Shelley, however, Byron had been resisted, and, since neither had been upheld by a public that responded to ideas, ‘their literary creation’ had not only been ‘failures’ but had been failures as significant as Wordsworth’s retirement into a monastery, Coleridge’s resort to opium, Keats’s commitment to sensuousness and Scott’s decision to become ‘the historiographer-royal of feudalism’. The first part of Arnold’s doctrine was a belief in the need to break up the mental rigidities of the age so that, out of doubt and ferment and in response to the ‘complex’ nature of modern life, a ‘creative epoch of literature’ might emerge. This was why Essays in Criticism threw European and classical literature at a public which could not read it, and why ‘bricks-and-mortar-protestantism’ was subjected to critical comparison with the Catholic profundities of Bossuet, the de Guérins and St François de Sales. It was also why On the Study of Celtic Literature attacked the most insidious of the age’s self-images – the belief in the solidity, sufficiency and utilitarian materialism of the British character. We need not follow the ethnological ramble of Parts I and II of On the Study of Celtic Literature or the details it gave of the history of the Semitic and Indo-European races. What is important is Arnold’s conclusion – that the gap between them was so great that the Semitic qualities were ‘non-assimilable’, that the English were an amalgam of Celtic, German and Norman elements which had merely made them ‘self-conscious and awkward’ and ‘philistine’ and ‘imperious’ where they might have been ‘quick-witted and spiritual’, ‘faithful to nature’ and ‘precise and clear’, and that, in the climate created by the ‘new ideas and forces’ which had been stirring since Palmerston’s death in 1865, a ‘new type of Englishman’ had been coming to the fore who was ‘more intelligent . . . gracious and humane’ than his forbears and had a new perception both of the English character and of English cultural and literary capability. This was not the prediction of a millennium, merely an account of the ‘wilderness’ in which Arnold expected all his contemporaries to die – a ‘wilderness’ where ‘the provincial spirit’ predominated, taste had become the ‘mere glorification by ourselves of ourselves or our literature’, and what was needed was a ‘large and centrally-placed intelligence’ distilling ‘urbanity’ or the ‘tone of the city’ and a ‘disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that [was] known and thought in the world’. When Arnold wrote about literature he was thinking chiefly about poetry, which excluded no area of existence from its illuminations. Poetry ‘seized the secret’ of the lives of ‘animals, water or plants’ and could not only ‘awaken’ an ‘intimate sense’ of the ‘mystery’ of the ‘universe’ but also ‘spoke like Adam naming . . . the creatures . . . by divine inspiration’. Arnold’s conception of the poetic function, as it was expressed in his public

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writings, was confident and omnicompetent. But it emerged from a more acute wrestling than these writings suggested. His letters insisted on the need for suffering, on the suffering involved in connecting ‘style’ with the ‘inward poetic life’, and on the poet’s duty to ‘tear . . . himself . . . to pieces’ in uniting ‘perfection of form’ with the ‘multitude of new thoughts and feelings’ which had become possible since Shakespeare and Milton. It entailed the conclusion (in criticism of Keats and Browning) that the poet needed to ‘begin’ not with ‘exquisite bits and images’ or ‘parts . . . episodes and ornamental works’ but with an ‘idea of the World’ in order ‘not to be prevailed over by the World’s multitudinousness’. This looks like a demand for philosophy, but Arnold dismissed philosophy. In fact it was a demand for ‘thought’ as a prelude to poetry, for ‘style’ as the ‘nobility of the poet’s character’, and for the subject-matter of poetry as the ‘richness’ of the poet’s ‘mind’. It was also a demand that ‘modern poetry’ should ‘subsist’, as the poetry of the ancients had subsisted, by including religion with poetry instead of existing as ‘poetry only’. Religion had been present in Arnold’s poetry from the start. From the late 1860s his writings were either literary or religious, or so much an amalgamation of the two that they must be considered together. In this respect, Culture and Anarchy was a transitional work, continuing the irony of the first part of Friendship’s Garland, vulgarizing the conceptions of Essays in Criticism, and sneering elegantly at the outward forms of nonconformist observance. At the same time it suggested a serious concern with religion which was to reach its fullest expression in the works that followed. Arnold was the prophet of culture because he wanted culture to bring the standards of the historic Anglican establishment to bear on bourgeois philistinism and nonconformity. This did not mean, however, that he identified culture with the existing Church of England. In Culture and Anarchy the remoulding of theology was less extensive than it was to be in Arnold’s later writings and it was Newman who symbolized culture’s subversion of liberal complacency. But even in Culture and Anarchy it was obvious that ‘the religion of culture’ had no time for the dogmatic aspects of religion, and that the attempt to use culture to kindle ‘the raw and unkindled masses’ would involve abandonment of the ‘mechanical’ theology by which they were not being kindled at present. Culture and Anarchy was a subtle and mocking work. It ridiculed the selfassertion and self-mutilation imposed by persecution on the Nonconformist character, opposed the disestablishment of the Church of England while wishing the universities to be opened to nonconformity, and hoped that Anglican ‘knowing’ would act ultimately as an antidote to Hebraic ‘doing’ by re-establishing the principle that culture was ‘alone sacred and binding’. About this three things were important – that the sacredness of culture, though designed to subvert both puritan sin and Renaissance intellectuality,

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was designed to subvert the first more than the second; that the doubt whether all classes should ‘do what they liked’ was accompanied by the belief that they should do as ‘their best selves’ told them to; and that this, as an aspect of culture, required not only the development of a ‘best self’ as against the inferior selves held up for admiration by the aristocracy and the middle and working classes, but also the establishment of an ‘authority’ based on the ‘sacred’ use of ‘state power’. II In the 1860s Arnold had begun to make a general statement about the religious duties of ‘the few’ towards ‘the many’, and about the inadequacy of Colenso, Essays and Reviews and other ill-considered latitudinarianisms which, instead of aiming at edification as the work of clergymen should, were upsetting the popular faith by intellectual questionings which were not good enough to instruct the instructed. It cannot be said that Arnold respected English popular religion; ‘perhaps in no country in the world’, he wrote in 1863, ‘is so much nonsense so firmly believed’. But he was as contemptuous of the ‘modern thinking’ which was being proposed in its place and objected to the doubts of the intelligentsia being broadcast to the ‘multitude’ until abandonment of the doctrine of Biblical inspiration had been examined intellectually and a search conducted for something else for churches to base their beliefs on once they had ceased to believe in that. In the 1860s, in other words, Arnold was both rejecting theological liberalism and taking its primary assumptions seriously. He was also saying that the masses had not accepted them, and that the necessary reconstruction should be conducted initially on a closed circuit where the intelligentsia, instead of talking to its servants, talked to itself. This circuit was a ‘laboratory’ of the mind where ideas were ‘fashioned’ for ‘use’ in the world, but where the process of transference to the world was complicated. It was possible to make ‘new intellectual ideas’ harmonize with the religious life, but this would need ‘great religious reformers’ if it was to be done properly. Since none were in sight, the true religious teacher was he who, ‘not yet reconciling all things, at least esteem[ed] things . . . in their due order’ and, ‘shutting his mind against no ideas brought by the spirit of the age, set these ideas . . . in the right prominence . . . in the religious life’. In the 1860s Arnold pinpointed the Bible as the problem. But he was tentative and uncertain, knew what to say about the merits and limitations of Spinoza’s view, but was not yet ready to provide a solution for the main problem. It was not until St Paul and Protestantism that he replaced the social by a theological critique of nonconformity, and began to show how the Church of England could become as credible and intelligible as Catholicism had been in the hands of St Francis. St Paul and Protestantism argued that Protestant nonconformity had been

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theologically aggressive and had come to exist for the sake of ‘special doctrines’, where the Church of England had believed – what the mediaeval Church was also supposed to have believed – that dogmatic definition was a matter of expediency which in no way touched ‘the essence of Christianity’. Reunion with Rome might be approached in the long term via the churches of France and Germany, but all the ‘England of this generation’ could do was ‘to bring about . . . the union of Protestants’ by convincing nonconformists that ‘Scriptural Protestantism’ was not ‘the Gospel of Christ’. By ‘Scriptural Protestantism’ Arnold meant election, justification and predestination, and the Calvinistic and Wesleyan emphasis on ‘what God gives and works for us, not on what we bring or do for ourselves’. What he aimed to show was that St Paul had not believed any of this and that to read him ‘with critical tact’ was to prove that the real Paul was incompatible with the Paul whom Luther and Calvin had ‘shut up’ in a scholastic, scientific or pseudo-scientific theology. Arnold’s ostensible aim in theological translation was to soften up Protestant nonconformity. But he also wanted the Church of England to acquire the modern religion which, after being hinted at in Culture and Anarchy and implied in St Paul and Protestantism, was laid out and explained in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible. By the time Literature and Dogma was published, the caution of the 1860s had disappeared. Where previously it had been dangerous to upset popular superstition unless there was something popular to put in its place, now there had been the inevitable revolution created by the high-quality secular literature of the late 1860s, and what was required was total reconstruction, with the whole Bible replacing the Pauline epistles as the text for elucidation, with Christ’s replacing St Paul’s as the teaching for reinterpretation, and with the Bible being treated comprehensively at last as ‘literature’. In treating the Bible as literature, Arnold was not, he thought, diminishing its importance. On the contrary, since the Bible’s ‘divine’ significance had been questioned, it had to be given some other significance – by being treated as the Jews’ contextualizeable contribution to ‘culture’, by attributing a meaning to ‘God’ which annexed God to human experience, and by disparaging all other religions by comparison with the religion of the golden age when the Jews had thought naturally and without the contortions produced by subsequent, and especially by theological, development. Christ, indeed, had used the Old Testament to enable men to discern, through the ‘three-fourths of life’ which regulated the impulses, both the ‘not ourselves which made for righteousness’ and the difficulty of knowing what the ‘not ourselves’ was like and, in showing the way back to that joy in pursuing righteousness which the Jews had lost by subjecting themselves to mechanical externality and a commanding God, had introduced the humbleness, repentance and sweet reasonableness which were Jesus’s distinctive contribution to religion.

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This was the ‘secret’ of Jesus, and that was all it was. It had been revealed less than half-way through Literature and Dogma, and the rest of that work, and the whole of God and the Bible, either reinforced it with Biblical evidence or defended it against the criticism it attracted, both for attenuating belief and for failing to attenuate belief sufficiently. In conceiving of men as having ‘two lives’, of their need to ‘die’ to the lower one, and of dying involving the annulment of sensuality, Christ was presented not only as a Carlylean moralist, without the lapsed Calvinistic harshness of Carlyle’s conception of nature, but also as pointing a gun down the ages at the ‘fairy-tales’ to which both high and low Christianity had become committed in the course of Christian history. This was not intended to be speculative any more than it was intended to be dogmatic. Its truth was supposed to lie in the fact that it worked, that, for nations as well as for individuals, there could be no escape from judgement by the ‘Eternal that loveth righteousness’, and that not only would the wicked eventually be no more and the ungodly be clean gone, but also that whoever was ‘shipwrecked’ would be ‘shipwrecked on conduct’. In Arnold’s religion, as in Marx’s, Mill’s or Carlyle’s religions, the point was the future. It was the ‘immense possibility for development’ once Jesus’s ‘secret’ had been disclosed that was to create a Christianity in which all men would read the Bible as Arnold read it, in which all men would treat it as a call to righteousness, and in which all men would annul their sensuality by reference to it. Arnold did not expect an easy ride either for righteousness or for the Bible as literature. But it is important to notice that he had in mind a ride on the back of the Church of England. In Culture and Anarchy and St Paul and Protestantism, there had been defences both of the Church of England as the Church established by the State and of Church establishments generally against nonconformist narrowness, on the ground that the human spirit’s approaches to totality had been made chiefly by men who either belonged to establishments or had been trained in establishments. The meaning of this was obscure but it is certainly the case that Arnold had a High-Church mind which, in Last Essays on Church and Religion, provided a High-Church and highly political justification of his decision to rearrange Christianity from above. In Last Essays on Church and Religion Arnold explained that he was not an enemy of the Church of England, which he defined as ‘a great national society for the promotion of . . . goodness’. And he insisted that the Anglican clergy would be missing an historic opportunity if they failed to act on this assumption, since the nation would turn out to be their natural ally provided they could bring themselves to abandon not only dogma but also the social and political conservatism which went with regard for rank, property and class interest. One of Arnold’s original aims in demythologizing the Bible had been to

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meet the demands of working-class scepticism. But now he was saying that it was necessary to rearrange the Church’s political teaching as well, and that even an undogmatic Christianity would not save the Church of England unless it responded to working-class aspirations, changed things for the better on this side of the grave and established ‘felicity’ and ‘endless self-sacrifice all round’. This was Jesus’ ‘ideal’, and not only was there no incompatibility between it, God’s earthly kingdom and working class improvement, but the Anglican tradition, with its lack of awe in face of class, property and station, provided positive testimony to their compatibility. This was what was seeping out of Arnold by the middle 1870s – that a comprehensive Establishment could not only embrace Anglicans and Protestant Nonconformists but could also bring the working classes within the pale of the religious constitution by providing a class as well as a personal interest in pursuing righteousness through the regulation of conduct. The question we have to ask is, how was this related to culture? In answering this question, we need to bear three things in mind. First, that one of culture’s most important roles was to translate theology, that Arnold’s introduction to selections from the English poets, as well as his versions of Isaiah, were meant to be contributions to popular religion, and that it was in this sense that Last Essays on Church and Religion announced his intention of spending the rest of his life on ‘literature, more strictly so-called . . . where work of the most important kind [had] now to be done for religion . . . though indirectly’. Second, that ‘hole-and-corner churches’ were damaging Christianity by isolating it from ‘the main currents of human life’ and what was needed was a modern replication of the Emperor Constantine’s success in bringing Christianity out of its ghetto and putting it in touch with ‘the main currents of human life’. Finally, that ‘men had got into such a habit of giving . . . a special application to the language of religion’ that they could only be reached ‘through all the voices of human experience – art, science, poetry, philosophy and history as well as religion’. This was a perceptive statement of an historic difficulty. But Arnold gave another reason for wanting to restore what Constantine had established – that culture requires totality of development; and if one asks whether the totality he was envisaging was a Christian totality, the answer must be that it was not necessarily Christian. Not only was culture a living thing where orthodox, historic, dogmatic, theological Christianity for him was a dead thing; he also saw, at the heart of orthodox, historic, dogmatic, theological Christianity, not the challenges and opportunities which were seen by Newman, Manning, Gladstone and Salisbury, but only an anachronism which, though it was to be treated as poetry and preserved in the form of Catholic worship where Carlyle had treated it as ‘rotten woodwork’ which had to be burnt out, was an anachronism just the same. The Eternal that loveth righteousness can just about be understood to be

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ministering to a Christian posture so long as it is recognized to have been a way of disciplining working-class power and contributing to a scripture consisting of the books, including the Bible, which embodied ‘the best that had been known and thought in the world’. But Newman surely said what needs to be said when he predicted, while still an Anglican and the only Arnold anyone had heard of was Thomas Arnold, that the time would come in the not very distant future when ‘literature (or science) would be judged capable of educating the masses’, when ‘private judgement of the Bible’ would make ‘sincerity’ the ‘sole test of thought and conduct’, and when eventually the Bible and the Church would give way to a ‘religion of beauty, philosophy and imagination’. As a religious thinker, Arnold had an attractive sadness and resignation towards inevitabilities which he implied that he might not have yielded to if the choices had been his. But there was an unattractive aspect to this as well – a fatalism which made a strategy out of testing the wind and blowing with it, and a bland, accommodating, acquiescent Anglican grandeur which, while regretting the inevitability and lamenting the loss, was perfectly willing to accommodate away its own grandmother. Arnold sometimes claimed that, if he had been born in the seventeenth century, he would have been ordained. But he was not born in the seventeenth century. He was not ordained; his most prominent objections to Whiggism, rationalism and Enlightenment were the objections which Lecky had made to the Stoics – that they had been unable to address the multitude; and his regard for the Papacy was connected with the fact that, though ‘aristocratic in carriage’, the Papacy, as Newman had said, was able to address the multitude. But what did Arnold want said to the multitude when they were addressed? What he wanted said was what Carlyle and Froude wanted said, but what Newman, Manning, Gladstone and Salisbury did not want said – that theology should go away, that the pursuit of righteousness should be established in its place, and that culture should become the instrument of its establishment. In England Arnoldianism has been effective chiefly in providing an ideology for the university-educated or intellectually aspiring classes, and in justifying virtuous, high-minded, attitudes to morals, politics and culture. But it has not been so effective at providing social solidarity, at linking low thought to high thought, or at developing that populist conservatism which was to be the unexpected outcome of the newspaper revolution of the 1880s. Arnoldian culture, indeed, had the effect, no less than Mill’s Liberalism, of dividing the educated classes from the uneducated, and of creating an anti-populist highminded ‘correctness’ which carried many unconservative assumptions with it. It is neither odd nor surprising that Arnold should have imagined that this would help Christianity. But it is possible to ask what he imagined Christianity would have been left like after help of this sort had been given.

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Arnold had a formative influence on literary studies in English universities. Seeley’s influence is more difficult to measure. But he was certainly doing, with different twists and in a different manner, the work which, as Arnold saw it, needed to be done. III Seeley2 was more than a decade younger than Arnold and, in spite of essays on literary criticism, was coy about his literary capability, claiming on the contrary to be a ‘scientific’ historian and leaving as his legacy four historical works, an Introduction to Political Science, and the part he played in establishing the Historical Tripos during a quarter of a century as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Seeley’s own history was complicated. He was brought up an Evangelical and educated at the City of London School, where he taught for a couple of years after being an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge. During the only period he spent away from Cambridge after his arrival in 1852, he was much affected by the Comteanism that was to be found at University College and elsewhere in London at that time. He differed from, and may have quarrelled with, his family about religion. But, though he was a close friend of Sidgwick, he seems to have avoided Sidgwickian anguish. He did not renounce Christianity but wrote Ecce Homo as a restatement of Christianity instead. He was recommended for appointment to the Regius Chair by Kingsley before Kingsley’s resignation, and was appointed by Gladstone who had written his own Ecce Homo as a commentary on Seeley’s. In the historical works that he wrote as Regius Professor between his middle forties and his death, Seeley dealt with Napoleon, with Stein and Prussia, and with British foreign policy and expansion since the age of Elizabeth, concentrating on the politics of all three subjects and treating the historical study of politics as both a preparation for statesmanship and a guarantee of impartiality in face of the party prejudice which had left its stain on political history in the past. Seeley’s impartiality in the 1860s and 1870s was Liberal and became Liberal Unionist after 1886. Though rancorous about theological Conservatism and by implication rancorous politically as well, he wrote appreciatively of the gentry-world out of which Stein had emerged, was critical of the Jacobinism which had destroyed the liberalism of 1789, and admired the ‘immortal ideals’ of 1808 in Spain and 1813 in Prussia by which Napoleon had been destroyed. In English history he assumed that liberty was the central theme, that it had 12

Sir John Robert Seeley (1834–95), educated City of London School and Christ’s College, Cambridge. Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, 1869–95. Author of Classical Studies, 1864; Ecce Homo, 1866; Lectures and Essays, 1870; Life and Times of Stein, 1878; Natural Religion, 1882; The Expansion of England, 1883; A Short History of Napoleon the First, 1888; Roman Imperialism, 1889; Goethe Reviewed after Sixty Years, 1893; The Growth of British Policy, 1895; and Introduction to Political Science, 1901.

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been established by the end of the seventeenth century and that the struggle for parliamentary liberty in the eighteenth century was unimportant by comparison. Moreover, since India was an oriental despotism over ‘alien races and religions’, it was ‘the diffusion of the race’ and ‘the expansion of the State’ through the ‘Greater Britain’ of ‘the Second Empire’ which would be central not only in creating a federation as powerful as the Russian and American federations but also in adapting ‘liberty’ to the ‘conditions of a nation-state’ which was ‘one in blood, language, religion and laws’. Seeley treated political science as a secular enquiry which led to scientific conclusions about the conduct of states. He also treated it as an enquiry into political morality, and asked whether the parity with Russia and the United States which would be open to an Imperial Federation ought not to be renounced if ‘mere material magnitude’ would be damaging. In giving his answer, he implied a complicated but self-conscious slide from the problematical Christianity of Ecce Homo in to the attenuated Christianity of Natural Religion. Like many of his contemporaries, Seeley was aware that orthodoxy was being undermined, that church and clergy were being attacked, and that the ‘formalism’ and ‘unquestioning conservatism’ which were appropriate for some were no longer appropriate for all. He connected the religious problem with the problem of education and offered English grammar and literature as ways of inserting a ‘manly . . . simplicity’ into the ‘rude class’ enfranchised in 1867. As much in advocating an improvement in English science and scholarship as in requiring the Church to acquire a ‘philosophy of society’, he was extending generally what he had said originally about classical education as a ‘science of life’ and a stage in man’s progress ‘from the cradle to the grave’. In conceiving of universities, expanded and properly conducted, as enemies of ‘philistinism’ and friends of ‘culture’ and ‘ideas’, he related them to the Church as ‘teacher of morality’ and proponent of a ‘political and . . . ethical doctrine’ which could be addressed ‘with confidence’ to ‘every class’ of society. In both respects his other works made unsystematic statements of what Ecce Homo stated systematically.

Ecce Homo was divided into two parts of which the first contextualized Christ and John the Baptist as heirs of the Jewish prophets, and the second explained the content of the teaching through which they had effected the reanimation of prophecy. In both parts the avowed aim was to discuss Christ not as the ‘creator of modern theology’ but as promulgator of a new way of conceiving and conducting life. Christ’s revolution had involved a breakout from the Jewish ghetto, the replacement of the Jews’ ‘common descent from Abraham’ as the basis for religion by man’s ‘common descent from God’, and the extrapolation out of

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the temporal kingdom anticipated by a dying Judaism of a spiritual kingdom in the form of a universal Church. Seeley’s Christ was neither bland nor accommodating. He stood out against convention, distanced his kingdom from it and associated his authority with those ‘better spirits of the nation’ whom he had called out by it. This suggests a pharisaical élitism. And Seeley had that element even when most careful to avoid it. On the other hand, he did avoid it, and in differentiating Christ from the prophets, left no doubt that Christ was antipathetic to it. He emphasized Christ’s belief in immortality, the discovery of which was the ‘greatest revolution’ experienced by man, had given Christ the power of ‘heaven and hell’ which the prophets had not had and had made obedience to Christ compatible with obedience to Caesar. So the question which has to be asked is, what for Seeley was the differentiating characteristic of a Christian? or rather, why was it that miracle, dogma and doctrine were not the differentiating characteristics of a Christian? Miracle was not a differentiating characteristic because, while being ‘excited’ by the revelation that he could work miracles, Christ had decided that he ought not to establish his kingdom through them. Dogma and doctrine were not differentiating characteristics because ‘a man could be a Christian without . . . full and firm belief in Christ’s theology’ and Christ had treated scepticism and doubt with the greatest tolerance and consideration. At the same time, Socratic scepticism could not be a differentiating characteristic, because Socrates had taught where Christ ruled, because Socrates had been European where Christ was Semitic, and because crucifixion had been as essential to Christ’s life as Socrates’ martyrdom had been incidental to his; above all, because, where Socratic philosophy addressed the élite and educated the reason, Christ educated the heart, addressed the worst as well as the best of mankind, and offered a ‘living example’ which made men love goodness in addition to merely understanding it. In that case, we ask once more, what was the differentiating characteristic of a Christian? In Part I of Ecce Homo the answer was given in terms of ‘the improvement of morality’ and the doing of God’s will on earth ‘as it was done in heaven’. Seeley contrasted the ‘pitiless excommunication’ enforced on deviants in Palestinian society with the open house that Christ kept and the ‘moral originality’ which he demanded from those who entered it. Seeley agreed that Christ had ‘discriminated’ and that the sternness of his discipline had deterred the ‘unworthy’. His point, as against a confessional Church, was, however, that Christ had declined to exclude anyone, had insisted on the unworthy excluding themselves, and had assumed that they would do so when required to take sides in those crises where ‘good and evil were most visibly opposed to each other’. In Ecce Homo ‘moral originality’ and ‘loyalty to goodness’ were synonyms for the ‘life of the soul’ and involved confidence in Christ and acceptance of

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his ‘natural superiority’. Christ had addressed the poor as much as he addressed everyone else, had addressed sinners in the hope of effecting their redemption and had deployed a special tone and manner in explaining the content of the law which included both ‘tenderness’ for the body and its inseparability from the soul, the recognition that, as God’s son, every man was capable of ‘giving a law unto himself’, and the conviction that this included not only an aversion towards evil but also love for the ‘Christ in every man’. This was the ‘enthusiasm of Humanity’. It was governed by a Comtean desire to ‘do as much good as possible’ to ‘every . . . member’ of the commonwealth; and in enjoining an attempt to rescue the ‘neglected, outcast and depraved’ from their misery, it supported the ‘improved social arrangements’ which distinguished modern societies from the societies of the ancient world. Seeley was as conscious of the accusation of wetness as of the accusation of legalistic narrowness. He emphasized that Christianity was neither ‘emasculate’ nor ‘sentimental’, and that its mercy blended ‘pity and resentment . . . at the highest power of each’, redeeming the criminal while also ‘judging him’ and ‘increasing his shame’ at the same time as it developed his ‘courage to amend’. There were emotional descriptions of the ‘wrath’ of the Lamb, the ‘complexity’ of Christ’s ‘gentleness’ and the ‘aweful’ nature of his resentment on behalf of the law of love, and there was an important distinction between the forgiveness Christ had shown towards pagan and heathen sinners and the resentment he had shown towards Christian sinners.

If one asks what impression Ecce Homo was designed to leave of Christ’s life and teaching, the answer is that it showed Christ scrutinizing the backsliding and rule-oriented conservatism of customary and traditional societies. It was the sinner who had ‘done nothing’ whom Christ had denounced most; it was among the scribes and pharisees that he found this sort of sinner most often; and it was because he had vented his anger against them that he had been put to death as a ‘tribune of the people’. Seeley’s Christ was an enemy of the ‘pomposity and conceit’ of Jewish respectability and of its enmity to moral originality. He could easily have turned against the leaders of the law, literature and the universities in nineteenth-century England, and to those who supposed that Christ had died ‘forgiving his enemies’, there was an energetic answer – that Christ’s anger was as unyielding as Elijah’s anger towards the prophet of Baal, that ‘the words of forgiveness on the Cross referred only to the Roman soldiers’, and that the ‘legalists whose crime was against the Kingdom of God’ Christ did not forgive. When Ecce Homo was published (anonymously), it was criticized for the attenuating of Christianity which it appeared to be effecting. But one feels in reading it, as Gladstone and many others felt in reading it with caution and

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enthusiasm, on first publication, that a modern mind was making itself intelligible to other modern minds without losing sight of Christ and Christianity. In Natural Religion, by contrast, both Christ and Christianity had flown away. In Ecce Homo Seeley had promised a further volume about Christ as the ‘creator of modern theology and religion’, and it is possible that this was what Natural Religion was intended to be. It is more likely that it was not intended to be this, even though the Christianity it described was identified with the ‘modern spirit’. In Seeley’s later writing this identification was ubiquitous. Goethe may have been as Christian in one phase as he was heathen in another, but his Christianity was presented as being languid and distant, and as failing to stand out against the culture it engaged with. Stein was a Protestant and a ‘believer’, belonged ‘at heart’ to the ‘Christian and Germanic world’, and was ‘disposed . . . to take the side of religion’ against Voltairean rationalism. But Stein ‘thought always of politics’, found it ‘irreligious to be too religious’, and was ‘detained from occupations purely religious by a function which left him no leisure’; while the British ‘ethical movement’ in the shape of Sidgwick’s Ethical Society was enjoined not only to avoid dogma and doctrine, but also to co-operate with Christianity – for ‘two thousand years the great Ethical Society of the world’ – in enabling ‘the old clergy’ to co-operate with ‘the new’ in rehabilitating the national ‘life and character’. In Natural Religion Seeley planned for Christianity’s continued pre-eminence, since he ‘could conceive no religion as satisfactory that fell short of it’. He wanted it transformed, however, and made compatible with ‘modern views of the Universe’ with which it had no quarrel and had seemed to have a quarrel only because it had been locked up in a clerical ghetto. It was in explaining how Christianity could get out of its ghetto that he came nearest to ‘theory’. The ‘theory’ of Natural Religion was that there was a religion hidden beneath science, culture and Liberalism, that the revolutionary movement since 1789 had been trying to do the same sort of good as apostolic Christianity had been trying to do in the ancient world, and that not only was culture an ‘alias for Natural Religion’ and science for the ‘discovery and propitiation’ of God but also that science and Christianity were natural allies – insofar as both disbelieved in authority, despised ‘philosophy’ and had their own ‘kind of knowledge’ which it was ‘happiness and salvation to possess’. And it restated what Ecce Homo had stated already – that morality was the enemy of ‘terror’ and ‘decorum’ and replicated that enmity to rules with which ‘genius’ had superseded the rule-regulated character of eighteenthcentury paganism. Culturally as well as morally, Seeley was a romantic believer in ‘free inspiration’ and the ‘prophetical’ (as against the ‘commentatorial’). He gave as careful consideration to pagan and Renaissance aestheticism as to science,

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and concluded that it was Christianity’s ‘melancholy’ which had propelled the aesthete to reject it. He stated emphatically that, though aestheticism was not really a religion, it should be welcomed as an ally of Christianity against irreligion. In religion as in politics, Seeley was an enemy of ‘party’, an advocate of impartiality and, in the name of the latter, conducted a contentious operation on contemporary Christianity which no more needed to be ‘mechanical’, ‘lifeless’ or ‘reactionary’ than it needed to be Calvinistic, orthodox or Evangelical. Christianity had no necessary affinity with ‘despotism . . . privilege . . . or militarism’, could as easily rid itself of ‘supernaturalism’ as of ‘legalism’, ‘sacerdotalism’ and the tyranny of the Bible and, by accepting the In Memoriam version of the ‘future life’, could reject judgement, ‘hell-fire’ and a ‘legal’ view of punishment and reward. Biblical Christianity, indeed, was a free religion, preferred the spirit to the letter, and, so far from being based on a ‘sibylline’ book, provided a ‘literary account’ of the ‘religion that lay hidden under morality’. The God who was to be visible to this new perception was not the God of historic Protestantism. Though not just the ‘merciless’ God who was visible in nature, He was to be ‘mainly in nature and not mainly beyond it’. He was to be the ‘unity’ of the universe more than its ‘cause’, was to become what He had been before theology had arrested itself at the supernatural and was in truth the Arnoldian ‘Power . . . not man’ for whose ‘ways’ the scientist felt a ‘love’ based on the knowledge that ‘the laws whose operations he . . . studied . . . in the universe’ could also be studied ‘in his own body’. Seeley expected to be accused of pantheism and of a ‘slow drifting down to the ocean of absolute secularity’. He replied that he was protesting against secularity and that his religion was to be found in the Book of Job, ‘the Psalms, . . . the Prophets . . . and the Pauline Epistles’. Not only in art and poetry was the Romantic God who had emerged between Goethe and Byron replacing the ecclesiastical God of the past and the ‘effeminate’ love of existing Christianity, but also in science, a revolutionary energy, which was the ‘universal characteristic’ of a properly functioning religion, was dramatizing the ‘struggle’ between man’s energy and external nature. The theology that Seeley wished to incorporate into Christianity was, as he explained, a Darwinian theology. But, as he was also careful to explain, Christianity could retain its faith in God’s ‘goodness and love’ while having a theology which denied them. To the question ‘was life worth having, and the universe a habitable place for one in whom the sense of duty had been awakened?’, his answer was that ‘Christianity was the system which answered the question in the most encouraging way.’ What Seeley was looking for was less the erosion of Christianity than the replacement of obedience by ‘admiration’, and the merging of Christianity into ‘the religion of humanity’. It was ‘admiration’ that he wanted – of the God whom science disclosed in nature, of the God who was disclosed in

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books, theatres and universities, and of the God who was ‘the Inspirer of Kings, the Revealer of laws, the Reconciler of nations, the Reformer of Churches [and] the Guide of the human race towards an unknown goal’. Seeley claimed that natural selection could become as ‘mighty’ a ‘force’ in politics and society as Christianity had been. He believed that ‘the notion’ of a ‘dying’ Church and of the ‘secular state prevailing against it’ was an error. What was dying was ‘one sort of Church’ and what was prevailing was a new sort of Church – the Church of ‘civilization’ which, though it had operated chiefly among the thinking classes, could become as universal as the old, could provide the basis for Britain’s imperial mission, and could effect a ‘correspondence’ between ‘the views of the people’ and the system under which they lived. Far more than Stanley, more even than Matthew Arnold, Seeley envisaged a ‘freethinking’ Church which would have neither ‘formularies’, ‘articles’ nor ‘tests of doctrine’, would be as skilful in adapting ‘means to ends’ in ‘ecclesiastical’ as statesmen had been in ‘secular’ politics since 1832, and, if allowed proper scope, would play a leading part in ‘holding the European races and their offshoots together’ through a new phase in which history would become a virtual theology and would ‘render back to the people’ the ‘authoritative teaching’ which would be acquired by the systematization of historical method. In Natural Religion Seeley was doing what Arnold had done in Literature and Dogma and God and The Bible – build on the priesthood of culture and demand of the Christian priesthood the silence appropriate to an archaic doctrine and anachronistic religion. ‘Zion’ was not a city from ‘across the grave’. Zion was here and now, on earth as much as it was in the Bible – not necessarily worth living for and not necessarily immune to the coldness of the eternal spaces but the embodiment, nevertheless, of the only principle by which life could be redeemed from ‘animalism’ and ‘high thoughts and liberal sentiments’ be built into a religion suitable to the coming time. Seeley was aware of the objections to his doctrine and of the accusation that a religion which was compatible with the ‘real honest beliefs’ of the modern age might require the death of Christianity. Nevertheless, it was Christianity which he claimed to be restating, while absorbing it (like Sidgwick) and denying that he was absorbing it into the culture of the expanded university. IV Sidgwick3 knew Seeley first when they were young men in Cambridge and he tried and failed to get him into the Apostles. Later, in addition to helping him 13

Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), educated Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Fellow of Trinity College. Author of The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription, 1870; The Methods of Ethics, 1874; The Principles of Political Economy, 1883; The Scope and Method of Economic Science, 1885; Outlines of the History of Ethics, 1886; The Elements of Politics, 1891; Practical Ethics, 1898; The Scope and Limits of the Work of an Ethical Society, 1900; Philosophy: Its Scope and Relations, 1902; The Development of European Polity, 1903; and Miscellaneous Essays, 1904.

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financially, Sidgwick involved him in the Ethical Society movement and edited his Introduction to Political Science after Seeley’s death in 1895. By then Sidgwick was a Liberal-Unionist with an enquiring track-record. He had for long been an admirer of Maurice, had been both a supporter of the Co-operative Movement and a working-class extension lecturer, and had played a part in psychical research. He had been one of the team of authors whom Alexander Macmillan had collected in Cambridge in the 1860s, had become a Macmillan author in London with Morley’s blessing in the 1870s and, as a member of the Metaphysical Society, had been a practitioner of its inconclusive eirenicism.

Sidgwick’s father had been an Anglican clergyman and a grammar-school headmaster, but had died when Sidgwick was three. Sidgwick was brought up by his mother, who had helped Archbishop Benson’s family after the death of Benson’s parents, and who sent Sidgwick to Rugby, in spite of a moral mistrust of public schools, at the same time as Benson went there as a master. At Rugby, Sidgwick was a contemporary of T. H. Green and was offered a teaching post by Archbishop Temple when Temple was headmaster in the 1860s. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he was a friend of G. O. Trevelyan and F. W. H. Myers; his later friends included J. A. Symonds. His brothers-in-law included not only Benson but also Balfour, who had been one of his first philosophy pupils at Trinity and whose Defence of Philosophic Doubt and Foundations of Belief he read and criticized in manuscript. Sidgwick was elected to a teaching Fellowship in classics in 1859. But his primary interest was in philosophy and religion, and he used his leisure as a Fellow to study German theology, Comte, Renan and Mill, and the Hebrew and Arabic languages. Having rejected schoolteaching, ordination, the Bar and politics as possible careers, he toyed with the idea of becoming a lecturer in Arabic, which he supposed would be compatible, where the theological duties of a philosopher might not then have been compatible, with unorthodox opinions about Christianity. It was not until he resigned his Fellowship at Trinity on religious grounds in 1869 – which he had been thinking of doing since 1862 – that his religious opinions became more or less fixed. In Cambridge Sidgwick was an influential academic performer and a member of important bodies and syndicates. He was an advocate of women’s education and was heavily involved in the foundation of Newnham College of which his wife, whom he had met at a séance in Balfour’s house, was both a benefactress and Principal. As a university reformer, he stated a need, which he had stated first in an article about Eton in 1861, to break into the ‘ultraConservative’ mentalities of closed corporations, to put them in touch with the ‘advance of the age’, and to ensure that ‘physical strength, gymnastic skill and social talents . . . yielding . . . in influence’ to ‘intellectual pre-eminence’

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and ‘earnestness of character’, would propagate the ‘noble, subtle and profound thoughts’ and ‘refined and lofty feelings’ which alone would permit the ‘bigotry . . . class prejudice and . . . stereotyped opinions’ of ‘existing classical education’ to be dispelled. Like Seeley, Sidgwick provided a modern justification for academic education, envisaging science, French, Latin, and English language and literature as its basis in the schools, and proposing a broadening of both the Oxford and the Cambridge curricula by inserting more science and mathematics into the one and more of a ‘liberal education’ into the other. Though Seeley eventually became an historian while Sidgwick became a philosopher, both were reconstructing thought in the same way, trying to make academic syllabuses relevant, virtuous and up-to-date, and showing, from Natural Religion and The Methods of Ethics onwards, how their subjects could become normative for morals, economics and politics. The Methods of Ethics expressed a high sense of the difficulty involved in understanding the universe and demanded constraint and flexibility in face of the conflict between pleasure, self-sacrifice and cultural self-development. Like Sidgwick’s other major works, it assumed that Christianity was only one ‘form of the ideal’, that theology and philosophy should evaluate the ‘element of truth’ in the ‘husk of legend’ by which Christianity was surrounded, and that post-capitalist utilitarian internationalism was a ‘moral . . . dispensation’ which could replace the ‘religious’ dispensations of the past. The problems Sidgwick faced were the same as the problems which were being faced by the Oxford Idealists. Both understood literature, philosophy and art as disclosures of the nature of existence; both wished to protect ethics, morality and religion against the indefeasibility of science, including historical science; both made it their life-work to express the relationship which ought to obtain between science, religion, philosophy, culture and politics. Politically, Sidgwick preferred Cavour to Garibaldi, was unsympathetic to the Polish revolution of 1863 and took the Prussian side during the FrancoPrussian War. He found Bagehot and Grant Duff more significant than Bright and Cobden, was anticipating ‘a long Conservative reaction’ if the Whigs were extruded and by 1871 was the ‘liberal Conservative’ his connection with Balfour was to confirm fifteen years later. In consigning Hegel and Oxford Idealism to the scrap-heap, he had already decided that it was necessary to ‘go back to Kant and begin again from him’ if utilitarianism was to be reconciled with the moral sense.

In the 1860s Sidgwick’s religious development was complicated by the ‘absolute candour’ which led him to abandon religious orthodoxy. He was not only influenced by Mill, Comte, Renan and Strauss but was also resistant not only to them but also to Arnold for treating religion ‘as a sort of spiritual police’

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whose aim was to subdue the ‘animality’ of ‘common people’ (where Macaulay and Tennyson took an interest in ‘common people’). If Myers is to be believed, Sidgwick began work on psychical research in the hope that ‘ghosts . . . and . . . spirits’ might supply ‘observable’ aids to ‘solving the riddle of the universe’ where ‘Tradition, Intuition and Metaphysic’ had failed. Like many other readers, Sidgwick had been stirred by Ecce Homo, though in reviewing it, he made Christ more individualist and less willing to sacrifice everything to humanity than Seeley had made him. For himself he proposed a Kantian Christ who ‘tempered’ the ‘rightness of man’s heart’ with the requirements of ‘the practical’ but found ‘fire and strength’ more important than ‘sweetness and light’ since Pusey and Newman had exposed the ‘humbug’ involved in remaining Anglicans while the Church of England remained a ‘hideous compromise’ between its practice and its law. In resigning his fellowship while remaining an Anglican, Sidgwick was exercised by the ‘dogmatic’ duties which attached to a Cambridge Fellowship and the need for ‘new formulae’ to bring profession closer to belief. But he offered nothing by way of reformulation and professed to be disabled by the paucity of his own belief. In one mood he described his view of religion and morality as being ‘such . . . that it was desirable to publish . . . it only . . . to the educated’. In another mood he regretted that undergraduates who would have ‘gone on peacefully and safely’ but for his lectures had developed ‘doubts’ because of his lectures and had ‘lost their old footing’ without finding anything to replace it. Sidgwick felt the spirit of the age and responded to the introspection and suspension of judgement which registered its mistrust of ‘the habitual’. He distinguished ‘the thinking classes of 1869’ from ‘the thinking classes of 1849’ and pushed beyond doubt about ‘theological-juridical . . . and . . . ecclesiastical-mystical’ dialectics to a scepticism about scepticism, a determination not to be swept away by secular utopias, and a residual sense of that rootedness in common life which was exemplified by the Anglican clergy among whom he had been brought up. In all these respects, Sidgwick’s opinions fluctuated. While admiring Clough’s prophetic posture, he also judged Clough to have been bad for him. His study of Arabic and Hebrew was designed to locate Christianity historically but was followed by doubt whether scientific study of the Bible could answer the questions raised by ‘orthodox Christianity’. At various times he experimented with Mansel’s sceptical orthodoxy, the Free Christian Union’s attempt to rid itself of ‘theological articles . . . and external rites’, and the opinions of Jowett, Rowland Williams, F. W. Newman and Goldwin Smith. Along with uncertainty, there was continuity. Sidgwick was clear from the start that he could not be ordained because of the difference between his own views and the views expressed by the Thirty-Nine Articles, and because Essays and Reviews ought to be dealt with, not by ecclesiastical censure but by directing ‘the spirit of Bishop Butler’ at ‘the truths . . . perverted in . . . the

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essayists’ . . . errors’. His negative rhetoric was about the ‘bigotry’ of the clergy, the ‘dusty culture’ and ‘inane polemics’ of Oxford and Cambridge, and the duty, or destiny, to do ‘to the modern monkery . . . whatever the [nineteenth] century acting through . . . him’ wished to be done in the ‘religious . . . crisis’ which England was undergoing. This was why he welcomed the ‘temperate’ dogmatism which was making its way ‘amongst the best representatives of orthodoxy’ and why, even if it would need ‘a generation or two’ to take on board ‘the conditions of . . . thought’ which science had established, the time spent would be well worth the effort.

In the 1890s, as much as in the 1860s, Sidgwick wanted ‘frankness . . . sincerity . . . and audacity’ in discussing theological truth and, since there were ‘so many other means of influencing human opinion . . . besides those afforded by [Anglican] pulpits’, denied that it was ‘legitimate to make . . . an unveracious declaration’ in order to ‘obtain or keep a post of trust and responsibility’. His injunctions in any case were uncompromising – that recital of the Creeds should cease to be a ‘formula of worship’ and become part of a ‘manual of instruction’, that in the present ‘chaotic state’ of ‘theological truth’, clergymen who disagreed with existing formulae or the views of their congregations should ‘openly . . . avow’ the disagreement, and that the Churches should remain ‘moralizing agencies’ even after their ‘creeds’ had ceased ‘seriously’ to ‘affect . . . belief’. Sidgwick believed in the nation-state, defended war as a ‘school of virtue’ and, in the expansion of civilized at the expense of ‘semi-civilized states’, found a use of force which was not necessarily unacceptable. He looked forward to the cultivation of that ‘impartial . . . endeavour to put . . . themselves . . . in . . . their . . . opponents’ place’ which was ‘the spiritual method . . . of avoiding . . . force’, to a reinterpretation of class-conflict as a conflict of rights which argument could resolve (since rights were, where interests were not, harmonious with one another) and to the improvements which would accompany the efforts of the Ethical Societies to prevent ‘class and international conflict’ growing ‘bitter and dangerous’. About theology, Sidgwick’s judgement was that it should be amalgamated with philosophy, that both were opposed to the ‘anti-teleological tendency of modern science’, and that both had something to say where positivism denied the possibility of saying anything about the ‘Final End of Existence’. By the time he died, he was conceptualizing an ‘empirical’ theology (supplementary to both rational and revealed theology) which, though ‘the product of a faculty . . . normal to the human mind’, would incorporate the sanctities of the non-Christian religions, disconnect God from miracle, mass-belief and professional theology, and separate theological ethics from divine command and the ‘struggle against sin’.

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In all these respects, Sidgwick’s intellectual heir was James Ward who, having been a Congregationalist minister in Cambridge, lost his faith between 1867 and 1872, and spent the rest of Sidgwick’s life under Sidgwick’s guidance as a Fellow and philosophy tutor at Trinity, sharing Sidgwick’s preference for an ‘empirical’ theology and leaving as little doubt as Wicksteed was to leave about the anachronistic nature of a Christian theology. V After Martineau, English Unitarianism’s most interesting phase – a phase which was filled with Bagehot’s and Hutton’s false hope – was one in which Herford, Estlin Carpenter and Wicksteed made explicit efforts to show how a Unitarian intellectuality could impinge on a modern consciousness. Herford was a literary critic and historian of literature, Carpenter a theologian who wrote about comparative and oriental religion, and Wicksteed an unusually versatile thinker whose subjects were literature, politics, theology and economics. In Wicksteed particularly, there was an Arnoldian sensibility, a Sidgwickian preference for philosophy over theology, and Seeley’s merging of Christianity into secular thought. Wicksteed’s4 father had been a Unitarian minister in Liverpool and Leeds when illness made it desirable that he should live in the country. Wicksteed himself was at an Anglican Grammar School in the Clwyd valley (for a time unhappily as a boarder) and, in addition to attending the parish church, was taught Unitarianism at home. By the time he left Wales, he was both a classical and a mathematical scholar; after repeating his classical successes at University College School and University College, London, he prepared for the Unitarian ministry, married the daughter of a Unitarian minister, and settled down to a long life as minister, lecturer and author. In his first cure, in the Pennines, Wicksteed had absorbed the social and industrial problem and had sensed the existence of a mill-hand culture. In politics, he was a Liberal. He denounced ‘inhumanity and injustice’ both at home and abroad, was involved in John Trevor’s Labour Church about which he wrote a pamphlet in 1892, and disputed publicly against Shaw’s defence of Marx’s labour theory of value. In The Common Sense of Political Economy (which he began delivering as lectures in the 1870s), he was both hard-nosed and virtuous, combining Adam Smith’s sense of complication with a mutuality-view of employment for which ‘hands . . . employed . . . managers and capitalists . . . as much as managers and capitalists employed . . . hands’. 14

Rev. Philip Henry Wicksteed (1844–1927), educated Ruthin Grammar School, University College School, London, University College, London and New College, Manchester. Unitarian minister, 1867–1927. Author of The Ecclesiastical Institutions of Holland, 1875; Dante, 1879; Four Lectures on Henrik Ibsen, 1892; Chistianity and the Personal Life, 1895; (with Carpenter) Studies in Theology, 1903; The Common Sense of Political Economy, 1910; Dante and Aquinas, 1911; Reactions Between Dogma and Philosophy, 1916; and From Vita Nuova to Paradiso, 1922.

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Wicksteed rejected Dissent’s mistrust of the State, its self-defeating conviction of its own powerlessness, and the assumption that law was the ‘antithesis to force’ when in truth law was an ‘attempt to secure force to the side of justice’. Risk-taking was said to be a ‘valuable trait in human nature’, tradeunionists to be ‘acting unsocially’ when they sought to ‘limit their numbers or . . . output’ in order to make themselves ‘privileged members of society’, and the rich to be acting socially when they prevented the poor starving by employing them at less than the standard wage. Wicksteed dismissed both the ascetic and the Puritan mistrust of beauty and comfort, and connected ‘a true sense of the sanctity of human life’ with a ‘deepening and purifying’ of the ‘springs of social enjoyment’. The Reform Act of 1884 had made possible a ‘more equal distribution of wealth’ and a separation of enjoyment from ownership (of parks and pictures, for example). But ‘our children’ would be reconciled to the curtailment of privilege only if this made it possible to end ‘the exclusion from all that made life worth living’ of those who had been excluded from it in the past. To the question whether the ‘business and political consciousness’ through which the world’s work was conducted needed correction by a ‘Christian consciousness’, his answer was that Jesus’ principles demanded deep pondering of criminality, sexual deviance, working-class bargaining power, the ‘shame’ involved in the nation’s wars, and the ‘nature and meaning’ of social and industrial institutions. Wicksteed borrowed Maine’s belief that status had been replaced by contract and asserted, as an aspect of contract, that economic forces, when they worked without friction, secured to everyone the ‘equivalent of his industrial significance at the point of the industrial organism in which he [was] placed’. Since friction was endemic, however, he wanted to get back beyond the liberation which contract had effected to that ‘equality . . . affection and mutual helpfulness’ which were all that remained of status after contract had purified it. In Arnold’s shadow, and in disengagement from Darwin in the 1880s, Wicksteed was struck by two facts – that God’s revelation was now to be found ‘in the . . . human mind’ and that ‘institutions and usages’ could be changed as the human heart changed. Social Darwinism, in other words, was not the end of the story. Love was ‘the deity of our hearts and hearths’, and it was God’s command that ‘the wise’ and the ‘learned’ should save the ‘weak’, that the ‘ignorant’ and ‘foolish’ should be spared the consequences of their ignorance and foolishness and that it was the ‘deepened intercourse’ with the ‘something not ourselves’ which alone could satisfy the ‘divine thrust . . . towards the infinite’. These Arnoldian pieties constituted Wicksteed’s sociology, instilled a ‘divine discontent’ with the ‘sordid and foul conditions’ in which ‘so many of our fellow-men were living’, and placed the family and the Fatherhood of God at the centre of a regenerated ‘brotherhood of man’.

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Wicksteed was a learned and ambitious historian who contrasted Reformation-Protestantism with mediaeval Christianity in one direction and with modern doubt in another direction. Mediaeval Christianity meant first Dante and then Aquinas; modern doubt meant Ibsen. In the Four Lectures on Henrik Ibsen which he delivered in Chelsea Town Hall in the early 1890s, Wicksteed stated that Ibsen was morally terrifying and that shams could not withstand his invigilation. Ibsen had been the didactic poet of Norwegian legend before becoming the didactic dramatist of the modern world and an enemy of humbug in both politics and religion. Peer Gynt’s cynicism and dread of commitment and Brand’s yearning to replace ‘tolerance’ and ‘culture’ by the ‘stern Gospel’ of the ‘living God’ were used to criticize conventional respectability in the way in which Wicksteed’s sermons entitled Dante had used Dante to criticize the modern mind in the 1870s. Wicksteed had no more accepted Dante’s religion than he accepted Ibsen’s. But the message of faith was as relevant as the message of doubt, the ‘exercise of virtue here’ and the ‘vision of God hereafter’ implied a modern demand, and The Divine Comedy had succeeded, where Brand had only tried, to remake ‘out of . . . stumps of souls and torsos of spirits . . . a whole that God [would] be able . . . to recognize’. In Dante, ‘a didactic purpose’ was compatible with the ‘poetic imagination’, The Divine Comedy was the supreme example of philosophy, prophecy and poetry uniting to make life ‘instinct with the very presence of the Eternal’, and a partisan account of Dante’s ‘purity’ and ‘patriotism’, Dante’s role as representative of ‘pseudo-Catholic civilization’, and Beatrice’s ‘personification of scholastic theology’ had made The Divine Comedy relevant to the nineteenth century – because it disclosed both ‘the deep peace of God’ and a personal ‘gentleness’ which had survived from ‘the days of chivalry’; because its ‘colossal force’ had subjected men to a ‘punishing justice’ from which neither ‘loftiness of place’ nor ‘loftiness of birth’ could shield them; and because the physical horrors of hell were subordinated to moral conceptions which held physical horrors in control. Wicksteed felt a modern difficulty about eternal punishment and the condemnation of the ‘virtuous heathen’. But he extracted from Dante a connection between justice and desert, presented rebellion against God as cutting men off from ‘all hopeful love’, and made Hell a reaction to the impenitence from which sinners had been sheltered in the world. As in Ibsen, so in Dante, Wicksteed was expounding literature in order to disclose a message about religion. In a long work about Aquinas, he addressed theological questions directly, disconnecting Aquinas, so far as he could, from reactionary Catholicism, but continuing to regret the transition he had described twenty years earlier from the ‘exalted . . . philosophical’ conception of God and Eternity characteristic of the Middle Ages to the ‘anthropomor-

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phic’ conception with which modern thought had degraded God to conform ‘with the limitations of human experience’ since. Wicksteed interpreted ‘authority’ as Christianity’s reaction to its first experience of a culture (i.e. Islam) commensurable with its own, and emphasized that its ‘supreme doctrines’, though ‘beyond the range of the human faculties’, did not ‘contradict reason’ and supplied ‘hints and analogues’ which reason could follow up. His ideal was a ‘democracy of believers’ and, by the side of the ideal, many of Aquinas’s statements had been ‘uncompromisingly dogmatic’, associating the credibility of the Bible with the credibility of miracles, and attempting a moral and rational vindication of the ‘ghastly and gratuitous dream of an eternal and non-redeemable Hell’. Aquinas was not exactly accused of preferring miracle and authority to Aristotelian naturalism. But it was left an open question whether he had contributed anything more than a ‘psychology’ by which the will ‘pleaded’ pragmatically with ‘the intelligence’ to accept intellectually advantageous beliefs as true, and whether the mysticism of the great mystics justified the ‘philosophia perennis’ or ‘life of the spirit’ which Carpenter’s Comparative Religion had suggested that a religion ought to be. ‘Orthodoxy’ had, no doubt, to be planted ‘from without’ before a religion could be ‘developed from within’ by a ‘system of supernatural sacraments and . . . powers’. But Wicksteed not only saw no sign that Rome could maintain its orthodoxy in face of the ‘growing sense of brotherhood’ which was defying the ‘barriers’ erected by dogma, he also thought it inconceivable, since it was philosophical criticism which ‘formulated’ and ‘related all the truths that [could] be established by human thought’, that a ‘science of theology’ could be imposed by ‘unquestioned’ authority. From early in his adult life, Wicksteed was engaged in a critical undertaking – ecclesiastically (in his Hibbert Report on the Protestant Churches of Holland) about concurrent endowment, subscription and the relations of the Dutch Reformed Church with the Dutch monarchy; intellectually, about the obstacles which Dutch Orthodoxy was placing in the way of adapting Calvinism to a ‘modern consciousness’. By ‘modern consciousness’ Wicksteed meant the ‘organic unity . . . of the universe’, the integration of ‘history and . . . philosophical science’, and a determination to locate the ‘foundations of religious faith’ in the ‘human faculties themselves’. These were the questions which had been raised by an aunt who had introduced him to the writings of Kuenen, the Dutch theologian, whose work on the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Colenso had translated in 1865. Wicksteed was impressed by Kuenen and his fellow-workers. He learnt Dutch in order to understand them, translated a six-volume popularization of Kuenen’s thought, and after making Kuenen’s acquaintance by correspondence, met him in the course of preparing the Hibbert Report. Much that he

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wrote about the future of theology bore the impress of Kuenen’s, and Colenso’s, influence, and repeated their low estimate of the Trinity and their belief that revelation was ‘internal and individual’. By the middle of the 1870s, he was assuming that Christianity was ‘no more supernatural . . . than any other religion’, that Kuenen and the others were making a constructive effort to ‘conquer the religious field for the modern spirit’ and that it was their achievement to have given popular expression, in pulpit and classroom, to Biblical criticism’s ‘most recent conclusions’ about the composition of the Bible. Wicksteed’s daughter married Kuenen’s son, so relations remained close up to the end of Wicksteed’s life. His most heartfelt theological writing after the 1870s, however, though it reflected the Dutch situation, was primarily about English Unitarianism.

Wicksteed’s statements about Unitarianism focused on three points – that the religion of the New Testament was ‘universalist’ where the religion of the Old Testament had been ‘particularist’, that Jesus differed from ‘Paul and John’ in declining to believe that ‘men could only come to God through Him’ and that the doctrine of the Incarnation was an ‘attitude of mind’ – not necessarily ‘peculiar to Christians’ – which saw the ‘utterance of [God’s] will’ in the ‘sum of things without us’ and ‘the revelation of His command’ in ‘the voice within us’. ‘The outward revelation is full of mystery, and sometimes appears chaotic to us’, went an especially opaque passage in The Significance of Unitarianism, But the voice within is a wave from the same ocean, a voice from the same depth, a part of the same whole, and it brings to us a whispered hint of the formula of the cosmos. God bids us strive in his name, and with his inward support, against the things that are . . . and if we obey, from the depth of the mystery and chaos without us comes back an echo, nay, not an echo but an answer to the voice within. That same moral law which alone harmonises us with ourselves and with each other, and arranges the chaos of our conflicting desires and purposes into a cosmos, at the very same time confirms our dominion over nature, or rather brings us into closer and more fruitful relations with her, and makes the very earth more beauteous. There is a power in the not-ourselves that ‘makes for righteousness’, and answers to love with glad response, and the more fully we obey God as he speaks in us the more fully do we experience his support as he speaks to us. (Rev. P. H. Wicksteed, The Significance of Unitarianism, 1892, in Carpenter and Wicksteed, ed., Studies in Theology, 1903, p. 98)

By the 1890s Wicksteed felt that he had lived through profound changes – that evolution had subverted the spiritual sanctions on which Protestantism had rested, that he had done well to abandon the ‘elaborately-cultivated religious depression’ dissociated from ‘ethical feeling’ which had constituted the ‘sinculture of his youth’, and that the conception of sin as both a disturbance of

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the ‘harmony between our souls and the Supreme Being’ and a remedy for the indiscipline of anarchism and Hellenism, was much to be preferred. In Wicksteed’s Unitarianism, the ‘ascent’ rather than the ‘fall’ of man was central, an incarnational intoxication dissolved the divisions created by orthodox Trinitarianism, and a ‘modern’ faith expelled the dogmatism of theological Protestantism. Wicksteed hoped out of the genuineness of his heart that a nonconformist latitudinarianism could command the twentieth century. In the first part of the next chapter, we shall examine the development in Dickens, Tennyson and Browning of the more influential latitudinarianism which manifested itself in literature.

5 Christianity and literature II

Ladies and gentlemen, reflect whether ignorance be not power, and a very dreadful power. Look where we will, do we not find it powerful for every kind of wrong and evil? Powerful to take its enemies to its heart, and strike its best friends down; powerful to fill the prisons, the hospitals, and the graves; in all their gloomy and destructive shapes . . . Whereas the power of knowledge, if I understand it . . . is to engender that self-respect which does not stop at self, but cherishes the best respect for the best objects; to turn an always enlarging acquaintance with the joys and sorrows, capabilities and imperfections of our race, to daily account in mildness of life and gentleness of construction, and humble efforts for the improvement, stone by stone, of the whole social fabric. (Charles Dickens, Soirée of the Mechanics’ Institution: Leeds, 1 December 1847, in K. J. Fielding, ed., The Speeches of Charles Dickens, 1988, p. 39) Howe’er it be, it seems to me ’Tis only noble to be good, Kind hearts are more than coronets And simple faith than Norman blood. (Alfred Tennyson, Lady Clara Vere de Vere in Poems 1842, quoted by Dickens in addressing a Soirée of the Mechanics’ Institution at Liverpool in K. J. Fielding ed., The Speeches of Charles Dickens, 1988, p. 56) I think anything is better than high intellectual pleasure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large. (Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband: A Play, Ross edition, 1908, p. 51).

Explicitness about literature’s power to defend Christianity has been as rare in modern England as the demand for a Christian political party and has seldom achieved either the high self-consciousness or the High-Church literature aimed at by T. S. Eliot. In modern England Christian literature has most often been effective and popular through the Bible and in the form of hymns which, from Wesley onwards, have often embodied a hard theology. Christian poets and Christian novelists, on the other hand, with rare exceptions (like Keble, Hopkins, Chesterton, Belloc, Machen, Yonge, Corelli, Greene and Waugh) have propagated only undemanding versions of duty, liberation, natural sentiment, moral respectability and liberal good-will. Anyone who looks in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature for parallels to Péguy, Bernanos and Dostoevsky will look in vain. There is, of course, the reverence for Shakespeare and Milton. But, though this reverence has been almost universal, the messages derived from it have been as atmospheric and imprecise as the messages which have been derived 104

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from Keats. Neither has rivalled Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Auden and Eliot as guides to living. Neither has had the impact of Dickens and Dr Johnson. Neither has done more as Christian poet than feed the English desire for an elevating poetry. There is also Coleridge. But Coleridge provides a warning rather than an exemplar. He invented the clerisy for modern English purposes and doubtless deserves the gratitude of thinkers who think of themselves as part of it. He proposed God’s mercy as against Calvinistic judgement, explained the difference between sin and redemption on the one hand and deism, Cartesianism and epicureanism on the other, and used ‘esemplastic power’ to claim for literature, including poetry, a repetition of ‘God’s eternal act of Creation’ and the imagination’s achievement of ‘understanding and control’. In spite of Aids to Reflection, a contagious mistrust of mechanism and materialism and an extensive following among Tractarians, however, he succeeded positively in constructing only a very ordinary defence of landed and industrial society, a very ordinary call to the upper classes to sacrifice their leisure and preferences to the resisting of agitation and a very ordinary, however drug-related, form of Kantianized spirituality as the modern version of Christianity. Of the writers to be discussed in this chapter, Tennyson wrote poetry more than he reflected on it and, apart from Browning’s essay on Shelley, resembled Browning in reflecting on poetry only in the course of writing it. Like Dickens, both were riddled with dogma; both made literature a vehicle of the dogma that the time for dogma was over, and both justified Jowett’s remark (to Tennyson) that Tennyson’s poetry had ‘an element of philosophy more to be considered than any regular philosophy in England’. Pater and Wilde, without putting anything very positive in place of dogma, not only made literature and art central to their practice, but also did their best to deconstruct the solemn deconstruction they were confronted with when they began writing. I Dickens1 was primarily a novelist, a reporter and an entertainer. But he was also a sentimental public thinker who, from his first appearances as a ‘slender, boyish, pale-faced . . . fresh . . . handsome celebrity of twenty-nine’ with ‘beautiful eyes . . . moist with feeling’ and a ‘frame aglow with excitement’, had embodied the nostrums and analyses of the 1840s. 11

Charles Dickens (1812–70), educated Baptist School in Chatham, Wellington House Academy and Henrietta Street School, Brunswick Square, London. Clerk in lawyers’ office. Reporter in House of Commons Gallery. Journalist. Author of Sketches by Boz, 1836; The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, 1836–7; Oliver Twist, 1838; Nicholas Nickleby, 1838–9; The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840–1; Barnaby Rudge, 1841; A Christmas Carol, 1843; Martin Chuzzlewhit, 1843–4; Dombey and Son, 1846–7; David Copperfield, 1849–50; Bleak House, 1852–3; Hard Times, 1854; Little Dorrit, 1855; A Tale of Two Cities, 1859; Our Mutual Friend, 1864–5 and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870.

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Dickens claimed knowledge of the ‘oppressed and neglected’, praised the Manchester Athenaeum as a temple ‘sacred’ to the ‘improvement’ of the working classes, and found in the Mechanics’ Institutions of the North the offer of a ‘patent of nobility’ in which all men could participate. Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby predated his emergence as prophet of a ‘breed of men’ who, ‘in time to come’, would be found ‘working for good or evil in every quarter of society’. But from then on, his emergence was manifest, in the United States and Canada as well as in Britain, where these early novels, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, A Christmas Carol and public speeches had a class-based moral doctrine about virtue, an anti-ecclesiastical edge about Christianity, and a condemnation of the injustices which were said to be endemic in English society. It did not need speeches at the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution, at the banquet which was held in Dickens’s honour in Edinburgh in 1841, or at the dinner he was given by the Young Men of Boston on his arrival there in 1842, to broadcast the conviction that ‘a new spirit’ had to be ‘breathed into the heart of society’, that ‘brilliant individuals’ had to be ‘drawn from the multitude’ in order to do this, and that the ‘soul of goodness’ which the Creator had scattered among the ‘evil things’ described in the novels, had to be given the sympathetic treatment that it deserved. Dickens was an enemy of conservative complacency. He associated defence of the Corn Laws with agrarian selfishness and reactionary hankerings after the past. But he condemned physical-force Chartism as an enemy of rational liberty, and was as critical of striking railway workers as he was flattering of the ‘steadiness and patriotism’ of the English working man generally. He was fascinated by the new police and by conditions in prisons and workhouses. He supported the abolition of the death penalty, the centralization of London sanitary arrangements and Layard’s Administrative Reform Association (on the ground that the English situation after Sebastopol resembled the French situation before 1789). For aristocratic party politics, especially Tory and Palmerstonian party politics, he expressed the deepest distaste, treating them as obstacles to goodness, finding virtue ‘oftener in alleys and by-ways than . . . in courts and palaces’ and asserting sentimentally that ‘some of the rejected ones’, in having retained ‘anything of their original natures’, might be ‘ten times better’ than the ‘proud and . . . thoughtless’. Dickens was much concerned about unemployment and denied that capital and labour were necessarily antagonistic. But the working classes were not to be patronized, not all institutions which seemed to be devoted to workingclass interests were devoted to working-class interests and the Temperance Movement, in concentrating on alcohol as the cause of working-class misery, was neglecting the deeper causes of which indulgence in alcohol was only a symptom. Dickens was the protagonist of working-class education not only because

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it was ignorance that bred crime but also because ‘parrot-acquaintance with the church catechism and the Ten Commandments’ did nothing to prevent crime. Education should not be ascetic, and should teach its recipients to ‘feel’ as well as to ‘reason’; it should involve ‘wives and sweethearts’ as well as being ‘cheap . . . social . . . and cheerful’; and it should show the way not only to ‘virtue’ but also to the ‘beauties of nature and art’, the ‘friendship . . . of . . . books’, and that ‘wisdom of great men’ which was so much better than ‘mere sensual enjoyment’. Dickens was as much obsessed as Ruskin, Arnold, Mill or Disraeli by the deliquescence of aristocracy and the challenge to provide a new cultural order to replace it. He praised the poetry of science, believed in the ‘eternal duties of the Arts to the People’, and claimed for literature a new dignity once liberated from ‘Grub Street’ and the ‘dependent seat . . . at my Lord Duke’s table’. In Maclise’s famous drawing, The Spirit of Chivalry, in music, drama, painting and gardening, and in the daily newspaper as successor to Virgil and Milton, he saw evidence that these duties were being performed. Dickens’s novels drew a massive portrait of a submerged England, and of the potentialities of a morally virtuous England in which ‘nothing was high, because it was in a high place . . . and . . . nothing . . . low, because it was in a low place’. They depicted the odiousness of unimaginative meanness in Scrooge, Fagin and Gradgrind, the odiousness of religious humbug in Scrooge, Stiggins, Pecksniff, Heap, Chadband, Jellyby and Honeythunder, and the odiousness of selfishness, cruelty, falsity and oppression wherever they were to be found. And they created a melodrama in which moral odiousness was disinfected by natural goodness and the harshness and narrowness of Utilitarianism by natural compassion. Dickens exuded the assumption that it was a Christian criticism which was embodied in A Christmas Carol, his condemnation of American prisons and his almost hysterical attack on American slavery, and that the sadness and even melancholy which began to seep through after The Pickwick Papers had Christian origins and implications. Christianity was as often on Dickens’s lips as in his writing, and it was always the same Christianity – dismissive of Exeter Hall (especially after the fiasco on the Niger in 1841) and contemptuous of Oxford, Puseyism and Rome (especially during the Papal aggression of 1851). The ‘church-learning’ of the Middle Ages had consisted of ‘artful excuses and pretences’; Henry VIII had been a ‘disgrace to human nature’; Queen Mary could only be remembered with ‘horror and detestation’. James I had been a ‘besotted fool’ and Laud and Charles I enemies of ‘religious liberty’, while the Puritans had ‘dressed in a hideous manner . . . talked through their noses . . . and wanted to have everything very pure and plain in all the Church services’. Only the reign of Elizabeth, the Revolution of 1688 and the movement for sanitary reform escaped censure, the first because it had been a ‘great reign’ for ‘the

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Protestant religion’, the second because it had entrenched ‘the Protestant religion’, the third because, by ‘cleansing the foul air’, it was easing the way for education and Christianity. As a speaker and fund-raiser for hospitals and prudential, charitable and educational institutions, Dickens gave high priority to the poor, the aged and the diseased, stated God’s claim to have ‘breathed mind’ into industrial workers, and declared that God alone had prevented them degenerating into ‘machines’. It was important, moreover, that Christ had avoided ‘sectarian illwill’, had blended the ‘understanding’ with ‘the imagination’, and had directed his ‘sacred Pity’ at ‘dear little’ children whose cradles were being rocked and coffins nailed down by poverty and sickness and whose conditions of work were such that Shaftesbury and Southwood Smith were right and the Marquess of Londonderry wrong, to defend conditions of work in his own coalfields. All this was given a religious basis in The Life of Our Lord. The Life of Our Lord, written for Dickens’s children in 1849 (but not published until 1934), did nothing to play down Christ’s miracles, Christ’s identity as God’s Son, or supernatural events, like the walking on the water. At the same time, the relationship with God was personal rather than theological, and very deliberately avoided creed and dogma. Christ had chosen the Apostles from among the poor because He ‘made no difference between those who wore good clothes and those who went barefoot’, and those of the poor who were bad would have been better if they had had ‘kind friends . . . good homes . . . and better . . . teaching’. What goodness entailed in The Life of Our Lord was a refusal to ‘hate’ and a determination to ‘forgive’, the duty to be ‘gentle’ and ‘merciful’, and the resolve ‘ ’ to ‘   ’. Dickens was not exactly a ‘muscular Christian’, though he spoke well of Thomas Hughes and Tom Brown, believed that Christian qualities should be kept ‘quiet in our . . . hearts and never made a boast of’, and supported both the Crimean War and the Volunteer Movement for their ‘manly and national’ revival of ‘the old brave spirit of our forefathers’. His attitude to charity was that it was a way of helping those who helped themselves, that one should do ‘to all men as one would have them do to one’, and that love was an antidote to the carelessness, selfishness and inequality of the existing social order. In many of these respects he resembled Tennyson. II Tennyson’s2 poetical life was unusually long. He was born in 1809, published his first volume of poetry with his brother, Frederick, in 1826, and was still 12

Alfred, 1st Baron Tennyson, (1809–92), educated Louth Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Poet Laureate, 1850–92. Author of Poems by Two Brothers, 1827; Poems Chiefly Lyrical, 1830; Poems, 1833; Poems, 1842; The Princess, 1847; In Memoriam, 1850; Maud, 1855; Idylls of the King, 1859; Enoch Arden, 1864; Ballads and Other Poems, 1880; Tiresias and Other Poems, 1885; and Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 1886.

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publishing when he died sixty-six years later. His later poetry withdrew from the forward-looking poetry of the 1840s and 1850s, but he spoke almost from the beginning to an extensive public which responded to his distinctive combination of nature-romanticism, mediaevalism, chivalry, married love and a very low-keyed version of Christianity. Tennyson was brought up in a cultured but disturbed Lincolnshire rectory which, along with his family, he left in 1837 for Epping, Tunbridge Wells and Maidstone (with lodgings in London) until settling eventually in the Isle of Wight. For a time as a boy he was at Louth Grammar School, which he disliked, and was then educated by his father before going, along with his brother Charles, to Trinity College, Cambridge, where his eldest brother was already an undergraduate. Tennyson left Cambridge without taking a degree but while there wrote a successful prize poem and made many friends by whom he was idolized for his physique, his detachment and the impression he left of being a person of judgement and wisdom. Volumes of poems published in 1830, 1833 and 1842, in spite of critical carping, then made him into a leading poet. However much he may have learnt from Shakespeare, Milton, Byron and Wordsworth, Tennyson’s manner by 1842 was unmistakably his own. The subject in this section will be the truths which his lyrical distinctiveness propagated up to In Memoriam in 1850. Politically, in his early years Tennyson was a Canningite who also admired Peel and Wellington, supported the anti-slavery movement and the 1832 Reform Act, and sympathized with the condition of the poor, especially the agrarian poor. He stood as ostentatiously as Dickens above party, hated the ‘narrow and ignorant Toryism of the country districts’ and, as the son of a disinherited clergyman, experienced the genteel indigence and investment failure which prevented him marrying until (paradoxically) the proceeds from In Memoriam enabled him to do so at the age of forty-one. He praised the absence from the English country town of vast contrasts between the size of houses and, except in Maud and unpleasantly and trivially elsewhere, omitted from his poetry all mention of the contemporary landed aristocracy. Tennyson believed in Polish freedom as opposed to the ‘Barbarian of the East’ and in ‘English freedom’ as opposed to Austrian and Papal tyranny. He had as little time for the ‘baronial’ freedom of a ‘fall’n nobility’ as for the ‘niggard’ freedom of Manchester cotton-spinners, and he contrasted both with the freedom which had been won by resistance to the Stuarts and preserved by Nelson’s and Wellington’s resistance to Napoleon. Tennyson held the conventional opinions of the educated classes about the Revolutions of 1848, about Louis Napoleon and about ‘free trade and the housing and education of the poor’ as remedies for Chartism. As Poet Laureate he had doubtless to express loyal sentiments about the Prince Consort, Queen Victoria and the Crimean War. But he did not have to

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support the Volunteer Movement, to highlight the danger of newspaper tyranny or to criticize the slackness of ‘British respectability’; his almost hysterical condemnation of anti-war sentiment was no more necessary to Maud as a poem than the demand for ‘one . . . strong man’ to remedy the defects of contemporary government. His enthusiasm for the higher education of women was in advance of educated opinion. The association he made between personal jealousy and class-hatred was as strikingly anti-aristocratic as anything in Dickens and there was an undercurrent of continuous denigration of the cheating, ‘lust of gain’ and deification of ‘the ledger’ that he associated with contemporary commerce. Apart from his villains, Tennyson’s men were chivalric or epic heroes like Arthur and Bedivere. His women on the whole were fragrant, beautiful and noble, and held out the hope of purity in word and deed. There was no satire, except in The Princess and no hint of impropriety, except in Vivien where Merlin supplied a proper rebuke. Tennyson’s Cambridge life had centred round the Apostles which had been founded by F. D. Maurice. Like other Apostles, he admired Torrijos’s rebellion against Ferdinand VII of Spain who, however, had had Torrijos’s leading supporters, including an Apostle, executed on the Esplanade at Malaga in 1831. At the same time as Tennyson deplored the expansion of St Simonianism on the Continent, he developed a dislike both of religious dogma and of subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. His poetry made it obvious that ‘churchmen’ were ‘killing the church’ as the ‘churches’ had ‘killed their Christ’, that ‘drowsy’ pulpits would produce only ‘worm-cankered’ sermons, and that Protestants should feel deeply mistrustful of Jesuitry and Tractarianism. In The Palace of Art which, among other things, was antiaesthetic, his sense of the littleness and brokenness of human systems was so overwhelming that the only viable theology was a theology of love. As a poet Tennyson was not generally didactic; he used the lessons that were available in his own and the public mind, just as he used nature, mythology, death, childhood and relations between men and women as material for a marriage between lyric appropriateness and verbal and rhythmic felicity. But the cumulative effect was so didactic that in some of his poems, he stated all he could have wished to state didactically if he had wished to make didactic statements at all. Like Wordsworth, Tennyson was conscious of God as the viewer or ‘visitant’ of man’s sojourn on earth. But whereas The Prelude recorded a sense of consonance between Wordsworth and God, In Memoriam began by recording Tennyson’s resentment at God. To Wordsworth it seemed that God had made Himself available for Wordsworth’s benefit. To Tennyson it seemed that God had deprived him of his ‘beloved’ and forced him back on a casuistical justification. In the end Tennyson arrived at a sort of theodicy, but the journey was

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uncertain and love a deus ex machina which was merely said, externally so to speak, to be the resolution of grief. No doubt the end-product was a world in which all would be well. But this was achieved only after a prolonged statement of misery which suggested the opposite. The resolution, present at the beginning of In Memoriam, was then unstitched into the doubts which accompanied grief. It was not until the end that the poem rearrived at its beginning, absorbing grief into the certainty that Hallam ‘lived in God’, and making of the ‘pain and anguish’ of Tennyson’s ‘private sorrows’ the occasion for the rediscovery of faith. Hallam was not only Tennyson’s ‘partner in a married life’; he was also a moral and intellectual pin-up whose sweetness had had ‘the graceful tact’ of ‘Christian art’ and, if he had lived, would have responded with ‘great legacies of thought’ to the ‘turmoil’ which was accompanying both the achievements of science and the revolutions of 1848. Moreover, Hallam was a ‘gentleman’ who in life acknowledged the ‘reverence and charity’ that needed to accompany ‘knowledge and power’. But it is was his death that was significant, his ‘dust’ that had become ‘sacred’, and the promise of immortality by immersion into the ‘general Soul’ which was warming the ‘cold crypts’ in which his clay had been housed. Tennyson’s doubt about God was a personal doubt and his resolution a weak resolution; his chief statement was the statement of a ‘larger hope’, of the blessing that love would bring to those who felt it, and of the acceptance of doubt as making possible a ‘stronger faith’ than would have been found without it. Tennyson did not detail as Hallam’s the details of Hallam’s faith. He did, however, detail his own, bidding ‘the ape and tiger die’, and offering a social message which merged into a religious message. ‘Ring out, wild bells’ has a fine sound. It sounds banal when its Dickensian platitudes are given careful consideration. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

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In Memoriam and The Prelude resembled one another in their resistance to materialism and their common concern with the poet’s self. But In Memoriam was not only more modest in tone, it was also less pagan in content. It was less obviously subversive of Christianity, and it took account of Revelation and the Incarnation where The Prelude did not. In Memoriam was self-obsessed but The Prelude, as we shall see later, was the greater poem by reason of its egocentricity. Though both would have failed the tests of orthodoxy, Tennyson, like Browning, would have failed less obviously. III Browning3 was born and brought up a London Congregationalist, was at a school in Peckham and had a brief undergraduate career at London University. For a time he was a Shelleyite atheist, published a Shelleyite poem – Pauline – which he later disliked, and in his late thirties wrote an essay about Shelley which went to the heart of his own conception of poetry’s function. Shelley claimed that a properly conceived biography would not mistake a ‘boy’s . . . impatient struggle towards truth and love’ for an ‘atheism of the heart’. ‘Whatever Shelley was’ he was ‘with an admirable sincerity’. He was ‘tender’ as well as ‘sincere’; his poetry was a ‘sublime’ essay about the ‘correspondancy of the universe to Deity and of the natural to the supernatural’; if he had lived longer, he would have displayed both the ‘religious’ cast of his mind and ‘some of the capital dogmas of Christianity’. Browning’s own poetry attracted critical attention from an early stage, and attracted particular attention in 1840 by reason of Sordello’s obscurity. It was not until his fifties that he acquired the poetic popularity which Tennyson had acquired in his thirties. By the time of his death in 1889, he had acquired a further reputation as seer, prophet and poetical philosopher who was to speak sometimes to and sometimes across the fin de siècle mentality of the 1890s. 13

Robert Browning (1812–89), educated Peckham and University College, London. Author of Pauline, 1833; Paracelsus, 1835; Strafford, 1837; Sordello, 1840; Pippa Passes, 1841; Dramatic Lyrics, 1842; Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845; Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy, 1846; Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, 1850; Shelley, 1852; Men and Woman, 1855; Dramatis Personae, 1864; The Ring and The Book, 1868–9; Fifine at the Fair, 1872; Ferishtah’s Fancies, 1884; and Asolando, 1890.

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Twenty years after his death Eliot and Pound employed for their own purposes the colloquial idiom he had invented seventy years earlier. Browning’s poetry was filled with drama, incident and persons, took shape in an endless sequence of miniatures and differed from Tennyson’s poetry by reason of its ambiguity, complication and stylistic inwardness, and its want of interest in the idealized human activity of Idylls of the King. Politically and morally, Browning was a Liberal whose emancipation from ‘prejudice’ and ‘convention’ promised a universal emancipation which would make it possible to serve God’s purposes through ‘body’ as well as ‘soul’ and would end the servile relationship between one human being and another which God had never allowed to exist between ‘Him and ourselves’. Except in Strafford, Sordello and The Ring and the Book, however, and even when dismissing the mediocrity involved in parliamentary politics, Browning shared none of Wordsworth’s and Tennyson’s political interests. His main poetical interest was in human action and its relation to God, and the question we have to ask is whether the regularity of his recourse to God, and the infrequency of his recourse to Christ, were announcements of a post-Christian mentality. Browning had a high sense of the poet’s calling and judged Shakespeare’s ‘actions’ greater than ‘Cromwell’s’. ‘All our life’ was a ‘form of religion’ and he attributed to the poet a duty to write ‘fearlessly’ and ‘for the times’ as ‘the only effective . . . service’ he, or she, could render to God and man. At a moment when Spencer was turning against religion in Social Statics, he turned back towards it under his wife’s influence, vindicated it from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (1850) onwards, and projected as much of a religious mentality as a thinking person could bear to project after science and the literature of infidelity had undermined it. Browning’s depiction of Christianity was dramatic, colloquial and informal. Its presence was assumed rather than its truth argued and, by contrast with God, about whom Browning expressed more belief than doubt, was made the object of more doubt than belief. Browning was as resistant to the infallibility of private judgement as to the infallibility of churches. It was the work of ‘Providence’ to have made religion dependent on ‘voluntary effort’, and he agreed with his future wife that ‘the truth’ as God saw it was not only different from ‘the truth’ as ‘the sects’ saw it but should also help Christians to ‘pray anywhere, and with all sorts of worshippers’, from the Sistine Chapel to ‘Mr Fox’s’ Chapel. Browning had abandoned Congregationalism long before his marriage and, insofar as he returned to it, did so because of his wife’s commitment. But it is as easy to see why he began to be identified as a Christian poet in face of the infidelity of the 1860s as to see why Pigou was to credit him forty years later with both the ‘metaphysical’ judgement that Christianity’s truth was ‘not proven’ and the practical judgement that Christianity had become an ‘absolute’ which ‘claimed his allegiance’.

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Browning was as averse to dogma and creed as any latitudinarian. His picture in Christmas Eve of nonconformist ecclesiasticism was coloured by contempt for nonconformist congregations. His picture of Bishop Bloughram celebrated Bloughram’s wordly success rather than the authority and sanctity of the Church. The Christian characters in The Ring of the Book disclosed the human condition rather than the Christian virtues. With one side of his doctrine, Browning’s poetry embodied a divine humanism – rough and rugged, it is true, but a divine humanism, nevertheless, which lent weight to an oblique Idealist rehabilitation of religion. Browning had ‘never read a line . . . of Hegel, Schelling or Kant’. But The Critique of Pure Reason was, he believed, one of the most important works of the century and had helped to establish that, though the ‘creative intelligence’ inherent in Darwinian evolution ‘acted as matter’, it ‘did not result from matter’, and was subject to ‘a hand’ which ‘set . . . it . . . off’, however little that hand controlled its progress. Browning’s Christianity was built on an affirmation of the spiritual against the material. It found its home neither in the external performances of historic Christianity nor in the social duties of the new Christian sociology, its central feature being a Romantic insistence on writing at length, a Romantic identification of poetry, philosophy and religion, and a Romantic concern with the internality of the heart and the communion of the soul with God. Browning avoided the emptiness of Tennyson’s theodicy. But his aim was the same as Tennyson’s – to register the death of creed, dogma and ecclesiasticism and to use poetry to express both the varieties of human behaviour and experience and the inevitability of God. Perhaps the wisest thing that has been said about him is that he was ‘very sure of God’; to which it may be added that he was much surer than Tennyson and lacked the resentment which compelled Tennyson to write In Memoriam. Browning may not have had an anima naturaliter christiana. What he did have was an unforced sense of a divine Providence transcending anything which could be supplied by a formal religion.

Like Dickens and Tennyson, Browning avoided Byronic flippancy. In a manner which in some respects resembled Byron’s, however, he also avoided Dickens’s and Tennyson’s seriousness. In the authors we are to examine next, seriousness (or solemnity) was at a discount as Byronic flippancy was restored to centrality. Wilde made himself into a glaring symbol, but it is unlikely that he would have made himself into a homosexual symbol, and even more unlikely that he would have achieved the intense view of Christianity which he achieved after his trial, if his trial and imprisonment had not forced both questions on him more publicly than he had intended.

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Of the works of Wilde’s imprisonment The Ballad of Reading Goal recalled The Ancient Mariner in both sense and manner, made an unconvincing idealization of a dead murderer and embodied a socially false attitude to his execution. The proximity of a condemned man provided a stimulus to important poetry, but the Ballad’s implication – that society was being unfair and disgusting – does not bear serious consideration. De Profundis, on the other hand, though written as a letter, was one of the most remarkable of Wilde’s writings, replaying the details of a traumatic experience, and drawing social and religious conclusions which were expressed with the greatest eloquence and power. IV Since the middle of the nineteenth century, a recognizable type of English Christian has expressed distaste for the modern world and has condescended towards its values by adopting the various types of deviant dandyism which it has shared with the pagan dandyism of Lytton Strachey and Aleister Crowley. There have been connections with the queenlier or more celibate aspects of Tractarianism. But Tractarianism until very recently has been morally ‘respectable’, has encouraged rather ‘the gentleman’ than the dandy, and has been attractive in part at least as an aspect of the upward social mobility which used to be associated with ordination in the Church of England. In this section we shall examine the relationship between dandyism and Christianity as it appeared in the Ruskinian aestheticism of which Pater was the most learned and Wilde the most ostentatious protagonist. The incidence of homosexuality among the late-Victorian and Edwardian intelligentsia has been confirmed by more than adequate evidence from Symonds’s diaries, Lees-Milnes’s Enigmatic Edwardian and Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes onwards. It is difficult, however, to establish connections between homosexuality and public doctrine; where such connections have been established, they suggest, as in the case of Edward Carpenter, rather a post-Christian than a Christian doctrine. In Wilde and Pater, the connection between Christianity, homosexuality and the deconstruction of respectability was complicated.

Pater4 was of Dutch ancestry and came from a family whose sons, until his father’s generation, were brought up as Roman Catholics while the daughters were brought up as Protestants. Pater was orphaned at the age of fifteen, 14

Walter Horatio Pater (1839–94), educated King’s School, Canterbury and The Queen’s College, Oxford. Fellow of Brasenose College, 1864–94. Author of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873; Marius the Epicurean, 1885; Imaginary Portraits, 1887; Gaston de la Tour, 1888; Appreciations, 1889; Emerald Uthwart, 1892; Apollo in Picardy, 1893; Plato and Platonism, 1893; The Child in the House, 1894; Miscellaneous Studies, 1895; and Greek Studies, 1895.

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became an undergraduate at Oxford four years later, and lived in Oxford with his sisters from their arrival in 1869 until they spent seven years together in London after the publication of Marius the Epicurean in 1885. Pater was a contemporary of Nietzsche and suffered the same sort of religious withdrawal as Nietzsche suffered at about the same time. From an early stage he was infamous in Oxford as a wit and flâneur, as an original in dress and manner and for his mockery of Christianity and Oxford respectability. On the other hand, explicitness about the importance of male beauty was sometimes blurred and, in the famous discussion of Winckelmann in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, was no more obtrusive than Winckelmann’s character made it necessary to be. Even where there was, or later in the century came to be, an empirical connection between aestheticism, ritualism and homosexuality, the more significant consideration for present purposes is the identification Pater made between a personal crisis of belief and the public crisis of belief which his personal crisis mirrored in the early 1860s. As a boy at King’s School, Canterbury, Pater modelled himself on Keble and Newman. His crisis of belief was occasioned by reading Maurice and Kingsley, by hearing Stanley preach while Stanley was a Canon of Canterbury, and by the conviction he acquired at Oxford that Froude, Darwin and Hegel had made orthodox theology anachronistic. By the time he became a Fellow of Brasenose College and made his first visit to Italy, he was well prepared to accept Greek sculpture and art as substitutes for Protestant Anglicanism. On his first serious appearances as an author, Pater identified ‘modern thought’ with rejection of the ‘absolute’ and with the ‘fecunditation’ it had received from the ‘sciences of observation’. Mankind was conceived of as ‘the most complex of the products of nature’, as reacting to ‘physical conditions and . . . remote laws of inheritance’, and as displaying itself in ‘fine gradations’, ‘subtleties of effect’ and ‘intricacies of expression’ which ontology and transcendentalism were incapable of understanding. What Pater was expressing was a preference for the ‘concrete’, a certain ‘levity’ about ‘the abstract’, and that ‘humour’ which was said to have distinguished Plato, Goethe and Newman from Coleridge’s solemnity about art and religion. Pater’s view of art was that the insertion of ‘the absolute’ lost the artefact in the ‘mind of the artist’ and the significance of what he ‘projected’ in the idea out of which he projected it. His view of religion was that, since the beginning of Christianity, there had been a conflict between reason and faith, that ‘all phases of theology’ since the Reformation had been ‘imperfect philosophies’, and that Europe was now divided between faith under the leadership of Pope Pius IX and an ‘irresistible modern culture’ which was Christian only by accident. In the mid-1860s Pater was an enemy of orthodoxy, denied that theologi-

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cal dogmas conveyed knowledge, and asserted that ‘sin and grace’ were no longer ‘congruous with the culture of the age’. Conversely, he asserted that culture needed ‘the religious graces’, that it needed them in a ‘subtlised and intellectual shape’, and that ‘their sacred perfume’ had to survive the rejection of the ‘narrower forms of religious life’. He was especially insistent that the Bible was a work of the ‘human spirit’, that theological dogmas were ‘memorials of . . . sincere and beautiful spirits’, and that in the modern world the instinct for religion was as often to be found in the philosopher and the artist as in the saint. In Pater’s early writings, art was the ‘highest product of the intellect’ and required from criticism a ‘subtle gradation of the shades of difference between one artistic gift and another’. This was also an ideal in life – an ideal which treated life ‘in the spirit of art’ and ‘cut obliquely’, as religion cut obliquely, across the ‘conditions of ordinary existence’, rejecting utilitarian ‘indifference’, pointing a ‘revolutionary’ simplicity and innocence at the ‘collective life’ which was removing colour and interest from the world, and bearing about it the ‘clear ring’ and ‘eternal outline’ of ‘the classical . . . and the antique’. In ‘Poems by William Morris’ in 1868 and in ‘Winckelmann’ in 1869, Pater said all that he had to say about Christianity up to the publication of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which contained eloquent ‘concrete’ accounts of some of the main Renaissance painters, sculptors and poets. It was in the essays on Morris and Winckelmann that a pre-Raphaelite regard for Chaucer and Abelard and an admiring sense of the mystical religion of Dante and St Louis were subverted by the conclusion that ‘the whole religion of the Middle Ages’ had been a ‘disorder of the senses’, and that what was needed was the theorization of a pagan aesthetic which would connect the ‘desire for beauty’, the ‘sense of death’ and the ‘shortness of life’, and would extract from their sculpture the fleshly sensuous forms characteristic of the ‘animal nature of the Greeks’. ‘Winckelmann’ described the Greek feeling for the ‘moulding of the bodily organs’ and their ‘delicate . . . transitions . . . from curve to curve’. It made something of Winckelmann’s often ‘painful . . . friendships with young men’, of the help they had given him in ‘handling those pagan marbles’ without ‘shame’ or ‘corruption’, and of the serenity and ‘sexlessness’ with which he had contemplated mankind ‘at unity . . . with . . . its . . . physical nature’. And it praised Winckelmann’s freedom from the ‘fever’ and ‘intoxication’ which Christian critics displayed when they tried to transcend Christianity’s discrediting of the senses. What Pater meant was put most clearly in the second part of ‘Poems of William Morris’ (the famous Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance) where the first answer to the question what did ‘modern philosophy’ teach was that it taught the ‘inconstancy’ of existence, and the second

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was that existence had finite limits disregard of which would disintegrate the personality. ‘We have an interval and then we cease to be’, went the concluding paragraph. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life . . . Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for art’s sake has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. (Walter Pater, ‘Poems of William Morris’, 1868, p. 312)

These were persuasions about ‘hard . . . gem-like’ flames, about the need for them to be burning ‘at the focus’ where the ‘greatest number of vital forces united in . . . purest energy’, and about the connection between ‘success in life’ and liberation from the constraints required by habitual morality. More important, they were arguments against orthodox Christianity.

Pater’s account of religion went back to primeval paganism in Greece and its persistence as an ‘ineradicable . . . vegetable growth’ through all the higher Hellenism’s attempts to improve it. He followed its sadness and rituals through endless generations and emphasized its importance in forming Greek art, mediaeval Christianity and modern Catholicism, where that had not been ‘adulterated by modern ideas’, and he used it to stigmatize Protestantism, especially German Protestantism, for its indifference to art, and for that ‘fatigue du nord ’ against which Winckelmann and Goethe had revolted. In ‘Winckelmann’ Pater argued that there was a ‘unity in European culture’ and that it was the mediaeval respect for antiquity which had enabled Renaissance art to restore the ‘senses and the blood’ to the ‘frozen world’ of the fifteenth century. On the other hand, he made it clear that the Renaissance had degenerated into the ‘facile . . . classicism’ of the eighteenth century, that it was necessary to get back behind this and that Goethe and Winckelmann were crucial because they had understood that Christianity had ‘crucified . . . the senses and . . . deflowered . . . the flesh’, and had failed to give sensual expression to ‘man’s knowledge . . . of . . . himself . . . and his relation to the world’. This was the central problem in both art and life. It was the problem to which Goethe’s ‘watchful intellectualism’ had addressed itself, and it was the intricacy and tragedy involved in Goethe’s consideration of ‘natural law even in the moral order’ which had made Goethean literature central to the modern world. Pater was as self-conscious and deliberate about literature as he was about

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art. In both poetry and prose since the thirteenth century, he saw disclosures of the ‘mystery of life’, which he specified in an essay entitled ‘Style’.

‘Style’ was a manifesto about the enrichment which had been brought to English prose in the previous half century by ‘pictorial art . . . the German metaphysical movement . . . and . . . mystical theology’; in looking forward to the incorporation of the ‘vocabulary of science’ as well, it discussed imaginative literature, including historical literature, in the way in which Bradley and Westcott had discussed it, attributing to it less a scientific ‘transcription of . . . fact’ than the transcription of a ‘sense’ of fact. This was said to be literature’s characteristic as a ‘fine art’, and it was of the essence of ‘imaginative’ literature that it ‘pleaded’ with the reader, persuaded to an ‘accommodation . . . to . . . the vision within’, and ‘represented . . . fact as connected with the . . . preferences . . . volition and . . . power’ that were the hallmark of the writer’s ‘personality’. This was what Pater meant by a ‘soul-fact’, and it was held to have special significance for the modern world insofar as imaginative prose – the modern world’s ‘special art’ – reflected the ‘variety and complexity’ of modern thought, and was better able than poetry’s ‘restraint’ to embody a modern ‘curiosity about everything . . . as it really was’. Pater’s idea of imaginative literature blurred the distinction between argument and persuasion, distinguished good literature from bad literature ‘just in proportion as it gave a representation of . . . the soul-fact’, and needed for its execution a prose which was as ‘varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its . . . experience’. The writer was a ‘scholar’ whose knowledge was a knowledge of ‘affinities and avoidances’ in the ‘recondite laws’ of a living language and ‘vindicated his liberty’ by using ‘scholarly tact’ to make ‘his own true manner’ out of the ‘fastidious genius’ of a developing language. Not only was ‘style’ in this sense ‘the man’, it was also the case that, ‘for every lineament of the vision within’, there was ‘one acceptable word’ which, by its ‘frugal closeness’, effected an ‘absolute correspondence’ to its ‘import’. In its anxiety about science, ‘Style’ was concerned primarily with the liberating nature of the inward vision. But even if a liberated inwardness had been the whole of Pater’s objective in the 1860s, it did not begin to touch his objective in the 1880s and 1890s, when mind was as important as soul and great literature was differentiated from good literature (just as great art was differentiated from good art) by its ability to ‘enlarge human sympathies’, by its ‘architectural place’ in the ‘great structure of human life’ and by the part it played in ennobling man’s sojourn on earth as an aspect of his relations with God.

Even before 1873 Pater had been toning down his rhetoric. He then suffered academic reverses occasioned by his conduct in Oxford and by the pillorying

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he received in Mallock’s New Republic in 1877. Thereafter, he disembarrassed himself of contentiousness and liberation, and aimed to achieve a reconciliation between Christianity on the one hand and paganism, Hellenism and aestheticism on the other. In this phase Pater failed to write a religious novel about eighteenth-century England and in The Child in the House, Apollo in Picardy and Emerald Uthwart, inserted an epicene romanticism into an ancien-régime Christianity which he associated with a macabre monasticism, with golden-haired youth’s proximity to death and with the combination of ‘beauty’ and ‘pain’ which The Child in the House experienced through the ‘tyranny of the senses’ in adolescence. ‘Decadence’, a necrophiliac expression of the ‘concentrated sorrow of the world’, and a higher version of the goings-on at the Monkery at Walworth, succeeded in providing an unusual view of the practice and theory of Christianity. In writing about Greek sculpture, religion and philosophy, Pater made statements of his Hellenism more or less without reference to Christianity. In writing about Pascal, Amiel and The History of Robert Elsmere, he made Christian statements more or less without reference to paganism. If he had lived longer, he would have brought the two together in an Arnoldian work he had planned before he died, consisting of sections entitled Hebrew and Hellene, The Genius of Christianity and The Poetry of Anglicanism. As things were, except marginally in Imaginary Portraits, it was only really in Gaston de la Tour and Marius the Epicurean that he dealt seriously with both. Gaston de la Tour was unfinished when Pater died and did not end with the Christian future with which Marius seemed to have ended. But there were enough hints to show that the resolution, like the resolution of Marius, would involve an accommodation between Christianity and sensuality, and that the entrenched religion was not, as it had been in Marius, a non-Christian religion but was the natural Catholicism of the home and the French countryside, the public Catholicism of the sixteenth-century French State, and the ‘Gothic darkness’ of which Gaston’s ‘mystic pre-occupations’ made him both critic and admirer. Marius and Gaston both had heroes who practised an old religion but were aware of the need to modify it. In both cases, the outcome was the assertion of an essential compatibility between Christianity, properly understood, and the epicureanisms of the second and the sixteenth centuries. In Gaston de la Tour the Roman Church, while standing for ‘the things of the spirit’, was not able to stand for them effectively amidst the ‘heady fanaticism’ created by the Wars of Religion. ‘Scrupulous spirits’ (i.e. the Politiques) were said to have found Counter-Reformation Papists as unpleasant as ‘militant Calvinists’ and to have reflected the ‘more permanent forms’ of human nature in doing so. Gaston himself – an ‘instinctively religious’ person – was described as having a natural regard for the ritual and architectural brilliance of mediaeval Catholicism as well as for the ‘highbred figures’ and ‘angelic . . .

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faces’ of the ancien-régime boys he encountered in the course of an ‘intellectual springtide’ which was said to be the experience of ‘sensitive youths’ in all generations. The dramatic centre of the book was the inroad which had been made into his Catholicism by the doubt, sensuality and ‘wanton paganism’ of Ronsard’s poetry, and the ‘external and authorised mouthpiece’ this provided for the ‘truant and irregular poetry’ of Pater’s own nature. Ronsard had been a man-of-the-world before receiving the tonsure, but his significance lay not so much in the combination of poetry with Christian observance as in the triumphant battle he had fought for the ‘worship’ of ‘Greek . . . physical beauty’ in the ‘brown cloudlands of the North’. It was when Gaston began to enquire whether this was not a ‘consecration of evil’ that the novel passed him on first to Montaigne and then to Giordano Bruno. Pater praised Bruno as both ‘lover . . . and . . . monk’, and as drawing from the ‘mystic recognition’ that the ‘all’ was ‘divine’ a realization of God’s identity with Bruno’s own soul. The problems associated with the possibility of ‘sin’ in a pantheistic world, however, make it more difficult to see how Pater would have left Bruno if the novel had been completed than it is to see how he would have left Montaigne who, unlike the hero of Marius the Epicurean was credited with ‘complexities’ and ‘irregularities’ and with the belief that the ‘priceless pearl of truth’ was discernible, if at all, through an ‘analysis of act and motive’ in which ‘vices’ were often ‘lawful’ and the ‘unheroic’ often better than the ‘heroic’. After it was published, Pater claimed that he had intended to make Marius more dismissive of Epicureanism than it was, and it is certain that he wanted to show why Epicureanism needed to be completed by Christianity. At the same time as he agreed that the Church of England had to ‘find room for latitudinarians among its clergy’, however, he made a point of explaining that the priest was ‘one of the necessary types of humanity’, and that in France a peasant priesthood had had the merit of keeping the peasantry in touch with the Church and providing ‘the only mode of poetry which could be realized by the poor’. Not only had the hero of The History of Robert Elsmere been ‘right’ to stop being a clergyman, he would not have become one in the first place if he had understood that the religious climate had moved on since Renan, that doubt about the truth of Christianity had become ‘unscientific’ and ‘unphilosophical’, and that the important consideration for the really modern mind was the ‘large class of minds’ which ‘could not be sure that . . . Christianity was false’. In Marius the Epicurean, the theme was the development of Marius’ opinions and the proof it offered that there need be no hiatus between paganism and Christianity, or between aestheticism and Christianity. The Christianity towards which it led was an antidote to ‘melancholy’ and ‘suicide’, had thrown off the ascesis and eschatology of the earliest Christians, while not yet putting on the ascesis and puritanism of the Middle Ages, and had treated

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man’s body as both a ‘proper object of worship’ and the ‘one true temple in the world’. It was a religion of hope which had not only introduced a new ‘sanction’ and ‘motive’ to the ‘mechanical . . . theory of the world’, but had also encompassed the weak, the old and the wretched, had elevated women, family and work higher even than Roman religion had elevated them, and had assured man of an ‘indefectible mind’ and ‘eternal’ friend ‘behind the veil’ of the ‘material order’. This was a very special Christianity in which Christ had encouraged the ‘harmonious development of all . . . parts of human nature’ and had made monasticism, Gothic architecture and the ‘ritual system’ of the Mass ‘great, conjoint and . . . necessary products of the human mind’. In his later writing, Pater left a strong impression of the compatibility between primeval religion, Greek Hellenism, mediaeval Catholicism, Renaissance art, the Catholicism of the French peasantry and the ‘hope’ which lay beneath contemporary scepticism. By this stage, he was yielding neither to Proestantism nor to Evangelicalism, was acclaiming mediaevalism ‘as one of the great discoveries’ of ‘the later half of the nineteenth century’, and was expressing the conviction that, if the Church was to survive, it would need priests who believed, more or less, what they professed. It is possible that Pater’s mediaevalism was more influential than his Hellenism among the educated classes after 1890. It is certain that his flippancy about the modern world concealed the sadness of a residually reactionary Tractarian who was instinctively unwilling to tolerate the earnestness and seriousness which the Oxford Idealists had extracted from their classical education. In Wilde, Pater’s attitudes became a posture. V Wilde5 was nearly twenty years younger than Pater and seems to have despised him sexually. But he was more than conscious of Pater’s impact as public theatre in Oxford in the 1870s, restated some of Pater’s attitudes to art and religion, and was even more explicit than Pater had been about male beauty. Like Shaw, Wilde was Dublin-Irish. Also like Shaw, once settled in London, he addressed the English about themselves, affronting by his insolence, entertaining (eventually) by his drama and fiction and instructing through a Shavian flippancy of which not even the young Pater had been capable. After his trial Wilde wrote nothing of consequence apart from De Profundis 15

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900), educated Porturo Royal School, Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalene College, Oxford. Author of Vera, 1880; Poems, 1881; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891; Intentions, 1891; Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, 1891; Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892; A Woman of No Importance, 1893; Salome, 1893; An Ideal Husband, 1895; The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895; The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1895; The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898; and De Profundis, 1905.

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and The Ballad of Reading Goal, the high point of his career having been reached, as it turned out, in the five years before his trial with The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Soul of Man under Socialism and the four plays with which he conquered the London theatre after the banning of Salome. These works supplied a message, reactions to which had been anticipated by the Oxford Union’s refusal to accept the gift of Wilde’s Poems in 1881 and by Gilbert and Sullivan’s send-up in Patience in the same year. More even than a message, however, Wilde inserted a content into the posture of a dandy. Wilde was born in 1854, the son of a successful oculist and an authoress who had been a radical member of Young Ireland. He was a schoolboy at an Irish public school, read classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he nearly became a Roman Catholic, and spent five successful years at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize and failed to win the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize with an essay on Historical Criticism Among the Ancients. At Oxford, Wilde became a Freemason, made himself prominent by his dress and manner, and appears to have been on friendly terms with Milner and Curzon. Between the end of his Oxford career in 1879 and the start of his peak-period as a public figure fourteen years later, he married and had two children, experienced continuous financial insecurity, and became a shameless flatterer of public figures from Gladstone downwards. Wilde’s politics had two aspects. In Vera in 1880 there were caricatures of the cynicism of the Russian autocracy and a contrast, to the autocracy’s disadvantage, with the liberal virtue of the Russian Nihilists. In Poems of 1881 Gladstonian fears for Christian Bulgaria and cultural and libertarian fears about the ‘red flag’ on ‘the piled-up street’ led to Miltonic or Cromwellian fears that ‘luxury was expelling liberty from the British Empire’. In the 1890s, in a different mode, there was the cynicism about liberal virtue and democracy which in Vera had been the prerogative of the hated Russian autocracy. Vera was a juvenile melodrama with a ridiculous plot. An Ideal Husband had a Liberal minister of ‘upright nature’ reacting to blackmail, declaring to his high-minded wife that the laws of politics were ‘very different . . . from the . . . laws of private life’, and deciding first that it was ‘vitally necessary’ to bow to blackmail, next that he should fight the blackmailer ‘so long as [his] wife did not know’ why he was being blackmailed, finally, after she had been affronted by being told, trying to persuade her to come down from her moral pedestal. An Ideal Husband revolved cleverly around a series of duplicities and then had a happy ending when Lady Chiltern acknowledged that her virtue had been too demanding. The general implication was that politics are seldom what they seem, that liberal virtue is incapable of coping with them, and that it needed the skill of a dandy – Lord Goring – to make the necessary adjustments. Wilde’s politics are embarrassing, but it would be wrong to ignore Vera,

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however juvenile, or An Ideal Husband, however cynical. It was only in The Soul of Man under Socialism that Wilde became politically coherent. In The Soul of Man under Socialism the subjects were Socialism and individualism and the Ruskinian connections that Bosanquet6 had made between Socialism and art. It was crucial to the argument that individualist Socialism was acceptable where authoritarian Socialism was not, that ‘to recommend thrift to the poor’ was ‘grotesque and insulting’, and that the ‘poor man’ who was ungrateful and unthrifty was probably a more ‘real personality’ than the ‘starved peasants of the Vendée who had gone out voluntarily to die for the ludicrous cause of feudalism’. The central assumptions in The Soul of Man were that the ‘duties’ imposed by property reduced the rich to the ‘sordid necessity of living for others’, and that ‘the people who did most harm’ in modern societies were those who tried to ‘do . . . good’ by ‘using private property’ to alleviate the evils which private property had created. It was as protagonist of art as well as of personality that Wilde looked forward to the abolition of the acquisitive mentality and to that liberation from altruism which he had extracted from Darwin, Keats, Flaubert and Renan. Wilde recognized that there was a ‘certain amount of freedom’ under the present system. But he adapted Arnold’s objections that human perfection consisted not in what man did but in what man was, that ‘gain not growth’ had been man’s aim in the past and, since growth not gain should be his aim in the future, that private property would have to be abolished if the life lived by Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire because they had had ‘private means’, was to be lived more generally. In discussing the relationship between ‘joy’ and ‘pain’, The Soul of Man was obscure. At other times it was naïve – about the emotional changes which would follow science’s solution of the problem of disease and Socialism’s solution of the problem of property. Nor is it possible to take seriously the principle that ‘authority is . . . degrading’, natural ‘unselfishness’ a possibility, and ‘a community . . . infinitely more brutalised’ by the infliction of punishment than ‘by the habitual occurrence of crime’. But the main argument, given Wilde’s mode of expression, was an Oxford commonplace in the 1880s – that, though ‘the new Individualism’ towards which Socialism was working was something the Greeks had been able to realize only in thought ‘because they had had slaves and fed them’ and the men of the Renaissance had been able to realize only in art ‘because they had had slaves and starved them’, Socialism might also contribute by constructing a ‘new Hellenism’ for the future. In The Soul of Man, the ‘New Hellenism’ was a statement about art as the ‘most intense form of individualism . . . the world had ever known’ and about 16

See below, chapter 17.

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the ‘corrupting’ effect art suffered when subjected to external control. Like Pearson’s7 political theory of science, Wilde’s political theory of art was that art should throw off extraneous control, should trust ‘the People’ even less than it had trusted ‘Princes and Popes’ and should be wary of the ‘new authority’ with which ‘the fourth estate’ had ‘eaten up’ the authority of parliament. Wilde affected to despise newspaper journalism, hated the ‘prejudice, stupidity and cant’ of the leading article, and (long before his own downfall) feared the ‘quite extraordinary tyranny’ the press was exercising over private lives. His real target, however, was the ‘suburban intellect’ of the respectable public which saw in art a ‘disintegrating force’, stuck to the ‘classics’ as a way of softening art’s impact and, when successful in imposing its own vulgarity, produced the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the ridicule to which the Aesthetes had been exposed in Patience in 1881. Wilde’s reaction to Patience was to beard the philistine, to insist that art’s sole object was the creation of beauty, and to establish that, if art did have social consequences, these could follow only as a by-product. Ruskin had been wrong to connect art with ethics and religion. It was wrong to expect anything beautiful from popular art, and there was an unavoidable contradiction, exemplified in Phidias’ imprisonment by the Athenian Philistines, between the artist’s discernment of beauty and the narrowness and censoriousness of popular taste. In addition to providing manifestos about literature, painting, poetry and sculpture, Wilde provided principles for cookery as an answer to the ‘penny dinners’ of the ‘new democracy’, for dress, including the principle that ‘all apparel [should] be hung from the shoulders’, and for bookbinding, woodcarving, jewellery, tapestry, house-decoration and the design of stage-scenery. The pinnacle was ‘Art’, which practitioners of the particular arts were beginning to achieve as ‘the secret laws of artistic creation’ were rediscovered through ‘the English Renaissance’. By ‘the English Renaissance’ in the early 1880s Wilde meant ‘a more gracious . . . way of life’ and an ‘attention to form’ which between them combined Greek ‘clearness of vision’, mediaeval ‘mystery’, and the ‘intricacy and complexity’ of ‘modern life’ since the French Revolution. This ‘new birth’ was as significant as the ‘new birth’ of the Italian Renaissance; it was replacing the classical interest in the ‘type’ with a romantic interest in the ‘exception’, and it had both tasted and rejected that ‘transcendentalism’ which had been the secret of Newman and Emerson. Its mentors were Phidias, Homer, Dante and Keats, French poetry and the Russian novel, along with Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, and the pre-Raphaelites, for whom ‘Art which fulfilled the conditions of beauty, fulfilled all conditions’. Its target was the ‘modern intellec17

See below, chapter 15.

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tual spirit’ with its ‘criticism of life’, its ‘intolerable burden’ of ‘intellectual doubt’, and its refusal to understand that there was ‘more health’ in Baudelaire than there had been in Kingsley. At one level, Wilde was idealizing a timeless élite whose function was to resist both the ‘commercial’ and the ‘national’ spirit, and to avoid ‘good and evil’ as marks of an ‘incompleteness of vision’. At another level, he was idealizing beauty as a necessity of civilization, art as the conversion of the citizen’s life into a ‘sacrament’, and sacramentality as creating a ‘new brotherhood’ and ‘universal language’ such that men would no longer ‘go out to slay one another for the whim and folly of some king or minister’. These were childish prognostications. But they brought Wilde closer to the liberal mind of the 1890s than he came through the doctrine of the heedlessness of art, and they gave social relevance to the claim that an ameliorative message was to be extracted from the ‘perfect design’ of the ‘lily and the sunflower’.

In the course of continuous reviewing in the 1880s, Wilde had applied his mind to contemporary culture. In writing and defending The Picture of Dorian Gray and in The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist, he theorized claims which were new and even more glaring. The Picture of Dorian Gray idealized Gray, whose ‘life’ was his ‘art’, sustained Wilde’s denigration of ‘middle-class virtue’, and despised anything which obscured the primacy of ‘youth’ and the insignificance of ‘will and intention’. The mixture was a mixture of high life, high camp, blood and death. Marriage and normal sexuality were at a minimum, the ‘artist’ avoided ‘ethical sympathies’, and a ‘New Hedonism’ was sketched in which beauty would be primary and goodness would involve ‘harmony with one’s self’ as opposed to being forced to be ‘in harmony with others’. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘beautiful sins, like beautiful things’ were ‘the privilege of the rich’ and conversion to Roman Catholicism (after flirtations with Darwin and mysticism) took the form of liturgy, vestments and ceremonial. In The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist the message became even more explicit. In The Critic as Artist, the subject was art’s dependence on criticism if it was to avoid becoming merely repetitive and criticism’s reaction to art as the ‘starting-point for a new creation’. Criticism was ‘independent’ and ‘subjective’, and, so far from ‘seeing’ Arnold’s ‘object’ as it really was, tried to see it as it was not. It was not only unconstrained by proof and probability, it also came ‘direct from the soul’, avoided ‘fairness’ and ‘impartiality’, and was as antagonistic as The Decay of Lying to that ‘complete absence of intelligence’ on which social stability depended. In The Decay of Lying, Wilde at times was merely silly. In general, he was

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not silly. He made a brilliant statement about the irreducibility of art’s disclosure of the imperfection of nature, placed a heavy burden on human invention, and in the ‘gift of exaggeration’ discerned an artistic capacity which was being edged out by the Blue-Book desire for facts. These strictures were applied to modern tapestry and the ‘rugs and carpets’ of the 1870s, to English drama since Shakespeare, to Dickens, to almost all of Reade’s works after The Cloister and the Hearth, and to Zola for making the novel ‘unreadable’ by trying to make it ‘modern’ and ‘reliable’. A canon of ‘unreliability’ then sketched a tradition which began with Herodotus as ‘Father of Lies’ and ended with Carlyle, whose French Revolution had ‘excluded . . . facts . . . on the ground of [their] dullness’. The Decay of Lying repeated the Idealist attack on utility and science, while denying the incompatibility between beauty and usefulness. It praised ‘the cultured . . . liar’ as against the philistine, and the pleasure that lying brought as ‘the very basis of civilized society’. It assumed that art shielded men from ‘actual existence’ and gave to art as a ‘veil’ the ‘reality’ of which life was the ‘mirror’. Once this had been formulated as fantasy, Wilde developed it with energy and power. The ‘boy-burglar’ was ‘Dick Turpin’ reproducing ‘fiction’ as ‘fact’; modern pessimism was Hamlet translated into reality; ‘Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau’ and the Nihilists out of Turgenev and Dostoevsky. ‘The nineteenth century as we knew it’ was an ‘invention of Balzac’, except insofar as it was the expression of an art which could not be associated with a person. Like The Critic as Artist, The Decay of Lying was a dandy’s manifesto – a reaction against Realism, a demand to free art and imagination from the dullness of common life, and the claim that, if society was capable of being redeemed, it would need to be redeemed by letting the poor ‘create more beautiful things’. At the same time, it expressed sympathy for religion in much the way in which Pater had expressed sympathy, praising Newman’s display of a ‘troubled soul’ on the way from ‘darkness to darkness’, rejecting the Christ of Victorian latitudinarianism, and regretting, much as De Profundis might have regretted, ‘the growth of common sense in the Church of England’. De Profundis repeated The Ballad’s denunciations of the prison system which were to be repeated again in letters to newspapers after Wilde’s release. It exposed the shallowness and childishness of Lord Alfred Douglas and the obstacle his ‘unintellectual’ intrusions had presented to Wilde’s dedication to art. And it included long passages of reflection about art, conduct and religion which were Wilde’s way of coming to terms with the ‘sorrows’ he had experienced since his trial and conviction. Wilde complained that he had been ruined by Douglas’s ‘greed’ and degraded ethically by Douglas’s success in taking over his ‘entire existence’. Contempt for Douglas mingled with forgiveness; reproach and self-reproach

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with calls for amendment of life; and Douglas’s hatred of his own father (the Marquess of Queensbury) with the claim that Queensbury’s ‘Puritanism’ had added a ‘representative’ quality to a family which had always been riddled with ‘violence . . . and . . . madness’. De Profundis omitted to discuss Wilde’s physical relations with Douglas and the relevance of ‘common lads’ to Wilde’s relations with his wife. It is odd, too, after the harm Douglas was accused of doing to Wilde’s ‘genius’ and the ‘hate’ Wilde accused him of being moved by, that Wilde still wished the ‘chasm of achieved Art’ which had divided them throughout their friendship, and the ‘chasm of Sorrow’ which had divided them since, to be bridged in the future. In De Profundis, Wilde claimed to be turning his back on bitterness, to be doing this ‘for [his] own sake’, and to be achieving a new mixture of agnosticism about faith with celebration of Christ as propagator of that ‘imaginative sympathy’ which was ‘the sole secret of Creation . . . in the sphere of Art’. He recalled the perversity, heedlessness and pleasure of his life before his fall and the hideousness, meanness and suffering of his life since his fall. In arriving at humility as remedy for the humiliations he had undergone, he explained that ‘the mood of rebellion closed up the channels of the soul’ and that the only way to retain ‘contact’ with the soul was to ‘accept all that [had] happened’ to him. Wilde associated suffering with holiness as well as truth, and asserted that grace would come only to those in whom love was restoring what sorrow had destroyed. He recalled not only the stubbornness of his first reactions to imprisonment but also his inability to find comfort in morality (about which he was ‘antinomian’), in reason (which told him that the laws under which he had been convicted were ‘unjust’), or in conventional, ecclesiastical religion. The religion of De Profundis was connected with art as both ‘the supreme reality’ and the ‘personal passion’ by which Wilde had revealed himself to himself and the world. In ‘awakening the imagination of the century’, he had, moreover, he claimed, developed ‘symbolic relations’ to the art of his age in a way which had brought Christ to the centre of consideration. There was no suggestion in De Profundis that Christ was to be spoken of in the terms in which orthodoxy spoke, or that he could be worshipped on any ordinary altar. And there were the suggestions that religion had to consist of ‘symbols’ of Wilde’s ‘own creation’, that Christ’s ‘intense . . . flame-like imagination’ had made him ‘the true precursor of the romantic movement in life’ and that, in ‘loving the sinner’ more than the Saint and searching for the ‘soul . . . in . . . everyone’, he had waged the battle against philistinism which ‘every child of light had to wage’. What was distinctive about Christ, however, was that he was not a philanthropist (‘like the dreadful philanthropists of the nineteenth century’) but believed that it was ‘for one’s own sake’ that one had to

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forgive one’s enemies because ‘Love was more beautiful than Hate’ and acceptance a better way of ‘treating . . . the . . . soul . . . as a friend’. Wilde’s identification of art, Christ and the soul had a positive healing aspect. But it also had a negative polemical aspect which was directed at the ‘contemptible’ quality of the ‘intellectual life of ordinary people’, their failure to understand that Christ had inspired the most extraordinary range of artistic achievement, and their indifference to ‘Chartres Cathedral, the Arthurian . . . legends . . . The Divine Comedy, Romeo and Juliet . . . The Ancient Mariner, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Les Misérables . . . Les Fleurs du Mal and Tannhauser’ – all of which had made Christ the ‘palpitating centre of [the] romance’ that Wilde believed in.

Between 1880 and his death, Wilde restated that distaste for the modern mind which had begun with Ruskin. The praise he lavished on Kipling for knowing ‘vulgarity better’ than anyone had known it before and establishing himself as an ‘authority on the second-rate’ was a symbol of Wilde’s contempt for suburban, lower-middle-class respectability (whether in India or in England). In the Oxford Idealists whom we shall discuss in the next chapter, Christianity involved a muddled, anti-élitist élitism which refused to regard anyone as second-rate.

6 Christianity and modern knowledge I

As in its first dawn, Christianity . . . is beginning to show itself . . . as a principle . . . which . . . is immanent in nature and in man and . . . is working . . . to still higher issues . . . The principle of Christianity has come to self-consciousness, and . . . is . . . capable of being held without that mixture of illusion which was inevitable in an earlier age. (Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion, Vol. II, 1893, 1899 edn, pp. 315–18) In the conscientious citizen of modern Christendom reason without and reason within . . . combine to yield both the judgment, and obedience to the judgment . . . that every human person has an absolute value . . . that in the estimate of that well-being which forms the true good everyone is to count for one and no one for more than one. (ed. A. C. Bradley, T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883, 1890 edn, p. 231) Religion is indestructible. . . . What then, can we in England do for Religion? All that in us lies to secure a form of Christianity in harmony with progress, liberty, and knowledge. How can this be obtained? By making the Church of England a church of intellectual freedom and a church of the people . . . Can this church of an episcopal sect, this last obstinate remnant of a dead social system . . . become a church of freedom, a church for the people? Yes it can! It is for the people to decide. (Arnold Toynbee, Leaflets for Working Men No. 1, in Eighteen Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, 1884, p. xxvi)

In chapter 4 we discussed Arnold’s, Seeley’s, Sidgwick’s and Wicksteed’s attempts to accommodate Christianity to modern knowledge by collapsing it into the modern knowledge that was represented by literary criticism, history and philosophy. None of these (except in a sense Sidgwick) believed that they were doing this; insofar as they did it, they did it inadvertently. In this chapter we shall discuss the similar fate which befell the attempt of the Oxford Idealists to propagate a modern philosophy which would destroy materialism, and would show not only that there was no necessary caesura between the religion of the thinking classes and the newly enfranchized people, but also, once adjustments were made, that both would be able to enjoy the cohesion, stability and solidarity which were the indications of a common consciousness. As a contribution to the teaching of philosophy, Oxford Idealism established a preference for Kant and Hegel over Locke, Hume and Bentham. It aimed to bridge the gap between ethics and economics which had seemed unbridgeable in the shadow of Ricardo; to rescue philosophy from science, positivism and an individualistic understanding of society and the State; and to bring, as Milner remembered the elder Toynbee wishing to bring, both 130

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‘idealism’ and ‘common sense’ to the improvement of the ‘material condition’ of the ‘working class’. There were undergraduate absurdities, like Toynbee’s crusade against the tipping of college servants in Balliol in the 1870s. But two beliefs were paramount – the belief Caird attributed to Hegel that there was ‘no secure path to a higher kind of knowledge’ which began by a quarrel with ordinary consciousness of ‘the facts of life’; and the belief that, since ‘special inspiration’ was ‘an anachronism for the modern spirit’, which expected the saint to be a ‘man-of-the-world’, a philosophy which had recourse to ex cathedra assertion was a philosophy which was ‘confessing its impotence’. This tone and doctrine was established in a period of destructive aggression up to 1883, when Caird published Hegel, A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant and The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte, Green published Introductions to Hume’s Treatises of Human Nature and essays about Spencer and G. H. Lewes, and Wallace and F. H. Bradley published respectively The Logic of Hegel and Kant and The Presuppositions of Critical History and Ethical Studies. In the fifteen years after Green’s death, negative criticism was transcended by Green’s posthumous works and the Essays in Philosophical Criticism which Haldane and Seth edited in his memory; by Bosanquet’s Logic and Bradley’s Appearance and Reality; by Toynbee’s Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, to which Jowett prefaced one memoir in 1884 and Milner another in 1908; and by the innumerable works which the brotherhood published before and after the publication of Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State in 1899. This was a massive output which had the widest ramifications when considered in conjunction with the political careers of Milner and Haldane, the posthumous works of Green, Nettleship and Wallace, the literary criticism of A. C. Bradley and W. P. Ker (who did not begin writing in earnest until middle life), and the writings of Sir Henry Hadow, who had been to Green’s lectures and borrowed some of Green’s opinions and who, though a Christian, will appear in chapter 17 in connection with the secular development of twentieth-century music.

Between Caird, Green and Wallace and many of these other thinkers, there was a difference of substance. These three (and Toynbee) were aiming to restore Christianity to the centre of life and thought, to adjust Christian institutions to the spiritual ‘destitution’ they sensed among the poor, and to accommodate the ‘large body of educated men and women’ who remained religious even after they had turned their backs on the ‘grossness’ and ‘contradictions’ of ‘the old religion’. Not that the other Idealists were aiming to reject Christianity, though some of them were secular or humanist, but that they tended either to ignore it, to subsume it into a higher vision, or to

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replicate that ambivalence towards it which was one possible implication of Hegel’s assertion of the primacy of philosophy. And since in the end this produced that death by a thousand cuts which we have already observed in a different manner in Seeley’s Natural Religion, it has seemed best to consider F. H. Bradey, A. C. Bradley and Bosanquet as contributors to the postChristian consensus. There had been exponents of Hegel in England and Scotland before Hutchison Stirling’s book, The Secret of Hegel, was published in 1865. But it was The Secret of Hegel which led the way in perceiving that Hegel was not only the most important thinker in the modern world but had also restored Christianity to the forefront of modern thought. I Stirling1 was the son of a Scottish publisher and was born in 1820. At Glasgow University, which he entered at the age of thirteen, he performed well in a broad-based degree, became a follower of Carlyle and acquired the belief that he was destined to be a writer. He did not, however, become a writer but acquired instead a medical qualification and spent a decade in medical practice in South Wales until the death of his father in 1851 enabled him to dedicate the rest of his life to thought. On ceasing to be a doctor, Stirling did not know that he was destined to become a Hegelian. He spent the earliest years of his retirement in France, wrote a pamphlet about cholera and an article about Robert Burns, and did not give systematic attention to German thought until he moved with his family to Heidelberg in 1856 in order to do so. In the course of a long life, Stirling failed to get the academic preferment that he wanted and became increasingly unable on an unearned income to sustain anything more than the most limited bourgeois sociability. He had experience of industrial life as a failed railway investor and friend of Crawshay, the Welsh iron magnate, but his main interests were in literature, philosophy and religion and the duty he proposed to the thinking classes in England and Scotland to understand the world and their duties in it in a Christian, elevated and Hegelian way. Between 1865 and the end of the century Stirling published books about Hamilton, Kant and Darwin, a defence of Hegel against Whewell and Robertson Smith, and a volume of Gifford lectures. But really, after 1868, his new writing was unimportant, his most important writing having already been published as Jerrold, Tennyson and Macaulay, a translation of 11

James Hutchison Stirling (1820–1909), educated Glasgow University. Medical practitioner. Author of The Secret of Hegel, 1865; Sir William Hamilton, 1865; Schwegler’s Handbook to the History of Philosophy, 1867; Jerrold, Tennyson and Macaulay, 1868; Address on Materialism, 1868; As Regards Protoplasm, 1869; Lectures on The Philosophy of Law, 1872; Philosophy in The Poets, 1885; Philosophy and Theology, 1890; and Darwinianism, 1894.

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Schwegler’s Handbook to the History of Philosophy and The Secret of Hegel. Jerrold, Tennyson and Macaulay consisted of magazine articles most of which had been published in the late 1850s. Two articles, about a Carlylean poet and about the ‘incessant . . . premature authorship’ which was the misfortune of Douglas Jerrold – Stirling’s journalistic mentor and first editor of Punch – were of no great significance, while a third, published after The Secret of Hegel, exposed the falsity of Coleridge’s and De Quincey’s treatment of Kant. ‘Tennyson’ and ‘Macaulay’ on the other hand were significant attempts at self-identification. ‘Macaulay’ made a measured examination of Macaulay’s History of England, explained what Stirling disliked about it, and used it in order to criticize the English situation as Macaulay had decided to understand it. It treated Hume as Macaulay’s mentor, Hume’s History as the model on which Macaulay’s History had been based, and Hume’s legacy to Macaulay as being the Enlightenment’s distaste for ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘superstition’ and its belief in toleration and private judgement. Critical attention was given to Macaulay’s reservations about puritanism, his support for the laissez-faire of the ‘passive political economists’, and his failure to understand, even after four years in India, that ignorance of ‘the Vedas . . . [of] Egypt’s place in universal history’ and of the other oriental subjects of which Bunsen and Max Müller were the masters, was inexcusable. Stirling praised the knowledge and experience that had gone into Macaulay’s History. But he criticized the party nature of Macaulay’s politics, the superficiality of Macaulay’s sketches of character and the ‘fallacious representations’ which his third chapter had borrowed from Fielding and Smollett. Carlyle’s French Revolution was declared to have been superior in ‘earnestness . . . intensity and vision’ as much as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall had been superior in ‘solidity, completeness and . . . range’, and Carlyle himself to have been ‘athirst’ for eternity where Macaulay had surrounded himself with as well understood and well arranged a ‘temporal’ as Sir William Hamilton had surrounded himself with. What ‘Macaulay’ said negatively, ‘Tennyson’ said positively, identifying an English poetic tradition from Chaucer onwards, making of Tennyson its transcendent living representative, and using idyll to conceptualize the possibility of a ‘purer life’ than had become possible amidst the ‘mercenary . . . meanness . . . and . . . unsightly toil’ which the English displayed in pursuit of ‘trade, commerce, profession, office and position’.

Stirling was a Carlylean Romantic and was even more explicit than Mill about cultural elevation. He advocated a democratic aristocracy which he saw embodied in the ‘purity’ of Tennyson’s women, the greatness of Tennyson’s

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men, and the indignation which Tennyson felt towards the ‘indifference of the wealthy . . . and . . . wellborn’. In In Memoriam, moreover, ‘the broken heart of the century’ was found ‘wailing . . . a universal grief’. In discussing Tennyson, Stirling communicated ‘a sense of grandeur . . . and . . . sorrow’. Tennyson was not only the ‘richest, purest and most Christian of poets’, he was also the ‘richest, purest and truest’ of men, and in In Memoriam had recorded ‘a love . . . greater than the love of women’ and a grief ‘deep as the grief of mothers in bereavement’. Stirling admired Tennyson in the way in which he admired Carlyle and did not admire Feuerbach’s ‘cheerless atheism’. But he intuited in Carlyle, as he intuited in Dickens and Thackeray, a middle-aged ‘gloom . . . and . . . sadness’. In aiming to ensure that Tennyson did not succumb too, he praised Tennyson’s ability to reflect ‘every point of cultured speculation’, his freedom from ‘the shabby prose of infidelity’, and the ‘sublimity’ he had achieved in wrestling with the ‘doubt and scepticism’ which had replaced ‘faith’ as ‘the sovereign of the hour’. It was unfortunate only that, while ‘naming the phantoms’ by which England was being haunted, Tennyson had failed to ‘lay’ them. Towards the end of ‘Tennyson’ Stirling contrasted the contemporary world, where doubt was endemic, with the ‘happier days’ of the past ‘where the problem had not been put and . . . every man had lived and moved and had his being in an all-unconscious answer’. He wanted to answer the questions that doubt had asked and to replace the ‘happiness of the unconscious answer’ with the ‘clearer happiness of a conscious answer’. In showing how a ‘purified’ Christianity would ‘live and grow for ever’, he was led on from consideration of Tennyson as the climax of English poetry to consideration of Hegel as the climax of German philosophy.

The Secret of Hegel was designed to have an effect in France and Germany. But Stirling was thinking of Scotland and England as well, and was setting his sights not only at the scepticism of Hamilton and Mansel but also at the misrepresentations of Hegel which had been made by ‘the German party’ in England. Stirling wished to establish that Hegel would have dismissed Buckle, Colenso, and the authors of Essays and Reviews as ‘friends of the monkey’, that Hegel’s was the best answer to atheism, materialism and sensuality (whether of the opium-eating or Utilitarian variety) and that Hegel alone had dealt with the Darwinian situation in which ‘the monkey’ had become the key to thought, ‘skeletons of monkeys’ the pedigree of ‘superior enlightenment’, and the Church a declining institution in which ‘priests confessed their imposture . . . before the picture of a huge baboon’. The Secret of Hegel contained three interconnected works – a translation

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of part of Hegel’s Logic, a commentary on the translation in which Hegel’s was the correction of Kant’s philosophy and an intellectual autobiography – The Struggle to Hegel – which described the experience Stirling had undergone in turning a vague hankering into intellectual certainty. The Secret of Hegel presented Stirling’s struggle as a mirror of the modern mind and Hegelianism as both the remedy for the ‘passions . . . and gesticulations’ of English Romanticism and an antidote to the idea that Hegel and Kant must have been ‘mystic’ and ‘obscure’ or ‘soared high’ because they had had ‘so much of the fervid in them’. The Carlylean conclusion was that it was unnecessary to ‘soar up into the empyrean’ and that Kant and Hegel, so far from being ‘conjurors’ who would ‘prove the chair they sat on not a chair’, were ‘very plain fellows . . . wholly down on the solid floor of substantial fact’. These were rhetorical persuasions – depictions of Hegel in particular as a ‘blunt . . . homespun . . . son of the Border’ who, despite a tendency to get ‘lost . . . in the baroque’, had had about him the simplicity of truth and the ‘sagacious ways’ of an ‘honest, deep-seen old Scotsman’. They were also philosophical assertions of the Hegelian assumption that philosophy’s function was not to dissolve, improve or change the world but to confirm the certainties of the world’s ordinary inhabitants by providing subtle, comprehensive and accurate principles ‘theoretically as regards what men could know, practically as regards how they should act, and aesthetically as regards the legitimate application of feeling’. The Secret of Hegel was a triumph of engaged exposition, an obfuscating but persuasive statement of philosophical principle which needs to be felt if it is to be understood. What matters for present purposes is the demolition of the Enlightenment which it assumed that Hegel had effected and the support he was supposed to have given to Christianity. Stirling’s criticism of ‘periods of . . . Enlightenment’ was that they lent themselves to ‘destruction and negativity’ and ‘compromised existence’ by maintaining the ‘vanity’ of being ‘superior to the prejudices of the vulgar’. Existence could no longer be ‘compromised’, he argued, the ‘vanity’ of being ‘superior to the prejudices of the vulgar’ had to be abandoned, and ‘it were an anachronism on our . . . part should we, like Mr Buckle, pat Scepticism on the back and urge it still further forward’. It was Hegelianism’s merit that it transcended destructiveness, ‘quit the penal fire of the negative’ and ‘emerged into the sunshine of the new and positive’ by ‘restoring’ what the ‘scepticism’ of the Enlightenment had ‘bereft us of’. Stirling identified Enlightenment with ‘free thinking’ and ‘private judgement’, and with the determination to reduce the State to such ‘absolute nudity’ that the only restraint on individuals ‘living to themselves’ had become the ‘mechanical force of a Police’. This had produced both an ‘empty subjectivity’ and Kant’s demonstration that it was the ‘direct reverse’ of Reason. It was the Kantian adaptation of the ‘subtle suggestions’ Hume had used to

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‘loosen . . . every joint of the Existent’ which had protected private judgement from the ‘universal scepticism’ Hume had seemed to be leading it to, and Kant who had understood that political economy’s consecration of the ‘rush’ for ‘material possessions’ was a concomitant of its conception of men being ‘isolated . . . abstract units in a universal, unsympathising, unparticipant . . . inorganic Atomism . . . of irresponsible selves’. ‘Atomism’ Stirling described as ‘animality’ and a divorce from ‘Substance’, and Kant’s merit as being the perception not only that self-will was antipathetic to reason but also that private judgement, if ‘carried forward’ into the future, would require the restoration of ‘Substance’ epistemologically as well as morally. Just, in other words, as Kant was credited with taking the first steps in a period of creative thought such as had been matched, despite their addiction to ‘sense’, only by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, so Hegel was credited with the completion of Kant’s work by achieving the final solution to all philosophical problems. It was Hegel who had made explicit the Concrete Universal which was implicit in Kant, had made a nonsense of Whig sarcasm and Comte’s ‘smirking, self-complacent sufficiency’ and had reanimated the ‘weary, hopeless ashes’ to which human aspiration had been reduced by empirical sensationalism and the ‘rush’ for material possessions. It was Hegel, too, in spite of the ‘agony’ he had suffered from the ‘refractoriness . . . of his materials’ who had reduced ‘Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke and Hume into sentences in a paragraph’, had conceived of ‘thought’ as the ‘real content’ of the universe, and had given the modern world the chance to save itself from the fate of Greece in the way in which The Stones of Venice had offered it the chance to save itself from the fate of Tyre. What Hegel was approved of for proposing was a form of Idealism in which ‘Being’ was ‘the most universal of truths’, the Kantian categories ‘exuded’ from the ‘nature of things’ like ‘water from a sponge’, and ‘the Notion’ was both the ‘inner moment of self-consciousness’ and the ‘foot that scanned the rhythms of the universe’. This was a philosophy in which ‘the Absolute’ was ‘the one monad’, ‘the Notion’ was present in ‘the most crass, refractory . . . externality’, and not only was the ‘unreachable infinite’ to be found ‘firmly settled’ across ‘the bridges of our noses’, but the ‘universal, particular and singular . . . held . . . each other in sway’ and ‘in fact . . . were . . . each other’. Stirling gave detailed attention to Hegel’s unravelling of the Absolute, to the remedy he supposed Hegel to have supplied for Tennysonian doubt and to the contempt Hegel had felt for the ‘infantile dilemmas’ manifested in Hamilton’s ‘incommensurability’ between ‘the contingent’ and ‘the infinite’. These were arguments in philosophy. They were also arguments about conduct, about Hegelianism’s ability to say ‘the last word . . . for many a day’ on ‘all the great concrete interests for which . . . humanity lived’, and about

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its power to restore ‘substance’ and the ‘selflessness’ of the ‘gentleman’ to the ‘immense mass of material commodity’ created by ‘industrialism’ and the ‘poisonous and deranging greed’ of the political economists. What Stirling wanted negatively was a retreat from the gorilla and the baboon. What he wanted positively was an idyll, though not a simple idyll. There were hints about ‘the green earth’ and the ‘bright fresh air’, and about the ‘happiness of our forefathers’ which even the ‘thinnest’ followers of the Enlightenment ‘confessed . . . by their sighs . . . while . . . denying it with their lips’. But his emphasis was on ‘State, town, church, family’ and the ‘stewardship of the nation’, and on Hegel as the answer to those ‘peracute individuals’ who ‘with fire . . . in their bellies to burn up the wrong of everybody else’ had succeeded only in making of ‘reform’ a ‘thin . . . peremptory . . . prescription of their right to their fellows’. Hegel was pictured ‘begrimed with powder’, echoing with the ‘laugh of demons’, and ‘wresting himself’, Boehme-like, ‘from . . . mortal place’ in order to envisage an ‘immense magical hollow universe constructing itself around from a very few simple elementary principles in the centre’. No doubt was left that he and Kant were ‘the very truest supports that philosophy had ever extended to the religious interests of mankind’, and that Hegel himself had become ‘the greatest abstract thinker of Christianity’. In writing of the Hegelian philosophy ‘construing all into a one individuality’, Stirling identified ‘Spirit’ and the ‘one individuality’ not only with ‘Substance’, and ‘the True’ or ‘Absolute Idea’, but also with God’s ‘beginning’ which was not a ‘thing that took place’ but a ‘pin or pole . . . which the universe thought and gave to itself . . . for its own distribution . . . and arrangement’. Creation was simply God’s thought – ‘God as thought’ – and God was both the ‘affirmation’ and the ‘negation’ of ‘all that was’ in which ‘all that was disappeared into the very breath that bore it’. This conception of God resembled the pantheism of which the enemies of the ‘German party’ in England were accustomed to accuse it. Sometimes Stirling denied that Hegel’s philosophy was pantheistic; at other times he argued that a pantheism which ‘demonstrated’ that God was the ‘all in all’ was conducive to a high degree of religious reverence. Stirling’s marriage of Hegelianism with Christianity was powerful, even ruthless. It emphasized that Hegel had played down miracle, had connected the triple reciprocity of dialectical development with the doctrine of the Trinity, and had interpreted God’s thought in such a way that it needed ‘concrete’ completion in Christ, not because God needed external propitiation through the rites and sacrifices of a priesthood but in the Lutheran or Protestant sense that ‘the mind (Reason)’ was ‘a law – in conscience’ – which ‘obeyed God in obeying itself’. All of this played a part in the Christian philosophy which in a different manner was to be broadcast to Oxford and the world by Green, Caird and Wallace.

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II Green, Caird and Wallace were nostalgic for the age of faith. But they embraced the achievements of ‘physical science and the industrial arts’, did not feel the tug of Tractarianism, and no more wished than Lecky did2 to restore mediaeval dogmatism, Reformation orthodoxy, the ‘exaltation of man’ which Toynbee found in Bellini’s St Peters, or the reactionary Protestantism which Kant had fallen foul of in Prussia. They conceptualized both the finiteness and the imperialism of science, criticized the reductions of philosophy which had been effected by positivism, Utilitarianism, intuitionism and Spencer, and stated that scientific truths, being ‘truths of abstraction’, were ‘partially false’ even when they had to be treated as though they were ‘absolute or universal’. The ‘intellectual task of the present age’ was to reach back to the ‘unity’ which underlay the ‘opposition’ between nature and spirit and to recognize that Darwinian evolution, in overstepping the bounds of a ‘working hypothesis’, had left the architect of creation ‘smiling at those who . . . identified the way they construed his plan with the plan itself’. Caird, Green and Wallace all treated criticism as the attempt to resolve the ‘antinomy’ between ‘the principles of physical science’ and ‘the unscientific consciousness of spiritual reality’. None of them dissented from Kant’s view that the ‘spiritual world’, though not divorceable from the ‘material world’, could not be reduced to it, and that, for the ‘moral consciousness’, men were beings in whom the ‘intelligible self’ was the ‘real self’ which ‘determined the empirical self . . . as phenomenal’.2 In the two huge volumes of Caird’s Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Kant was shown distancing himself from ‘mechanical religion’, expressing an ‘intuitive apprehension of the . . . spiritual . . . and . . . religious consciousness’, and blazing a trail in separating ‘the transitory’ from the ‘permanent’ in Christianity. In Caird and early Wallace, much more than in Green, nevertheless, Kant had stubbed his toe on the opposition between ‘the thought which constituted experience’ and the ‘experience it constituted’, and had neglected to deduce from the principle that ‘existence means existence for consciousness’ the conclusion that ‘consciousness transcends the dualism between itself . . . and its object’. And not only had Kant made every man an ‘atomic’ individual for whom God was ‘external’ and quasi-Judaic, and the ‘kingdom of Ends’ a ‘pure ideal’ to which nothing in the ‘objective world’ could be ‘commensurate’, he had also taken that view of the individual being ‘alone in his sin . . . responsibilities and efforts after goodness’ which Christianity had rejected. Green was an Hegelianizer but had doubts about Hegelianism as a system and did not write a book about Hegel. Caird and Wallace, who did write 12

See below, chapter 7.

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books about Hegel, pointed to contradictions, and denied that Hegelianism could be adapted easily to the requirements of living men. Yet for all three Hegel was the philosopher of the future who had disclosed the ‘universal law of the mind’ beneath ‘the mask of Nature . . . works of art . . . the institutions of the state . . . or . . . society and religious forms and creeds’. It would be possible to report endlessly on the epistemological principles which Caird and Wallace attributed to Hegel, the inventiveness they supposed him to have shown in overcoming the limitations endemic in European philosophy since Aristotle and the success he had achieved by contrast with Descartes in making the ‘beginning’ of logic and philosophy anticipate ‘Absolute Mind’ and philosophy’s subsequent development. Caird judged Hegel least successful in dealing with the inorganic world. About his success in dealing with Spirit, God and Christianity, neither he nor Wallace was in any doubt. In explaining the Christian character of Hegel’s philosophy, there was no disposition to treat Hegel as an apologist. The ‘greatness of a philosophy’ was its ‘power of comprehending facts’, and it was Christianity as the ‘most characteristic fact of modern times’ that Hegel had examined, breaking down the dualism between God and the world and showing ‘all the objects of science, all the terms of thought and all the forms of life . . . leading out of themselves’ into this ‘centre and resting-point’. This was the ‘theme’ of Hegel’s philosophy – the apprehension ‘by . . . thought’ of the truth which ‘the religious mind had by faith’, the bringing in of God from the ‘solitude’ of a ‘world beyond’, and the elevation of knowledge into an ‘exaltation’ of man’s mind towards God. Green and Wallace both died in mid-stream and made only partial disclosure of their meaning. Caird, who lived to be seventy-three, gave a far fuller disclosure. III Caird3 was one of six sons of a Greenock engineer and was a younger brother of the Reverend John Caird, who, as Professor of Theology and Principal of Glasgow University, was a celebrated Scottish preacher, a liberalizing influence on the theology of the Kirk and author of a Hegelian Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. After a short period at St Andrews under Tulloch, 13

Edward Caird (1835–1908), educated Greenock Academy, Glasgow and St Andrews Universities, and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, 1864–6. Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, 1866–93. Master of Balliol, l893–1907. Author of A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, 1877, The Problem of Philosophy at the Present Time, 1881; Hegel, 1883; The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte, 1885; The Critical Philosophy of Kant, 1889; Essays on Literature and Philosophy, 1892; The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 1904; and Lay Sermons and Addresses, 1907.

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Edward Caird had gone from Glasgow to Balliol, where he was taught by both Green and Jowett and spent four years as a Fellow of Merton College before returning to Glasgow where, between 1866 and 1893, he was the mind behind many of the Scottish Idealists whom Balliol sent to universities in Britain and the British Empire. At Balliol in the 1860s, Caird had shared Green’s political radicalism and during his Mastership of Balliol thirty years later was the anti-imperialist Radical that Green would almost certainly have been if he had still been alive. Caird, though not a rampant feminist like Wallace, was also an advocate of women’s education. It was as central to Caird, moreover, as it was to Wallace, that English philosophy, having been ‘free-thinking’ and ‘infidel’ in Hobbes, Bentham, Hume and Locke, now had a regenerating role to play in reconciling Christianity with the ‘ampler’ but more ‘conservative’ philosophy and theology which the ‘chosen . . . official . . . order’ of the ‘German professoriate’ had established in Germany.

Wallace4 was the son of a Scottish stone-mason and went from Glasgow to Balliol, where he borrowed from Jowett the idea of translating Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.5 He also published studies of Lotze (as a better approach to Hegel than the approach via Kant), of Nietzsche (as theorist of Wagnerian reconstruction) and of Epicurus who, so far from being the epicurean of historic infamy, had been a ‘rallying-point’ for ‘the broken ranks of humanity’ in the fourth century BC. In addition, there were essays about Socialism and Utilitarianism, a book about Schopenhauer, and two series of Gifford Lectures about Greek philosophy, natural religion and the relation of religion to morality, which, among other things, rejected Balfour’s idea of authority, Balfour’s condescension towards philosophical Idealism, and Balfour’s failure to make God anything more than an ‘unknown’ who was continually ‘receding . . . beyond phenomena’. Wallace reported Schopenhauer’s misogynistic isolation and the pathetic energy he had displayed in the search for disciples in later life. Schopenhauer’s decision to be a visionary rather than an academic philosopher was seen to have been problematical, but it was held to his credit that, unlike most of the German Idealists, he had been bourgeois by origin, had used his financial independence to effect a marriage of philosophy to poetry and, without in any way praising democracy, had given the ‘multitude’ the chance to benefit from the leadership of genius by speaking directly to it. 14

William Wallace (1843–97), educated St Andrew’s University and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of Merton College, 1867–82, Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, 1882–97. Author of The Logic of Hegel and Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, 1874–93; Epicureanism, 1880; Kant, 1882; Schopenhauer, 1890; and Lectures and Essays on Natural 15 Theology and Ethics, 1898. Part I (1874), Part III (1894).

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Schopenhauer was by no means Wallace’s answer to the modern problem. Wallace was no more a pessimist than he was a misogynist; he did not accept the Schopenhauerian antithesis between intellect and will: nor did he deduce from the mendaciousness of the ‘great bulk of mankind’ the need for one man to ‘stand above the laws’ as ‘ruler by divine grace’. Nevertheless, he admired Schopenhauer for expounding Buddhism and the Upanishads; for interpreting miracle as an ‘eternal’ rather than an ‘historic’ fact; and for embodying a Romantic weariness at the ‘artificial light’ which had been spread by ‘reason . . . science . . . and civilization’. It was deeply congenial that Schopenhauer had expressed doubts about Baconian science, had believed that art ‘interpreted the . . . intrinsic meaning of the drama of existence’, and had perceived ‘soul’ as ‘piercing through . . . illusions’ and uniting men in the ‘great oceanic being . . . by which they lived’. Wallace shared Green’s and Caird’s belief that universities were ‘made for the world’, not the world for the universities, and echoed their envious regard for the public role of the German universities. At the same time he was a private person, was neither Master of Balliol (like Caird) nor a member of Oxford City Council (like Green), and confined himself almost exclusively to the forms of teaching and persuasion which were open to a Fellow of Merton who became Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy in the university. In his political writings Wallace accused natural rights theorists of forgetting that the individual ‘realized the universal’ by becoming a ‘conscious and co-operating’ member of a group and that the State, as the ‘concrete but implicit universal’, enabled the individual, ‘by means of his particular function and occupation’, to rise from the ‘implicit universal’ to ‘actuality’. He attributed to Hegel a ‘voice’ in that ‘socialism’ which was both a ‘protest’ felt in ‘every heart’ that had not ‘lost its humanity’ against the damage done to ‘human brotherhood’ by the ‘struggle for existence’ and a promise that ‘the divine would dwell among us’ and a ‘reasonably . . . tangible form’ of organization help ‘every part of the social machine’ to ‘keep . . . its social duty . . . in mind’. Socialism was not the solution to the modern problem, but the ‘present line of movement’ in modern society was ‘in . . . a socialist direction’; ‘every syndicate formed to regulate the price of a commodity in a particular interest’ showed the immanence of social organization; it was Socialism which was not only ‘remarrying . . . soul . . . to body’ and the secular to the sacred, but also reminding ‘the priest, the politician and the school-master’ that ‘the question’ which mattered ultimately was ‘what hungry and stranger and sick’ they had endowed and helped with ‘sympathy and aid’. Wallace’s politics were an attempt to understand Hegelian Conservatism as a form of liberation. His theology was an attempt to build the German theological revolution into a Protestantism from which ‘petrification’ and Paleyite externality had been expelled by ‘conscientiousness . . . heroism . . . and . . . dependence on God’, and the ‘malaise’ felt by ‘the masses’ at the removal of

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‘local religion, patriotism and . . . dogma’ would be mitigated by a properly thought-out ‘social solidarity’ in which ‘the whole psychic organism’ would be as ‘immanent’ in God as God was ‘immanent in the world’ and man’s reciprocity with man would make the world anthropocentric through labour. Wallace accused ‘the modern world’ of thinking ‘too gingerly’ about ‘the divine stage-manager’. Not only was God not the ‘rewarder of a narrowly moral law’, He was also so much ‘more than moral’ that His ‘moral law’ was a form of freedom which sought its ‘holy Grail’ in ‘strange lands’ and ‘perilous seas’, and judged ‘every ethical precept’ as a ‘co-operant part of growing perfection for the individual and the . . . collectivity’. Caird wrote in the Dictionary of National Biography of the ‘force and beauty’ of Wallace’s prose. In fact Wallace wrote a paralyzing prose which disclosed contortion about the possibility of making religion persuasive to the modern mind. Behind an innocent silliness about crime, the environment and the political process, moreover, he rescued himself from banality only by proclaiming that ‘God and man were ‘old friends’ who had ‘drifted apart’ in the course of civilization, that the God of religion was a ‘superior power’ who both ‘controlled’ man and yet ‘permitted him . . . to exercise control’, and that it was man’s character which enabled religion to assure him that not only were ‘the inmost and supreme forces of the world . . . on his side’ but also that his existence would be prolonged ‘into a world beyond death’. Much of what Wallace would have said if he had lived longer, was said by Caird. IV Caird’s learning was Greek as well as German, but he made it as obvious as Seeley that the classics should be put to a modern use, that the universities should be wrenched out of inward-looking reaction and that they should be brought ‘into the market-place’ so as to show up the superficiality of modern journalism. Among Caird’s works, three heavy volumes on Kant were not designed for popular use, and even polemical works like The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte (1885) were designed only for the most recherchés of audiences. It is still the case that Caird’s main works presented Idealism as a commentary not just on the philosophical situation but on ‘the spirit of the time’. In locating ‘the spirit of time’, Caird began with the authority, priesthood and externality of the Middle Ages, with Luther’s, Decartes’s and Spinoza’s awakening of ‘individual and national independence’, and with the ‘emancipation’ effected by the French Revolution – all of which justified his attempts both to criticize Comte and to emulate Comte’s attempt to synthesize the old order with the rebellion against it. By profession Caird was a philosopher rather than a theologian. But he aimed to make philosophy relevant to the ‘broken harmony’ of modern ‘spiritual life’, to respond to naturally religious men like Mark Rutherford who

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had ‘imbibed from the literature of the time’ the conviction that religious ideas were ‘illusory’, and to rescue the public world, as Plato had rescued his public world, from chaos and irrationality. In undertaking a ‘reconstruction of belief’ which would make ‘the simple intuitions of faith’ relevant to the modern world, he declared that modern men had to seek God ‘in the whole process of nature and history’ and religion in the ‘higher life’ which was to be found in Carlyle, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. Caird discounted miracle, while claiming that it was the universe which was ‘miraculous’ and that religion, after passing through a ‘predominantly subjective phase’, could now ‘know God in the form of God’. He expressed an Arnoldian wish to break down Puritanism’s disregard of community and the ‘monotonous intensity’ with which its Hebraism had damped down ‘intelligence and imagination’ in art, literature and science. But he was also conscious of the association between Hellenism and ‘moral corruption’ (as any acquaintance of Conington and J. A. Symonds had to be), and found Christ’s attitude to both Hellenism and Hebraism ‘so hard to grasp and . . . difficult to follow’ that he expected the conflict to continue as long as human development continued. Caird was uncertain whether mid-Victorian doubt was rebelling against anything ‘vital’ in Christianity. He was saddened by any rejection of Christianity but in the literature of rejection saw merely confirmation that ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’ was ‘in the midst of us’, offering to that ‘large and increasing class’ whose ‘spiritual life’ had been ‘alienated from . . . dogmatic systems of belief’ an accommodation for which Christianity, as the fulfilment of all other philosophies and religions, taught both a ‘critical spirit without agnosticism’ and a ‘reasonable faith without dogmatism’. He was derogatory about Max Müller’s ‘Infinite’ and Catholicism’s detachment from ‘advancing civilization’, and he criticized Calvinism’s responsibility (via Rousseau’s ‘diseased self-consciousness’) for the ‘self-contempt’ and world-weariness of Byron, Senancour and Turgenev. Christianity’s God was a ‘spiritual principle’ in whom ‘the process of evolution’ reconciled ‘differences and antagonisms’ by enjoining ‘self-renunciation’. Christ had given a ‘clearer expression of the idea of development than it had ever received before’ or was to receive again until Vico, Hegel and Darwin. ‘The most consistent of all Idealists’, he had not only rejected the ‘natural weapons’ with which man was ‘armed for the struggle for existence’ but had also defied more than anyone else in the history of the world ‘the faint-hearted maxim . . . that . . . that which is true in theory is false in practice’. Caird dismissed Mansel’s, Balfour’s and de Maistre’s scepticism and blew on Pascal, William James and Newman’s Grammar of Assent (for implying that ‘insufficient evidence’ could be treated as though it was ‘sufficient’). Given Christianity’s long-standing character as a ‘book-religion’, he iden-

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tified the central problem as being the problem of theology, without attention to which Christianity would be unable to prevent itself becoming a ‘dead . . . formula’ which was dependent for its acceptance on ‘some kind of authority’. With some, but not all, of this, Green would have agreed. V Green6 was the son of an Anglican clergyman and, after going from Rugby to Balliol in 1855, had become a Fellow at about the time at which Caird had arrived from Glasgow. As a schoolboy, undergraduate and young don, he had gained much from a Congregationalist uncle, from Conington and Jowett, from Bright and Cobden, and from Wordsworth, Carlyle, Maurice and Fichte. After a brief period with the School Inquiry Commission of 1864, he had resolved indecision as between teaching, journalism and public administration by marrying J. A. Symonds’s sister and becoming Balliol’s first lay tutor. Between Jowett’s election to the Mastership in 1870 and his own election to a professorship in 1877, he and Jowett ran the college in tandem in spite of Jowett’s growing mistrust. Jowett’s mistrust was a reaction to Green’s proselytizing anti-Lockeanism rather than to the impact of Green’s personality on undergraduates. But any reader who wishes not to give Green the benefit of the doubt should read chapter V of Mrs Humphry Ward’s History of Robert Elsmere where Mark Pattison (i.e. Langham) invites Elsmere, his undergraduate pupil, to listen to Gray (i.e. Green) preach, and where Gray’s ‘massive head . . . make of limb and feature . . . and Midland accent’ suggested not only the ‘rude strength and simplicity of a peasant ancestory’ but also the ‘nobility . . . and . . . fire . . . of . . . spiritual beauty’ and a sense, which Elsmere was ‘too young and immature to analyze’, that Gray ‘was . . . indeed . . . a man . . . in whom the generation of spiritual force was so strong . . . kindling and . . . enriching . . . that it overflowed of necessity into the poorer, barrener lives around him’. Green’s best-known work was a posthumously published course of Oxford lectures which subverted liberal individualism and explained the powers which a modern liberal state should exercise over its subjects. Green did not actually write, as Toynbee wrote, of a ‘divine democracy’ or of ‘the State divorced from religion’ becoming ‘anti-Christ’. But Principles of Political Obligation gave a detailed account of political rights as guarantors of moral liberty, of the rights which a state should guarantee to the citizen if it is to be a state and of the kinds of freedom and well-being to which these rights should be regarded as instrumental. It specified the extent to which states 16

Thomas Hill Green (1836–82), educated Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of Balliol, 1860–82. Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, 1878–82. Author of Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract, 1881 (ed. A. C. Bradley); Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883 (ed. A. and C. Toynbee); The Witness of God and Faith, 1883; and (ed. Nettleship) Works, 1885–8 (including Principles of Political Obligation).

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should promote morality, provide education and inflict punishment. It went into considerable detail about marriage and divorce, and about the ways in which a properly-constituted state would control the free disposition of property and the worker’s freedom to contract away his freedom. It was more critical of landlordism than of capitalism; and it pointed the way towards a modified capitalism governed by the general will of the community and a moralization of relations between states as being likely to put an end to war by eliminating the dynastic despotisms which Europe had yet to learn were not the chief cause of war. Principles of Political Obligation made a measured subversion of the ‘stream of unrelenting competition’ in which ‘the worker’ had to ‘sink or swim’ and disclosed assumptions about the nature of morality and the relationship between philosophy and Christianity which were disclosed more fully in a handful of essays, sermons and reviews,7 and in Prolegomena to Ethics, which Green delivered as lectures in 1877. Prolegomena to Ethics was an attack on Utilitarianism’s understanding of morality. It was also affirmative – about the inseparability of morality from a Kantian, or Hegelian, understanding of it, and about the ways in which philosophy might minister to religion. In both respects, it systematized what Green had been trying to say since he had been alienated from the Church of England in the early 1860s. In the 1860s Green had thought of becoming a Unitarian, had developed a deep regard for Baur whose work he had started to translate and had begun to conceptualize the importance of Dissent, especially Congregationalist Dissent, in English life. The Unitarian temptation did not last, and neither did Green become a Congregationalist. Sympathy, however, remained, and was expressed through support for a Congregationalist college in Oxford.8 Dissatisfaction with orthodoxy also remained, along with the conviction that theology had to be modernized and dogma, doctrine and ‘externality’ replaced by ‘spiritual freedom’.

In his earliest writings Green had displayed the tone that was to be with him throughout. He was the proponent of moral seriousness, of the responsibility which the educated classes should feel for the poor and of a rational sincerity which would bind humanity together. But, though he was the enemy of the epicurean, the ‘practical’ man and ‘the man-of-the-world’, and wished to replace the Enlightenment with something better, he also knew that Enlightenment was ‘as much of the essence of the modern world as the principles of the Reformation and . . . 1789’, and that its ubiquity – in ‘pulpit and 17 18

Including The Grading of Secondary Schools, The Elementary School System of England and Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract. Mansfield College, of which A. M. Fairbairn was the first head.

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. . . senate’, in ‘newspapers and journals of science’, on the lips of ‘saint and of sage’, presented a challenge to which it was as necessary for him to respond in England as it had been for Kant to respond in Koenigsberg a hundred years earlier. Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life sketched the ‘philosophy of feeling’ from Hobbes to Rousseau, pointed to its destructive outcome in the French Revolution and criticized it as a ‘naturalistic’ ethic which had reduced vice and virtue to pain and pleasure. It did not deny that English and European society embodied a ‘decent . . . equity and gentle liberalism’. It did suggest that these had not been theorized, that Epicureanism, Utilitarianism and Sensationalism had been theorized and that it was the damage done by a failure in theory which made it necessary to follow Carlyle, Newman and Kingsley in bringing theory closer to practice. In formulating a resistance to naturalism, Green presented nature as the ‘receptacle’ and man as the ‘channel’ of the ‘influx of divinity’, the ‘outer world’ as the means through which ‘the deity . . . poured the truth and love which transformed . . . man’s . . . capabilities into reality’, and the function of ‘genius’ as being to ‘feel the pulse of the . . . nation’ in helping forward the ‘apprehension of the divine’. Apprehension of the ‘divine’ did not arrive merely through religion, far less did it arrive through orthodox religion. It arrived through philosophy and statesmanship, through the engagement with ‘social reform’ which novelists had been pursuing between Defoe and Kingsley, and through that fusing of man’s ‘animal’ with his ‘spiritual’ element which had enabled him to become a ‘conscious partaker of the reason’ by which both were animated. Green admired Luther for ridding Christianity of ‘ordinances’, but criticized historic Protestantism for restoring them. Essay on Christian Dogma (1858) and Four Lectures on the English Commonwealth (1867) interpreted the English revolution of the 1640s as a countervailing proof that Protestantism was compatible with freedom. Essay on Christian Dogma repeated that primitive Christianity had been dogma-less, that dogma had emerged as a reaction to heresy and that it was this which had turned ‘Christian truth’ into a ‘theology’. The difference between Christian truth as theology and Christian truth as an ‘expression of the highest spiritual life’ had then become a ‘difference of substance’, ‘theological’ consciousness had replaced the ‘immediate consciousness’ which arose from ‘personal experience’ of God, and Christianity, once incorporated into the ‘great society’ of the Roman Empire, had confirmed the ecclesiastical Christianity which the Reformation had had to attack. In the last section of Essay on Christian Dogma the Protestant problem was brought up to date, popular Protestantism’s desire for authority was contrasted with the higher Protestantism’s desire for faith and faith in this sense was declared to have ‘expressed the continuous act in virtue of which the indi-

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vidual broke loose from the outward constraint of alien ordinances’ and absorbed ‘all merely finite . . . virtues . . . in the consciousness of union with the infinite God’. It was central to the higher Protestantism, or philosophy of religion, that it allowed ‘the rationalising intellect’ to ‘play on’ the ‘dogmatic material’ of theology, while also doing – what Scholasticism had declined to do in the Middle Ages – allow ‘conscience’ to ‘move freely’ in a ‘redeemed world’ and give the ‘dogmatic system’ the ‘infinite expansion’ it would need if it was to bring itself into ‘new relations’ with the ‘intelligible world’. An open-ended theology was thus of central importance. It was matched by the equal importance that Four Lectures on the English Commonwealth attached to the translation of Christianity into practice. Four Lectures began from ‘the short life of English Republicanism’ between 1640 and 1660 as ‘the last act’ in a struggle between ‘hierarchy under Royal Licence’ on one side and ‘freedom in grace’ on the other. It attributed to Cromwell, the English Independents and the New Model Army a Reformation-consciousness of ‘spiritual . . . right’ in face of Laudianism and Presbyterianism, and a crucial role in enabling the ‘plebeian elements of English life’ to exert themselves in the public realm. What Cromwell’s ‘sword’ had secured was a ‘real step forward of English society’ which ‘no reaction could suppress’ and which had been ‘the great spring of political life in England’ since his death. The ‘higher enthusiasm’ proclaimed by Sir Harry Vane and the Independents, moreover, had had a ‘universal’ significance and ‘belonged to the spiritual force which as ecstasy, mysticism, quietism, philosophy, was in permanent collision with the carnal interests of the world’. ‘Death’, Vane was quoted declaring on the scaffold, is a little word, but it is a great work to die.’ So Vane’s enthusiasm died that it might ‘rise again. It was sown in the weakness of feeling, that it might be raised in the intellectual comprehension which is power. ‘The people of England’, Vane had said, ‘have been long asleep. I doubt they will be hungry when they awake.’ ‘They have slept, we may say’, Green wrote in 1867, ‘another two hundred years. If they should yet wake and be hungry, they will find their food in the ideas which, with much blindness and weakness, he vainly offered them, cleared and ripened by a philosophy of which he did not dream’ (T. H. Green, Four Lectures on the English Commonwealth in ed. Nettleship The Works of T. H. Green, 1888, III, 1891 edn, p. 364). The ‘philosophy’ of which Vane ‘did not dream’ was, of course, Kantian or Hegelian Idealism, along with the ‘intellectual comprehension’ which gave it ‘power’. Almost all the statements which Green was to make about it were in place by the time he delivered Prolegomena to Ethics as lectures. As a moral and political doctrine, Prolegomena to Ethics was more or less intelligible by itself. As a statement about religion, it involved the complicated beliefs that the lesson religion should learn from science was that God was to be sought in man rather than in nature, and that the theologian from a posi-

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tive and the scientist from a negative position were both misrepresenting religion when they identified it with ‘projections of the supernatural within the natural’. For Green ‘God was reason’ and there could be a ‘consciousness of God’ which did not ‘depend on a past event’ or a ‘particular creed’, and did not attribute a ‘miraculous’ origin to the Church. Green’s theological writings were unsystematic and incomplete. But they had a programme. Historical evidences and theological formulae were to be played down, and there was to be a prolonged period of transition in which the ‘terrible’ God of Evangelicalism and existing ways of expressing ‘the ideal law of conduct’ would be replaced by the ‘one spiritual self-conscious being’ encouraging man’s participation in self-consciousness. This was Green’s starting point, to which he added many characteristic extensions – about Christ’s death as the sacrifice of the ‘spirit’ of which the death of the flesh on the Cross had been ‘only a sign’; about death itself as the passage from ‘the highest form of nature’ into a ‘spiritual . . . realisation’; and about the resurrection as a ‘continuous act of God’ which provided a ‘new intellectual consciousness’ and new possibilities for ‘righteousness, sanctification and redemption’ as the ‘natural man’ was ‘slipped’, men were rescued from sin, and God became the ‘cause’ of their moral lives by supplying antidotes to the ‘cloaks of darkness’ with which they ‘hid’ themselves from Him. As a modernizer, Green was cautious. He recognized that the objections to dogma were felt chiefly by the educated classes. He had no wish ‘rashly to tamper’ with the dependence on miracle, the sacraments and Biblical inspiration which he found among simple Christians, and he pointed to ‘prayer’ and ‘co-operation’ as activities which could unite even those who could not accept the creeds. He was particularly anxious to remind ‘university men’ of the duties they owed the poor and of the significance of the ‘simple, self-denying’ Christianity which enabled men of ‘awkward manners’ and ‘mean appearance’ to exhibit the ‘power of the Resurrection’ better than they could. Faith and The Witness of God, though not published until after Green’s death, were statements of his determination to bring Christian duty down to earth by directing the educated classes towards the improvement of society. Both had stated briefly what Prolegomena to Ethics stated at length. Prolegomena to Ethics was delivered first as undergraduate lectures when Disraeli was three years into his second term as Prime Minister and, in attributing to the ‘educated’ classes an interest in applying ‘ideas . . . to life’, found in the ‘highest poetry of our time’, especially Wordsworth’s, Tennyson’s and Browning’s poetry, a ‘free’ response to what ‘dogmatic theology’ had previously supplied through a ‘regulation’ response. It denied that there was a caesura between poetic feeling and scientific understanding, was as unwilling to turn moral conduct into a ‘physical science of ethics’ as into a Biblical theology, and claimed merely to be sketching a ‘metaphysic of morals’ which articulated the conception of an ‘eternally complete consciousness’ repro-

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ducing itself through ‘brain, nerve and tissue’, ‘determining . . . Man’s . . . animal nature’, and ensuring that the ‘animal condition’ disappeared in the process. These were the quasi-Hegelian ideas that man’s moral performance was ‘the divine mind . . . reproducing itself in the human soul’, that man’s moral capability could only be known through embodiment in historic social evolution, and that each man, in performing the ‘duties of his station’, was pursuing a ‘Best’ which would stimulate achievement of a ‘Better’. Though it did not follow that differentiation in terms of class, property or gender was illegitimate, it did follow that each member of society should treat all other members as he would treat himself, that ‘duty to humanity’ worked through the duties in which were attached to ‘family, tribe and urban commonwealth’, and that it was ‘only in so far as . . . development . . . was obtained for all who were capable of it, as presumably everyone who said “I” was capable, that human society . . . could be held to . . . realize its idea as it was in God’. This was Green’s answer to Austinian and Hobbesian ideas of sovereignty founded on fear, selfishness and command, to political economy’s assumption that the ‘negative right to be left alone’ was socially sufficient and to the belief that it was unnecessary to replace the ‘war’ which was produced by competition by a condition in which ‘the attainment of the good by one was a contribution to its attainment by everyone else’. Green assumed that no man could exhibit ‘all that Spirit working through and in him properly and potentially was’, that ‘performing the duties of one’s station’ was the condition of the ‘only personality’ which men could know, and that conventional morality and ‘the duties’ recognized by the ‘law of the state or opinion’ required philosophical evaluation as circumstances changed. Moral philosophy involved an understanding of existing moral practice which it should not attempt needlessly to supersede. But it had certainly to address cases of ‘moral anarchy’ or ‘intellectual perplexity’ where one theory, formula, Church or State was in conflict with another, and duty, too often identified in religion with ‘injunctions given by external authorities’, was best understood as the ‘infinite Spirit . . . communicating itself to the soul of man’ via a sense of ‘personal responsibility’. Green believed that the idea of brotherhood, though hidden by slavery, the subjection of women and the exclusive nature of the pollis, was present implicitly in Greek moral philosophy, that it had needed only the Pax Romana and Christ’s transformation of the Jewish Kingdom to achieve universality and, where the ‘religions of the East’ taught ‘esoteric vacancy’, that Christianity taught ‘purity of heart’, the ‘life of charity’, and a complicated ‘self-denial’ for which the problem of ‘the sick . . . ignorant and . . . debased’ had to be dealt with in the shadow of a new-found ‘equality before the law’. Class distinctions would continue, but modern Christians, and especially middle- and upper-class student Christians, would bear the ‘burden’ of

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putting aestheticism and scholarship in their place, responding to a ‘new spiritual activity . . . on the part of the multitude’, and helping the multitude to achieve the fuller life which would be achieved through ‘personal holiness’ and ‘the lighting up of the heart before God’. ‘Mere respectability’, in other words, was inferior to the saint’s ‘self-abasement’ and inferior to the ‘selfquestioning of the man who, without charging himself with the neglect of any outward duty . . . still asked . . . whether he had been what he should be in doing what he had done’. It would be wrong to impute to Green a merely subjective pietism since, like Caird and Wallace, he thought of subjectivity as a Protestant heresy which needed to be overcome through involvement in community. In spite of the warnings he gave against the temptation pharisaically to ‘finger . . . one’s own motives’, it would not, however, be wrong to accuse him of a scrupulousness so priggish and unbearable that ‘in declining to apply a different standard in judging of the well-being of others than in judging of his own’, a man had to be careful, ‘before gratifying an altruistic inclination’, to enquire ‘how far in doing so’ he would affect others who were ‘not the object of the inclination’. Green was a solemn Radical and critic of Whig blaséness who supposed that ‘enthusiasm for humanity’ was both the winning cause and the curb which had to be imposed on ‘selfishness’. He claimed that his philosophy was ‘analytical’. Its consequence was a duplicitous replacement of authoritarian arguments by the claim that a man who ‘imposed’ his moral duty ‘on himself’ and urged it on others by writing and legislating, was his ‘divine spirit . . . setting before himself the idea of a perfect life’.

Caird, Green and Wallace were missionaries of holiness and knowledge who, in aiming to insinuate the arguments of the schools into the market-place, assumed a spiritual duty to incorporate the democracy into historic thought. Among the Whig and Liberal thinkers who will be discussed in the next two chapters and in chapter 18, the compulsion to enter the market-place was accompanied by the suspicion that democracy’s crudeness and selfishness might be dangerous.

7 Whiggism, Liberalism and Christianity I

It was in some sense fortunate . . . for the Church of England that the Reformation in this country was effected by men who cared little about religion. And, in the same manner, it was fortunate for our civil government that the Revolution was in a great measure effected by men who cared little about their political principles. (T. B. Macaulay, Hallam’s Constitutional History, in Edinburgh Review, September 1828, reprinted in Lady Trevelyan, ed., Miscellaneous Works of Lord Macaulay, 1880, Vol. IV, p. 274) It is always . . . important to trace the direction in which the spirit of self-sacrifice is moving . . . Celibacy, voluntary poverty and voluntary subjection, were the three . . . subjects which Giotto painted over the high altar of Assisi as the distinctive characteristics of the saint . . . All of them have now lost their power . . . The spirit of self-sacrifice still exists, but it is to be sought in other fields – in a boundless philanthropy growing out of affections that are common to all religions, and above all in the sphere of politics. Liberty and not theology is the enthusiasm of the nineteenth century. (W. E. H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 1865, 1910 edn, pp. 224–5) The Peace Treaty is bad, thoroughly bad, but its badness is due . . . as much to the failure of the peoples as to the failure of their leaders at the Conference . . . I have been long from home, far away from the base which I have to rely on. I have not been big or effective enough to work to a new base and to appeal from a world platform . . . I look to the coming years to undo the evils of our present work . . . and . . . I have a quiet but fundamental faith in God . . . I [would think it] wrong . . . to slink away like a wounded animal without . . . cries of distress . . . [and] would gladly talk these questions over . . . in the cups of the hills and . . . the hollows of God’s hand. (J. C. Smuts to M. C. Gillett, 16 and 21 June 1919, in W. K. Hancock and J. van der Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers, 1966, Vol. IV, pp. 232–3, 241)

Whiggism was invented as a public doctrine by, among others, Burke in the eighteenth century. It was reinvented by Fox and Mackintosh in defending the French Revolution and passed through many hands including Brougham’s, Russell’s, Lewis’s and Hallam’s, before achieving a striking literary success in Macaulay. The essence of Whiggism was the belief that it was the Whigs not the Tories who had been right in 1640 and 1688, that it was the landed classes rather than the Crown which should govern and that government involved the compromises entailed by the need to keep in touch with virtuous and progressive opinion and with present and prospective forms of social and economic power. After 1789, Whig thinkers and politicians disassociated themselves from revolutionary violence while paying lip-service to revolutionary principles. They represented the grievances of Dissent and Roman 151

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Catholicism in Ireland as well as England, the ideological thrust symbolized by Adam Smith and political economy and the intellectual demand for the modernizing of British institutions, including the universities and the Church of England. As instruments of a governing ideology, the Whigs were responsible for the implementation of Liberal improvement between 1830 and 1880 and were involved in a striking success in 1906. But it was the Whigs who were derailed by the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 as political Radicalism and Gladstonian Liberalism drove the landed classes, parts of the intelligentsia and an increasing part of the industrial and commercial classes into the Conservative Party, and the arrival of the Labour Party and the Trade Union movement justified the prediction that aristocratic Whiggism, whose death had been expected since the 1840s, would not survive the arrival of democracy. In some respects the displacement of the Liberal by the Conservative Party in the 1920s produced a continuation of Whig-Liberalism under a different name and management, with a less secure intellectual backing, and with a new tone which was designed for consumption by mass democracy. Once Dissent and Ireland had been dealt with, the Conservative Party came to resemble the Whig-Liberal Party in having a governing ideology which deduced from electoral success and the support it received from landed, commercial and industrial wealth and rural, social and suburban respectability the same right to rule that Asquith had deduced from the Liberal Party’s electoral success in 1906. There was Palmerstonian chauvinism and Chamberlainite as well as Disraelian imperialism, and there was a mistrust of liberal optimism and progress which the Whigs had avoided. But there was also a manifest continuity as pains were taken, by Baldwin especially, to ensure that mugwump Liberalism was incorporated and all reasonable men saw that Conservatism was indefeasible. In this chapter and the next, we shall examine the connections between Liberalism, Whiggism and Christianity in Macaulay, Lecky, Fitzjames Stephen, Acton, Bryce, Fisher, Maine, Inge, Henson and Smuts. Apart from Smuts, none of these exercised democratic political power, but all of them indicated their feelings about democracy and almost all of them registered a complicated pessimism about the future.

Like Burke, Macaulay was a middle-class meritocrat or ‘man of talent’ who had risen through aristocratic patronage before establishing a popular reputation far wider than any Whig writer had established previously. His achievement was to marry an edgeless Protestantism, industrial progress and bourgeois predominance to constitutional freedom and to merge Whiggism into the Liberalism which was to be overthrown politically between 1886 and 1924 even when it remained pervasive intellectually.

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I Macaulay’s1 father was a drinker and gambler in whom financial prosperity and Evangelical conversion produced internal stress, external strictness and participation in the movement for the emancipation of slaves. From an early stage Macaulay was precocious, was both rough and ready, and was able to argue to almost any opinion. As an undergraduate he abandoned the stricter aspects of his father’s regime, while remaining tensely respectful of his father’s person in face of deterioration in his father’s finances. At the beginning of his public life, he was straddling to avoid the offence which would be caused by the process of liberation. At Cambridge Macaulay was weak at mathematics but used a remarkable memory and literary self-confidence to turn himself into a prize poet, historian and classical scholar. He became a Fellow soon after taking his degree at Trinity, read for the bar after deciding not to be ordained, and achieved fame in London with the publication of an essay entitled ‘Milton’ in the Edinburgh Review in 1825. Macaulay knew Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, Spanish and eventually Dutch. He read constantly and continuously in all of them (except possibly Dutch), and not only lived in literature but also brought a sledgehammer mind to bear upon it. At the same time he made his way in the world, became a Member of Parliament and of the Cabinet, and was carried into Westminster Abbey for burial not only by Milman and Bishop Wilberforce but also by the Lord Chancellor, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Duke of Argyll and Lord John Russell, ex and future Prime Minister and leader of the Whigs. Macaulay’s connection with the Whigs began through his father’s antislavery activity. Reviewing in the Edinburgh Review then confirmed his party identity, and at the point at which the Whigs were emerging from opposition to Liverpool brought him to the attention of Brougham, the great Whig thinker, and Lansdowne, the great Whig magnate who, between them, enabled him to enter Parliament in 1830. By the time he went to India as Legal Member of the Council in 1834 in order to secure himself financially, he had already spent a decade as an anti-slavery and Whig propagandist and in expounding history and literature as aspects of doctrine. In his first Edinburgh Review essay Macaulay rejected the ‘grammatical and philological studies’ on which he had been brought up in Cambridge and celebrated Milton as succeeding in the most difficult task a writer could undertake – of ‘producing a great poem in a civilized age’. This was what he had 11

Thomas Babington 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–59), educated Little Shelford and Trinity College, Cambridge. MP, 1830–4, 1839–47 and 1852–3. Legal Member of Council in Calcutta, 1834–8, ministerial office (England), 1832–3, 1839–41 and 1846–7. Author of The Lays of Ancient Rome, 1842; Critical and Historical Essays, 1843; The History of England from The Accession of James II, 1849–58; and Speeches 1853.

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described Dante as doing the year before and was to describe him as doing in Machiavelli two years later, the Divine Comedy being ‘the greatest work of imagination . . . since the poems of Homer’, Paradise Lost being the only subsequent work to match it, and the ‘intensity’ of the one and ‘loftiness’ of the other speaking directly to all mankind. In these earliest essays Macaulay discussed literature, patronage, publishing and book-reviewing, the ‘vanity, jealousy and morbid sensibility’ of the literary character, and the opportunity which men-of-letters had been given by an age of ‘curiosity and intelligence’ to live better than they had lived at any time in the previous hundred years. He also made what he supposed to be philosophical statements about poetry, prose and historical writing. Macaulay read widely in philosophy but showed no deep interest in any philosopher apart from Bacon, whose philosophy, however, having played a central part in the creation of the modern world, raised the question whether the modern world had any use for poetry, whether the abstract mentalities of ‘advanced’ societies were not more inimical to poetry than the particularity of ‘half-civilized’ societies, and whether ‘enlightened ages’ did not find it difficult to understand the ‘agony, ecstasy and plenitude of belief’ with which poetry had been associated in more primitive ages. This was the conception of poetry as ‘frenzy’, of its truths being the ‘truths of madness’, and of a ‘certain unsoundness of mind’ being characteristic both of it and of poetic appreciation. It was a Romantic conception which aimed to bring poetry back into the Shakespearean and Spenserean mainstream which puritanism, the Restoration and the ‘narrow . . . correctness’ of the eighteenth century had destroyed. Macaulay emphasized poetry’s creative autonomy and the duty the poet had to ‘take to pieces . . . the web of his mind . . . and . . . the spirit of the age’. The greatest poets were credited not only with the moral qualities that Milton had had in one direction and Byron in another, but also with a capacity both to characterize and to rise imaginatively above the opinions of their ages, as Shakespeare had done to Reformation Protestantism, Shelley to metaphysical atheism and Dante to the ‘religious zeal, chivalrous love, and democratic liberty’ which had accompanied the ‘melancholy . . . and depression’ of the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade. As a reviewer, Macaulay judged poets, as he judged all writers, less by their technical capability than by their success in embodying, or failing to embody doctrines of historic public importance. Like Carlyle’s speciality at the same time, and Matthew Arnold’s speciality later, his speciality was literature as exemplification – with Bunyan and Milton exemplifying the ‘great stirring of the mind’ which had threatened ecclesiasticism in the seventeenth century, Dr Johnson exemplifying an insular, High-Church, High-Tory bigotry which it was a pleasure to expose and Horace Walpole – ‘the most Frenchified English writer of the eighteenth century’ – being prevented by his ‘aristocratic feel-

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ings’ from exemplifying an age in which ‘the great French writers’ had interpreted Bacon, Newton and Locke to mankind. In these early essays Macaulay treated literature as ministering to a broadening of the spiritual capability. In discussing historical literature, he sketched the prospect of an increasing depth of political understanding. Macaulay’s essay ‘On History’ (1828) stated generally that ancient historical writing had been hampered by the self-regarding parochiality of Greek civilization and the ‘Chinese’ character of Roman civilization, that Christianity had been responsible for improvement in the first six centuries AD, and that it was the millennium of ‘barbarism’ after the northern invasions which had enabled Europe’s ‘federal’ character to give historical writing both a ‘comparative’ and a generalizing aspect. ‘On History’ made large demands on the historian, alleging that all historians had failed, and attributing their failure not only to the difficulty they had encountered in compressing facts into ‘affecting and picturesque’ narrative, but also to the temptation to which they had succumbed – of allowing ‘facts’ to be dominated by ‘hypothesis’. In contradiction it sketched a history which would ‘reclaim . . . materials . . . appropriated . . . by the novelist’, would make of ‘the complex system of society’ a subject as important as ‘the court, the camp and the senate’, and would explain political events by showing that it was ‘noiseless’ revolutions in ‘morals and manners’ which had had ‘most influence on the happiness of mankind’. As an undergraduate Macaulay had written a prize essay about ‘Lewis XIV and William III’. As a young man, he had attacked slavery for dissolving the ‘natural . . . connection between the higher and lower classes of citizens’, and for producing the ‘despotic’ character displayed by whites in the slave islands of the West Indies. It was not until essays entitled ‘The Present Administration’ in 1827 and ‘Hallam’s History’ in 1828 that he gave a fully politicized excuse for the violence which the English had used in 1642, and risked in 1688, as the ‘price’ which had had to be paid for ‘public liberty’. Between 1827 and 1835, Macaulay sketched the guidance that historical study could give about the way in which government should be conducted and revolution avoided, and proved by reference to the superiority of English over French developments since the sixteenth century that there was something about England which had special significance for the ‘science of government’ – a ‘stationary’ science between Pericles and Augustus, advancing in the sixteenth century and coming into its own when ‘sound doctrines of trade and jurisprudence’ had been arrived at, ‘in the lifetime of a single generation’, under the influence of Adam Smith. Macaulay assumed that both trade and discussion should be ‘free’ and, though it was not the business of government to ‘make the people rich’, that it was its business to ‘protect them in making themselves rich’. As against Southey, he stated that the ‘manufacturing system’, despite ‘moments of

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distress’, had improved the condition of the British working classes who were not only better off ‘as to physical comforts’ than they had ever been before but were also better off than the inhabitants of ‘any equally extensive district’ in the world, except in the United States. Macaulay believed that industrial progress was achieved by leaving ‘the people’ free to achieve it. But, though it was likely to be advanced by political science, industrial progress was not what Macaulay’s political science was primarily about. What it was about was the Whig fact that ‘the great body of the . . . English . . . nation’ had blended ‘love of liberty’ with ‘aristocratic’ feeling and that the aristocracy had, therefore, a special responsibility to deal with the demagogues and agitators of the 1820s. In the 1820s, Macaulay was a coalitionist, distancing Pitt from Pittite Toryism, and praising Pitt’s commitment to free trade, parliamentary reform and Catholic Emancipation. On the other hand, though he defended Canning’s coalition in 1827, for not insisting on immediate Emancipation (since many of those members of the ‘middle classes’ whose influence was generally exerted for ‘salutary purposes’ had on this issue been made the ‘tools . . . of a . . . faction’), he predicted that, if Canning fell and a Tory government refused Emancipation, there would be ‘civil war in Ireland’, war with France and a ‘bloody revolution’ in England in which reformers and revolutionaries would come together to ensure for the aristocracy the total ruin which the French aristocracy had suffered after 1789. ‘The Present Administration’ was a work of party propaganda and political terror, just as Macaulay’s Reform bill speeches in 1831–2 were to state the party claim that the passage of a Reform bill alone could prevent a revolution. It was not until ‘Hallam’s History’ and three essays about Utilitarianism in 1829 that Macaulay gave a ‘high’ account of Whig politics. Macaulay’s essays on Utilitarianism served two main purposes. They used analytical sneering and a cunning dialectical negativity in order to confute James Mill’s belief that a democratic polity based on universal suffrage would be more conducive to human happiness than a monarchical, aristocratic or middle-class polity. And they commented generally that Mill’s deductive method was irrelevant and misleading, resembled the ‘logomachies of the schoolmen’ from which modern thought had been rescued by Bacon, and, if widely adopted, would prevent the ‘noble science of politics’ grounding itself in induction, experience and historical knowledge and understanding. One feature of Macaulay’s attacks was a tendency to slobber over Bentham as a legal reformer, to contrast him with James Mill to the latter’s disadvantage, and to deflate the rest of the Utilitarians as ‘ordinary men’ with ‘little information’ and ‘ordinary understandings’. Another feature was a tendency to increase the distance between himself and both the advocates and the enemies of ‘popular government’, and to prove, as against the ‘venerable nonsense’ of the ‘ultra-Tories’ and the ‘upstart prejudices’ of the Utilitarians, that

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the only sensible objective, even if it involved a ‘pecuniary qualification’ for voting, was to turn the House of Commons into the ‘express image of the opinions of the middle orders of Britain’. In these essays Macaulay aimed to show that Mill had discussed ‘motives and objects of desire’ as though they were ‘lines and numbers’, had examined ‘names and badges’ instead of ‘the real distribution of power’, and had been unable to understand that ‘it would be for the interest of the majority to plunder the rich’ if they had the power to do so. Prophecy added that, though the ‘civilized part of the world’ had nothing to fear from the hostility of ‘savage’ nations, ‘the bosom of civilization’ might well be ‘engendering the malady which . . . would . . . destroy it’, that ‘the whole people’ was at least as likely as any aristocracy to ‘transmit . . . the estate . . . of mankind . . . impoverished and desolated’, and that the consequence of a democratic system might well be the catastrophe encapsulated in the prospect in two or three hundred years . . . of . . . a few lean and half-naked fishermen . . . divid[ing] with owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities . . . wash[ing] their nets amidst the relics of her gigantic docks and . . . building their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals . . . (Macaulay, Mill’s Essay on Government in Works, vol. I, p. 317)

This was an image – a Romantic, or Turnerian, image. But the prognostication was meant to be real, just as Baconian induction and historical relativism were offered in justification of the principles which Macaulay’s essays applied to Italy marginally, and to France and England mainly, from ‘Hallam’s History’ onwards. ‘Hallam’s History’ characterized, more even than ‘Milton’ the cause for which ‘Hampden had bled on the field and Sydney on the scaffold’ adding, however, that Hallam’s ‘rigid justice’ had freed him from ‘vulgar’ engagements, that his Constitutional History of England was the ‘most impartial book’ Macaulay had ever read, and that the truths it taught about English history required a comparison with the truths which Macaulay was to extract from French history. In his essays entitled ‘Mirabeau’ and ‘Sir James Mackintosh’, and in his unfinished History of France, Macaulay’s lesson was that, though the French Revolution had cleansed ‘political science’ of ‘impurity’, it had been ignorant as well as violent, had supplied a shock to property and the authority of government, and had not only been surrounded with metaphysical cant, but had also failed to establish ‘whatever part of political freedom’ existed in England and America. In contrasting France with England, Macaulay explained that Louis XVI had turned the monarchy into a ‘bloated excrescence’ and that the Revolution – ‘the most horrible event . . . in history’ – had ‘corresponded to the degree of misgovernment which had produced it’. The French aristocracy in particular had offended both ‘the new knowledge’ and ‘the new wealth’, had ignored the

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‘visible signs of an approaching retribution’ and had been swept aside by men who had responded to theory because they did not know how to act without it. History of France recorded Napoleon’s ambivalence about the Revolution, his attempt to ‘force . . . political science . . . backwards’ by creating a ‘Byzantine’ or ‘Chinese’ monarchy, and his wish to ‘compress . . . literature . . . education . . . and the spirit of the age into conformity with his maxims’. It described the war between Napoleon and England not only as a war between a ‘despotism sprung from a revolution’ and a ‘limited monarch consecrated by immemorial prescription’ but also, ‘on the part of the English people’, as a war of ‘hatred’ such as ‘could be conceived only by those who had felt it’ – the hatred of ‘democrats’ for a ‘tyrant’, the hatred of aristocrats for an upstart, and the natural outcome of England’s social and political history since the Norman Conquest. Macaulay’s account of English history had Saxon and Norman fused into ‘the English nation’, the ‘free constitution’ being based on the House of Commons and the ‘common law’ from the thirteenth century onwards, and a literature and language being created which were ‘inferior . . . in force . . . richness . . . and aptitude . . . to . . . Greek alone’. Though the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had had dark features, including the pursuit of an empire in France and ‘civil strife’ in England, no doubt was left that, once slavery had followed racial animosity into the past, ‘our forefathers had been by far the best-governed people in Europe’ and, even after the Reformation, had had a ‘popular magistracy . . . conducted under . . . the titles and forms . . . of . . . monarchical supremacy’. This was a prelude to an account of the seventeenth century in which limits had been placed on royal absolutism by ‘the old polity’, the aristocracy had been the ‘least insolent and exclusive . . . of all hereditary aristocracies’, and resistance to the Stuarts had involved so ‘conservative’ a revolution that the ‘ancient prescription’ and ‘venerable institutions which had curbed the monarchy curbed also the revolution which overthrew the monarchy’. Macaulay took a sterner view than Hallam of Charles I and Charles’s intention to ‘shed . . . blood . . . on the very floor of the Parliament House’. He represented the parliamentary leaders as ‘gentlemen’ who were defending the liberties of Englishmen, were compelled by the King to resort to war, and were nearly defeated by the King’s hypocrisy in 1642. His narrative was hard and tough, while disclosing the continuity which was alleged to link the heroism of the seventeenth century to the ‘humanity’ and ‘moderation’ of the ‘revolution’ by which in 1832 an ‘immense mass of power’ had been transferred ‘from an oligarchy’ to the nation without the violence of 1789 in France. The continuity that Macaulay pin-pointed was first of all a continuity in liberty and participation – the fact that, ‘during many generations, England had had habeas corpus, trial by jury, and freedom of the press

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and public meeting’, that its ‘legislative assemblies . . . had always had many members chosen by the people’, and that a large proportion of the population had been ‘long accustomed’ to the exercise of ‘political functions’. It was also a continuity of form since ‘the obedience’ which was given to ‘constituted authorities’ was the effect of ‘habit and association rather than . . . reason’, the ‘politic’ statesman ‘disguised innovations as much as possible under ancient names and badges’, and ‘legitimacy’ would have been as much the enemy of law, order and authority as the ultra-royalists had made it in France. Macaulay, then, was a Whig – in English terms a consecratory Whig and a proper target for accusations of complacency. What needs to be emphasized, however, is less Macaulay’s complacency, than the starkness of his apophthegms. There was, he claimed, no reason to suppose that ‘the advance of civilization was favourable to liberty’ and there was every reason to suppose that ‘representative assemblies sat in vain unless they had at their command . . . the physical power . . . necessary to make their deliberations free’. The eighteenth-century political system was a facet of the fact that the House of Commons, not yet ‘being held in awe by the people’, had had to be ‘managed by corruption . . . or not managed at all’. ‘It was, in truth’, of Cromwell’s Irish policy, ‘more merciful to extirpate a hundred thousand beings at once than to misgovern millions through a long succession of generations’. In addition to starkness, there was irony – about Burleigh’s ‘choosing not to be burnt’, for example. There was disparagement – of Falkland’s fastidiousness, of Shaftesbury’s betrayal of ‘every party in the State’, and of the ‘hard, cold, impudent, low . . . dirty libertinism’ of the Restoration. And there were encomiums – on the ‘plain Buckinghamshire Esquire’ (Hampden) who, like Washington, had ‘placed himself . . . across the path of tyranny’, on Cromwell’s ‘high, stout, honest English heart’, and on Halifax, the ‘trimmer’ of 1688, who had trimmed ‘as a good government trims between despotism and anarchy or a pure church . . . between the errors of the papist and the errors of the Anabaptist’. And just as it had been fortunate for the Church of England that the English Reformation had been ‘conducted by men who cared little about religion’, so it had been fortunate that the revolution of 1688 had ‘in almost every part’ been ‘discreditable to the English’, had reflected well on ‘William III, and William III alone’, and had avoided ‘bloodshed and commotion’ only because of the duplicity of the conspirators and their want of interest in ‘political principles’. What Macaulay derived from political science was a dislike of distance between governments and governed, a demand for governors to reduce the distance, as Elizabeth had reduced it and Charles I had failed to reduce it, and the acknowledgement in 1832 that the ‘destruction’ which would accompany universal suffrage could only be avoided by bringing the ‘great mass of property and intelligence’ within the framework of the constitution. The

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conclusions of relativism and political science alike were that a ‘liberal government makes a conservative people’, that the ‘demagogues’ as well as the ‘bigots’ had to be resisted, and that the English had been a ‘happy people’ because their history had been a history of the ‘timely reforms’ through which government had been ‘constantly giving way, sometimes peaceably, sometimes after a violent struggle, but constantly giving way, before a nation which had been constantly advancing’. In addition to being a Whig politician, Macaulay hit the jackpot as a writer – on his emergence (in terms of reputation), in the 1820s, financially in the 1840s with The Lays of Ancient Rome, Critical and Historical Essays and the first two volumes of The History of England. The History ignored Wales and did not really integrate the famous third chapter into the political and ecclesiastical narrative. But it dealt with three of the four components of the United Kingdom in a European setting, produced powerful, exact and picturesque narrative, and was enabled, by the compactness of the events that it dealt with, to speak to the Protestant reader of 1848 as intelligibly as Carlyle had spoken to him in 1837 and Lecky and Froude were to speak to him later, and to assure him – what the events of 1827–32 were held to confirm – that conflict had been replaced by participation between the death of William III in 1702 and the death of Lord Holland, Macaulay’s friend and benefactor, in 1840. Macaulay might have been a great historian of the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution and the resistance to Napoleon, and was well equipped to trace the transition through which Parliament exchanged control by royal prerogative for control by public opinion, as the ‘Nadir of national prosperity’ arrived at in the reign of William III was replaced by the endless prosperity of the reign of Queen Victoria. But he would have found it difficult to replicate the compactness, unity and quadrilateral melodrama between the bigoted Catholicism of James II, the Dutch caution of William III, the decent adiaphorism of a Protestant people, the perfidy and indifference of England’s politicians, and the construction of a Whig/Tory alliance more powerful and impressive than any which could have been constructed by Pitt or Canning. The History of England had a political message and expressed what Macaulay took to be the political mind of the modern world. It also had a religious message and expressed what he took to be the Protestant mind of the modern world. II For Macaulay Protestantism was a rebellion against the corruption of mediaeval religion, an ‘insurrection of the great German race against an alien domination’ and, in relation to the Roman clergy, a ‘rising up of reason against a caste’. Bacon was central; in his essay on Bacon he explained that there was a paradoxical connection between Bacon as enemy of the ‘barren’

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tradition which had dominated European philosophy since Democritus, Bacon as ‘sincere believer in the divine authority of the Christian revelation’, and Bacon as exponent of the belief that knowledge should have as its object the ‘multiplying of human enjoyment’ and the ‘mitigating of human suffering’. Bacon, on this view, had signalled the beginning of the modern world, not because Baconian induction was new (which it was not) but because Bacon’s knowledge of the ‘mutual relations’ between all departments of knowledge and his diversion of high thought to the ends of ‘utility and progress’, had produced a volume of science and improvement such as the world had never seen. In this connection Macaulay propounded a paradox – that, whereas Bacon’s achievements would have been impossible without the Reformation, Protestantism had receded since the sixteenth century while Catholicism, without any regard for ‘progress in knowledge’, had effected, ‘in a single generation’ a ‘reformation of manners and discipline’ in Southern Europe as profound as the ‘reformation of doctrine in the North’. Macaulay criticized Catholicism’s ‘stunting . . . of the mind’ and its negativity about Luther, Calvin, Voltaire, the Encyclopaedists and the French Revolution. But he had a Romantic component as well as a Protestant and rationalistic one. He displayed the visual imagination which Gibbon had displayed about the Papacy’s antiquity and the eirenic imagination which Ranke had brought to bear on all sides of the Reformation, presenting Catholicism as the ‘chief agent’ in ‘effacing the distinction’ between ‘Norman and Saxon’ and ‘master and slave’ in mediaeval England, and finding it ‘difficult to say’ whether England ‘owed more’ to the Middle Ages or to the Reformation. ‘Even in the time of its utmost extravagance and atrocity’, Catholicism had ‘never wholly lost the spirit of its Great Teacher’, had been favourable to ‘science . . . civilization and good government’ from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, and, in resisting the Albigensians and the Lollards, had stood out against the ‘cruel and licentious superstitions’ with which centuries more ignorant than the sixteenth would have filled the space vacated by its fall. In relation to a Protestant public, this was deliberate and provocative, especially in drawing a Whig contrast between Anglican servility towards the English monarchy and the papal attempt to remain independent of all monarchies. Its most important conclusion, however, was another paradox – that it was Catholicism’s renewal since the sixteenth century which explained ‘the decay of the southern countries of Europe’, and that Holland’s superiority to Spain, Protestant Germany’s superiority to Catholic Germany, and the United States’s superiority to Peru, Mexico and Brazil, proved that Northern Europe owed its ‘civilization and prosperity’ chiefly to the ‘moral effect’ which Protestantism had had upon it. Macaulay wrote very little about the sixteenth-century reformers, except to

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contrast them to their advantage with the Jacobinism of the German Anabaptists, and to show that in France, Germany and Switzerland, the ‘contest against the Papal power was essentially . . . religious’. In fact, almost everything that he wrote about Protestantism was about England, Scotland, Ireland or India. In The History of England and in his essays on English history, Macaulay made a coherent statement of two facts – that, in the English Reformation, ‘zeal had been the tool of worldliness’, and that it was the mixed motives and poor characters of almost all the participants, including especially Cranmer, which had given the Church of England its ‘moderate articles . . . decent ceremonies and . . . noble liturgy’. Macaulay described the Reformation’s ‘immediate effect’ as ‘by no means favourable to public belief’. It was the reign of Elizabeth which for him had been the greatest age of the Church of England and, at a time when the nation was against ‘clericalism’ and ‘extreme parties’ on both sides, had been fortunate in being governed by Burleigh’s ‘dextrousness’ and Renaissance sensibility, and by his decision to assume the leadership of European Protestantism. To puritanism Macaulay had two attitudes. He disliked its Hebraic cant, sour solemnity and aversion to learning, the polarization it had effected after 1580, and the intolerance, austerity and self-abasement which had made it odious and ridiculous in the 1650s. On the other hand, in Hampden it had been married to the sentiments and tastes of an accomplished gentleman; it had produced generally ‘the most remarkable body of men’ the world had ever seen; and it had formed, out of the most unpromising materials, the ‘finest, best conducted and most morally reputable army’ that Europe had ever known. Macaulay was not unappreciative of the Church of England which had practised ‘in greater degree than any of her Protestant sisters’ that ‘art of striking the senses and filling the imagination’ in which the Catholic Church ‘so eminently excelled’. But she had ‘for more than a hundred and fifty years’ been the ‘enemy of public liberty’ and had only once – ‘when her . . . dignity and prosperity’ were threatened in 1688 – abandoned that servility towards the monarchy which had been inherent from the start. Even so she had not been rewarded, since Charles I had felt a merely ‘political’ loyalty to her, Charles II would have preferred exile and his mistresses to the inconvenience of having to defend her, and the ‘profligate sophisms’ with which she had justified her allegiance to William III had been demeaning. Nowhere had it been proved more decisively than by the Tory squirearchy of the late 1680s that men could ‘fight to the death and persecute without pity for a religion whose creed they did not understand and whose precepts they habitually disobeyed’. In rejecting Southey’s and early Gladstone’s view of the political function of religion, Macaulay enunciated three main principles – that government was designed for the ‘protection . . . of persons and . . . property’ by ‘arbitration’;

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that ‘the education of the people . . . in those principles of morality . . . which were . . . common to all the forms of Christianity’, though likely to be helpful to government, did not impose on government a primary duty to ‘propagate . . . religious truth’; and that not only was religion ‘demonstrably’ not ‘the basis of civil government’, but the propagating of a particular religion could easily result in the ‘dissolution of society’. It was in pursuit of these principles that he wished the Government of India to avoid proselytization, supported both the emancipation of Catholics, Jews and Dissenters and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; and adduced the ‘foulest of . . . judicial murders’ – the murder of Christ – as a reason for ‘blotting out from the Statute Book’ the ‘wicked and foolish’ permission to persecute for the sake of doctrine. It was for the same reason that the ‘religious instruction’ which rulers ought to support was not necessarily that in which they believed, that it should rather be ‘that from which . . . the people . . . would . . . learn most good with the smallest evil’, and that it was dangerous to tamper with any ‘institution deeply fixed in the hearts and minds of millions’ if the consequence of doing so would be to pull down their ‘intellectual and moral exemplars’ without putting anything in their place. What Macaulay wanted from modern Protestantism was what he supposed Bacon to have wanted – a playing-down of enthusiasm and a playing-up of charity, mercy, consolation, tolerance and hope. He believed that Christianity was incompatible with slavery and compatible with liberty wherever its ‘spirit’ had surmounted its ‘forms’, that it was ‘in far greater danger’ from the ‘alliance with power’ than from opposition to power, and that its real security was to be found in its ‘benevolent morality . . . and exquisite adaptation to the human heart’. He was particularly concerned that Christianity should disassociate itself from ‘controversial theology’. Macaulay did not write theologically; when he wrote about theology, it was to explain the irrelevance of orthodoxy, the impossibility of agreement except about ‘the existence of some superior mind,’ and the non-existence of a ‘visible body’ on earth ‘to whose decrees men were bound to submit their private judgement on points of faith’. In these respects, he had a deliberately modern mind. He criticized the ‘Chinese’ mentality which he associated with the ‘selfish life’ and Anglican tests of monastic universities (like Cambridge), wanted an invigorating competition to enable churches and creeds to prevail according to their merits, and hoped to match the ‘prodigious’ expansion of education among the ‘working people’ by introducing into university curricula the scientific and modern studies which the new rich would prefer to the tedious philology on which he had been reared. Macaulay wanted the Protestant establishment and educational system to be made tolerable to new wealth and Dissent in England, and to Catholicism in Ireland; and he wanted Christianity made compatible with modern knowledge by removing large areas of intellectual territory from it. In all

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these respects, his arguments were both brisk and glib. Nevertheless, he was a Protestant luminary, was read in his lifetime and has been read since, more widely, probably, than any other modern English Protestant and, in modernizing Protestantism, adopted an attitude which was to be continued by Lecky. III Macaulay died in 1859 when Lecky was twenty-one; it is unlikely that they met, though they would have done so if Macaulay had been alive when Lecky became a celebrated figure in London society six years later. Macaulay was a Whig politician, Lecky was not really a politician and was an Irish Liberal rather than a Whig. Nevertheless, they had much in common not only politically but also in religion. Before his death, Lecky2 spent six years as MP for the University of Dublin, was offered and refused the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford before Froude accepted it, and was made both a Diamond Jubilee Privy Councillor and one of the earliest members of the Order of Merit. Even if he was honoured because he was a Liberal Unionist, there is no doubt that he was one of the most distinguished Anglo-Irishmen of his generation. In the course of his life Lecky acquired three public reputations – as a critic of the Ritualist movement and of the threat which democracy and Gladstonian demagoguery were presenting to equable government and a free society in the 1890s; as the author in the 1870s and 1880s of a multivolume history of England in the eighteenth century; and as exponent of the account he had given before he was thirty-one of the history of morals and religion. Lecky was of partly Scottish ancestry, was the son of an Irish landowner and was orphaned in his early teens. After an unhappy period as a schoolboy at Cheltenham, he was a Fellow-Commoner at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read widely, made many friends and was an orator on the model of Flood and Grattan. A modest unearned income having relieved him of the need for employment, he thought about and rejected the Bar, Parliament and ordination (the latter on conscientious grounds). Until his marriage in 1870 to an impoverished member of the court of the Queen of the Netherlands, he travelled with large loads of books around Spain, Italy, Germany, France and Austria-Hungary. He wrote large parts of his most successful works while on the move, transferring to the history of European morals and religion some of the ideas which Religious Tendencies of the Age and Leaders of Public 12

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903), educated Cheltenham College and Trinity College, Dublin. MP 1895–1902. Author of Religious Tendencies of the Age, l860; Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, 1861; The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 1865; The History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 1869; A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 1878–90, Poems, 1890; Democracy and Liberty, 1896; The Map of Life, 1899; and Political Essays, 1908.

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Opinion in Ireland – his two earliest works – had applied to the history of morals and religion in Ireland and England. Lecky admired Flood and Grattan for the national sentiment they had created and the national politics they had pursued. He admired O’Connell as their successor, regretted Protestant sectarianism as much as he regretted the ‘clerical influence’ which had spread among middle-class and rural Catholics since O’Connell’s death, and pointed out that Ireland, so far from having an ‘Irish party’ and a ‘tradition of nationality’, had only an ‘English party’ on the one side and an ‘Italian party’ on the other. In Leaders of Public Opinion, he emphasized the anti-English feeling which had accompanied Irish emigration to America and Australia, the damage which a determined Irish party might do during a ‘disintegration of parties’ in the English Parliament, and the prospect of the Royal Navy being unable to prevent a ‘coalition of great powers’ effecting a successful invasion in the future. To the ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘brutality’ of the English government of Ireland in the seventeenth century, the abolition of the Irish Parliament at the end of the eighteenth century, and the ridicule and abuse which had been showered on the Irish character in the English Parliament since, he attributed the paradox that Irish Catholics supported Austria and the Papacy against ‘the revolution’ in Italy, while extenuating agrarian murder and radical opinions about land-tenure in Ireland. Since sectarian feeling was stronger among the lower than among the middle classes, Lecky was cautious about franchise extension and avoided the choice between a separate Irish parliament and ‘complete fusion with England’. He supported the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of Ireland but wanted most of all the removal of clerical influence, the Catholic clergy, in spite of its ‘fidelity, zeal and disinterestedness’, being anti-national as ‘many of the doctrines of the Church of Rome’ would be ‘in any land’, and the Protestant clergy, if given their heads, being likely to sacrifice the ‘dignity . . . stability and . . . future greatness of Ireland to the narrowness of . . . their . . . dogmas about eternal punishment’. Lecky believed that Protestant landlords were the people’s ‘natural leaders’, that lay Protestantism was capable of coalescing with Liberalism and that lay public opinion would respond to the ‘tendency of the age’ if a ‘man of transcendent intellect’ were to allay the ‘theological fever’ which was ‘raging through the land’. In relation to England, his Protestantism had many similar features. Religious Tendencies of the Age praised Wesley and Whitfield for having rescued ‘the lower orders’ from the ‘frigid religion’ and ‘heathen morality’ of the eighteenth century, for having restored love, emotion and the Atonement to the centre of the scene, and for having achieved a ‘religious revolution’ of which the Evangelical movement had been the beneficiary. It also expressed a good deal of sympathy for the Roman Church. Lecky was not tempted by Rome. But he had travelled in Catholic countries

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and had read and admired both Bossuet and Newman. He believed, like Acton, that the Catholic system had been a friend of liberty and the alternative to ‘irreligion’ in the Middle Ages, that its ‘ecclesiastical structure’ had been one of ‘the most marvellous creations of human sagacity’, and that there was something to be said for those of its doctrines which were ‘most obnoxious to Protestants’, like the efficacy of works, the communion of saints, and the ‘protecting power’ of the Virgin. Transubstantiation, though apparently ‘repugnant to reason’, had been cherished ‘more than any other Roman Catholic tenet in every age and church by men of intellect and piety’; – the popular realization of God’s presence in Roman images, liturgy, painting, ceremonial and cathedrals, was overwhelming; in face of the ‘desolating’ Utilitarianism of America and the ‘desolating’ rationalism of Germany, the ‘Roman system’ was, ‘as it had ever been’, the ‘leading fact of Europe’. It was sad only that Catholicism had failed to identify itself with liberty and the popular cause in the 1830s and, by the 1860s, had missed its chance as the French clergy sold out to Napoleonic ‘despotism’ and the Papacy to Austrian reaction. Lecky criticized Tractarian ‘millinery’ and ‘equivocation’, the Tractarian ‘theory of reserve’, and Tract XC ’s ‘insincerity’. With equal impartiality, he criticized Evangelicalism’s inability to give ‘impartial consideration’ to ‘religious systems different from its own’, and the Protestant insistence that the Roman Church had from the start been the work of ‘designing and unprincipled men’. For him, as for Salisbury and Fitzjames Stephen, it was a central difficulty that the English clergy, Dissenting as well as Anglican, were so absorbed in clerical concerns that they had driven away the educated intellect of the nation and replaced it with ‘women’. About Rome’s ‘ecclesiastical despotism’, as about Ultramontane and Jesuit ‘idolatry’ and ‘casuistry’, Lecky was scathing. He left no doubt, however, that there was a Catholic aspect to his latitudinarian desire to supersede the Evangelical movement, and that there were three reasons for being a latitudinarian rather than an Evangelical – that the latitudinarian could not ‘attach the idea of crime’ to ‘any . . . doctrine’ which was held ‘sincerely and conscientiously’; that Protestant ‘diatribes’ against Roman infallibility merely ‘rejected the infallibility of the church’ in favour of ‘the infallibility of the individual’; and that the ‘elaborate and detailed systems of doctrine’ which Evangelicalism had constructed were ‘pernicious and irrational’. As a Reformation Protestant, Lecky denied that Protestantism was ‘a church’, insisted that it was ‘a principle’, and identified it with the ‘spirit of enquiry’ and ‘progress of civilisation’ which had also intruded itself into the Roman Church during the Counter-Reformation. To the question, was Protestantism likely to be as powerful in the future as it had been in the past, his answers were ambiguous, partly because the age was ‘not a believing age’, partly because the Old Testament and parts of the New Testament were becoming repugnant to the moral sense.

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Lecky affirmed that Protestantism could be defended (by the methods of Bishop Butler) and that a reconstructed Protestantism might have valuable functions to perform – in mobilizing the doctrine of ‘personal responsibility’ against military authoritarianism, in replacing ‘retaliation’ as an encouragement to war by ‘forgiveness’ as a preventive of war, and in showing that God’s ‘character’, so far from being ‘harsh or unamiable’, could be associated with pleasure, wit and reason. In the life of the Protestant clergyman, moreover, blended as it had been after the abandonment of celibacy, with ‘every scene of domestic joy’, he found ‘the one idyll of modern civilization’ and ‘one of the most beautiful . . . positions that could be conceived’. In Religious Tendencies of the Age and Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, Lecky mixed analysis with injunction and turned historical knowledge to censorial purposes. In both The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe and The History of European Morals, he showed that philosophical, literary, scientific and commercial modes of theory and practice were at least as important as theological modes of theory and practice, and that theological opinions were effects of the ‘causes that produced and favoured them’ according to the ‘degrees and ways in which they benefited and injured mankind’. This implied a ‘natural’ or ‘morphological’ history which separated ‘the historian’ from the ‘theologian’ and declined the presumption that the reason why some theological opinions prevailed and others did not was ‘the force of theological argument’. In contrasting the establishment of superstitious, ascetic, ecclesiastical, persecuting, monastic, theological Christianity between the first and the fifteenth centuries with its disestablishment by science, tolerance, the ‘industrial spirit’ and secularization since the fifteenth century, Lecky looked forward to the triumph of rationalism and backwards to the triumph of Catholicism over the morality and religion of the Roman Empire. Of the rise of Catholicism, Lecky had two explanations. On the one hand, that its teaching had been congruous with the ‘spiritual nature of mankind’ and had evoked a ‘devotion to [man’s] welfare, analogous to that which the patriot bore to his country’. On the other hand, that it had ‘acted upon the masses’ where stoicism had failed to and, in burrowing away as a ‘secret society’, had established a ‘new enthusiasm’, the ‘brotherhood of man’, and the ‘supreme sanctity of love’. This was the heart of Christianity, the basis for martyrdom and the stimulus to ‘hatred’ of both heretics and unbelievers. In the hands of Athanasius, Augustine, Theodosius, Cyril of Alexandria and Justinian, it was to destroy ‘for a thousand years’ that ‘liberty of thought and . . . expression’ which had been the ‘supreme attainment’ of Roman civilization. Volume II of The History of European Morals began with Christian ethics as ‘part of a religion’ where pagan ethics had been ‘part of a philosophy’, and traced Christianity’s achievement in turning views of the duties of man into

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the ‘truisms’ and ‘proverbs’ of the ‘cottage . . . the alley . . . and . . . the village school’. Christianity had spread ‘knowledge of the Cross . . . from Lombardy to Sweden’, had made the church bell, the altar and the cemetery a ‘romance . . . for the poor’, and had created an ideal of chivalry which ‘even now . . . might . . . be . . . traced in the character of the modern gentleman’. Lecky’s judgement on ‘the Catholic ascendancy’, though more friendly than Gibbon’s, was not especially friendly. He criticized feudalism and the ‘military Christianity’ which had been caught from Islam, the priestly tyranny which had been established through Augustinian depravity and ‘personal retribution’, and the objectionable association between sin and the fear of death as opposed to the pagan conception of ‘virtue’ and the acceptance of death. It was as apparent in European Morals as in The Rise of Rationalism that both mediaeval Christianity and the intolerant Protestantism which had succeeded it had fallen short of the Christianity of the first two centuries, and that a ‘literature of mendacious ferocity’ had ‘cursed . . . the conditions of true enquiry’ and already created in the thirteenth century the desert which Froude believed that Reformation theology had created in the sixteenth century. As antidote Lecky offered the science, scepticism and rationalism which The Rise of Rationalism had described from the sixteenth century onwards. The Rise of Rationalism associated witch-hunting with the intellectual stirrings of the twelfth century and declared the tyrannies established by Protestant sects ‘in the name of religious liberty’ intolerable. In the toleration established in England and Scotland in 1688, it saw Protestantism’s flexible side, the anachronizing of ‘damnation’ and the beginning of a phase in which politics was becoming secular. Lecky acknowledged that not all states were modern, that ‘vestiges of the old theocratic spirit’ survived, and that the ‘church-and-state theory’ that ‘every nation should . . . endow . . . only . . . one form of religion’ had not really been disposed of in 1829. He held out the hope, nevertheless, that reaction and ‘Toryism’ were receding, that the ‘organ which represented dogmatic interests . . . all over Europe’ was ‘sinking’ into ‘contempt’, and that the bayonets which were propping up the ‘decrepitude of the papacy’ signalled the Papacy’s inability to adapt itself to the ‘patriotism’ and ‘liberty’ of modern societies. The death of the Papacy, which Lecky announced, somewhat prematurely, in 1865, was a symbol of the vitality of a new pluralistic politics which would restrict the power of sovereigns, augment ‘the power of peoples’, and liberate Christianity from both the aristocratic and the reactionary politics with which it had come to be associated. Lecky agreed with Cobden, in a sense which ‘should not be restricted to politics’, that ‘the towns’ would eventually ‘govern England’, would bring with them the inequalities, fluctuations and population-growth which went with industrialization and political economy, and would make ‘credit . . . invention’ and their ‘associated habits of thought’ into

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‘the true psychology of society’, associating the inter-connectedness of worldmarkets with the ‘Christian conception of universal peace’, helping the ‘industrial element’ to become the ‘dominant influence in politics’, and enabling the ‘principles of political economy’ to be ‘realised as axioms by the masses’. Lecky predicted that ‘political economy’ would alone be able to cope with the ‘evils of democracy’ and that the material prosperity of the working classes would depend so directly on capital increasing faster than population that confiscation of wealth, and governmental intervention to raise wages, would be ‘catastrophic’. ‘Reproductive continence’ on the part of labourers and protection of the capitalist’s accumulation, indeed, were the routes to prosperity, and political economy was so much the herald of ‘amity’ that it was already ‘effecting a considerable alteration in our moral judgements’. With this dictum, The Rise of Rationalism was brought to bear on modem society, contrasting the ‘happiness’ which ‘mortification’ and the ‘diminution of desires’ had produced in the minds of ‘devoted men’ in Asiatic, Egyptian and mediaeval civilization with the happiness produced by the ‘multiplication of desires’ in ‘industrial civilization’, and finding in the ‘multiplication of wants’ and the accumulation of capital the route by which the poor would be rescued from being the ‘helpless tools of their masters’. Lecky’s optimism was systematic. But he ended ambivalently, regretting the resurgence of speculative materialism, deploring the ‘mercenary’ element which was edging out ‘self-sacrifice’, and doubting the ability of ‘heroism’ or ‘genius’ to touch ‘the masses’ in the modem world. Deism and dogmatic Protestantism were dead, and science unable to discover ultimate causes. The conflict of the future, therefore, would be between ‘Catholicism’ and ‘Rationalism’ as it slowly became clear that sacred art, recessions in persecution’ and abandonment of the doctrine of eternal suffering, had helped Christianity to ‘irrigate . . . . every quarter of the earth with the fertilizing stream of an almost boundless benevolence’.

Lecky gave a liberal and subtly-considered account of the reconstruction of Christianity, and had a major impact on public discussion. What Bryce and Fisher were to do fifty years later was to keep the Liberal show on the road after the catastrophe of the first World War. Bryce3 was an Irish Presbyterian and a contemporary of Lecky. He was at 13

James, 1st Viscount Bryce of Dechmont (1838–1922), educated Glasgow High School, Belfast Academy, Glasgow University, Trinity College, Oxford and Heidelburg University. Fellow of Oriel College, l862–93 (Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, 1870–93). MP, 1880–l907, Minister, 1892–5 and 1906–7. Ambassador in Washington, 1907–l3. Author of The Holy Roman Empire, 1864; The American Commonwealth, l888; Impressions of South Africa, 1897; Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 1901; Studies in Contemporary Biography, 1903; South America, l912; Essays and Addresses in Wartime, 1918; and Modern Democracies, 1922.

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school in Glasgow and Belfast, and was then at Glasgow University before going to Trinity College, Oxford, where he made a point of refusing to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Bryce became distinguished as an historian, a mountaineer, a jurisprudentialist and a commentator on the contemporary world. His Holy Roman Empire, published when he was twenty-six, gave a subtle impetus to the internationalism to which he was to be committed later. After teaching Roman law at Oxford for more than twenty years, he became a Liberal MP and Cabinet Minister under Gladstone and Rosebery before becoming Ambassador to Washington after a failure at the Irish Office under Campbell-Bannerman. As an admirer of Stanley and Green, he was a trendy and optimistic ornament of the post-clerical university, and felt strongly, as a Roman lawyer, what others felt as philosophers or historians, the proximity and relevance of Graeco-Roman civilization. In urging Oxford to respond to the modern challenge, he implied, threateningly or otherwise, that ‘alone out of the great mediaeval sisterhood’ she had been ‘privileged’ to retain ‘the great wealth and external splendour’ which the rest of the sisterhood had lost. Bryce’s Liberalism included a latitudinarianism for which the New Testament, so far from being a matter of ‘command’, was ‘a record of events’, a ‘body of poems’ and a ‘series of . . . precepts and . . . discourses’ which ‘no body of Christians had ever yet come near to obeying’. The Emperor Constantine had placed the State’s ‘carnal weapons’ at Christianity’s disposal, but it was the Church’s role as a ‘property-holding society’ not an ecclesiastical theocracy which had been systematized by the Canon law of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and, if there had ever been any likelihood of the civil law being ‘ousted’, the Great Schism and the Renaissance would have reversed it. It had been good for Europe that Europe had avoided the ‘Judaic’ identification of law with religion which Bryce had observed during a visit to the al-Azhar University in Cairo in 1888 and to which he attributed the servile character of Islamic politics, Islam’s insistence on works, authority and the divine law to the exclusion of reason, faith and grace, and the impossibility of reversing the imbalance without a revolutionary infusion from Europe. Bryce was a quarter of a century older than Fisher and had been far more intimately involved in party politics. By 1915 he was attributing the threat which the war presented to historic Liberalism to the theorization of the evolutionary struggle, the replacement of laissez-faire by tariffs, State action and imperial expansion, and the probability that ‘the interests and passions of peoples’ would be more ‘lasting and pernicious’ than those of ‘oligarchs’ and ‘monarchs’. As a wartime propagandist, Bryce made a Dissenter’s denial that Britain was fighting for ‘selfish interests’ or had any quarrel with the German people who did not necessarily ‘share the doctrines of the . . . caste which had . . . gained control of German policy’. He demonized the ‘small gang of unscru-

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pulous ruffians’ who, in the course of misgoverning Turkey, were terrorizing the Armenians in the way in which the Prussians were terrorizing the Belgians. As advocate of a League of Nations, he made much of England’s ‘allegiance to humanity’ and of the tradition of internationalist thinking which had descended from Dante, Marsilius and Kant. Bryce poised his predictions on a knife-edge and was not sure that ‘the spirit of sin and strife’ which had been let out of the bottle in 1914 could be put back in again. In his residual optimism he resembled Fisher rather than Maine.

Fisher’s4 younger brother was a distinguished Admiral; their father had been private secretary to King Edward VII when Prince of Wales. Before six years in his fifties, when he was ‘taken up into heaven’ by being made Lloyd George’s President of The Board of Education, Fisher had been a hard-working Oxford don and provincial Vice-Chancellor, an intelligent biographer of Maitland, his brother-in-law, and a versatile historian whose mixture of thought, politics and religion had shown to advantage in The Mediaeval Empire, a history of England between Henry VII and Elizabeth, and The Republican Tradition in Europe. In his wartime account of the contribution of English universities to the ‘great National Crusade against the German Crime’, he had offered the unifying reflection that ‘soldiers’ (he meant ‘officers’) from ‘commercial and industrial families’ had behaved as well as officers from families which had been ‘inured to the tradition of arms’. In The Common Weal in 1924, he was to be the advocate of a ‘civic’ consciousness as the Liberal answer to Socialism, and in James Bryce three years later was to be the chronicler of Liberalism’s lost predominance. It was in Napoleon (1913) and A History of Europe (1935) that he made his most significant declarations. Fisher’s Napoleon gave an admiring account of its subject’s energy and brilliance as a military commander, the populist empathy which had enabled him to identify himself with both the French Revolution and the reaction against the Terror, and the unexampled popularity which would have enabled him to remain Emperor even in defeat if he had not made a mess of the political situation. Fisher’s romantic attachment survived the judgement that Napoleon provided the ‘great modern example’ of that ‘reckless and defiant insolence’ which was the subject of ancient tragedy and was ‘at war with the harmonies of human life’. He felt a manifest sympathy for armed liberty against the 14

Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher (1865–1940), educated Winchester and New College, Oxford (Fellow, 1889–1925 and Warden, l926–40). Vice-Chancellor of Sheffeld University, 1914–16, President of the Board of Education, 1916–22 and MP, 1917–25. Author of The Mediaeval Empire, 1898, The History of England 1485–1547, 1906; Frederick William Maitland, 1910; The Republican Tradition in Europe, 1911; Napoleon, 1913; The Common Weal, 1924; James Bryce, 1927; Our New Religion, 1929; and A History of Europe, 1935.

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reactionary coalition by which it was to be defeated and wished it to be everybody’s wish that Napoleon had fallen at Waterloo at the head of his Old Guard ‘as the dusk of evening stole across the summer sky’. Fisher wrote powerfully about Napoleon’s support for the Koran in Egypt, the Roman Catholic Church in France and Protestantism in Holland, and displayed an almost Erastian sympathy for the view Napoleon had taken, ‘as an indifferent, like Pontius Pilate’, that religion was useful in creating a ‘vaccination’ against ‘social distempers’. Fisher did not conceal Napoleon’s responsibility for his own defeat or for the conflict the ‘Continental System’ created with both the Catholic Church and the ‘spirit of nationality’ – the ‘strongest forces in European civilization’. But he admired Napoleon’s more than Gladstonian parsimony about the public finances and his ease in the use of power which, but for his arbitrariness as Emperor, would have enabled him to establish a more convincing popular libertarianism than could have been established by Mill or Hobhouse. A passage about the continental system suggests greater respect than these showed for the realities of political life. ‘Goethe being a poet and a philosopher’, it went, wrote of Napoleon as a kind of apostle of the higher civilization, but if it were an inseparable part of the apostolic process that tobacco should be at famine prices, coffee and sugar unobtainable, that ships should rot in harbour, and that firm after firm should put up its shutters and discharge its hands, we may well imagine that beings less philosophical and poetical than Goethe saw nothing in Napoleon’s proceedings but cruel tyranny and senseless waste. (H. A. L. Fisher, Napoleon, 1913, 1945 edn, p. 161).

Fisher is sometimes thought of as one of the targets for attack in Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History. But while it is true that Fisher’s European history was both Whig history and a cultural and intellectual history masquerading as a general history, it is also the case that Butterfield shared many of Fisher’s instincts, was an Asquithean Liberal, just as Fisher was a Lloyd-George Liberal, and became a critic of Liberalism only because the Liberalism he was attacking was less subtle than Fisher’s Liberalism. Fisher denied that ‘progress’ was a ‘law of nature’, that there was a ‘predetermined pattern in history’, or that ‘the play of the contingent’ could be avoided. But, though ‘disaster and barbarism’ were endemic and the ‘tides of liberty’ receding ‘over wide tracts of Europe’, ‘the fact of progress’ in A History of Europe was still ‘plain and large’. The ‘Liberal experiment’ was ‘firmly established in Britain, the Dominions, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the United States’, and it was therefore a pleasure to look back in 1936 to the ‘life-giving rush of the Aryan peoples, the flowering of Greek genius, the long Roman peace, the cleansing tide of Christian ethics, the slow reconquest of classical learning after the barbarian invasions, the dis-

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covery . . . of the New World, the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the philanthropy and science of the nineteenth century’. In the early 1920s, Fisher concluded that ‘the sane and comfortable conduct of human relations’ demanded a ‘common ground of belief’ based on ‘a general similarity in the constitution of the human mind’. This he described in a way which neither Newman nor Chesterton would have recognized, as ‘orthodoxy’ – a ‘common measure for the interpreting of the facts of life’ such that, in the ‘cerebral life of every man’, ‘originality’ and ‘dissidence’ would be ‘minimal’. Since orthodoxy’s ‘dogmatic fabric’ had already been ‘broken by the study of comparative religion’, however, this amounted to little more than a vague sense that a ‘spiritual’ religion was better than a ‘material’ religion, the ‘religion of civilized men’ better than the ‘religion of savages’, and ecclesiastical religion, though ‘dyed with the waters of . . . political . . . compromise’, comforting to those who accepted it. Fisher acknowledged the threats offered by science to religion while pointing out that science, no less than religion, needed an ‘element of unanalyzed belief’ which ‘furnished the . . . repose . . . necessary for the discovering intellect’. As a beneficiary of European civilization, he himself was a ‘limited . . . meliorist’ to whom it seemed, in spite of the war and Dostoevsky’s forecast of Armageddon, that the ‘science of conducting life upon this planet’ had ‘improved’, was ‘improving’ and was likely to ‘continue to improve’. Of Socialism, Fisher took the condescending view that it was a religion, that its ‘sacred scriptures’ embodied the ‘sentimental . . . materialism’ thrown up by the ‘industrialism of our great cities’, and that it would retain this character ‘so long as want and poverty existed’. If, however, he had been asked what he expected for the future in 1922, his answer would have been that science, philosophy and culture, though they had ‘cleared away some of the wilder and grosser forms of superstition’, had not built a ‘permanent dyke’, that ‘polytheism, necromancy and magic’ would flourish ‘if . . . civilized opinion ever so little relaxed’, and that it was ‘vain to expect . . . the working creeds of a people’ to ‘escape the general deterioration’ once ‘the standard of civilized life’ had been ‘depressed’.

Neither Macaulay, Lecky, Bryce nor Fisher was idly optimistic or doubted that Whig and Liberal opinions would be contested. But in all four, optimism was primary. In the next chapter we shall examine four thinkers for whom optimism was not primary.

8 Whiggism, Liberalism and Christianity II I Fitzjames Stephen’s’1 father was an important civil servant, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and a Clapham Evangelical. At Eton and King’s College, London, Fitzjames himself was a talented performer and was prominent in both the Cambridge Union and the Apostles. After performing indifferently in the classics and mathematics required by Cambridge in the 1840s, however, he decided not to offer himself for a Fellowship. He also decided against ordination and in favour of the Bar, and spent the next decade or so building up a legal practice, writing prolifically in quarterly magazines, and combining the two activities in the statement of Anglican latitudinarianism which he made in the course of defending the Reverend Rowland Williams during Williams’s trial in the Court of Arches. When published as a book in 1862, The Defence of the Reverend Rowland Williams asserted that the questions at issue in Williams’s trial were whether ‘the law of England’ forbade the Anglican clergy to ‘use their minds’, whether the Church of England was a ‘voluntary association’ whose doctrines were ‘regulated . . . by public opinion’ or a Church whose ‘doctrines were established and regulated by law’, and whether, by law as distinct from ‘the public prejudice of a majority of the laity’, Williams was forbidden to express the opinions he had expressed in discussing Bunsen’s Biblical Researches in Essays and Reviews. The conclusions were that Williams had completed the work begun by the Gorham Judgement, that, so far as ‘legal penalties’ were concerned, the clergy were now at liberty to criticize ‘every part of the Bible’, and that ‘rationalistic views’ about the Bible no longer suffered the stigma of illegality. 11

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94), educated Eton, King’s College, London and Trinity College, Cambridge. Barrister. Legal Member of Council in Calcutta, 1869–72. Judge of the High Court, 1879–91. Author of The Relation of Novels to Life, 1855; The Characteristics of English Criminal Law, 1857; Essays by a Barrister, l862; The Defence of the Reverend Rowland Williams, l862; A General View of the Criminal Law of England, l863; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, l873; A Digest of the Law of Evidence, l876; A Digest of the Criminal Law, 1877; A History of the Criminal Law in England, 1883; Letters on the Ilbert Bill, 1883; The Story of Nuncomar and Sir Elijah Impey, 1885; and Horae Sabbaticae, 1892.

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We need not impute to an advocate, even in the ecclesiastical courts, a personal responsibility for the opinions he expresses. But no such caution is necessary in discussing Stephen. From start to finish, he had an ostentatiously free mind which asserted that man’s ‘religious faculties’ would ‘never be satisfied’ until they were ‘brought into harmony with the other faculties, including the intellect’, and that one of the benefits attached to the absence of a system of Anglican doctrine was that ‘the differences which divided the Anglican clergy’ had to be settled by law. Stephen was a successful advocate, wrote important legal textbooks and A History of the Criminal Law in England, and became both legal Member of the Council in Calcutta and a High Court judge in London. He was a member of the Metaphysical Society and was on terms of intellectual intimacy not only with Lyall and Lytton (Owen Meredith) – Disraeli’s Viceroy – but also with Sir Henry Maine, whose Ancient Law recorded the challenge offered to man’s natural conservatism by contract and competition, and whose Popular Government was more pessimistic than Lecky about the prospects for political economy, more apprehensive than Acton about the prospect of Caesarism and coercion, and more fearful than Stephen about the future of democracy. Fitzjames’s brother and biographer, Leslie Stephen, left the impression that, in spite of intellectual talent, moral directness and the expectations which were entertained by his contemporaries, something had gone wrong. Fitzjames had not scaled the highest peaks of the law. Disraeli had declared that he would have made an admirable leader of the Conservative Party, but he had had unfortunate experiences as a Liberal candidate for Parliament and had failed as a politician. In this section of this chapter we shall follow his opinions as they led up to his famous attack on Mill in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity in l873. Stephen was in his twenties when he began writing – about the superiority of the historic public school to the priggishness, innocence and humourlessness of Arnold’s Rugby; and about the need to insert modern studies into the Cambridge curriculum while preventing Cambridge becoming a ‘finishing school’ for the lower and middle classes on their way to ‘the shop and the counting house’. By the time he made his first collection of magazine articles in l862, he had defined a public position in which Matthew Arnold had failed to establish the ‘poverty and vulgarity of the modern English mind’, Kingsley had overdone athleticism, simplicity and unselfconsciousness, and Macaulay’s Whiggism required ‘limitations and additions . . . in order to be accepted as true’. Carlyle was an ‘incredible’ historian, and ‘the most untrustworthy moralist and politician of the age’ and Buckle’s History of Civilisation an attempt to undermine free will, Christianity and the ‘supremacy of . . . human consciousness’. On the way to Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Stephen gave many hints of the outcome. During the Darwinian winter of 1859, the Italian winter of 1860

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and the early stages of the American Civil War, he said much of what he was to say later about the disjunction between ‘innocence’ and ‘greatness’ in men and nations, about the difference between public and private morality, and about the double standards with which English opinion had condemned Bourbon violations of international law at the same time as it had applauded them in Cavour and Garibaldi. Stephen found Newman’s Apologia a ‘winning’, even a ‘touching’, book and brushed aside Kingsley’s insinuation that it was ‘dishonest’. Though a ‘favourable specimen’ of candour, however, Newman had arrived at ‘superstition’ through ‘sophistry’ and was propounding a theology which ‘drugged the mind’ and presented a false choice between atheism and Rome. It was unlikely that the Church he had fallen in love with had the ideal qualities he was determined to find there or that Protestantism was more distant from primitive Christianity than the ‘gay, coarse half-cynical half-credulous superstition of a Catholic population’. The review of the Apologia was long and powerful, and conveyed everything that Stephen wished to convey about the damage which ‘asceticism’, ‘voluntary mortification’, and the ‘preference for virginity over marriage’, did to the ‘domestic and civic virtues’. Nothing expressed more clearly the robust nature of his hatred than the rebuttal of Newman’s notion that English society was ‘selfish, worldly, and godless’. ‘It never seems to occur to him’, he wrote, that men can honestly believe that God sent them into the world expressly for the purpose of doing the business of the world; that the objects of the statesmen, the lawyer, the doctor, the merchant, the shopkeeper, the day-labourer, are as sacred as those of the priest; that when the scavenger cleans the street, or the stockbroker sells shares or the publican serves his customers, he is discharging a divinely-imposed duty, and playing his part . . . in a divine scheme, as much as a priest administering the sacrament to a dying man . . . One of the strongest moral objections which Englishmen feel to popery arises from their conviction that it does not do due honour to the common occupations, the common duties, the common objects of life. (F. Stephen, Dr Newman ‘Apologia’, in Fraser’s Magazine, September 1864, p. 302)

By the time Stephen went to India in 1869 and stopped going to Church, he had defended Montaigne and Voltaire, had attacked many versions of Christianity, and had made it obvious that the ‘duty to be religious’ included the duty to ‘purify religion by scrutinizing and correcting the dogmas which excited it’. On the other hand, Bossuet had given a ‘noble’ sketch of Tory absolutism, Hooker had so stated his case that even Chillingworth, Locke, Warburton, Butler and Paley had added little to it, and the only plausible objection to Anglicanism was the objection raised at ‘Marston Moor and Naseby’ and ‘on the scaffold in Whitehall’ – that ‘men who were . . . affected by it refused to submit to it’. In his journalism, Stephen was as happy to address an educated as he would have been to address an uneducated public. He wanted ‘scholars’ to be ‘men-

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of-the-world’, disliked ‘academic specialisation’ and what he described as Froude’s cult of original documents and welcomed the subtilized ‘science of history’ practised by Guizot, Tocqueville, Grote, Milman and Merivale, not least because it was not the unsubtilized science of history practised by Comte and Buckle. He sneered at ‘Gamaliels’ like Carlyle, Newman and Thomas Arnold for stirring up the enthusiasm of the young, was not surprised that the young fell back into ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘scepticism’ once they had been disillusioned, and deplored the tendency of philanthropists and the ‘Social Science Association’ to assume that, since it was the ‘better-off’ who profited by a society which kept the poor ‘ignorant and vicious’, it was the better-off who had to ensure that society would conduct a rescue operation. For himself, he was ‘content to take the world’ as he found it, had no time for ‘gratuitous lectures’ at Exeter Hall or the Young Men’s Christian Association, and was particularly insistent that the disinterested occupations were not better at supplying guarantees of virtue than occupations for which payment was made ‘in money . . . rank . . . or reputation’. Stephen was a critic of complacency and of the incompatibility between the John Bull content of the English character and the intellectual power of Bacon, Hobbes and Locke. He registered his admiration for Bentham and made it aggressively obvious that squeamishness about pain was a recent innovation which would not stop pain being ‘the strongest moral influence . . . in the world’. In identifying Liberalism with ‘normal assumptions’, he claimed that many of the assumptions of the 1860s were abnormal, that they would have to be reconstructed if indiscriminate progress was to be resisted and that the voices which were urging the ‘liberated working-man’ to ‘pull down’ the ‘monuments’ of his ‘disgrace’ were attempts to reduce him to prostration before democracy. His recommendations were that the ‘liberal . . . politician’ should teach – what Liberalism as an ‘aristocratic’ doctrine was fitted to teach – that never in modern England had ‘any one class of the community succeeded . . . in riding roughshod over the sentiments and interests of others’, and that Liberalism’s acid test would be its success, not so much in preventing revolution, which was not likely to happen, as in resisting the triviality with which working-class newspapers would deprive public life of that ‘high-minded management of public affairs’ characteristic of England preeminently among the nations. During the 1850s and 1860s, Stephen had read everything that could reasonably be read by a busy lawyer. He had described the struggle which had been going on from Byron onwards between a Liberalism which attacked ‘the whole order of things’ in politics, literature and religion and a resistance which emphasized the ‘restraints’ required by the ‘imperfections of human nature’, and had applied an eschatological savagery to the ‘easy-going’ theology which enabled a ‘multiplicity of social devices’ to drown out the ‘undying worm and unquenchable fire’. Steam-engines and cotton-mills ‘had their

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greatness’, but ‘life and death’ were ‘greater and older’, and it would be ‘revolting’ to the ‘moral sense’ and the ‘divine providence’ if men had ‘passed through six thousand years of trial and suffering’ in order to produce ‘a perpetual succession of comfortable shopkeepers’. There was, therefore, at the beginning of Stephen’s consideration of modern thought, a perspective on eternity which he associated with a ‘powerful political system’, the ‘composure and completeness’ of the Established Church, and the contribution it had made to the ‘traditional modes of thought and feeling’ through which Christianity had been mediated to Englishmen. He was against systematic theology, Coleridgean transcendentalism, the ‘pretentiousness’ of Nonconformity and the ‘childlike’ qualities of Roman Catholicism; and he gave blistering reminders that a Puseyite Church, run by a ‘minority of the clergy and . . . a small section of the laity remarkable principally for . . . a feminine turn of mind’, could not possibly become a national Church. In discussing Paley, Stephen had expressed the opinion that Paley’s was the only recent form of Christianity ‘worthy of the serious consideration of rational men’, that Paley and his school had been in every major respect Protestant, but that Protestantism, so far from being a ‘set of doctrines’, was a method for justifying Christianity – the method of ‘evidence’ so that, if it became ‘the common opinion of mankind’ that Christ did not ‘rise from the dead and ascend into heaven’, then ‘the great mass of normal Christians of all denominations would . . . quietly drop off and . . . leave it to . . . enthusiasts who would cease to allege any reason for their faith’. Theology, as Stephen repeatedly affirmed, was not designed ‘to satisfy curiosity’, and nor had any particular theology the sanction of God’s authority. Theology’s proper task, especially through prayer-books and articles of religion, was to assist worship, promote religious feeling and encourage ‘the practice of moral virtue’. Since there was ‘very little difference’ between an ‘average Unitarian’ and an ‘average member of Church of England’, the ‘unlearned’ ought, therefore, to ‘accept the religion of their time and country’ and ought not to be distressed by the ‘controversies’ which accompanied the ‘reorganization of opinions among the learned’. Stephen agreed that loss of belief in God’s existence and a ‘future state’ would ‘cast . . . a tremendous shadow . . . over . . . human life’. But theology was still a matter of probabilities, Christ’s divinity depended on the testimony of the disciples, and truth would only be arrived at when ‘the most improved methods of historical investigation’ replaced the clerical assumption that ‘the religious department’, alone among the ‘departments of thought’, ought to be ‘stationary’ where all others were ‘progressive’. This led him first to the conclusion that Nonconformity and Ultramontanism were both mistaken, then to the conclusion that Anglican ‘cowardice’ in dodging the issue about Colenso, and the tolerance of ‘mediocrity’ which distinguished the clerical

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profession from the other professions, required leadership from the laity – that ‘gentry’ in the ‘true and noble sense of the word’ which, through its ‘knowledge’ and ‘liberal sentiments’, would persuade the ‘commonalty’ to follow. By the 1860s, Stephen believed that the public was bored by the Oxford Movement and unimpressed by conversions to Rome. Having explained why Manning’s Essays on Religion and Literature were irreconcilable with ‘a sincere attachment to . . . English principles of government’, he added, after the proclamation of Papal Infallibility, that ‘States’ were ‘more honest’, their ‘objects’ more ‘rational’, and their ‘leading men . . . abler and wiser’, than ‘the leading men in Churches’, and that the point at issue between Infallibility and the authority of states divided ‘the Roman Catholic clergy and their adherents’ on the one hand from ‘the great mass of the educated . . . laity’, including ‘the leading statesmen of Germany, France and Italy’ on the other. Towards de Maistre as the major Ultramontane thinker, Stephen’s attitude was complicated. He mistrusted de Maistre’s preference for instinct and mystery, his failure to appreciate the religious character of the Enlightenment, and his insensitivity to the fact that, in announcing the ‘coming triumph’ of Catholicism at its nadir in 1796, he had been announcing a triumph which was to coincide with Christianity’s demotion into being a merely ‘tolerated’ system. But he not only found de Maistre stimulating, he also found him more stimulating than Newman, who was not a man-of-the-world, had a theory of tradition which was ‘clearly absurd’, and had avoided the only intelligible version of papal authority – that of ‘an infallible legislator’ in whom, however, it was impossible to believe since, if the Papacy was infallible, ‘modern civilization’ was both an ‘error’ and a ‘sin’.

In reflecting on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Stephen remarked on the ‘rapidly progressive rate’ at which the ‘civilized world’ had been thrown into a ‘single moral community’ since the French Revolution. In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, he showed in what ways this moral community was defective, and applied to the secular religions by which it was being plagued the antiseptic normality he had been abstracting from liberal Anglicanism. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity identified the revolutionary triad as the slogans of a religion, dissected Mill’s libertarianism as an example of it, and related two arguments to one another – the argument that Mill’s libertarian principle was incapable of being applied in practice and the argument that the ‘management of . . . life’ depended on the attitude that was taken to God and a ‘future state’. In discussing the first argument, Stephen stated that morality had to be ‘prohibitive’, that Mill’s principle would ‘condemn every existing system of

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morals’, and that the instances in which coercion had to be employed ‘for other purposes than . . . self-protection’ included the establishment, maintenance and alteration of morality, government, social institutions and religion. In discussing the second argument, he stated that faith was not ‘knowledge’, that it depended on ‘probabilities’, and, since probabilities included the possibility of error, that it required to be reconstructed ‘from age to age as circumstances changed’. The linking targets were Comte’s ‘Religion of Humanity’ for aiming to remove ‘all restraints’ on conduct by establishing ‘equality . . . fraternity . . . and general love’ all round and Seeley’s Ecce Homo for making Christ an ‘enthusiast for humanity’ than which ‘no more terrible enemy . . . or intolerable bore’ could be imagined. In the l860s Stephen had criticized Christianity more than he had criticized its enemies. Now he turned probability against them, criticizing Mill for an absolutism he had both admired and criticized in Bossuet, and exposing the ‘dishonesty’ of a ‘system of optimism’ which was merely a systemization of ‘excited feeling’.

Stephen’s criticism involved in the first place what he thought of as ‘fact’ – the fact that human nature was neither what Comte supposed nor was able to respond to what the Religion of Humanity asked of it; the fact that the ‘political and social changes’ which Mill admired Europe for making since the sixteenth century had been brought about by ‘force’, the fact that Mill’s injunction against the ‘coercive influence of public opinion’ proposed a principle which it was impossible to carry out. It then involved conclusions – that the progress of civilization would not ‘sublimate’ self-love into love of mankind, that the man who ‘worked . . . for himself . . . and his own advantage’ was more likely to produce happiness in others than a’Don Quixote’ who sacrificed ‘himself and his neighbours’ to the indefinite demands of humanity, and that no mercy should be shown to the assumption ‘held by many persons in these days’ that it was possible to ‘retain the morality . . . they liked after getting rid of the religion . . . they disbelieved’. Stephen distinguished Mill’s System of Logic and Principles of Political Economy, of which he approved, from On Liberty and Utilitarianism, of which he disapproved. He used Mill’s Subjection of Women to argue that women were not equal to men, that legislation which assumed that they were was trying to ‘make clumsy feet . . . handsome by the help of tight boots’, and that the establishment of marriage as a contract between equals would result in marriage being dissolved ‘at pleasure’. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity bore the marks of Indian autocracy. It argued that, though the ‘great mass of men’ were governed by restraints imposed by a ‘minority’, these were so ‘contentedly accepted by the majority’ that the majority ‘did not recognize them as restraints’. Neither the Comtean clerisy

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nor Mill’s élite had envisaged compulsion as necessary for effectiveness and, they were not only planning, therefore, to deprive mankind of the authority it wanted but were also making a nonsense of their own claim to wrest ‘spiritual power’ from ‘the priests’. Stephen agreed with Mill in wanting open discussion ‘of the great questions of theology . . . with complete freedom from legal restraints’. But he left no doubt about the ‘embarrassment to rational legislation’ that adoption of Mill’s principles would create, the scepticism that was likely to accompany ‘unlimited freedom of thought’, and the diminutions of ‘originality’ that were likely to accompany a democratic franchise. Stephen did not have Mill’s experience of disengaging from Bentham, but he did have the experience of observing human nature in the law courts. He reached the conclusion not only that ‘Society could not make silk purses out of sows’ ears’ but also that there were ‘plenty of ears in the world which no tanning could turn into even serviceable pig-skin’. More deliberately and paradoxically, he defended Pilate’s role in the Crucifixion, compared Pilate’s position to ‘that of an English Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab’ and implied, as against Mill, that Pilate had believed in good faith ‘on reasonable grounds’ that Christ was a threat to the ‘peace of Palestine’. In Stephen, there was as much bravado as in Carlyle and Salisbury, as well as the claim that neither the theory nor the practice of Liberalism had been a ‘mistake’. Yet in the end, Stephen tilted the balance, criticized the modern presumption against the ‘virtue of obedience’, and expected ‘a free Church in a free State’ to degrade the state as much as universal suffrage would invert ‘the true . . . relation between wisdom and folly’. If one asks what Stephen believed, one must bear in mind the very limited extent to which he committed himself. Even the minimum package of God’s existence and a ‘future state’ went further than he was willing to go by way of personal affirmation. Indeed, his most positive statements about religion were negative – that no ‘human creature’ could ‘strip his soul stark naked before another and . . . hold his head up afterwards’, that man was an ‘imprisoned spirit’ for whom language was so poor that poetry ‘seemed sometimes to say more than logic’, and that a generation ‘to whom the word God had no meaning’ might totally subvert the bases of morality. He evaded a monkish, benevolent or ‘mainly loving’ God, denied that men had ‘rights . . . even the right of existence’ as against God, and used words like awe, sternness and inflexibility to describe the law under which they lived. Christianity had a ‘tender’ as well as a ‘terrible’ side; but it was also problematical and even the gospel could not provide a ‘complete guide’ unless men were willing to become – what Stephen had no wish for them to become – ‘passionate Communists’ or enemies of the vast military expenditures necessary for the maintenance of ‘national independence’. In the end very little was left except the negative lessons – that no religion could be preserved without

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coercion, that coercion had to be willed if Christianity was to be preserved and that the public needed to be reminded that it could not follow both Mill and Christ. Stephen’s pessimism suggests a fellow-feeling with Acton, who at times in the twentieth century has been an exemplar of liberal pessimism. Acton ‘foresaw’ the demonstration which the twentieth century was to give of the tendency of ‘absolute power’ to ‘corrupt’ and has been used, especially in the United States, both to defend Catholic thought and learning against bureaucratic ecclesiastism and to justify a Cold War resistance to Communist totalitarianism. As a young man, he had three chief aims – to intrude the requirements of modern thought and learning into Catholicism, to acknowledge the moral shortcomings of historic Christianity and to prove not only that Catholicism and liberty were inseparable but also that they were threatened by Protestantism at least as much as by modern secularism. II Acton2 was of English and German descent, had a great-uncle who had been Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and was a Roman Catholic by birth and continuous subsequent conviction. He was a stepson of Lord Granville (Gladstone’s Foreign Secretary) and became a friend and admirer of Gladstone, who made him a peer in 1869. Most of his life, when it was not spent as a country gentleman in Bavaria, was spent in London or as a country gentleman in Shropshire until, seven years before his death, he was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Acton was born in 1834 and was at school at Oscott under Wiseman. Because he was a Roman Catholic, he could not go to Oxford or Cambridge, but went first to Edinburgh for private study and then to the University of Munich for six years with Döllinger. A period acquainting himself with American and European politics was followed by six years as MP for an Irish constituency, and a dozen years informing English Roman Catholics about the inconvenient truths he had absorbed in Munich. For the part he played in helping to edit The Rambler, The Home and Foreign Review, The Chronicle and The North British Review he was mistrusted by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England. For his role at the Vatican Council of 1870 as a lobbyist against Papal Infallibility, and for the letters he published about the Council, he may for a time have been in danger of excommunication. After 1870 Acton gave up contentious journalism, spent the next thirty years on weighty, powerful and extended review articles, and became closely 12

Sir John Edward Emerich Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902), educated Oscott and University of Munich. Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, 1895–1902. Author of Romische Briefe von Concil von Quirinus, 1870; The History of Freedom in Antiquity and The History of Freedom in Christianity, both 1877; Lectures on Modern History, 1906; Historical Essays and Studies, 1907; The History of Freedom and Other Essays, 1907; and Lectures on the French Revolution, 1910.

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involved in the establishment of the English Historical Review as an achievement of ‘scientific history’. After 1870, however, much of Acton’s steam was lost. He did not write much of his History of Freedom and nor did he publish the Lectures on Modern History and Lectures on the French Revolution which he delivered as Regius Professor in Cambridge. It was A. W. Ward who was in charge of the publication of the Cambridge Modern History which Acton had planned and edited and Figgis and Laurence who collected Acton’s lectures and essays after his death. By instinct as well as connection, Acton was a Whig. But he looked to Burke and Macaulay rather than to Fox, gave to the idea of freedom a cuttingedge against Protestantism and believed intensely in the possibility of an alliance between Christianity and historical knowledge. Even in the censorious, learned Acton of the 1880s and the 1890s, there was a suppressed intensity. In the young Acton, dogma and intensity sustained the duty to prove to the modern world that Catholicism was what it needed. When Acton arrived in Munich for study with Döllinger, his Whiggism had been innocent and enthusiastic. The doctrine of freedom he began to propound ten years later had moved on from the Whigs and doubted the genuineness of their interest in Catholic Emancipation. It admired ‘liberty’ as a Catholic achievement which Burke had understood in his Abridgement of English History, which Calhoun had borrowed in defending States’ rights in the United States and which Acton himself associated with the Teutonic races. The young Acton’s sympathies were Teutonic in the most conventional sense. The invaders of the Roman Empire, along with ‘the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans’, had been ‘the only makers of history . . . or . . . authors of advancement’, and the ‘spiritual freedom’ and system of law which had made the Church a self-governing corporation, had laid the foundation of ‘our happiness’ and ‘greatness’, and of Catholicism’s role as ‘the religion of the masses’. When Acton began writing at the age of twenty-four, he was helping to rescue Catholicism from the wreckage to which it had been reduced by the French Revolution. In the revival of mediaeval learning he found an influence as ‘comprehensive and penetrating’ as the revival of classical learning had been during the Renaissance, a ‘pilgrimage to the homes of our fathers’ and a proof that ‘the Christian notion of conscience’ demanded a ‘measure of political liberty’ known only in states that had passed through ‘the . . . mediaeval action’ of the church. This did not mean that the Church had not suffered from Catholic absolutism, or that the Inquisition had not acted as a Gallican ‘barrier’ to papal authority in Spain. It did mean, however, that the main enemy was Protestantism, not only because of the self-interested nature of its ‘toleration’ and forgeries more remarkable than any Catholic forgeries, but also because

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of its theology and the association it made between the tyranny of the ‘upper classes’ over the ‘lower classes’ and the ‘unmitigated despotism’ of the State. The full weight of Acton’s censure was brought to bear on the contrast between Maryland, where ‘Catholic emigrants had established for the first time in modern history a government in which religion was free’, and Massachusetts where ‘the Puritans . . . had revived with greater severity the penal laws of the mother country’. In Continental Protestantism, Acton saw an infection which had made Counter-Reformation Catholicism more intolerant than it should have been. In relation to England his view was that Reformation despotism had failed to achieve its ‘full development’ and that the ‘fusion of the races’, the ‘abolition of villeinage’ and the system of representative government had been established so securely under the influence of the Church in the Middle Ages that, in the midst of England’s ‘apostasy’, it had been possible to preserve ‘Catholic forms’ and the ‘Catholic spirit’ in Church and State. In the United States, Acton drew comfort from Calhoun before 1861 and from Robert E. Lee after 1865, while criticizing the South for its crude insistence on Negro inequality and the North for its crude hatred of aristocratic inequality. In Europe, he hated the Holy Alliance as well as Communism and felt about Cavour, ‘though a noble and an enemy of democracy’, what he felt about ‘most . . . continental Liberals and . . . most men who [were] not religious’ – that they endowed the State with ‘indefinite power’, treated individual rights as subject to the State’s ‘supreme authority’ and found the sequestration of Church property objectionable only because a sequestrated clergy, emancipated from the State, would be as undesirably dependent on popular sentiment as it would be on the Papacy. Most of all, he disliked nationalism – not the secure, well-established nationalism of the English – but ‘the theory of nationality’ which made the State commensurate with the nation, eliminated all intermediate authorities, and denied the belief, in which ‘Christianity rejoiced’, that ‘the presence of different nations under the same sovereign’ resembled ‘the independence of the Church in the State’. Acton’s judgement of the English polity was that it was ‘representative’ rather than ‘democratic’, was the work of the Church as well as the monarchy and was permitting the aristocracy to play a continuing role in public life. He shared Gladstone’s acceptance of the English social structure, assumed that ‘education should be fitted . . . to the special character and occupation of the several ranks to which each man belonged’, and associated freedom not with majoritarian democracy but with ‘property, descent and merit’. In an article in 1860, the Volunteer Movement was a symbol of co-operation between the aristocracy and the people, a way of avoiding conscription and a large standing army, and a guarantee of English liberties in face of the threat presented by Louis Napoleon and the steam-warship. Acton condemned nearly all absolutisms, denied that either kings or popes

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had had ‘the right of disposing of the lives of their subjects’ and left little doubt about the objectionable nature of the approval given by Popes and Catholics to the Massacre of St Bartholomew. He seemed, however, to condone intolerance as a ‘religious duty’ when it was thrust on the Church ‘by the exigencies of half-organized societies’, and he sketched a complicated, and faintly fraudulent, distinction between ‘Protestant establishments’, in which ‘the will of the State’ was ‘independent of the condition of the community’ and Catholic establishments, in which ‘the religion of the country’ and a ‘unity of moral consciousness’ were ‘founded on a precedent unity of spiritual belief’. Acton no more believed in freedom for its own sake than Mill did. But whereas Mill wanted freedom because it would subvert Christianity, Acton wanted the ‘supreme ecclesiastical authority’ to be ‘independent of political control’ because, in the absence of independence, Christianity would be subjected to ‘liberalism’, ‘arbitrary authority’ and Terror as ‘the organ of the popular will’. Though he felt a Free Church confidence in religious liberty, he differed from Free Churchmen in identifying the Papacy’s temporal power as its guarantor and, during the progress of Italian Unification, intended only a temporary change in agreeing with Döllinger that it might have for a time to be suspended. He added, in an age in which ‘the State throughout the Continent . . . tolerated no immunities’ and Piedmont itself was an anti-clerical ‘tyranny’, that the Pope could not live in a united Italy and, if he was to go on giving the religious guidance his predecessors had been giving since the Council of Trent, must be ‘the free ruler of an independent territory’ protected by international law and a European guarantee. Acton’s politics were a Catholic politics which feared popular dictatorship whether in Cavour’s Italy, Louis Napoleon’s France or Lincoln’s America. He also believed that freedom of thought was necessary for the survival of any Catholicism which would be likely to absorb modern knowledge without being subverted by it. Acton may have exaggerated tactically in recommending modern knowledge to English Catholics. But he meant what he wrote in praising Möhler, Kulm and Döllinger for denying the finality of the Bible and of doctrine, assumed genuinely that a ‘dogmatic theology’ could show ‘each doctrine preserving its original substance in growing into its present form’, and undoubtedly believed that it was ‘the Hegelian philosophy’ rather than scholarship or ‘critical method’ which was ‘the great vice of the Tubingen school’. He followed Döllinger in treating learning, wherever it originated, as the leading characteristic of the German intellectual revolution and, in his earliest methodological discourses, supposed himself to be contributing towards a ‘scientific history’ in which ‘didactic purposes’ would be avoided. Yet he also believed that ‘scientific history’, though it would subvert Catholic as well as Protestant myth, would in the long run confirm Catholic rather than Protestant truth.

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In making Catholicism relevant to the English context, Acton was conscious of the trail which had been blazed by the Oxford Movement. He was even more conscious of the obstacles from Protestant respectability, from the materialism and flawed learning of proponents of infidelity (like Buckle) and from that insensitivity to the ‘supernatural’ which had made Goldwin Smith a prejudiced guide to Catholic history. He shared Mill’s belief that the age of coercion was over and, ‘at the present stage of European civilization’, that restraints on ‘reading and publication’ did ‘more harm than good’. But he did not share either Mill’s fear that restraints might ‘keep out the truth’, or the Protestant belief that ‘every individual had a moral right to construct his religious creed for himself’. Acton took Mill seriously, but as an enemy more than as a friend. He pointed out that the principle of non-amenability to society did not preclude ‘amenability . . . to a higher tribunal’. He rejected Mill’s characterization of Christian morality as ‘negative . . . passive and . . . selfish’ and he asserted the indispensability of eternal life, a ‘preference of the heavenly to the earthly’, and ‘humility’ – an un-Protestant virtue – as consisting at least in part in ‘imitation of the lowly and suffering life of Jesus’. In all these respects, he was vigorously polemical, demanding of English Catholics an end of recusant withdrawal, a sensitivity to the achievements of German Catholicism and the development of a Catholic literature which would make them independent of infidel, as well as of Protestant, intellectuality. Acton professed contempt for English Protestantism’s intellectual weakness and welcomed both latitudinarianism and Puseyism as challenges by which Catholics might be stimulated. His enthusiasm was proselytizing and demanding, and was offensively critical of the ‘narrow-minded indolence’ with which too many Catholic teachers ‘defended their own false opinions’ under the pretence of ‘defending the faith’. He was greatly discouraged to find that Cardinal Wiseman mistrusted both The Rambler and The Home and Foreign Review. The decision to close The Home and Foreign Review because of the undesirability of a ‘Catholic journalist . . . persistently . . . thwarting the will of the Holy See’, did not prevent Acton arguing that ‘ethical and intellectual’, as distinct from ‘spiritual’, offices did not belong to the Church ‘exclusively or peculiarly’, that many of these offices were now being discharged by ‘science and society’, and that the Church should move on from Tridentine ‘intolerance’ to absorb and understand the significance of historical and scientific knowledge. Acton praised Ultramontanism for the success it had had against Protestantism and Enlightenment. But he accused it of theorizing the woodenness of ecclesiastical thought, expressed disquiet about its links with the Holy Alliance and made of de Maistre a lay symbol of the reactionary desire to restore the ‘common interest’ between Church and State which had fallen before the ‘common foe’ in 1789. In denying, at the beginning of a decade which

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was to see the proclamation of Papal Infallibility, that Infallibility was an attribute of the ‘political system of the Popes’, he knew that Ultramontanism had been taken up by both the Pope and the Jesuits. He also knew that Catholics in German universities had had the experience, which the authorities in Rome lacked, of working alongside Protestants, infidels and teachers who ‘had no religious object’, that the German experience was that Catholicism could win a ‘competition of knowledge’, and that the superiority of Catholic scholarship was so incontestable, and ‘every part’ of the Catholic system so ‘equally certain’ and incapable of being ‘destroyed by the progress of knowledge’, that it was the Church’s business to speak ‘in harmony with existing ideas’ and in the language of ‘each age and nation’. ‘An assembly of the most learned clergy in Europe would, in approaching the rulers of the Church’, he wrote with the irony of innocence about the Munich Congress of 1864, be sustained by a prestige not easy to resist, while the men of science would feel its interests safe in their hands. Their appeal for freedom, instead of exciting insubordination and resistance to the decrees of the Holy See, would come as a constitutional remonstrance against dangerous restrictions; while those limits which the most profound scholars and original thinkers were ready to observe could not well be rejected by anyone who claimed to understand the hierarchy of literary merit. (J. Acton, The Munich Congress, in Home and Foreign Review, January 1864, p. 238)

At the Munich Congress – an ‘epoch’, Acton believed, in the ecclesiastical history both of Germany and of the Catholic world – Döllinger was to be central. It was Döllinger’s leadership which would establish that Catholics ‘could no longer shut themselves out from contact with the world’, Döllinger who would relieve Catholics of the ‘scandal’ of ‘questioning too closely the limits of authority’, Döllinger who would show how to work out scientific and political problems on ‘scientific and political principles’. It was Döllinger, too, whose Rectoral Address at Munich four years later was to provide the occasion for Acton’s formal encomium on the Humboldtian university with its transcendence of professional and vocational education, its emphasis on the progressive as opposed to the stationary nature of knowledge, and its belief in the indispensability of specialization, scientific magazines and the modern apparatus of academic self-importance. Acton referred often to the difference between popular Catholicism and the esoteric Catholicism of the scientific theologian. He was conscious of the ‘illimitable power’ which the ‘uneducated mass of Catholics’ ascribed to the Pope, of the ‘widening chasm’ which separated ‘the aristocracy of knowledge’ from ‘the democracy of simple faith’, and of the ‘sin, error and fraud’ which had historically accompanied the definition of dogma. He was even more aware of the conflict between Conciliarism and Papal Infallibility, of the difficulty he (wrongly) expected Infallibility to create for converts in the long run, and of the importance of university learning as a substitute for the Councils of the historic Church.

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Acton rejected the denominational university in theory, while accepting it in practice, and deduced from the success achieved by German Catholic theology in confronting German Protestant theology, the undesirability of subjecting theological enquiry to ecclesiastical control. A great deal of the academic history of the next hundred years was contained in his approving paraphrase of Döllinger’s belief that ‘the same university should have more than one faculty of theology’. Stuffed up as he was with Döllinger, Acton found it offensive that anyone could set aside historical study as ‘useless or dangerous’, or could wish to render theology incapable of pursuing ‘those original studies which were needed for its advancement’. His judgement, made early in the 1860s and repeated with increasing energy throughout the 1860s, was that these attitudes, of which Manning’s support for the Index and the Syllabus were examples, were out of touch with the ‘serious culture’ of ‘the new epoch’. In The North British Review in July 1869, he acclaimed Gladstone’s Irish Church Bill as an example of what ‘the new epoch’ demanded and committed himself to the ‘new spirit’ which, having already ‘established its ascendancy’ in the natural sciences and political economy, would transfer religious questions ‘from the region of denominational controversy to the sphere of scientific discussion’. Fifteen months later, also in The North British Review, he stated, of the Vatican Council’s support for Papal Infallibility that, although its opponents had lost the vote, they had won the argument, and that the victors’ success had been achieved by political management, a failure of nerve and sympathy for the Pope’s resistance to Italian Unification. After the Vatican Council, Acton appears to have remained a Roman Catholic and to have wished for England’s conversion, while renouncing the attempt to influence Church policy either in England or in Rome. His writing does credit to the impartiality and disinterestedness which he believed in as the remedy for sectarian and partisan history. But there is a difficulty – that, though religion may impregnate impartiality and disinterestedness and be strengthened in the process, it may equally well be impregnated by them and may disappear in the process. One can see why Trevor-Roper admires Acton, but one could equally apply to Acton and in either direction the force of Zaehner’s judgement that the Roman Catholic Church, which nineteenth-century ‘progressive opinion’ had expected to collapse ‘under the weight of its conservatism’, had survived because ‘the . . . faithful had gone on going to Mass’ through all the shocks which the French Revolution had created around them and all the theological games which ‘desiccated mandarins’ had played above them. Acton’s sympathies were reactionary in discussing politically backward societies, associating liberty with property and exposing the setbacks which he believed liberty to have suffered since 1517. As a good European, he was deeply mistrustful not only of Erastianism but also of the connection which Sir Henry Maine established between Caesarism and democracy.

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III Maine3 was a distinguished person who became Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University and was Legal Member of the Calcutta Council, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford and Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Before going to Calcutta, he wrote a famous book – Ancient Law – and followed this with others which set the tone for a phase of thinking about law and religion. In Popular Government he expressed as openly as Stephen had expressed a decade earlier the fears felt by high-Victorian Liberals about the impact of democracy. In Popular Government Maine acknowledged both Stephen’s and Acton’s help. He made much of de Tocqueville, of the conservatism of the Federalist Papers and of the American Supreme Court as a novel way of making democracy ‘tolerable’. He rescued Bentham from the ‘advanced Liberals or Radicals’ of the 1880s, found Mallet du Pan ‘one of the few persons who had understood the French Revolution’, and reacted to the 1884 Reform Act as Fitzjames Stephen had reacted to the 1867 Reform Act, criticizing the ‘hypothesis of a . . . system of Rights and Duties . . . antecedent to all positive institutions’ and deploring replacement of the principle that rulers were the ‘rightful guides of the whole population’ by the principle that ‘governments held their powers by delegation from the community’. Maine may have been reacting to the industrial unrest of the 1880s. But his chief arguments were that government was being threatened by both the ‘parcel of dynamite’ and the ‘nitro-glycerine . . . bomb’, and by the ‘religious intensity’ with which the ‘Irreconcilables’ were actuating ‘crime and disorder’ in Ireland. He expected the democratic system to destroy liberty and prevent the State compelling ‘obedience to law’, to establish a reign of ignorance in which the democratic consecration of average opinion would be as bad as the Roman Catholic consecration of average opinion, and to put an end to ‘scientific thinking’ and ‘reforming legislation’ as it would have done, if given the chance, to the industrial and agricultural revolutions. Maine feared the ‘military’, of whom he stated that there was ‘probably no country except the United States’ which it could not ‘control’ in favourable circumstances. He was even more fearful of the plebiscite, the mandate and the caucus, and the power these had to subvert the competition, inequality and devotion to work on which the world’s wealth depended. He had no time for the ‘wire-puller’s’ belief in the inevitability of universal suffrage, he 13

Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822–88), educated Christ’s Hospital and Pembroke College, Cambridge. Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, 1847–55, Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University, 1862–9, Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, 1869–79, Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge, 1887–8 and Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1877–88. Author of Roman Law and Legal Education, 1856; Ancient Law, 1861; Address . . . By . . . Vice-Chancellor of University of Calcutta, 1866; Village Communities in the East and West, 1871; Letters on the Early History of Institutions, 1875; Dissertations on Early Law and Custom, l883; and Popular Government, 1885.

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pictured democratic politicians listening nervously ‘at the end of a speakingtube’ to ‘the suggestions of a lower intelligence’, and he predicted that popular government would be as much subject to flattery as monarchy had been, while being no more capable than monarchy of responding to man’s permanent needs and nature. In contrasting the modern desire for change with man’s immemorial immobility in Africa and the Muslim world, in China (but not among the ‘undoubtedly feebler Japanese’), in India (except among the minority who had been ‘educated at the feet of English politicians’) and (supremely) ‘among women’, he argued that, though Britain had led the resistance to change in the past, the 1830 revolution in France had set off a period of ‘continuous’ British legislation unknown in the eighteenth century and ‘very rare in the history of the world’. Maine believed in ordered progress and constitutional government, wished to avoid questions that were ‘disputed between the two great English parties’, and affirmed that, even though England had adopted democratic assumptions, its legal system had not adopted them. In Popular Government, he restated what he had stated in Ancient Law – that Western European civilization was a ‘rare exception’ to the truth that ‘“the greatest part of mankind . . . had . . . never shown a particle of desire that its civil institutions should be improved”’. Maine share Fitzjames Stephen’s and Bryce’s interest in codification. He hoped for a ‘Comparative Jurisprudence’ to expose the tortuousness of the English legal system and to apply history’s inflexible order to the demystification of law in the way in which it had already been applied to the demystification of philology, mythology and religion. On the way to established eminence, he acquired not only German scholarship but also Indian experience from both ends of the historical spectrum. Maine’s understanding of contemporary India was that the reconstruction of Indian society ‘upon a purely Native model’ which he attributed to the Government of India since the Mutiny, was impracticable and that British power had unavoidably to ‘dissolve the ideas and social forms beneath it’. In his understanding of primitive India, he owed much to Bunsen and Max Müller, and to the charting of India’s social and landowning arrangements which had been effected by the East India Company and the Government of India in the seventy years before his arrival. His principal conclusions were that Hindu law, so far from being Austinian, had merely declared ‘what had always been’ and had known nothing of rent, competition and individual rights; and that the Hindu village had been a despotism of ‘paterfamiliases’ and ‘representative’ elders who had bound the village together by age, authority to ‘declare the law’, and control of the rules which regulated relations between family and communal cultivation. Maine thought it important to dismiss Rousseau. He also wished to show that primitive law had not been the ‘caprice’ of a king or the ‘customary’

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knowledge of a ‘caste’ or ‘sacerdotal college’, that, in ‘the infancy . . . of social brotherhood’, there had been little distinction between crime, tort and sin, and that the law of persons, property, inheritance and contract in the modern sense had scarcely existed. Where one of the leading features of ‘modern’ law was the permission it gave men to ‘create . . . social positions’ for themselves, one of the leading features of ancient law had been to fix men’s ‘social positions . . . irreversibly at . . . birth’. It was, he claimed, not until the present generation in Western Europe that all ‘ties between man and man’ had acquired the character of that ‘free agreement’ of responsible individuals which had accompanied the replacement of ‘Status’ by ‘contract’. Maine felt none of Marx’s sourness about contract. But neither did he share political economy’s self-congratulation. Political economists should not only examine, instead of abusing, the ‘half-conscious revulsion’ mankind felt for political economy when applied to the family or the group, they should also recognize that the great mass of men in all past civilizations, and the great mass of men in contemporary England, if given their heads, would do whatever they could to undermine it. Like Bryce, Fitzjames Stephen and Lecky, Maine caught the middle-class moment, when aristocratic power was fading and working-class power was only beginning to arrive, when the liberation which had been achieved from the primitive and feudal was being matched by constructive achievements in science and knowledge, and when jurisprudence and a proselytizing Liberalism in politics and culture were registering the subtlety and subterfuge with which society was reconciling itself to the economic revolution of the previous hundred years. Maine mistrusted asceticism and Roman Catholicism, gave a cautious imprimatur to Bunsen’s and Max Müller Aryanism and shared their dislike of the influence which Brahminism had had on Hinduism. He underlined the difference between Western legal codes, like the Roman Code, which had disassociated law from religion, and the legal codes of ‘Eastern societies’, including Hindu society, where ‘religious oligarchies’ had used their authority to teach their view of what the law ought to be, and he unearthed a normal type of law and custom from behind Brahminical jurisprudence in much the way in which Bunsen and Max Müller had unearthed a normal type of Vedism from behind Brahminical religion. Maine shared Stephen’s sympathy for the ‘despotic autocracy’ of the Government of India but anticipated an uphill struggle against the ‘superstitions’ about diet, caste and pollution that were prevalent in contemporary Hinduism. How he would have interpreted the announcements of progress with which China and Japan were to convulse themselves in the century after his death, is far from certain. What is certain is that, along with a deafening silence about contemporary religion, he was beating as unwilling a retreat as Dean Inge was to beat from mid-Victorian optimism.

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IV Like Maine, Inge had doubts about the modern world, mistrusted its attitude to Liberalism, and believed that ‘almost every department of mental activity’ was threatened by the ‘democratisation of thought’ which the indelible élitism of the natural sciences alone had resisted. On the other hand, Inge was an expressive defender of Christianity, while believing that ‘the apples of Sodom’ were eating away at it, and that ages of prosperity were ‘less penetrating’ than ages of ‘agony’. He denied that Christianity was élitist. He did not deny that, in claiming ‘the whole man’, it was ‘too stern’ and ‘dynamical’ to be acceptable to the ‘multitudes who were [only] nominally Christian’. Inge adopted the contrast between the ‘Palestinian gospel’, the ‘sacerdotal magic’ which Catholicism had taken over from paganism, and the Catholic Church as a political achievement of ‘classical antiquity’. He contrasted Catholicism as a ‘servile’ religion with Protestantism as a ‘free’ religion, and the ‘well-organized’ religion of Latin Christendom with the ‘fumbling uncertainty’ of post-Reformation Christendom. For the future, he looked to a ‘new type of Christianity’ emerging from the ‘vigour . . . and . . . earnestness’ of English, German and Dutch Protestantism.

At Eton and at King’s College, Cambridge, Inge4 was an accomplished classical scholar and wrote a prize essay on Christianity in Rome under the Caesars. After an abortive attempt at schoolteaching, again at Eton, he became a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, where he taught classics, began a serious study of philosophy, and published his first real book – Christian Mysticism – when he was thirty-nine. As a scholar and public figure, and probably as a person, Inge was a late developer. He wrote voluminously about religion in his forties and early fifties; it was not until his sixties that he began a career as a newspaper columnist for Beaverbrook Newspapers which continued, along with much other journalism, until within six years of his death at the age of ninety-four, predicting for popular audiences between 1920 and 1950 a ‘shaking of civilization’ which was also being predicted by Spengler, Keyserling, Huizinga, Berdyaev, Toynbee, Michael Roberts, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Dawson. 14

Very Rev. William Ralph Inge (1860–1954), educated Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, 1888–1905, Vicar of All Saints Ennismore Gardens, 1905–7, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, 1907–11, Dean of St Pauls, 1911–34. Author of Society in Rome under the Caesars, 1888; Christian Mysticism, 1899; Faith and Knowledge, 1904; Studies of English Mystics, 1906; Truth and Falsehood in Religion, 1906; Personal Idealism and Mysticism, 1907; Faith, 1909; Speculum Animae, 1911; The Church and the Age, 1912; Types of Christian Saintliness, 1915; The Philosophy of Plotinus, 1917–18; Outspoken Essays, 1919 and 1922; Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion, 1924; England, 1926; The Lay Thoughts of a Dean, 1926; Protestantism, 1927; Christian Ethics and Modern Problems, 1930; More Lay Thoughts of a Dean, 1931; God and the Astronomers, 1933; A Pacifist in Trouble, 1939; and The End of an Age, 1948.

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Inge’s valedictory utterances in the 1940s were comminatory. Hayek’s ‘great book . . . The Road to Serfdom’ recalled the ‘self-reliance’ of the past and the Beveridge Report the ‘mischievous’ desire of official thinking to ‘stimulate the already excessive birthrate of the slums’. There were many statements of the view that England contained a large amount of ‘social refuse’ which, though eugenically unsuitable, had had ‘more than . . . its . . . share’ of children. In the late 1940s, Inge’s tone and manner were at variance with the tone and manner of the Attleean-Anglican consensus of Tawney and Temple. In the 1920s, he was less of an oddity and in certain respects resembled Henson, who was both a bishop and one of the most effective preachers and polemicists in the Church of England.

Henson5 was the son of an Evangelical (with Plymouth Brethren connections). After a Tractarian phase as a young man, he became a leading antiCatholic who caused offence, as Inge caused offence, by his ‘rationalism’ and ‘individualism’, and by the assumption that infidelity could not be resisted, as he accused Gore and the Tractarians of supposing it could be resisted, by ‘driving a wedge’ between ‘the Church’ and ‘the Nation’. Henson read widely but was not a scholar in the modern sense. Nor was he a public schoolboy at a time when it mattered (in Oxford in the 1880s). He mistrusted Gore and the Talbots as aristocratic radicals (while being on good terms with Gore privately), was suspicious of the ‘public-school conception’ of ‘the gentleman’, and as late as 1940, believed that ‘rank and station’ mattered more in Britain than ‘reason’ could ‘justify’ or religion ‘condone’. Henson was impressed by the poverty he observed as a parish priest in Birkenhead and Barking. But he rejected easy remedies and sneered, like Inge, at sacerdotal attempts to compete with the Labour Party for ‘the allegiance of the masses’. By the 1920s he was invoking Alfred Marshall in support of the claim that ‘no Socialistic scheme yet advanced’ would enable the ‘real incomes of the manual labour class’ to increase as much as they had done ‘recently’. In Tawney’s and Lansbury’s influence on the Archbishops’ report on Christianity and Industrial Problems, he had a Liberal’s sense of the 15

Rt. Rev. Herbert Hensley Henson (1863–1947), educated Broadstairs and Oxford University (non-collegiate). Fellow of All Souls College, 1884–91 and 1896–1947. Parish clergyman, then Rector of St Margaret’s, Westminster, 1900–12. Dean of Durham, 1912–17. Bishop of Hereford, 1917–20 and of Durham 1920–39; In retirement, Churchill’s candidate to be a Canon of Westminster in 1940. Author of Apostolic Christianity, 1898; ed. Church Problems, 1900; Cross-bench Views of Current Church Questions, 1902; Notes on Popular Rationalism, 1904; Christian Marriage, 1907; The National Church, 1908; The Liberty of Prophesying, 1909; Westminster Sermons, 1910; Wartime Sermons, 1915; Anglicanism, 1921; Church and Parson in England, 1927; The Book and the Vote, 1928; Christian Morality, 1936; The Church of England, 1939; Last Words in Westminster Abbey, 1941; Retrospect of an Unimportant Life, 1942–50, and Bishoprick Papers, 1946.

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‘suicide’ of a trading and industrial nation. From the ‘credulousness’ of the strikers and the ‘un-trustworthiness’ of their leaders during the general strike in 1926, he deduced the probability that ‘considerate employers and honest workmen’ would be submerged as ‘traditional Christian morality’ and ‘individual responsibility’ were swept aside by ‘class war’. His message to the newly enfranchized and educated ‘multitudes’ was that, since direct action to produce a ‘perfect society’ would lead to a diminution of freedom, the individual’s ‘conscience and . . . civic franchises’ should be directed rather at resisting the sensuality, cynicism and urban frivolity which were ‘the most formidable obstacles to Christianity’. Henson identified apostolic Christianity with episcopacy rather than the ‘invisible Church’ and praised the ‘freehold’ which had made a non-professional, theologically ignorant, married Anglican clergy independent of ‘parishioners . . . patrons and . . . bishops’. At the same time, he encouraged inter-communion with Nonconformists, caused offence by his willingness to preach in Dissenting churches, and made a point of trying to remove the obstacles which Anglicans had put in the way of dissenting education. Henson was an instinctive establishmentarian for whom the Establishment guaranteed a Christian presence in the nation’s life. He seems to have decided, however, during the First World War, that disestablishment was inevitable and, where Gore wanted to use it in order to make the Church of England part of the Catholic Church, wanted to unite all the Reformed Churches into a national Protestant Church. When parliament rejected the Revised Prayer Book in 1928, he began to regret the Church’s spiritual subordination to democracy and the ‘secular’ state, and to anticipate a future in which, unless there was agreement with both parliament and Dissent, there might be punitive disendowment, a ‘rift’ between Christianity and civilization, and renewal of the ‘isolation, conflict . . . and . . . persecution’ that Christians had suffered after 1789 and 1917. Henson dodged the Suffragette question, regretted the loss of those ‘reticences, deferences and disciplines which had once been regarded as the necessary protections of female virtue’, and deplored the effect on sexual morality of the ‘so-called emancipation of women’ during the First World War. In drawing attention to Christ’s opposition to divorce, he did not attribute to Christ a legalistic view of marriage and he declined to support any simple view of its ‘indissolubility’. In arguing that the disciplining of the sexual instinct through marriage could be achieved best by disengagement from the sexual morality of the past, he stipulated, nevertheless, that contraceptives should not weaken either ‘self-control’ or the ‘due fulfilment of parentage’. Henson’s Christ had been a normal Galilean, had lacked culture and education and had accepted the morality of the common people. It was Christianity’s business to include ‘whatever in the world’s life’ was ‘ethically sound’ and to apply this principle to a larger area of human action than had

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been available in first-century Palestine. Henson borrowed Cunningham’s view that Christianity had no ‘essential’ association with any ‘specific type of economic organization’ and achieved public notoriety by denouncing the atrocities committed by the Peruvian-Amazon rubber company in the Putumayo district of Peru in 1912. In England, by contrast, he admired the average army officer, approved of patriotism when it combined ‘love of country’ with ‘love of the human race’ and, after being a conventional admirer of the League of Nations, which had its ‘main, perhaps its only, support in the Christianised sections of European Society’, differed from Inge in supporting the 1939 war as a war against barbarism. In aiming to restore Christianity to normality, Henson was willing to accommodate doubt, especially about the Virgin Birth, and to underline the links between ‘creed and conduct’. He admired Mark Pattison and F. W. Robertson more than he admired Hoskyns’s Fourth Gospel, wished to prevent the ‘moral obtuseness’ of theologians reducing theology to a ‘logomachy’ and was the object of a concerted assault on the heretical character of his own theology after his nomination to the See of Hereford in 1918. Henson was contentious theologically and was especially offensive to Tractarians. But, though he disliked the denigration of modern civilization which he found in Middleton Murry and Bishop Bell, he shared Gore’s fear that secularization was replicating the suicide, sexual perversion, self-indulgence, occultism, spiritualism, contempt for liberty, oppression of minorities and political cynicism which had been the most deplorable features of the Roman Empire in decline. Henson was scarcely a heroic figure. But he had a sure sense of the age he was living in; he kept his head where C. S. Lewis was to lose his; and he avoided most of Inge’s social rancorousness.

Like Henson’s, Inge’s Christ had had principles rather than a ‘code of social legislation’, and had provided no justification for the ‘religious demagogues’ who were denouncing capitalists, glorifying trade unions and ‘egging on municipal councils to feats of fantastic extravagance’. Christ’s language was a problem, especially his language about the rich. But Christ had been neither a Socialist, a Communist nor a Tolstoyan, had judged great wealth an insuperable obstacle to salvation only when it was corrupted into ‘mammonworship’, and could be interpreted as subscribing to the view that ‘all acquisition . . . should be the exchange-value for some service rendered’. In modern England he would naturally have expected the rich to do ‘unpaid work’ for society and would have agreed that, in its ‘nobler’ variations, the ‘aristocratic type of personal excellence’ had so much more in common with the democratic type of personal excellence than either had with their ‘corrupt’ variations that the affinity between the ‘high-minded aristocrat’ and the

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‘high-minded democrat’ might unite ‘gardeners and bricklayers, and bankers and clergymen’ in the necessary attempt to control ‘the passions and aspirations of the mob’. Before the 1914 war, Inge believed in the Christian duty to ‘break down class barriers’. After the war, he began to complain that the best had been ‘selected for destruction’, that the financial limitation of families practised by the ‘upper and middle classes’ and the ‘skilled artisans’ had not been matched by any parallel limitation among the ‘thoughtless ranks of unskilled labour’, and that emigration, family-planning and State action were imperative if ‘natural’ selection was to be replaced by ‘rational’ selection. Like the MiddleClass Union and other similar bodies which became active during the closing years of the Lloyd-George Coalition, Inge was the self-appointed spokesman of the ‘professional classes’ whose eugenic superiority was being destroyed by taxation directed expressly against them. He recognized as a chief cause of upheaval the ‘aristocracy of labour’, which, however, after ‘winning its privilege of exploiting the community’, would become a ‘conservative class’ and ‘prevent others from sharing . . . in that privilege’. What he feared was the ‘rotten human material’ in the ‘large parasitic class’ beneath, which was being encouraged to breed more quickly than other classes by the doles politicians were paying it in order to ‘buy off revolution’. The political problem of the early 1920s as Inge understood it was that there were too many Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Jews in the higher reaches of English government, that syndicalists were a Leninist élite, some of whom were ‘imbecile or . . . neurotic’, and that the State Socialism of the Webbs, though a barrier against syndicalism, would ‘increase bureaucratic regimentation’. This was the hostile side of Inge’s politics – the side for which democracy ‘dissolved communities into individuals and collected them again into mobs’. There was also, however, a positive side which praised the ‘masses’ for their conduct during the war and claimed that the classic liberal emphasis on freedom and the classic conservative emphasis on order were beginning to coincide. Inge praised the Victorian achievement and defended the Victorian middle class against Matthew Arnold. But he had no regrets. The ‘canker of industrialism’ was dying, its ‘hideous towns’ were disappearing, and there was no need to revive them. He attacked ‘consumptionism’ and the ‘fetishism of commodities’; he wrote as nostalgically as Leavis and D. H. Lawrence about the disappearance of the ‘craftsman’; and he adverted to the truths which ‘the East had to teach . . . the West’ about the protection of the environment and the exhaustion of the planet. By the 1930s, unlike Henson, he was a pacifist critic of British involvement in Continental entanglements, found ‘more to admire than to blame’ in Nazi Germany (while criticizing the persecution of the Jews), and accounted for Hitler and Mussolini as intelligible reactions to

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Bela Kun in Hungary and the Red Terror in Riga. Of the Spanish Civil War he wrote that ‘lying and suppression of the truth’ had characterized English public discussion and that Franco was a reaction against the ‘senseless cruelty’ of ‘Anti-Christ’. In all this, he was expressing a more intense and apocalyptic version of opinions he had expressed in England in 1926. In England, Inge called on the upper and middle classes to act as a ‘poor aristocracy’ – a Samurai, as he had called them earlier, which would be less distant from the people than the eighteenth-century aristocracy had been. From this point of view, England was a celebration of the English character, with its impatience of ‘discipline . . . and restraint’, its hatred of both Machiavellianism and force, and its love of ‘fair play’. The English were cool, prudent and practical, had become more ‘reckless and light-hearted’ during the 1914 war than the Puritans would have wished, and in the 1920s were becoming more resistant than previously to the Protestant work ethic. Even if ‘faddism’ and ‘eccentricity’, and laziness and arrogance, had been English peculiarities (until the Industrial Revolution and the Boer War respectively), it was still important that it was the Englishman’s sweetness, justness and boyishness which Santayana had admired in England’s conduct as ‘ruler of the world’. England half-suggested – as Santayana had half-suggested – that the historic English type was threatened by a ‘new and dangerous type’ which had grown up in the industrial cities and lacked that ‘spirit of the gentleman’ – ‘the lay religion of the English’ – which, with all its ‘faults and defects’, was one of the most admirable in western civilization. The question that arises is what had this to do with Christianity, or rather, what had it to do with the Church of England? In England, Inge said very little about the Church of England, though it was the only Church which represented the ‘spirit of a gentleman . . . on the religious side’. It was evident, however, that he was beginning to doubt, even when he said the opposite, whether his type of Anglicanism was going to prevail against the ritualistic and Anglo-Catholic campaign to ‘drag’ the Church of England away from its ‘history and traditions’. The future Inge had not envisaged for the Church of England in the first decade of the century was an Anglo-Catholic future in which the urban clergy would prevail over the rural clergy and divide the Church from ‘the thoughtful and devout among the young’. He shared Gore’s idea that Christianity was a ‘revolutionary idealism’. But his politics, ever since he had encountered Gore’s politics in Oxford, were the opposite of Gore’s. In spite of admiring Gore’s Biblical commentaries, moreover, he attacked the hindrances which Gore’s ‘bad faith’ in relation to the Thirty-Nine Articles offered to the prospect of bringing the modern world ‘under obedience to Christ’. In the course of attacking Anglo-Catholicism, Inge showed why Newman’s Roman life had been ‘sad and isolated’, why his ‘stiff conservatism’ had been joined to the ‘credulousness of the convert’, and why his subjective and

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disintegrating nominalism was not much better than the sophistical pragmatism of the Modernists, who had had to be condemned if the Papacy was to protect the ‘faith of simple Catholics all over the world’. To Inge the Roman Catholic Church was a formidable institution. It had an ‘iron discipline’, esprit de corps and military ‘fanaticism and devotion’. It satisfied ‘nearly all the needs of the average man . . . and . . . all the needs of the average woman’ and might well have a future as a ‘nucleus of . . . resistance’ to the ‘Red peril’ which was coming from ‘our great towns’. Protestantism (in 1908) was relevant only in the form of ‘mysticism’ and was not to be identified with the Church of England, which had been careful to avoid not only the ‘meretricious gaudiness’ of Rome but also the ‘squalid sluttery of fanatical conventicles’. Inge wrote often in this vein, deploring the imbalance which Wesley had introduced, the ‘hideous chapels’ with which England had been covered by his followers, and the ‘unctuous emotionalism and sentimental humanitarianism’ of the ‘vulgar class’ which formed the ‘backbone of Dissent’. He saw no hope in ‘premature . . . fusion’ with Dissent, which had become the ‘greasy instrument of party politics’, in reunion with the Papacy, which would insist on its ‘monopoly of divine grace’, or in rapprochement with the Eastern Church, which was the State Church of a semi-barbarous autocracy. So far as he had a coherent vision of the future, he looked to Liberal Evangelicalism to separate dissenters from Dissent and to ‘the Church of the honestest and most illogical nation on the face of the earth’ to resume her ‘proper place as the . . . exponent of our national Christianity’. Inge had a brisk way of dealing with the sacred. ‘The Creeds . . . were documents which . . . represented . . . only . . . the opinions of a majority at a meeting . . . and what manner of meetings Church Councils sometimes were’ was ‘well-known to history’. Joseph and Mary had had ‘four sons and one daughter’, thus becoming ‘intolerable’ during the Church’s ‘long frenzy of asceticism’ and necessitating the ‘non-Biblical doctrine of Jesus’s conception . . . by the Holy Ghost’. In the Church of England, Anglo-Catholics had succeeded in creating a ‘Latin sect’ which was ‘especially strong in the districts served by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway’. Inge’s religious writing after the middle 1930s need not detain us. But between 1899 and 1933, he dealt contentiously, if repetitively, with most of the issues which were exercising religious minds, dwelt on the subversion of ‘cocksure’ Victorian complacency by Bergson, Jeans and Eddington, and helped to make ‘mysticism and speculative idealism’ the catchwords of a party. In these years Inge criticized contemporary Protestant theology6 and out16

I.e. the quietist account in terms of feeling, the pragmatic account in terms of will, the Modernist account in terms of ‘practical needs’, the authoritarian account in terms of Bible, Church or Christ, the intellectualist account in terms of reason and the aesthetic account in terms of beauty.

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lined an alternative theology which related ‘historic Christianity to modern thought’. In the process he made a three-pronged attack – on the ‘millennial secularism’ which had ‘robbed mankind of the hope of immortality’, on secularized Christianity for rubbishing ‘struggle . . . pilgrimage . . . and . . . probation’, and on the Hinduism, Confucianism, spiritualism, necromancy, occultism and pathological emotionalism which were evident around him. Inge assumed that there was a ‘morbid . . . unsettlement’ in English religion which symbolized the transition from the ‘instinctive’ to the ‘self-determining’ stage of religious life. Ethics and art were ‘acts of worship’ which had to be related to the ‘permanent truths of religion’; science had to limit itself to the ‘quantitatively commensurable’; and there were tensions to resolve between God’s kingdom as Christ had conceived it, the world God had designed it to regenerate, and the impossibility of any society being regenerated unless it wished to be. In claiming for Christ’s teaching a relevance for the present, Inge argued that a ‘transvaluation of . . . values’ was desirable, that the ‘ideal standard’ implied by the ‘wolf-pack’ and the ‘great stomach of the people’ should be replaced by ‘disinterestedness . . . kindliness . . . and integrity’, and that it was Christianity’s primary business to break down the pharisaism which obstructed proper relations between God and the believer. As a theologian, Inge’s conclusions were that the ‘religious consciousness’ discerned ‘all the highest truths’ as ‘antinomies’, that these were not to be presented as creeds and dogmas, and that theology had to be reconciled with modern thought by being rescued from the arbitrary, irrational and superstitious. In Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion, he distinguished practical from philosophical mysticism and identified the former not only with the ‘love, joy, peace, faith, hope and . . . communion with nature’ which almost constituted a Christian ideology but also with a ‘thirst’ for prayer and for God in which all men could participate. In The Philosophy of Plotinus, man’s personality contained a ‘spark’ lighted at God’s ‘altar’ and the soul ‘worshipped’ not Hegel’s or Bosanquet’s Absolute but Plotinus’s Absolute, which was present in the ‘great spiritual world of eternal existence’ and made the ‘ultimate reality something . . . not contingent on human needs or desires’. In Christian Mysticism, about fifty mystical thinkers between St John and St Paul at one end and Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson and Browning at the other end, had been used to break down the superstition which passed for mysticism in contemporary Catholicism, the John Bull ‘travesty’ which passed for the national character in England and the gap between Evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism which was dividing the Church of England. Christian Mysticism gave negative disquisitions on contemporary superstition and made extensive use of German and English Idealists. Its central judgements were that gnosticism had been ‘degenerate’ and ‘oriental’, that Alexandrian Neo-Platonism possibly, and Syrian mysticism certainly, had

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tended to become Asiatic ‘mysteriosophies’, and that mediaeval mysticism, except in England and Germany, had been ‘Asiatic’ rather than ‘European’ and had led to the admirable but ‘one-sided mysticism’ of St Theresa and St John of the Cross. Inge dissociated himself from Carlyle, Emerson, Maeterlinck and Huysmans. But he cited Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw, and in Wordsworth – ‘the greatest prophet of contemplative mysticism’ – found a crucial sensitivity to ‘the symbolic value of natural objects’ and to that ‘still small voice of God’ which breathed out from ‘the contact of the soul with nature’. Christian Mysticism did not dismiss sacerdotal and ecclesiastical Christianity since ‘the seer or the prophet’, if allowed to ‘expel the priest’, would destroy ‘discipline and . . . cohesion’. But the ‘infallible’ Church and ‘infallible’ Bible were under assault, and the ‘return to fundamentals’, if there was to be one, had to be through faith as an ‘experiment’ on the way to becoming an ‘experience’, through experience as discovered in ‘the depths of the religious consciousness’, and through the internal transformations which occurred when the desire for God broke down the barriers which divided the soul from Him. Like Seeley, Inge expected to be accused of pantheism. He replied that a properly conducted mysticism would rid pantheism of its drawbacks, would dismiss theosophy, the occult, psychical research and the virtually Yogic ‘apathy’ which many mediaeval mystics had borrowed from the pseudoDionysius, and would justify Weigel, Boehme, Law and the Cambridge Platonists who, by seeing the world as the ‘mirror of the Deity’, had made it possible to reclaim ‘the whole of intellectual life’ for Christianity. Inge’s account of mysticism began from ‘consciousness of the beyond ’ as the basic material of religion, philosophy and art, and moved via an ‘extension of the frontier of consciousness’ to the realization of ‘God’s presence . . . in the soul’. Mysticism was neither eccentric, miraculous nor irrational, had nothing necessarily to do with visions, and did not require either withdrawal from practical life or the ascetical buffetings of the body which had been demanded by the dualistic Manicheism of the Middle Ages. Mysticism, on the contrary, was the ‘whole personality acting in concord’, the application of reason to a sphere which transcended ‘rationalism’, and a ‘scholastic of the heart’ which was the antidote to ‘formalism’ as well as to ‘unbelief’. Inge wanted to ‘spiritualize’ science as much as art and morality had been ‘spiritualized already’ and to break down the hostility which had enabled agnosticism and materialism to intrude. He believed that nature was a ‘symbol of God’, that the ‘vicarious suffering’ which was ‘a law of nature’ was ‘a law of God’ and that for ‘the true mystic’ everything in being what it was, symbolized ‘correspondences and affinities’ deeper than those which the ‘superficial consciousness’ was aware of. To ‘the true mystic’ life itself was a ‘sacrament’, the world was ‘the poem of the Word to the glory of the Father’, and the ‘ever-

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lasting Now’ which existed ‘in the mind of God’ was a region in which it was so impossible for ‘human thought’ to ‘live’ that a ‘symbolic eschatology’ was essential if it was to be thought about at all. Christian Mysticism concluded that the subjective mysticism of the Middle Ages had been antipathetic to sacramental religion, had viewed symbols as ‘veils between man’s eyes and reality’ and had denied that ‘the spiritual eye’ could see unless the ‘eye of sense was closed’. In objective mysticism, by contrast, it saw the ‘external world’ being rescued from ‘exile’, a ‘bright and genial . . . philosophy’ being treated with ‘admiration . . . and love’ instead of ‘horror and disgust’, and ‘the sweet influences’ of home and marriage, which the celibate mysticism of the Middle Ages had been incapable of appreciating, becoming the ‘true idyll’ and ‘the shortest road’ to the ‘vision of God’. Inge identified himself as a member of the ‘right-wing of theological liberalism’ and as belonging to the Christian-Platonist party. In Confessio Fidei he examined the belief that men ‘tended’ to make gods ‘in their own likeness’, adding that the God he, Inge, had made was the Creator who owed nothing to the world, that ‘the world was a hymn sung by the creative logos to the glory of . . . the Father’, and that the ‘ultimate values’ were ‘the most real . . . things . . . . of all’ because they were ‘attributes of the divine nature’. Inge’s Platonism was as special as Temple’s Platonism and presents as high a hurdle to the uninitiated. But it was integral to his Christianity, showed how the ‘transvaluation of values’ effected by the Incarnation opened ‘a gate into the future’ more than it offered an atonement for the past, and thought of God as a ‘genial’ God who was neither ‘sour’ nor ‘angry’ and divided His attentions ‘about equally’ between the ‘moral, intellectual and aesthetic aspects of his Creation’.

Inge rejected many of the fashions of the age, gave only one cheer for historical progress (for adding the ‘religious sense’ to man’s other faculties), and had no difficulty believing either in evolution or that ‘the greatest and best among the sons of men had lived two thousand years ago’. He had no faith in the ‘short cut’ involved in the ‘trust in miracles’, warned the Church not to approach men’s souls ‘through their stomachs’, and agreed with Jowett – ‘half-saint, half-cynic’ – in declining to advocate the use of ‘force’ or ‘fraud’ in pursuit of God’s kingdom. Insofar as he believed that Christianity could not be destroyed without the destruction of ‘the white race’, he was an optimist. But his Liberalism was at the same time inherently rancid – about the future of humanity, about the contribution to civilization which was likely to be made by the lower classes and about those ‘unctuous’ predictions of the downfall of individualism which were the ‘idols . . . of the market-place’.

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Inge admired many features of Prussian thought and, in his seventies and eighties, lumped together Hitler as defender of civilization against MarxistLeninism, with Franco as defender of civilization against Republican atheism. In these, and in other respects, he combined unfashionable opinions with a willing pessimism. In Smuts, liberal optimism wilted less willingly. V In Smuts’s7 life there were tensions between rhetoric and reality and between race and transcendence of race. Smuts was brought up an Afrikaans speaker and came to share the bitterness which Boers felt about English imperialism. But he was tri-lingual, used English and Dutch as his normal languages for the higher discourse, and made it his aim to establish in South Africa a political order which would make bitterness impossible. He did not succeed; in his failure, he displayed an unusual combination of political skill and Liberal rhetoric which fled into mysticism in face of twentieth-century reality. In addition to exercising political power for more than fifty years, Smuts was an untrained citizen-soldier. He refused command of the British invasion of Palestine in 1917, while offering to replace Pershing as commander of American troops after the American arrival in Europe. By then he had already exercised command against the British during the Boer War and high command against both the Boer rebellion at the beginning of the First World War and the Germans in East and Southwest Africa during the war.

Smuts’s father had been a farmer in Cape Province and a backbench member of the Colonial Parliament. Smuts himself was brought up a farmer and, as a family man, in spite of long periods away from home, involved himself in the running of his farm. At seventeen, he had been full of Shelley’s ‘ethereal spirit’ and had addressed his future wife in the terms of Salvationist Christianity. At Victoria College, Stellenbosch, he had studied both literature and science, and had written an extended essay in favour of a South African Customs Union as a Shelleyite ‘striving after the common good’. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he had been reclusive and rebarbative, and while reading for the Bar in London, he had written unpublished essays about the future of South African literature, ‘Christ in History’ and ‘The Application 17

Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950), educated Victoria College, Stellenbosch and Christ’s College, Cambridge. Attorney-General of the Transvaal and military commander during the Boer War. Minister in Transvaal Government, 1907–10, and in South African Government, 1910–24. Member of British War Cabinet, 1916. Prime Minister of South Africa, 1919–24 and 1939–48. Author of Walt Whitman, 1894–5; Wartime Speeches, 1917; Holism and Evolution, 1926; Africa and Some World Problems, 1930; The Disarmed Peace, 1931; and Plans for a Better World, 1942.

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of Physical Concepts to Biological Phenomena’, an eloquently woolly college magazine essay entitled ‘Law As A Liberal Study’, and a book, also unpublished, about Walt Whitman.

Walt Whitman implied and to some extent stated a ‘theory of personality’, using Whitman as an example and making a ‘biological application’ to ‘the higher ranges of genius’ of evolutionary ideas which Smuts believed had not been applied to them in the past. He knew that evolutionism was under attack. But he reaffirmed its relevance and connected it to the principles he had borrowed from Plato, Bacon and Hegel – that ‘every individual . . . life . . . developed according to its own inherent . . . laws’ and that every personality contained an ‘immanent’ faith, the unrestrained and natural development of which realized life’s ‘promise and potency’. Smuts claimed to be blazing a trail. But the outcome was a theorization of the man more than an account of the flesh. There were only hints about Whitman’s physical life, and nothing directly about his homosexuality, which Smuts seems not at that time to have recognized. It was Whitman’s spontaneity, his ‘dynamic, emotional’ quality, and the ‘spiritualism, realism and acceptivity’ of the ‘unbroken liquid onward movement’ of a ‘supremely happy life’ that were central. This set the tone for Smuts’s praise of the beauty of early Whitman’s conception of a ‘new social world’ in which the ‘ruins of feudalism and competitive industrialism’ would be replaced as the ‘cementing ties of society’ by ‘primal affinities and attractions’. In Leaves of Grass, he saw anticipations of Darwin and Spencer and an ‘objective’ egoism which embodied not only ‘divine-brute energies’ and ‘world-transforming enthusiasm’ but also equality, respect for the ‘divine average’, and sympathy for the ‘oppressed and the weak’. Smuts attributed to Whitman’s almost permanent presence as a hospital visitor during the American Civil War a deepening of his spiritual sensibility, a ‘sobering’ of his ‘democratic enthusiasm’ and a Hegelian broadening of his philosophy. This new Whitman had identified Lincoln and America as ‘sources of spiritual strength’ and, in conceptualizing the ‘imperious, mystic and abysmic . . . forces’ which moulded society, had made high estimates both of religion’s power to lead the soul to a ‘new and vaster’ idea of God and of literature’s power to give ‘the people as a whole’ that personal culture, belief in science and ‘faith in the sanity . . . of the cosmic life-process’ which existing literature gave only to ‘the côterie’ or ‘the learned’. In later life, Smuts looked back to his interest in Whitman as a liberation from the narrowness of conventional Christianity, and it is obvious that in Walt Whitman he exposed a good deal of himself. The next phase of his

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life was to confute as much as it was to confirm the views he had expressed then.

On returning to South Africa, Smuts had a not very successful period as a Cape Town lawyer while making a journalistic reputation as a follower of Rhodes. In this brief phase, he was in favour of ‘consolidating’ South Africa’s ‘two Teutonic peoples’ and the agrarian and mining communities into a single nation, advocated a restricted franchise and a practical, Pestalozzian rather than an intellectual education for the black population, and looked forward to an ‘ordered civilization’ resisting the ‘immemorial . . . and animal savagery’ of African barbarism. The Jameson Raid put an end to admiration for Rhodes. Smuts renounced his citizenship and moved to Johannesburg, where timely support for President Krüger, about whom he had previously been condescending, resulted in his appointment as State-Attorney of the Transvaal at the age of twenty-eight. During the run-up to the Boer War, Smuts accused Milner of aiming to forestall the creation of ‘a great Afrikaaner republic’ and predicted that, in the event of war, direct intervention by the European powers would ensure for the ‘Afrikaaner people’ a ‘baptism . . . of . . . blood’ which would admit them ‘among the great peoples of the world’. The war turned out rather differently. As he accepted defeat, and helped others to accept it, Smuts addressed himself to the English instinct for ‘liberty’, to English Radicals like Stead, Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse, and to the ‘most distinguished’ in English politics, literature and science for refusing to join in the ‘conspiracy of silence’ about the ‘abomination of desolation’ which Chamberlain and Kitchener were creating around them. He spent the next three years attacking Conservative policy about war debt, the dismemberment of the Transvaal and the imposition of an English education, accusing Milner and the Transvaal mine-owners of aiming to subvert a white South Africa, and calling for a ‘large influx’ of white labourers from Ireland, Italy or any other country that was willing to send them, in order to halt the reinforcement of the ‘preponderating black population’ by ‘hordes of the yellow races from Asia’. After the Liberal victory at the British general election of 1905, Smuts was sent to London to persuade the new Cabinet to grant self-government. He became a member of Botha’s Transvaal Cabinet when self-government was granted two years later and became a leading member of Botha’s Union Cabinet when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910. Smuts had a Gladstonian sense of the connection between theory and practice, was Liberal as only a Victorian Liberal could be Liberal, and, in the course of time, acquired English friends who were either Quaker or Radical. Much of his writing and speaking was an aspect of practice and used the language which men-of-affairs use in practice. But much of it was suffused with

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theory and emotion, and was involved, as Maine, Acton, Inge and Fitzjames Stephen were involved, in defending liberal civilization against the barbarians at the gate. In examining the pessimism which was integral to his hope, and the exclusions which were integral to his ‘whole’, we shall examine the connections between his politics, his rhetoric and the frame of mind in which he wrote Holism and Evolution.

In advocating ‘the South African idea’ and a South African Union, Smuts wished to break down resurgent, rural isolationism in the Transvaal, to stymie both Downing Street and the ‘Jewish-Jingo’ power of the mining industry and to lift the ‘South African nation’ out of the ‘spirit of selfish commercialism’. Smuts observed from time to time that ‘justice and the Christian virtues’ should prevail in relations with ‘the natives’. He also observed that white manhood-suffrage should not entail black manhood-suffrage, that black and white should be kept ‘apart as much as possible in our institutions’, and that it was a South African ‘axiom’ that it was ‘dishonourable’ to mix ‘white . . . blood’ with ‘black’. In ‘civilizing Africa . . . from the South’ where previous attempts to civilize it ‘from the North’ had failed, his instruments were to be land-links with the Mediterranean, the settlement of a large white population upon them, and a determination, after the experience of Germany’s black army, to have no more black armies in Africa. Smuts mistrusted the ‘poor white’ but much less than he mistrusted the ‘rich white’. He was clear that there would have to be ‘tests of education and civilized life’ for ‘Blacks and Coloureds’, that blacks and coloureds would need to be protected from the ‘unsettling influence’ of politics, and that the black and coloured questions would take ‘the higher ethical doctrines . . . deep down to the foundations of expediency and self-preservation’. It took time to convince Smuts that the Liberal Cabinet in London meant business about self-government, or could be trusted to show sympathy and understanding for the Boers. Eventually he was convinced, and resumed his support for the imperial connection. For the rest of his life, CampbellBannerman’s work was a ‘monument to Liberal policy at its best’. In the 1920s, when the memory of the Jameson Raid had been lost in an alliance of convenience with the remnants of Rhodes’s party, Smuts recalled that Rhodes, in addition to his interest in ‘the progress of European civilization on the African continent’, had cherished ‘the ideal of world peace’, the ‘interests of humanity at large’, and a ‘better understanding between the leading nations of the world’. In the run-up to the 1914 war Smuts had found Britain’s ‘embroilment’ against Germany incomprehensible and had interpreted both the British reaction to the Agadir Crisis and the first killings of the war as signs that civilization was under threat. For the first two years of the war, he faced a militant

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Afrikaaner opposition and narrowly escaped assassination. When Botha decided to send him to London in late 1916 as South Africa’s representative at the centre of Empire, his ‘romantic’ persona was complete. By the time he lost the general election of 1924 after seventeen years in office, Smuts had spent more than two years as a member of the British War Cabinet, had been involved in the strategy of the war and planning for the peace and, as Prime Minister of South Africa, had been responsible for the imposition of martial law during the Witwatersrand Strike of 1922. On the other hand his reading, reflection and language had been liberal and ‘spiritual’, had had Quaker as well as Old Testament overtones, and had been suffused with a rhetoric of reconciliation. Reconciliation between Boer and Briton in South Africa took a long time to mature but reached its high points with the reconstructions of party and party-alliances between 1920 and 1933. Reconciliation between Britain and the rest of the Empire was a theme when Smuts intervened with de Valera before the Irish Settlement of 1921 and in the establishment of a ‘Commonwealth’ of self-governing Dominions for which he provided some of the rhetoric. International reconciliation involved the application to post-war Europe not just of the principles which Smuts had applied in South Africa but also of the reasons for their application – the threat from black power (to which the threat from syndicalism was to be added later) leading to the disintegration of white civilization in South Africa and the threat from Bolshevism and the ‘yellow peril’ leading to the disintegration of civilization in Europe. After his arrival in London in 1916 Smuts, conscious of the overstretching of British resources, wanted to teach a ‘lasting lesson’ to Prussian militarism not so much through overwhelming military force (except in Palestine) as through ‘imponderables’ and the appeal to world opinion. He wrote a British War Cabinet Paper about the desirability of a League of Nations and, as South African delegate to the Peace Conference (along with Botha), advocated a peace treaty which would recognize the central role that Germany would have to play in Europe in the future. In Smuts’s opposition to a punitive peace treaty, there was a party political aspect arising from the strength of pro-German feeling in South Africa. In England, too, there was a party political aspect as the Conservative supporters of a punitive treaty proclaimed their regard for William Hughes, the Australian Prime Minister, whose ‘stridency’ Smuts disliked as much as he disliked the stridency of the Northcliffe newspapers. Smuts thought of standing for the British Parliament as a follower of Lloyd George and with help from the Labour Party, felt no more difficulty about the nationalization of power and transport in 1918 than he was to feel in 1945 and, just as he was to become an ally of Murray, Cecil and the League of Nations Union in the 1920s, so, during the peace conference, he became an ally of Keynes, whom he encouraged to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

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In the course of the 1920s, Smuts used ‘appeasement’ as a political tactic for which the League of Nations was the best way of protecting the British Commonwealth. But he also felt a moral enthusiasm which had welcomed American intervention and the Kerensky revolution in 1917 as the ‘Armageddon’ of the ‘long struggle “against” feudalism’ and ‘the old Europe’. What Smuts saw after the Armistice was a ‘broken and bleeding Europe’ and the ‘dissolution’ of its ‘corporate state-organization’. Generosity, magnanimity and a League of Nations were now a ‘practical necessity’ as well as an ‘ideal’, and the ‘bad spirit’ displayed by Poincaré, by many English Conservatives, and (he believed, tactically) by Lloyd George, had to be opposed. He opposed Polish policy towards Danzig and French policy towards the Saar, the abandonment of the undertakings which President Wilson had given at the time of the Armistice and any steps calculated to drive Germany, as he had seen Hungary driven during a mission to Hungary, into the hands of ‘Bolshevik Russia’. This was what Smuts meant by ‘appeasement’. He urged it on Lloyd George and President Wilson from March 1919 onwards, agonized about it in correspondence with his English friends, and concluded that, if changes were not made in the reparations and territorial clauses of the draft Treaty, Germany would become a ‘Kaffri nation’ and Europe be reduced to ‘ruin’. In deciding eventually to join Botha in signing the treaty instead of resigning, he felt that he had suffered a ‘moral defeat’, that the ‘poison’ of ‘revenge’ might produce a ‘tragedy of infinite dimensions’ in the future, and that for England and America, Europe was now a great ‘mission-field’ where ‘the gospel’ would be a gospel of ‘good-will . . . human comradeship and . . . common service in the great human causes’. On returning to South Africa, Smuts spent five uneasy years as Prime Minister when Botha died unexpectedly in 1919. He watched nervously as nationalism became intractable in Poland and Ireland, starvation spread from Europe to China, and a ‘vast financial crisis’ threatened to ‘bring down the prosperous countries as well as central Europe’. He was deeply depressed when France used black troops in Europe, an economic war began to be waged against Germany, and even a die-hard government in London was able to expose the inadequacy of the Liberal and Labour leaders. His opponents in South Africa were right to suggest that he would rather have been in Geneva than in Cape Town; it is certain that he appointed Lord Robert Cecil as South African representative at the League of Nations instead of going there himself because he believed there was no one good enough to replace him at home. In South Africa, Smuts’s attack on the peace treaty did him no good with Boer Republicans. He failed to pressurize Rhodesia into joining the Union, was shaken by the Bulhoek massacre and the ‘blood-letting’ he had to order

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in dealing with the Witwatersrand strike, and recognized very reluctantly that he was being accused of being ‘a butcher and a hangman’. He was not surprised when he lost his seat as well as his majority in the ‘National TalkingShop’ at the general election of 1924. Up to 1924 Smuts had not only experienced disappointment, he had also made mistaken predictions. He had predicted that Germany or Austria would collapse in 1915 and that a negotiated peace was necessary because they would not collapse thereafter. He had expected the German delegation to refuse to sign the peace treaty, which they did sign, and had prepared to set up a press campaign in their support in case they did not. He had been pyeeyed about the United States, had not expected Congress to pull the plug on President Wilson and had declared it economically inevitable that Ulster should make an ‘early entry’ into the Irish Free State. He knew of ‘no people . . . or government . . . better equipped than the British’ to deal with the conflict that might arise in Palestine as a result of the Balfour Declaration, to which he had been a party and of which he was to become, and remain, a zealous advocate for the rest of his life. Throughout, moreover, he had been ruminating on ‘the Whole’. After his defeat in 1924, ‘the Whole’ became the focus of Smuts’s attention, and it might seem that Holism and Evolution was the work of a statesman on sabbatical, so to speak, the sort of book that politicians say they will write when it looks as though they will have to leave office but do not intend to write if they can avoid it. With Smuts, the opposite was the case. From the beginning of his career, he had had a sense of destiny – first of all Rhodes’s sense of destiny, then a Boer sense of destiny, finally, a sense of religious destiny. He discussed both destiny and ‘the Whole’ so endlessly in conversation and correspondence with his English friends – the Clarks and the Gilletts, H. J. Wolstenholme and Gilbert Murray’s daughter Agnes – that Holism and Evolution must be judged a continuation of his public career by other means – a philosophical or ‘spiritual’ statement which, as he told L. T. Hobhouse in 1926, had been ‘of practical value’ in ‘solving difficulties’ and ‘rendering intelligible’ what ‘otherwise’ would have been ‘a hopeless puzzle’. In a lecture delivered at Witwatersrand University after the publication of Holism and Evolution, Smuts stated that holism had been in operation during the formation of the South African Union and in the creation of a League or ‘Society’ of Nations out of Europe’s ‘morbid nationalism’. In the preface to the third edition in 1936, just as the League was being buried for ever, he added that holism was ‘pointing the way’ to ‘our race and civilization’ and confronting it with the choice between ‘integration’ and ‘disintegration’. There can be no doubt that holism was present, both before and after Macmillan and Company published Holism and Evolution in 1926, in Smut’s speeches, and in the explanations and justifications that he

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gave in private of the initiatives for which he had been responsible in public.

In 1926 Smuts had nearly a quarter of a century to go as a leading politician. In this period he was to express the same fear as before about the collapse of traditional African society, and the same justification to liberal opinion in England of the duty to stop the African native being turned into a ‘pseudoEuropean’. The inadequacy of English, and European, statesmen in face of the ‘terrifying’ power of public opinion, and the decline of civilization as a result of the ‘reactionary spirit’ of the early 1930s, made frequent appearances. So too did the view that the Roman Catholic Church was the instigator of the Franco rebellion and the source of all that had been wrong in Spain since the Inquisition, the view that the Indian commercial and financial invasion of South and East Africa threatened another racial disaster, and the view, so different from the view of the young Smuts of 1903, that the British ‘surrender’ to the Arabs in Palestine would destroy Jewry’s ‘influence’ on behalf of our ‘worldwide Commonwealth’. In spite of the belief that Stresemann had made ‘time’ into a ‘great healer’ in Germany, Smuts’s only real optimism was about the vast white Dominion he still believed could be built ‘in the next three or four generations’ on the temperate highlands between South Africa and Abyssinia, provided Germany’s African colonies were incorporated into South Africa and the Indian invasion of South and East Africa was halted. About Nazism Smuts at first was uncertain, acknowledging its ‘ruffianly’ aspects, ‘hating its internal policy’, and being puzzled by the ‘bee’ Hitler had got ‘in his bonnet’ about Russia, but never being sure until very late in 1938 that a new peace conference would not be a possible way of preventing the collapse of civilization. About Mussolini, on the other hand, he was entirely certain, regarding Abyssinia as so ‘vital’ a ‘test’ of the League of Nations, and so important an area of South African interest, that sanctions should continue even after Britain’s ‘cowardly surrender’. After expressing the deepest bitterness about the damage done to Commonwealth unity by Chamberlain’s toppling of the League of Nations in 1936, he expressed the deepest alarm about the astonishment with which the British guarantee to Poland had been greeted in the Commonwealth capitals in 1939. In face of the ‘horrible’ events which had occurred between the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Moroccan ‘invasion of Spain’, Smuts was as cataclysmic as he was understanding. He registered the challenge to ‘the spirit of Jesus’ by the forces of darkness and the imminence of that ‘same battle of the human spirit’ which had been fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But he also stated that Communism was disclosing ‘flaws . . . in . . . our civilization’, and that Nazism was a ‘queer compound’ of ‘romanticism, racism, ethics . . . and holism’ which would have to be incorporated ‘with the

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old culture’ into a ‘new structure of belief and action’, perhaps even into a new ‘world-view and religion’. Smuts disapproved of many of the policies that had led to the 1939 war but was wholehearted in wishing the war to be waged once it had begun. After the German invasion of the Netherlands, he had more support among Boers than he had had at any time in the previous thirty-five years. He was heartened by a general election victory in 1943, and, in the midst of unrest, ‘Communist’ infiltration and a threatening influx of ‘natives’ into the South African cities, took pride in the fact that the ‘natives’ he had put to work on the war effort had had ‘far more guts’ than the natives of India who had ‘run away en masse from their work . . . on the first approach of danger’. Smuts’s confidence that Hitler would be defeated was continuous through all the victories Hitler won on the way. He interpreted the Russo-German pact as making Hitler a ‘morally-defeated person’ and was puzzled when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Though ‘very proud’ of Britain after the Battle of Britain and stating repeatedly, even before the invasion of Russia, that Hitler could not now win, it was to the United States that he looked, as in 1917, to ensure victory and positive reconstruction. Smuts was alternately encouraged and discouraged by the world’s religious condition. At times he thought that ‘holism’ and a ‘wider patriotism’ were ‘making . . . their . . . appeal’. At other times he thought that Christ had been beaten by Machiavelli. He wrote of Niemoller as the ‘hero of the struggle . . . in Germany’, of Madame Chang-Kai Shek’s China at the Crossroads as a Christian contribution to a world-conflict, and of Gandhi’s ‘use of suffering’, though sometimes ‘disagreeable’ and ‘an obstacle’ to an Indian settlement, as a parallel to the Christian use of martyrdom in the Roman Empire. As the war failed to come to an end in 1944, he noted the want of energy and ‘moral enthusiasm’ among British politicians. He experienced a ‘demoralizing . . . hopelessness’ about the fall of Churchill, and was driven by American hostility to the Commonwealth, United Nations’ hostility to ‘colour bars’, and the United Nations’ rejection of South Africa’s claim to South-West Africa, to a gloom which was relieved only by the certainty that atomic weapons had ‘put war out of court’ forever. Yet he had felt throughout the war, and evidently still felt, that the British cause had been the cause of ‘Christian ethics’, that the war, which had ‘begun as Hitler’s war’, had ended as ‘God’s war’, and that it had been a war for the ‘human race’ in which Christ’s ‘heroic simplicity’ and ‘Testament of Love’ alone had supplied a ‘foothold in the verities of our spiritual heritage’. The assumption that a reconstructed religion would ‘come to the rescue’ politically as it had done during the fall of Rome, was by no means peculiar to Smuts. Nor were the judgements that Christ had been interested more in ‘the coming of the Kingdom’ than in ‘immortality’, that any new outburst of

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religious feeling would have to be ‘very different’ from what had gone before, or that ‘incarnation’ could build a bridge between ‘humanism and divinity’ by subverting the Calvinistic ‘separation between the natural and the divine’. What was distinctive was the belief that holism was the clue to the ‘integration’ and ‘enlargement’ of personality, that a reconstructed religion could supply an ‘inner momentum’ to the ‘struggles of the world’ and, in an age when mankind was becoming ‘more closely knit under the aegis of a World Charter’, that UNESCO and the Carnegie Endowment should prepare an eclectic ‘bible . . . for spiritual direction and inspiration’ and should finance ‘men of wide spiritual leadership and appeal’ to do ‘missionary work on . . . a . . . worldwide basis’ in the way in which St Paul had done it in the Roman Empire. Smuts had come to believe that Victorian Liberalism had been too good for the world and that it was necessary to effect an intellectual incorporation of the role of evil, force, power and leadership if the new world envisaged in the Covenant of the League of Nations was to be restored by the United Nations. This represented the experience Smuts had had in life. His identification of Liberalism with value was confirmed by almost all the literature and correspondence he received from Wolstenholme and the Gilletts. The Gilletts were a family of Quaker bankers who, with their relatives the Clarks, made a second home and family for Smuts in Oxford and elsewhere whenever he was in England. Wolstenholme was a philosopher – a close friend of James Ward who, like Ward, had been compelled by doubt to leave the Congregationalist ministry and who, when Smuts first knew him, was a member of Christ’s College Combination Room. Like the Gilletts, Wolstenholme was impeccably Liberal, reproached Smuts for South Africa’s attitude to the ‘Native’ problem, and described an early draft of Holism and Evolution as an ‘hypostatisation of abstracts’. His own, and after his death, the Gilletts’ selections of books from English publishers’ lists (which were sent to Smuts and paid for), embodied a phase of Liberalism,8 religious as well as political, while the darkness was descending – a phase which Smuts absorbed and commented on, alongside his comments on Plato, Shelley, Spinoza, Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron, Browning, Shakespeare and the New Testament (sometimes in Greek) from his late thirties onwards. This phase of thought contributed to the urgency of Smuts’s seventies when a holistic reconstruction was even more necessary than previously. Holism had its origins, however, far earlier – in Smuts’s account of his own people. 18

As exemplified by Seeley, the Bradleys, Raleigh, Ward, Illingworth, Sorley, A. E. Taylor, Harnack, Croce, G. E. Moore, Pringle-Pattison, Hobhouse, Ritchie, Pfleiderer, Whitehead, Hoffnung, Renan, Schweitzer, Toynbee, Glover, Keynes, Gilbert Murray, Bridges, J. S. Haldane, Bergson and Santayana.

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VI On the rebound from the Boer War, Smuts had wished to prevent the Boers turning their backs on the modern world. But he had also contrasted them to their advantage with the modern world, and had claimed for them a wholeness and sanity of life and vision which had survived suffering, defeat and the Treaty of Vereeniging. Smuts’s idea of a people was of an ‘immanent life . . . moulded by internal forces’ and of a ‘corporate personality’ which identified individual liberty with ‘the laws and restraints of existence’. The ‘swaddling-clothes’ suitable to the ‘infancy of the individual personality’ were being removed by democracy. But even a democratic nation was an ‘organism’ whose ‘solidarity’ was ‘the result of the process immanent in the social whole’ – that struggle against ‘materialism’, ‘moneymaking’ and ‘greed’ which had accompanied the ‘unprecedented magnitude’ of modern material advancement. Smuts’s idealization of the Boers centred on their Carlylean ‘silence’ and mistrust of ‘parade’, their belief in their own language after eighty years of attack from the English language, and the ‘sacrifice’ which had been made by the thousands of their war dead. In face of the ‘destruction and burning of their farms’, the ‘carrying off of their wives and children,’ and the arming of natives and coloureds against them, Smuts could ‘think no other than that the Lord God had destined great things for them’. ‘Perhaps’ he wrote in June 1901 ‘it is [our] fate to be sacrificed to the world’s ideals. Perhaps we are destined to . . . redeem our . . . money-age from . . . worldliness and selfishness.’ In either case, the war had created ‘a select band . . . men of physical courage, moral endurance . . . and . . . childlike faith in God’ who had ‘elevated’ the war to the ‘higher level of ethical forces’ and had made of Boer history ‘from the call in Europe centuries ago . . . through all [their] vicissitudes of wandering and suffering . . . a movement in the interior world of the soul and of God’.

This spiritualization of the war, this identification of patriotism as a ‘divine nexus’, and the conversion of the ‘Boer cause’ into a Boer religion, was of the greatest consequence for Smuts’s development. The ‘Moral Energy of our race’, which he made the issue in 1902, remained the issue thereafter; the fear and pity he was to feel for the peoples of Europe in 1920 was the ‘fear and pity’ he had felt for the ‘Afrikaaner peoples’ in 1903, and the ‘complete revolution’ with which ‘the heroes . . . buried under the shattered ramparts’ would have drowned out the ‘moral stench’ of the old order (if they had survived) in South Africa the same in essence as the ‘complete revolution’ which he wanted in Europe between 1917 and 1920. Smuts had a deep sense of his ‘own soul’, a desire to ‘retire’ into it and to ‘meditate’, and a belief that nations which ‘set God aside’ would ‘go under’. He had as deep a sense of the pathos and grandeur of Nature, of the ‘bless-

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edness and . . . tranquillity’ of the rural mind, and of the ‘joy’ and ‘freedom’ of the ‘bounding hills’ and ‘great table-lands of the Spirit’. As ‘daggers were pointed at the heart of civilization’, it was not a brutalizing of the spirit that he anticipated but a ‘deepened consciousness of right and wrong’, the ‘sorrow and suffering’ which were ‘of the essence of ethical progress’, and a ‘regeneration . . . from within’ creating out of the ‘mere materialism of nineteenthcentury culture’ that Shelleyite, Holy and holistic Spirit which would carry ‘lives’ up to the ‘higher Mysticism’ he described in a speech on Table Mountain in 1923 in which the Mountain itself realized the ‘freedom of the soul’ and brought down ‘from the summits’ the religion which ought to be practised in the valleys below. Enough has been said to establish that for many years before 1926, and continually thereafter, Smuts used the language of holism to discuss his involvement in the affairs of the world. What is necessary in conclusion is to explain what holism was.

In the preface to the first edition, Smuts offered Holism and Evolution from two points of view – as a sketch of the ‘universal phenomenon’ he had examined in the form of ‘Personality’ in Walt Whitman, and as a preliminary to enabling the ‘spiritual temple of the future’ to incorporate the ‘immense extension’ which had occurred in man’s ‘intellectual horizons’ in the previous hundred years. He rejected ‘materialism’ and ‘mechanism’, sought a ‘bridge’ between the ‘physical, biological and mental’ and, in drawing general conclusions from the effect which genetics had had on biology since Darwin, called for ‘new thinking’ to replace ‘mechanical’ evolution by ‘creative’ evolution. ‘Creative Evolution’ and the development of ‘life and mind . . . in and from the physical order’ were what Smuts took off from. The ‘vast masses’ of ‘physical and biological’ knowledge which had been built up since Darwin had to be ‘resurveyed’ from a ‘psychical’ point of view, and ‘life and mind’ shown to be both essential elements in causation and remedies for the analytical ‘abstraction’ which was replicating Scholasticism’s attribution of ‘reality to universals’. These prefatory slogans – by no means as original as Smuts implied – were then joined by Einsteinian relativity as a subversion of the absoluteness of Newtonian mechanics, by the dynamic atom of Böhr and Rutherford as a subversion of the ‘indivisible character’ of the ‘chemical compound’, and by the ‘metabolism’ of the biological cell as the point at which ‘matter or energy aroused itself from its slumbers’ and achieved an ‘active, moving equilibrium’. They led to the reassurance that the ‘gulf’ between mind and matter was being bridged, that there was an ‘inner . . . factor . . . or creative synthetic ordering’ of which mind and matter were ‘the expression’, and that it was holism which was the ‘something more fundamental’ of which these were ‘forms and phases’.

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These formulations could easily have been treated as merely ‘methodological . . . categories of research and explanation’. For Smuts they were very much more. For him, ‘the whole’ was a ‘real character’ and was ‘writ large on the face of Nature’. It extended evolution in the physical world into creative evolution in the world of spirit and into that new element of control and direction which occurred when ‘the central nervous system’ achieved its ‘highest flowering’ in the human personality, ‘the State’, and the ‘even more perfect wholes’ embodied in truth, beauty and goodness. Smuts’s account of the evolution of nature centred on the difference between the freedom which had been achieved in nature before the arrival of mind or consciousness; and the freedom which had been achieved after the arrival of mind or consciousness, and between the ‘delicacy of co-ordination’ and ‘complexity of adjustment’ of ‘organic wholes’ (in the ‘physiology of breathing’, for example) and the intrusion by mind of ‘voluntary’ or ‘psychic’ individuation which contrasted with the ‘precision and regularity’ of ‘organic activity’ in plants and animals and constituted a breach with the ‘ancient order’ of the ‘holistic universe’ by intruding sin, sorrow, faith, love, tears, laughter, irregularity and eccentricity into it. The idea that mind or reason could repair the breach and begin to restore ‘wholeness’ was of the essence of the matter as Smuts understood it and was elaborated through three further ideas – that personality was destined to establish a ‘complete mastery . . . over routine’, that this would be the ‘culminating phase of a graduating movement’ which would subsume all that had preceded it in ‘cosmic evolution’ and that it would destroy that ‘horror of the flesh’ which asceticism and medieval superstition had borrowed from the ‘degraded’ religions of the East. Holism and Evolution described the ‘cement’ which would carry up the ‘common-sense’ and ‘empirical order’ of the ‘common man’ into the ‘esoteric rational’ system through which science had liberated men into ‘educability’. But it also insisted that the ‘moral self-control’ of ‘conscious manhood’, so far from listening ‘forever’ for the ‘thundering reverberations of the Categorical Imperative’, had as its role to marry the ‘conscious will’ to the ‘subconscious . . . personal life’, the ‘lower . . . to the higher . . . grades of ethical evolution’, and ‘duty’ to the ‘normal impulses’ of the ‘Personality’. The main chapters of Holism and Evolution were a treatise on freedom into which the author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity would doubtless have stuck his Benthamite pitchfork if he had had the opportunity. It is unlikely that he would have felt any better about the concluding chapter which drew together what Smuts wished to say about the emergence of spirit out of matter in the ‘millions of years’ before the ‘spiritual’ order had arisen, about the role of ‘the Great Society of the universe’ in leaving a place ‘no less . . . for the most . . . inanimate inorganic structure . . . than for the crowning glory of the great

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soul’, and about man’s experience of the universe as a ‘spiritual wave . . . rising on an ocean . . . that . . . contained much more besides . . . Spirit’. In bidding a not very reluctant farewell to Smuts’s religion, we draw attention to two passages which displayed not only its mistily political aspect but also the mistily mystical aspect that sustained it throughout. The ‘mysticism’ is captured in a letter Smuts wrote in September 1917 to one of the Gilletts with whom he had walked up ‘Fair Mile . . . and by the mushrooms and . . . the grass knots which symbolize the blending of spirits’. The ‘politics’ comes from the end of Holism and Evolution where, among the ‘busy and exacting scenes’ in which most of his life had been spent, Smuts had watched men ‘searching and struggling for the Good with . . . a sincerity of purpose which added to the poignancy of . . . fratricidal strife’. ‘It is a dull day here with an occasional drizzle’, he wrote from Windsor Castle when he was staying there in 1917, but for me the sunshine of yesterday continues to shine on the green hills of memory. This morning in chapel my mind kept roving over those hills, in spite of the droning of the parson – up Fair Mile, and by the mushrooms, and by the grass knots which symbolize the blending of spirits. And then the parson’s voice would recall me again to my uninspiring surroundings, and off my mind would pass . . . and I would sit up with fair-smiling little Helen on my knee, her father on my left, her mother at my feet. Then some remark of the parson on the water which quenches thirst for ever sends me to the hills once more, and I drink the water which never quenches the thirst of the spirit but only serves to . . . increase the soul hunger . . . And through it all, and over it all, assimilating, transforming, transfusing, transfiguring everything to the radiancy of the spirit, the Holistic Impulse! And then the parson intervenes again, and I see a woman drying a man’s feet with her black hair in a cottage in the cup of the hills, and again I see farther back on one of the hills the man hanging on a cross and the woman standing weeping below. And I read from Habakkuk of the soul moving over the high places as on hind’s feet, and . . . the man of sorrows who poured out his soul in sacrifice. (J. C. Smuts to A. B. Gillett, September 1917, in W. H. Hancock and J. van der Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers, 1966, vol. III, pp. 548–9)

‘We are still far, very far’, went the ‘political’ confession, from the goal to which Holism points. The Great War – with its infinite loss and suffering, its toll of untold lives, the shattering of great States and almost of civilization, the fearful waste of goodwill and sincere human ideals which followed the close of that vast tragedy – has been proof enough for our day and generation that we are yet far of the attainment of the ideal of a really Holistic universe. But everywhere too I have seen that it was at bottom a struggle for the Good, a wild striving towards human betterment . . . Thus the League of Nations, the chief constructive outcome of the Great War, is but the expression of the deeply-felt aspiration towards a more stable holistic human society. And the faith has been strengthened in me that what has here been called Holism is at work even in the conflicts and confusions of men; that in spite of all appearances to the contrary, eventual victory is serenely and securely waiting, and that the immeasurable sacrifices have not been in vain . . . It is the nature of the universe to strive for and slowly, but in ever-increasing measure, to attain wholeness, fullness, blessedness. The real defeat for men as for other grades of the universe would be to ease the pain by a cessation of effort, to cease from striving toward the Good. The holistic nisus which rises like a living fountain from the

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very depths of the universe is the guarantee that failure does not await us, that the ideals of Well-being, of Truth, Beauty and Goodness are firmly grounded in the nature of things, and will not eventually be endangered or lost. Wholeness, healing, holiness – all expressions and ideas springing from the same root in language as in experience – lie on the rugged upward path of the universe, and are secure of attainment – in part here and now, and eventually more fully and truly. The rise and selfperfection of wholes in the Whole is the slow but unerring process and goal of this Holistic universe. (J. C. Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 1926, pp. 344–5)

It would be easy to sneer at Holism and Evolution as the work of a secular monk, or a ponderous way of connecting the atom and the cell to Lord Robert Cecil. Smuts claimed that ‘there was not a problem of Metaphysics . . . Ethics . . . or even Religion’ which holism could not have illuminated, and that its high point was that ‘peace of God passing understanding’ which was to be found in Buddhism as well as in Christianity. These claims may or may not have been just. But of one thing we can be certain – that Smuts was more naïve intellectually than even the naïvest of English exponents of the lines of thinking which connected Whiggism and Liberalism to Christianity, that at times he was as intellectually imbecile as the younger Toynbee, and that he would, if justice had been done, have made an admirable target for the throw-back, sneering Whiggism with which Lord Dacre taunted Liberals, Christians and Marxists throughout the late twentieth century.

9 Christianity and modern knowledge II

We can not only hold with Galen and Harvey, and all the great physiologists, that the organs of animals give evidence of a purpose; not only assert with Cuvier that this conviction of a purpose can alone enable us to understand every part of every living thing; not only say with Newton that . . . ‘the business of natural philosophy is to deduce causes from effects, until we come to the very First Cause, which certainly is not mechanical’: but we can go much further, and declare, still with Newton, that ‘this beautiful system could have its origin no other way than by the purpose and command of an intelligent and powerful Being, who governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as the Lord of the Universe; who is not only God, but Lord and Governor’ (Rev. William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840, vol. II, p. 585) There is, I speak humbly, in common with Natural Science, in the study of living History, a gradual approximation to a consciousness that we are growing into a perception of the workings of the Almighty Ruler of the world; that we are growing able to justify the Eternal Wisdom . . . [and] that we are coming to see, not only in His ruling of His church in her spiritual character but in His overruling of the world to which His act of redemption has given a new and all-interesting character to His own people, a hand of justice and mercy, a hand of progress and order, a kind and wise disposition ever leading the world on to the better, but never forcing, and out of the evil of man’s working bringing continually that which is good. (Rev. William Stubbs, Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, 7 February 1867, reprinted in Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediaeval and Modern History and Kindred Subjects, 1886, pp. 23–4)

In the last two chapters, we have examined reactions to infidelity which, though seemingly robust, were not as robust as they seemed. In this chapter we shall examine the reactions of Whewell, Stubbs and Cunningham and their determination – more robust in the first two cases than in the third – to capture modern knowledge for Christianity. I Whewell’s1 public life had two subsidiary phases – up to the publication of his review of the first volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1831 and from 1845 until his death in 1866 when he wrote a famous essay, ‘On the Plurality 11

Rev. William Whewell (1794–1866), educated Royal Grammar School, Lancaster, Heversham Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge (Fellow, 1817–41, Master 1841–66). Author of Natural Theology, 1833; The History of the Inductive Sciences, 1837; The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840; Two Introductory Lectures on Moral Philosophy, 1841; Elements of Morality Including Polity, 1845; Of a Liberal Education, 1845–52; Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England, 1852; Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 1852; and On the Plurality of Worlds, 1853.

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of Worlds’, published further editions and popular versions of what he had written previously and, in the course of congratulating himself on the success and acceptability of his doctrines, praised George Grote, criticized Pattison, crushed Comte and acted generally as a public arbiter in continuation of the criticisms he had already made of Mill, Mansel and other important authors of the period. The most brilliant, and constructive, phase, and his anni mirabiles in terms of significant productivity, lasted from 1831 until 1845, when his Bridgewater Treatise, Introductory Lectures on Moral Philosophy and Elements of Morality, along with five huge volumes on The History and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, made a massive, up to a point Baconian, and, above all, Protestant statement about method and knowledge in science, politics and morality, and about the relationship between morality, politics, science, prosperity and Christianity. Whewell was the son of a Lake District builder and was a schoolboy first at the Royal Grammar School, Lancaster and then at Heversham Grammar School. He arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1812 and became a Fellow in 1817. After deciding not to be a lawyer, he became first a College Lecturer in Mathematics and a Tutor, and then, successively, Professor of Mineralogy and of Moral Theology. Having being ordained in the Church of England at thirty-two, he had married at forty-four and had accepted a country living when Peel appointed him to the Mastership of Trinity in 1841 when he was forty-six. Whewell was not exactly a research scientist in the laboratory sense. But in his early years as a Fellow of Trinity, he wrote innovative works about mechanics, dynamics, Greek mathematics, German ecclesiastical architecture, mineralogy, tidology and political economy and was much involved in the politics of science in London and elsewhere. By the time he published The History of the Inductive Sciences and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in 1837 and 1840, he had had an unusually wide experience of modern knowledge. In national politics, Whewell looked like a Whig among Tories and a Tory among Whigs. In Cambridge he was a prominent defender of the independence of colleges against movements in favour of the erosion of colleges, was sometimes a successful, and sometimes an unsuccessful, educational reformer and, since all great advances in the sciences should become the ‘common property of . . . cultivated men’, believed that mechanics, i.e. engineering, should form part of a ‘liberal education’. As an educational theorist, Whewell distinguished between practical and speculative teaching, argued that the ‘stationary or retrograde’ period of science corresponded to the period when ‘philosophy was the instrument of Education’, and expressed the opinion that the Greeks might have ‘anticipated’ Galileo, Kepler and Newton if speculative philosophy had not held

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them back as it had held back the Romans, the Neo-Platonists and the theologians of the Middle Ages. ‘Practical teaching’, in which the learner had to ‘do something himself’, was what Whewell believed in, as opposed to ‘speculative teaching’ in which ‘the lecturer expounded . . . while . . . the audience . . . received . . . what the speaker delivered’. It was practical teaching that he identified with the ‘promotion of civilization’, not only when ‘the mathematical student . . . solved the problem’ presented by the teacher but also when ‘the classical scholar rendered Horace or Thucydides into English’. Practical teaching was ‘vital’ to the future of civilization and its persistence would decide whether Europe and America would ‘for the next thousand years . . . have for their mental aristocracy a class of philosophical system-builders, commentators and mere metaphysicians’ or would exhibit ‘that vigour and . . . effort at real progress and improvement’ which had been endemic in ‘this quarter of the globe for the last three hundred years’. In making classics and mathematics centres of resistance to philosophy, Whewell praised the rigour of thought which the classical student would gain from reading mathematics and the ‘liberal education’ which classics would add to the mathematical ‘calculator,’ and he deplored the encouragement given by philosophical subjectivity and sociological system-making to that ‘hostility to the institutions of their country’ which Hegel and Schelling had induced ‘among the young men of the universities . . . in Germany and France’. Whewell defended the connections between learning, religion and moral discipline which were entrenched in the colleges of Anglican Cambridge. He emphasized the ‘solemnity’ of the responsibility to ‘build . . . for eternity’. And he was acutely aware of the importance of knowledge in modern societies.

Whewell was born within a year of Carlyle. But he was not a Carlylean, and his science required a depth of knowledge with which none of Carlyle’s heroes had been endowed. Yet Carlyle’s doctrine about the hero, and the ‘genealogical tree of scientific notability’ which Whewell appended to The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, were chronologically simultaneous attempts to provide for modern societies the tradition of intellectual leadership which Froude was to provide through his secularization of Newman’s Lives of the Saints. As luminary of an established university, Whewell mistrusted the precipitances of authors and the demands of journalism, but died before the full ‘threat from democracy’ had become apparent. He rejected both vulgar Baconianism’s belief that knowledge was power and the Utilitarian

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association of knowledge with pleasure. While pointing out that Bacon had valued science as ministering to man’s dignity, he understood, nevertheless, that without science, there would have been neither railways nor electricity, and that, in the modern world, where the arts might have ‘gratified the tastes of the few’, it was ‘machinery’ which was supplying ‘the wants of the many’. Whewell was tough and cautious, disliked ‘gratuitous theorizing’ and the ‘strange . . . assumptions’ which followed when science abandoned the ‘province of observation’ and emphasized the religious duty which would be performed when the ‘pious’ left the sciences to the care of those who knew about them. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, he argued that science was an arcane élitism and ‘too fine for vulgar appreciation’, that the anti-Christian message which was being extracted from it was being extracted illegitimately and that it was science’s limitations which made it compatible with Christianity. In accounting for scientific progress, Whewell singled out induction – the work of the mind guessing, or making up, the ideas which constituted intellectual invention and engaging in an active wager, or risking on a hunch, in which ‘baseless assumptions’ were often the route to ‘right guesses’. Guessing required a technical terminology and much ‘narrow . . . labour’, like the ‘process of book-keeping in a large commercial establishment’. But it also required an element which was not ‘offered by Nature’, did not exist in ‘any of the observed facts’, and considered observed facts as merely ‘exemplifying . . . some ideal case . . . constructed by the mind’. The History of The Inductive Sciences was not merely historical. It drew from the history of science a philosophical account of its nature, with the commonsense belief in the difference between facts derived from sense and theories invented by intelligence being misleading, and the process of converting ‘conscious’ theories into ‘facts’ involving receptivity, creativeness and ascending ‘acts of the mind’. These were necessary to all the existing sciences which, having been surveyed in their historic individuality in The History, were surveyed again philosophically in The Philosophy, where the fundamental ideas of each2 and the ‘simplicity and harmony’ of true as distinct from false theories were described at length. These Kantian, Collingwoodian or Popperian points, along with their postBaconian implications, were made continuously. It was a recurrent theme that invention of ‘fundamental ideas’ had been the mainspring of scientific progress, that ‘felicitous . . . strokes of inventive talent’ were not to be predicted in advance, and that it was common for thinkers to apprehend the ‘proposition which contained a scientific truth’ before they had arrived at the ‘co-ordinate definition’. 12

I.e. symmetry in crystallography, causation in palaeontology, space, time and number in geometry, force and matter in mechanics, polarity, affinity and substance in chemistry, and resemblance and natural affinity in mineralogy, botany and zoology.

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Whewell’s account of the process of invention was a homily in defence of error, an attempt to do justice to those whose ideas had been defeated, and an essay in rescuing defeat from the contempt with which the victors tended to treat it. Popper and Butterfield could not have been more critical of the selfrighteousness of the victors; but the conclusion was, nevertheless, that ‘those who were defeated’ in science were ‘in the wrong’, that even men of genius had had to put up with failure before they achieved success and, though it was impossible to prepare for genius, that it was possible to provide the right sort of education and culture. Towards the end of The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Whewell described the methods which had been employed in the formation of science in the past. He offered them, however, not as ‘universal’ rules to be applied ‘peremptorily’, but as ‘limited and precarious’ aids which might or might not be helpful in leading through an ‘intellectual education’ to the acquisition of ‘clear scientific ideas’ in the future. Likewise, in accounting for morality, it was an historic achievement which was being consecrated. II Before he published Elements of Morality Including Polity in 1845, Whewell had located himself in relation to his predecessors, and particularly in relation to Paley who, where morality was concerned, provided him with a Utilitarian Aunt Sally to knock down. Elements of Morality rejected Lockeanism and sensationalism, was dedicated to Wordsworth as a Lake District hero and, in treating the types of morality and politics practised in Europe since the Greeks, praised the moral character and political assumptions of English Protestant respectability. It contained little direct discussion of Tractarianism, and nothing to match the condemnation which Kingsley was to make thirty years later. But it was published in the year of Newman’s conversion and defended existing arrangements in Church and State, along with the upright, courageous, compassionate, thoughtful and disciplined integrity of the pure, joyful, goodnatured, open-hearted and spontaneous personality which stood as far as it was possible to stand from the self-conscious exaggerations of the Tractarian personality. These were the preferences in Elements of Morality morally. Philosophically it began from the ‘springs of action’ which put men in a ‘state of internal motion’ and led by ‘intention and will’ to ‘external acts’. The ‘springs of action’ were ‘motives’, and an action which ‘did not proceed from a man’s will . . . was not his act, though his limbs be employed in it’. Motives operated through instinct as well as reason, but needed to be directed by the practical reason’s application of the speculative reason’s knowledge of ‘speculative truth’. Whewell asserted that the rules which ‘directed the course and limits of . . .

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gratification’ were parts of the ‘Order’ of society and were necessary to the ‘Peace’ of society. It was ‘moral rules’ which balanced the ‘repulsive tendencies of the desires’ and drew men together where the desires pulled them apart, and it was ‘Universal Human Reason’ and a ‘Universal Moral Sympathy’ to which each man’s reason and conscience had to conform if the rights of personal security, property, contract, family, government, education, self-culture and free opinion, as distinct from the French Revolution’s ‘Rights of Man’, were to be made effective by the State’s infliction of punishment for ‘Wrongs’ done against them. Book II of Elements of Morality showed that men’s ‘actual rights’ were determined by ‘positive law’ which varied from community to community, that ‘Rights’, as well as being a ‘fact’ in the history of every nation, were an idea in the ‘consciousness of . . . man’s moral nature’, and that it was through a universal duty to respect the ‘personal safety, property, contracts, family ties’ and so on ‘of others’ that men were able to feel ‘indignation against wrong’, bear moral responsibility for action, and accept punishment for transgression. Whewell distinguished between duty as ‘what men did’ and virtues as ‘what they were’, and between duty as ‘conscious thought’ and virtue as ‘unconscious disposition’. Frequent performance of duties produced the ‘habit’ of virtue, moral progress was achieved by the ‘constant endeavour’ at ‘intellectual progress’ and the moral life involved a constant attempt at moral progress ‘which could never terminate while . . . men remained on earth’. Conscience might err or be unable to act as ‘Ultimate and Supreme Authority’ where nations or communities were concerned, and ‘standards of Right and Wrong’ might vary between ages and cultures. But ‘national law’ was still ‘subject’ to ‘Conscience’ and would ‘always have . . . part of her journey to perform’. In politics, Whewell was anti-revolutionary. While agreeing, in relation to slavery, that men needed the rights which were necessary for moral agency, he also affirmed that ‘Natural Rights’, unless accompanied by ‘corresponding obligations’, were antipathetic to the ‘humanity of a moral man’. He added that, in societies where rights were not fully realized, their ‘indefeasibility’, so far from justifying disobedience, justified only the use of ‘constitutional means’ by way of remedy; that established laws and ‘superiority of social condition’ had to be deferred to, even when the laws were unjust and the occupants of superior station lacked the requisite benevolence; and that the state was not a ‘voluntary association’ which arose by individuals contributing ‘Rights they naturally possessed’ but a ‘necessary’ association which was both the originator and enforcer of law and the ‘source of the reality of Rights’. The State, on this understanding, was a ‘moral agent’ in all its actions and had to establish in the mind of its subjects the ‘moral ideas of benevolence, justice, truth, purity and order’. The State also punished, not in order to ‘prevent harm to members of the community’ (as a Utilitarian

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would argue) but because crimes were ‘violations of the law’ and ‘offences against morality’, and because punishments were part of the ‘moral education’ of the citizen. Whewell made it plain that one of the State’s chief functions was to indoctrinate (a word he did not use); if the ‘life of the State’ was to be preserved, there had to be a consonance between the individual’s self-education, the domestic morality inculcated by parents and friends, the morality taught in education and the morality which was to be found in ‘poetry and literature’. In Elements of Morality, he explained his view of the State twice – first as part of the human morality which he described in volume I, then in explaining the relationship which ought to obtain between morality and religion in volume II.

Whewell did not write an extended theology, or any large work exclusively about religion. But God and religion were sustaining considerations not only in his account of science, but also in the doctrine he enunciated about the relations which ought to obtain between Churches and States. Whewell took off from the ‘rights’ that a State needed in order to be a State and ended with the essential aid which ‘religious teachers’ gave a State in exercising its right to conduct the ‘moral education of its members’. Whewell did not confine himself to Christianity or to the Church in any orthodox sense since in every religion, ‘the Church in a general sense’ was the ‘teaching body’ and was capable of assisting the State in moral education. But Christianity was said to offer ‘special facilities’, to be especially zealous about education and to raise the question on what terms ‘the Church should give and the State receive’ this assistance. Whewell envisaged the possibility of the Church having supremacy over the State, of the State being neutral about religion, or of the State protecting one or more religions, by subsidy, for example, because they were ‘useful’. His conclusions were that a ‘neutral’ or ‘indifferent’ state would encourage atheism and indifference and that a papal system, though conducive ‘ideally’ to the State’s ‘religious character’, had in practice been ruined by the political corruption of the clergy. He dismissed persecution and agreed that in England Dissenters should not be compelled to have their children educated by the established Church. But the State he was justifying was still a confessional State which could not be ‘indifferent to the truth or falsehood of religion’ and had to keep persons ‘hostile’ to the Church away from positions of power. Whewell’s idea was of a State in which ‘every act’ would be ‘religious’, the Church would be established because its teachings were true and the State itself would attract a devotion from the Church which it would withhold from an irreligious State. He also had the idea that the Church would teach ‘the expanding population’ the truths it believed, and would look to the State to

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provide ‘machinery’ to give it a ‘missionary’ character at home as well as abroad. Whewell attached importance to lay rulers and to their ultimate leadership in religion. He made extended reference to the royal supremacy, patronage and the parish system; to the episcopate (when properly endowed with ‘maintenance and rank’) as a check on clericalism and ‘spiritual domination’; and to the importance of combining ‘moral and intellectual education’ with a definite theological teaching, particularly in universities where the young statesman, if surrounded by a ‘coexistence of theologies’, might take the first step towards the atheism inherent in any student’s attempt to ‘frame a religion of . . . his . . . own’. More important, he stated that rulers ought not to support religions they thought false, ought to support the religion they thought true, even if it was not the religion of their subjects, and ought to ‘reform’ a Church when it succumbed to ‘religious’ or ‘political’ error.

In writing theologically, Whewell distinguished natural religion and theology from revealed religion and theology. In both cases he pointed out that happiness in order to be happiness had to coincide with duty, that ‘the moral law’ was ‘God’s command’ and conscience God’s voice, and that God had not only appointed ‘misery’ as the ‘punishment of transgression’ but had also appointed ‘happiness in the present and a future life’ as a consequence of ‘conformity’. This, however, was as far as natural religion was allowed to get. For ‘repentance and amendment’ as the ‘remedy for sin’, and for the ‘hope of some power’ beyond the ‘ordinary powers of our minds’ to ‘enlighten and instruct our consciences’, Whewell pointed to ‘fact’ – the fact that God had revealed his ‘commands and promises’ through the Old Testament and the ‘coming of Jesus Christ upon Earth’. Whewell was an enemy of narrow bibliolatry and argued that man’s proper ‘rule of action’ was ‘God’s will . . . whether . . . made known by Scripture or by Reason’. God’s will about Christian ordinances had to be determined by the Church through consideration of natural piety and early, chiefly Jewish, revelation; through ‘apostolic institutions’ insofar as the spirit of the times and the altered forms of life permitted; and through a tradition in which, though apostolic and Catholic usage were generally decisive, the ‘national church’ had authority to decide when they were indecisive. These principles were applied flexibly, confirming English conventions, while recognizing that the conventions of other nations ‘differed from our own’. But it was affirmed bluntly that baptism was the ‘necessary mode of institution into the Christian church’, that the Lord’s Supper, Communion or Eucharist was the ‘union of Christians with Christ’, that marriage was a ‘religious communion’ which the Cromwellian ‘usurpation’ had wrongly subverted, and that Christian funerals were edifying spectacles which diminished the fear of death. Once the

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Reformation had improved the Catholic liturgy, moreover, fixed forms of prayer and worship had been made compatible with ‘inward movements of the heart’. Whewell’s God was not only the creator of man as well as of nature and the object of reverence, obedience, admiration, love, praise, prayer, thanksgiving and worship, He was also man’s ‘universal father’ and displayed an ‘energy’ and ‘intelligence’ which ‘upheld, pervaded, saw, knew and judged all things’. In Elements of Morality, Whewell specified the content of a Christian morality, the grounds on which men had to follow it, and belief in Christ’s divinity, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension as inseparable not only from the duties of private prayer, provision of a Christian education for children and dependents and the ‘Christian improvement’ of ‘neighbours . . . fellowcitizens . . . and . . . the whole world’, but also from the duty to replace anger, revenge, violence, covetousness, dishonesty, deceit and fornication by pity, meekness, courtesy, honesty, purity, temperance, sobriety, obedience and love. Though in some sense latitudinarian and regarding the Christian clergy as ‘Presbyterian’ rather than ‘Levitical’, Whewell was not theologically liberal. He denied that revelation was subject to progressive discovery, affirmed that it could be stated as ‘Creed’, and rejected the ‘right of free enquiry’ in religion and morality. There was a ‘truth’ which it was the duty of ‘every one to hold’, and he agreed with the ‘universal consent of mankind’ that not only the atheist but anyone who denied the ‘truth of the Christian revelation’ broke so fundamental a human tie as to deserve to be looked on as the enemy.

Between 1831 and 1845, Whewell made a firm statement of Church–State Anglicanism in face of the attacks which were being made on it by Dissent, Tractarianism, infidelity and democracy. It remains to consider his conclusions about relations between nature, man and God. III Whewell despised the conclusions which popular writers were drawing from science’s achievements. He ran them through his methodological gauntlet and deployed a brilliant belligerence against ‘scientific’ atheism and materialism. From his Bridgewater Treatise onwards, he not only rejected the assumption, which some Newtonians had made, that all forces were mechanical forces along with the assumption, which some of Faraday’s supporters had made, that all forces were ‘polar’ forces, he also intuited in the transition from the one to the other a proof that conclusions in science were both unpredictable and incomplete and, however brilliant and illuminating, must be judged ‘narrow’ if considered as links in the chain which led to the ‘Supreme Cause’. This was one, high-thinking, criticism of science. It was accompanied by

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rejection of pseudo-philosophical claims which had been extrapolated from science, including the ‘transmutation of species’ as the explanation of the origin of species, and the doctrine that ‘animals followed one another upon the earth in the order of their anatomical resemblances’. To the origin of species, long before Darwin, Whewell had stated three attitudes – that the creation of new species could not be explained by ‘study of the existing organic world’, that men and languages could not have grown out of ‘apes’ and ape-like ‘jabberings’ and that explanation did not belong to the ‘laws of nature’. These attitudes were accompanied by the claim that ‘an impassable abyss’ separated men ‘from the origin of things’, that philosophy could not touch ‘the skirts of the garment of creative power’, and that the ‘Supreme Will’, as their ‘law and foundation’, had permitted new species to appear exactly ‘as if . . . each . . . had been placed there by an express act of the Creator’. Whewell’s use of science as an approach to religion was ambiguous. He was saying on the one hand that science could not validate the belief that ultimate origins were explicable in terms of natural causes. He was saying, on the other hand, that the inductive mind was often a ‘teleological’ mind, and that, in addition to ‘connections’ and a ‘causation’ which it could not comprehend, science provided both ‘indispensable evidence of design’ and ubiquitous ‘indications’ of a Creator. These statements appeared frequently in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences and in Indications of the Creator. They had been made first in Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise – Natural Theology – in 1833. Natural Theology was an attempt to ‘lead religion to look with confidence and pleasure on the progress of the physical sciences’ and to show that the God who was the author of the ‘law of duty’ was the same God who was the author of the ‘laws of nature’. It stated that ‘the line by which pain . . . sorrow and vice fell in with . . . the strictest right and greatest good’ involved the ‘darkest and most tangled recesses of our knowledge’, that modern science (especially astronomy and physics) supplied new testimony to religion’s truth, and that the greatest and most inventive of inductive scientists had held that there was a ‘divine purpose and power’ and a ‘legislator’ whose ‘high and profound mind’ had written ‘the laws of nature’. Whewell devoted two chapters to explaining that deductive science had been more hostile to religion than inductive science had been, and that this was to be explained by the inferior inventiveness of the ‘mere mathematician’ and his ‘contempt for knowledge which was not mathematical’. He also explained why induction supplied the idea of God where deduction did not, why their superior inventiveness had enabled the inductive sciences to ‘acknowledge the existence . . . of a God’ whose government of the universe gave grounds for ‘love and hope’, and why it was reasonable to interpret the universe as an ‘assemblage of mathematical propositions’ which justified the

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conclusion that God, insofar as his mind was intelligible, was in certain respects an algebraic mathematician. As elsewhere, so in the Bridgewater Treatise, Whewell emphasized science’s ignorance as well as its knowledge, the ‘number . . . and . . . complexity’ of the laws operating in nature, and the difficulty science had in achieving knowledge of more than a ‘very small proportion of the appearances of the universe’. His ultimate dicta were threefold – that, though God had shaped and guided the ‘visible creation’ through ‘general laws’, He had not ‘enumerated individual contingencies’; that His action in creating laws was quite different from a man’s action in obeying them, and that science, while unable to show that the universe was God’s work or to assimilate God’s actions to men’s actions, assumed, nevertheless, that the laws of nature were ‘prescribed’ by God ‘to his own acts’ in such a way as to make ‘the agency of the divine’ present in ‘every portion of the universe’. Whewell emphasized the importance of scientific discovery. But he also emphasized the transcendence which God would retain, however extensive scientific discovery might become. Whewell’s God was ‘God for ever and ever’ and science could do no more than discover what He had done. ‘In those regions’, moreover, ‘where science had thrown her strongest illumination’, he wrote seventy years before Rutherford’s and Soddy’s demolition of the indestructibility of matter, all [was] full of wisdom and harmony and beauty, and . . . a . . . wise selection of means . . . harmonious combination of laws [and] . . . beautiful symmetry of relation [was] directed, with no exception which human investigation has yet discovered, to the preservation, the diffusion, the well-being of those living things which, though of their nature we know so little, we cannot doubt to be the worthiest objects of the Creator’s care. (Rev. W. Whewell, Bridgewater Treatise, 1933, p. 380)

While emphasizing the autonomy of scientific procedures, Whewell indicated their limits and, in specifying the exact nature of the inventiveness involved in both induction and deduction, rescued for religion not only the areas which these had not yet organized but also the essential difference between God and man. In Stubbs’s treatment of history, there was an even more complicated attempt to capture modern knowledge for Christianity. Stubbs was not a popular historian but Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History was a central collection of documents and The Constitutional History of England a central work in the teaching of English history at Oxford and elsewhere for many decades after Stubbs’s death. The Constitutional History in particular gave a bold account of the development of the English Constitution which, though in certain respects High Church or quasi-Tractarian, could more generally have been written by any patriotic Liberal (like Freeman) who believed that mediaeval constitutional history was about progress, liberty and national cohesion rather than about Christianity.

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Stubbs3 spent sixteen years as a country clergyman and seventeen as a bishop; he shared Max Müller’s ‘chivalrous, almost romantic, devotion’ to Queen Victoria, and bore the burden of preaching in front of King Edward VII in St George’s Chapel, Windsor the day after her funeral. He was also a Yorkshireman of self-proclaimed ‘yeoman stock’, traced his family back to the fourteenth century, and had been taught to read legal documents by his father – a solicitor – who had died when Stubbs was seventeen, leaving his family in straitened circumstances from which Stubbs was rescued by a recommendation to Christ Church, Oxford by Bishop Longley of Ripon who was to be Archbishop of York and Canterbury later. Stubbs entered Christ Church in 1844 where, according to Tout, he was ‘kept at arms length’ as a Servitor until being taken up by a member of the Stanhope family and by Kitchin, who was later to be an historian of France and Dean of Durham. Stubbs did as badly in mathematics as Macaulay and Maitland, did well in literae humaniores, and followed Freeman in a Fellowship at Trinity College on Freeman’s marriage. On being ordained in 1850, he became vicar of Navestock in Essex, where for a time he tutored Swinburne. He stayed in Navestock until 1866, marrying the village schoolmistress (with whom he had five sons), becoming a highly-paid contributing editor of the Rolls Series and failing, after a short period as part-time librarian at Lambeth Palace, to get either the Modern or Ecclesiastical History Chair at Oxford, or the succession to Panizzi as Librarian of the British Museum. As a schoolboy Stubbs was an Evangelical, but on arrival in Oxford acquired Tractarian sympathies. His arrival, however, coincided with the break-up of the Tractarian movement during which, despite the loss of friends, he remained an Anglican. As an undergraduate and young don, he knew Pusey and taught Liddon, though it was not until the Oxford University election at which Gladstone was defeated in 1865 that he was close to either. In spite of supporting Gladstone at that election, he felt an instinctive mistrust which was exceeded only by the mistrust he felt for Disraeli. During Derby’s brief period of office in 1866, he was at last appointed to the Regius Chair of Modern History. As a professor Stubbs at first had a bad time. He had to lecture on subjects 13

Rt. Rev. William Stubbs (1825–1901), educated Ripon Grammar School and Christ Church, Oxford. Parish clergyman 1850–66. Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, 1866–84; Bishop of Chester, 1884–8 and of Oxford, 1888–1901. Author of Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, 1866; Inaugural Lecture, 1866; ed. Memorials of St Dunstan, 1874; The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, 1878–80; The Constitutional History of England, 1874–8; The Early Plantagenets, 1876; ed. Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, 1882–3; Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediaeval and Modern History, 1886; Ordination Addresses, 1901; Historical Introductions to the Rolls Series, 1902; Lectures on European History, 1904; Visitation Charges, 1904; Lectures on Early English History, 1906; and Germany in the Early Middle Ages and Germany in the Later Middle Ages, both 1908.

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he did not want to lecture on; his audiences were small; and he complained about the ‘Balliolised idiots’ who were produced by the ‘class-getting . . . training’ imposed on the tutorial system by the examination arrangements of the 1860s. Stubbs held strong views about politics, philosophy and religion and expressed them as bluntly in Oxford as he was to do as a bishop later. In doing so, he covered a great deal of ground – from the description of the ‘flesh and blood’ to whom Gladstone wished to give votes as including many who ‘swore and stole’, through the judgement that Wycliffe’s politics ‘when . . . applied to practice’ had been ‘little else than socialism’, to the injunction to the clergy of the 1890s to learn ‘the simple principles of political economy’. The Poles of 1863 were ‘horrid’, more or less like the Italians four years earlier and Louis Napoleon’s France later; the Jews were no better. The ‘Swiss imposture’ demonstrated ‘the evil of republican institutions’, and the French Revolution a ‘defiance of God . . . and overthrow of all the laws of human society’. The Roman Law celebrated by Bryce in a famous Inaugural in 1871 was ‘the most pliant tool of oppression’ and ‘one of the greatest obstacles to national development’ in European history. Stubbs admired the English monarchy but not the doctrine, ‘so falsely imputed to churchmen of all ages’, of the ‘indefeasible sanctity of royalty’. He was illusionless about force and wrote of the English under William the Conqueror ‘suffering without power to rebel until all the old causes between them were forgotten’. Though ‘each class of society . . . should be admitted to a share of power’ once ‘fitted for the trust’, he ‘did not think’ that a clergyman (i.e. Gore) had ‘any right to use [his] influence’ to encourage the ‘agitations’ of Tom Mann, the Labour leader. Stubbs did not believe in the philosophy of history, could not, therefore, believe in Buckle or Renan and was much exercised by the ‘crude Liberalism’ he encountered on his return to Oxford in 1866. He doubted whether a ‘Dissenter could write a history of England’, believed that Puritanism, though associated with freedom, had nothing in common with it except a mistrust of authority, and described ‘modern philosophy’ as being no nearer than the ‘schoolmen’ to solving ‘the problem of existence’. He shared Wellington’s dislike of secular education and expressed his own dislike of Hume, Paine, Voltaire and Lessing, to whom J. R. Green was succumbing and to whom Frederick Temple had succumbed in Essays and Reviews. About Biblical criticism, even as late as the 1890s, Stubbs was ambivalent. He recognized its technical proficiency, the impact it had had on ‘the literary and religious beliefs of 2,000 years’, and the ‘readjustment’ it had demanded in ‘religious theories of inspiration’. But the inaccuracy of the Old Testament, and the doubt which Christ’s dependence on it raised about his divinity was ‘very terrible’, and was to be met by patience, suspension of judgement and the realization that it was ‘no proof of faith to believe until all [was] made clear’.

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Stubbs was not a ritualist and was so much an enemy of Roman Catholicism that, on Ripon’s conversion in 1874, he declared himself ‘ashamed of being an Englishman’. At the same time he mistrusted latitudinarianism and affirmed that ‘the articles of the Creed’ were as ‘certain . . . as the proofs of Euclid’. It was a ‘delusion’ to expect religion to survive the softening of dogma and it was also the case that a ‘pitched battle’ was going on from which ‘the Church of the future’ might emerge ‘with no creeds, no sacrifice, no Bible but only . . . the infinite expansion [of a] . . . religion of humanity’ in which ‘the light that was in the hearts of them that believed not [would still be] darkness, in spite of all our education’. In addition to mistrusting latitudinarianism, Stubbs mistrusted Erastianism. He collaborated with Westcott and Dean Church as a member of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts in the 1880s, and in five appendices to the Commission’s Report said all that he wished to say about the Church of England’s doctrinal independence from the State. It is in the light of these opinions that we approach the amazing output he achieved between the publication of the first of his Rolls contributions in 1864 and his appointment to the Bishopric of Chester twenty years later.

Stubbs’s first serious works, published in his thirties, were contributions to ecclesiastical history. On returning to Oxford in 1866, he still thought of himself as an ecclesiastical historian and tried, unsuccessfully, to move to the Chair of Ecclesiastical History. From then on, while spreading himself into secular history, he so far identified it with ecclesiastical history that it was, he claimed, ‘through the Church (of the Heptarchy) . . . that . . . the [English] nation had learned to realize its unity’ and through the memory of that ‘unity’ that the ‘unity of the race’ had eventually become ‘available for organized government’. In Oxford Stubbs occupied a Chair which had been founded in the eighteenth century but was conscious of teaching an undergraduate subject which was new by comparison with the study of classical literature, history and philosophy. In justification he claimed that, next to revealed theology, history afforded ‘the most thoroughly religious training that the mind could receive’, that the continuity of mediaeval with modern institutions was more illuminating than the disjunction which separated modern institutions from the institutions of Greece and Rome, and that ‘Christianity’ had not only given modern history its ‘living unity’ but had also enabled historians to share with scientists a ‘growing . . . consciousness . . . of the workings of the Almighty Ruler of the world’. This was a persuasion to the study of a new academic subject on the ground of its contemporary relevance. History was the remedy for philosophy and infidelity. Christian freedom was superior to the freedom of classicism and

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civic humanism, and mediaeval history would be relevant so long as the British Empire carried to the corners of the globe the institutions which the ‘Angles, Jutes and Saxons’ had brought from Germany in the fifth century. Apart from the introductions to the Rolls series which he had begun at Navestock, Stubbs’s most important works4 were nearly all written or delivered in Oxford at the same time as Green was writing and delivering his most important works to larger and more captive audiences. In these works Stubbs transcended the ecclesiastical history he had begun with and took as his central subject the institutions which had been introduced into England by peoples who were ‘of German descent in the main constituents of Blood, character and language’. In the opening pages of The Constitutional History, he compared the forms taken by German institutions in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and England, stated that all the invasions of England had been made by peoples of Germanic stock, and concluded that not only was ‘the polity developed by the German races on British soil . . . the purest product of their primitive instinct’, but also that the formation of the ‘complete’ polity which had been achieved by the reign of Edward I had been a ‘progressive, persistent development from the primeval polity of the common fatherland’. This ‘progressive, persistent development’ between the fifth and the thirteenth centuries and its variations up to the death of Richard III were Stubbs’s main themes in The Constitutional History and in his three other works about English politics. None of them suggested, however, that development had been inevitable or motives unmixed, or that the ‘great . . . results’ which had been achieved had been achieved independently of a ‘confused mass of unconscious agencies’. Development had been providential, that is to say, under God’s providence, as in Darwin, but was attributed neither to God directly nor to evolution alone but, as also in Darwin, to an interaction – in Darwin’s case between plants, animals, men and their environments, in Stubbs’s case, between kings, nobilities, clergies, popes and peoples in which the ‘law of progress’ was that ‘the evil and debased elements’ were ‘so closely intermingled with . . . noble and beautiful’ elements that, in the ‘assured march of good . . . much that [was] noble and beautiful must needs [have] share[d] the fate of the evil and debased’. What the interaction ought to have produced according to The Constitutional History was what it had produced – a constitution which ‘more than any that the world had ever seen’ had ‘kept alive the form and spirit of free government . . . social freedom . . . and true political liberty’ and, though not arrived at by simple linear development pushed forward by Carlylean heroes or philosopher-kings, had been sustained by a long undertow which, through all the ‘weariness and vexation’ of events and all the ‘revenge’ and ‘class’ interest that had motivated the actors, had ensured that ‘the roots of 14

I.e Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, Lectures on Early English History, The Early Plantagenets and The Constitutional History of England.

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the present’ would be found ‘deep’ in the deepest layers of ‘mediaeval institutions’. This process was Stubbs’s teleology which, though rooted in human fallibility, was to be understood neither cynically nor contemptuously. Innumerable statements emphasized that understanding required effort and a sense of the deviousness and unpredictability of events, and that both were essential if the ‘history of institutions’ was to be made the key to the history of the nation. Stubbs believed that, even under the most despotic kings, the ‘right of the nation to determine by what laws it would be governed was fully admitted’. His story, insofar as it did not simply show good coming out of evil, was in part a tribute to the kings’ mainly ecclesiastical advisers. Primarily, however, it was a tribute to the Conqueror for ‘maintaining the usages of the nation’ and ‘welding together the administrative framework of the two races’, to Henry I for ‘paving the way for law’ and raising up a ‘counterpoise’ to the ‘older vassals’, to Henry II for the ‘indelible marks’ he had left on the Constitution and to Edward I whose ‘intuitive knowledge of the needs of his people’ had enabled him to complete the transition from ‘an age of routine dependence on the will of a despot’ to an ‘age of law’ secured by the unity, identity and ‘indwelling energy’ of a ‘better-educated’ people. This was what Stubbs believed had been achieved when representatives of the shires and boroughs, collected in Parliament, had joined the clergy and the baronage in acquiring ‘a share’, though not an equal share, of ‘taxing-power’ and the ‘supreme work of government’ in 1295.

Volume III of The Constitutional History included a Burkean or Annales-type gazeteer of the classes and forces that gave late-mediaeval England its identity. It did not ignore the helplessness of artisans or the existence of ‘classjealousies’. But it denied that ‘our forefathers in the middle ranks of life desired to set an impassable boundary between class and class’; it drew attention to the opportunities for ennoblement that had been open to lawyers and soldiers, and it did not allow the excellence of the Reformation grammar schools to obscure the excellence of the cathedral and monastic schools of the Middle Ages both educationally and as avenues of social mobility. Above all, it described a ‘national’ history in which ‘political wisdom’ was not the ‘heirloom’ of any one class of society, and all classes played a part through their selfishness as much as through their idealism in laying the foundations of English liberty in the constitutional structures of the Middle Ages. In Volume III the teleology was the bending, failure and eventual consolidation of the ‘social’ and ‘formal’ aspects of Parliament and parliamentary procedure up to the end of the seventeenth century when constitutional growth had ‘outrun the capacity of the nation’, and the nation had needed ‘rest and renewal’ and ‘discipline and reformation’ after ‘changes in . . . life,

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mind and character far greater than it had gone through since the Norman Conquest’. Stubbs stated on many occasions that the period between 1485 and 1688 required a treatment different from the treatment required by the Middle Ages. But he worked backwards so directly that his account of the Middle Ages was made significant by what followed – the loss of the ‘manly . . . sense of great responsibilities’ which at their best had made the mediaeval barons ‘shepherds of the people’; the Tudors’ humiliation of the clergy and encouragement of the ‘obsequious flattery of wealth and . . . rank’, however ‘acquired’ and ‘won’; the dénouement, after Elizabeth’s skilful holding-operation, in which Charles I paid for his inadequacy with his life, and even Cromwell’s ‘great gifts’ were unable to impose a revolution on an ‘ancient fullgrown people’. Stubbs’s governing idea was that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments had been deviant, in spite of the ‘glories’ of Elizabeth; that the period between 1688 and 1878 had been a reversion to mediaeval development; and that Parliament, so far from being simply representative, had consisted of ‘assemblies of estates’ or ‘political constituents of the nation’ from which distinctions of ‘caste, blood and religion’ had been absent and for which the ‘adjustment and limitation of taxation’ had formed ‘a body of . . . constitutional questions . . . to be worked out in the political struggles of two centuries’. When put in the form of a principle – that ‘the law that [bound] all, the tax that [was] paid by all, [and] the policy that affected the interest of all [should be] authorised by the consent of all’ – this sounded naïve. It was saved from naïveté not only by Stubbs’s prose but also because he had a secure view of the limitations of historical knowledge.

Stubbs distanced himself from the philosophy of history and the ‘narrow view of truth’ which resulted from its ‘perpetual straining after the abstract idea’. Ideas were embodied in institutions and the ‘gravity’ of the ‘great ship of state’ had to be understood in connection with its ‘apparatus for steering and sailing’. This was the sense in which history was ‘concrete’ (where the philosophy of history was not), and why it had to be divided ‘by the . . . reigns of kings and the lives of great men’, even where these had been unable to ‘determine the conjunctions’ within which they had had to act. As an historical tactician, Stubbs was unwilling to exclude ‘party feeling’ and ‘personal sympathy’, aimed to make Whigs ‘good, wise and sensible Whigs’ and Tories ‘good, wise and sensible Tories’, and discerned in the highmindedness and sincerity of the ‘best men’ evidence that they had had far more in common than was suggested by their ‘internecine hostility in act’. On the other hand, he had an Oakeshottian sense of the intimations of situations, of the importance of ‘opportunity’ as well as of ‘purpose’, and of the impossibility of understanding the connections between the two unless both were

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connected with the compulsions and uncertainties which crabbed and cabinned political decisions. Stubbs’s emphasis on Parliament may have been naïve. But there was nothing naïve about his versions of the political process. He wanted to make English history a teleological history because of the association he made between liberty and Christianity. But he did not want the historian either to ‘acquit’ or to ‘condemn’, and he wanted a history which would take with the utmost seriousness the length of the haul, the distant nature of the telos and the respects in which the cause of liberty had suffered setbacks which could only be understood as operations of ‘the Higher Hand’. In discussing the connection between principle and practice, Stubbs warned historians against ‘substituting [their] own formulated conclusions . . . and imputing a . . . more . . . conscious political sagacity than [statesmen] would ever have claimed for themselves’. Sin in the form of mixed motives and human fallibility in the form of teleological ignorance, indeed, were as central as in Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (which Stubbs may have stimulated), and made it easy to appreciate both developments which had obstructed the route to constitutional government and developments which had occurred under the canopy of God’s providence – not only the ‘march of . . . progress’ through periods of selfishness and faction but also the deferral for at least two centuries of the telos towards which English history had been moving. Stubbs’s history undoubtedly had a telos, but this was, he believed, nothing to do with the ‘philosophy of history’. His reasons for thinking this, and the distinction he drew between the philosophy of history and a Christian attitude to historical thinking, were put most clearly in a statement he made in Oxford while he was Regius Professor. ‘Philosophy’, it went, in its modern use is generally nothing but an attempt to discover the wrong reasons for events or phenomena, to elaborate processes by which the things that we see or know to have happened could be accounted for, supposing that everything that produced them was something else than what it is. History is, on the other hand, the tracing of recorded effect and recorded cause; and such philosophy seems to me to be a contradiction in terms of the true readings of history. If you think that I misrepresent . . . the philosophy of history, I . . . will say only . . . that I am opposed to the school of thinkers which exalts the generalisations of partially-informed men into laws, and attempts out of these laws to create a science of history. And the reason of this is simple. I fully believe in the government of the world by Divine Providence, and that the Divine Providence, acting always for that which is right and best, by its very nature acts with some uniformity of cause and consequence. But I also believe that the Divine Providence acts in the government of the world through secondary agencies, and the chief agency in the department of history which we are attempting is the . . . aggregate of wills of individual men, than which no agencies can be conceived more capricious, more uncertain, more uncalculable. It is the portion of history to trace the workings of these secondary agencies, and even to generalise from them; but to enter into the higher regions of Divine Providence is the portion of faith rather than of science, and I for my part should be very loath to bind as by a law the action of Divine Providence with any generalisation of mine

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from men’s doings, as regards either past or future. (The Revd. W. Stubbs, The Comparative Constitutional History of Mediaeval Europe, n.d. but before 1884, in A. Hassall, ed. Lectures on Early English History 1906, pp. 194–5)

In Stubbs’s Oxford writings, the main interest was in secular and political development. But the idea of a Christian nation and national Church was ubiquitous, as it had been from the start. IV In the introduction to Epistolae Cantuarenses in 1864, Stubbs described the ‘patriotic’ character of early English monasticism and the conversion of a missionary clergy into a settled clergy once the population had begun to increase. In contextualising the conflict of intrigue between Archbishops Hubert and Baldwin of Canterbury and the Prior and Convent of Christ Church, Canterbury at the end of the twelfth century, he was sceptically descriptive of the vicissitudes of monastic discipline, of the conflict between the monastic and the secular clergy and of the loss of patriotism which had occurred when the eleventh-century monasteries had become ‘colonies of Roman partizans’. In Itinerarum . . . Regis Ricardi he brought a similar frame of mind to bear on Richard I as a Crusader. Stubbs compared the Crusades to the Crimean War. But he said at least as much on behalf of Saladin as on behalf of Richard who, in addition to being ‘no Englishman’ had been both a ‘bad ruler’ and a ‘man of blood’. Richard’s ‘cause’ had been ‘as religious as the Reformation’, but had been undermined by jealousy and backsliding among the leaders, venality among the pilgrims, and a conjunction of racial degeneracy, luxury, effeminacy, female rule and the Oriental habits which had been picked up by the Crusading settlements. Only the military orders had produced a constant succession of ‘fresh and healthy blood from Europe’, and if their system had been followed, Palestine would have remained Christian as long as Cyprus did. Stubbs believed that the ‘national Church’ from the seventh century onwards had been the ‘presentment’ to the English of the ‘reality of the great church of God’, and that the modern Church of England, as the ‘Catholic universal church’, was not merely ‘of all churches’ the closest approximation ‘to the . . . spirit of the apostolic model’ but also had a mission ‘to plant the Cross in the waste places of the earth’ and ‘guide our statesmen’ towards the ‘destiny which had . . . made [England’s respect for civil liberties] . . . patterns to the world’. There had been backslidings in the eighth and ninth centuries, and also subsequently. But just as the seventh-century Church had avoided the theocratic character of the seventh-century Spanish Church and was eventually to establish the historic connection between township and parish which had survived ‘for more than a thousand years’, so, after the Norman Conquest, the ‘ecclesiastical and national spirit’ had supplied ‘something at least of that passive power’ which the ‘Norman despotism’ had been unable

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to break, had had a theological literature ‘in the tongue of the people’ which testified to a ‘more thorough religious sympathy between the teachers and the taught’ than was to be found in any of the Continental churches and, in sacrificing neither the State to the Church nor the Church to the State, had succeeded under Henry I in pinpointing regions of life in which ‘liberty’ had had to be allowed if ‘clergy and people’ were to ‘draw more closely together’. Stubbs wrote very little about the post-Reformation Church of England except in his appendix to the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts and the second of his two lectures on the History of the Canon Law in England. Though there were general encomiums, therefore, there was no historical encomium to match the encomium on the Anglo-Saxon Church and no extended account of the ‘social benefits’ brought by the Church of England since the Reformation. Stubbs praised More and Fisher and expressed a certain Tractarian embarrassment about Henry VIII’s wish to be ‘something more than the pope’. On the other hand, he argued that the Elizabethan Settlement had left the Church free to determine doctrine; he was an enthusiast for Convocation and a critic of the ‘atavistic Whiggism’ which Hallam had brought to bear on it; and he praised the inseparability of the Church’s ‘political liberty’ from that ‘physical enforcement of law . . . sentence . . . canon or censure . . . by the secular arm’ which distinguished State Churches from Free Churches. Stubbs denied that the Church of England had been a ‘creation of the State’ since the State had neither ‘made’ the Church’s ‘laws’ nor ‘bestowed its endowments’. The Church’s property had made the Anglican clergy independent of the ‘arbitrary contributions of the people’ and had not only saved them from the ‘danger of . . . teaching as would please men rather than God’ but would also go on doing so even if the Church of England went, as it might, the way of the East India Company. He gave many reminders of the fact that Puritanism and mediaeval Ultramontanism – both by origin ‘struggles for liberty’ – had ended in tyranny, and that Ecclesia Anglicana, in spite of the closeness of its connections with the State, had always been freer than other Churches. It had been of great importance in the Middle Ages, that the clerical system of judicature which had ‘penetrated . . . every act and relation of men’s lives’, had been conducted by men drawn so widely from every class that ‘every tradesman or yeoman might . . . see his son promoted to a position of wealth and power’, and it had been of equal importance that episcopal defence of the rights of both freeholders and the Commons had lasted ‘until the destruction of the class which furnished their natural leaders’ had subjected both Church and nation to the ‘tyranny which followed the Wars of the Roses’. Stubbs explained the Reformation by reference to celibacy’s distance from domestic life, a ‘pious mysticism’ which was ‘too fastidious’ for the world, and the ‘unscrupulous partisanship’ involved in the persecution of the Lollards.

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The Renaissance had had an ‘intensity of critical power’ which the Middle Ages had lacked. But something had been lost and the modern world had been saved from inferiority only by the fact that the Bible had been brought to ‘every family’, that every man could become a ‘reader . . . thinker . . . and . . . priest in his own household’, and that the Church of England, in association with the State, had achieved far more than the Papacy (or the Free Churches) in fulfilling duties which it was the business of all Churches to fulfil.

Like Acton, Creighton, Seeley and Maitland, Stubbs felt obliged to write a history which did justice to all the actors in the dramas it depicted, including in his case not only a Tractarian justice to both sides in the Reformation but also a social justice to the old ruling class in face of the imbecility and partypolitical untruth which these others, though in general Liberals, also feared from a democratic franchise. In retrospect, this makes Stubbs look bland and established. In fact he was neither. He stood at a point of Tractarian tension and, though the cause of professionalization in others, was spared the dessications of professionalization himself. Like Kingsley’s, his preference was for a Church which was close to the people, though he knew that there had been periods when the English Church had not been close to the people. But the implication of his argument was that, even if the mediaeval situation was unlikely to recur, the mediaeval Church had protected liberties and been closer to the people than anyone had had a right to expect.

Though Stubbs was an enemy of the ‘Balliolised idiocy’ that he encountered on his return to Oxford in the 1860s, he had at least something in common with the Balliol desire to subvert Epicureanism and materialism. In Cunningham, along with rejection of Socialist cynicism about economic motivations under capitalism and enmity to the claim of the emancipated career-woman to provide a new norm of womanhood, there was a mentality which declined to be merely censorious about the past and explained both the mixed motives which had obtained and the relationships which ought to obtain between the so-called ‘greed’ of ‘Capitalists’, the so-called ‘tyranny’ of ‘landlords’ and Christian economic duty. V Cunningham5 was the son of an Edinburgh lawyer and was born a quarter of a century after Stubbs. He was brought up in the Scottish Free Church and 15

Ven. William Cunningham (1849–1919), educated Edinburgh Institution and Academy and Universities of Edinburgh, Tübingen and Cambridge. Fellow and Chaplain of

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was at Edinburgh University and Caius College, Cambridge before migrating to Trinity College, where he published his Edinburgh dissertation which, after an extended theoretical contrast between philosophy as truth and history as contextualization, examined Descartes’s influence on English thought since the seventeenth century.

Having failed, like Maitland, to get a Trinity Fellowship, Cunningham became a university extension lecturer in the North of England and travelled in India and elsewhere. At Tübingen he came into contact with Milner’s family and by that route with Arnold Toynbee. He married at the age of twenty-seven, was ordained in the Church of England, and settled first as a university administrator, then as Chaplain of Trinity, finally as a Fellow of Trinity and a Lecturer in the new Cambridge history faculty. Once eased into authorship with the publication of his dissertation, Cunningham’s output was continuous. By the time he was thirty-seven, he had published an edition and introduction to The Epistle of St Barnabas, studies of St Augustine, the first-century Church and Indian Christianity, a survey entitled Christian Opinions on Usury, a book entitled Politics and Economics, and the first of the four versions he was to write of The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, which established economic history as a Cambridge subject, paralleled Maitland’s history of English law and remained a leading textbook in a growing subject for nearly forty years. Cunningham was a part-time professor in London and a regular lecturer in the United States; he was a rural clergyman and vicar of the leading Anglican church in Cambridge; and he became Archdeacon of Ely, Proctor for the Clergy in Convocation, and a member of the Board of the local water company. He was a founding Fellow of the British Academy, served on many international committees, and from the 1880s onwards was first a freemason and then chaplain to the English freemasons. He became an economic historian because the Cambridge history faculty needed somebody to lecture on the subject. But he was an historical economist by principle and conviction, quoted Roscher, Dühring, Marx, Schmoller and J. S. Nicholson in criticism footnote 5 (cont.) Trinity College, Cambridge and Vicar of Great St Mary’s, Lecturer in History at Cambridge and Professor at King’s College, London. Author of The Epistle of St Barnabas, 1877; Christian Civilization with Special Reference to India, 1880; The Churches of Asia, 1880; The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 1882; Politics and Economics, 1885; The Alternative to Socialism in England, 1885; St Austin and his Place in History, 1886; The Use and Abuse of Money, 1891; The Path to Knowledge, 1891; The Gospel of Work, 1902; The Rise and Decline of the Free Trade Movement, 1903; The Real Richard Cobden, 1904; Back to Adam Smith, 1904; The Cure of Souls, 1907; Christianity and Social Questions, 1910; The Case Against Free Trade, 1911; Christianity and Economic Science, 1914; British Citizens and their Responsibility to God, 1916; Christianity and Politics, 1916, The Common Weal, 1917; and The Increase of Religion, 1917.

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of laissez-faire, and in a series of articles in the Cambridge Review in 1882 recorded the ‘terrible mistakes’ made by the Government of India in increasing rural debt and lawlessness by effecting the ‘nihilistic’ overthrow of the caste, village and guild system. As a young man, Cunningham admired Maurice,6 moved to Trinity because Maurice was there and, in addition to lecturing as Maurice’s deputy on political economy just before Maurice’s death, was preparing an account of Maurice’s thought just before his own death in 1919. Like Maurice, too, he had moved out of Nonconformity, had intended, if ordained in Scotland, to be ordained as a Presbyterian and, again like Maurice, had eventually been ordained in the Church of England. During his university extension period in the 1870s, Cunningham acquired experience of working-class secularism and wrote an article entitled ‘The Progress of Socialism in England’. Almost his last published work, forty years later, was an unfriendly analysis of the Report [inspired by Lansbury and Tawney] of the Archbishops’ Committee on Christianity and Industrial Problems, on which his judgement was that it was ‘not especially Christian’, made ‘unjustified . . . claims on behalf of the clergy’, and announced the need for a post-war ‘revolution’ which a Christian ethic gave no reason to suppose was needed. When it appeared in the Contemporary Review in 1879, ‘The Progress of Socialism’ had criticized the mammonizing of marriage, the ‘widening gulf’ between the poor and the rentier, and a ‘paralysis’ of ‘State power’ so obvious that it was questionable whether ‘brewers . . . railway directors and shipowners should be allowed to sit in the House of Commons’. In contrasting the steadiness of Socialism’s progress in England with the violence of its progress elsewhere, it referred to the ‘heritage of political experience’ acquired during the struggle against the monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and added, in terms which Marx would have approved, that the waste and uncertainty which capitalism was creating were so extensive, capitalism’s ‘crises’ so persistent and the ‘scope for private enterprise’ so obviously ‘diminishing’, that capitalists themselves would welcome ‘any commercial reorganization’ that would ‘bring them a calmer life’. Cunningham listed among the evidences of Socialism’s progress in the 1880s the new land system in Ireland, the proliferation of ‘public companies’ and co-operative societies and the increasing involvement of central and local government in the provision of public utilities. To the question whether Socialism would be better than capitalism at ‘increasing and maintaining the national wealth’, he did not give a direct answer. In The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, he began to show how both laissez-faire and Socialism could be resisted. 16

For Maurice see below, chapter 10.

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The Growth of English Industry and Commerce was a ‘simple relation of facts’ in which the central transition was from the regulated economic activity of the Middle Ages to a ‘new view of money’, the fixing of prices by reference to ‘utility’ instead of custom and ‘reasonableness’, and capitalism, competition, mercantilism and laissez-faire as ‘complex’ and ‘delicatelyadjusted’ ways of ‘providing for human wants’ in the modern world. Cunningham was the enemy of political economy both in the form which Mill had established in 1848 and in the forms which Jevons and Marshall had established thereafter. He complained about its stranglehold over examination syllabuses especially for the Civil Service, and the respects in which, since Ricardo, an arcanely mathematical ideal had ‘lost touch’ with ‘actual phenomena’ and had forgotten that economic principles dealt with human action ‘each piece . . . of which . . . had . . . to be corrected . . . by . . . experience’ and directed ‘towards the end . . . conceived and . . . desired . . . by current morality’. This was a doctrine about economic systems being ‘relative’ to the ‘particular politics’ for which they were designed and it disapproved of the idea which was said to have taken possession of Parliament in the early years of the nineteenth century that there could be no conflict of interest between merchants and manufacturers on the one hand and the interests of the State on the other. Laissez-faire was defended insofar as laissez-faire had increased national wealth and comfort and enabled competition to assess the ‘relative value’ of the services rendered by citizens to the community. But it was criticized by reference to the German historical school, the English moralists whom Maurice had examined from Law onwards and (eventually) the Tariff Reform Movement’s reactions to commercial, industrial and agricultural depression. Cunningham praised capitalism’s testimony to ‘human inventiveness’, defended the part it had played in the creation of national wealth and described the misery which had accompanied the breakdown of the old industrial system as ‘not more conclusive of the mischief wrought by capital in private hands’ than of ‘the inability of public authorities to adapt their arrangements to new economic conditions’. On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution had effected a ‘real depression’ in the position of the labourer ‘relatively to other factors in production’ and the trade unions had been right to propose remedies, even when they had been acting in the interests of a class. While defending private property as ‘essential’ to ‘economic . . . vigour . . . and . . . prosperity’, he felt no difficulty about the Factory Acts, the eight-hour day or the Dock Strike of 1889 as assertions of the supremacy of ‘men’ over ‘machinery’. An address at Leicester during a strike in 1895 taught that strikes involved not merely ‘greed’ but also ‘great public interests’, that the interests of capital and labour were identical ‘in the long run’, even where they were opposed to each other in the short run, and that

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there was a Christian duty on both sides to be sure of their ground, to be ‘courteous and chivalrous’ and to be governed by ‘self-discipline’ and ‘selfsacrifice’. Cunningham believed that the ‘national resources’ had to be administered through a form of ‘National Husbandry’. He approved of ‘rising in the social scale’ as a ‘stimulus to exertion’ but declined to make this an overriding principle. He asserted that State interference with ‘individual liberty . . . permeated all our relations’, that the individual ‘possessed his rights . . . because they were given to him . . . by the State’, and that the State, in ensuring that every man performed the minimum duties which public opinion demanded, should limit the ‘free play of the pursuit of individual gain’. These duties bore particularly on the owners of wealth and those who had ‘risen in the social scale’ and it was necessary to recall the ‘personal responsibility’ to make capitalism acceptable by being ‘mindful of those who had been less fortunate’ in the enjoyment of its benefits. ‘The world owes much to the inventors and discoverers’, he wrote with Maurice’s impartiality in 1891, it owes more to ascetics and saints. There have been men in all ages who have taught their fellow-men how to overcome nature and to acquire wealth; there have been others who have showed them how to overcome themselves, to rise to a better conception of man’s life, and thus to use their wealth so that it might tend to human welfare. (Rev. W. Cunningham, The Use and Abuse of Money, 1891, pp. 217–19)

In Politics and Economics (1885) and The Use and Abuse of Money (1891), Cunningham examined the legislation of the previous forty years as an already existing modification of laissez-faire. In The Rise and Decline of the Free Trade Movement (1903) and The Wisdom of the Wise (1910), he brought historical economics into the Chamberlainite market-place. As a tariff reformer, Cunningham wanted a return to Adam Smith to match the return to Kant in moral philosophy and a rediscovery of ‘the real Cobden’ who had been lost as political economy had degenerated into ‘a party science’. Cobden had not been either a party Liberal or a doctrinaire, and tariff reformers would positively admire him once they understood that the ‘democratic’ rhetoric of the Tariff Reform League resembled the democratic rhetoric of the anti-Corn Law League insofar as ‘Cobdenite Free Trade’ had been a ‘stepping-stone’ to ‘Universal Free Trade’ and the ‘Anglicising’ of ‘the globe’. These writings stated that State intervention need not be corrupt, and that a higher-profile State was needed to address Britain’s loss of industrial and commercial supremacy. They accused Haldane and Rosebery of coterie economics and free traders generally of allowing ‘personal greed’ to create classconflict and racial hatred. They dwelt on the ‘patriotism’ of the Empire’s ‘five great self-governing nations’, the disinterestedness which had enabled ‘the youth of Britain’ to ‘take up the white man’s burden’, and the Empire of the Future as promising not only to merge British interests and ‘authority’ into

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Imperial co-operation but also to diminish the racial struggle between Gentile and Jew and between ‘the white man’ and ‘the black man’. These arguments, and the even more detailed arguments of The Case Against Free Trade (1911), were arguments about the right use of power. They accommodated ‘Imperialism’ to the Commonwealth ideal of the future in the way in which, if he had lived longer, Cunningham would have accommodated Victorian Liberalism to Baldwinian Conservatism. In the face of Fabianism and Christian Socialism, the question he asked was whether Christianity issued in any particular economic policy.

Cunningham’s economic history was his contribution to modern knowledge and, in its factual aspect, was presented as the product of value-free study. It was also subjected to judgement in the enormous body of his Christian writing beginning in the 1870s and ending with the works he wrote between the declaration of war in 1914 and his death five years later. During the 1914 war, Cunningham emphasized at the same time the ‘divine vocation’ which democracy had imposed on every citizen and the false prophecy involved in the conscientious objector’s claim to ‘divine authority’. He defended ‘party’ as the ‘best instrument . . . yet devised’ for the government of a ‘free people’ and declared, for the benefit of the British Workers’ League in The British Citizen and for the benefit of academic Americans in his Lowell Lectures in Boston, that war, though not of course the Kaiser’s war, was compatible with Christianity. There were warnings about the possible ‘selfishness of the masses’ and about the ‘intellectual conceit’ which, in declaring war an anachronism, had allowed ‘the Kaiser’s advisers’, to persuade themselves that England would remain neutral. In the wartime recognition of religion as a ‘force in political life’, Cunningham found proof that ‘the progress of civilization’ and the ‘spread of democracy’ were realizing the ‘full meaning of Christian faith’. Cunningham’s earliest writing about Christianity7 was about the replacement of the ‘external ritual of the Jews’ by the ‘true religious life’ initiated with ‘the death and suffering of Christ’, and about the contrast between Christians who were servile to the Bible as an ‘infallible record’ and those who ‘rested their faith’ on a Divine Spirit teaching them how to ‘use’ the Bible. Though committed to the methods of Bunsen and Baur, he was critical of Biblical criticism and did not throw it at orthodoxy. The Epistle of St Barnabas, and, indeed, The Churches of Asia interpreted the first-century Church in its own terms (rather than, anachronistically, as an anticipation of Protestantism), but did as little to disclose Cunningham’s religious opinions as The Growth of English Industry and Commerce was to do later. It was only in Christian Civilization with Special 17

In The Epistle of St Barnabas.

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Reference to India that the ‘full force’ of Christ’s message was expounded. Christian Civilization imposed on an age of earnestness and conscientiousness the duty to repudiate the ‘scepticism’ which put ‘every religious opinion on the same level’ and failed to see in the Christian ideal a power ‘greater than the wisdom of the world’. At the same time, it shared Lecky’s and Fitzjames Stephen’s refusal to condemn ‘the natural activities’ of the laity as the ‘corrupt inclinations of the unregenerate’. In Christian Civilization Cunningham identified the ‘Greek, Latin and Anglican Communions’ as having, and Congregationalists and Baptists as lacking, the requisite Catholicity. He criticized Presbyterianism for taking a particular phase of Christian history as a ‘model for all time’, Quakerism for its constricting conception of God’s relation to the human heart, and Methodism for being ‘too easily influenced’ by revivalist enthusiasms. It was episcopacy that promised the ultimate realization of Christian unity – provided it was established in the form ‘most congruent to the life of the people’. In India in 1880 Cunningham was on the side of ‘native Christians’ against both the ‘chilling contempt’ displayed by the unofficial English and the lack of interest displayed by the Government of India, and he claimed for the Church – ‘the only body . . . devoid of commercial interest and military ambitions’ – that it alone had ‘the will’ to ‘foster the growth’ of a ‘free political life’ in preparation for the Christian civilization which would emerge from it. In 1882 he was more cautious. He not only contrasted missionary Christianity’s failure to match a ‘destructive’ attitude towards the ‘old beliefs . . . and . . . ways of life’ with the positive effort at reconstruction which he found in St Augustine, he also by-passed Scholasticism and Calvinism in interpreting Augustine as anticipating the modern wish to solve the mysteries of an ‘unintelligible world’ via the ‘empirical truth detected through the senses in scientific investigation’. Cunningham doubted whether St Augustine’s doctrine of eternal punishment was compatible with a ‘Christian view of God’. But he enthused over the Augustinian view of sin as the defect of a ‘good nature’ which retained ‘elements of goodness’ in its corruption, preferred the Augustinian doctrine of ‘personal responsibility for sin’ to both predestination and the modern belief in the inherited predisposition to sin, and found Augustine’s philosophy of history superior to Hegel’s philosophy of history not only by reason of its more complicated conception of ‘the end to which Creation moved’ but also because of its greater compatibility with a modern public doctrine. VI Cunningham’s public doctrine was in the first place negative; it offered a way out of modern error – not only materialist, Comtean and ‘cosmopolitan’ error

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but also the ‘external . . . and . . . mechanical diminutions’ of ‘inner freedom’ which he associated with socialist ‘compulsion’ and the Christian Socialist assumption that the Church had a commission to ‘reconstruct . . . economic life’ and the ‘laws of social order’. Cunningham assumed that secular Socialists who denied Socialism’s compatibility with Christianity were right, that modern prophecy from St-Simon and Fourier onwards carried with it ideals ‘so meagre’ as to have very little connection with Christianity, and that sin as the Christian explanation of social dislocation was superior to Lassalle’s, Marx’s and Hyndman’s secular explanation of social dislocation. Cunningham’s account of Christianity’s social doctrine was diffident and complicated. He associated the Reformation economy with the ‘uncertain sound’ given forth by Protestantism. But he avoided nostalgia and recognized not only that Christianity could not ‘permeate’ the modern world as it had permeated the Middle Ages but also that The Wealth of Nations was the central document of the modern world and capitalism an evil only where it was dominated by selfishness and covetousness. Cunningham’s casuistry rejected equality of opportunity unless accompanied by ‘equal capacity for taking advantage of . . . opportunity’, and much preferred the rhetoric of ‘levelling-up’ to the rhetoric of ‘levelling-down’. It was cautious, in an age of limited liability, about the capitalist’s ability to exercise responsibility for the distant consequences of his actions. It dismissed the idea that moral duty could operate simply and directly and insisted that it was qualities of will and imagination as distinct from Christian moral qualities which had made capitalist accumulation possible. Cunningham was sensitive to atmosphere and especially to subversions of Christianity. He drew such comfort as he could from the politics of the new century, asserted the importance of religion ‘as an element in the life of a Modern State’, and claimed for religion the power to create and maintain a ‘community of sentiment’ and ‘tradition of national character’ among ‘men of different races’. He applied this idea with special force to the races of the British Empire which displayed those ‘redeeming elements’ that God had used in making ‘the English people’ his instrument in diffusing ‘civilization . . . love and righteousness throughout the world’. Cunningham touched on the injury Christianity had suffered from ‘spiritual . . . theocracy’ in Latin Christendom, Presbyterian Scotland and Puritan New England, on the tension between the Sermon on the Mount as a statement about the ‘inner disposition’ and the identification of Christianity with ‘civil institutions’, and on the individual spirituality which made the Christian will incapable of being determined by authoritarian or external pressure. He dismissed the toleration which rested on indifference and the moderation which rested on ‘scepticism’, just as he rejected the clerical cant of being ‘above party politics’.

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Though he had chosen to be ordained in the Church of England, Cunningham was anti-Erastian. It was a ‘fundamental principle’ of the English Constitution that the Anglican clergy were not ‘mere officers of state’, that the ‘spiritual authority’ which dealt with ‘matters of faith and worship’ was ‘separate’ from the ‘civil power’, and that Christian judgement, while taking careful account of secular practice, should avoid the indiscriminate promulgation of secular principles. Cunningham did not think of Christianity as a recipe for success. But the Christian conception of liberty enabled the free labourer to work better for reward than the slave worked by compulsion; the Christian conception of ‘stewardship’ enabled all men to ‘use the resources under their control’ better than they would use them without it; and the Christian conception of continence and marriage, which touched ‘the springs of evil’ in the ‘inner life’, where ‘ordinary social morality’ did not, gave a Christian confirmation to the need for a Malthusian check on population. These coincidences between Christianity and secular prudence were extensive and far-reaching. They included the idea of a ‘high standard of comfort’ for all citizens and ‘the monogamous family’s’ importance in enabling the races which had adopted it ‘to keep their hold on the regions where they had settled’. And just as the ‘strongest safeguard’ against corrupt and tyrannical government and the evils which had accompanied inequality of possession was the rich man’s and the ruler’s – even the democratic ruler’s – responsibility to God, so the maintenance of a sound currency, the duty of ‘diligence’, and the ‘dignity of work’, were connected with imitation of God as ‘the supreme worker’. In The Gospel of Work, ‘no man had a right to be idle’. The ‘dignity of work’ was a ‘divine vocation’; the ‘diligence’ shown by ordinary people towards their work had a religious quality which had been central to life and thought from God’s creation of the world onwards, and this had disclosed itself not only in the dominion man exercised over ‘the earth . . . and the brute creation’ but also in great artists, lawgivers and moral teachers; indeed, wherever the ‘spark of genius’ was associated with a ‘longing to put forth creative power’. In his later years, Cunningham praised Calvinism’s alliance with capitalism for keeping ‘material progress in touch with religion’. But he also blamed Calvinism for replacing a New Testament social morality by a social morality based on Jewish standards of commercial dealing, and at times expressed a Ruskinian gloom about the oppressiveness of modern work and the ‘contempt and indignation’ which was aroused by the ‘capricious use of wealth by smart people’. Basically, however, he avoided rancour, reminded the commercial and industrial, as well as the landed, classes of the duties which God wished them to perform towards their fellow-men, and stated more clearly than Maurice had stated that their ‘duty . . . in regard to the distribution of

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their wealth’ was less likely to be carried on under compulsion or political control than from the effort of individuals to do what was right. Unlike some Christian thinkers, Cunningham was not afraid of the modern world. He was not only, as a friend of Baldwin, at ease in practice (more than Maurice was), he was also theoretically at ease, rejecting unnecessary revolutions, claiming for Christian experience that it was ‘the most effective means for . . . improving men with a new sense of social duty’ and in his writing embodying the unreconstructed university which expansion after 1940 was to supersede.

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Politics and party now are not what politics and party were formerly; the struggle is between antagonist principles, and the issue is life or death to the Constitution in Church and State, under which the mercy of God has hitherto appointed us to live. I can imagine a successful resistance on our part, but I see eventual triumph for our enemies, because a mighty revolution is gradually taking place in the habits and character of thinking, among men. To oppose this is to oppose the flow of the river Amazon – steady, certain, and overwhelming. The only Conservative principle is the Protestant religion as embodied in the doctrines and framework of the Church of England. (7th Earl of Shaftesbury, Diary, 23 January 1840, in Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, 1886, vol. I, p. 288) It is impossible to describe the feelings with which I stand here tonight, in the hall of my native city, and look back . . . upon all I owed to Birmingham in my school years. . . We who passed through them dimly felt that the old order was changing and that a revolution was going on about us, of which the form and the issue could not be foreseen . . . I seemed to discern . . . that all life was one, that no part lay outside my sphere, that national life, social life, civic life, were all forms of the religious life which was the embodiment of the Gospel. The fifty years which have passed since have deepened this conviction. (Bishop B. F. Westcott, Social Service, A Speech Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Christian Social Union, Birmingham Town Hall, November 29 1898, reprinted in Christian Social Union Addresses, 1903, pp. 46–7) A society . . . whose Founder was executed as the enemy of law and order, need not seek to soften the materialism of principalities and powers with mild doses of piety administered in an apologetic whisper. It will teach as one having authority . . . It . . . will rebuke the open and notorious sin of the man who oppresses his fellows for the sake of gain as freely as that of the drunkard or adulterer. It will voice frankly the judgment of the Christian conscience on the acts of the State, even when to do so is an offence to nine-tenths of its fellow-citizens. Like Missionary Churches in Africa today, it will have as its aim, not merely to convert the individual, but to make a new . . . and a Christian, kind of civilization. (R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 1921, pp. 238–9)

Relations between the Church of England and the State entered a new phase with Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and from one point of view involved a debate about the help or hindrance brought by Establishment to the Church’s performance of its duties as an English and a Christian institution. The Roman Church’s claim to be the only true Church and the Nonconformist claim that free church Christianity was the only Christianity capable of keeping England Christian, were extensions of the assumption that the Reformation and Restoration had imprisoned Anglicans in Erastian chains and rendered them incapable of acting as Christians ought to act. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Liberal Party became a vehicle 247

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of this opinion, remained a vehicle until the beginning of the first World War, and ceased to be such only when the connection between theological liberalism and political liberalism and between theological conservatism and political conservatism was broken by the retreat of Dissent and the Conservative Party’s incorporation of party Liberals, including dissenters and theological liberals, in the 1920s and 1930s. Among nineteenth- and twentieth-century defenders of Establishment, this volume has examined Thomas Arnold, Jowett, Stanley, Froude, Kingsley, Whewell, Stubbs, Cunningham, Inge and Henson (who changed his mind), and will examine Maurice, Temple and Balfour. It will also examine Gore as an Anglican, and Forsyth as a Dissenting, disestablishmentarian, along with Figgis and Lewis, for whom the more pressing question than Establishment was the irreconcilability of Christianity with modern thought. In this connection, Dean Church especially, but also Bishop Wilberforce, made Tractarianism a doctrine central to English intellectual history. I Wilberforce1 was the son of a famous Evangelical, was at Oriel in its greatest phase, and had a brother and friends who became Roman Catholics. Though close to Manning and Hurrell Froude, however, he was never close to Newman, had no time for celibacy and virginity, and was not only married before he was ordained but also led an active life as sportsman and man-of-the-world. He had been a significant Bishop of Oxford and died as Bishop of Winchester in 1873. He did not become Archbishop of Canterbury. But he was greatly admired by both the High Church and the Evangelical parties in the 1860s as leader of resistance to infidelity, and critic of Darwinian and Huxleyite evolution. Wilberforce’s view of Darwin is easily parodied. But the truth, as Darwin acknowledged, is that it drew on the first-hand expertise of a naturalist, and did what any serious critic of ‘science’ had to do from Vestiges of Creation onwards – prod at its theory, relate it to observation and assert the essential contestability of its fundamental assumptions. In a famous review of The Origin of Species, Wilberforce made it plain that there was a ‘struggle for existence’ which exterminated the weak and prevented the ‘deterioration’ of the Creator’s work, that ‘the words graven on the everlasting rocks’ had a divine quality no less than the words written in the Bible, and that it was ‘lying for God’ to object to ‘alleged facts in Nature’ on the ground that they ‘conflicted with revelation’. Towards the end of the 11

Rt. Rev. Samuel Wilberforce (1805–73), educated ‘privately’ and Oriel College, Oxford. Parish clergyman, 1829–45. Bishop of Oxford, 1845–69. Bishop of Winchester, 1869–73. Author of Notebook of a Clergyman, 1833; Journals and Letters of Henry Martyn, 1837, Heroes of Hebrew History, 1870.

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review he let fly at Darwin’s account of man’s origin, his neglect of man’s redemption and his doubts about the ‘cavalier’ body of conjecture (‘dishonourable’ in a Baconian) which Darwin had inserted into the ‘venerable temper of scientific truth’. Wilberforce’s criticism of Darwin involved criticism of Darwin’s deviation from established science. His criticism of Newman involved criticism of Newman’s deviation from established Anglicanism.

About Newman, Wilberforce wrote in the highest terms possible. He compared the Apologia with St Augustine’s Confessions, admired the ‘fidelity and completeness’ with which it had revealed the ‘inner being’ of a ‘remarkable man’, and claimed for Newman alone among converts to Rome the ‘rare gift of undoubted genius’. He was unfriendly to Kingsley. He praised the Oxford Movement as a movement to make the Church a ‘spiritual society’, and supported Newman’s claim that Newman had been forced out of Oxford unwillingly ‘by the Liberals’. Wilberforce’s view of Newman, however respectful, was nevertheless critical – of the ‘subjective’ character of Newman’s mind, of his Jesuitical preference for ‘casuistry’ to ‘conscience’, and of his ‘scepticism’ about any truth ‘external to himself when placed in comparison with his perception of what was passing within himself’. As a Calvinistic puritan, Newman had ‘skipped over’ mainstream Anglicanism and ‘true sound English churchmanship’, and was guilty not only of a ‘scepticism’ which had driven him to Rome as an ‘escape from speculation’ but also of a ‘mutability’ which did not diminish his certainty about any temporary opinion that he arrived at. Wilberforce’s account of the Apologia included a statement of Anglican catholicity, a rejection of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility and a contrast between Manning’s ‘bitter sarcasm’ about the Church of England and the loving tone in which Newman was still speaking about it twenty years after his secession. Most important of all, it pointed out that, in the struggle between those who wished to subject ‘all science and . . . the human mind to the authority of the Church’ and those who wished to ‘limit’ that ‘authority’ to the ‘proper subject-matter of theology’, Manning was on the wrong side and Döllinger on the right side, and the Papacy’s ‘startled, trembling minaciousness’ was depriving a whole generation of the benefits of Catholic thinking. Wilberforce was conscious of the ‘sporadic and feeble’ way in which the Church of England made authoritative judgements about doctrine. He congratulated it on its reaction to Essays and Reviews, ridiculed the ‘agony of . . . soul’ claimed by the essayists and declared their chief effect to have been the sinful effect of encouraging ‘doubt’ among the young. In attacking their

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German appetite for mysticism and metaphysics and their confidence in the ‘verifying principle’, he accused them of creating ‘a new religion’ by subjecting ‘external revelation’ to man’s ‘internal consciousness’. About Essays and Reviews Wilberforce was neither thoughtless nor illadvised. He attached significance to the fact that it was written by Oxford men rather than by ‘professors of University College, London’. It would, he believed, place on the individual believer the burden of deciding which parts of the Bible were revelation, and it would not only expel God’s ‘special inspiration’ but would also reduce the Bible’s ‘doctrinal truth’ to a ‘halo of goodness’. For Wilberforce, the essence of Christianity was the ‘internal evidences’ which effected an awakening of the soul and turned men’s hearts into ‘instruments of conversion’. What he objected to in Essays and Reviews was the essayists’ abandonment of the ‘objective truths’ of ‘the Christian revelation’ and the idea that there could be a ‘theological teaching’ which was not ‘founded upon a definite teaching as to God’. II In the 1970s Steiner described the ‘apocalyptically-exact disaster’ of 1915 as a turning-point in modern history. There have been many such turning-points in English history, including the Huxleyite/Darwinian turning-point of 1870–2, when ‘society [was] debating whether it [should] remain Christian or not’, and Church2 hoped that ‘all who heard him’, the majority of whom ‘would still be alive twenty years hence, when I and my contemporaries shall have passed from the scene’, would ‘learn to reflect on that question with the seriousness which it deserves’. Church was born into a mercantile family and was one of the most cosmopolitan of Victorian Anglican churchmen. He was brought up in Portugal and Italy, had Quakerism as well as Anglicanism in his background and at Oxford wrote a prize-essay on Mohamet. As a young don he was a prominent Oriel Tractarian and, though saddened by Newman’s conversion, arrived at the belief that the Church of England had to do in its own way ‘the good’ which Rome did in its way. As a founder-editor of the Guardian, he consolidated a career as critic of contemporary philosophy, literature and religion during twenty years as Rector of a Somerset parish until, a decade after Shaftesbury and Palmerston had prevented him becoming Regius Professor of 12

Very Rev. Richard William Church (1815–99), born in Lisbon, educated Leghorn, Redlands School and Wadham College, Oxford. Fellow of Oriel College, 1838–52. Rector of Whatley, 1853–71 and Dean of St Paul’s, 1871–91. Reviewer of Essays and Reviews, 1854; author of The Essays of Montaigne, 1859; Civilization and Religion, 1860; University Sermons, 1869; Civilization Before and After Christianity, 1872; On Some Influences of Christianity on National Character, 1872; On the Sacred Poetry of Early Religion, 1874; The Pensées of Blaise Pascal, 1875; Lancelot Andrewes, 1977; The Beginning of the Middle Ages, 1877; Human Life and its Conditions, 1878; Dante, 1878; Spenger, 1879, etc.

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Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, Gladstone, who later thought of him as Archbishop of Canterbury, made him Dean of St Paul’s.

In the course of commenting on Anglicanism’s relations with the State, Church claimed that the Reformation Church had never yielded the duty to be ‘the guardian of her faith’ and that The Radical Programme of 1885 which had made disestablishment and disendowment ‘a formidable probability’, had expressed the wish of our ‘new masters’ to ‘humble’ the Church by depriving it of ‘resources for impressing religious truth on the people’. As an apologist against disendowment in the late 1880s, his arguments were as sociological as Thomas Arnold’s had been in the 1820s or as his own had been in admiring the Breton Christianity of 1846. As an apologist against the infidelity of the late 1860s, he dwelt on the contrast between the New Testament’s detachment from Roman civilization and modern Christianity’s inseparability from modern civilization.

By civilization Church meant anything that ‘trained and finished man’ towards the ‘civil state . . . for the purposes of the present life’. He acknowledged the existence alongside Christianity of ‘another influence’ which was aiming to become a ‘substitute religion’, and made no attempt to claim that a civilization which had been divorced from Christianity could not ‘thrive and grow strong’. His tactic was simply to point out that there were things which only Christianity could do, that its opportunity to do them would widen as civilization advanced and that its greatest triumph would be the absorption of civilization through the agency of a ‘Christian sensibility’. To the question, how the ‘repression’ of the Roman character had become the ‘splendour and imagination’ of the Italian character and the ‘delicacy’ and ‘exuberance’ of the French character, Church’s answer was that ‘it was the conversion of these races to the faith of Christ’, the new sense of ‘companionship’ between God and man which had been brought by Christ’s ‘humiliation’ and the ‘sympathy and . . . affections’ which had revealed to ‘the proud, the reserved, the frivolous and the selfish’ a ‘compassion for the poor’ and a ‘new thing in the human heart’. Though Church did not have a plan for re-Christianizing civilization, he created an expectation by describing an historic achievement through which the Christian sensibility had become an engine of intellect, art, culture and that ‘Kingdom of Spirit and . . . goodness’ which was ‘as much above the ordinary intellect’ as intellect was ‘above material things’. Church had a Tractarian imagination and the power to put his finger on the Tractarian pulse. He shared the Tractarian doubt whether Christianity’s role in civilization could be preserved by being relieved of miracle, the supernatural

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and the Resurrection. He made it a central feature of his apologetic that a ‘sound and secure intellectual basis’ for Christianity depended on victory in ‘the great battle against Liberalism’ and he directed at ‘Liberalism’ an intellectual version of what all Tractarians believed, dismissing Thomas Arnold for treating Church organization as a matter of convenience, Stanley for preferring ‘the human’ to ‘the divine’ and Bunsen for not being ‘the Luther’ of a ‘new 1517’. Carlyle’s Cromwell had had a ‘repulsive energy’ and Carlyle’s religion a ‘merely mythic significance’. Froude’s History had misrepresented the English Reformation, and Renan’s infidelity, even where it had registered the high moral tone of the 1860s, had been infidelity just the same. Milman was superficial, Ranke’s theology slovenly and Maurice’s writing ‘a cloud of words’. Lecky was better than Buckle but the curse was put not only on Buckle, Tyndall, F. W. Robertson, Stopford Brooke and Mark Pattison, but also on Mrs Humphrey Ward for deconstructing the Christ who had ‘risen from the dead’ into a Christ whose sole function was ‘to do good’. Church mistrusted Jesuitry, Mariolatry and Quanta Cura, Pusey’s residual enthusiasm for reunion and the Vatican Council of 1870. Origin of Species, on the other hand, was not ‘incompatible with ideas of a higher spiritual order’ and even Vestiges of Creation showed that Christianity could accept freedom of scientific investigation because belief in God did not depend on it. Church agreed with Mozley that the question of miracle could no longer be avoided, that it had to be decided by ‘reason’, and that without it there could be no belief in ‘revelation’, no transformation of conduct and ‘no such thing as Christianity’. Church slid round the English Reformation because of his disapproval of Henry VIII and round the Continental Reformation because of his disapproval of Calvin. He associated Anglicanism’s beginnings with Hooker and the first vernacular ‘theory of the order of the world’, with Spenser and Shakespeare as joint creators of English literature, with Bacon as creator of English science and philosophy and with Lancelot Andrewes as saint, literate scientist, and clergyman to the fashionable world. It was from Hooker, Andrewes and the seventeenth-century English divines that he dated the real English Reformation and the beginning of a tone and manner which did not disparage dogma or Counter-Reformation theology, did disparage counterReformation intolerance and Calvinist and Puritan narrowness and invented a theology of ‘adoration, self-surrender and blessing’ which while respecting the ‘unutterable wonders’ of the Creeds, had shrunk from ‘speculation on the secret . . . things of the Most High’. Church was neither irrational nor anti-intellectual. He was, however, antirationalist; identified ‘rationalism’ with a want of ‘humility’ in the pursuit of knowledge and a ‘rebellion’ against the order which was inseparable from life; and he discerned its effects not only in ‘error and unbelief’ but also in ‘right

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belief’ when ‘the sins of the . . . unbending will’ concealed themselves ‘under the mask of a passionless reason’. He emphasized the seriousness of belief and the ‘death-bed . . . anxiety’ as well as the intellectual centrality men ought to feel about it. At a time when a ‘specious novelty’ was encouraging ‘indifference’, Church followed Andrewes, Pascal and Bishop Butler in deducing from the absence of ‘demonstrative’ proof the duty to ‘venture’ beyond ‘knowledge’ in the search for God and a certainty as strong as Shaftesbury’s Evangelical certainty about the reality of God. III Like Newman, who was a contemporary, Shaftesbury3 was a critic of Peel and Whig blaséness. Unlike Newman, Church and Wilberforce, he was a party politician who began with a party politician’s sensitivity about his prospects but in the end partly chose and was partly compelled to transcend party politics. Politically Shaftesbury was a pessimist, not because he believed that either the middle or the working classes were revolutionary in intention, nor because the monarchy and aristocracy were incapable of getting closer to them than the French monarchy and aristocracy had got to their equivalents in the eighteenth century, but because the Reform Act of 1832 had created a new atmosphere which had led to Chartism, Radicalism and Socialism in the 1840s and 1850s, and to the crooked auction between Disraeli and Gladstone which took place between Palmerston’s death and the Reform Act of 1867. Shaftesbury subscribed neither to democratic principles nor to the principles of 1789. He thought of England as a home of freedom. He associated freedom with the aristocratic polity, though in the 1860s he began to fear that damage was being done to aristocratic leadership by the behaviour of a ‘minority’ of its number in ‘domestic life’, ‘on the turf’ and ‘at the gaming table’. After the 1867 Act, the threat to freedom from the ballot, electoral districts and shorter parliaments seemed to be even greater than the threat from extensions of the franchise, and he reached the conclusion that, if there had to be further franchise extension, universal suffrage might well be safest, provided ‘the quiet and orderly’ were not frightened off by ‘the agitating and noisy’. He may have half hoped, even, that like Conservatism, Protestantism would be strengthened by going lower. In 1839 Shaftesbury had become Palmerston’s stepson and later was to have Palmerston’s help in paying off his own debts and the debts he inherited with the family estates. During Palmerston’s Prime Ministership, he was more in sympathy than he had been with any previous Prime Minister apart from Wellington, and accepted the Garter which he had refused from Aberdeen 13

Rt. Hon. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85), educated Harrow School and Christ Church, Oxford. MP, 1826–46 and 1847–51. Junior Minister, 1828–9 and 1834–5. Philanthropist and evangelical. Author of Speeches, 1868.

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after being spared the necessity of refusing a place in the 1855 Cabinet by the Whigs’ insistence that Palmerston’s invitation be withdrawn. Shaftesbury was a public celebrity with a personal following as large as any minister’s. He had ready access both to newspapers and to a hundred or so institutions4 which were as permeative as any political party, and he made an important impact on the Church of England through the advice he gave Palmerston about ecclesiastical appointments between 1855 and 1865. He was also an intellectual who, though he did not mix with other intellectuals (except for Southey, John Forster and Alexander Haldane) was an intellectual notwithstanding. He learnt Welsh and became a Druid and a Bard, learnt Hebrew as an aid to understanding the Bible, and not only took a close interest in science under guidance from Sir James South, the astronomer, but also thought seriously about becoming a scientist himself. In Thomas Arnold’s, or rather Tait’s, Rugby as the nursery of ‘the coming generation’, he sensed a ‘nobler’ dedication to ‘the service of God and the interests of mankind’ than he sensed at Eton, where his younger brother had been killed in a drunken fight. Having long believed that ‘love of gold’ and ‘adoration of intellect’ were the English vices, it was only after prayer and meditation, and after failing to write a book entitled Evidences of the Heart, that he enunciated social purposes designed, through improvement of their material conditions, to enable the poor to raise themselves to ‘the dignity of human beings’, qualify themselves for ‘immortality’ and be ‘brought up in the faith and fear’ of the God who had created them. Shaftesbury was an aristocratic reformer who infiltrated the working classes and urged them to avoid violence and triumphalism as much as he assured politicians and the comfortable classes that violence and triumphalism would be avoided. But, though he co-operated with thinkers and politicians who did, he did not believe in liberal improvement or Lecky’s middle-class moment. He doubted the adequacy of the philanthropy of the 1860s, and disliked both competitive examinations and life peerages. He wanted to strengthen the House of Lords by reforming its procedures and incorporating some of the ‘intelligent, generous and patriotic men’ who ran ‘great mercantile establishments’. He denied any desire to ‘exalt the landed and humiliate the commercial aristocracy’ and he praised the ‘prodigious means of doing good’ which ‘Providence’ had placed in the hands of the latter. Behind Bright’s Quakerism, Shaftesbury sensed a pugilist’s aggression. He did not care for Cobden’s sneers at Wellington or Cobden’s caricature of Wellington’s funeral as ‘pagan honours’ to a general who had led an ‘unrighteous coalition’ to destroy self-government in France. He looked back on the abolition of the slave trade as an achievement of the aristocratic polity, 14

Like the Young Mens’ Christian Association, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Lord’s Day Observance Society and the Social Science Association.

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deplored the resistance offered by Bright and Cobden to his factory legislation, and treated the Established Church, hereditary peerage and existing landed system, not as adjuncts to what Cobden thought of as England’s historic militarism but as adjuncts to what he, Shaftesbury, thought of as England’s historic freedom. In deciding eventually that the Corn Laws should be repealed, he did so, he persuaded himself, not in capitulation to the antiCorn Law League, but because repeal would strengthen the authority of the landed classes. By the time he was forty, Shaftesbury was giving wide circulation to an ideology which was ‘founded upon the Bible’ and the Church of ‘Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer’, was treating women as having duties of an ‘essentially secret and retiring nature’, and was speaking to all classes over the heads not only of the Conservative Party but also of the shopkeepers whom Froude and Maurice were to single out as the hard core of Evangelicalism. In doing so, he became the victim of his own virtue, an object of distaste among landowners as well as manufacturers, and a target of the countervailing literature and organizations with which his critics felt obliged to resist him. Shaftesbury’s father was a prominent figure in the House of Lords but Shaftesbury had an unhappy childhood in a ‘high-and-dry’ landed household in Dorset. As Lord Ashley (until his father’s death in 1851), he blossomed at Harrow, took a First at Christ Church, Oxford, and at the age of twenty-five was an MP in the unreformed House of Commons. Having been a schoolboy admirer at the time of Waterloo, he became both a friend of Wellington and a junior member of Wellington’s government in 1828. He mistrusted Canning’s coalition mentality and Canning’s disloyalty to Wellington, and refused to believe that Canning, Melbourne or the Whigs were capable of ‘leavening’ their politics with ‘the feeling of religion’. In the following fifteen years he blew hot and cold about Russell, was puzzled by Palmerston’s secularity and came to criticize Peel for his ‘egoistry’, ‘expediency’ and ‘affiliation towards wealth and capital’, his insistence on obstructing Shaftesbury’s factory legislation and the impression he left of wishing to establish a parliamentary dictatorship. In these formative years, Shaftesbury believed that the Reformation had been ‘God’s gift’ to England, that Protestantism was the Ark of the Conservative Covenant, and that the working classes of the North would need ‘only a few words of kindness’ to make it obvious that they loved both ‘the monarchy’ and ‘religion’. It was Peel’s inability to utter such words, his reluctance to acknowledge the significance of religion in either domestic or foreign policy, and his stealing of the Whigs’ clothes over the Maynooth grant in 1845 which persuaded Shaftesbury to become a free-standing politician with a reputation for honesty and pertinacity and a pressing desire to complete his social programme before his father’s death consigned him to the House of Lords.

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After refusing office from Canning in 1827, Shaftesbury had made conditions before accepting office from Peel in 1834. He refused office from Peel in 1841 and also hints of office, including the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland, subsequently. On deciding to support the repeal of the Corn Laws, he resigned his seat in Parliament when the local newspapers and his constituency association seemed to be turning against him. He was Conservative MP for Bath from 1845 until succeeding to his father’s peerage in 1851 but remained independent of party thereafter, and made his final refusals during Derby’s second Prime Ministership when he declined membership both of the Ritual Commission and of the Cabinet, from which he might well have resigned with Cranborne, Peel and Carnarvon if he had been a member in early 1867. Shaftesbury’s maiden speech in the House of Commons was on a Lunatic Bill which he did not initiate; his own subsequent legislation led to thirty years as Chairman of the Lunacy Commission and a period as Chairman of the Board of Health. By persistent enquiry about the enforcement of earlier legislation, by introducing, and sometimes passing, legislation of his own about conditions of life and work in collieries, factories and farms, and by both parliamentary and philanthropic activity about housing, Ragged Schools, the employment of women, working-class emigration, temperance and so on, he acquired a unique standing not only as a friend of the poor who made a point of going around among the poor, but also as an authority on the poor to whom Prime Ministers, the Royal Family and foreign dignitaries listened attentively. Shaftesbury’s social doctrine was a comprehensive statement about Parliament’s duty to use State power to mitigate suffering and diffuse education; about the philanthropic duty to supplement State power where the exercise of State power was undesirable; and about the importance of sustaining a climate in which latitudinarianism and infidelity on the one hand and Tractarianism and Roman Catholicism on the other hand could be resisted. Shaftesbury claimed to have learnt his religion from the family housekeeper rather than from his parents. Whatever its source, his Evangelicalism was a throwback at a time when the up-to-date Christian intellectual was a High Church Tractarian who divided the forces which might otherwise have resisted infidelity. In advocating the social legislation for which he became famous, Shaftesbury fought acrimonious battles with governments of both parties. But allegations of ‘legalized slavery’, ‘covetous and cruel practices’ and ‘mill-owner’ callousness did not really stir his imagination. What stirred his imagination, as it stirred Marx’s and Engels’s imaginations, was the length of the working day as a matter of ‘religion’, and the prospect of education, sanitation, increased leisure and proper housing restoring stability to the cities and reclaiming the masses, especially the mothers and children of the masses, from living conditions which rendered them incapable of Christian responses. His aim throughout was explicit and uncompromising – to protect the poor

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from ‘the experimental philosophy of infidels and democrats’, to bring everyone who could be brought in within the pale of the Protestant constitution, and to fulfil the missionary duty of making Anglican and dissenting Evangelicalism the dominant doctrine of Britain and the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Empire. Shaftesbury sensed the ‘chameleon’ character of politicians and the gap which divided parliamentary behaviour from conscientious conviction. He had a Benn-like obduracy. He judged foreign and imperial policy by reference to Christian principle, and propounded the hope that a ‘really Christian Empire’ would acquire the sovereignty of the world by attracting the ‘voluntary . . . resort of all nations under the shadow of its wings’. He was shocked by the Indian Government’s ‘tyranny’ in Scinde, and by the ‘cruelty’ of the first Afghan War. But he praised Hardinge for giving the Sikhs what they deserved in 1846. He deduced from the Indian Mutiny that it had not been caused by Christian proselytization, that on the contrary it was Brahminism’s ‘dying effort’, and that what India needed was an assault on Hinduism’s ‘filthy practices’ and a ‘Christian government’ which would put an end to ‘religious neutrality’ while giving Hindus and Muslims ‘the same liberty’ that Christians claimed for themselves. Shaftesbury exerted himself against the persecution of Italian Protestants, against France’s deposition of the Queen of Tahiti whose kingdom was ‘the only kingdom . . . founded on the truths of the Gospel’, and in favour of both Italian and Polish independence. He denounced the lawlessness and Mammonism of the first Opium War and deplored both the obstacles the war presented to British missionary activity in China and the ‘low mercantile tone’ – far below ‘a Christian tone’ – in which English politicians defended the ‘shedding of more Heathen blood’ than ‘the Heathens had shed of Christian blood in two centuries’. For many years he opposed the admission of Jews to Parliament. A quarter of a century before failing to persuade Gladstone to make Sir Moses Montefiore a peer at the age of 100, however, he had not only deduced from Biblical prophecy that the Jews would return to Palestine but also played a part in the setting-up of the Jerusalem Bishopric so that English and German Protestants could co-operate in the Jews’ conversion once they arrived in Palestine. Though he was to play an anti-Turkish role in the 1870s, it was Turkish co-operation in the Jerusalem Bishopric and other enterprises which enabled him during the Crimean War to contrast ‘the singular and unprecedented liberality of the Turkish system’ with the Orthodox illiberality of the Russian system.

Shaftesbury had read Hurrell Froude’s Remains and The British Critic. He understood the significance of Tracts 75, 80, 87 and 90, and could see that the Tractarians were identifying Protestantism with Socinianism and

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Anabaptism. But he also believed that the Tractarians were traitors to the Reformation and the Protestant constitution, were damaging relations between the clergy and the people and were responsible for the ‘sacerdotal forgery of a sacrificing priesthood’. In the elimination of ‘dogma and doctrine’, on the other hand, he saw the subjection of the Bible to ‘philosophy’, the prospect of ‘Vishnu, Mohamet and Jupiter’ being ‘put on a level’ with Christ, and evidence that neologians and latitudinarians hated Christ, whether or not their hatred extended to God. Even at his most flexible – in playing down the Athanasian Creed, refusing to oppose Jowett’s election to the Oxford Chair of Greek and working with Manning and Pusey (the latter a relative and a friend from Christ Church) – Shaftesbury was still the enemy of convocation, ritualism, confession and the canon law as much as of Renan, Colenso, Seeley and Essays and Reviews. While rejecting as atheism the ‘scientific claim’ that science would ‘govern . . . human . . . destinies’ in the future, he looked forward not just to massive endowments of science but also to science making ‘every syllable of the Old and New Testaments as clear and certain to our minds’ as ‘hunger and thirst, food and raiment, pain and pleasure’ were ‘to our bodies’. Shaftesbury criticized Gladstone as a Tractarian, a Manchester economist and a prophet of democracy, and for his disestablishment of the Church of Ireland – ‘the most serious’ blow the Church of England had suffered since the Reformation. He was a friend of Spurgeon, favoured an Anglican alliance with Evangelical Dissent and, in spite of reservations about ‘enthusiasm’, supported the mission conducted by Moody and Sankey in the 1870s. Like Thomas Arnold, he felt ‘shame and remorse’ at England’s record in Ireland, but pointed to the ‘monkish and sacerdotal orders’ as among the causes of Irish misery, was surprised and pleased by the Protestant intensity of Russell’s Durham letter in 1851 and contributed willingly to the Protestant backlash he had originally predicted would follow the use of Jesuit money at parliamentary elections under the Reform Act of 1832.

Shaftesbury attached supreme importance to Biblical inspiration, private judgement and justification by faith, and accused the modern world of emphasizing works without faith and the sufficiency of philanthropy without belief. He believed that ‘urban and agricultural workers’ were not being fed spiritually, that the preaching they heard had an ‘uncertain sound’ and that it would have to ‘address’ their ‘affections’, ‘sorrows’ and ‘miseries’ if it was not to alienate their sympathies. Shaftesbury objected to the idea of a revised version of the Bible when it was floated in 1870. He approved of the death penalty and cremation, and treated the ‘corpses of the dead’ as ‘relinquished garments’ which confirmed the promise of a ‘resurrection’. He had a strong sense of a special Providence,

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of the use God was making of him and of the ‘comfort’ afforded by the doctrine of the Atonement. But he also believed that depravity made effort worthless, that even the most extensive schemes for human improvement would have only limited effects, and that redemption was inseparable from ‘our blessed Lord’s’ establishment on ‘the throne of David’. Shaftesbury no more attacked the Catholic laity than he attacked the Anglican laity; his target was the clergy, especially the higher Anglican clergy who grovelled before capital and power, failed to prepare ‘men’s hearts for Christ’s Second Coming’ and needed the discipline which would have been imposed by his Uniformity of Worship Bill if it had been passed in 1868. He was both a resolute Sabbatarian and a supporter of moves to hold religious services in theatres and secular halls; he defended Church schools against the ‘godless’ secularization which would accompany State control; and he assumed that the Evangelical party was the proper object of Palmerston’s sympathy, even when Palmerston had to appease the High Church Peelites in his 1859 Cabinet. As a Church reformer, Shaftesbury supported the multiplication of dioceses, the involvement of laymen in the choice of clergy, and a well-paid and well-housed ‘pastor’ for ‘every three thousand souls’. In changes to the liturgy and the Prayer Book and the removal of bishops from the House of Lords, he saw ways of making the Church of England more acceptable than hitherto to the body of the people.

Shaftesbury acknowledged that Evangelical thought and preaching were in decline, but he was still an ‘Evangelical of Evangelicals’ and, except in reaction, was unaffected by either Newman or the Oxford Movement. It was Maurice’s destiny by contrast, out of Unitarian origins, to incorporate Evangelicalism with Tractarianism and, from a more liberal standpoint than Shaftesbury’s, to arrive at Shaftesbury’s conclusions about a Christian attitude to the poor. IV Maurice5 belonged to a generation to which Tennyson was central, Westcott to a generation for which Browning had ‘laid bare’ the ‘drama of the soul’. Westcott was first and foremost a textual scholar, which Maurice was not, and used textual criticism as a way of re-establishing the impregnability of the 15

Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–72), educated at home, Trinity College, Cambridge and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Author of Eustace Conway, 1834; The Kingdom of Christ, 1837–8; A Letter to Lord Ashley, 1843; Remarks on Mandeville’s Fable of The Bees, 1844; Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 1845–62; The Epistle to the Hebrews, 1846; The Religions of the World, 1847; Theological Essays, 1853; On the Reformation of Society, 1854; Lectures on the Ecclesiastical History of the First and Second Centuries, 1854; The Epistles of St John, 1857; The Indian Crisis: Five Sermons, 1857; What is Revelation?, 1859; Sermons, 1860; The Conscience, 1868; Social Morality, 1869; and (ed. Hughes) The Friendship of Books, 1874.

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Bible. But he was as sensitive as Maurice to literature and the climate of opinion, and aimed not only to adapt Christianity to them but also to adapt them to Christianity. He was an advocate of accommodation, but in him, as in Maurice, there was a conviction that, whatever might be necessary by way of accommodation, Christianity must in some sense stand in judgement on art, thought, science, philosophy and political systems. Maurice was born in a large house in Norfolk in 1805. His mother was a Unitarian, as were his mother’s family, some of whom lived in the household. His father, who kept a school, was a Unitarian minister and hoped that Maurice would follow him into the ministry. When Maurice was nine there was a family convulsion. Maurice’s mother ceased to be a Unitarian, two of his sisters had Calvinistic conversions and a third became a member of the Church of England. Maurice was educated by his father, who then sent him to Trinity College, Cambridge, where, in addition to being taught by Hare, he was a friend of John Sterling. After taking his degree, he moved with Sterling to Trinity Hall, where he studied Law. Having read for the Bar, he took his first steps in journalism in London. In his middle twenties he went to Exeter College, Oxford, was baptised into the Church of England and, at the age of twenty-nine, took Anglican Orders. In the same year he published Eustace Conway – a threevolume novel of domestic and social life and political and religious ideas, the keynote conclusion of which was that, ‘except the purified Soul . . . there could be no more glorious temple . . . for the Divine Being to dwell in than this beautiful world with its lakes and skies and woods, if . . . men’s eyes were only opened to see his glories . . . and the reflection of his . . . countenance in it’. As a Unitarian Maurice not only agonized about the temptations which the Church of England offered for academic advancement, he also used the magazines he edited to expose the defects of contemporary politics and religion, linking them to defects in contemporary literature, and making distinctive criticisms of Eldonian Toryism, Huskissonian economics and the northern Cockneyism of Blackwoods Magazine. The Utilitarians were criticized for debasing politics and ridiculing Hindu literature and religion, and the Edinburgh Review for its ‘flippant ribaldry’ about any emotion that transcended ‘personal interest’. Brougham – ‘the most distinguished person in the House of Commons’ – was the ‘manacled captive’ of the Whig party, aimed to achieve ‘universal justice’ by a form of ‘chemical analysis’ and relied more on the aristocracy and less on ‘the people’ than a genuine ‘friend of the poor’ ought to have done. Maurice at this time was an enemy of sentimental mediaevalism but declined to make an ‘idol’ of the Reformation. Like Brougham, he was a friend of Catholic Emancipation as well as being, what Brougham was not, an enemy of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists. What he wanted chiefly was

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God’s love and the ending of ‘theological fury’, though some of the allies to whom he looked were surprising – not only Shakespeare, the two Hares, De Quincey, Coleridge and Bishop Berkeley, all of whom were in some sense Christian, but also Byron and Shelley, who were not. Maurice acknowledged Shelley’s atheism and Byron’s depravity. But both had felt their beliefs genuinely instead of as dogmas or borrowings from contemporary respectability, and both had had a sense of sublimity and spirituality. Shelley had set up a ‘ladder to heaven’ in place of a ‘cruel’ God and the ‘eternity’ of Evangelical ‘suffering’. Byron’s Cain had been so helpful to ‘troubled minds’ on their way through the ‘misery’ of ‘scepticism’ to the ‘happiness of religion’ that the decision to erect a monument to Byron’s memory in Westminster Abbey, so far from being a ‘profanation to Christianity’, was a recognition that the English poets had been ‘links in the great chain of Providence’ and aids to the ‘development of the human species’.

During more than thirty years as an Anglican clergyman, Maurice was chaplain to Guy’s Hospital and Lincoln’s Inn, and was closely involved in Christian Socialism, the Co-operative Movement and the movements for the education of women and the working classes. He wrote at length about ‘the friendship of books’ and about relations between politics, literature and religion. In 1853 he was dismissed from his Chair at King’s College, London in part, probably, because of his politics, mainly because of the doctrines he propounded in the famous volume of Theological Essays which he published in that year. In this section we shall examine his opinions as they emerged between his first Anglican pamphlet ‘Subscription No Bondage’ in 1835 and the concluding volume of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in 1862. ‘Subscription No Bondage’ denied that the Thirty-Nine Articles were a ‘confession of faith’ and defended the subscription required of undergraduates on matriculation at Oxford on the ground that higher education could not be conducted without ‘conditions of thought’. ‘Conditions of thought’ ought to be explicit and ought not to be assumed; they ought to be ‘theological and ought not to be anything else’; and they supplied both an antidote to the ‘competitive’ pursuit of academic distinction and a ‘safety-lamp’ when undergraduates began descending into the ‘mines’ of thought. This was the statement of an Anglicanism which put a premium on ‘knowledge got in quietness and silence’, demanded an opening-up of the Christian sensibility and aimed to reconnect men to one another by subjecting political economy to social and political control. Maurice’s social and political writings were not the guilt-offerings of a middle-class mind which felt shamed by the solidarity of the poor but a Wordsworthian intimation of the natural goodness of the poor and a register

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of the clergy’s duty to minister to the poor. In taking advantage of the failure of Chartism and Chartist atheism in 1848, they reminded the ‘better feelings of mankind’ what all classes had manifestly forgotten – that ‘selfish competition’ was ‘unnatural’. Maurice wanted it to be understood that ‘the masses’ were going to combine and should be encouraged to do so, and that disaster would engulf the upper and middle classes if combination was obstructed, or was effected on ‘selfish principles’. It would be for the good of all classes that the working class should recognize in the material progress of which Macaulay was the laureate the work of the ‘Divine Will and Reason . . . prompting men . . . to preserve society . . . against the self-seeking which . . . was hastening its destruction’. What Maurice stated to audiences of working men, he stated systematically in his introduction to William Law’s Remarks on Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1844) where, in contradiction to Mandeville, it was not the case that ‘vices were . . . as necessary to the existence of society as . . . virtues’ and it was the case that moral judgements were ‘as much facts as any which would come under the notice of the physical philosophers’. In the 1830s Maurice was respected by the Tractarians and regarded for a time as one of them. It then became obvious that he was not one of them. Between 1838 and 1845 he explained why. Maurice approved of Protestantism insofar as it interpreted man’s ‘personal being’ to himself. But he criticized it for being exclusive and routine, for losing sight of man’s relation to society, and for degenerating into a ‘newspaper, cheap-book, lecture machinery’ which attacked those who were ‘supposed not to hold its principles’. Catholicism was good insofar as it emphasized the law of fellowship and God’s ‘unfathomable mystery’, but bad insofar as it distorted itself when addressing the conscience. In A Letter to Archdeacon Wilberforce in 1842 and Letter to Lord Ashley in the year following, Protestantism and Catholicism were complementary, the former had prevented the middle class degenerating into a ‘trading-class and nothing else’ from Wycliffe onwards, while the latter had restored belief in the ‘meaning and worth of ministerial ordination’ and had disseminated among the ‘student and professional classes’ the ‘chivalric and feudal feeling’ which had previously been confined to the aristocracy. Maurice deplored Tractarian snobbery, the Romanizing Tractarianism which was alienating the middle classes, and the Evangelical ‘gossip’ which had turned Protestant principles into ‘mere symbols of our differences from Rome’. It was only, he believed, if a marriage could be arranged between the ‘charity’, ‘fellowship’ and ‘self-sacrifice’ of the Tractarians and Evangelical ‘manliness’ and ‘self-respect’ that the Church would find a place for the ‘millions’ whose reclamation required the Evangelical clergy to free themselves from ‘the social and political exclusiveness of the tradesmen and manufacturers who made up their congregations’.

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Like many of Maurice’s writings in the 1840s, Letter to Lord Ashley, in showing how the Church of England could regain contact with the masses, resembled one aspect of the work which Newman had been doing in the previous ten years. In 1843, however, Newman was still an Anglican. Review of Mr Newman’s Theory of Development, the year after Newman’s conversion, answered Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine blow-by-blow, arguing that the barriers against rationalism which Newman had erected as an Anglican had provided no ‘rock’ for Christianity to stand on and concluding that ‘not a few young men who were flying to the belief in an infallible Pope’ were doing so ‘because they had not the courage to ask themselves whether they believed in an Infallible God’. About the Tractarians, apart from Ward, Maurice was sorrowful rather than militant, sensing in Newman a certain cunning as well as a manifest sincerity but accusing him of slipping at times into a ‘mechanistic’ and ‘pantheistical’ phraseology which suggested that the ideas he received from the Bible were ‘in his mind’ and not necessarily ‘in the text’. No less than Newman, Maurice was drawing up battle-lines between atheism and God, while arguing that the ‘childlike’ faith he was calling for lived in close proximity to denial of God. He expected atheism to ‘cry’ for ‘something to believe in’ from ‘the depths of its unbelief’ and saw every reason why it could be satisfied by a Person to whom men could confess their imperfections. In all his subsequent writings, this Person was the only agency by which ‘the poor’ could be connected with ‘theological science’, the capacity for prayer be acquired by ‘heathens’ in ‘Manchester and Glasgow’, and the threatening ‘crisis’ – a crisis ‘not less terrible than the destruction of the old polity’ – surmounted by a ‘unity in Christ’ as effective as the ‘unity’ which Maurice’s book The Kingdom of Christ had traced from the Apostles onwards. V The Kingdom of Christ was designed to persuade English Dissenters that Anglicanism could satisfy their spiritual needs and natures, that the Church of England was as immune to the self-centredness of the Protestant conscience as to the ‘savage dogmatism’ which lurked beneath the ‘tolerance’ of modern liberalism, and that the ‘processes of discipline’ through which ‘our nation had been trained to understand principles . . . by their working in institutions’ (like the law courts, equity, Parliament and the royal supremacy) had not only preserved the Church of England more effectively than the Churches had been preserved on the Continent but had also, in its ‘apparent humiliation’ after Catholic Emancipation, equipped it to ‘direct the future progress’ of society. The conception of the Church of England directing the future progress of society was a convert’s anachronism. But it was a possible projection from

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conditions which had obtained between 1588 and 1829 when baptism could be thought of as receiving ‘every English child’ into Christ’s ‘heavenly kingdom’, and Anglicanism could be identified with that primitive ‘sacramental Catholicity’ to which ‘God [had been] leading his creatures, in all his kingdoms and nations and languages, by all their schemes of religion . . . philosophy . . . art . . . science and politics’, and in all that they had done ‘in the camp and in the closet, in poverty and in riches, in honour and in shame, in sickness and in . . . health’. The Kingdom of Christ disassociated itself from the Laudian attempt to pervert the Church of England and the Presbyterian attempt to destroy it, and claimed that Vane, Fox and Milton ought ideally to have been Anglicans. In Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, the French revolution and the German philosophical revolution were treated with care and caution. From the French revolution Maurice drew three morals – that it was God’s judgement on both the ancien régime and the ‘warring, ineffectual atoms’ involved in Rousseau’s return to nature; that it was God’s proof that there was something ‘higher than law’ and ‘deeper and more universal than a state’; and that the ‘theocratic principle’ was that every man must be so surely treated as ‘God’s child’ that, in any society where he was not so treated, the ‘lords of the earth’ would ‘drink’ God’s ‘wine-red’ cup ‘to the very dregs’. In those parts of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in which the ambience was Christian (from Jesus onwards), the connections between philosophy and theology were integral. In those parts which dealt with ancient philosophy from the Egyptians to Philo and with modern philosophy since Ockham, the ambience was either pre-Christian or in the process of becoming post-Christian. In all four volumes the culminating ground for hope was found in the nineteenth century. Maurice’s ‘glimpse into the nineteenth century’ recalled the attempt which had been made to ‘overthrow’ metaphysics between Locke and Kant and the emasculation of philosophy which had accompanied it. In the French revolution and in German Idealism down to Schleiermacher, Maurice found a philosophy which would ‘bear upon life’. Through Strauss and Comte, he brought enquiry to the question whether the conception of an ‘absolute Being . . . speaking to men through his Son and . . . redeeming them . . . from evil’ was or was not a ‘dream’. Maurice praised German, Methodist and Coleridgean transcendentalism, while recording the ‘growing feeling, among the rich and prosperous’ that ‘the invisible world’ held ‘no interest’ for a ‘refined state of civilization’. In explaining why the ‘rich and prosperous’ should be interested, he offered the contestable argument that a civilization which ‘lost sight’ of ‘the Infinite and Eternal’ was ‘doomed to destruction’. Maurice judged Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy a ‘more real service’ to the young than ‘translating modern German commentaries’ would have been

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and spent an immense effort on the various modifications which he gave during the years that elapsed between its first appearance and its completion. In What is Revelation?, he used the knowledge he had acquired in writing it in an attempt to crush Mansel6 who, while claiming to expose ‘Hegel . . . and the Germans’, had really replaced Hegel by Hume, had disparaged those features of divinity, including practical divinity, which had been demanded by the ‘conscience of the most earnest and religious men in England’, and had ignored the needs of those who were ‘roughing it in the world’ and ‘forming the minds of . . . our . . . children and pupils’ through ‘our old English education’. As in everything else that he wrote, so in condemning Mansel, Maurice rested on that ‘Universal Human Consciousness’ which had ‘worked itself into our very dialect’, on the person of Christ as the bond between ‘every man and his fellow’, and on the continuous spiritual life which had enabled Anselm’s theology to be debated ‘in the hearts of peasants and miners’ under Wesley and Whitfield ‘with as much earnestness’ as ‘the monks of Bec’ had debated it under Anselm. Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy and What is Revelation? extracted aids to a Christian mentality by reliving man’s philosophical experience and ignoring the sublety of Mansel’s apologetic. The Religions of the World dealt with the challenges which the other religions presented to Christianity and with the hypothesis that Christianity was ‘not worth bestowing . . . on . . . distant parts of the earth’. Maurice assumed that religion was natural to man, that it was a response to the ‘mysteries’ in which existence was entangled, and that it was antipathetic to the ‘grovelling notions’ which were to be found within the commodity-fetishism of modern England. He treated religion as addressing ‘mankind’ rather than ‘the few’, and as finding in ‘working-men’ no less than in ‘gentlemen, philosophers and divines’, a concern with the ‘problems of life’ which could be studied more readily in Persia and Tibet than in Birmingham and Manchester. Maurice was as much opposed to premature diminutions of the nonChristian religions as to premature diminutions of science and was to become even more opposed when the ‘crimes and oppressions’ of the English in India received their just reward in the Mutiny of 1857. In taking the non-Christian religions seriously, he explained that, though polytheistic Brahminism was too distant from Christianity for commerce, a shared experience of shortcoming would enable Christianity to ‘complete’ Buddhism. He saw no reason to be optimistic about either the Brahmo-Samaj or Indian Christianity, the chief comfort he derived from studying Eastern religion being the reminder that the spirit which stirred ‘the Indian sage and the Indian Sudra’ was working beneath ‘all . . . the bustling life . . . of the western world’. 6

For Mansel see Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, II, pp. 71–7.

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Maurice praised Maine for demolishing ‘atomic’ morality and criticized Whewell for insensitivity to the ‘dependencies’ in which society was involved. But he assumed the existing condition of English society, including its aristocratic condition, raised difficulties about anything resembling a ‘universal’ morality and approached the ‘theological’ argument by considering Chesterfield, Fielding, Goldsmith and the ‘ethos’ of civilization at least as much as he considered more obviously religious writers and subjects. In accounting for Christianity’s moral failure, he specified the ‘selfishness . . . unreality . . . and ambition’ surrounding the celibate family created by the Papacy after Gregory the Great, Lutheranism’s separation of some men out for ‘exercising more faith than others’, Loyola for depriving men of their ‘individuality’, Calvin for condemning ‘the majority of mankind’ to be ‘outcasts’, and Bacon and his followers for formulating ‘a common morality’ without reference to ‘theological maxims’. ‘Not that which was peculiar . . . or . . . exceptional’, moreover, was ‘most elevated’ but ‘that which had the largest, most comprehensive sympathy’ and could ‘most enter into the conditions of those who were lowest and most degraded’. Insofar as he could in his Cambridge lectures on Social Morality in the 1860s, Maurice justified his subject as a response to men’s natural needs. But he was carried beyond natural needs, insofar as a natural theology was insufficient to arrive at a moral theology; insofar as man could only arrive at a moral theology if the ‘being who was above him’ revealed Himself in the form of a ‘perfectly moral Being’; and insofar as the ‘probability’ which was so central a feature of mid-Victorian religious thinking was replaced by a ‘certainty’ for which worship – the link between ‘physical and moral bodies’ – was directed not at Comte’s humanity but at what Comte thought the ‘infantine’ form which asked of the Father that the Empire of Death be overthrown. In interpreting worship as an aid to morality, Maurice did not mean a ‘cosmopolitan worship’ which would blot out the worship of ‘particular races and nations’. What he meant was that ‘beneath all the polities of the earth, sustaining the order of each country and upholding the charity of each household’, was ‘a City’ or ‘Kingdom’ which urged ‘implacable war’ against the divisiveness of sects, races and classes and the political power of universal empires. In Theological Essays (1853), Maurice had expressed the intention, more likely to be fulfilled ‘by our children than by ourselves’, of ‘ringing in’ the Christ whom In Memoriam had proposed for consideration. Though addressed to Unitarians, Theological Essays was dedicated to Tennyson (who in return dedicated an indifferent poem to Maurice) and enquired whether Evangelical accounts of punishment for sin ‘corresponded to the deepest thoughts and feelings of human beings’. In rejecting the idea of man doing God’s will for ‘hire’ as strongly as in rejecting the idea of man doing God’s will from ‘fear’, Maurice found in a fatherly God and the ‘law of love’ an

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Incarnation which did not condemn the flesh. In redemption for all, he found not only the resolution of the battle in the soul between a spirit which was tempting it to ‘falsehood and evil’ and a ‘divine’ spirit which was tempting it to ‘goodness and truth’, but also the answer to pantheism, Straussianism and Unitarianism. Maurice questioned both the mediaeval conception of the saint quarantining sanctity so as to leave the remainder of mankind to ‘shuffle through existence’, and the Protestant ‘hypocrisy’ which promised the unbeliever the ‘wrath’ that the believer would avoid. In the end, he decided that ‘every attempt to draw lines . . . for the purpose of dividing the righteous from the wicked’ tended to ‘confound them’, that it was the ‘unbelief’ of Christians and the ‘torment’ of the isolated self which had weakened Christianity’s ‘influence on society’, and that ‘self-love and social’ would become the same only when social regeneration was pursued by exposing sin wherever sin was to be found. It would be easy to deduce from what he wrote that Maurice aimed to absorb all available truths into an eclectic Christianity. What needs to be added is that he also rejected this aim and insisted that sacramental Christianity was both anti-eclectic and a register of the soul’s struggle with God and with other men. In claiming that sectarianism addressed the ‘tears and longings’ that were to be found in man’s heart, he made it the Christian thinker’s function to discover the ‘latent feeling for the sake of which the sectarian valued his exclusive notion’ and to proclaim the truth that the ‘confessions, forms and ordinances of the Catholic Church . . . laid the . . . only foundation for a system of dogmatic theology which should exhibit the method of God’s revelation without converting it into a theory’. As a friend of Kingsley and Stanley, and an admirer of Ruskin, Froude, Bunsen, Max Müller and Tennyson (though not, as it happens, of Thomas Arnold), Maurice was aware of the subtle forms taken by the incompatibilities which separated Christ’s Kingdom from secular thought. The claim that his theology was not a theory, however, came close to being the argument that his argument was not an argument; there is the same difficulty in taking it seriously as in taking Carlyle’s ‘silence’ seriously and an even stronger sense of apologetic being forced back by the ‘climate of the age’ on to the embarrassed restatement in which, up to a point, Westcott participated. VI Westcott7 was brought up on mathematics and the Greek and Latin classics, and in an atmosphere which combined Christian devotion with secular study. 17

Rt. Rev. Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901), educated King Edward VI School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge. Fellow of Trinity, 1849–52, Schoolmaster at Harrow, 1852–69, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, 1870–90 and Bishop of Durham, 1890–1901. Author of Elements of the Gospel Harmony, 1851; A General Survey of the Canon of the New Testament, 1855; An Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, 1860; The Bible in the Church, 1864; The Gospel of the Resurrection, 1866; A General View

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From an early stage he investigated the connections between divinity, Romantic literature, historical thought and modern philosophy, and tried to incorporate all of them into a vindication of Christianity. Westcott had been born in Birmingham in 1825 and was to die after eleven years as Bishop of Durham in 1901. His first book was published in 1851, his last were published after his death. He was at King Edward’s School, Birmingham a little before Benson and Lightfoot and, after a successful undergraduate career at Trinity College, Cambridge, was at various times a schoolmaster at Harrow, a Canon of Peterborough and of Westminster, and Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. He wrote half a dozen books about the history of the Biblical canon and, in addition to publishing critical editions of parts of the New Testament, helped reluctantly and from a distance in preparing the Revised Version of 1881. Westcott was as endlessly eloquent as Gladstone or Salisbury about the role of learning, scholarship and education in the maintenance of national belief and about the functions it was proper for both the thinking classes and the Church of England to perform in Britain and the British Empire in an age of political and intellectual upheaval. He sensed both the dangers and the possibilities of an autonomous modern culture, felt the need for a strategy of incorporation and, because he had an Anglican sense of responsibility, had the confidence to supply one. In spite of the secularizing threat implicit in movements for educational reform in Oxford and Cambridge, he judged it possible to preserve a Christian influence and ‘true spiritual power’ so long as the Church of England maintained its doctrines, whatever professional or secularized doctrines a reformed university might propose in addition. Westcott wanted the universities to stop being ‘clubs for the rich and indolent’ and to achieve a ‘close communion’ with ‘manifold forms of social life’. But he did not mean by this that there should be the financially guaranteed access for ‘merit’ which has been established in the twentieth century. What he meant in the main was that the intellectual standard for undergraduate admission should be raised, that every town and village should have University Extension teaching, and that Oxford and Cambridge should confirm their influence on the rich and powerful while creating a ‘true understanding between class and class’. Even if it was a ‘laborious, grave and simple’ disposition which he hoped for from the influx of Nonconformists into Oxford and Cambridge, it is still possible to see why, in the ‘new age’ footnote 7 (cont.) of the History of The English Bible, 1868; On Some Points in the Religious Office of the Universities, 1873; Introduction to The New Testament, 1881; The Gospel According to St John, 1882; The Epistles of St John, 1883; Social Aspects of Christianity, 1887; Essays in the History of Religious Thought in the West, 1891; The Incarnation and The Common Life, 1893; Some Lessons of the Revised Version, 1897; Christian Aspects of Life, 1897; Peterborough Sermons, 1902; and Christian Social Union Addresses, 1903.

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which science and history were creating, he looked to theology as co-ordinator of ‘new . . . modes of thinking’, to ‘religion’ as the ‘final synthesis of all the sciences’ and the antidote to ‘arrogance’ and ‘one-sidedness’ in research, and to doctrines about literature, art and society as promising a ‘representation’ of the ‘highest thought of the whole Empire’. Westcott had a synthesizing mind with all the Toynbeean fraudulence that this involves. He thought of the Church of England and the British Empire as ordained to interpret ‘the east to the west’ and ‘the west to the east’, and fell for both the Brahmo-Samaj and the ‘Mohammedan revival’. But he also acknowledged that ‘Western thought’ was spreading faster in India than Christianity was. He urged missionaries to adapt their doctrines to the ‘religious instincts’ of the faiths they were trying to replace and to avoid the mistake of the ‘early Judaizers’ who had offered as ‘permanent’ what was ‘accidental and transitory’. In hoping for a ‘new Alexandria . . . on the Indus or the Ganges’, he explained what an Anglican synthesis could do towards the conversion of Asia and Africa. As a synthesizer, Westcott implied that it would be possible to control secular knowledge by inserting a Christian component into it. He was limited, however in pursuing this aim, by the fact that he wrote with authority only about literature, art and social philosophy. Westcott saw the Homeric poems as ‘a kind of Bible’ and found in Aeschylus ‘the light of a divine presence’. But he did not imagine that the theology of the Greek poets had been Christian. On the contrary, it had lacked a conception of everlasting life, had looked for the vindication of righteousness on earth and had resembled Plato in providing both contrasts with Christianity and the anticipations of Christianity which had also been provided by Euripides. Westcott gave as much attention to Greek poetry as to modern poetry, and treated both as aspects of the religious character of culture. It would be idle, however, to pretend that the path he picked from poetry to Christianity was as important as the path he picked from positivism to Christianity. In articles which he wrote in the 1860s, Westcott argued that there was no ‘fundamental antagonism’ between positivism and Christianity, and that indeed positivism was more in harmony with an ‘historic’ religion than any other system of philosophy. Positivism was merely a transition to a ‘fuller faith’, and a ‘positivist in philosophy might be a Christian in religion’ since Christianity, through the fact of the Incarnation, ‘carried on’ to the ‘unseen and eternal’ the ideas which positivism limited to the ‘seen and temporal’. Westcott treated positivism sympathetically and found its tendency to slide into secularism no more marked than Evangelicalism’s tendency to slide into mysticism. Of its ‘outline of the hierarchy of the sciences’, he observed that religion, though ‘built upon’ the sciences, was not ‘shaped by them’ and that

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positivism was merely a ‘forcing again upon our notice of aspects of Christian truth which [had] been more or less hidden since the teaching of the greatest Greek fathers [had been] superseded . . . by the . . . narrow system of Latin theology’. The prospect of science sustaining religion, and the help positivism might give in bringing this about, were important aspects of Westcott’s tactic. It was even more important that Comte’s replacement of individualism by an ‘idealized’ humanity was compatible with both Christianity’s ‘social’ destination and the social consciousness inherent in Christianity’s ‘corporate’ life. Westcott accepted Comte’s view that ‘theocratic . . . intellectual and social types of religion’ had converged in Christianity. In six expressive pages in The Contemporary Review in 1867, he made the crucial claim that Protestantism, so far from being, as Comte had supposed, ‘simply destructive’, had been both constructively individualistic and the educator of the ‘separate nationalities’, and was now heralding a new phase in which a ‘Catholicism of feeling’ would ‘harmonise . . . self . . . with society’. In drawing out the social implications of the Incarnation in the wake of the Reform Act of 1867, Westcott was austere rather than accommodating, found one of the ‘condition[s] . . . of . . . social health’ to lie in an ‘abiding distinction of classes’ and left no doubt that the ‘selfishness and self-indulgence’ of the ‘very poorest’ were to be regretted as much as the extravagance of the rich. It was only when he began preaching to the ‘vast congregations’ of Westminster Abbey in the 1880s that he expressed a systematic sense of Christianity’s social relevance, called on Anglicans to bring their own resources to bear on the passion which Fabianism was bringing to bear on the condition of the working classes, and followed Maurice and St Francis as well as Comte in dethroning ‘material wealth’ and ‘conspicuous consumption’ as ‘supreme objects of human endeavour’. Westcott was as conscious as Joseph Chamberlain of municipal achievement and of the centrality of the State’s relations with the lower classes. But his pivot was the ‘moral office’ and ‘universal mission’ of the Church and its historic destiny as shaper of a public opinion to which it was ‘the office of the State to give effect’ in the Empire as well as in England. Though Westcott’s social purpose was to establish the principles which were inherent in the New Testament, there was not much about policy and there was a great deal about it not being the Church’s office to lay down the details of policy. As Bishop of Durham, he was to be reasonably specific about living conditions in the Durham cities. But his influence otherwise was largely conceptual and incantatory – about the dignity of labour, about the help the Church had given the nation in coping with ‘corruption’, ‘foreign conquest’ and ‘domestic revolution’, and about the transformations which had been effected by industrialization, urbanization and the empire. As an imperialist, Westcott played down the militarism and materialism of

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the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, admired its demonstration of the ‘paramountcy . . . of the Unseen’, and attributed to England as ‘mother and mistress of the nations’ a special responsibility for both brotherhood and peace. In the year of his death he supported imperial federation ‘under a single sovereign power’ as a further step in the process which the revolutions of 1848 had begun towards national fulfilment in a ‘federation of the world’. Westcott believed that the laws of political economy were neither moral judgements nor commands, that ‘the function of the State’ could not be limited to ‘retributive justice . . . the repression of crime . . . or the furtherance of material prosperity’, and that, in pursuit of peace between the classes, education had to be made spiritual as well as commercial and ‘public service’ entrenched as the motivating force in ‘manufactures, commerce, trade and agriculture’. Since a nation which lost its religion declined, moreover, Christianity should take its stand on the ‘realities of sin’, the ‘power of Redemption’ and the fact, or gospel, of the Resurrection. Westcott’s book The Gospel of the Resurrection was fertile and eloquent but succeeded mainly in proving how difficult it is to preach to anyone who has not already been converted. Westcott was in any case a person of such transparent sincerity that it is no easier to wonder whether he believed what he wrote than it is to wonder whether Shaw, as a person of transparent insincerity, believed what he had written in the way in which he had written it by the time Westcott died.

Maurice and Westcott had given Anglicanism a message which had combined with Green’s message to imply that Christianity should issue in a sort of radical, or quasi-socialistic, Liberalism. In Gore, who grew up in Green’s shadow at Balliol in the 1870s, and in Temple and Tawney, who grew up in Caird’s shadow at Balliol at the turn of the century, the implication was that it should issue in a sort of quasi-liberal Socialism. Gore will appear in chapter 11 as an advocate of disestablishment and exemplar of the incompatibility between Christianity and modern thought. In this chapter we shall examine Tawney and Temple as exemplars of the assumption, which Maurice and Westcott shared, that it was not too late to make the State the instrument of a Christian purpose. VII Where Macaulay had been a book in breeches, Temple8 was a book in gaiters. There was the same robust energy as in Macaulay, the same suspect geniality 18

Rt. Rev. William Temple (1881–1944), educated Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, 1904–10. Headmaster of Repton School, 1910–14; Rector of St James, Piccadilly, 1914–20; Bishop of Manchester, 1920–9; Archbishop of York, 1929–42; and Archbishop of Canterbury, 1942–4. Author of The Faith and Modern Thought, 1910; The Nature of Personality, 1911; The Kingdom of God,

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of character, the same myopic, masculine demonstration of moral and mental directness. Unlike Runcie, Ramsey, Lang, Tait and Davidson among the Archbishops of Canterbury of the last hundred or so years, Temple was born and brought up an English Anglican. His father was Frederick Temple who, as Jowett’s friend and colleague, had contributed to Essays and Reviews, had dissociated himself from Essays and Reviews on becoming Bishop of Exeter and was to be Archbishop of Canterbury for a short time in the 1890s. Temple himself was a boy at Rugby before becoming an undergraduate at Balliol. After a few years as an Oxford philosophy don and headmaster of Repton, he took off for parochial life in London and was on the way to higher preferment when he resigned from being Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly in order to run the Life and Liberty Movement. For much of his life he was involved with the Workers’ Educational Association and the Ecumenical Movement. He became Bishop of Manchester at the age of thirty-nine during Lloyd George’s Prime Ministership, Archbishop of York at the age of forty-seven towards the end of Baldwin’s second Prime Ministership, and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 against Churchill’s better judgement. He had always been a productive author, became a prolific one and, first at York and then at Canterbury, became a best-selling one. Temple had read Greats at Oxford and had acquainted himself with Eucken and Harnack in Germany. On expressing doubts about the Virgin Birth, he was given special facilities for ordination by Archbishop Davidson, his mentor and family friend, after Bishop Paget of Oxford had declined to ordain him. In early life he was on the wavelengths of Bosanquet and Bergson as well as of Caird and Streeter, and by 1911 was relating historic Christianity to Plato, Hegel, Browning and Spinoza. Temple was a Protestant but not in the sense in which Kingsley and Froude had been Protestants. He admired Gore, had no wish to be a ‘Protestant’ as opposed to a ‘Catholic’ Anglican, and was more sympathetic to the Catholic element in the Elizabethan settlement than Stanley, for example, had been half a century earlier. He mistrusted Gore’s anti-establishmentarianism but accepted Gore’s view that Christianity and some sort of Socialism should be married. He shared Caird’s view that Christianity, philosophy and literature should be married and claimed, indeed, that the ‘philosophic life might have in it more of real prayer than was to be found in very many devotional exercises’. footnote 8 (cont.) 1912; Repton School Sermons, 1913; Church and Nation, 1915; Plato and Christianity, 1916; A Challenge to the Church, 1917; Issues of Faith, 1917; Mens Creatrix, 1917; Life of Bishop Percival, 1921; Christus Veritas, 1924; Personal Religion and the Life of Fellowship, 1926; Essays on Christian Politics, 1927; Christianity and the State, 1928; Nature, Man and God, 1934; Readings in St John’s Chapel, 1939; Thoughts in Wartime, 1940; Christianity and Social Order, 1942; and The Church Looks Forward, 1944.

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Temple praised Wesley, argued that it was easier now to insert a ‘free spiritual’ Christianity into the English mind than it had been for some time past, and stated that ‘Archbishops . . . Parker, Tillotson . . . Thomson and Tait’, as well as Thomas Arnold, had all been right to think of the Church of England as a ‘truly national church for which the State’ was a ‘religious body . . . whose . . . highest obligation lay in the exercise of its religious functions’. Temple was aware that Christian belief might disintegrate, perhaps had disintegrated. He struggled to maintain it and produced both a complicated vindication and a political casuistry which was to do for the modern world what Canonism had done for the Middle Ages. But he mistrusted the neo-Catholicism of the 1920s, was more than ordinarily resistant to Christopher Dawson, and expected the Christianity of the future to resemble mediaeval Christianity only in ‘possessing an order’, creating a ‘Commonwealth of Value’ and helping to resolve the problems created by Lutheran and Cartesian individualism. Before World War I, Temple had expressed hopes for reunion with Dissent, as well as with Roman Catholicism. Later, he expected reunion to come, if at all, by ‘mutual understanding’ leading to a ‘real synthesis of all that was precious in the uniting traditions’. In face of Nazism, he claimed that ‘the Christian world was moving towards a deeper unity . . . across all secular divisions’. During and after World War I, Temple constructed a career as an ecclesiastical journalist, criticizing the ‘autocracy of the parson’ and the lack of an Anglican equivalent to the Roman Curia, and advocating the equalization of endowments, the uniting of benefices and the creation of new dioceses. He defended the Establishment (provided lay participation was increased and ecclesiastical self-government preserved) and argued that it was ‘the veto of the State’ which had prevented the Church of England becoming sectarian and intolerant. He defended the 1927 Prayer Book on the ground that the ‘extraordinary renewal’ of English spiritual life in the previous century and a half required a widening of ‘the law of public worship’. When the Prayer Book was rejected, he wanted the ‘battle of Liberty’ for the Church to be followed by a ‘battle for Liberty . . . within the Church’. Temple highlighted the contrast between the Church as ‘Bride of Christ’ and the imperfection of the Church militant on earth, observed that English Christians during World War I had had ‘no links’ with ‘fellow-Christians in Germany’ comparable to the links which bound them to agnostic patriots in England, and recorded without warmth or pleasure the religious changes which had been effected in his lifetime by mechanization, motor transport, Sunday amusements, modern education, ‘the scientific attitude’, the industrial system and the newspaper press. He drew such comfort as he could, admiring Reith’s BBC, finding compensation for the disappearance of large congregations in the ‘greater sincerity’ of smaller congregations, and believing that ‘the heart of our people . . . remained . . . impregnably religious’, however little they realized this themselves.

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Temple wanted a ‘specialized training’ to protect a professional clergy against unctuousness and ecclesiasticism. He enjoined study, prayer and pastoral activity, along with closer attention to evangelical activity than was being directed at non-believers in the 1930s. He made Carlylean requisitions to ‘lay the newspaper on the altar’ by ‘showing the bearing of the Gospel on . . . such . . . problems as Peace . . . Poverty and Unemployment’. As a young clergyman Temple had declared that the ‘immanent . . . Reason which guided . . . Nations, directed History, and fashioned States’, was ‘none other’ than ‘the Eternal Word of God’; that ‘the Universe could not have been made by God’ without the ‘life of Christ’; and that democracy and the ‘spirit of service’ would never have been discovered ‘if . . . they . . . had not broken out . . . in . . . their full splendour’ in the ‘Person’ of Christ. This did not lead him to propose the formation of a Christian Democrat party. It did suggest, however, that the authoritarian God who had been the norm in monarchical epochs was unsuitable for a democratic epoch, that the God to whom a democratic epoch would defer was the God of love and that it was as an exemplification of love that a Christian doctrine should be applied to politics and society. Temple’s political and social doctrine brought with it the high sense of the Church’s responsibility to assist at the redemption of the secular world which the older Wilberforce had brought in campaigning against slavery and Garibaldi (in Temple’s opinion) had brought in his Christ-like campaigns for ‘justice and purity’. But it also brought with it a refusal to identify the nation with secularity or the Church with spirituality, and an insistence that, though the nation was one stage in God’s work where the Church was another, relations between the two had been obscured by both the departmentalization which the Renaissance had effected in politics and education and the liberation of economic power from religious control which Tawney had made it his life’s work to expose. Tawney and Temple were contemporaries as schoolboys and undergraduates, and intimate friends both then and thereafter. Temple officiated at Tawney’s wedding to Beveridge’s sister in 1908; they collaborated in the Workers’ Educational Association and in attempting to define an Anglican politics. Gore, too, was one of Tawney’s early supporters, presided at his Inaugural Lecture to the Ratan Tata Foundation in 1913, and saw a lot of him while Tawney was convalescing from war wounds later. Where Gore and Temple gave continuous weight to the connections between Christianity and social and political duty, however, Tawney’s historical, political and economic doctrine achieved indefeasibility in its own right. Not that Tawney did not emphasize the Christian character of his Socialism or the duty it imposed on the Church to ‘repent’ of ‘class privilege’ as an ‘outrage’ on God’s image. But he was taken up by the Webbs as well as by Gore, spent most of his academic life at the London School of Economics

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and elicited the same sort of response there as he elicited in the similarly secular atmosphere of the Labour Party. VIII In a memorial address after Tawney’s9 death in 1962, Gaitskell, then leader of the Labour Party, alluded to the contrast which Tawney had drawn between ‘the Christian ethic and the actual condition of society’. In celebrating Tawney as a ‘great man’ and a ‘tremendous influence’ on Gaitskell’s generation, however, he spoke of him as primarily a ‘Democratic Socialist’, an ‘idealist who was a rationalist’, and a ‘believer in liberty and equality’; as a thinker, that is to say, whose doctrine was compatible with a post-Christian secularity. Tawney’s undergraduate religion was as tenuous as Sidgwick’s mature religion, but he then moved in the opposite direction. Throughout adult life, he was a High Anglican and between 1919 and 1926 enunciated the sort of Christian sociology which Sidgwick could never have contemplated. Tawney was brought up in cantonment India, was educated at Rugby and Balliol, and, on taking an Oxford History degree, slummed it for a time at Toynbee Hall before spending a short period as a lecturer in economics at Glasgow. He then worked in Rochdale for the Workers’ Educational Association and the Oxford University Tutorial Class Committee and, under their auspices, in 1912 published Tudor Economic Documents and a remarkable work of his own, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. Tawney had written about poverty, juvenile labour and minimum wage rates before volunteering for Kitchener’s army at the age of thirty-three in 1914. After refusing a commission, he became a sergeant in the Manchester Regiment, with which he was serving when he was wounded at the Somme. He was a Labour candidate for Parliament from 1918 to 1924, and became a member of party committees, as well as of the official Sankey Committee on the Coal Industry. With his appointment first to a Fellowship at Balliol in 1918 and then to a Lectureship at the London School of Economics, he achieved as much financial security as a spending wife was to permit him. Throughout his life Tawney was a pamphleteer. He was also a voluminous journalist, eventually, for thirty years after 1920, in the Manchester Guardian, 19

Richard Henry Tawney (1880–62), educated Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of Balliol, 1918–21, Lecturer, later Professor at the London School of Economics, 1917–62, Member of governmental committees. Author of The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, 1912; Poverty as an Industrial Problem, 1913; ed. (with Bland and Brown) English Economic History, 1914; The Establishment of Minimum Wage Rates, 1914; The Acquisitive Society, 1921; ed. (with Power) Tudor Economic Documents, 1924; The British Labour Movement, 1924; intro. to T. Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, 1925; Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926; Studies in Economic History, 1927; Equality, 1931; Land and Labour in China, 1932; The Attack, 1933; and Business and Politics under James I, 1958.

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which gave him the opportunity to provide running commentaries on the defects of English society and civilization. Tawney’s indictment of England was outlined first of all (in his diary) in the shadow of the Labour unrest of 1912–14 which had ‘done a lot of good’ in ‘waking us up’ to the fact that society’s ‘external arrangements’ were a form of ‘slavery’, that the workman’s status was determined by ‘force’ and ‘compulsion’, and that the workman himself was treated as a ‘tool’ rather than a ‘personality’. A ‘moral wrong’ was done when children were exploited, the wages of ‘unorganized labour’ were ‘beaten down’, and employers ‘took large profits’ while employees were ‘housed like cattle’; above all, when ‘the . . . life . . . and work of the mass of the people’ were settled ‘by someone else’ or ‘the standard of utility’, and ‘a steamroller’ was passed ‘over the . . . associations, loyalties . . . and immemorial graces and pieties’ (it is just like Oakesholt) which constituted the ‘conservatism [of] all decent people’. Tawney agreed that the mass of the people enjoyed lives which were ‘richer and more varied than in 1750’. But he denied that there was ‘more contentment’, claimed that ‘many working people idealised the age before the rise of the great industry’, and affirmed that contemporary England lacked, what mediaeval England for all its poverty had had, a social order which was not ‘revolting’ to the conscience. In accounting for the ‘revolting’ aspects of contemporary society, Tawney specified the ‘wrong attitude of governments to social questions’, a ‘classethic’ which a lot of the poor seemed to accept, and the ‘vanity’ which the acquiescence of the poor induced among the rich. This was his condemnation of ‘privilege’, and in particular of economic privilege, to which his objections were that it ought to be judged by philosophical rather than economic considerations, and that Marshall’s belief that economics could judge social problems ‘by the same order of mind which tested the stability of a battleship in bad weather’, was ‘twaddle’. These criticisms, stated mainly by Tawney to himself before 1914, were then restated for the benefit of a nation at war in performance of a sacred duty to the war dead. There was the same emphasis as previously on the amorality of the industrial system and the distance it had put between the workers and the upper classes, the same suggestion that the support for social reform which was being given by employers and managers was designed merely to ensure that workers would work more efficiently. But there were also new criticisms – that British society had a ‘Prussian’ aspect, that ‘the spirit of . . . English and American capitalism’ was ‘too often the spirit of . . . German imperialism’, and that the ‘cult of power [and] subordination of personality’ which in Prussia had ‘revealed itself in the adoration of the State’, was revealing itself in England in an ‘adoration of the power of money’ which even Kitchener’s army, as a ‘petrified model of the society in which it was born’, had been unable to avoid. During his convalescence, Tawney pursued the implications of these argu-

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ments, compared industry’s specialization and centralized autocracy with the specialization and centralized autocracy of war, and contrasted the resistance which was being offered to Prussianism in France and Flanders with the absence of resistance in England. He accused government, employers’ organizations and the post-war reconstruction committees of making ‘the mass of mankind’ merely ‘accessories to production’, and made it clear that it was the co-existence of poverty with riches, the ‘aristocratic’ character of the government of industry and the methods by which ‘capital and land’ were being disposed of, which were objectionable. Tawney used the war to announce that something was wrong, that the ‘thousands of young men’ who had volunteered for Kitchener’s army had known this, and that the survivors were beginning to understand that the ‘glorious resurrection’ hoped for in 1914 and paid for by the ‘corpses’ of dead comrades had been made impossible by the cynicism, Machiavellianism and moral indifference of British and Allied politicians. The Landsdowne Peace Letter, the Russian Revolutions and the Russian government’s publication of Russia’s pre-revolutionary diplomatic archives were then welcomed as evidence that the past was as dead in France and England as it was in Russia and that a marriage would have to be arranged between President Wilson’s principles and the ‘humane ideals’ and ‘kindly feelings’ of ‘the common people’. This was an attempt to alienate by recording what Tawney believed to be the existing alienation of the other ranks of the army and their wives, mothers and widows from the rich and the upper classes; to contrast the imputed Machiavellianism of the latter with the imputed virtue of the former; and to identify virtue as issuing in a League of Nations as a way of ‘conquer[ing] the soul of the German people’ and nationalization as a way of ‘meeting the demands’ of both ‘the worker and the consumer’ in England. These were Tawney’s version of the opinions of the trenches, of the preliminaries necessary to ‘opening . . . windows into the soul’, and of a reconstruction which would liberate parliament from ‘party politics’ and turn ‘landlords’ and ‘employers’ into ‘servants of the public’. In his Ratan Tata Lecture in 1913, Tawney had recorded the shift registered by contemporary investigation of poverty from the abnormality of destitution leading to relief through charity to poverty as a normal function of the industrial system. It was, he argued, the industrial system which needed investigation if economic power was to be subjected to ‘moral control’, and the question he asked was whether ‘industrial liberty with a lower level of economic efficiency’ might not be ‘socially more desirable than the highest degree of . . . efficiency accompanied by industrial autocracy’. Tawney did not dismiss ‘economic efficiency’; by 1920 he was claiming that moral control would increase it. But his argument stood irrespective of the consequences; it was the ‘increasing repugnance to the government of industry by the agents of shareholders for the profit of shareholders’ that was the

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problem, and the ‘failure of the existing organization to win the confidence of the mass of the workers’ which suggested a move to a ‘different type of industrial government’. In looking forward to the ‘industrial struggles of the coming generation’, Tawney drew a distinction between ‘nationalization’ as the occasion for centralization and ‘red tape’, and the transfer of industrial authority from the ‘owners of capital or their agents’ to industry’s ‘working personnel’. The ‘discipline’ imposed in the previous century by the ‘threat of dismissal’ was no longer viable. But a new discipline of ‘professional pride and responsibility’ would become possible once industry was no longer ‘conducted primarily’ for the ‘pecuniary gain of those who owned property in it’. Tawney put these positions with rancour, with a high degree of class-consciousness, and with a dogma unwillingness either to sense difficulties or to see more than the most minimal moral merit in the existing industrial system. He saw an even more fundamental want of merit in the existing educational system, without a revolution in which class divisions would never be ended, ‘moral cohesion’ would never replace anarchy and the lower classes (who in truth had been achieving self-development through wealth creation since the Industrial Revolution) would never achieve self-development. Tawney’s first major statement about education was in articles that he wrote in The Westminster Gazette in 1906 on behalf of Canon Barnett, the head of Toynbee Hall, who had been invited to declare himself about Oxford’s role in national life. The articles assumed that the 1902 Education Act had intended ‘all who had brains for a higher education’ to get it, and asked whether Oxford was playing its part in ‘disseminating culture’ among all who were capable of receiving it. In calling for the opening of Oxford to ‘men of ability’ in ‘every social class’, they pictured ‘a new race of nearly nine hundred thousand souls’ standing every year ‘with the world at their feet, like barbarians gazing upon the time-worn plains of an ancient civilization’ and deserving better than to be ‘merely grinders of corn for the Philistines . . . and doff[ers] of bobbins for mill-owners’. Tawney undoubtedly wanted to widen access to higher education. But he was wary of creating a ladder for the ambitious. He was against ambition, and thought it important to ensure that the culture which Oxford would provide for ‘poorer members’ of the lower classes and ‘the industrial classes generally’ would not be the culture of self-help or self-advancement but the ‘spiritual’ culture of Jowett and Matthew Arnold. Tawney’s educational writing, the most formidable part of his sociopolitical output, combined class warfare, high-mindedness and the wish to insert an Arnoldian humanism into a democratic and technological society, disconnecting universities from the ‘plutocratic system’ and connecting them with the ‘increasing volume of opinion’ which believed that civilization could be rescued from the ‘misuse of its material triumphs’. This combination of

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criticism and fashion coincided with the emergence of the Labour Party after 1917 and achieved its fullest statement in The Acquisitive Society, which had a wide circulation when published as a book at the point at which Labour electoral success was beginning to undermine the Lloyd-George coalition in 1921. The Acquisitive Society glanced polemically at the party political situation. But it did so as a prelude to enunciating the universal principles that ‘property and economic activity’ should ‘promote the ends of society’, that managers as well as proprietors should be made to ‘justify’ their activity before a ‘social tribunal’, and that there should be an end of the alliance between economic individualism, landed and financial wealth, and the two ‘traditional’ political parties. What Tawney was demanding was restriction on the idleness of rentiers and the bourgeoisie, an effort to base ‘remuneration’ on ‘service’, and a rehabilitation of the labouring man, who was judged ‘vulgar and meaningless’ because he had not acquired wealth. And not only had industry to be professionalized through ‘intellectual and moral training’, States also had to be moralized by renouncing nationalism and imperialism as analogues of individualism within states. Tawney was at once a high-principled thinker and a calculating psephologist. He welcomed the conversion into a profession of the ‘intellectual proletariat’ which had been created by the separation of management from ownership, looked for a ‘gradual conversion’ of ‘managers, experts and technicians’ into a ‘cautious and doctrineless trade unionism’, and hoped to ally working-class and trade-union voters with ‘the consumer . . . the brain worker . . . and the petite bourgeoisie’ whom the rich despised for imagining that ‘anything so vulgar’ as their savings ‘had . . . any interest’ for them ‘except at elections’. Tawney’s ideal, utopianized from the Middle Ages, was of a ‘social order’ in which the ‘mass of the people would be masters of the holdings . . . they ploughed . . . and the tools with which they worked’. His problem was to ensure that property would be associated with work, that it would be used by its owner ‘for the conduct of his profession and the upkeep of his household’, and that an extension of the insurance principle would give the insecure and deprived both greater security and more of the ‘fruits of . . . [their] own . . . labour’ than had been possible in the recent past. Tawney’s primary interest in The Acquisitive Society was moral. It was only in the concluding chapter – with its reference to Culture and Anarchy – that he made the first of many connections between the moral problem and Christianity and laid the foundations for Religion and the Rise of Capitalism which, after a number of preliminary versions,10 was published as a book in the year of the General Strike in 1926. 10

In the Scott Holland Lectures and a Hibbert Journal article in 1922, in three articles entitled ‘Religious Thought in the Sixteenth Century’ which were published in the United States in 1923, and in half a dozen other places in the following years.

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As an historian, Tawney’s output was not especially large. There were important articles,11 two important introductions,12 two important collections of documents13 and three major books.14 What needs to be examined is the process by which the secular historical sociology of The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century in 1912 became the Christian historical sociology of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism in 1926. The Agrarian Problem was a complicated book. But its message was simple – that ‘with one short interval’ under the ‘rapacious oligarchy’ which had brought about the fall of Somerset for being ‘a traitor to his order’ in 1549, the Elizabethan and early Stuart State had made ‘one of the most remarkable attempts’ ever made to ‘control changing economic conditions’ by ‘government action’; that sixteenth-century statesmen and enlightened opinion had, where eighteenth-century statesmen and enlightened opinion had not, been willing to use State-power to protect the poor and the peasant against the rich and the landowner; and that Elizabethan and Stuart statesmen, however mixed their motives, were to be admired for resisting both the ‘commercialising of English life’ and a ‘conception of land ownership’ which was to divorce the English peasantry from the soil on a scale that was to be unique in Europe. In praising the conservative communalism which he discerned in the latemediaeval and sixteenth-century village, Tawney emphasized the ‘positive’ status of custom as ‘the law of the village’ and its overriding importance from the copyholders’ point of view. He celebrated the energy, robustness and ‘humble idealisms’ of copyholders and their presence in grammar schools and universities at the beginning of the sixteenth century before the ‘upper classes’ had begun to ‘covet education . . . sufficiently to withhold it’ from them and by this route he arrived at his central theme – that the small cultivator who had been liberated from the oppressive régime of villeinage by the fourteenth century was then to be subjected to the oppressive régime of competition. The tone of The Agrarian Problem was sardonic and realistic. It did not much believe in statistics. But it did believe that ‘in numberless English villages’ between 1500 and 1600 rural life had slipped via ‘agrarian warfare’ and an immense increase in rural poverty from ‘one form of economic organization’ to another, that the consolidation of land ownership had been a destructive irruption into a stable society, and that the great modern estate was the child of rapacity and the source of the aristocracy’s belief that it was an ‘impertinence’ for the poor to own property. 11 12 13 14

‘The Rise of the Gentry’, ‘The Abolition of Economic Controls 1918–21’ and ‘Harrington’s Interpretation of His Age’. to Thomas Wilson’s Discourse Upon Usury and The Collected Papers of George Unwin. English Economic History, which he edited with Bland and Brown, and Tudor Economic Documents, which he edited with Eileen Power. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and Business and Politics under James I.

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The Agrarian Problem was important, finally, because it enabled Tawney to cast doubt on the inevitability of the new aristocratic commercialism. It did this, with only passing reference to religion, with a measured dissociation from Gasquet and Cobbett and with a positive commitment only to the view that the dissolution of the monasteries had given the ‘Cecils, Herberts and Grenvilles’ who had ‘invested in the Reformation . . . as a gambling-stock’ both a ‘material interest in . . . the new order’ and the sort of reassurance for their ‘plastic consciences’ which had enabled them to ‘lay up for themselves treasures in Heaven as the best insurance for the treasures . . . they had already accumulated on earth’. IX About religion, Tawney was comparatively simple. His interest was in Christianity; he believed from the start that English Christianity was in decline at any rate among the urban poor and that ‘one of the great social forces of history’ was thus ‘gradually and reluctantly drifting out of the lives of no inconsiderable part of society’. After his Toynbee Hall phase Tawney did not for some time address the problem. There is no sign that he thought of ordination; occasional observations in his twenties suggest a mistrust of clericalism and establishmentarianism and a rejection of natural religion in view of the advantages which accrued from an incarnational religion. But these were thoughts on the way; there was no systematic attempt to transcend the moral considerations associated with secular government. Tawney’s mind was indubitably Christian, he was capable in his maturity of writing without embarrassment about ‘grace’ and ‘sin’ (or rather, about ‘grace’ more than about ‘sin’), about the ‘truth and subtlety’ of the dogmas he had ‘laughed at’ as an undergraduate, and about man’s ‘personality’ as the ‘most divine thing we know’. He was in his late thirties, however, before an article in The Hibbert Journal and the concluding chapter of The Acquisitive Society gave his first systematic statement of the ‘revolution through which the human spirit had passed’ when the Christian Churches had abdicated a ‘whole department of life’ and the mediaeval conception of Christianity as implying a comprehensive social doctrine had been replaced by the modern conception of Christianity as being limited by the primacy of individual salvation. About this Tawney was powerful and persistent. ‘The Churches of the nineteenth century’ had made religion ‘the ornament of leisure instead of the banner of a Crusade’. They had had ‘no strong assurance of the reality of any spiritual order invisible to the eye of sense’ and they had helped the ‘restraints imposed on social conduct’ to ‘snap’ before the ‘intoxication of riches’ which had accompanied the Industrial Revolution. In The Hibbert Journal and The Acquisitive Society, Tawney pointed out

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that, since the Middle Ages, the ‘habitual conduct and organization of society’ had become something to which religion was irrelevant. It is not clear, however, that he had taken Weber and Sombart on board; it is clear that he was still accounting for the change by reference to the social and religious individualism of English nonconformity and the Church of England’s status as ‘moral police’ and ‘servile client . . . of a half-pagan aristocracy’. It was, indeed, in Gore’s terms more than in Weber’s that he wrote of the Church as a society with ‘powers of moral discipline’ over its members, urged a reversion to the unestablished character of the ‘Church in the Roman Empire before the conversion of Constantine’, and required of any teaching which such a Church would provide that it should be as ‘inconvenient’ as Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was to want it to be ‘to all parties and persons who desir[ed] to dwell at ease in Zion’. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism had three main contentions – that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had witnessed a ‘secularization’ of political and economic thought, that Adam Smith had freed economic activity from Christian control and that it was only in the twentieth century that Socialism and the League of Nations had tried to ‘restate the practical implications of the Christian faith in a form sufficiently comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the collective actions and institutions of mankind’. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was an extension of The Agrarian Problem insofar as it dealt with the mentalities which had ratified commercialization in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and the ‘almost tragic intensity of emotion’ with which the ‘traditional social theory’ of the Middle Ages had reacted against it. It differed from The Agrarian Problem insofar as it made religion central, examined the ‘new conceptions’ of religion’s province which had accompanied the ‘new conceptions of . . . economic organization’ and discussed Lutheran and Calvinist social theory as background to the final demolition of mediaeval social theory after the Civil War. In all these respects it identified a ‘crisis’, like the crisis Toynbee was to identify later, in which science, including especially economic science’s ratification of avarice, had made ‘the triumph of Mammon’ almost complete ‘from the Baltic to the Ganges and . . . the Spice Islands to Peru’. Tawney’s sympathies were with the canonist mistrust of avarice, and against the individualistic consecration of selfishness which he associated with political economy. He contrasted Luther’s peasant, mystic and ChesterBellocian attitude to commercialization with Calvin’s consecration of it, and, in fixing on Calvinism as the cause of offence, examined the belief held by ‘the most modern and progressive elements’ in Geneva, Antwerp, London and Amsterdam that, since ‘large-scale commerce and finance’ were necessary if economic progress was to be achieved, a Christian ethic had to come to terms with them.

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Tawney acknowledged that Calvin had begun by mistrusting wealth and at no time abandoned the duty to make religion ‘penetrate’ economic life. He pointed out, however, that, in addition to accepting credit and economic motives as ‘inevitable’, Calvinists had ‘conduct[ed] their business’ with ‘high seriousness’ in their ‘taskmaster’s eye’, had combined asceticism and personal responsibility with an ‘iron determination’ to sweep aside ‘effete and bankrupt monarchies and aristocracies’, and in Geneva, Scotland and New England had exceeded the tyranny of the mediaeval Church in exactly the way in which the Jacobin clubs had exceeded the tyranny of the French monarchy. Although Religion and the Rise of Capitalism said a good deal about Continental religion, its central theme was the history of England, not only because English governments from Wolsey to Laud had been mediaeval in social intention, but also because it was in England that the ‘organized money-market’ had connected itself with an individualism which had no idea of corporate morality’, and the failure of Laud’s ecclesiastical institutions had left the Church of the 1660s incapable of resisting Locke and commercial civilization. This was Gore’s view of the Church of England; and it recognized, as Temple also recognized, that the Church had a target to attack. What is significant historically is that, in Tawney’s hands, this was yet another attack on the Puritanism which had been the target of Arnold’s attack.

Where Green had idealized Puritanism as an irruption of the spiritual into the material, Tawney maintained a Tractarian hostility, believing that the ‘self-sufficiency’ of Puritan morality had ‘corroded’ the Puritan sense of ‘social solidarity’, and had come to assume that the poverty of those who ‘[fell] by the way’ was ‘not a misfortune to be pitied or relieved’ but a ‘moral failing to be condemned’. Puritanism was not, of course, even in Tawney’s view, the only source of harshness towards the poor. But it had supplied religious consecration of an economic posture and, far more than the Tudor struggle against Rome, had been ‘the true . . . Reformation’ by which England had entered the modern world, transforming souls, replacing ecclesiastical sacraments by the sacrament of work, and succeeding by the end of the seventeenth century in compounding the aristocracy with the commercial and industrial classes into the ‘gilded clay’ of a plutocracy. With the concept of plutocracy, Tawney felt able to characterize English life and society since the seventeenth century. In passages of naïve eloquence he laid down the spiritual truths that ‘those who [sought] God in isolation from their fellow-men’ were likely to find ‘not God but the devil’, that ‘the spiritual aristocrat who sacrificed fraternity to liberty’ was reversing the traditional scheme of ‘Christian virtues’, and that those who ‘condemned the external

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order as unspiritual . . . made it, and ultimately [themselves], less spiritual by reason of [their] contempt’. ‘While the revelation of God to the individual soul is the centre of all religion’, went a powerful passage, the essence of Puritan theology was that it made it, not only the centre, but the whole circumference and substance . . . To a vision thus absorbed in a single intense experience, not only religious and ecclesiastical systems, but the entire world of human relations, the whole fabric of social institutions, witnessing in all the wealth of their idealism and their greed to the infinite creativeness of man, reveal themselves in a new and wintry light. The fire of the spirit burns brightly in the hearth, but through the windows of his soul the Puritan, unless a poet or a saint, looks on . . . a forbidding and frostbound wilderness, rolling its snow-clad leagues towards the grave – a wilderness to be subdued with aching limbs beneath solitary stars . . . Where Catholic and Anglican had caught a glimpse of the invisible, hovering like a consecration over the gross world of sense, and touching its muddy vesture with the unearthly gleam of a divine, yet familiar, beauty, the Puritan mourned for the lost Paradise and a creation sunk in sin. Where they had seen society as a mystical body, compact of members varying in order and degree, but dignified by participation in the common life of Christendom, he saw a bleak antithesis between the spirit which quickeneth and an alien, indifferent or hostile world. Where they had reverenced the decent order whereby past was knit to present, and man to man, and man to God, through fellowship in works of charity, in festival and fast, in the prayers and ceremonies of the Church, he turned with horror from the filthy rags of human righteousness. Where they, in short, had found comfort in a sacrament, he started back from a snare set to entrap his soul. (R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926, 1937 edn, pp. 227–8)

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was a weighty, judicious and Tractarian analysis of the merits and defects of Calvinism and Puritanism. The ultimate picture was of the dereliction apparent in two modern assumptions – the assumption that the Puritan conception of ‘the Calling’ gave ‘a halo of ethical sanctification’ to the ‘practical interests of the city’, and the assumption that its interpretation of ‘success in business’ as ‘almost a sign of spiritual grace’ was still in the 1920s sustaining the un-Christian belief that the Church should not interfere in politics. By the end of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Tawney’s position was unbearably plain. The Communist Manifesto had stated that ‘the bourgeoisie . . . had established naked self-interest and callous cash-payment’ as the only bond ‘between man and man’, and this was precisely what the theorists of England’s bourgeois predominance had stated between 1660 and 1700, preaching ‘the rigours of economic exploitation’ as a ‘public duty’, denouncing the ‘industrial proletariat’ after the manner of the ‘less reputable of white colonists denouncing coloured labour’, and differing among themselves only ‘as to the methods by which severity could most advantageously be organized’. The ‘grand discovery of a commercial age’ – that poor relief might be so administered ‘as to deter’ – was still in the future. But almost everything else about the nineteenth-century attitude to poverty had been established –

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not only the ‘ideal’ with which the ‘inventor . . . engineer and captain of industry’ was to effect the ‘astonishing outburst of industrial activity . . . after 1760’ but also the irregularity of ‘modern Capitalism’ which was, as Keynes had declared, a ‘system of appetites’ that ‘deified’ both ‘snatching to hoard’ and ‘hoarding to snatch’. ‘Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social history’, went a peroration, will be disposed to deny that the exploitation of the weak by the powerful, organised for purposes of economic gain, buttressed by imposing systems of law, and screened by decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in modern societies, which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to the Founder of the Christian Faith, lies deeper than the exceptional failures and abnormal follies against which criticism is most commonly directed. It consists in the assumption, accepted by most reformers with hardly less naïveté than by the defenders of the established order, that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object of human endeavour and the final criterion of human success. Such a philosophy, plausible, militant, and not indisposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecution, may triumph or may decline. What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State-idolatry of the Roman Empire. (R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926, 1937 edn, pp. 279–80)

Tawney’s was one of the most partial and effective statements of Socialism that has been made in Britain in this century. It turned a blind eye to workingclass materialism, ignored the landed aristocracy’s mistrust of commercialism, made capitalism into a simple aggressor, and extracted from the length of Christianity’s existence and the brevity of capitalism’s the idea that the ‘two great apostasies’ – ‘the idolatry of riches and the idolatry of power’ – might be superseded by a new phase of existence in which neither would predominate. In these extraordinary naïvetés, it bypassed the theological complexities with which Temple surrounded his Christian mentality between The Church and the Education Bill in 1906 and The Church Looks Forward in 1944. X In relation to British opinion in the first half of the twentieth century, Temple both was and was not on the winning side. Suburbanization, two world wars, and the resurgence of the Conservative Party between the wars, struck at much of what he stood for. The Labour Party’s second coming in the 1940 coalition and the establishment of Socialism as a viable policy made him a contributory figure in a movement which only death robbed him of the chance to see in action in the Attlee Government of 1945, in post-war Keynesian collectivism and in the United Nations.

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Temple defended British involvement in both world wars, wrote affirmatively about the relevance of the Christian conception of immortality to the Christian duty to bear arms, and dismissed both the Buddhist notion that ‘physiological life was sacred’ and the ‘monastic’ or pacifist notion that armsbearing was immoral. The ‘Good Centurion’ was as pleasing to God as ‘The Good Samaritan’; ‘the man who was ready to give up his . . . life for the sake of his country’s gain . . . was . . . a better man than one who shirked fighting on the ground of self-interest’; and just as World War I had been a war of democratic freedom (in Britain, France, Italy and the ‘local life’ of Czarist Russia), so in World War II it was ‘the law of love’ which made it necessary to fight ‘Nazi tyranny’. Between the wars Temple was a critic of white predominance over coloured peoples, an enemy of the ‘Machiavellian’ nationalism which had created the ‘vast divergence’ between European development and ‘the principles of Christianity’ and a political leader of African opinion. The British Empire was the ‘germ’ of the ‘federal . . . world government’ towards which the League of Nations was moving, world economic planning to ‘solve the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty’ was the ‘immanent logic’ and Christian end of the State, and there was a duty incumbent on the ‘more fortunate sections of our country, probably including some grades of labour’, to accept a ‘reduced standard of living’. Throughout it was assumed, obtusely, that subordination of the State to international control had the theological merit, which it was Butterfield’s function to deny, of embodying the ‘subordination of force to the authority of love’. About Germany Temple wrote at length. He was an early critic of the punitive aspects of the Versailles Settlement, advocated treaty revision and deletion of the war-guilt clause in 1932 and, for a brief Lansdowne-like moment during the phoney war of 1939-40, advocated a definition of peace aims so as to encourage ‘the Germany which Hitler had silenced and wronged’. Once the war became serious, however, he ruled out a negotiated peace, anticipated Germany’s break-up into its pre-Bismarckian units, and wanted a ‘new international authority’ to require all nations to study history ‘from Swiss textbooks’ so as to condemn Germany’s ‘three acts of planned aggression’. It was only for the peace treaty that he envisaged Germany’s return to the comity of nations and equal participation in ‘organizing the common life for the common good’. These were offered as applications of Christian principles to international politics. They were matched by a Tawneyite application to domestic politics involving fellowship and charity between all persons and classes, the abandonment of retribution and deterrence in punishment and subordination of the ‘interests of industry’ to the ‘interests of the community’. From his earliest excursions into social theory, Temple believed that immediate obedience to the Sermon on the Mount would cut the Church off from

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contemporary life as thoroughly as monasticism had cut it off from the life of the Middle Ages, and that casuistry and compromise were as important as the duty to edge society towards God’s kingdom through education. Education permeated Temple’s politics as much as it permeated Tawney’s. He wanted it to induce a ‘corporate spirit’ while lifting the people ‘above crowd-consciousness’; to permit everyone to realize his (or her) potentialities; and to give the ‘children of all classes’ a chance to be educated together so as to enable them to ‘understand’ each other better. About higher education, however, he had a difficulty. He was unwilling to denude the lower classes of talent, was reluctant to admit working- and lower-middle-class boys to Oxford and Cambridge unless they were older than ordinary undergraduates and wanted to impose previous attendance at University Tutorial Classes as a condition of entry. In reactionary unease about the wave of the future, he was as much exercised as Tawney by what he thought of as the edginess and ambition of the ‘scholarship-boy’ and wrote critically about a type of mind, common among able young men in modern universities who, ‘in relation to . . . good and evil’, were in the ‘mental condition of children’. In contrasting ‘traditional . . . aristocratic’ education with the ‘modern education’ derived from Rousseau, Temple identified the former with the public schools and ‘the two older universities’ as encouraging ‘sympathy’, ‘imagination’ and ‘corporate activity’ more than ‘memory’, ‘influence’ and ‘instruction’, and the latter with the training of ‘intelligence and memory’, an educational ladder up which the talented poor were in process of climbing, and a ‘selfishness and aggressiveness’ which disconnected education from all sense of social responsibility. Temple denied that life should be controlled by ‘the highly-developed conscious intellect’, control by which had been ‘the great sin’ of modern Germany. He believed, by contrast, that power would be exercised better after a traditional education based on the ‘sub-conscious’ methods of Oxford and Cambridge, and that the sense of ‘literature . . . science . . . history and . . . art’ as a ‘treasure-house’ of which no one would be deprived by ‘another possessing . . . them’, would redound to the ‘enrichment of all’. Temple looked to education, as he looked to his social doctrine generally, to erase personal and class ‘suspiciousness’ and to replace the ‘old-fashioned’ concern with ‘salvation in another world’ by ‘the conviction that . . . Christians . . . were called to the service of God here and now’. It was in this sense that his political, social and educational doctrine cohered with the theological and philosophical doctrines which he enunciated from Mens Creatrix onwards.

In these years Temple did for the benefit of the nation what he believed that scholasticism and canonism had done for the benefit of mediaeval

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Christendom. And he did it in the belief that a leading symptom of Christianity’s recovery of an independent identity would be the application to the State and to all classes and groups in British society of a revised version of the ‘Christian Sociology’ which Reformation Protestantism had destroyed. Temple was well aware of the restrictions which Establishment imposed on the Church of England. But he also thought pluralistically, at any rate in the 1920s, shared some of the ideas which Laski had propounded in his pluralistic phase, and, while accepting the limitations of Establishment, affirmed the Church’s duty to resist both its social blandishments and parliamentary and democratic interference in creeds and formularies. In relation to gambling, extra-marital sexual intercourse, the marriage of divorced persons in church, and the increase in sexual licence which he sensed during World War II, Temple was mistrustful and morally conservative. The same attitude was present up to a point in the claim that the profit-motive contained the ‘seeds of violence’ and a threat to the consumer, that ‘Christian principles’ had been flouted by the treatment of workers ‘during the Industrial Revolution’, and that the Church had a duty to warn the State against a postChristian ‘decadence’ in which humanism would be predominant, ‘pain’ would be more troublesome than ‘sin’, and the temptation to ‘acquiesce in a wrong course taken by the State’ would be greater than the temptation to ‘oppose the State on insufficient grounds’. Temple supported Labour’s resistance to ‘privilege’. But he was as critical of the Labour movement as he was of ‘unfettered competition’ and accused the ‘majority’ of being too ready to ‘trample on minorities and dissentient individuals’. Force uncontrolled by ‘spiritual principles’ was as great an evil when operated by a trade union as when operated by Lenin or Mussolini and the General Strike of 1926, though also the fault of the Conservative government, was Labour’s fault insofar as it embodied antagonism to a ‘social class’. Temple’s regard for democracy, therefore, was limited politically and did not extend to democratic control of the creeds and formularies of the Church. Moreover, he admired the corporations which fascism was interposing between the individual and the State and the sense of community and Christlike aspects of the Fuehrer-Prinzip which Hitler was instilling into the German young. In both movements, and in Marxism, he saw, what he also saw in Maritain’s Christian Democracy, a recognition that the division between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ was ‘unethical’, that ‘reconciliation’ had to be pursued, and that moral and intellectual solidarity had to be restored. Temple deduced a duty of hostility to ‘wage-slavery’, ‘class-war’ and suburban snobbery, expressed a preference for industrial ‘management’ as a ‘profession’ over industrial management as the pursuit of profit and attacked the idea that anyone should ‘make a living . . . or . . . a fortune’ out of the manipulation of money. He believed in ‘freedom’ but also believed that English

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freedom was under threat from ‘standardisation’ by ‘film and wireless’, the ‘segregation of social classes’ and the selfishness which denied to ‘earthly authority’ the divine claim to human loyalty.

The reader who has read thus far may well imagine that only a sneer is intended. A sneer is intended, but not only a sneer. For Temple’s theology and philosophy – the justification of his social and political doctrine – were yet another attempt, as brilliant as some of those we have examined already, to find a way of explaining why Christianity had not been invalidated by the unfriendly character of modern thought. XI From early in his life, Temple had proclaimed the grimness of the contemporary world – the recessions in hope, doubts about God, and increase in ‘pleasure-seeking and indulgence’ which had been present in literature as well as in life since the 1860s. He claimed, as Gore had claimed, that the Church of England was now a missionary Church, in England as much as in Africa and Asia, and he well understood, even when criticizing, the belief borrowed in the 1930s by Demant and Mascall from Barth and Niebuhr, that there was a fundamental incompatibility between Christianity and natural theology. Temple had three lines of reply – that the problems of natural theology would not be resolved for ‘many generations’ to come; that the ‘open repudiation’ of Christian doctrine and ‘standards of conduct’ by modern ideologists had made it urgent to ‘convert the world’; and that the context in which he had been formed theologically had been one in which believers in progress and ethics who did not believe in ‘Christian doctrine’ could only be persuaded that they needed a God who was more than a ‘diffused essence of . . . amiability’ by using God, Christ, Incarnation, Love and Atonement as solutions to philosophical problems. Though Temple was never dismissive of miracle, he was careful not to base religious belief on it. He accepted the regularities disclosed by science, affirmed that incarnational Christianity alone among the religions of the world ‘did justice to the physical’, and argued not only that ‘the constancy of nature was no argument against . . . belief in the Divine purpose’ but also that only a divine purpose could account for a universe from which Whewell’s First Cause had been removed. Evolutionary materialism interpreted the ‘higher and more complex’ forms of life in terms of the lower and less complex. What it ought to do was to interpret ‘the lower . . . and less complex’ in terms of the ‘higher and more complex’ and to understand, as ‘the true meaning of evolution’, that ‘the greatest thing the world had yet produced’ was man, whose ‘will and purpose’ distinguished the human world from the physical world and supplied the justification of the ‘divine personality’.

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As Temple presented it, the doctrine of the ‘Logos’ reclaimed ‘all creation’ as God’s and showed God, in addition to acting ‘everywhere and always’, also making of Christ ‘the embodiment of the supreme principle’ which ‘men’s actual experience’ led them to believe was the ‘Supreme Power’. This was a truth which had to be received ‘with doubt and trembling’. But it was still the case that not only ‘orthodoxy’ but also ‘philosophy’ required a ‘Personal God’ with a ‘Governing Will’, that Reason and Experience ‘stood over against’ one another ‘in hopeless antagonism’ unless ‘all the essential points of the whole of dogmatic Christianity were true’, and that the ‘coherence’ assumed by science carried with it the idea of a ‘living God’ as the ‘real Will’ behind the world studied by science. ‘Theology or the science of religion’ had, it is true, unlike the other sciences, to establish the reality of its subject-matter. But it could do this – slickly and simply, it may be right to suggest – because ‘faith in the Godhead of Jesus’, so far from being a ‘dogma imposed by authority’, was a ‘discovery’ based on ‘experience’ and the God of Reason, whom science needed and ‘thinking and arguing arrived at’, was identical with the God of Experience. Temple acknowledged that philosophy was only an ‘introduction’ to religion and for some people was an ‘unnecessary introduction’. His tactic, therefore, was to validate philosophy via Christianity – to show that the Incarnation and the Trinity were necessary to solve philosophy’s problems and, in a situation in which ‘comparatively few men of the highest ability and education were . . . offering themselves for ordination’, that the ‘philosophy of the Incarnation’ and the ‘gospel of the divine immanence’ really did supply ‘the only tolerable metaphysic’. These positions were stated first between 1910 and 1916. They were systematized between 1917 and 193415 when rationalism, scepticism, quietism, pantheism, indifference and the infinite regress of the first cause were disposed of, God became a person with a ‘creative will’, and ‘ordinary belief’ was made more tolerable by making God’s remedy for sin not punishment but conversion of the ‘self-centred will’. Like Westcott, Temple was partial to the rhetoric of ‘historical fact’ and used Browning and Shelley to contextualize Christ’s response to an historical situation. But he judged the evidence for Christ’s divinity deficient in ‘spiritual value’; Christ had refused to supply either the miraculous signs which the Jews had needed or the intellectual signs which the Greeks had needed, and had come only slowly and reluctantly to the conviction that he was divine. It was Christ’s character, the ‘ecstasy’ of his ‘mysticism’, the ‘confidence’ of his ‘faith’ and the impossibility of explaining the Church’s expansion without him which were decisive, whether as history, theology or philosophy. 15

Philosophically in Book I of Mens Creatrix and the early parts of Christus Veritas, theologically in the rest of Mens Creatrix, the later parts of Christus Veritas and Nature, Man and God.

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Like Seeley and Chesterton, Temple rejected the ‘sentimental’ Christ of historic devotion and attributed to Christ’s ‘loneliness . . . and . . . ferocity’ an heroic, Carlylean or Nietzschean character to which modern minds were better able to respond than they had been to the Christ of the past. It was the terribleness as well as the meekness of Christ’s person which had embodied the terribleness and meekness of God’s love, the love and sacrifice of God’s Kingdom which had exposed the pride and assertion of secular kingdoms, and the Church’s role as God’s ‘outpost’ which had thrust forward into the world and incorporated both the liberal theologian’s identification of ‘Christendom’ with ‘the world’ and the post-liberal theologian’s vision of the ‘cataclysms and catastrophes’ which had to sweep away what was ‘hostile . . . to . . . God’s Cause’ in the world. Temple was much moved by the transition he supposed contemporary philosophy to be making from Matter via Life and Mind to Spirit, Will and Purpose, and the location it was effecting of the ‘intelligible good’ in ‘Value’ and the ‘creative act’. In Mens Creatrix, he applied to modern civilization the broad brush he had been taught to apply to Greek civilization, describing science as incomplete because its ‘order’ was ‘departmental’ and ‘intellectual’; art because its ‘votaries’ tended to be ‘inward-looking’ and arcane; a purely human conception of the good life because it did not realize a purpose ‘lofty’ and ‘rich’ enough to ‘bind men’s . . . faculties . . . together . . . in . . . love’; and mind ‘in its human manifestations’ because it existed only in the shadow of God’s ‘sacramental’ action for which the function of everything except the ‘Creative Will’ was to be the ‘actualization of God’s values’. Man was the first creature who had been capable of appreciating God’s values, and he had done this not only in the ‘forms of truth, beauty and goodness’ but also in the form of Love as the ‘One Absolute Value’ which enabled the self to overcome its inability to achieve ‘complete sanctification’ on its own. It was Love which enabled the self to turn the apprehension of Value into a ‘religious experience’, to re-establish religion’s proper place in thought, and to restore the whole of thought to religion. It is unnecessary to detail the power of Temple’s theology, the quite extraordinary amount of philosophy that he tried to govern through it, the wetness to which he seemed to be leaning in associating himself with Streeter’s theology or the blurred vigour of his marriage of Christian theology, secular literature and secular philosophy. It is enough to be conscious of the richness of his attempt to give Christianity a pivotal function in modern thought and to contrast his confidence ‘in an unchristian climate’ with the lack of confidence of the thinkers who are to be discussed in the next chapter.

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The very word Gospel may become a piece of pious slang. We do not betray enough of the manner of people who are habitually under authority to it, who are held by it, crushed and born again by it, people who are broken to pieces and made again from the dust, people who are shut for ever from the old Eden . . . So much of our religious teaching betrays no sign that the speaker has descended into hell, been near the everlasting burnings, or been plucked from the awful pit. He has risen with Christ – what right have we to deny it? – but it is out of a shallow grave, with no deepness of earth, with no huge millstone to roll away. (Rev. P. T. Forsyth, The Church, The Gospel and Society, 1905, 1962 edn, p. 100) My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and therefore cannot be expected to lead Christian lives. (C. S. Lewis, Christian Behaviour, 1943, reprinted in Mere Christianity, 1952, p. 99) I do not think any policy ought to be forwarded by the Church as a corporate society, and imposed in its name in a State in which churchmanship has no longer anything to do with the qualifications of a citizen. Those who take their ethical ideas from Nietzsche or their practice from Gabriele d’Annunzio, are hardly likely to be in favour of Christian solutions; and they have every whit as much a place in the State as you. (Rev. J. N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, 1913, pp. 127–8)

In a collection of essays and reviews which he published in 1895 under the title Christianity and Agnosticism, Prebendary Wace – the Principal of King’s College, London and a Chaplain to both Queen Victoria and the Archbishop of Canterbury – discussed Huxley, Cotter Morison and Mrs Humphry Ward’s History of Robert Elsmere, declaring himself about the defects of each, drawing comfort from parallels between modern scientific and Old Testament cosmogony, and affirming the ‘contention of reasonable Christian men’ that, so far from being obliged to ‘believe certain doctrines whether rational or not’, the truths of the Christian religion were the ‘best induction’ that could be made ‘from the facts open to our observation in the religious and moral world’ and had been ‘verified, more and more, by the experience alike of history and of individuals’. In earlier chapters we have noticed the latitudinarian contention that Christianity needed to be modified if it was to survive in the modern world along with the latitudinarian confidence that, provided it was modified, it would remain the dominant English religion. In the thinkers to be discussed in this chapter, there was defensiveness, a fear that Christianity was already, or was about to become, a minority religion, and the conclusion, with varying 292

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emphases in Forsyth, Masterman, Figgis, Gore and Lewis, that, in order to protect itself against infidelity, Christianity should disconnect itself from both latitudinarianism and conventional respectability. I Forsyth1 was a successful student at Aberdeen University. He read, and for a time, tutored in, classics, helped to restore a derelict chapel in the City, and encountered Robertson Smith, who sent him to study under Ritschl in Göttingen in 1872. After Göttingen and an uneasy year as a student at New College, London, he withdrew from the College, married, and came under the influence of an admirer of Maurice who had a Congregationalist Church in Brixton. Forsyth left Scotland in his early twenties and did not really return. In 1876, he became a Congregationalist minister in Yorkshire and was then appointed to St Thomas’s Church, Hackney where his reputation as a critic of orthodoxy seems to have receded. After Hackney, he was a minister in Manchester, Leicester and Cambridge, was Principal of Hackney Congregationalist College and Dean of Theology in the University of London and, in the course of his fifties, acquired an American reputation on the strength of the large output he had achieved since his middle thirties. In the 1890s, Forsyth mounted a vigorous defence of Dissent against assaults from the Conservative party. He wrote at length about the Free Churches as proper, and about Anglicanism and Lutheranism as improper, embodiments of Christianity. There was a great deal about Roman Catholicism having a ‘monopolist’ church and an ‘external’ faith and being subject to intrusion by both the ‘natural man’ and ‘pagan culture’; and there was a fundamental objection not just to priestly interposition between man and God, but also to the fact that, where the celibate priest diminished the family, the confessor-priest invaded it at its most ‘sacred’ and ‘intimate’. Forsyth expressed eirenical intentions towards the Roman and Anglican churches as joint heirs with Dissent of the mediaeval Church, and towards those ‘younger men of the High Church party’ who felt the damage which Establishment was doing to ‘spiritual religion’. His eirenicism, however, was offended by Anglican condescension, by the Roman Church’s character as ‘footstool’ of a monarchical pope and by the anti-Erastian High 11

Rev. Peter Taylor Forsyth, educated Aberdeen Grammar School, Aberdeen University and Hackney Theological College, Hampstead. Chairman of Congregational Union of England and Wales, 1905. Author of Religion in Recent Art, 1889; The Charter of The Church, 1896; The Happy Warrior, 1898; Christian Perfection, 1899; Rome, Reform and Reaction, 1899; The Church, The Gospel and Society, 1905; Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 1907; Socialism, The Churches and The Poor, 1908; The Cruciality of The Cross, 1909; Christ on Parnassus, 1911; Faith, Freedom and The Future, 1912; The Principle of Authority, 1913, The Christian Ethic of War, 1916; and Congregationalism and Reunion, 1921.

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Churchmanship which took Anglicans to Rome and Russia but not to Nonconformity. The Free Churches were churches, Forsyth pointed out, not Socinian free-for-alls. A Free Church was not only the only Church which could be a ‘redeemed church’, it was much more a church than papal or established Churches, which were ‘pagan’ in conception, ‘impediments’ to Christian principles and amorally Machiavellian in operation. Forsyth idealized Dissent as the ‘chief maker’ of the ‘constitutionalism’ of the modern English state. He believed that the State had ‘secularized the Church’ more than the Church had ‘spiritualized the State’, that ‘the Kingdom’ had to be ‘disentangled’ from the Church as well as from the State, and that ‘Democracy’ would demand ‘even more subjection of the Church to Parliament in the future than there had been in the past’. In English politics, Forsyth began life as a Radical. In time he came to mistrust ‘democracy’ not only because it tended to be dominated by the ‘natural man’ but also because the natural man tended to be opposed to religion. ‘Trusting the people’ had not been ‘the battlecry of the New Testament’ and, if Gladstone was to be admired more than any other politician (including Bright), it was because he had been the ‘flywheel’, not the creature, of democracy, had loathed the Erastianism of the English establishment and had not only ‘evangelized’ and ‘humanized’ the English political system but had also shown Nonconformists how to play a creative role in it. He did not like us . . . He did not understand us . . . But he was a great Free Churchman for all that . . . He planted in the soul of national politics the evangelical faith and ethics which make the soul of our existence as Free Churches . . . and so he gave us, without knowing it, a positive part and lot in affairs of State. (Rev. P. T. Forsyth, The Happy Warrior, 1898, pp. 19–21)

In practice Forsyth’s politics were comparatively simple. The ‘old Liberalism’ had driven ‘the weak’ to ‘the wall’, had replaced the ‘warlord’ by the ‘wealthlord’ and, while liberating the ‘capable man’, had ‘huddled the masses into harder and bitterer poverty than before’. Socialism on the other hand, insofar as it was a ‘morality of natural right’, was inappropriate to a Christian society. If one had asked what Forsyth meant by a Christian society in the first two decades of the twentieth century, one would have received conflicting answers. His regret (with reference to the Kaiser) that German Lutheranism had failed to ‘execute a king’, his borrowing of Ritschl’s analysis of German imperialism as a ‘kingdom of sin’, and his defence of British intervention in the First World War as a ‘service to the German people’, would have suggested one answer; the claim that the Old and New Testaments had both had an ‘anticapitalist tendency’, that Christ had been impressed with the ‘dangers’ of wealth, and that monasticism and Luther had protested against ‘high finance’ when it was becoming ‘the ruling-power of the present stage of history’, would have suggested another. Forsyth’s social doctrine was exceedingly cautious. He convinced himself

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that he was living at a conjunction of crises – the crisis of capitalism which could no longer meet the ‘needs’ and ‘sensibilities’ of the Christian gospel; the crisis in ‘philanthropy’ which had prevented a ‘very unpleasant revolution’ in the past but could no longer be the sole instrument of Christian justice for the future; and the crisis in the patriarchal system of production which meant that capitalism had to be ‘disestablished’. Since a ‘premature’ Socialism, however, would bring ‘civil war’ and ‘suffering for the innocent and helpless’ where it did not become ‘chiliastic . . . unEnglish and doctrinaire’, the ‘ethic of Christian brotherhood’ had to be established through ‘the ethical conversion of society’ and ‘the Christianity of the Free Churches’. Forsyth’s depiction of the relationship between Christianity and modern political doctrines was problematical as well as idyllic. It assumed that the 1890s were a ‘spent time’, that the political system was out of control, and that the loss, not only of Gladstone and Bright, but also of Carlyle, Maurice, Kingsley, Mill, Ruskin, Tennyson and Browning, had removed an earnestness central to the nation’s culture and made it necessary to find a new earnestness to replace it.

When Forsyth published his lectures on Religion in Recent Art in 1889, they were ‘lay sermons’ designed to explain that the ‘escape from sentimentalism’ in art might facilitate the escape from sentimentalism in religion, that there was a connection between the flight from thought in art and the flight from thought in religion, and that it was ‘useless to seek in Art the calm which was destroyed by Theology’. Religion in Recent Art glanced at the destruction of religion by art in Greece, the creation of art by religion in the Middle Ages, and the slaying of art by the Reformation. It praised Watts and the Pre-Raphaelites for pursuing art ‘in a religious spirit’ and Wagner – the ‘Luther of Art’ – for restoring to Protestantism that intimacy with the imagination of which its past had deprived it. In a ‘burdened’ Germany at a ‘disjointed time’ when faith was dead and the ‘pressure of militarism upon industry’ was overwhelming, Wagner had not only produced in Parsifal the greatest of all Redemptionmusic apart from the Messiah, he had also incorporated pessimism into it. Pessimism had the merit in Forsyth’s eyes of not being evolutionism, naturalism or agnosticism, of resisting ‘easy optimism’, and of reflecting something resembling a ‘sense of sin’. On the other hand, it was only ‘one side of Christianity’, and it was not Christian in Wagner because the Redemption to which Wagner looked redeemed through will rather than through love, and redeemed not to God but ‘from all the elements’ which the heart could associate with God. Religion in Recent Art had the merit of relevance and compactness. Christ on Parnassus did not. It personified and theologized architectural fashions,

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repeated the commonplaces of racial contrast which had been prominent in Stanley, Matthew Arnold and Max Müller, and explained the differences between Semitic art and religion and Indo-European art and religion in terms of the closeness of the connection in the latter between God and natural phenomena and the closeness of the connection in the former between God and the human consciousness. In identifying ‘redemption’ as a Hebrew idea and ‘incarnation’ as an Indo-European idea, it declared that the Hebrew prophets, Hebrew ‘democracy’ and the Hebrew conception of the universe as ‘the fiat of a supreme will’ had ensured that Art would not be ‘the task which fell to the [Semitic] family in the division of the world’s work’. Forsyth was unembarrassed by this sort of art-historical thinking, and used the history of painting, music and poetry as support for his main thesis that of all the arts, poetry was ‘the most truly religious’, could most easily ‘penetrate the texture of the heart’ and could express ‘in . . . intimate psychology . . . the delicate shades of individual character and the successive stages of the spiritual process’.

Just as he aimed to bring politics back into God’s Kingdom by rescuing it from materialistic individualism, so Forsyth aimed to bring art back into God’s Kingdom by rescuing it from hedonistic aestheticism. But, just as art’s deliverance was an ‘aesthetic deliverance’ which ‘released the mood’, so the Sermon on the Mount was an ‘illustration’ of the Cross which suggested redemption before it suggested ‘social reconstruction’. It was a theological as much as a sociological truth that Socialism, if it was to replace ‘egoism’, had to find a motive strong enough to do so, that the Kingdom of God grew out of God’s ‘power . . . in the soul’, and that the function of that power was to disclose the God that society had to ‘live in’. In practice Forsyth was a social reformer; like the Socialists he was criticizing, he was as much concerned as the ‘university . . . gentleman’ with the ‘mastery of current ethic’. But he was also emphatic that the ‘university gentleman’ had ‘the solvent soul of the moral rentier’ where the priest and the pastor dealt with sin, evil and the ‘moral bankrupt’; that the religion of Socialists was ‘a gospel of humanity with Christ as its champion and servant’ where Christianity was ‘the Gospel of Christ with Himself as his witness and servant’; and that Christ had belonged neither with the ‘gentleness’ of the ‘middle classes’, the ‘culture’ of the ‘upper classes’, nor the ‘beer and football’ of a mass democracy, but with the ‘choice country people’ who responded to the ‘vital Godliness . . . moral seriousness . . . soul-hunger . . . spontaneity of heart . . . lack of pretentiousness [and] . . . sense of unworthiness’ which he had found most freely among the poor. To art, as to politics, Forsyth imputed a high measure of autonomy. Neither, however, was to usurp the functions of religion, and both were

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subject to judgement – not so much the judgement of mankind as the judgement of Christ, and not the judgement of the merely ‘human’ Christ of the nineteenth century, but the judgement of the ‘Christ of dogma’ who alone could restore rule by ‘moral passion’ and alone could decide whether, in the final reckoning, ‘the beautiful’ would or would not ‘come out with holiness on the crown of the world’. In anatomizing the autonomy of art, its ‘aristocracy of taste’ and Wilde’s refusal to qualify his regard for beauty, Forsyth observed that it was not art but faith which was ‘life’, that a man was a ‘real man’ insofar as he ‘lived with his conscience’, and that no human activity could be real ‘unless settled’ on the ‘sure and Eternal God’ who offered a redemption to all. It was, he claimed, not the world’s grief nor the sorrow that was to be seen daily on the world’s streets but the world’s wickedness which had ‘broken Christ’s heart’ and made him wish not for the ‘reorganization of society’ but for the reorganization of the soul.

Forsyth preferred Israel to Greece and wrote admiringly of the ‘old orthodoxies’ which had grappled with human wickedness. He imputed to Protestantism a failure to ‘realize its own gospel as thoroughly as Catholicism had realized the Church’ and to Catholicism’s preference for love an ‘aesthetic’ capability which had diminished its evangelical capability. Modern theology, moreover, had handed the Bible over to an ‘aristocracy of . . . historical experts’, had given a Christian ‘varnish’ to a mainly pagan religion and had substituted for an ‘evangelical’ Christ and the ‘insatiable holiness’ of the Cross the synoptic ‘geniality’ of a ‘biographical’ Christ. It was, he concluded, theology which would rescue the layman from the Biblical critic and Christianity which would rescue him from theosophy, psychical research, a ‘diluted’ Hegelianism and the ‘Galatian levity’ of juridical and human codes. Forsyth was a prominent member of the Congregational Union but believed that Congregationalism had lost ground in rural areas and among the poor, and had suffered financially from the drift to the towns and the disappearance of the yeoman-farmer. It was as part of a declining sect, therefore, that he reproached Congregationalists with their forgetfulness of the Puritan Hell, their failure to face the problem of authority once the ‘inerrant Bible’ had followed the ‘authoritative church’ into oblivion, and their neglect of the duty to distinguish, as Calvin for all his faults had distinguished, between ‘love’, ‘sympathy’ and a social gospel on the one hand and the ‘moral principle of holiness’ which was in ‘standing conflict’ with the egoism that ruled the world on the other. In a major statement he told American Protestant ordinands that, though preaching and the new theology should ‘speak the language of the time’, reduce the ‘bulk’ of ‘creed’ and enable a ‘new theology’ to make sense of the ‘old faith’, the new theology should not be

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liberal and should not allow philosophical dogma and ‘modern theories of the soul and the world’ to fill the space vacated by theological dogma.

Forsyth had read everything that mattered and was by no means dismissive of high culture, high science and the higher ambitions of democratic thought. But he wished to halt St Paul’s retreat before Pelagius, to restore a Protestant type of life as against a Catholic type of life and to renovate Protestantism so as to enable it to neutralize the ‘moralities of Villadom’ and the ‘vague . . . good-will’ which was eliminating ‘God’s anger’ and ‘judgement’. God ‘saved’ rather than ‘guided’; the ‘Evangelical Gospel’ was ‘to believe’ where the Catholic Gospel was ‘to love’; and in an age when churches wanted to avoid authority, it was vital to understand that their authority was unavoidably undemocratic, was ‘made from above’ by an ‘absolute king’, and supplied the ‘deep note’ of ‘religious . . . control’ which ‘Englishmen . . . loved’ and Protestants should not attempt to avoid. It is impossible to read Forsyth without disliking the easy religion of ethical goodness, Liberalism’s determination to avoid ‘obedience’ to God and Rationalism’s insistence on ‘measuring Revelation by something outside itself’. It is equally impossible to like the ‘evangelism of the Kingdom’ or the ‘battle for the soul’ which Lewis was to reduce to pious imbecility half a century later. The ‘evangelisim of the Kingdom’ and the ‘battle for the soul’, however, were central to Forsyth’s belief that ‘the new Pentecost’ was inseparable from ‘the old agony’ and to his denial that God had either made Christ into a ‘divine monk’ or ‘appointed sinlessness’ as man’s ‘object in this world’. Above all, it was Forsyth’s contention that ‘faith’ was a ‘more self-sufficient power’ than either ‘the independence of science’ or the ‘intuitions of thought’, that the fruit of the ‘tree of knowledge’ was like an ‘apple of sodom’ and that it might be nesessary for religion’s good that culture should be ‘crucified’. Forsyth differed from the Tractarian enemies of theological Liberalism in that his reaction was Protestant or Evangelical. In Masterman and Figgis the reaction was directed more clearly against what the former called ‘Protestant civilization’. II Masterman2 was a brilliant undergraduate who read natural sciences and philosophy at Cambridge, was one of the best student-orators of his generation, and was associated with Gooch, Noel-Buxton and G. M. Trevelyan in Radical hostility to imperialism. He became a Fellow of Christ’s College at 12

Rt. Hon. Charles F. G. Masterman (1873–1927), educated Weymouth and Christ’s College, Cambridge. MP, 1906–14. Minister, 1906–15. Author of Tennyson As a Religious Teacher, 1899; The Heart of the Empire, 1901; From the Abyss, 1902; In Peril of Change, 1905; F. D. Maurice, 1907; and The Condition of England, 1909.

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the age of twenty-six and had a brilliant period as a journalist, Liberal MP and Cabinet Minister (at the age of forty in the Asquith government), after playing a central and contentious role as financial secretary to the Treasury during the passage of Lloyd George’s insurance legislation. His career then collapsed into difficulties which were set off by the requirement that a Minister should fight a by-election on appointment to the Cabinet and were made more permanent by the disintegration of the Liberal Party and his failure between 1914 and his early death in 1927 to spend more than nine months as an MP. Masterman was a friend of Figgis, shared many of his opinions and admired Belloc and Chesterton until some aspects of Chesterton’s optimism became intolerable. He made something out of a reaction against Henley and Kipling and made even more of the literary and political reaction against Victorianism. In Tennyson as a Religious Teacher, he explained the Victorian religious revolution and the subterranean certainties it had established, praising Tennyson for refusing to glorify violations of the ‘established ethical code’ but accusing him of watering down Christianity, identifying it with a ‘mild sentiment of love and charity’ and pushing the ‘extirpation of the Beast’ so far into the future as to make his later poetry uncertain about ‘the divine purpose’. In Tennyson as a Religious Teacher Masterman disclosed his disengagement from a distinctive phase of intellectual religion. In Peril of Change then considered the forms which might be taken by popular religion in the future. Masterman believed that the rich of the ‘West End’ played with religion as they played with life, that the ‘really poor’, except where they were Roman Catholic, were ‘ready prey’ for missions from the better-off, and that the decent and contented working classes not only did not go to church but were burdened by the suddenness of their disconnection from rural society. Though it was only in the suburbs and among inner-London tradesmen that he found an active religious life, he nevertheless drew a contrast between the Continent, where Socialism had simply replaced Christianity, and England where ‘religious ideas’ were ‘still in the air’, sin and repentance had not entirely disappeared, and clubs, guilds, boys’ Brigades, mothers’ meetings and improvement societies, along with parish churches, nonconformist preachers and Roman Catholic priests, had preserved a ‘friendliness’ towards Christianity among ‘populations’ who were ‘impervious’ to a Christian message. If Masterman had a criticism of contemporary Christanity, it was that the suburbs were too respectable, paid too much attention to ‘saving one’s own soul’ and differed from all previous forms of society by their achievement of conditions in which ‘sudden menace no longer lurked in the shadows’ and the ‘clouding’ of the ‘sense of sin’ by a gospel of ‘decency and good manners’ had rendered the ‘passion’ and ‘terror’ of ancient liturgies ‘archaic and meaningless’.

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Masterman’s assumption, borrowed from Goethe, was that ‘the struggle between belief and unbelief’ was ‘the only thing . . . worth considering’, that the break-up of traditional theology was fundamental, and that Puritanism, Protestantism and the non-churchgoer who affected to believe in the Sermon on the Mount, were all doomed. The question he was left with was, what form of Christianity would be viable once Protestantism and ethical virtue had died? Masterman admired Frederick Temple and declared Temple’s correspondence with Tait (about Essays and Reviews) as significant as any of the correspondence that had passed between Newman and Manning. He admired Gladstone’s reconciliation of liberty with the Catholic faith, Westcott’s combination of the ‘mystical’, the ‘practical’ and the ‘ascetic’, and in Creighton – a ‘kind of ecclesiastical Bernard Shaw’ – found cleverness, frivolity and frankness, an enthusiasm for ‘liberty and knowledge’ and an admirable combination of cynicism and belief. Masterman was aware of the erosion not just of the ‘quiet . . . agricultural’ England of the past but also of the assumption that death was a prelude to judgement. The Protestant Reformation had been aristocratic, had taken the churches out of ‘the hands of the people’ and had made their services less intelligible than the Mass. The migration of labour to the cities, the elimination of ‘the old country gentleman’ by ‘the new wealth’ and the arrival of Dissenters in Parliament and Biblical criticism in the universities had registered, as surely as ritualism could register, the end of English Protestant civilization. In looking to the future, Masterman was certain only that the laity’s Protestantism was moving towards indifference, that the clergy was becoming Catholic and that nothing could better symbolize the end of Protestantism than the attempt of Dolling, the slum-priest, to bring ‘the full inheritance of sacramental worship’ to the ‘huddled squalor of the poor’. What Masterman wanted was more ‘light, colour, beauty, drama and procession’, association between the Church and ‘the demands of labour’, and a diversion of the ‘High Church Party’ towards the achievement of ‘social salvation’. In Figgis, these preferences achieved academic significance. III Figgis’s3 father was a minister in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion and brought Figgis up as an Evangelical. Figgis was at school at Brighton 13

Rev. John Neville Figgis (1866–1919), educated Brighton College and St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. Anglican parish clergyman, 1894–5 and, 1902–7. Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, 1896–1902. Member of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, 1907–19. Author of The Divine Right of Kings, 1896; From Gerson to Grotius, 1907; The Gospel and Human Needs, 1909; Civilization At The Crossroads, 1912; Churches in the Modern State, 1913; The Fellowship of the Mystery, 1914; The Will to Freedom, 1917; Hopes for English Religion, 1919; and The Political Aspect of St Augustine’s De Civitate, 1921.

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College before going to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, where he read history (after reading mathematics) in the faculty of Creighton, Maitland, Cunningham and Seeley. Thereafter he divided his time between Cambridge and parochial life until entering the Community of the Resurrection as a monk at the age of forty-one in 1907. Figgis began his public career in 1896 with The Divine Right of Kings, which rescued its subject from Whig ridicule and Austinian misunderstanding and gave it contextual plausibility by describing its origin in the mediaeval idea that the Emperor not the Pope was God’s earthly sovereign. Divine right theory, in other words, had not been the doctrine of a ‘perversely . . . servile church’, had appealed to ‘some of the deepest instincts of human nature’ and had established the truth that government was ‘of divine authority’. It was the papacy’s attempt to use obedience ‘in its own interest’ which had destroyed papal authority, had set off a ‘secular politics’ against it and had issued in the ‘free’ and ‘organic’ State which was to be the subject of Churches in the Modern State seventeen years later. Churches in the Modern State concluded by repeating Figgis’s, and Acton’s, rejection of papal Ultramontanism. But it began with the delinquencies of the modern State and discussed at length the threats presented by Bismarck and the Kulturkampf in Germany, Combes and positivist persecution in France and the jurisdictional claims which had been made by the law courts in England and Scotland. In reaction, it conceptualized the ‘free Church in a free State’ first into the principle that the Church was ‘a living social union . . . acting by virtue of an inherent spontaneity of life’, then into the principle that Churches were not ‘creatures of the State’, finally into the principle that other associations were not creatures of the State either. Figgis agreed that no established Church could claim ‘quite the same liberty’ as a non-established Church. But the same principle applied to both – that it was not just Churches which had ‘powers of self-development like a person’ but ‘the whole . . . structure of civil society’ in which the ‘corporate personality’ was independent alike of the sovereign, of ‘State absolutism’ and of the injustice and tyranny characteristic of any ‘denial of human personality’. These principles were applied in two directions – as a description of the nature of the Church and as a description of the nature of relations between society and the State. Figgis was less interested in the latter than in the former. But he had an Actonian sense of the advance of Leviathan and attributed its ‘dangerous ascendancy in the contemporary world’ to that ‘horror’ of ‘economic and industrial oppression’ which was modern capitalism’s ‘distinctive gift to history’. Between the State and the individual Figgis interposed ‘collective’ institutions which exercised governmental functions ‘with reference to their own members’ and carried into the modern world the Teutonic conception of an

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‘organic’ corporation as against the modern conception that ‘every right’ was the creation of ‘the one and indivisible sovereign’. Figgis denied that such sovereignty had ever existed, pointed to the ascending hierarchy of ‘group, family, school, town, country, union and church’ as the social reality and, along with the omnicompetent Parliament, bundled out of the window the idea of the ‘isolated individual’. He did not permit corporations to be outside the law, to be ‘false to the ends of civil society’ or to exercise the control which Pope Boniface VIII had tried to exercise over politics. But his conception of a free Church owed something to Acton, something to Dissent, and something to Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and included the defensive claim, which he found in St Augustine, Thorndike, Warburton, Thomas Cartwright and Leo XIII, not only that Church and State were both of them ‘perfect societies’ but also that the Church did not claim ‘theoretically’ more than liberty from the State and should not try to ‘dictate . . . State policy’ in regard to ‘the whole mass’ of a ‘State’s citizens’. Figgis compared Nietzsche with Newman as a soul that was ‘on fire’; he shared Nietzsche’s distaste for the ‘pantheistic idealism of the universities’, and he praised the ‘heroism and simplicity’ with which Nietzsche had dismissed the Spencerian grocer-philosophy, the respectable Christianity of the Nietzsche family circle, and the ‘cheap’ culture, money-making and ‘easygoing middle-class ideals’ of the modern ‘rational millennium’. On the other hand, he was conscious (in England) of a new hatred of Christ and of Nietzsche’s determination to replace Christianity by a new religion, and he emphasized Nietzsche’s madness, the Nietzschean element in Prussianism, and the Nietzschean belief that, while ‘morality existed for the mediocre’ and ‘Christian morality for the slave races’, an ‘inner pain’ resulted when ‘the will’ was tamed by ‘conscience’ and ‘civilization’. Figgis compared ‘the pose of aristocracy’ which Nietzsche had adopted (‘without its obligations’) to the snobbery induced by Browning and Meredith among the middle- and lower-middle-class reading publics in England. He showed Nietzsche ignoring the ‘sterner side’ of Christ’s character, mistaking the emphasis in Christ’s injunction to ‘love our neighbour as ourselves’, and denying Christianity’s ‘yea-saying’ power because of his refusal of both gentleness and the limitation of ‘impulses’. Figgis was by no means the last Anglican to respond to the ‘objections to Christianity’. But his response to Nietzsche’s objections was on a higher level than most subsequent responses. He found the Nietzschean polemic more useful to Christianity than Nietzsche had intended because the real target of Nietzsche’s attack was not Christianity but the post-Christian morality associated with ‘the Absolute’, and he saw no point in ‘giving up God’ while remaining in the ‘prison-house of an ethical system which resulted from faith in God’. In much of the rest of his writing, the aim was to show that latitudinarianism was anachronistic, that ‘Dionysiac . . . rage’ was heralding ‘a new

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age of faith’ and that Christians should think of themselves as Christian not insofar as Christianity resembled other faiths but insofar as it differed from them. Figgis pronounced himself the victim of doubt and his faith ‘the angel of an agony’. His doubt issued, nevertheless, in ‘the courage to take risks’, in moral freedom as a ‘life-raft’ in ‘a sea of naturalism’ and in miracle and the ‘impossible pardon’ which Christ had won for men upon the Cross as guarantees that the ‘diseased will’ would be ‘delivered from sin’. Figgis reminded his audiences and congregations that the anti-Christian apologetic of Shaw, Wells and Galsworthy was ‘catastrophic, redemptive and apocalyptic’ and that this cohered with the ‘catastrophic, redemptive and apocalyptic’ Christ who had persisted behind the Christ of Liberalism. He drew attention to the importance of contemplation, the ascetic and the mystical, and was willing to leaven the ‘practical rationalism of Western religion’ by going to school, if necessary, ‘to the East’. He looked forward to the Cross being ‘set higher in the days to come’ than it had been by both Liberal Protestantism and respectable Victorian churchmanship. What Figgis wanted was an end of ‘muffled Christianity’. He rejected ‘niceness’, the priggish fear of ‘being thought priggish’ and a ‘Christianity of halftone and half-beliefs’ which would not be endured by the young. Though he did not live to see the young of the first decade of the new century in action, he gave them comprehensive guidance. He criticized justification by faith for making grace divisive, confining redemption, as Gosse had shown in Father and Son, to one kind of temperament and being indifferent to children (who could not respond to the Evangelical demand for conversion). Catholicism, by contrast, he saw as a system in which baptism, especially infant baptism, was not only independent of the will but also offered redemption to everyone, regardless of their success or failure in conversion or respectability. The Fellowship of the Mystery was a ‘democratic’ manifesto. It was as respectful about mysticism as about the Evangelicalism in which Figgis had been brought up; but, in addition to criticizing the Calvinist desire to create the ‘côterie of religious aristocrats’ which M’Cleod Campbell had been disciplined for attacking in the Kirk eighty years earlier, it also criticized contemporary mysticism for encouraging a special type of emotion and a ‘subjective . . . aristocratic’ ideal in which the mystic alone had a first-hand religion. Latitudinarianism, was a ‘unitarianized’ Christianity which would not command the future and belief in the utter independence of the individual, was ‘the root of all evil’. The ‘vast super-individual life’ of a ‘whole society’ which had sometimes to be ‘crystallized’ into ‘definite commands and creeds’ had also to avoid thinking of ‘authority’ as ‘external command’, had not to confuse the Church with her ‘officials’ and had in the last resort to depend on each nation, patriarchate, diocese, parish and individual conscience submitting to that ‘communal life’ of which creeds were merely the expression.

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What Figgis claimed to be against was spiritual oligarchy and Protestant exclusivity. What he favoured was the attempt he recognized in Lowder and Dolling to make Christianity available not just to Calvinists, illuminati or the bearers of the Quaker ‘inner light’, but to all men, including the poor and those who went on being Christian without regard to intellectual or religious fashion. Figgis used ‘diversity’ and ‘comprehensiveness’ as compliments to the Church of England, while applauding Rome’s witness to prayer and the sacramental, its idea of authority (by contrast with the ‘enclosed authority’ of Biblical Protestantism), and its ‘democratic avoidance’ of the middle-class character which linked the Church of England to the ‘banks and co-operative stores’ of the prosperous. As an erstwhile Dissenter, he reconciled himself to the Church of England on the assumption that it was separating ‘Churchmanship’ from ‘citizenship’, shedding ‘the nominal adherence’ of many to whom it made no appeal, and remodelling itself into a peoples’ Church for which the trade union movement was the most ‘thorough-going Christian movement of the nineteenth century’ and in ‘our hideous industrial cities’ needed the higher life that went with ‘theatres, municipal orchestras and civic universities’. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Figgis’s mixture was becoming intellectually fashionable, was conceptualizing a disjunction between Christianity and State power and was associating pluralism with a new contentiousness which made it impossible to assume Christianity’s truth. In Gore, who was more than ten years older, there was an even stronger sense of Christianity’s distance from the modern mind. IV Gore4 was born into the landed gentry in 1853. As a clever boy at Harrow, he was much influenced by Westcott, who was teaching there when he arrived, and by Father Stanton, the ritualist, of St Alban’s, Holborn. By the time he left Harrow, he had adopted a Tractarian discipline and piety, and had been 14

Rt. Rev. Charles Gore (1853–1932), educated Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. VicePrincipal of Cuddesdon Theological College, 1880–4; Principal of Pusey House, 1884–93; Canon of Westminster, 1894–1902 and Bishop of Worcester, 1902–5, Birmingham, 1905–11 and Oxford, 1911–19. Author of Leo the Great, 1880; The Church and the Ministry, 1882; The Roman Catholic Claims, 1886; ed. Lux Mundi, 1889; The Ministry of the Christian Church, 1889; The Incarnation of the Son of God, 1891; The Mission of the Church, 1892; The Creed of the Christian, 1895; Dissertations, 1895; The Sermon on the Mount, 1896; ed. Essays in Aid of the Reform of the Church, 1898; St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, 1898; St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 1898–1900; The Body of Christ, 1901; The New Theology and the Old Religion, 1907; Orders and Unity, 1909; The Question of Divorce, 1911; The War and the Church, 1914; Crisis in Church and Nation, 1915; Dominant Ideas and Corrective Principles, 1918; The Epistles of St John, 1920; Belief in God, 1921; Belief in Christ, 1922; The Holy Spirit and the Church, 1924; Can We Then Believe, 1926; Jesus of Nazareth, 1929; and The Philosophy of the Good Life: The Reconstruction of Belief, 1930.

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introduced to both fasting and confession. At Jowett’s Balliol, in addition to admiring Green, he admired Gladstone, was a speaker at the Oxford Union and was much indebted to Father Benson of the Cowley Fathers, to Scott Holland, who was a student of Christ Church, and to E. S. Talbot, who was Warden of Keble College. In the middle of the 1870s he became a Fellow of Trinity College and was ordained. Thereafter, he led an active life as VicePrincipal of Cuddesdon Theological College and head of Pusey House, as parish priest and Canon of Westminster, and as Bishop of Birmingham, Worcester and Oxford. Gore was unmarried and for most of his adult life was a member of the Community of the Resurrection, of which he had been a founder. He exercised a powerful influence on undergraduates in Oxford and on the congregations to whom he preached. As guide and counsellor to the Anglo-Catholic clergy, he was one of the chief agents by which Tractarianism was carried into the twentieth century. Gore thought of himself as heir to Wesley and Simeon as well as to the Tractarians. He celebrated the ‘revivals of religious life and social energy’ characteristic of the nineteenth-century and was conscious of being in a missionary situation – not the missionary situation of which he had had experience in Calcutta, but the missionary situation which made it necessary to distance the Church of England from both its ‘aristocratic past’ and its ‘disastrous identification’ with the State, to achieve for it the liberty which the Established Church had achieved in Scotland and to strengthen links with Dissent (including Welsh Dissent) not by formal reunion but by bearing a ‘Christian moral witness’ against State secularity in relation to divorce, birth control and contraception. As editor of Lux Mundi, Gore offended Liddon by associating Tractarianism too closely with Biblical criticism. On the other hand, he deplored the latitudinarian dream of imputing an ‘unnatural sense’ to the ‘language of our creeds and prayers’ and, in reaffirming the ‘natural’ sense of creeds and prayers, had little in common with Green. In developing a social doctrine, he borrowed heavily from Green and Westcott. Gore’s social doctrine was acquired in the 1870s and never lost; he was as emphatic fifty years later as he had been then that Christ was man’s Saviour in his ‘social’ as well as his ‘individual’ life, that God’s Kingdom had to be established as the Old Testament prophets had wanted it established and that ‘contempt for the poor . . . triumphant greed and . . . fraudulent commerce’ constituted obstacles to its realization. Christ had had an immanent eschatology. But he had still been a critic of wealth and privilege, had wanted a ‘spiritual aristocracy’ to be created out of ‘ordinary humanity’ and had addressed his ‘ethical and social teaching’ to the Church rather than the State. Gore aimed to transform mentalities and to give the Church ‘the best moral conscience of the community’. The Community of the Resurrection had

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drawn together ‘sanctified’ celibates whose community of goods replicated the lives of the Apostles. But it was unnecessary to have a Christian political party since there was ‘right’ on both sides of the party division and the object, more ambiguous in relation to the Liberal Party than in relation to the Labour Party, was to put the Church ‘on the side of the poor’ and persuade captains of industry ‘to act in the public interest’. Gore wished to insert a Pauline atmosphere into the patriotism of ‘the newspapers’ and ‘the streets’. He urged Christians to ‘repent’ of ‘the balance of power’ while supporting the 1914 war as a ‘judgement on sin’. He welcomed the first Labour government and hoped that it would eradicate ‘the philosophy of . . . competition’. He did not believe, however, that God’s purposes would be served by capitulating to a ‘materialistic democracy’ and he did believe that they would be served by the ‘self-sacrifice’ which had been learnt in the war. Even his appeals to the rich and educated to ‘help the poor in doing their duty’, so far from being incitements to the poor to rise up and impose duties on their betters, were reminders of the sins of social omission which Westcott and Green had taught him before they had been confirmed by Tawney. In relating Christianity to the crisis of civilization, Gore generalized the ethos of the post-confessional university. He made it a primary principle that Christianity had cost too little to profess since the conversion of Constantine and should deprive itself of the dubious support it had been given by Erastian establishmentarianism. He condemned Lutheranism and Calvinism for preferring the Atonement to the Incarnation and for the inadequacy of their anthropology by comparison with the anthropology of Tridentine Catholicism. He also contrasted the papacy’s peremptoriness (at Malines in 1922) and doctrinal perversions of Transubstantiation, Infallibility and the Immaculate Conception with the Church of England’s ‘toleration . . . reasonableness’ and commitment to truth, and he used both the science of the 1920s and supernatural elements in the New Testament narratives to argue that these latter could only be judged by minds which were already open to persuasion. In acknowledging that there had been a general collapse in English Christianity since the 1860s, Gore concentrated on two symptoms – the latitudinarian subversion within Christianity and infidelity’s attack on Christianity. The first element he associated not with Biblical criticism, of which he approved, but with Colenso’s and Ewald’s intellectual ‘conspiracy’ to replace the plain meaning of the New Testament by a ‘humanitarian conception of Christ’ and a (Spinozan) pantheism which had neglected the ‘anthropomorphic’ aspect of God’s personality. The second element he associated with Darwin, Nietzsche and Whitman, with comparative religion, ethical idealism and the ‘revolt’ of Mill’s ‘moral conscience’, and with the erosion of sin and emphasis on self-expression which had linked Rousseau to

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the moral free-for-all of the 1920s and to modern industrialism’s rejection of ‘theocratic control’. For latitudinarianism, Gore’s remedies included Christianity’s inseparability from the Church, the freedom God had to act miraculously when his ‘Being and Will’ required it, and the conjunction of God’s personality with his Creation of the world, transcendence of it and presence in it. For the external attack his remedy was a doctrinal reconstruction in which ‘Catholicity’ would be a popular philosophical statement about existence. Like Temple in the 1920s, Gore wanted to emasculate cynicism, subjectivity and pragmatism, and to put Christian doctrines on a level with antiChristian doctrines. He approved of philosophical Idealism, but disapproved of the Hegelian rejection of God’s once-for-all embodiment in the Incarnation and the Church. In praising the Incarnation’s testimony to the ‘dignity of . . . the material world’ at the expense of Oriental, Hellenic and Protestant ‘horror’ of the material world, he made it central to Christianity that the individual person was God’s ‘son’ not his ‘slave’, and was free either to co-operate with Him or to rebel against Him. Gore criticized the hardening and multiplication of dogmas, emphasized Christ’s wish that Christians should engage in ‘rational . . . enquiry’ and declined to ‘use for the purposes of religion’ a language which was ‘less true than it might be’. On the way to concluding that Christian enquiry would be ‘more acceptable to the enlightened reason’ than anything available to modern enquiry, he absorbed whatever could usefully be absorbed from Eddington and Whitehead, turned to his own purposes the ‘design’ suggested by ‘emergent evolution’ and subjected the woodenness of God’s ‘otherness’ in Barth and Otto to the idea that man had been made in God’s image. In The Philosophy of the Good Life (1930), Gore surveyed the moral teachings of the great religions, pinpointing their assumption that the ‘interest of the group’ was morally prior to the interest of the individual, showing all of them (apart from the Indian religions) fighting a perennial war against evil by distinguishing between the good on the one hand and the beautiful, the pleasant, the profitable and the judgement of public opinion on the other, and drawing comfort from the universality of man’s sense of ‘moral obligation’ and the ‘transcendence of the tribe’ which carried him ‘above’ himself into the region of divinity. Gore, though emphatic, was problematical. God’s love was the ‘only difficult dogma’ but could not be understood as preventing the ‘ruin’ which man’s sin had brought upon the world. The ‘faithful remnant’ of believers was ‘as large . . . and genuine . . . as at any previous period of history’. But neither modern social confusion nor religious collapse would be remedied until there was a general ‘return to God’. Gore did not blink in the glare of modern thought. He made of ‘Catholicity’ a modern version of perennial insights, and did his best to reunite reason with

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faith, grace with nature, the conscious with the unconscious and religion with science. Characteristically circular passages added that mere external testimony to the Christian dogmas would not ‘produce conviction’, that the man who was to be convinced by the evidence had to be antecedently responsive to it, and that the ‘power to believe’ and the ‘illative sense’ were God’s gift without which there could be neither inward faith nor ‘outward evidence’. Either men believed, or they did not believe. Once they did believe, it would become obvious that science had no Gospel and heard no ‘lamentations’, and that the Christian ‘idea of God’ appealing to man’s ‘spiritual faculties’ and refusing to desanctify the body, lay at the root of Christian civilization. Like Forsyth and Figgis, Gore played for high stakes, rejected easy options, and willed the English either to accept ‘Catholicity’ or to reject it. On the whole the English have rejected it, but Gore’s ‘Reconstruction of Belief’ was a remarkable work implying, as it did, the possibility of a Christianity which would be less immune than established Christianity to worldly evasion, claiming for Christian dogma an unproblematical rationality, and suggesting, like Jowett or Green, if not a distaste for conventional respectability, then at least a missionary challenge to it. Gore was a contemporary of Wilde and we may properly enquire whether he was not rather a dandy than a missionary. By origin he was a dandy, as many Tractarians and Ritualists were. But he leaves the impression, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that his challenge transcended dandyism and was at least as genuine as C. S. Lewis’s challenge. V Lewis5 was the son of a Protestant Irish solicitor. He was brought up in Ulster and was at Campbell College, Belfast before being sent to Malvern, where he was deeply unhappy. After entering University College, Oxford in 1917, he was commissioned into a British infantry regiment, was wounded during the German advance in March 1918 and returned to Oxford at the end of that year. Lewis combined a faintly stuffy, or inhibited, middle-class mentality with a faintly snobbish mistrust of those who had risen socially through academic 15

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), educated Campbell College, Belfast, Malvern College and University College, Oxford. Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1925–54. Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge, and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, 1954–63. Author of The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933; The Allegory of Love, 1936; Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Rehabilitations, 1939; (with Tillyard) The Personal Heresy, 1939; The Problem of Pain, 1940; The Screwtape Letters, 1942; A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942; Broadcast Talks, 1942; The Weight of Glory, 1942; Christian Behaviour, 1943; Perelandra, 1943; The Abolition of Man, 1943; Beyond Personality, 1944; That Hideous Strength, 1945; The Great Divorce, 1945; Miracles, 1947; The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950; Prince Caspian, 1951; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952; The Silver Chair, 1953; The Horse and The Boy, 1954; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 1954; Surprised by Joy, 1954; and Studies in Words, 1960.

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achievement. His family arrangements were unusual. His mother had died when he was ten; his relations with his father were difficult; he lived from 1919 until her death in 1951 with the mother of a friend who had been killed in the war. The relationship seems to have been maternal and autocratic. It was not until after Mrs Moore’s death that Lewis married a wife who was dying of cancer and who died three years after their marriage when Lewis was in his sixties. After a successful undergraduate career studying classics, English and philosophy, Lewis suffered a period of anxiety during which he thought of becoming a schoolmaster or civil servant. In 1929 he became a teaching Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where for a time he supposed himself to have been persecuted but where he remained continuously until becoming a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, on election to a Chair in the Cambridge English Faculty, which he occupied from 1954 until just before his death nine years later. In both Oxford and Cambridge Lewis was a successful lecturer who showed, as Willey, Coulton, Lord David Cecil, Helen Gardner and Muriel Bradbrook were showing at the same time, that the academic study of English could have a Christian component inserted without destroying its academic plausibility. By the time of his election to the Cambridge Chair, he had written substantial works of critical literary history and, after an abortive beginning as a poet, had achieved a reputation as a writer of children’s books, imaginative fiction and popular theology. Lewis went on writing in all modes right up to his death since which new works, along with refurbishings of already published works, have been so continuously successful that he was still in the 1990s a best-selling author in the English-speaking world and beyond. His fiction is an acquired taste which the present writer has not acquired. This section will examine his literary criticism and the religious writing which followed his conversion from atheism to Christianity under the influence of Tolkien (among others) between 1927 and 1931.

When Lewis began publishing literary criticism in the 1930s, he was an admirer of Dante and William Morris, was criticizing the professionalization of English studies, and was anticipating the emergence of a ‘new race of readers and critics’ whose ‘advancement in the social and economic scale’ would single out a ‘special class of lowbrow art’ for mockery and vilification. Lewis’s idea was that there should be no gap between the highbrow and the lowbrow and that culture should be spared the ravages of professionalization. Education was for ‘freemen’ and vocational training for ‘slaves’ and, where the preservation of life was ‘merely the means’, civilization depended on ‘the realization of the human idea in . . . thought, art, literature and conversation’.

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Lewis warned the young against the Freudian obsession with infantile sexuality and against psychoanalytical interpretations of literature. He urged the importance of being able to construe the English language and to study the great texts as distinct from studying critical commentaries. In defending the presence of Anglo-Saxon in the Oxford English school, he made a quasipatriotic statement about its centrality (along with old French) as the ‘taproot’ of English literature without which no one could understand either modern English speech-rhythms or the origins of English Romanticism. These sentiments, eirenical as well as critical, borrowed something from George McDonald and Tolkien and from Chesterton’s hatred of high seriousness. They assumed that the ‘half-Christian, half-pantheist piety’ of nineteenth-century criticism had been replaced by a bitter conflict between ‘the convinced materialists’ and ‘positive and militant’ Christianity, about which, except in The Personal Heresy, Lewis was faintly negative. The Personal Heresy was an exchange of letters with E. M. W. Tillyard, the Cambridge literary critic whose instincts, however unobtrusive, were the pagan instincts of the classically educated son of a Presbyterian mayor of Cambridge. In opposition to Tillyard, Lewis argued that poetry was not an ‘expression of personality’, contained ‘no representation which claim[ed] to be the poet’ and was not a disclosure of the ‘true structure of [the poet’s] mind’. The ‘real poet’ had already ‘escaped . . . from emotion sufficiently to see it objectively’ and was to be met with, ‘even in the most personal lyric poetry’, only in a ‘strained and ambiguous sense’. Poetry, so far from ‘proving anything’, was a ‘skill of utterance’ which could ‘utter almost anything’ and had to be judged not by the ‘modish freelance journalist’ who lived ‘in the heart of whatever literary movement was going on around him’ but by Lewis’s ideal critic – the reader who read what he read ‘because he liked it’. It was not poetry’s business to look at the poet. Poetry’s business, on the contrary, was to look ‘through’ the poet ‘at the world’. It was the ‘message’ that mattered, ‘not the messenger’ and that ‘arrangement of public experiences, embodied in words’ which would admit the poet (and the reader) to a ‘new mode of consciousness’ involving the ‘annihilation’ of his ‘own particular psychology’. In The Personal Heresy, the argument was theological as well as literary. The object in reading poetry could not be the ‘private furniture of the poet’s mind’ since a mind which ‘saw as synthetically . . . with so vast a context’ as was facilitated ‘for moments by poetry’ would be ‘a mind . . . greatly beyond the human’. The Personal Heresy was theological, secondly, in rejecting Tillyard’s conception of ‘personality’, denying that personality should be associated with an ‘impartial . . . acquiescent contemplation’ [or] ‘suspension of disbelief’, and affirming that personality in order to be human had to rise above the ‘triviality of its “quotidian” accidents’ and become the personality of a ‘real man’ – ‘one of us’, an object of ‘love’ and ‘travelling with us’ ‘between birth and death’.

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The Personal Heresy was theological, finally, in attacking the ‘religious characteristics’ which literature had been acquiring since Arnold, as ‘criticism’ had degenerated into ‘cult’, poets had been conceived of as a ‘race of . . . Mahatmas’ and ‘hagiography’ had combined with ‘blasphemy’ in the examination of ‘tangled trinities like “Christ, Shakespeare and Keats”’. It was important to understand that poetry provided no substitute for religion, that poets should be discouraged from ‘disparaging . . . common things and common men’, and that their ‘arrogance’ about the ‘inarticulate many’ did not alter the fact that the ‘boredom and nausea’ they had induced through the poetic naturalism of the 1920s, had not only not shown them to be ‘great souls’ but had also shown them ‘differing from the mass, if at all, only by defect’. The outcome of The Personal Heresy was bare and practical. The poet’s ‘status’ had to be lowered because the poet’s ‘arrogance’ was endangering poetry’s existence, and the ‘only . . . questions to ask about a poem in the long run’ were whether it was ‘interesting and enjoyable’ and ‘helped or hindered’ men to become ‘happier . . . wiser . . . or better’. In a talk entitled ‘Christianity and Literature’ these ideas were enlarged. ‘Creative’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘freedom’ which for modern criticism were good words, were contrasted with ‘derivative,’ ‘convention’ and ‘rules’, which for modern criticism were bad words and were passed through the Johannine conception of ‘imitation’ as the paradigm of Christ’s Sonship, to the idea that Christians would ‘take literature a little less seriously’ than ‘cultured pagans’ and would avoid the temptation to believe that the ‘artistic conscience’ made authors superior to ‘the great mass of mankind’. It was evident in Christianity and Literature that Lewis’s conversion had left a mark on his critical writing. In two essays published in 1932, accounts of Chaucer and of the ‘poetic chastity’ and ‘gnomic . . . ethical’ flavour of the alterations which Milton had made to Comus between 1637 and 1645, announced major discussions of mediaeval and Renaissance literature. These were to be given in The Allegory of Love and A Preface to Paradise Lost, where Lewis looked back, with the ‘thick, rough fingers’ of an ‘industrial age’, at the ‘delicate . . . scholastic and aristocratic . . . threads’ of the Middle Ages, rescued Spenser from modern imperviousness and, in seeking to escape ‘the prison of the Zeitgeist’, encouraged modern readers to sneer at Tillyard’s inability to understand ‘the great moral . . . in Milton’ – that ‘Obedience to the will of God makes men happy, and Disobedience makes them miserable’. In The Allegory of Love the argument was that ‘our present and perhaps even our future’ would be better understood by ‘reconstructing the . . . state of mind’ in which, from the eleventh century onwards, a ‘momentous . . . revolution’ had established the ‘romantic species of passion’ which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth century. In A Preface to Paradise Lost, the argument was that the ‘permanent’ quality of Milton’s thought

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could not be disentangled from ‘theological rubbish’ and that obedience to ‘natural superiors’ was both ‘the proper office of a rational soul’ and the alternative to the ‘tyranny’ of brute force. In his critical writing, Lewis criticized Richards for preferring the ‘free play of experience’ to ‘stock themes’ in poetic appreciation and praised the preRomantic poets for performing a service of ‘moral, civil . . . and . . . biological importance’ in insisting on ‘stock themes’. In his theological writings his assumptions were made even more central and explicit. VI In the 1940s, Lewis declined to associate Christianity with a ‘detailed political programme’. But he presented it as being economically Socialist, as attacking the ‘lending of money at interest’ and as giving in the New Testament ‘pretty clear hints’ that a Christian society, while keeping the death penalty, would do its best to discourage ‘the sillier sorts of luxury’. In supporting the 1939 war, he urged Christians not to obey anti-Christian orders, made fun of Nazi misunderstandings of Nordic mythology and expressed commonplace anxieties about the conduct of the war and the possibility of post-war revolution. He held it to be especially significant that, while the state, nation and civilization might be more important than the individual if an individual’s life lasted only seventy years, the individual must be judged ‘incomparably more important’ if life was to be everlasting. Lewis’s first Christian statement had been The Pilgrim’s Regress, which combined plodding allegory with low-level theology. Also, later in the 1930s, he wrote the article entitled ‘Christianity and Literature’.6 It was not until five short books appeared in quick succession between 1940 and 1944,7 that a popular statement about Christianity, a polemic against modernity and the claim that Christianity made sense of human experience where Freud, Marx and Wells did not, confirmed the aggressive nature of his religion. All of these works prodded at fashion, despised its indifference to religion, and proscribed the attitudes which had been endemic among ‘moderatelyeducated young men of the professional class [in England] between the two wars’. These were the attitudes which were ‘putting civilization . . . hygiene, transport . . . and a higher standard of life’ first and were adopting the ‘modern pretence’ that sexuality was ‘in a mess’ because it was being ‘hushed up’ when it had in fact been ‘chattered about all day long . . . for the last twenty years’ as ‘poster after poster, film after film and novel after novel’ had associated ‘sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness and good humour’. Lewis was attacking the secular mind and its belief that ‘theology was 6 7

See above p. 311. I.e. The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, Broadcast Talks, The Abolition of Man and Beyond Personality.

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unnecessary’. He was also depuritanizing puritan warnings against ‘worldly vanities’ and ridiculing not only the ‘broad’ type of clergyman whose ‘milkand-water Christianity’ ignored the evil in the universe but also the ‘high’ type of clergyman who preached Communist, Maritainesque or fascist sermons which his congregation could not understand. He emphasized the need for theology, theology’s character as a ‘map’ based on the experience of people who had been ‘in touch with God’, and the fact that, since Christianity had been revealed for the relief of man’s ‘urgent necessities’ and not in order to gratify liberal curiosity, it could be neither science nor poetry, in spite of its power to become poetic once it was believed in. In sketching a popular theology, Lewis suggested that heaven, hell, the Trinity, prayer, penitence, forgiveness and God’s love and omnipotence were more relevant to modern conditions than the modern doctrines he had believed in in the 1920s, and that religious naturalness, the ubiquity of the moral sense and ‘the moral Law’ as the best disclosure of the ‘something . . . which directed the universe’, would be of fundamental importance for the restoration of a religious sensibility. These claims were made chiefly in Broadcast Talks and The Abolition of Man. They depended on the claims which had been made in The Screwtape Letters in 1942. The Screwtape Letters described the obstacles which religion faced in the modern world and the complacency and self-congratulation with which conversion was tempting the Christian convert. They implied the existence of an unceasing battle between God and the Devil in which the inability to bear death, the concentration of prayer on the person praying rather than on God, and a ragbag of intellectual fashions from ‘the Life Force’ to ‘the Worship of Sex’, were issuing in the ‘contented worldliness’ of intellectual abortions like Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and Vegetarianism and Christianity and Spelling Reform. In The Screwtape Letters Lewis implied a simple antithesis between truth and falsehood. He rejected the obfuscating antitheses which he associated with ‘the academic’ and ‘the practical’, and attacked the flippancy about the ‘great mass of their fellow men’ which he attributed to a fictional rich, smart, fashionably Communist couple whom The Letters regarded as particularly fertile soil for the Devil. In disassociating the Church from the ‘intensity’ and ‘self-righteousness’ which came from acting as a sect, clique or ‘secret society’, he denied that God offered his love through an overriding of men’s wills, associated the transcendence of self-will with man’s ‘free’ conformity to God’s will and dismissed the historical Jesus (in the ‘liberal-humanitarian’ and ‘Marxistcatastrophic’ versions) for making Christ into a ‘remote’ figure with whom worship, resurrection and redemption could not be connected. Lewis distinguished between pleasure and perversion (sexual and alcoholic, for example), associating the latter with Satan and making it obvious that

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God’s purposes were more than compatible with the former. There was, however, a difference between ‘repressed’ sex which involved dangers to the ‘sub-conscious’ and ‘suppressed’ sex as an aspect of chastity’s duty to control desire, and it had to be understood that God mistrusted ‘schemes of thought’ which anticipated the future by permitting men to ‘break His commands in the present’. Much of this was ecclesiastically conservative, enjoining attendance at the parish church on the ground that parishioner-choice would turn the parishioner into a ‘critic’ where God wished him to be a ‘pupil’. More significantly, it was conservative morally, attacking the ‘modern’ association of marriage with ‘being in love’ and the assumption that marriage could properly be dissolved once the partners had stopped ‘being in love’, and conceptualizing the lifelong combination of ‘male and female’ into a ‘single organism’ as entailing ‘complete faithfulness’, the avoidance of contraceptives, the obedience of the wife to the husband, and the production of children as the ‘biological purpose’. The Screwtape Letters suffered, like the rest of Lewis’s religious writing, from a certain evangelical narrowness. In this respect, among Lewis’s religious writings at this time, only The Abolition of Man avoided difficulty. The subtitle of The Abolition of Man was The Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools, about which the leading point was that the ‘spirit’ of the two contemporary textbooks it discussed would be ethically and theologically ‘destructive’ of any society which took them seriously. After listing their errors – the commitment to ‘debunking’, the belief that ‘all emotions aroused by local [or patriotic] associations were . . . contrary to reason’, and the subjectivist assumption that ‘all sentences containing a predicate of value were statements about the emotional state of the speaker’ – Lewis enquired in what sense man had achieved ‘increasing power over Nature’ through ‘the progress of applied science’ and whether ‘the wresting of powers from Nature’ had not involved ‘the surrendering of things to Nature’. To the second question, his answer was that ‘the wresting of powers from Nature’ was always ‘the surrendering of things to Nature’, and that in psychoanalysis, for example, the soul became a ‘natural object’ and its ‘judgements of value . . . raw material for scientific manipulation’. To the first question the answer was more complicated. In giving his answer, Lewis stated first that man’s power over nature was ‘a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument’ and that time was a process in which ‘each generation, insofar as it . . . rebelled against tradition . . . limited the power of its predecessors . . . and . . . successors’. Secondly, he stated that ‘eugenics . . . and . . . applied psychology’ promised to subject men to the ‘dead-hand’ of the planners and conditioners and to the omnicompetence of the State. This was a comment on Huxley’s Brave New World and an assertion of the

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‘beneficient obstinacy’ shown by ‘real mothers’ to ‘real children’. It suggested that an impartial scientific education, while claiming to ‘stand . . . outside judgement and value’, was creating a substitute for them and was misunderstanding man’s needs and natures as they had been universally understood, ‘until quite recent times’, by Aristotelianism, Hinduism and Confucianism, by the ‘Tao’ of Platonism and by the principles or ‘platitudes’ which the book’s Appendix unearthed in Jewish, Norse, Roman and Egyptian sacred literature. The claim was that the Tao was non-repressive, that it was transmitted as ‘old birds [taught] young birds to fly’ and that education trained the emotions to enable ‘stable sentiments’ to act as ‘liaison officers between cerebral . . . and visceral man’. There was, that is to say, a natural law, traditional morality or practical reason from which contemporary ideological systems were fragmentary wrenchings, and not only was this traditional morality capable of rescuing the modern mind from cynicism and determinism, it could also rescue it from the value-relativism which reared its head ‘whenever a . . . traditional morality was . . . challenged to produce its credentials’. The Abolition of Man was neither Christian nor theist. It presented the case, however, as Broadcast Talks had explained in 1942, that ‘the ultimate platitudes of practical reason’ had a special connection with Christianity which was neither a ‘liberal’ nor an ‘easy’ religion and called to a ‘struggle . . . in each man’s soul’ between the ‘human self’ on the one hand and the ‘animal’ or ‘diabolical’ self on the other. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis distinguished between the cardinal virtues common to ‘all civilized peoples’ and the ‘theological virtues’ which ‘as a rule’ were the preserve of Christian peoples. Christian morality on this view, entailed not obedience to rules in return for a reward, but resistance to the ‘Dark Power’ of the ‘Prince of This World’. The universe was ‘enemy-occupied territory’ where the ‘rightful king had landed’, his Church was a centre of ‘sabotage’ and he himself had brought with him ‘a technique for putting the human machine right’. So, of course, had psychoanalysis, which shared with Christianity the assumption that an ‘abnormal’ psychological outfit was a ‘disease’ rather than a ‘sin’, was an obstacle to moral effort and, when it achieved moral effort notwithstanding, gave more pleasure to God than when the effort was made out of a ‘normal’ psychological outfit. Lewis’s theology was declared to be both unique to Christianity and ‘the key to history’. It explained historic evil as man’s yielding to Satan and Christ’s death as enabling men to start again. The uniqueness of Christianity, moreover, resided in the claim that God had made men good because ‘he loved [them]’ not that He would love them provided they were good, and that He had intruded in the end only because He had loved them too much to leave them to their own devices.

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Lewis presented the Incarnation as evidence of God’s love for man’s material as well as his spiritual character, and Christ and the Trinity as material embodiments of the conversion of the ‘biological life’ men had acquired through ‘nature’ into the ‘spiritual life’ they could acquire from God. Obedience was both a human need and a divine injunction; its outcome was harmony between individuals, harmony within individuals and a harmonious relationship between individuals and God, and what God wanted as the next step in evolution was ‘new men’ who would be ‘trained’ in ‘dressing up’ as Christ and would be ‘stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant . . . than most of us’ not only over all the earth but also to eternity. Towards the end of Christian Behaviour Lewis showed where this was leading. It was unnecessary for all Christians to have the same sorts of belief though, in the case of doctrines which were difficult to believe, Christians should act as though they believed them, since even the practice of Christianity was ‘an education in itself’. But the essence of the argument was the importance of getting back to God through Christ and the transformation of the personality which would follow a ‘real giving up of the self’ to Christ. What was awful about Lewis was not so much his politics, the rhetoric of ‘fact’ about the Incarnation or a defence of sexual eccentricity that was so much at variance with his moral doctrine, as his sermonizing, his slang and the vulgar wish not to be part of an ‘inner ring’. It was, and is, deeply unpleasant to discover that Christianity’s business is not only to create ‘little Christs’ without whom ‘all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself [were] . . . a waste of time’, but also to enable those who had had a ‘wretched upbringing . . . a loathsome sexual perversion [or] an inferiority complex’ to find Christ flinging their ‘wretched machine . . . on the scrapheap’ and ‘giving [them] a new one [that would] astonish us all’. Lewis bore the marks of Inkling-speak – the language of the pipe-smoking, beer-drinking ‘jolly middle earth’ whose idea it was that Christ had avoided ‘idealistic gas’, that mankind had got into a ‘terrible fix’, and that it had to avoid ‘religious jaw’ and ‘cut out’ the ‘soft soap’ which had been ‘talked about God for the last hundred years’. Tolkien’s contribution to Charles Williams’s festschrift stated more clearly than it was sensible to have stated the intellectual bases of Tolkien’s life-work – the claim that fairies were natural ‘where man was supernatural, the belief that mythology was not, as Max Müller had supposed, a ‘disease of language’ and the assertion that fantasy – as necessary and distinct an activity as science – provided ‘escape’, ‘consolation’ and ‘freedom from the domination of observed fact’. Though he was trying, like many before him, to effect a liberation from science, Tolkien was careful to state that fantasy could not destroy reason or ‘blunt . . . the perception of scientific verity’, and that ‘creative fantasy’, since it was founded on both ‘the recognition of fact’ and the avoidance of ‘slavery’ to fact, made it possible, as humility also made it possible, to do what

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Chestertonian fantasy had demanded – ‘clean our windows so that the things seen clearly’ might be ‘freed from the drab blur of . . . familiarity’. On Fairy-Stories was Tolkien’s justification of his practice, the place in which he explained that his fiction and mediaeval scholarship were not only ways of escaping from industrial society but were also showing that ‘railwayengineers’, if they had had more fantasy in their upbringing, might have built better railways than they were building normally. Tolkien incorporated Ruskin’s, Morris’s and pre-Raphaelite judgements on the ‘ugliness of the modern world’. He added ‘evil’ to ‘ugliness’, made the mark of the true fairy-story the ‘joy’ which gave ‘a sudden glimpse of . . . underlying reality or truth’, and pointed to the New Testament as embracing ‘all the essence of fairy-stories’. ‘The Gospels . . . contain many marvels’, went a crucial passage, ‘and among the marvels is . . . the Birth of Christ’. ‘The Birth of Christ’, the odd and slightly mad passage went on, is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It was pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality’. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath. It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be ‘primarily’ true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the ‘turn’ in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth . . . In God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending’. The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know. (J. R. M. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, in C. S. Lewis, ed., Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 1947, pp. 83–4)

Inkling-speak was at its most private in Tolkien. In Lewis it was used for public purposes – through the language of ‘fun’ (the ‘fun’ the Nazis were failing to get out of Odin), the ‘uproarious’ talent for ‘laughter and the love of friends’, and the ‘yonge fresshe, folkes, he or she’ who listened ‘with incredulity . . . toleration and delight’ to an Oxford lecture of Charles Williams in whose honour Lewis edited the festschrift to which Tolkien had contributed. ‘He is an ugly man with rather a cockney voice’, went the hagiographics,

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But no one ever thinks of this for five minutes after he has begun speaking. His face becomes almost angelic. Both in public and in private he is of nearly all the men I have met, the one whose address most overflows with love. It is simply irresistible. These young men and women were lapping up what he said about Chastity before the end of the hour. It is a big thing to have done. (C. S. Lewis to Dom Bede Griffiths, 24 December 1941, in W. H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C. S. Lewis, 1966, pp. 196–7)

As though this was not enough, there was a deeply unfortunate passage at the end of A Preface to Paradise Lost, where, in specifying some of Milton’s critical enemies, there was said to be a class ‘to which Mr. Eliot himself probably belonged’ [some of whom] were ‘outside the Wall because they were barbarians who could not get in’ but others of whom had ‘gone out beyond it of their own will in order to fast and pray in the wilderness’. ‘Civilization’, it went on, hates civility from below: sanctity rebukes it from above. The round table is pressed between the upper millstone (Galahad) and the nether (Mordred). If Mr. Eliot disdains the eagles and trumpets of epic poetry because the fashion of this world passes away, I honour him. But if he goes on to draw the conclusion that all poetry should have the penitential qualities of his own best work, I believe he is mistaken. As long as we live in merry middle earth it is necessary to have middle things. If the round table is abolished . . . a hundred will drop plumb down to . . . the level . . . of Mordred. Mr. Eliot may succeed in persuading the reading youth of England to have done with robes of purple and pavement of marble. But he will not therefore find them walking in sackcloth on floors of mud – he will only find them in smart, ugly suits walking on rubberoid. It has all been tried before. The older Puritans took away the maypoles and the mince-pies: but they did not bring in the millennium, they only brought in the Restoration. Galahad must not make common cause with Mordred, for it is always Mordred who gains, and he who loses, by such alliance. (C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942, ed. 1960 edn, p. 137)

Lewis, though not a dandy, shared the dandy’s impulse to stand out against conventionality. The conventionality he stood out against, like the conventionality Gore stood out against in the 1920s, was self-consciously progressive and denied that the world was out of joint. To that extent Lewis’s criticism, fiction and apologetic were essays ‘against the grain’ – attempts in unpromising circumstances to look back longingly on something that had been lost. In the thinkers to be discussed in the next chapter, the argument was that, whatever was altered, nothing important need be lost.

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Religion . . . has always suffered by its connection with the State, and . . . no Church has ever existed . . . which has not lost something of its independence and its freedom when it became a department of the State. (Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, Speech at Glasgow, 15 September 1885, in H. W. Lucy, ed., The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, 1885, pp. 195–6) When the religious history of the generation in which we are living comes to be written by our descendants, they will . . . say with truth that Christendom has been passing through a great revolution in the last thirty years . . . that . . . it . . . has absorbed all the results of science, of criticism, of investigation, in every field of thought; that it is showing gradually, without the ostentation of apologetic polemics but showing by practice, that it can assimilate all those new elements of enlightenment and progress: and that the teaching of Christianity need not be, and ought not to be . . . of a character which leaves science and knowledge on one side, and goes its own way, ignoring all that may be done in other departments of human learning and human effort. (Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour, speech at Crowborough, 6 June 1906, in W. M. Short, Arthur James Balfour As Philosopher and Thinker, 1912, pp. 278–9) I travelled to London in order to attend the funeral of Neville Chamberlain in the Abbey . . . I could not but reflect on the profound significance of the fact that an avowed Unitarian was buried in the Abbey with full rites as if he had been an orthodox Christian . . . One must draw the line somewhere, and I cannot see any other defensible line than that which makes belief in Christ’s Divinity the unum necessarium of Christian profession. But even so, I dare not act, nor would even wish to act, on this assumption! (Rt. Rev. Hensley Henson, Canon of Westminster, 14 November 1940, in Retrospect of an Unimportant Life, III, p. 171)

In the speech quoted as an epigraph to this chapter, Balfour congratulated England on passing through a phase of religious unsettlement into a new phase of settled Christianity. A decade earlier, Joseph Chamberlain had indicated the process by which Dissent would cease to be a major element in the Liberal party. Between them Balfour and Chamberlain, under the appearance of doing the opposite, beat symbolic retreats – in Balfour’s case from Christianity to religion, in Chamberlain’s case from Dissent to respectability. In this chapter we shall examine these retreats as they were expressed by these two and by W. J. Ashley’s transition to Baldwinian Anglicanism. I The main part of Balfour’s1 professional life was spent in ministerial office and the House of Commons of which, having become a member for the first 11

Arthur James, 1st Earl Balfour (1848–1930), educated Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. MP, 1874–1922. Minister, 1886–92, 1895–1902, 1915–22 and, 1925–9.

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time when he was twenty-five, he remained a member for almost fifty years. From 1886 onwards, he and Salisbury were the beneficiaries first of Gladstone’s hatred of Chamberlain and then of a change in the political climate which, during nearly twenty years in office, enabled them, on foundations laid by Disraeli and in an alliance of tension with Chamberlain, to neutralize the sectarian issue and set up the secular Conservatism which has survived all the changes which have occurred since in the scope of State power, the social composition of the Conservative Party, and Britain’s position in the world. Balfour did not become Prime Minister until the Conservative ascendancy of 1886 was being undermined. He fought the election of 1905 with a divided party and lost heavily, remained party leader in opposition for five years after the election and did not resign until his advice about House of Lords reform was rejected in a striking fashion. The 1914 war then restored him as a Conservative elder statesman. He was First Lord of the Admiralty in the Asquith coalition, was closely involved in war strategy and the Dardanelles campaign, and lent his weight quiescently when Lloyd George (who had tried to get rid of him) got rid of Asquith in 1916. For the last fourteen years of his life he had an untouchable superiority – as Lloyd George’s Foreign Secretary (in spite of Lloyd George’s pre-eminence at Versailles), as a member of Baldwin’s second cabinet (after opposing the ending of the Lloyd-George coalition) and as President of the British Academy and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. In the late 1920s Balfour combined wealth, lineage, political experience and academic capability. He gave a more impressive version of elder statesmanship than any Conservative leader before or since, constructing an edgeless intellectuality which celebrated the Crown and the British temperament; and suggesting the possibility not only of a national unity which would transcend class-conflict and a ‘moral unity’ which would knit together the ‘New . . . Empire’ but also the conviction, so much at variance with his separatist realism about Ulster, that Palestine Arabs, who had been freed from ‘tyranny’ by the great powers, had nothing to fear from the Jewish National Home the Balfour Declaration had proposed in expiation of the ‘crimes’ Jews had suffered at the hands of European culture and religion. As a contractor in India, Balfour’s Scots grandfather had made a fortune which, by inheritance in his twenties, had made Balfour one of the richest men in the United Kingdom. By then he had been orphaned and had been a schoolboy at Eton and a Fellow-Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge, footnote 1 (cont.) Prime Minister, 1902–5. Author of A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, 1879; The Religion of Humanity, 1888; A Fragment on Progress, 1892; Essays and Addresses, 1892 and 1905; The Foundations of Belief, 1894; The Nineteenth Century, 1900; Decadence, 1908; Theism and Humanism, 1915; Essays Speculative and Political, 1920. Theism and Thought, 1923 and (ed. Dugdale) Chapters of Autobiography, 1930.

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where two of the Fellows became brothers-in-law and two of his brothers became Fellows. Balfour was taught by Sidgwick, helped Sidgwick with psychical research, and was helped by Sidgwick in writing A Defence of Philosophic Doubt. As Salisbury’s nephew and in effect Salisbury’s ward, he was Salisbury’s private secretary at the Congress of Berlin and, in straddling between Sidgwickianism’s retreat from Christianity and Cecilian Conservatism’s reassertion of Christianity, acquired the most ambiguous type of intellectual purchase. Neither Balfour’s performance at Trinity nor his earliest years in the House of Commons were distinguished. As an author, as a member of the Fourth Party, and as a critic of Northcote, he then began to flower and, by the end of the 1880 Parliament, had moved from the family pocket-borough in Hertford to a popular constituency in Manchester. Thereafter, he had made his name as a critic of Gladstone’s Irish policy and had come to share Salisbury’s judgement of Gladstone’s unprincipled duplicity. Though he worked with Lord Randolph Churchill in the Fourth Party, he felt a primary loyalty to Salisbury whose eyes and ears he was when Salisbury was away from London. He was much involved in the negotiations which led up to the Liberal split in 1886 and developed an effective working relationship with Chamberlain. After ministerial experience at the Local Government and Scottish Offices and four years in major office as Irish Secretary, he became leader of the House of Commons in 1891. In Balfour’s political life, Ireland was the first challenge and the first opportunity to display his conception of political duty. As Chief Secretary, his Irish policy had three aspects – suppression of Fenianism and Socialism and the use of censorship and force to disperse meetings, support evictions and control a ‘conspiracy which worked by methods . . . differ[ing] very little from civil war’; an attempt to address peasant poverty, and the Catholic middle classes, and to persuade the Papacy to prevent the Catholic clergy supporting ‘Socialism and revolution’; and an appeal to the self-interest of the English electorate who were assured that Gladstonian Home Rule was not only giving a new solidarity to Ulster working men but was also threatening to flood the labour market in England by destroying the labour market in Ireland. Balfour believed, as Disraeli had believed, that Conservatism had to be presented judiciously if it was to suit the sentiment of modern electorates. But his Irish experience also taught him that force used in defence of ‘Empire’ against Home Rule had helped to break up the Liberal Party, and that it was possible, to use a street-alley rhetoric about the ‘atrocious political wickedness’ involved in directing British soldiers to hand over Ulster Protestants ‘to a body of persons’ who differed from them ‘in their views of morality . . . and religion’. Balfour was irritated by the naïveté of Irish landlords and the timidity of

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Irish officials, and wrote to Salisbury in terms which sometimes approached despair. He was convinced, nevertheless, by 1889 that his policies were working and that toughness had been combined successfully with the removal of grievances. There is no reason to suppose that he changed his mind in the following thirty years or doubted that the Union with Ireland was as compatible with an Irish identity as the Union with Scotland was with a Scottish identity until ‘organised assassination’ persuaded him that Home Rule and partition were unavoidable. In some respect Balfour had a cross-bench mind and had picked up some of the academic fads of the late 1860s. His first independent act in Parliament was to associate himself with two Burial Bills which would have reduced Nonconformist grievances about churchyards. In two articles in the early 1880s he disparaged Henry George by comparison with Marx, denied that political economy could move logically from ‘scientific’ accounts of ‘laws of nature’ to policy recommendations and stated that economic argument was always ‘subject to revision’, like the revision he helped to give in arguing for the repudiation of the gold standard in 1892 and in Economic Notes on Insular Free Trade in 1903. In ‘Cobden and the Manchester School’, Balfour turned Morley’s and Chamberlain’s class-rhetoric against the class interests of manufacturers, described it as ‘pure illusion’ to suppose that English landlords had ever been a ‘political’ aristocracy and accused Cobden of having a ‘bagman’s’ theory of empire which the British people had not accepted in his lifetime and ‘did not accept’ in the 1880s.

In his main period as a party leader, Balfour was at once hostile and accommodating, throw-away and determined, detached and committed, in aiming to unite the nation against the Liberal Party. He left the impression, as part of his political persona, that he knew about painting, cycling, golf, literature and music, and that he admired the newspaper industry and Civil Service impartiality. He wanted polytechnics to persuade their students that they belonged to a ‘great community’ just as he wanted the ‘great artisan-class’ to acquire ‘the closest possible knowledge’ of the business methods of modern industry and agriculture. He shared the Cecilian mistrust of State interference, except in support of scientific research, praised charity as the alternative to State expenditure and was opposed to Conscription during the 1914 war, as he and Salisbury had been during the Boer War. He anticipated difficulty in extracting ‘the best kind of service’ from the paid professional politician of the future, was critical of the tendency of democratic argument to degenerate into ‘rhetoric’ and wished to protect science, as well as economics and Indian government against its intrusiveness. As a party leader, his topics, apart from Ireland, were education, imperial defence, the House of Lords, the Welsh

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Church, property, taxation and tariffs. But he transcended the range of the average Conservative and took a high and considered view not just of the importance of religious freedom within the Established Church but also of the continuing contribution which religion, especially lay religion, could make to civilization. II By the time Balfour was becoming a significant public figure, it was beginning to be understood, he believed, that, though religion had not kept hold of urban populations once divorced from ‘the great processes of nature’, it had still not been destroyed by science. Balfour wished to maintain religion’s place in the public order. But he did not mean by religion the mere ‘preaching of morality’ or the ‘dead hand’ of unchanging formularies; far less did he mean the ‘non-Conformist conscience’ about which he wrote scathingly. What he meant as a politician was the Established Church in England, Scotland and (until 1912) Wales and the reunion of Churches, like the reunion of the Free Church and United Presbyterian Churches in Scotland in 1901. What he meant as a philosopher was something vaguer and considerably more fugutive. Throughout his life Balfour supplied a Conservative intellectuality which proved once more – what Derby, Salisbury and even Disraeli had proved already – that it was possible for a Conservative leader to occupy the highest intellectual ground. Later Balfour was a rambling concoction and did not add much to early Balfour, except insofar as Bergson helped to diversify his account of the nonrational. For Balfour’s essential arguments, it is necessary to go back behind the Gifford lectures of 19142 and 19223 to A Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879),4 The Religion of Humanity (1888) and The Foundations of Belief (1894) which was in its eighth edition before he became Prime Minister in 1902. Balfour knew many scientists, praised Huxley, Spencer and Darwin for ‘establishing . . . evolution on a scientific basis’ and claimed that the ‘embryonic forces’ which would shape man’s future were to be found in the ‘laboratories of scientific students’. In A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, by contrast, he was sceptical about ‘the imperialism’ which had enabled science to impose on the modern mind the illegitimate control theology had imposed on the medieval mind. In A Defence Balfour attacked the ‘intellectual dogmatism’ which equated naturalism with truth and derived from it ‘ethical . . . aesthetic . . . or theological’ beliefs which could not be derived legitimately. After reviewing influential accounts of scientific knowledge between Kant and Caird, he 12 14

13 Theism and Humanism, 1915. Theism and Thought, 1923. Originally A Defence of Philosophic Scepticism.

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declared that science could not conceive the ‘real nature of the external world’ and that there was a ‘discrepancy’ between its ‘empirical premises’ and its ‘received conclusions’. Balfour did not offer this as a criticism since theology was defective in the same way. What he offered was to remove from science the certainty which had already been removed from theology, and to build on the truth that the most ‘pernicious’ obstacle to ‘impartial speculation’ in the modern world was science’s treatment of philosophy as a ‘servant’ instead of a ‘judge’. In explaining where reflection should go next, Balfour began by arguing that, though all beliefs were ‘caused’, fundamental beliefs differed from derivative beliefs by reason of the fact that the ‘causes’ which produced them were ‘non-rational’. This raised the question of presuppositions (not his word) which he used as Newman, F. H. Bradley and Westcott had used it in order to point out that science, as a ‘system of belief’, could not only not be validated by Mill’s or Jevons’s version of inductive empiricism but also could not be validated at all in the sense in which its advocates claimed to validate it. Neither in A Defence nor anywhere else in the following forty years did Balfour offer a philosophical system. On the contrary, he avoided system and addressed his negative subtlety to that ‘apparently increasing class of persons who desired to be advanced thinkers’ while wishing to have their ‘advanced thinking done for them’, and to theologians who, in their anxiety to establish a ‘congruity’ between science and religion, had accepted the assumptions made by religion’s opponents. Fifteen positive pages in A Defence explained why the problem could not be dealt with by ‘lopping off from religion’ whatever was disagreeable to science, why religion was not necessarily less ‘rational’ when taken as a whole than science was when taken as a whole, and why religion resembled science in its dependence on ‘inclination’ or ‘impulse’ as much as on ‘reasons’. Balfour’s positive argument was that religion was a matter of need and sentiment and that, in present circumstances, when ‘consistency would involve the destruction of either science or religion’, inconsistency was closer to truth and more likely to lead back to that faith which had been ‘the spiritual life’ of ‘the millions’. About Christianity, he employed Sidgwick’s scepticism in defence of positions from which Sidgwick’s life had been a disengagement and, in the address that he gave to a Church Congress at Manchester in 1888, was notably tepid in Christianity’s defence. The Religion of Humanity drew a line between a supernatural religion and any religion which declined to be polluted by ‘the supernatural’. It enquired whether a non-supernatural religion was capable of meeting man’s ‘highest needs’, and replied that, though it could not possibly be ‘religious’ if considered ‘from the outside’ as a system of dogma and belief, such a religion could be ‘religious’ if considered from ‘the inside’ as consisting of ‘acts of belief penetrated with religious emotion’. This raised the question whether the religion of

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humanity could rival Christianity; to which the answer, prolonged and leisurely, and flicking contemptuously at the Deists for having a ‘theology’ without ‘religious feeling’, was that the one set of feelings positivism could not induce were the feelings associated with ‘belief in a future state’. The rest of the lecture then showed why, without such a belief, positivism could not emulate Christianity, would fail to address the ‘multitude’ and, through its ‘chilly scepticism’ about ‘the final worth of human effort’, would envelop existence in an eschatological hopelessness such that when men went ‘down to the pit’, nothing that remained would be ‘better or . . . worse’ for all the ‘labour, genius, devotion and suffering’ which countless generations had ‘striven to effect’. In The Religion of Humanity, Balfour gave only cursory attention to Christianity since, as he pointed out, on that occasion, Christianity was not his ‘subject’. In The Foundations of Belief he also took a long time to arrive at the subject.

The Foundations of Belief made a more impressive investigation of naturalism than Balfour had made previously. It saw in rationalism a post-Renaissance ‘temper of thought’ which had taken hold of ‘educated opinion’ and aimed at a ‘special form of that reaction against dogmatic theology’ which had imposed a pitiless consistency on ‘the whole circuit of belief’. Balfour held a low opinion of rationalism’s ‘profundity’, treated rationalists as ‘men-of-the-world’ rather than philosophers and suggested that ‘rationalist orthodoxy’, including all attempts to ‘reconcile’ religion with science or holiness with sociology, should be rejected. To the central philosophical questions he gave three kinds of answer – that, in the ‘present condition of our knowledge’, it was impossible to offer a ‘complete or adequate philosophy’ which would ‘unify belief into an ordered whole’; that scientific beliefs had a more ‘solid’ basis than any others by reason of the ‘universality’ and ‘inevitability’ which men had come to feel about what they ‘saw and handled’ in ‘the material world’ during the ‘struggle for existence’; and that religion ought to ‘frame some wider scheme’ founded upon needs other than the needs which men shared with their ‘brute progenitors’. In Foundations Balfour argued in favour of a ‘harmony between men’s ‘inner-selves’ and ‘the universe’, a ‘consonance’ between ‘the subjective’ and ‘the objective’ which gave men a ‘practical’ assurance of the truths they were concerned with and the certainty that ‘the whole’ of which men desired a ‘reasoned knowledge’ was superior to naturalism’s knowledge by reason of the ‘large tracts’ of consciousness which naturalism excluded. In the last sixty or so pages these ideas were applied to religion, to the resistance which theology presented, and science did not present, to the process of reconstruction and to the fact that changes in theology affected belief in spiritual reality where changes in scientific theory did not affect belief in material reality.

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Foundations of Belief discussed the ‘shock’ given to ‘the common sense of mankind’ by the contradiction between the evolution of theology and the ‘immutability claimed for theological doctrines’. It explained the contradiction by reference to the intermingling of theology’s ‘speculative’ character with the ‘social’ character it had acquired ‘amid the confusion and . . . clamour of the market-place’, and it pointed out that a Church was not merely a ‘learned society’ but also an organization dedicated to a ‘great practical work’ which could not guarantee that agreement about doctrine would guarantee practical agreement between those who subscribed to it. Balfour’s view of the relation between belief and reality was coloured by his view of the relation between language and belief, and by his doubt whether formal logic’s and mediaeval scholasticism’s assumption of a ‘constant relation’ between symbol and the thing symbolized was justified. ‘Incessant variation in the use to which we put the same expression’ was said to be necessary if the ‘complexity of the Universe’ was to ‘find a response in thought’, and science, literature and theology to depend on a ‘play of mind’ in which language ‘hung’ as ‘loosely to the belief it endeavoured to express’ as belief to the reality with which it was ‘intended to correspond’. ‘In as much as any fragmentary presentation of a concrete whole must . . . be erroneous’, it followed that ‘the full complexity of any true belief about reality’ would ‘necessarily transcend the comprehension of any finite intelligence’ and, ‘in whatever age they were born, and whatever creed they might profess’, that men were engaged in ‘spelling out . . . fragments of a message’ which, if ‘measured on the celestial scale’, were ‘minute’. Foundations was sceptical about the idea that it was reason which had triumphed at the Reformation. It was even more sceptical about the contemporary assumption that ‘reason alone’ could ‘sift’ opinions on the way to adopting them, and it drew attention to the ‘immense, inevitable and on the whole beneficent part’ which authority, ‘unconscious procedure’ and ‘the spirit of the age’, played in the production of belief. Balfour doubted whether men could properly be regarded as ‘free intelligences’ when they ‘formed their opinions in obedience to reason’, since ‘teachers . . . family . . . neighbours . . . country, party and church’ were at least as important and it was unnecessary to postpone adoption of a working creed until its assumptions had been ‘established . . . rationally’. Those to whose constructive suggestions ‘the world had owed most’, moreover, had not been ‘speculating in a void’ but had been ‘working over’, as philosophers from Locke to Schopenhauer had been ‘working over and shaping afresh’, a ‘body of doctrine “which” in the main they found but did not make’. In inserting authority into the idea of reason, Balfour was being both Conservative and religious. In bringing his argument to the point at which theism and theology responded to the need, which naturalism denied, to ‘penetrate beyond the phenomenal causes by which . . . beliefs were produced’, he

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proceeded from the ‘irrational’ truths that science disclosed ‘at the root of every process’ to a ‘Supreme Reason’ in which man had to believe if he was to believe in anything. This Supreme Reason was God. But it was not enough to postulate a ‘rational God in the interests of science’, a ‘moral God in the interests of morality’ or a God whose ‘divine beauty’ was to be found in all ‘loveliness’. It was necessary also to postulate a God of religion – not the God of natural religion who had made the world intelligible but the God of theology for whom knowledge was the outcome of co-operation between the ‘human soul’ which ‘assimilated’ and the ‘Divine power “which” inspired’. Balfour’s emphasis on inspiration was far-reaching, but was not specifically Christian. It was present at the beginning of belief as well as in its later developments and in the ‘side alleys’ as well as along the ‘main line’ of ‘religious progress’. It was required by those who learnt as well as by those who taught, and it was important that it had not been narrowed down to the ‘sources, however unique, from which we draw our own spiritual nourishment’. This was as latitudinarian a declaration as anything in Max Müller. It left it to theology to enquire whether there was ‘an authority on religious matters of a kind which was without parallel in scientific or ethical matters’ and, in failing to supply an answer, brought Foundations to a close with the question whether ‘scientific, ethical and theological beliefs’ would be ‘more coherent and satisfactory . . . if considered in a Christian [rather] than a merely theistic . . . setting?’ Foundations dodged many questions, and in facing the question of miracles, supplied a casuistical digression about the absence from the New Testament of a ‘supernatural’ world which ‘occasionally upset . . . uniformities’ in the natural world. What it did not dodge was science’s incapacity to deal with misery, evil and wrong, and the crucial character of the belief religion had arrived at, long before ‘organized science’ had been thought of, that God was ‘loving and . . . just’. In justifying Christianity, Foundations made three points – that the uniqueness and historicity of the Incarnation was the crucial question, that though the ‘historical evidence’ went some way towards establishing it, its ‘trustworthiness and competence’ depended on philosophy’s, not history’s, judgement of its ‘inherent likelihood’, which in its turn depended on Christianity’s power of ‘ministering to human needs’. ‘Ministering to human needs’ was an antidote to ‘categorical imperatives’ (which supplied only a ‘meagre outfit’ to meet the ‘storms and stresses of actual life’) and realized itself in the ‘long and complex’ evolution which had issued in ‘the moral law’ not as an ‘accidental variation’ of natural selection but as an ‘instrument’ of the ‘Divine purpose’ through which the unloveliness of primordial instinct had been transformed. Balfour’s conception of relations between God and men was complicated and unsure. It took account of the diversity of knowledge which had been acquired in the course of evolution but treated the immensity of the Copernican universe and the roughness of the Darwinian universe, as

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‘increasing rather than diminishing’ Christianity’s ability to minister to men’s needs. God was concerned more with ‘the moral growth of the human spirit’ than with ‘the stability of the heavens’, and mind’s dependence on body – a signal discovery of modern science – had not altered the Christian truth that men were ‘made in the likeness of God’ and were capable of a ‘high endeavour’ to which materialism was a threat. It was even more important that the impossibility of disconnecting God from evil – a rediscovery of the nineteenth century – had subverted the remoteness and indifference of theism’s God, had made ‘a future life’ at least as important to social harmony as prison, the scaffold or public opinion, and had ensured that ‘Spirit’ would neutralize ‘materialism’ as the conflict between science and religion receded. ‘If the goal to which, consciously or unconsciously, the modern physicist is pressing, be ever reached’, Balfour wrote in 1900, the mechanical view of things will receive an extension and a completeness never before dreamed of. There could then in truth be only one natural science, namely, physics; and only one kind of explanation, namely, the dynamic. If any other science claimed a separate existence it could only be because its work was as yet imperfectly performed, because it had not as yet pressed sufficiently far its analysis of cause and effect. Would this conception, in its turn, foster a new and refined materialism? For my own part I conjecture that it would not. I believe that the very completeness and internal consistency of such a view of the physical world would establish its inadequacy. The very fact that within it there seemed no room for Spirit would convince mankind that Spirit must be invoked to explain it. I know not how the theoretic reconciliation will be affected; for I mistrust the current philosophical theories upon the subject. But that in some way or other future generations will, each in its own way, find a practical modus vivendi between the natural and the spiritual I do not doubt at all; and if, a hundred years hence, some lecturer, whose parents are not yet born, shall discourse to your successors in this place on the twentieth century, it may be that he will note the fact that, unlike their forefathers, men of his time were no longer disquieted by the controversies once suggested by that well-worn phrase ‘the conflict between Science and Religion’. (A. J. Balfour, The Nineteenth Century, 1900, in Essays and Addresses, 1908 edn, pp. 331–2)

In allowing Sidgwick to edge out Salisbury, Balfour defended Christianity by saying very little about it. In the rest of this chapter, we shall examine the mentality which enabled Joseph Chamberlain to replace Dissent by imperialism. II In the last two centuries, the Church of England has lost ground to Roman Catholicism. It has suffered from the secularization of education, reductions in the relative importance of its own charitable functions, and the growth of the leisure, information and entertainment industries. In the last eighty years, it has been spared any serious assault from Dissent at the same time as Dissent has receded in the face of urbanization, suburbanization, the patriotic solidarity of 1914 and 1939, the death of the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party’s disengagement from political Anglicanism.

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The political tactic of Victorian Dissent was to demand equal rights with the Church of England and to argue that both true religion and a free State required free Churches rather than an Established Church. In the face of modern infidelity from the 1860s onwards, Dissent’s reactions were as varied as Anglican reactions, including not only a toughness which wished to resist and a smoothness which wished to accommodate, but also an optimism which supposed that unsnobbish, anti-Erastian, quasi-Puritan Dissent was better equipped than Anglicanism to become the leading form of English Christianity. These volumes might have examined Miall, Bright and Dale as political Dissenters and Spurgeon, Martineau, Hutton, Fairbairn, Dodd, Rupp, Thomas Hodgkin, Powicke and Glover as Baptist preacher, Unitarian philosopher, Congregationalist theologians, and Methodist, Quaker, Presbyterian and Baptist historians respectively. The Catholicization of Dissent has been examined through Knowles. Its Anglicanization, which has been examined through Maurice, Cunningham, Figgis and Butterfield, and will shortly be examined through Ashley, might also have been examined through Archbishops Davidson, Ramsey and Runcie who, unlike Bonar Law, were converted Presbyterians; through Bishop Kirk, a converted Methodist theologian, and A. E. Taylor and H. A. Hodges who were converted Methodist philosophers; through J. H. Shorthouse, a converted Quaker and author of the most brilliant of High Church novels;5 and through Ernest Barker (the son of a violin-playing miner) who was brought up a Congregationalist and became an influential teacher and political philosopher in Oxford, Cambridge and London. While Pearson, Keynes and R. B. Haldane have provided the occasion for examining the secularization of Dissent, this might also have been examined through Lloyd George’s transition from being a Welsh Baptist into being a war leader, world statesman and great lover, and Mark Rutherford’s transition (in the novel, Mark Rutherford) from the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion to Spinoza on the one hand and a distinguished career as an Admiralty civil servant on the other. The Dissenter assimilated to political, intellectual, or bureaucratic respectability (like Sir Austen Chamberlain, Sir Henry Dale or Lord Armstrong of Sanderstead) has been an important feature of English life in the twentieth century. In this section, we shall examine Ashley’s and Joseph Chamberlain’s theorization of the process.

Chamberlain6 was the eldest child of a long-established family of London merchants. He left University College School at the age of sixteen in order to 15 16

John Inglesant, 1880. Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914), educated University College School, London. MP, 1876–1914. Cabinet Minister, 1880–5; Colonial Secretary, 1895–1903. Author of (ed. Lucy) Speeches of The Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, 1885; The Radical

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join the family business, and was sent to Birmingham two years later in order to expand the family interest in the Nettlefold company. In the following twenty years he made enough money to devote the rest of his life to politics, becoming a member of Birmingham City Council in 1869 and Chairman of the National Education League in 1870. Chamberlain shared J. S. Mill’s belief in the development of intelligence ‘throughout the nation’, instituted classes for workmen in his own firm and taught for a time in a Unitarian Sunday school. He was a Nonconformist enemy of Forster’s Education Act and made his maiden speech in Parliament about the future of elementary education. He held the bland accommodating view of Christianity which constituted the Unitarian version of Protestantism and left the impression that it was his destiny to proclaim ‘the gospel of humanity’ to the ‘heart and conscience of the nation’.

Chamberlain’s political persona included descent from a minister who had been evicted in 1660 and he claimed to have a personal account to settle with the Church of England, while threatening to break up the Liberal Party if it failed to give his followers – its ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ over Jewish and Catholic emancipation – the degree of consideration which had been given to ‘Irish disaffection’ and a ‘foreign priesthood’. After attacking the alliance between property, privilege, ‘the parson’ and ‘the publican’, and the use made of the ‘so-called National Schools, built in part with our money’, as Conservative committee-rooms at parliamentary elections, he raised as the central issue in 1885 the disendowment as well as the disestablishment of the Church of England and the sweeping away of ‘every vestige of ecclesiastical supremacy . . . and religious inequality’. In addition to being a representative of Dissent, Chamberlain was a classwarrior, eventually as champion of the rural labourer whom the upper classes had turned into the ‘worst paid . . . fed . . . clothed and housed peasantry in the civilized world’, initially as champion of the urban labourer who had a right to impose on industry the restraints which the middle classes had imposed on competition in the middle-class professions. As Mayor of Birmingham, he embodied the intelligence and cultivation which were being achieved by the municipalities, made it a point of cardinal importance that the individual had the right to ‘think out . . . his religious faith . . . for himself’, and connected ‘crime and intemperance’ with the ‘plague-spots of filth, ignorance and vice’ which were not only obliterating ‘reverence and decency’ in the centre of all great cities, but were also making it necessary to institute ‘secular’ before there could be ‘missionary’ care. footnote 6 (cont.) Programme, 1885; Foreign and Colonial Speeches by The Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, 1897 and (ed. Boyd) Mr. Chamberlain’s Speeches, 1915.

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In the 1870s Chamberlain was stating principles which challenged and reproached. In office in the 1880s, he spent moral capital defending Gladstone’s policies in Egypt and the Transvaal, presented coercion in Ireland as a way of protecting the poor creditor from the ‘harsh landlord’ and looked forward to a major battle against ‘Toryism’ over the franchise. When the franchise was settled by agreement, he argued that ‘the liberties of Englishmen’ should not be subject to an ‘oligarchy’ governed by the ‘accident of birth’, that Whigs and Tories were concealing the confiscation of the ‘open spaces’ which had destroyed the independent yeomanry, and that Salisbury’s ‘arrogant and monstrous pretensions’ were keeping ‘a portion of our population . . . in a state repugnant to humanity . . . under conditions which made morality almost impossible’. As a minister, Chamberlain took his stand on the caucus, which Tories hated too much to imitate, and on Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign which was an essay in ‘educating the people’. Between the Reform Act of 1884 and the general election of 1885, he found new ways of asserting that a ‘democratic revolution’ could not be accomplished by ‘aristocratic perverts’, that Salisbury was leader of a class which neither ‘toiled’ nor ‘spun’, and that Tories aimed chiefly to preserve their ‘levy’ on the ‘unearned share’ of what other men had added to the country’s wealth. Chamberlain’s radicalism was both populist and conservative. It argued that a German level of rate-support would neutralize a ‘danger to the State’, that graduated taxation would transfer to investors and landowners the burdens borne by farmers, small shopkeepers and ‘struggling professional men’, and that Birmingham interests could be reconciled with the love of the land ‘the Almighty’ had ‘implanted in the human breast’ through an agricultural revival which would prevent unemployed rural labourers flooding the towns to compete with unemployed urban labourers. Chamberlain ‘was not a communist’, did not want to ‘bring things down to a dead level’ and affirmed that ‘the strong . . . and the able’ would always be ‘the first in the race’. In The Radical Programme of 1885 and its associated speeches, ‘platitudes about eternal laws, unvarying causation and the fitness of things’ were described as anachronistic; the poor should be given back the property which had been stolen from them in the past; and the community should alleviate the ‘misery’ and ‘suffering’ which were a disgrace to Christianity and civilization. By the time The Radical Programme was published Chamberlain claimed to have effected a radical turnabout in Salisbury’s policies and, in a ‘critical time’ which would ‘probably settle’ our political history for ‘the whole of the present generation’, made his first statements against Home Rule on the ground ‘that five millions of Irishmen’ had no greater ‘inherent right to govern themselves’ than the ‘five million inhabitants of the metropolis’. The lost leader who spent twenty years as Salisbury’s and Balfour’s ally was the outcome.

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Chamberlain’s arrival as a Unionist was the symbol of a sea-change in English politics as the British Empire, in the sixty years before its eclipse, supplied a scaffolding for a populist, patriotic politics which, though it reflected Ulster’s fear of the Liberal alliance with Catholicism, also reflected its fear of economic backwardness. As a very young man, Chamberlain attacked Bright at the general election of 1859 on the ground that Bright was a pacifist. As an MP and minister, on the other hand, he had typecast Salisbury as a warmonger. It was not until Gladstone drove him out of the Liberal Party that the radical alliance between working-class interests, imperial power politics and civilization came to prevail over Nonconformity. During ten years as an unbeneficed ally of the Conservative Party, Chamberlain abandoned disestablishment in private while continuing to support it in public. He converted reluctant support for the occupation of Egypt (under Gladstone) into the secular claim that the pax Britannica, if conducted purposively, could not only play a civilizing role by ‘breaking up the authority of those who were held to be chiefs among the people’ in West Africa but could also create, in the vast area up to the Zambesi, a major outlet for ‘European enterprise and . . . colonization’. Chamberlain’s empire had three leading features. In India it was authoritarian. In Africa its destiny was to prevent the Dutch ‘stretching out their hands’ to their ‘kindred nation’ in German West Africa. In the colonies of settlement, it included an Anglo-Saxon identity, the God-given memory of ‘the native land’, and the prospect of the ‘crowded population’ of the British Isles achieving a material millennium. In addressing the Anglo-Saxon empire, Chamberlain dwelt on its democratic character and the part which could be played in it by the new Toryism. Not only had Gladstonian Liberalism ‘ceased to be Liberal’ at the same time as the Tory Party had ceased to be Tory, but the English and Scottish peasantries, the ‘industrious’ artisans of the English towns, and ‘the great majority’ of the Irish people, would ‘benefit . . . from the Liberal measures’ which were to be expected from a Tory government. When Salisbury made him Colonial Secretary in 1895, Chamberlain’s rhetoric was about the ‘critical stage’ at which the empire had arrived, its ‘common origin . . . language . . . literature . . . and love of liberty and law’, and the promise it held out of gold, diamonds and an indefinite expansion of the ‘British race’. In other words, he had become the advocate of an ‘Imperial Federation’ which would advance the prosperity and be in tune with the ‘highest sentiments’ of the ‘Anglo-Saxon people’, and would have virtually nothing to do with the interests of historic Dissent. Chamberlain did not advocate a merely aggressive imperialism. He stressed the danger of Britain sinking ‘isolated and separate’ into a ‘fifth-rate power’ and expressed the hope, which the Boers did not reciprocate during his visit

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to South Africa in 1903, that Milner would build on Britain’s affinities with the Dutch to create a ‘white man’s country’ enjoying ‘unity of life . . . flag . . . fleet . . . and throne’ in the ‘freest and most powerful of the Empires which the world had ever seen’. After he left the Balfour cabinet in September 1903 in the wake of his tariff reform speech four months earlier, Chamberlain became the free-standing advocate of an empire which was not only at a turning-point, like the turningpoint at which Washington had appeared in the United States and Bismarck in Germany, but was also an institution particularly suitable to the Conservative and Unionist Party with its freedom from dogmatism and openness to the idea that ‘the principle of a tariff’ was ‘part of a system for the elevation of the working-classes’. After 1895, Chamberlain was an imperfectly converted Radical who had intuited that Cobdenism was ‘stagnant’ and ‘retrograde’, that Toryism was so much changed that co-operation was possible and that the Nonconformist issue was capable only of wounding, as it was to do in Wales in 1912. Chamberlain became in effect a Conservative and had a profound effect on the Conservative ethos. But neither he nor his sons became Anglicans. In the course of a significant and exemplary career, W. J. Ashley did. III Ashley’s7 father was a journeyman-hatter who lived in Southwark. Ashley was at a Wesleyan elementary school and St Olave’s Grammar School before going first for a few weeks to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then as a Brackenbury Scholar to Balliol where he read history. Though Jowett befriended him in minor ways, Ashley was not part of fashionable Balliol and was unable to read Greats after reading history because he was short of money. After a period as a history coach, he was elected to a Fellowship of Lincoln College, from which in the 1890s he became successively Professor of Political Economy at Toronto and of Economic History at Harvard. On the foundation of Birmingham University, he was made Professor of Commerce. At about the same time, he became a Unionist on the ground that the Liberal Party was clinging to an outdated version of Cobden and Adam Smith where Conservative divisions left room for protection, imperial preference and social reform. Both before and after the First World War, 17

Sir William James Ashley (1860–1927), educated St Olave’s Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of Lincoln College. Professor at Toronto, 1888–92; at Harvard, 1892–1901 and at Birmingham, 1902–27. Author of James and Philip van Artevelde, 1883; The Early History of the English Woollen Industry, 1887; An Introduction to Economic History and Theory, 1888; Surveys, Historic and Economic, 1897; The Tariff Problem, 1903; The Progress of The German Working Class, 1904; The Economic Organization of England, 1914; The War and its Economic Aspects, 1914; Citizenship, 1917; In Troublous Times, 1920; Freedom and Service, 1922; An Open Door, 1922; and The Christian Outlook, 1925.

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he was a member of party and governmental committees, becoming an enthusiastic Baldwinian in the 1920s and displaying what Baldwin in the preface to Ashley’s biography called a ‘surprisingly open mind’ on practical questions. When young, Ashley had been a Socialist, with a high degree of classconsciousness and a class-structured analysis of the past. His Lothian prize essay of 1882 was sodden with class-feeling and showed how the lower classes in fourteenth-century Flanders, so far from being a disreputable residuum, had been an ‘intelligible’ advance ‘in the “world’s struggle”’ for ‘political rights’. Though the young Ashley was a Socialist, his Socialism was Fabian and had no interest in dynamite, barricades and revolution. He discerned socialization in the existing facts of society, looked forward in a hundred years’ time to ‘fundamental changes in social organization’ which could not be brought about in ten, and drew out the implications of the view he found in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin and Thomas Arnold that, ‘from the dawn of history’, society ‘had never been entirely individualistic’. Ashley had no time for the idealization of rural life. But he looked forward to full employment, trade unionism and welfare economics providing ‘an expression of the will of the community’, like the expression of will which the canonists had tried to impose on the mediaeval community, and he followed Green and Toynbee in assuming that the Industrial Revolution could be subjected to moral and spiritual control. Ashley was an undergraduate at the end of Stubbs’s period as Regius Professor and had acquired some of the long-term professional assumptions which Stubbs made about historical writing. His main professional writings, however, unlike Stubbs’s, included conceptional discussions of economic history and the history of economic thought, and books, essays and pamphlets about commercial education, economic policy and the nature of economics. In all these areas, he made economic history significant by means of an efficiently integrated combination of Toynbee, Jevons and Leslie, of Gierke, Schmöller, Roscher, and the historical economics he had acquired during visits to Germany, and of Seebohm’s and de Coulanges’s scepticism about the ‘freedom’ of England’s Teutonic villages. Ashley was an evolutionary relativist in Spencerian, Hegelian, Darwinian and Comtean senses, pointing relativism at all dogmas and aiming to dissolve them in the process. He assumed that mankind needed assistance in order to arrive at a better future and identified himself increasingly with the responsibilities of power. In middle age he discovered that the conceptions he had advocated when young had permeated very generally, that history had become ‘collective and institutional’ rather than ‘individual and psychological’ and that society was feeling its way towards a ‘corporate organization of industry’ which would be neither wholly socialistic nor wholly capitalistic and, with the withering-away of competition, would provide a practical compromise between the two. As an Anglican and modern Churchman in his

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fifties and sixties, he connected modern Conservatism with Christianity in much the way in which, as a young Baptist or lapsed Baptist-Fabian, he had connected historical economics with canonistic economics. Ashley’s father had been an admirer of Spurgeon and a worshipper at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Ashley’s enthusiasm, however, did not survive baptism at the age of fifteen. His churchgoing had become eclectic before his arrival in Oxford; Oxford put question-marks against Christianity. After a long period in which he was sceptical about belief, he began to be sceptical about unbelief. In rescuing himself from unbelief, Ashley found an ‘explanation’ of the ‘mystery outside ourselves’ in an ‘ultimate Unity’ which, assuming a ‘prompting inspiring in-dwelling something which brought about moral growth’, must itself have been ‘moral’. This ‘something’ could properly be called ‘God’ and, though Ashley was not sure in what ultimate sense God was good, he was sure enough for the conduct of life. For the last thirty years of his life, Ashley was an Anglican; but his Anglicanism, though regular in observance, was a replica of the woolly religion of his generation. He thought of Christianity as ethical rather than dogmatic and, while resenting Idealist condescension towards the poor, as the son of a small tradesman might, made it his chief aim to teach the sons of Birmingham businessmen, what Green would have wanted them taught in Birmingham University’s Department of Commerce, that material prosperity was not the end of life and that States existed for the sake of the good life. Ashley respected Hort, Lighfoot and Gore for reconciling scholarship and Christianity. But he played down clerical Christianity and the uniqueness of Christ and expected scientific employment to create classes of men who would reject any religion which ‘represented Divine Power as suspending . . . natural law’. He wanted to free Christianity from ‘views of the divine nature’ which were ‘dishonouring to God, . . . untaught by . . . Christ and . . . unacceptable to the understanding’; he drew sharp contrasts between the liberty of Adam Smith and the Christian liberty of the New Testament; and he associated Christianity’s engagement in social improvement with Christ’s refusal to ‘give up the world as bad’. Ashley believed that Churches had been made politically redundant by the moralization of States but argued, in relation to States, that Christians should walk warily, maintaining an independent ‘stronghold’ in ‘conscience’ while avoiding Hildebrandinianism, and using State power to further an ‘active and unselfish care for the public weal’. In religion, he was an optimist as well as a modernist. He wanted the Churches to keep hold of ‘our young people in an age of personal liberty and scientific education’ by letting in ‘more light and air . . . [and] more of the language and thought of our time’. He ‘did not believe that the great body of our people had ever been as moral’ as in 1922,

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or had so completely understood ‘the essential idea of Christianity’. It was not only ‘our task’ to Work out the Beast And let the Ape and Tiger die . . .

It was also ‘astonishingly appropriate’ that St Paul had had a ‘prophetic vision of the time when “we shall all come into a perfect man” . . . in the full measure of development which belong[ed] to Christ’. More probably than anyone else who made the transition, Ashley embodied the transition from antinomian Dissent via a canonistic version of responsible Socialism to a latitudinarian Baldwinianism for which Dissent was a dead political issue. Dissent remained an element in party politics at least up to the beginning of World War I and many Dissenting assumptions were to enter into Anglican theology subsequently. But it was Chamberlain who prepared the way for the political emasculation of Dissent, Armageddon which made Dissent spiritually marginal and Lloyd George who, from beyond his own grave, danced on the grave of its ostentatious virtue.

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It is exceedingly difficult nowadays to inculcate into people any conception of genuine religion . . . In the psyche of educated people . . . there is only a big, black hole. (C. G. Jung to Pastor J. Schattauer, 20 February 1933, in A. Adler, ed., C. G. Jung: Letters, 1973 I, p. 118) In England it never seems to occur to me that I am in a Christian country. (R. C. Zaehner, Address Delivered on Founder’s Day 1969 at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, reprinted in Evolution in Religion 1971, p. 115) It is not possible for the controlling laws of the spiritual substratum which in so far as it is known to us in consciousness is essentially non-metrical, to be analogous to the differential and other mathematical equations of physics which are meaningless unless they are fed with metrical quantities. So that the crudest anthropomorphic image of a spiritual deity can scarcely be so wide of the truth as one conceived in terms of metrical equations. (A. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1928, 1929 edn, pp. 281–2)

It was obvious to most of the thinkers of the last three chapters that Christianity was ceasing to be dominant, was unlikely to regain its predominance and would have an intellectually uncertain future. To some of the Christian thinkers to be discussed in this chapter, it seemed that a ‘rational’ rescue-operation might have to defer to a ‘mystical’ rescue-operation. As a supplement to dogma, and a way of avoiding dogma, mysticism in England in the last century and a half has been both aspiration and bolt-hole. It was aspiration in Knowles (austerely), in Needham and Zaehner (synthetically), in Inge (devotionally) and with an internal power in Shorthouse and Eddington. It was a bolt-hole in Kingsley and Max Müller, and a liberating bolt-hole in Aldous Huxley, the drug-based mysticism of the 1960s and 1970s and the Jungian paperback literature of the 1970s and 1980s.1 Evelyn Underhill’s mysticism was a downmarket version of von Hügel’s, but resembled Knowles’s, Zaehner’s and Inge’s in being associated with ecclesiastical religion and avoiding the spiritual free-for-all which mysticism has become since 1960. I Von Hügel was thirty years older than Underhill, had the wider learning and the more conspectual intelligence and was important in bringing Underhill 11

For Kingsley, Max Müller and Inge see above, chapters 1, 2 and 8. For Knowles see Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, I, pp. 129–55.

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out of the ghetto of subjective mysticism. Von Hügel, however, though a better mind and an important influence on Anglican thinking, was so much more recherché a thinker than she was that, for present purposes, she represents better the mysticism they both represented. Underhill2 was confirmed at school but encountered little religion as she grew up in a middle-class Tory family. In her late twenties, she wrote ‘spiritual’ novels before moving from agnosticism to religion via art and culture. At the time at which she met von Hügel, R. H. Benson and her future husband, she would almost certainly have become a Roman Catholic but for Pope Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism. According to her own account, Underhill’s first mystical experiences were ‘Quakerlike’, were experiences of God and remained so until von Hügel ‘compelled’ her to experience Christ in the 1920s. In the main part of her life, she used public speaking, private counselling and books and journalism to show that the ‘instinct for transcendence’ was ‘latent’ in all men and that the great mystics, however ‘arcane’, were ‘the brethren’ and ‘heroes’ of ordinary men. Though Underhill recognized ‘social service’ as ‘a fundamental duty’, she was out of sympathy with exclusively social Christianity, denied that ‘mere . . . material betterment’ was a sufficient substitute for ‘spiritual acts’, and demanded of every preacher of the Gospel that he should know ‘the highest spiritual values’ as ‘a living, burning fire’ within him. In writing in this way, Underhill was correcting a distortion, not rejecting a fashion. She welcomed the death of Victorian individualism, accused the Church of England of failing to give corporate expression to Christian ideals and called for ‘a real social repentance’ which would feel the deepest unease at ‘acquisitiveness’, ‘materialism’, ‘economic insecurity’, ‘the present system of State punishment’, the conditions of life in the East End of London and the ‘inner nature of international diplomacy and finance’. As an apologist for mysticism, Underhill defended it against rationalistic disparagement and dissociated it from the ‘visions and voices’ which ‘the best mystics’ had been slow to accept. She denied that ‘abnormal perceptions’ were aspects of ‘hysteria or disease’ and was no more willing to allow ‘ill-health’ and ‘modifications of the physical organism’ to discredit them than Kant’s or Beethoven’s hypochondria discredited philosophy and music. She took with the utmost seriousness the ‘unusual . . . richness’ of the ‘tracts of personality’ 12

Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), educated at home and King’s College for Women, London. Author of A Ba-Lambs Ballad Book, 1902; The Grey World, 1904; The Lost World, 1907; The Column of Dust, 1907; Mysticism, 1911; The Path of the Eternal Wisdom, 1911; ed. The Cloud of Unknowing, 1912; The Spiral Way, 1912; The Mystic Way, 1913; Practical Mysticism, 1914; Mysticism and War, 1915; Ruysbroeck, 1915; Jacopone da Todi, 1919; The Essentials of Mysticism, 1920; The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 1922; ed. The Scale of Perfection, 1923; The Mysteries of the Church, 1925; Man and the Supernatural, 1927; The House of the Soul, 1929; Mixed Pastures, 1933; The School of Charity, 1934; Worship, 1936; The Spiritual Life, 1937; The Church and the War, 1940 and The Fruits of the Spirit, 1942.

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which lay below the level of ‘normal consciousness’ and the presence ‘among the great mystics’ supremely of that movement which occurred when genius allowed the ‘sluices to open’ and ‘the waters of truth’ to rise from the ‘deep levels’ to the ‘crust of consciousness’. In the same mood, she challenged what she believed to be the rejections of mysticism by ‘almost every view of Christianity’ which had been fashionable since 1860, and she asserted in opposition that Christ, St Paul and St John had from the very beginning made mysticism central. What Underhill meant by mysticism was a ‘tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order’, a ‘science and art’ which had not changed over the centuries and the ‘establishing of communication’ with the ‘immaterial and final Being’. Mysticism dominated the lives of those who experienced it. It was ‘the true line of development of the highest form of human consciousness’, and not only was it as different from magic, the occult and ‘psychical’ phenomena as it was from ‘aesthetic sentimentality’, it was also an action of ‘the whole self’ which, though it required ‘a nervous organization of the artistic type’, was concerned solely with the wish to ‘live . . . in union with . . . the One’, to love reality through ‘pain . . . beauty and . . . artistic satisfaction’, and to lead past ‘normal consciousness’, the ‘unreal world of appearance’ and ‘the neat dialectic of the Schools’, to that ‘science of ultimates’ (quoting Patmore) which concentrated all its ‘forces’ towards a ‘Supernatural Object’ conceived of as a ‘living Person’. Early Underhill littered her pages with Nietzsche, Driesch and Vitalism, with William James and Pragmatism and with Bergson’s view of the intellect as merely a ‘specialized aspect of self’. She also littered them with Plato, Plotinus, Blake, Whitman, Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, Tauler, Boehme and William Law, underlining the parallels between their views and the views of these others, and suggesting the prospect of a fusion between them in the future. Whether Underhill’s mysticism was real or illusion is not a question we need to address. Here it is sufficient that between 1920 and 1940, she met needs which were not met by conventional orthodoxy, and, in doing so, took pains to make mysticism compatible with psychology’s treatment of the repressed or disintegrated personality. Underhill aimed to bring mediaeval and patristic mysticism up-to-date, to make room for the ‘transfiguration of character’ which was necessary when ‘a life immersed in the stream of history’ was ‘yet poised on the eternal’ and to extract from Maritain and Brémond the implications of the belief that ‘contemplation’ was ‘the self’s method of stretching out . . . beyond . . . reason’ towards that ‘mysterious Other’ which gave ‘meaning to life’. Underhill began with ‘psychic energy’ as an ‘undifferentiated directive power’, the psyche as a ‘unity’ which could no longer be divided into ‘intellect, soul and spirit’ and the real self as the ‘whole man of impulse, thought

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and desire’ which it was religion’s business to ‘capture and domesticate for God’. It was, she believed, a Christian as well as a psychological insight that ‘the jungle and the Stone Age’ were still with us, that ‘instinct’ in psychology and ‘original sin’ in Christianity were the same thing, and that the ‘profound disharmony . . . in most civilized men’ between the ‘impulsive’ and the ‘rational’ life could not be overcome by writing the past out of existence. Sin was an atavistic conservatism which survived the conversion of the savage to civilization. The remedy for sin was neither a ‘lofty aloofness’ from human failings nor a repressive asceticism which ‘disguised’ the ‘cravings’ it was ‘supposed to kill’, but a ‘mental gymnastic’ in which ‘the wild beast’ was sublimated, its ‘energies’ harnessed, and egoistic ambitions, anxieties and desires ‘released’ and ‘redirected’ from ‘lower to higher levels’. The remedy for sin, in other words, was not the acquisition of ‘new beliefs’ (or new dogmas) but ‘conversion . . . of the instinctive life’, the gearing of ‘psychic energy to new and higher correspondences’, and that overflowing of the spiritual into ‘every department of the self’ which alone could prevent the ‘spiritual impulse’ degenerating into ‘specialized feelings’. Underhill expressed no doubt about the reality of the ‘mystical state’ in which ‘the Absolute flowed in’, the images of sense were ‘closed out’, and the soul saw in the ‘perpetual negations’ the mystic gazed at in the darkness of ‘the . . . Abyss’ aspects of the ‘face of perfect Love’. There was, however, she believed, a ‘great gulf’ between ‘the mystic’ and ‘the world’; it was difficult for the mystic to rival the modern composer in conveying his ‘unspeakable experience’ to mankind; and if, in Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale and General Gordon, mysticism had generated practical ‘energies’, it was only really in Péguy that ‘courage and hope’, want of ‘intellectual subtlety’ and an ‘assured’ relation to the ‘supernatural order’, had been rooted in the ‘homely, everyday faith of the past’. To ‘practical’ men Underhill addressed a call, through both ‘heroic’ and ‘ordinary’ action, to bring ‘the Real Presence’ out of its ‘hiddenness’, to make life both a ‘theophany’ and a ‘redemption of the world’, and to ‘actualize within . . . time and space’ the ‘holy . . . energy’ which worked for ‘mercy, order and beauty’. It is impossible to know whether ‘practical men’ were convinced, how many of them believed that mysticism ‘emancipated’ them from ‘the fetters of appearance’ and the ‘crowd-spirit’s tyrannical consciousness’, and whether for any of them mystical experiences were objects which they had been pursuing vaguely and imperfectly at ‘every moment of their conscious lives’ and intensely and thoroughly ‘in all the more valid moments of their lives’. Underhill wished to bring the infinite closer to the finite, the ‘transcendental’ closer to the ‘homely’, and the ‘contemplative’ closer to the ‘practical’. In the process she built on Tractarian sanctity, order and sacramentality, as in Worship (1936), and reminded the religious ‘rank and file’ of the ‘austerity . . .

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and obedience’ which human nature could acquire once it was ‘utterly selfgiven’ to God’s purposes. In Eddington there was a different and less detailed affirmation of mysticism’s importance. II Eddington3 was the son of a Quaker headmaster and, like Pater, was of partly Dutch ancestry. He was born in 1882, was at school in Somerset, and was then at Owen’s College, Manchester before going to Trinity College, Cambridge. After a period at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, he became Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge at the age of thiry-one. Until he was forty, Eddington was a mathematical astronomer whose brilliant technical output was to continue right up to his death in 1946. With the publication of Space, Time and Gravitation, he entered on a second career as exponent of the significance of ‘the new physics’ for modern thought and religion. In this Eddington was associated by tension, as well as by agreement, with Jeans. Jeans, however, had only a marginal interest in religion and no discernible interest in Christianity. Here we shall follow Eddington’s attempt to show how compatible mathematical astronomy and the new physics were with religion in general and with Quakerism in particular. Mathematical astronomy had had an extraordinarily rapid development in Eddington’s lifetime and, as he claimed in the Gifford Lectures in 1927 and the Swarthmore Lectures in 1928, had not only made a bonfire of the mechanism, materialism and causality which ‘every physicist of repute’ had believed that he believed in previously, but had also made it easier than previously for science to end its conflict with religion. Eddington assumed that religion needed justification against the ‘moral materialism’ which ‘despised’ it more even than against the ‘scientific materialism’ which explained it away. He denied that ‘material forces’ had been the most potent shapers of the ‘ant-heap of humanity’, asserted that ‘the soul’ had in it a ‘yearning towards God’ which had been the root of ‘mysticism’ throughout the ages, and examined the implications for ‘the average person’ of the ‘revolutionary’ transformation which Einstein, Minkowski, Rutherford, Heisenberg and Böhr had effected in conceptions of the physical world. 13

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944), educated small school in Somerset, Owen’s College, Manchester and Trinity College, Cambridge. Greenwich Observatory, 1906–13; Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, 1913–44. Author of Stellar Movements and the Structure of the Universe, 1914; Space, Time and Gravitation, 1920; The Mathematical Theory of Relativity, 1923; The Internal Constitution of The Stars, 1926; Stars and Atoms, 1927; The Nature of The Physical World, 1928; Science and The Unseen World, 1929; The Expanding Universe, 1933; New Pathways in Science, 1935; Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons, 1936; and The Philosophy of Physical Science, 1939.

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In Space, Time and Gravitation, Eddington confined himself to Einstein and Minkowski and in the concluding ‘philosophical’ chapter about ‘the meaning of Nature’, did little more than identify as man’s the ‘strange footprint’ that relativity theory had found ‘on the shores of the Unknown’. In his Gifford Lectures six years later, his argument was broader and deeper. In The Nature of the Physical World, Eddington took on board not only relativity but also quantum theory, the indeterminacy principle and Rutherford’s ‘dissolution of matter’, which was more ‘revolutionary’ than Einstein’s revolution and the most important change ‘in our view of matter since the time of Democritus’. The total ensemble involved ‘the downfall of classical physics’ and abandonment of the idea that ‘things’ had a ‘solid substance’. It led on from the ‘void’ left in both ‘the atom’ and ‘the interstellar spaces’ to the physical world as merely ‘the skeleton of reality’, to the ‘second law of thermodynamics’ as an ‘incongruous mixture of theology and statistics’, and to the mathematician’s and astronomer’s account of the world as being so ‘abstract’, so wanting in ‘actuality’, and so unconcerned with results except in confirmation of hypotheses, that it had become ‘symbolical’, even ‘supernatural’. Eddington was at pains to explain that, even though the new ensemble might put an end to the conflict between science and religion, he was not using relativity-, quantum- or atomic-theory as vindications of religion since such vindications would be ‘swept away in the next scientific revolution’. A chapter entitled ‘Science and Mysticism’ compared the soullessness supposedly characteristic of science’s mathematical expression with the ‘intimate . . . spiritual’ knowledge which was expressed in religion, poetry and art, insisted that ‘passages written in mathematical symbols’ could ‘vie in sublimity’ with a poem of Rupert Brooke, and associated the impalpability of the new physics with a measure of reality no less spiritual than the impalpability of literature. It was the ‘rearrangement’ of space, time and matter effected by the new physics, the porousness that it attributed to both the atom and the solar system, and the difficulty that now surrounded understanding of the ‘physical’ aspect of the world which proved that things were ‘not what they seemed’, that measurement (of distance, for example) was not what it seemed, and that the connection between the ‘symbolic world of physics’ and ‘the world of familiar experience’ was difficult to understand. It was the fact that both kinds of knowledge were ‘transmitted’ from the ‘central clearing-station’ along the ‘nerves’ to the seat of consciousness which made it plausible to argue that an ‘instinctive image-building’ went on not only in acquiring ‘intimate knowledge’ but also in acquiring physics’ knowledge of the physical world. What Eddington was saying was that there were not ‘two avenues of approach’ but ‘only one’, that everything was ‘mental’ (i.e. was the ‘direct knowledge of mind’), and that the approach through physics led only into a ‘cycle’, where we ‘run round and round like a chicken chasing its tail’ and ‘never reach the world-stuff at all’.

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Eddington knew that the ‘matter-of-fact physicist’ would doubt the existence of a ‘censorship . . . higher . . . than science could supply’. His statements of the opposite view achieved a culminating force in a long paragraph in chapter 13, where the ‘crudest anthropomorphic image of a spiritual deity’ could ‘scarcely be so wide of the truth as one conceived in terms of metrical equations’.

Eddington was against the ‘imperialism of science’, probed searchingly at the ‘halo’ that science claimed for itself and asked for the validation of the ‘impulse’ which set science forth on its ‘voyage of discovery’. In the end he validated the impulse and the voyage as aspects both of man’s nature and of man’s wish ‘to affirm the reality of the external world’. But he made three qualifications – that those who began ‘the search for truth’ from ‘consciousness as the seat of self-knowledge’ were ‘just as much facing the hard facts of experience’ as those who began by reading . . . spectroscopes and micrometers’; that ‘any raising of the question of reality in its transcendental sense’ led to envisaging man as conscious of purposes and responsibilities to which ‘the external world was subordinate’; and that the search for truth could not be satisfied without ‘the . . . hypothesis that the quest and all that was reached by it were of worth in the eyes of an Absolute Valuer’. Eddington made it plain that the capacity for religion was a natural human capacity which only a deviant phase of intellectuality had obscured. His reaffirmation, however, had the disabling Quaker characteristic, which was also a disabling latitudinarian characteristic, of disengaging from dogma and creed. Since these were large areas of historic religion, about which Eddington did not wish to know, we must ask what it was that he did wish to know. In the Gifford Lectures, Eddington had had ‘no impulse’ to defend any religion except ‘mystical religion’ which, though it had been guilty of neurotic extravagances and had distanced itself from ‘daily life’ in its more arcane and theological forms in the past, had nevertheless to be understood ‘as a commonplace matter of ordinary life’, in which theology was a ‘skeleton’ rather than a proof of reality and lacked the ‘inner sense of values’ and ‘intimate response of the spirit’ which were the ‘central point of religious experience’. In describing the new cosmology, Eddington was cautious about associating it with God, and even more cautious about viewing it as working more ‘to the glory of God’ than ‘the traditional story’ did. He bypassed the argument between vitalists and mechanists, and used geology to show how nature had made every ‘possible mistake’ before arriving at man. Insofar as he confirmed religion, he deferred confirmation until the electrical particles which had been ‘widely diffused in the primeval chaos’ had ‘come together’ in the ‘complexity of a human being’ and had developed the unique characteristic of combining

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‘consciousness’ with the ‘scurrying atoms and electric charges’ which constituted the brain. Eddington sought assurance that ‘the unseen world’ to which the soul was ‘reaching out’ was ‘not an illusion’. But no such assurance would be supplied by conventional proofs of God’s existence or by the imputation of a ‘universal creative spirit’ behind ‘the workings of the physical universe’. Something more was needed – not so much the revelation of a life that was ‘lived nineteen hundred years ago’ (which he dodged in The Swarthmore Lectures more even than in the Gifford Lectures) but ‘the revelation’ implied in the ‘indwelling of the divine spirit in the life of man’. About this Eddington made three points – that any feeling the physicist or mathematician might have about theology’s ‘indefiniteness’ and ‘lack of coherence’ was matched by the ‘indefiniteness’ and ‘lack of coherence’ of biology and psychology; that the ‘act of faith’ involved in the ‘determination to use our eyes’ in studying ‘the visible universe’ was matched by the ‘act of faith’ through which the mystic recognized ‘the vistas of a world outside space and time’; and that Quakerism paralleled science’s emphasis on ‘seeking’ rather than ‘finding’, its distaste for the ‘clamorous voice’ that went with ‘finding’ (i.e. dogma and creed), and its belief in provisionality as the essential feature of its discoveries. In the most positive section of Science and the Unseen World, the dominant ideas were the Inner Light, the similarity between the ‘building of the scientific world out of the symbols of the mathematician’ and the ‘building of the spiritual world out of the symbols taken from our own personalities’, and the certainty that this latter would supply a far ‘surer’ religion than credal or dogmatic religion could supply. Eddington had a boundless intellectual vitality which enabled him to be an outstanding successor of the nineteenth-century exponents of science, while disentangling science from their narrowing conception of religion. Yet his conception of religion was in its own way narrowing, was confined to the internal dialogue of consciousness with itself and had no sense of the problematical grandeur of a public, credal or dogmatic religion. We may sympathize with the Quaker desire to derive assurance from the internal process by which the mind had created the world of symbols. We may equally well find the defensiveness portentous and disabling. Even Needham, for all his peculiarities, was not so unsatisfactory. III Needham4 died at the age of ninety-five after the most remarkable academic career in twentieth-century England. His memorial will be Science and 14

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (1900–95), educated Oundle School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (Fellow, 1924–95 and Master, 1966–76). Ed. Science, Religion and Reality, 1925; author of Man a Machine, 1927; Materialism and Religion, 1929; The Sceptical Biologist, 1929; Chemical Embryology, 1931; The Great

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Civilization in China which ranks with Toynbee’s Study of History, Frazer’s Golden Bough and Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex among the monuments of liberal scholarship, and, like all such monuments, drives a small number of ideas about thought, politics, knowledge and religion through an extraordinary range of material. The questions that arise are about the continuity between the vatic quality with which Needham surrounded his interest in China after the 1940s and the vatic quality of his interest in biochemistry, science, religion and politics before the 1940s. At about the time at which he began four years as Scientific Counsellor to the British Embassy in Chungking in 1942, Needham had published a large scientific work and what were to be his last research articles. Thereafter, almost all his writing was to be an application to science, religion and society in China of a doctrine which had originally been applied to science, religion and society in England. When volume I of Science and Civilization in China appeared in 1954, it described China’s economic geography and political history, and the contacts which China had had with India, Islam and Western Europe up to the fifteenth century. It also announced the structure at which Needham was to aim from volume II onwards in describing relations between Chinese achievements in the sciences and the religious, philosophical and sociological framework of Chinese thought and life. This announcement was followed more or less as planned, though some of the volumes mushroomed and others were restructured in the process of composition. The concluding volume has not been published and may not have been written. It is unlikely, however, that it will alter the picture of which Needham made many statements not only in Science and Civilization in China but also in The Grand Titration, Within the Four Seas and Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West. What Needham brought to China was his already stated belief that Europeans in general, and scientists and Christians in particular, were suffused with spiritual pride, that European religion was objectionably supernatural and that scientific wisdom was not necessarily superior to religious, ethical and sociological wisdom. In explaining the uncongenial fact that science had not developed in China as it had in Europe since the sixteenth century, he was led on to the more congenial question, why it had developed in China before the sixteenth century. One thing that was not apparent in Needham’s public persona in the early 1940s was any special sympathy for Chinese Communism as distinct from a Amphibium, 1931; Order and Life, 1936; (as H. Holorenshaw) The Levellers and The English Revolution, 1939; The Nazi Attack on International Science, 1941; Biochemistry and Morphogenesis, 1942; Time; The Refreshing River, 1943; Chinese Science, 1945; History is on Our Side, 1946; Some Thoughts About China, 1946; Science and Civilization in China, 1954–84, The Grand Titration, 1969; Within The Four Seas, 1969; and Clerks and Craftsmen in China and The West, 1970.

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sympathy for Communism generally. Whatever his role as a Cambridge Communist in the 1930s, his wartime mission to China was a mission of liaison with the Chiang-Kai-Shek régime. It was not until his retirement from government service and the retreat to Taiwan in 1949 that he made public judgements against Chiang-Kai-Shek’s perversion of the 1911 revolution, the subjection of ‘Christian democracy’ to the ‘landowner-banker-comprador group’ and the failure of the ‘new fascism’ to deserve support against the Maoist revolution. These condemnations then merged into the condemnations Needham was to utter over the following forty years – of the American refusal to recognize Communist China, of American bombing of North Korean industrial plants during the Korean War, and of American saturation bombing during the Vietnamese War, as examples of the ‘dominance-psychology’ of the West and its aggression towards the natural development of Chinese culture. These arguments assumed that in China economic development was a foreign importation, that Communism was by no means as antipathetic to the modern Chinese as it was to English and American Conservatives, and that the Chinese people, in ‘winning the civil war’ and willing the attainment of Socialism ‘at the earliest possible time’, had been extending the ‘cohesiveness’, anti-individualism and feeling for ‘mutual aid’ characteristic of ‘bureaucratic feudalism’ and the historic Chinese mind. Needham spelt out the reasons for thinking of Chinese Communism as the heir to Chinese history – that peasant and, to some extent, classical China agreed with Marx that practice and theory, or manual and intellectual labour, should be united, and that Communism was likely to adapt its theories to the ‘concrete conditions of Chinese society’, the absence of a ‘military’ or ‘expansive’ ethos, and the Confucian concern for the ‘juristic security of the individual’. At the same time he spelt out the reasons for admiring the Communist régime – that the rural communes of the late 1950s were trying to recapture that ‘social solidarity’ which had been a ‘motivating force’ in Chinese society for two millennia; that the Cultural Revolution was a natural reaction against the ‘capitalist tendencies’ of the early 1960s which had needed an ‘altruistic social morality’ to resist them; and that, in the age of artificial intelligence, biological engineering and atomic physics, Europeans and Americans had something to learn from the ‘saints and sages’ of China. Even the Chinese interest in acquiring atomic weapons did not dent the belief Needham expressed to the student revolutionaries of the 1960s that ‘Scientism’ was a ‘Euro-American disease’ which China had never experienced, that Mao TseTung was a ‘social and ethical philosopher’ rather than a ‘military man’, and that it might well be China’s world role to ‘restore humanistic values based on all the forms of human experience’.

Needham’s mother was the author of the famous song, ‘Nellie Dean’; his father was a distinguished doctor and an Anglo-Catholic of Quaker sympa-

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thies. Needham himself was at school at Oundle during the headmastership of F. W. Sanderson, who was a friend and admirer of H. G. Wells. After brief wartime service in the Navy, he read the natural sciences Tripos at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow in 1924 and of which, apart from ten years as Master, he was to be a Fellow for the rest of his life, including the short period he spent at UNESCO after the end of World War II. As to the provenance of his thoughts and the early direction of his mind, Needham specified many influences.5 His mixture, however, was his own, and was displayed in four stages: through the two hundred or so technical papers and four large volumes which he published about biochemistry between 1925 and 1942; through the sketch he gave of the nature of religious and scientific enquiry up to 1931; through the account that he gave in the 1930s of the nature of life and biological structure, and through the insertion he achieved, also in the 1930s, of an ethical, political and sociological doctrine which had not really been present previously. Chemical Embryology, Biochemistry and Morphogenesis and the biochemical papers, were based ultimately on research done by Needham himself or by other biochemists in the two or three decades before he went to China in 1942. It was only in informal essays and books that he contextualized biochemistry, confined it to its proper sphere and insisted that it should be conducted, indeed was being conducted, by almost all existing research workers, according to methods which were mathematical and mechanistic. These adjectives were negative and critical. They reminded ‘philosophically-minded biologists’, like Haldane and Driesch, that the invention of neovitalism in order to explain ‘those aspects of animal life most difficult to deal with psychochemically’ had ignored the ‘vast army of physiologists, zoologists, embryologists and biochemists’ who had been ‘getting on with the job’ in laboratories and professional journals, and who had not only ignored ‘teleology’, ‘entelechies’ and ‘hormic’ urges but had also treated man as a machine who had to be dealt with ‘under . . . the headings of number, measure, weight, intensity or capacity’. Needham’s ultimate conclusion in the 1920s was a criticism of the ‘overspecialization’ of ‘philosophically-naïve scientists’ and a reminder, by reference to Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne, that, unless they fertilized themselves more widely, scientists would be unlikely to establish anything more than ad hoc hypotheses. His immediate conclusions were more constricting: that scientific activity was an ‘abstraction’ (i.e. the result of the decision to consider experience mathematically and mechanistically), that the knowledge acquired by research since the seventeenth century had been acquired therefore by 15

Among them Gowland Hopkins in biochemistry, Collingwood, Inge, Noel, Bishop Barnes, F. C. Burkitt, E. G. Browne and Otto in religion, and James Ward, Whitehead, Blake, Lotze, Mach, Havelock Ellis, Bernal, D. H. Lawrence, Carpenter, H. G. Wells and Shaw intellectually.

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‘legitimate methodological distortion’, and that laboratory research, though applicable to ‘any phenomenon whatever’, did not correspond to ‘external nature’ and was a Kantian subjectivation or Vaihingerian fiction – a ‘special . . . department of the human spirit’ – which need not in the short run be affected, as Butterfield and Oakeshott6 were saying about history at the same time in The Whig Interpretation of History and Experience and Its Modes, by anything the philosopher might say to ‘explain it or to explain it away’. These conclusions, the outcome of continuous research and reflection on research in a highly successful enterprise – the Cambridge Biochemistry Laboratory – included an emphasis on both the disjunction and the compatibility between scientific activity and philosophical, religious and aesthetic activity. There was virtually nothing about Freud or psychoanalysis, the task of the future, having protected the abstraction suitable to laboratory research, being to build on existing demolitions of naturalistic materialism, not by concocting ‘immiscible’ mixtures like ‘Scientific Deism’ or ‘the Religion of Science’, but by protecting religion, art and philosophy against science. Needham was an Anglo-Catholic and spent a number of years testing his vocation to be a priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd in Cambridge. It is important, however, that he was a liturgical Anglo-Catholic, and that his Anglo-Catholicism did not exclude scepticism about the ‘direct telephonic communication with Omniscience’ that he found in the ‘mental prisons . . . inhabited by the theologian and the mystic’. Needham agreed that philosophy and theology could have indirect effects on scientific assumptions. But he aimed in the first place to effect a defensive separation, denying scientific authority to ‘theologians . . . mystics and . . . idealist philosophers’, while affirming the existence of a vast field of thought and practice in which scientific abstraction was inoperative and man could legitimately be understood as ‘Organism’, ‘Personality’ or ‘Child of God and . . . Inheritor of the City of Heaven’. Needham seemed sometimes to affirm that religion, art and philosophy were merely different from science and not ‘higher’. At other times he borrowed Mallock’s view that for ‘theologic religion’ nothing which was important ‘could be proved by science’. He added, moreover, that the retreat from philosophical naturalism had been matched by a retreat from objectivity in religion, as interest in mysticism had revived, the individual had replaced the Church as the focus of attention and psychology and pragmatism had created a ‘more subjective standpoint’ than had been possible in the nineteenth century. And since not only science but also religion had been both ‘subjectivated’ and given an infusion of ‘humility’ in the previous thirty years, each had become more compatible with the other in their search for that ‘unmoveable . . . reality . . . behind the changing show of facts’. 16

The latter a friend and colleague of Needham at Caius.

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These propositions, elaborated with help from Wittgenstein, Holbein, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, issued in the claim that methodological materialism presented no obstacle to prayer and worship, that religious experience, though as natural and necessary to man as singing or walking, was no more ‘in touch with the real’ than scientific experience was and that Christianity should no more be thought of as ‘the final religion’ than ‘Einsteinian physics’ or ‘Joycean prose’ should be thought of as the ‘final physics’ or the ‘final prose’. For most of the 1920s Needham’s interests did not extend to ethics, politics or sociology. Like many other public schoolboys, he had been a volunteerstrikebreaker during the General Strike of 1926 but seems previously not to have taken very much interest in politics. Between 1929, when he joined the Labour Party, and Hitler’s arrival in office in 1933, he acquired an ethical, political and sociological dimension in which ‘individualism’ became a dirty word. In the 1930s, Needham wrote to some extent as a Christian, to some extent as advocate of the combination of ‘intellectual’ and ‘manual’ capability characteristic of the scientific research worker. He also wrote positively as delineator of the ‘biological order’ which Order and Life adapted from Whitehead and others, of the dialectical materialism which he found in Marx, Engels and Lenin, and of the English identification between science, puritanism and social equality which he found in Winstanley and the Diggers and Levellers of the seventeenth century. These positions were interconnected. Needham wished religion to turn into ‘social emotion’, and the ‘bacterial . . . protozoic . . . coloemic, endocrinic . . . osmo-regulatory . . . vertebral . . . conscious and toolmaking’ levels of evolutionary integration to be completed by the ‘socialization of the means of production’ and a ‘world-society’, from which the aggressiveness, female slavery and ‘warped . . . mental states’ which were obstructing Engels’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom, would have been abolished. Needham anticipated Orwellian or Huxleyite hiccups, wrote feelingly about the hostility to science displayed by Barth and D. H. Lawrence and envisaged a ‘scientifically-stabilized stagnant class-stratified totalitarian social organism’ enslaving ‘whole peoples . . . and destroying culture and learning’ in the process. It was, he believed, only ‘ultimate’ victory which was ‘inevitable’; but inevitable it was, whatever setbacks were being suffered in Spain, Germany, Italy and Japan, and whatever damage might be done to the ‘great democracy’ of the Soviet Union, since the ‘higher levels’ of organization to which both science and Marxism looked forward, would undoubtedly be achieved as private ownership and the profit motive became obsolete. In the 1920s Needham had been concerned primarily to protect religion against syncretism and naturalism. By 1931 he was saying that the religious period of European history was over, that religion was in for a ‘bad time’

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during the ‘next four or five centuries’ and that the establishment of the scientist on the ‘semi-oracular tripod’ hitherto occupied by the priest was irreversible. Though religion would ‘never die’, it should, therefore, be edged out of its other-worldly ghetto, should make a ‘flesh-and-blood’ contribution to the material millennium which science had made possible, and should make it its business to resist the ‘tyranny’ which ‘scientific experience’ was imposing on the other forms of experience. By the time he and John Lewis edited Christianity and the Social Revolution in 1935, pluralist libertarianism had been joined by a very explicit Marxism. What Needham claimed to see in the middle 1930s was that ‘the present order of civilization’ was neither the ‘highest form . . . of which nature was capable’ nor ‘the last masterpiece of universal organization’, and that man’s ‘first duty’ was to ‘appraise the social forces at work around . . . him’ in order to make himself the ‘efficacious instrument’ of ‘social evolution’. In his Spencer Lecture in 1937 he criticized Spencer’s ‘biological putrefaction’, his failure to identify the historic State as a ‘neuro-muscular’ apparatus of classcontrol and his accommodation to the ‘narrow prejudices’ of the ‘dying class’ to which he belonged. Needham’s marriage of biology and Marxism was as ridiculous as Gladstone’s marriage of science and Christianity. He used biology’s authority to assert that it was the ‘social struggle’ under capitalist individualism which had made men ‘predatory’ and ‘aggressive’ in the past, and that diet, environment and psychology could help to remove these defects in the future. On the other hand, he mistrusted science’s ‘blindness’ about pain, sadness and death, and the reactionary mentality he observed among laboratory workers in England. During World War II, he attacked the militarization of science in Germany, Italy and Japan and anticipated a general ‘socialisation of industry and research’ once dictatorship had been defeated. Politically Needham claimed to be a pluralist for whom the crucial contrast was between ‘capitalism and civil liberties’. How far he believed in civil liberties, how far he wanted a Leninist or Mill-like foreclosing of options, is uncertain. What is certain is that throughout the 1930s his reaction to the challenges presented by 1917 in Russia, 1933 in Germany and 1936 in Spain, had important implications for religion. Between 1935 and 1943 Needham defined the role of ‘the traditional religion of the European West’ in the ‘coming world order’. He rejected ‘retrograde asceticism’, Inge’s neo-Platonism, ‘verbal inspiration, eternal damnation and the magical efficacy of prayer’. He argued that the ‘allegorical constructiveness’ of historic theology had blunted the directness of Christ’s commands and that feudal lords and capitalist employers had used Christ as a ‘social opiate’ for ‘proletarian misery’. Science, Marx and early Christianity moreover, had been so much on one side in pursuit of sacramentality, and fascism so much on the other side, that Marxism was the ‘only possible moral

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theology’ for the twentieth century and the only way of completing the transition which Christ had implied from the religion of fear as established by priests, through the religion of holiness as established by prophets, to the religion of love as the work of the Holy Spirit of a righteous order. And not only was Christianity as compatible with materialism as psychology had suggested, as ‘the Blessed Sacrament of the Mass’ had made clear, and as Teilhard de Chardin was later to be praised for pointing out, it would also, in identifying itself with a ‘scientific ethic’, set women on an equality with men and help to abolish ‘privilege, bourgeois liberty . . . exploitation . . . private property . . . national wars, colonial exploitation and . . . the unequal distribution of goods, education and leisure’ throughout the world. Needham idealized his idols – the ‘oppressed creatures’ whose ‘sighs’ he found in the folk-songs, outlaws and Morris-dancers whom puritans and businessmen had hated. He praised the cultural autonomy of the Soviet Union and distinguished not only between the ‘permanence’ of dictatorship in fascist states and the ‘transience’ of dictatorship in Communist states but also between fascist leadership ‘from above’ and Communist leadership ‘from within’. We need not be too critical; Needham was no sillier than Auden, Laski, John Strachey, Anthony Blunt, Forster, Shaw or the Webbs. But his identification of Marxism with religion raises a question. If one asks how Needham conceived the future of religion in the 1930s, the answer is that, while more than happy for the ‘wonderful poetry of the liturgy’ to survive the ‘world-view’ out of which it had been written, he doubted whether it would survive, and did not believe that existing churchgoers would welcome either ‘new forms of social emotion’ or the ‘clergy and people of the New Dispensation’. What he wanted was acknowledgement of the fact that Christianity, so far from being a ‘divine revelation’, was ‘the human spirit . . . reacting to the facts of human destiny’, that it would be succeeded in time by ‘another form of numinous feeling’ and a ‘new development of social emotions’, and that, indeed, once ‘justice, love and comradeship’ had been fully incorporated into social life, ‘society’ would have been ‘sanctified’ and religion ‘would pass . . . without loss . . . into social emotion as such’. In envisaging the death of existing religion, Needham denied that the new religion would be initiated in the ‘armchairs of literary critics’, the ‘lecturerooms of academic philosophers’ or ‘the speculations of scientific workers’. Even when half-suggesting that it might be initiated in the cinema and theatre or through the factory-system of post-capitalist co-operating producers, he made it clear that it would be indistinguishable from the social emotions it would sustain. Increasingly, moreover, he pointed to similarities between his own conception of religion and the conception of religion which he described in the articles and books he was beginning to write about China.

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IV Needham’s first historical writing – in volume I of Chemical Embryology in 1931 – had not been sociologically orientated and had made little attempt at general explanation. Nor, though he had co-operated with Butterfield, Postan and others in setting up the history of science as a Cambridge subject in the 1930s, did he give any full-scale account of European science. All he had done by 1942 was to connect science rather cursorily with the Levellers in The Levellers and the English Revolution, to suggest that it needed to be rescued from bourgeois capitalism and to add that there was a problem about its comparative backwardness in modern China. In the 1930s Needham had been interested in China and had referred approvingly to the influence which Taoism and Confucianism had had on Leibniz, the philosophes and the French Revolution. The arrival in his laboratory in the course of the 1930s of Lu-Gwei Djen and other Chinese research students then encouraged him to add Chinese to the languages that he had already, and gave him the idea of writing an historical account of classical Chinese science. By 1942 all of his interests were engaged, and he began, a decade before volume I of Science and Civilization in China was published, to give accounts of its significance. In considering China’s failure to develop the mathematically based science which Europe had developed since the sixteenth century, Needham began from a negative principle – that, since the reason could not be found in Europe’s inherent superiority or China’s inherent inferiority, it had to be found in factors like the absence of city-states, the transition which China had made to an examination-based non-hereditary bureaucratic mandarinate in the third century BC, and the intellectual superiority and ethical will with which the Confucian mandarinate had obstructed capitalism and the seizure of the state by the merchant class subsequently. These were represented as important truths about Confucianism, about the Chinese mentality and about modern science. It was pointed out that among Chinese religions only Buddhism was other-worldly, that Confucianism and Taoism were really ‘philosophies’ and that it was their emphasis on this world to the exclusion of the next which was of explanatory significance – negatively because they excluded the conception of a Creator who had made the laws of nature, positively because mathematical science in sixteenth-century Europe had developed in the shadow of this conception. In the Taoist and other revolts against Confucius, Needham saw similarities to Lucretius. He interpreted the Taoist insistence on ‘observing nature without preconceptions’ and the Taoist belief in the ‘permeative’ character of the ‘Order of Nature’ as intelligible parallels to Epicurean ataraxia. In Taoism’s replacement of Confucianism’s ‘masculine’ authoritarianism by a certain ‘feminine receptiveness’, he saw an anticipation of the modern Western scientist’s ‘intellectual humility . . . in face of Nature’.

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Confucianism, though it had been the overwhelming fact in Chinese life for two millennia, was not, of course, a scientific philosophy. It was a sociological philosophy which had no conception of theology or a ‘Creator God’, thought of the universe as itself being ‘moral’, and conceptualized justice within a ‘feudal’ or ‘bureaucratic-feudal’ framework as the self-perpetuating instrument of sedentary administrators and a ‘scholar-gentry’. As against European Augustinianism and the aristocratic militarism of mediaeval Christianity, Needham extolled Confucianism’s ‘civil’ ethos, its Pelagian sinlessness and refusal to persecute for the sake of opinion, and both the intellectual synthesis it had achieved between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries and the anticipations it had made of Darwin and Marx. In general, however, he made it obvious that he was an ‘honorary Taoist’, that Confucianism had been an enemy of science, and that Taoism had been its friend. Taoism was ‘of the extreme left’ and had ‘bridged the gap’ which the Confucian literati could not begin to bridge between the scholar and the artisan. It had not only preserved the memory of the ‘legendary rebels’ who had resisted the ‘anti-social accumulation of wealth for private ends’ but had also been associated with all the revolutions which had endeavoured to ‘overthrow the established order for more than a thousand years’, treating women as equal to men, linking science to democracy and, as the ‘only . . . systematic scientific . . . mysticism’ proving that science and rationalism did not necessarily go together. In explaining Chinese science, Needham took off from the primordial Taoism of the village collective, from the idea that the Confucian social order required a profounder knowledge of nature than Confucians had been willing to pursue, and from the fact that, in laying the foundations for science, Taoism had amalgamated magic, alchemy and the search for the ‘elixir of life’ whether through gymnastic, helio-therapeutic, respiratory, sexual and dietary techniques, or through the shamanism which ‘the masses’ had for many generations preferred to the ‘state-religion’ of the Confucians. Throughout his Chinese writings, Needham was as determined as Toynbee to belittle Western mentalities and to supply Chinese homilies about their improvement. He took it for granted that China had had to reject ‘dogmatic . . . ecclesiastical and . . . transcendental’ Christianity when presented with it in the eighth, thirteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and that Europeans, though stuck with Christianity, would have to give up the idea of the ‘visible . . . church’ extending itself ‘to all mankind’, since the ‘invisible’ Church, including Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Judaism and many other manifestations of the Holy Spirit, ‘covered . . . the earth . . . already’, even though Christians did not realize it. Towards the end of his life, Needham wished it to be known that he was neither a Comtean nor a Theosophist, had not been advocating ‘a world union of faiths’ or ‘the reunion of the churches’, and would have ‘liked’ to join

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C. S. Lewis in making ‘the Christian ethic’ the ‘guiding beacon for humanity’. However, he did no such thing, not only because of the difficulty involved in disentangling Christianity’s ‘eternal gospel’ from the ‘fears . . . and prejudices’ of ages ‘more ignorant and powerless than our own’, but also because it was with the unforced humanism embodied in all the Chinese religions (especially Taoism) that Western Christians, instead of ‘exalting themselves as sole possessors of all truth’, should ‘sit down in the lowest room’ and make an effort at ‘greater mutual understanding’. Liberal scholarship needs ideas, but they do not have to be very sensible ideas, so long as they are applied relentlessly and fluently, and it is impossible to withhold admiration for the relentlessness and fluency with which Needham spread an English doctrine upon the world. It is equally impossible to avoid amazement at the assumption that his very English, and rather simple, mixture of Marxism, mysticism, sociology and Anglo-Catholicism could provide a subtle structure for so long and complicated a subject as the history of Chinese science. When confronted by Zaehner, amazement is even more overwhelming. V Zaehner’s7 major work was Concordant Discord – the Gifford Lectures that he delivered between 1967 and 1969. But Concordant Discord was sanitized Zaehner, a ponderous concoction which submerged its message in learning and illustration. Those who wish to understand what Zaehner meant should approach him through other more revealing statements. Zaehner died four years after the Gifford Lectures were published, having acquired in the meantime a media-reputation by addressing the problems of Drugs,Mysticism and Make-Believe which he associated with the student revolution of the late 1960s. In the course of his life, he had already acquired a number of other reputations. Zaehner was part Swiss, part English, and part Jewish. He read Oriental languages at Oxford and, during the 1939 war, and again at the beginning of the 1950s, was a British Intelligence Officer in Iran. After 1952 he lived mainly in All Souls College, Oxford where he became a confirmed, reclusive but apparently non-homosexual bachelor who felt an irremovable distaste for his mother and interrupted an intense dedication to work with controlled regular interludes of intoxication. Though he had been converted to Roman 17

Robert Charles Zaehner (1913–74), educated Tonbridge School, Christ Church, Oxford and King’s College, Cambridge. Fellow of All Souls College and Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics, Oxford, 1952–74. Author of Zurvan, 1955; Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, 1957; At Sundry Times, 1958; Hindu and Muslim Mysticism, 1960; The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, 1961; Hinduism, 1962; The Convergent Spirit, 1963; The Catholic Church and World Religions, 1964; The Bhagavad-Gita, 1968; Concordant Discord, 1970; Evolution in Religion, 1971; Dialectical Christianity and Christian Materialism, 1971; Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, 1972; and Our Savage God, 1974.

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Catholicism in 1946, he had written exclusively about Zoroastrianism, as a philologist and an historian of theology, until he was elected to the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics which, Radhakrishnan having been the first occupant, Indianists had come to regard as an Indianist preserve. Radhakrishnan8 was a Vedantist and ‘monistic idealist’ for whom philosophy pursued a ‘logical’ and ‘intellectual’ understanding of the whole of experience and ‘ultimate reality’, science pursued an ‘abstracted’ understanding of ‘partial’ reality, and religion involved itself in ‘authority’ and ‘faith’. Philosophy had to proceed without faith, without interest in practical consequences, and in disregard of the manifest desire of Bergson and William James to create a ‘popular’ or ‘plebeian’ metaphysics which would join contemporary art and culture in pandering to the sensationalism, emotion and want of logic characteristic of democracy and ‘the ordinary man’. Radhakrishnan’s life-work (apart from the Presidency of India) was to pinpoint the conflict between philosophy and ‘popular prejudice’, and to arrange a marriage, extending over many books and twenty years, between religion and reason, mysticism and philosophy, and spiritual monism and the Upanishads. It was in an attempt to prove himself a suitable successor to Radhakrishnan, a decade before the student revolution had been heard of, that Zaehner began criticizing the account which Aldous Huxley had given of the connection between drugs and mysticism. Zaehner’s first book had been finished before his election to the Chair and had run the academic gauntlet when it was published two years later. Zurvan, A Zoroastrian Dilemma, was an historico-theological attempt to rescue Zervanism’s comprehensiveness from the ‘Stalinist’ rewriting Zaehner believed it to have suffered from both Christianity and Zoroastrianism. It emphasized the unsystematic nature of Zervanite doctrine, the ambiguity and obscurity of Zaehner’s disentanglement of a Zervanism which had been ‘of the letter rather than the spirit’, and the Sassanian period as the period in which Zoroastrianism became the ‘state religion’ of the Persian Empire and acquired both a ‘complex theology’ and the status of a ‘higher religion’. In Zurvan, in his full-length commentary on the Bhagavadgita, and in some of the descriptions of the world-religions that he was to give from 1965 onwards, Zaehner avoided the suggestion that any one of the religions he was 18

Sir S. Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), educated Lutheran Mission High School, Tirupati, Voorhees College Vellore and Madras Christian College. Lecturer at Madras Presidency College, etc., 1909–21 and King George V Professor of Moral and Mental Philosophy, Calcutta University, 1921–31. Vice-Chancellor of Andhra University, 1931–6 and of Benares University, 1939–48. Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, 1936–52. Indian delegate to League of Nations Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, 1931–9. Member of Indian Constituent Assembly, 1947–8; Indian Ambassador to the USSR, 1949–52; Vice President of India, 1952–62 and President of India, 1962–7. Author of The Reign of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, 1920; Indian Philosophy, 1923–7; The Hindu View of Life, 1927; An Idealist View of Life, 1932 and Eastern Religions and Western Thought, 1939.

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discussing was better or worse than any other. In other works he expounded the opinion that, just as a scholar who ‘did not know’ what it means to pray would be unlikely to have anything useful to say about prayer, so the agnostic who had no experience of religion would be unlikely to have anything useful to say about religion. Zaehner denied that ‘all religions’ were ‘equally true’ and stigmatized the scholarly ‘half-truth’ embodied in the assumption that they were. Scholars, he argued, could not in any case effect a syncretism since, if syncretism was desirable, it was the religious statesman who had to effect it. All scholarship could do – and what comparative religion was especially competent to do – was to ‘point the differences’ between religions before asking whether there was ‘sufficient common ground’ to suggest a ‘divine plan’ behind them.

When Zaehner became a Roman Catholic during the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, the Roman Catholic Church seemed to many English converts to provide an impregnable resistance to modern fashion. This resistance was undermined by Pope John XXIII’s destruction of Roman conservatism, and by the licence he gave Roman Catholics to ‘think . . . for themselves’. As the most problematical phase of Zaehner’s thought got under way, its leading features were gloom at the degeneracy and self-centredness of the Western intelligentsia, distaste for its distance from ordinary people, and a positive hatred of the élitist angst and existential despair through which it was trying to persuade ordinary people that they were ‘unhappy and desperate’. Politically Zaehner was intense and naïve. He was the rawest type of antiappeaser, had an almost childish regard for Churchill and De Gaulle and expressed a deep distaste for both the bureaucratized French bourgeoisie of the 1970s and the ‘free-for-all’ through which organized labour was trying to ‘put up the wages’ of a ‘bourgeois . . . working-class’ in Britain. He compared the British invasion of Iran in 1941 with the totalitarian invasions of the previous decade, deplored the British public’s indifference to both the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and ‘the horrors perpetrated in East Pakistan in the name of an Islamic state’, and borrowed the idea that American respectability and the Protestant work-ethic were making the West ‘flabby’ and ‘rotten’, more materialistic than the Communist world, and so ‘bored’ and ‘evil’ that it was even ‘bored by evil’. Zaehner followed Bonhoeffer in deploring mechanization; he also deplored the ‘well-nigh unanimous verdict’ of the post-Copernican ‘scientific establishment’ that, within a ‘fixed and invariable genetic code’, evolution was a ‘freak’ produced by ‘pure chance operating on a microscopic machine which . . . determined [man’s] whole development’. The question he asked was whether, in the ‘spiritual desert’ thus created, either the ‘reasonably-contented majority’ would go on being reasonably contented or the young become

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capable of saying anything worthwhile through their withdrawal into the communes.

In the late 1960s Zaehner interpreted the withdrawal into the communes as a rebellion against science. Earlier in the decade, he had admired Teilhard de Chardin’s reconciliation of science, Marxism and Christianity. Earlier still, and on one side of his work right up to 1964, he had been urging the Roman Catholic Church to be more sympathetic to the non-Catholic religions than it had been in the past. Zaehner criticized Protestantism’s murder of ‘the great mystical tradition’ in Europe, and missionary-Protestantism’s zeal against the religions amongst which it had worked elsewhere. He denied that Asian culture was inferior, argued that Western rationalism and ‘Judaic’ Protestantism were incapable of understanding Eastern mysticism and accused Protestantism of so ‘sapping’ the ‘roots’ in China as to have assisted at the replacement of historic Chinese religion by enlightenment, science and industrialization. While ridiculing the ‘cranks’ who had tried to insert Oriental religion into the gap created by ‘deChristianisation’ in Britain, he claimed, nevertheless, that there was an ‘element in Man other than reason’, that the rationalist attempt to suppress this had produced Nazism in one direction and surrealism in another, and that this element, though reduced in Britain to a ‘meaningless benevolence’, retained a hold over ‘millions of souls’ in the non-Communist East. In The Catholic Church and World Religions (1964), Zaehner repeated that the West was being constricted by secularism and rationalism, that Catholicism needed to be disengaged from both, and that religious values, religious consciousness, and religious mysticism might well reassert themselves against Western secularism in Oriental societies in the future. In Zaehner’s treatment of the non-Christian religions there was ecumenism, a suggestion that the division between religion and secularism was more important than any division between religions, and the claim that Catholicism was capable of providing both a praeparatio evangelica and a location on which all religions might meet. Zaehner professed Froude’s hostility to both theology and demythologization and made Carlyle’s assumption that literature – the literature in his own case, of Péguy, Bernanos, Balzac and Dostoyevsky – was speaking more directly to the modern world than historic theology could. This did not prevent him interpreting the dogmas of historic theology and speculating about their ‘meaning’. He speculated about the Crucifixion and the Trinity, interpreted the Incarnation as the ‘dust of the universe’ being ‘breathed upon by the Holy Spirit’ in the billions of years it had taken for ‘human life to begin’ and connected the Fall with the ‘shattering distress’ which had accompanied supersession of the ‘unconscious’ by consciousness, of the species by the

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individual, and of the ‘felt unity’ of man’s initial ‘apprehension of the divine’ by an ‘apprehension of the divine’ as ‘something other’ which he was expected to obey.

The Convergent Spirit, when it was published in 1963, was different from anything that Zaehner had published previously. It assumed that the Reformation had destroyed both Christian unity and ‘the unity of civilization’, that the ‘popish apostasy’ of the Counter-Reformation had lost the right to call itself ‘Catholic’, and that the Industrial Revolution had introduced a cleavage between the man who had ‘nothing to sell except the labour of his hands’ and the manufacturer fortunate enough to ‘buy his labour cheap’. On the whole, The Convergent Spirit was optimistic, not unmindful of nuclear destruction, but positively persuaded that the world’s religions would eventually ‘simmer down’ into a ‘convergence’ based on the ‘material and sacramental structure of the Catholic Church’ and the motion which Teilhard de Chardin had attributed to evolution. About evolution, three things were stressed: that it had been confirmed by ‘the enormous technological achievements of the last hundred years’, that these achievements were what the new nationalisms of Asia and Africa wanted and that what they wanted had been ‘foreshadowed’ by Marxism. By Marxism, Zaehner did not mean the politics of Stalin, Brezhnev or Mao Tse-Tung. In the short run he meant Dubcek and the ‘brief hope’ which had flared in Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the long run, he meant an ‘earthly paradise’ bringing the Kingdom of Heaven ‘apocalyptically . . . down to earth within the lifetime of many of us’, religion disappearing once social exploitation had ended and the vision of the Communist Manifesto being so much the vision of the Catholic Church that Catholicism was the ‘only religion into which the ideal Marxist state would fit’.

In almost everything that Zaehner wrote in the late 1960s, the hero was Teilhard de Chardin – the ‘first Marxist Christian’ or ‘mystic of matter’ who had put up with the Church’s ‘legalism’ and mechanical sacramentalism, had turned Christianity from being science’s enemy into being its ‘culmination’, and had seen his way past death and the ‘entropy’ envisaged in the second law of thermodynamics to a law of ‘increasing complexity’ both of life and of consciousness which had married the intelligibility of matter to matter’s ‘holy’ role as the ‘indispensable vehicle’ of Spirit. This was the ‘crossroad’ at which ‘modern man’ had arrived. The Universe was no longer ‘mysterious’, the Incarnation was a ‘conscious . . . irruption of the divine into matter’, and Christ would become the Bodhisattva of Bodhisattvas, the ‘collective fulfilment’ of mankind and, through his distribu-

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tion of the consecrated elements to the Apostles, the agency by which the ‘whole of the material universe’ would be converted ‘into . . . himself’. What happened to the world after the 1960s was the opposite of what Zaehner had hoped for. Russian Marxism collapsed, not because of a ‘convergence in unanimity’ but because an indigenous Russian hatred of the Marxist system combined with American military and economic pressure to make it collapse. This was a factor which Zaehner wished to ignore; it was his insistence on ignoring it which made it as difficult to take The Convergent Spirit seriously as it was to take Eagleton seriously as apocalypticist of the student revolution. In the late 1960s, Zaehner had criticized the fashions to which the student revolution had conformed – its vague hotchpotch of German-American ideas, the ‘noxious varieties’ of its urban groups and the incipient militarism and admiration for Hitler and Aleister Crowley of which Charles Manson, the Californian mass-murderer, was the exemplar. As the son of a teenage prostitute and an ‘officer-client’, Manson seemed to Zaehner to be ‘highly symbolical’. He had moulded disciples, withdrawn them into the desert and ‘descended . . . into the unholy city of Los Angeles to strike terror into the fattened hearts of the over-fed’. Manson had had both ‘dignity’ and ‘pathos’; his hatred of the ‘American establishment’ had been both ‘natural to a young criminal’ and ‘fashionable among the educated young’; the ‘rebuke’ he had administered to a ‘corrupt and self-satisfied élite’ had replicated Christ’s rebuke to the ‘scribes and the pharisees’. Zaehner brought empathy to Manson, while being critical of his mystical experiences, associating him with Marcion’s Platonism and identifying his atrocities as the logical outcome of Stuart Hampshire’s belief that men should ‘identify [them]selves with their own wills’. This may sound laughable, but Zaehner’s distaste for the ‘Western intelligentsia’ included a distaste for post-war Oxford philosophy of which Hampshire though a deviant was a part. It also included the belief that the student revolution had had a genuine thirst for religion, and that Oxford philosophers had been no more capable of responding to it than the religious leaders of the 1960s when Barth, Brunner and Bultmann had ceased to be relevant, Bonhoeffer’s memory had been corrupted by his followers (including Bishop Robinson) and the ‘social gospel’ onto which the Churches had been forced by science had become a ‘vaguely deistic humanism’ which had nothing to say to anyone; while Pope John XXIII’s goodness and open-mindedness had been followed by an ‘unnecessary crisis of authority’ about abortion and a ludicrously consecratory attitude to science at the time of the first landings on the moon. Zaehner did not want the Church to capitulate to the young. But it had got into a ‘panic’ about drugs, which it ought to have approached without panic and had made it difficult for Zaehner to command a hearing for what he had

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to say – that the youth leaders who were pushing the Church aside were even more corrupting and careless than he had represented Aldous Huxley as being in Mysticism Sacred and Profane a decade earlier.

Huxley had been writing about ‘psychedelic’ and ‘visionary’ experiences for twenty years before achieving a cult-success with The Doors of Perception which, though not published until he was sixty in 1954, made the highest claims he had yet made for mescaline as a safe way of enhancing the ‘quality’ of man’s ‘consciousness’ and the ‘holiness’ and ‘infinity’ of his ‘inner world’. In recommending mescaline as an ‘almost completely innocuous stimulant’, The Doors of Perception emphasized the incidence of contemplation in ‘urban-industrial societies’ and the ‘pain’ and ‘monotony’ for which it was the remedy. Remedies in the past had been supplied by carnivals, dancing and oratory, and by the very close connections between drugs and religion. In the modern world, remedies were supplied by drinking and smoking, which, however, were undesirable, and were incompatible, Huxley claimed, with Christianity. Huxley’s understanding was that ‘the urge to transcend self-consciousness’ was a ‘principal appetite of the soul’, that it was in his ‘inner world’, where there was neither ‘work nor monotony’, that man was most likely to find ‘the divine’, and that the ‘spiritual exercises’ of conventional religion did not always enable him to do this. Mescaline was not only the best way into the ‘transcendent country of the mind’, it also had the ethical merit of finding fulfilment in the right kind of ‘Weltanschauung’ and the right kind of ‘Bodhisattva’. Like many other ‘mystical’ writers, Huxley disparaged Western civilization, contrasting the ‘interior nakedness’ of ‘highly-educated whites’ with the ‘transcendental experience’ achieved by mescaline-taking Red Indians in the United States, and identifying the Red Indian experience as a ‘gratuitous grace’ inducing a ‘felt immanence’ about the relationship between ‘systematic reasoning’ and the ‘unfathomable mystery’ which systematic reasoning tried ‘vainly to comprehend’. Huxley had expatiated on mystical contemplation in Grey Eminence in 1941, in The Art of Seeing in 1942 and in The Perennial Philosophy in 1945. But, though these had not taken off as The Doors of Perception had taken off, Zaehner’s criticisms were a cumulative criticism of all of them. In Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, as also in Hindu and Muslim Mysticism, Zaehner brought an investigative scepticism to bear on drug-based mystical experience, and denied that it embodied the ‘universal . . . yearning . . . for personal communion with God’ which Huxley’s ‘perennial philosophy’ had extracted from it. In comparing William James’s experience of nitrous oxide, Baudelaire’s experience of hashish, and his own and Huxley’s experience of

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mescaline with feelings of ‘expansion’ in the literature of nature-mysticism, he concluded that some of the characteristics referred to as ‘mystical’ were also ‘characteristic of lunacy’, that drugs and manic-depression were quite different from the ‘Beatific Vision’ of God’s ‘holiness’ experienced by Christian mystics and Roman Catholics ‘through . . . the normal channels of grace’, and that there was a gulf not only between those who saw God as ‘incomparably greater than oneself’ and those who conceived of the soul as itself ‘God’, but also between those whose mystical experiences were the soul’s ‘intimate communion . . . with its Maker’ and those whose mystical experiences were the ‘upsurge’ from the God-archetype of Jung’s Unconscious. Zaehner acknowledged the genuineness of Huxley’s belief in mescaline as an instrument of mystical experience. But he had much amusement with Huxley’s access to ‘Mind at Large’ and the sensation of ‘being’ as well as ‘perceiving’ external objects which Huxley associated with it. To the question whether The Cloud of Unknowing, in speaking of being ‘oned’ with God, had meant the same as Huxley meant in describing the experience of being ‘Notself in the Not-Self of a chair’, his reply was that there was a fundamental difference between mystical and preternatural experiences which were, and mystical and preternatural experiences which were not, governed by the sense that the soul was created by God. Zaehner’s negative purpose in deflating nature- and drug-based mysticism was to deflate Huxley’s account of the Vedanta and the philosophia perennis, and to damage the reputation Huxley had acquired as advocate of transcendental meditation. He played Suso, Ruysbroeck, Julian of Norwich and The Cloud of Unknowing against him and praised the superiority of Ramanuja’s to Sankara’s understanding of the mysticism of the Bhagavadgita. He also paid attention to Jung. VI In his thirties, Jung9 had been Freud’s closest collaborator and had acquired a professional reputation as advocate of Freudian psychoanalysis. After his breach with Freud in 1913, he began to acquire a literary reputation first in the German then in the English-speaking world, between the translation into 19

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), educated Basel Gymnasium, Basel University (medical student), assistant in mental hospital in Zurich, physician at psychiatric clinic and lecturer and professor at Zurich University. Private psychiatric practice, 1913–61. Author of Psychological Types, 1921; Psychoanalysis and the Cure of Souls, 1928; Sigmund Freud in His Historic Setting, 1932; Modern Man in Search of A Soul, 1933; Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, 1934; Principles of Practical Psychology, 1935; Analytical Psychology, 1935; What is Psychotherapy?, 1935; The Concept of the Collective Unconscious, 1936; Yoga and the West, 1936; Realities of Practical Psychotherapy, 1937; Psychology and Religion, 1938; A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity, 1940–1; Transformation Symbolism in the Mass, 1940–1; Psychology and Alchemy, 1944; Essays on Contemporary Events, 1946; Answer to Job, 1955; The Undiscovered Self, 1957; Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1961.

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English of Psychological Types in 1923 and the publication (in English) of Modern Man in Search of a Soul in 1933. Thereafter, he and ‘analytical psychology’ had a place in English thought, though never as prominent a place as Freud and ‘psychoanalysis’. Jung explained more fully what he meant as a public teacher than did any of his English followers and was at least as conscious of the unfriendliness of the modern world as any of the other thinkers discussed in this or the previous chapters. In paperback translation during the last couple of decades, even at his most ludicrous, he has provided a psychological antidote to the psychological reductionism to which Freud had wished religion to be subjected. Jung was Freud’s pupil and for a time had a dependent relationship which was intensified by mutual analysis and co-operation in making psychoanalysis an international movement. The breach when it occurred was fundamental. Freud took it personally. It liberated Jung not only from Freud but also from ‘psychoanalysis’. Freud’s view of Jung was stated at once in The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, where psychoanalysis was declared to be Freud’s own ‘creation’ and Jung’s devotion to ‘his own interests’ and inability to ‘tolerate . . . authority’ were used as grounds for excommunication. Jung was declared to have been anti-Semitic before he met Freud and to have suppressed his feelings only in order to work with Freud. He and his followers were ridiculed for ‘disputing things which they formerly upheld’ and for eliminating from psychoanalysis whatever was objectionable to public opinion so as to be spared the embarrassment of ‘finding [it] again’ when they came to consider ‘religion and ethics’. It was an angry prophet who accused Jung of creating ‘a new religioethical system’ which was ‘picking out . . . a few cultural overtones from the symphony of life . . . and failing to hear the mighty and primordial elements of the instincts’. In dismissing Freud’s view of religion, Jung accused Freud of the ‘mechanization and intellectualization’ by which Jews were afflicted when they lost touch with their roots. He contextualized Freud as protesting not only against the concealments and sentimentalizations of Austrian middle-class morality but also against the last Christian resistance to Voltaire, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In Freud’s The Future of an Illusion he saw an ignorance of religion which did not prevent the ‘super-ego’ smuggling in the ‘time-honoured image of Jehovah in the dress of psychological theory’. Freud, in other words, was a remarkable man whose ‘dogmatism’ and ‘fanaticism’ had become ‘narrowing’ and ‘inquisitorial’, and whose role, like that of Nietzsche, had been essentially destructive, converting evil into secularized sin but having nothing positive to say because of his lack of sympathy for the human race. Jung claimed to be ‘first and foremost’ an ‘empiricist’ and a ‘scientist’ for whom religion was a fact he had encountered in the course of his medical

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practice. His concern was with psychology, not theology; he drew a dividing line between the content of belief and the requirements of science; and he congratulated Protestantism on ‘separating the things of God from the things of the world’. It would be boring to list the occasions on which he stated that the ‘God-image’ was a ‘psychological fact’, that God’s ‘metaphysical reality’ was outside the range of psychological knowledge, and that it did not matter to him as a psychologist whether ‘God and the unconscious’ were ‘ultimately identical’ since God was not a subject it was the business of analytical psychology to ‘make assertions about’. These disavowals did not inhibit substantive judgements – that the consensus gentium had found a ‘positive value’ in ‘all religions’, that the symbols he, Jung, had observed in the unconscious of his patients, he had also observed in Hinduism, Zen Buddhism and mediaeval alchemy, and that analytical psychology, while emphasizing the individuality of the person, found it impossible to separate the person from the ‘impersonal and supra-personal . . . world he carried with him from the State, the family and religion’.

After the fall of Hitler, Jung claimed that his pre-war writings about Germany had been misunderstood, that his specification of the differences between a ‘Jewish’ and a ‘Christian’ psychology had been routine and innocent, and that his co-operation with the Nazi authorities as President of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy had enabled him to protect both Jews personally and the study of psychology under the Nazis. If there was a misunderstanding, Jung more than made up for it once Germany had been defeated. He lamented the concentration camps, diagnosed Hitler as a ‘psychic scarecrow’ and identified the uprush of mass instincts in Germany as registering an estrangement between ‘the conscious state’ of the German people and the ‘natural laws’ of ‘human existence’. There is, however, no need to assume that he had been a Nazi because he had taken Nazism’s religious character as seriously as Smuts had taken it,10 believed that disappointment of the ‘rational expectation’ of ‘world-understanding’ entertained at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 had been beneficial to the ‘lop-sidedness’ of an ‘intellectualist or rationalistic’ civilization and blamed the Second World War – the war ‘that nobody wanted’ – on the ‘arrogant’ claim of ‘the conscious mind’ to be ‘the whole of the psyche’. Jung’s father was a Swiss Protestant clergyman who had read Oriental languages at Göttingen. Jung himself went to the University of Basel in 1895, was then a doctor and therapist in Swiss hospitals, and lectured for a time at Zurich University. For many years he did national service as a captain in the Swiss Army Medical Service and late in life was involved in an unsuccessful 10

See above pp. 209–10.

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attempt to become a Swiss dignitary. Throughout he was conscious of the duty to make Protestantism serviceable and acceptable to the modern world, and in the alchemical procedures and symbols he described in Psychology and Alchemy in 1944, found ‘fundamental psychic facts’ which would require Christian attention if Christianity was to be ‘experienced in our souls’. The duties which presented themselves in the course of Jung’s intellectual formation were to recognize the subtle and compensatory relationship between the religion and the way of life of a people, to understand dogma as being in ‘living reciprocity’ with the psyche and to rearrange Christianity in the way in which many of the thinkers discussed in Part V have wished to rearrange it. His defence of Christianity was nebulous and eclectic; but he was the enemy of its enemies and dedicated a large part of his public attention to the principles that sin and repression were very closely connected and that ‘the beginnings of . . . analytical treatment were to be found in . . . the confessional’. Jung differentiated the cure of souls as ‘a religious influence based on a Christian confession of faith’ from psychoanalysis as a technique which laid bare the ‘contents of the unconscious and integrated them into the conscious mind’. But he soon brought them together, at least in the case of Catholicism, where the confessional was indeed the parallel to psychotherapy, and Catholic symbols had served historically to effect the necessary integration of ‘the lower instinctual forces of the psyche into the hierarchy of the spirit’. In Psychopathology and the Cure of Souls, Jung listed Protestantism’s deficiencies in ‘expressive Symbolism’ and ‘priestly mediation’, and fixed on three major problems – the directness of the individual Protestant’s relation to God and the replacement of a single Church by a proliferation of churches; the personal attachment to the clergyman which resulted from Protestantism’s abolition of confession; and Protestant perplexity about human nature which obscured ‘unconscious conflict’ and the ‘lower instincts of the psychic life’, and suggested a disablingly simple opposition between good and evil. Jung did not reject Protestantism or deny that it had the merits of its defects. Nor did the interest he took in Roman Catholic reactions to his work make it likely that he would become a Roman Catholic. He believed, however, that the exodus from the Protestant churches among the European intelligentsia would spread to the masses in the next generation and that the ‘restlessness . . . and disorientation’ he discerned in the European soul could also be discerned in his own patients, including ‘able, courageous and upright’ patients who had faced the problem of finding ‘a religious outlook on life’ in the absence of ‘what the living religions of every age’ had provided. Protestants and ex-Protestants in mental distress, moreover, were not only more likely than Roman Catholics to need comfort but were also more likely to go to a psychotherapist than to a clergyman; not so much because modern men hated ‘traditional . . . and ecclesiastical religion’ (though they did) as

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because the psychotherapist ‘trod with the patient the path of his illness’ without censure or condemnation and relieved the ‘spiritual suffering’ involved in the ‘opening up of the unconscious’ by helping the archetypes to ‘take over the guidance of the psychic personality’. Jung’s treatment of religion was the outcome of meditation on the idea that religion was central to the psyche and prayer central to religion, that symbolism was ‘legitimate’ only if it gave expression to the ‘immutable structure of the unconscious’, and that the modern need was not ‘for moral compulsion’ or an ‘effort of the will’ but for primordial experience of the psyche as independent of consciousness. Jung never ceased to proclaim it the religious problem of the modern world to know what to do with Protestantism. But he was much opposed to historic Protestantism and regretted the loss of the Mass, confession and ‘the vicarious function of the priesthood’. He made it his position that Protestantism would have to be latitudinarianized11 if it was to address modern men about their souls; that, unless Christian symbols could be invested with ‘psychological meaning’, they would never achieve the ‘universal’ meaning achieved by the other world-religions; and that the first step on the way to universal significance was to reject the ‘liberal-rationalist’ assumption that religion was a function of consciousness which should keep the very tightest control over the unconscious. In Psychological Types Jung made a subtle statement about the religious content of the archetypes of the unconscious, arguing that study of the psyche varied with the type of mind which was studying it, and that the important consideration was the ‘diversity’ of historic psyches and the difference that was made when they were understood not in terms of their undifferentiated origin but in terms of their probable differentiation in the future. In giving currency to the distinction between the introvert and the extrovert and between at least eight variations of the distinction, he wrote of ‘a fact, which was . . . overwhelmingly apparent in [his] practical work’, that ‘strife and misunderstanding’ were among ‘the props of the tragi-comedy of human existence’, and that the only basis for a ‘settlement of conflicting views’ was the recognition that every man was so ‘imprisoned in his type as to be incapable of understanding any other’. Jung regretted the imbalance in favour of the extrovert which had been created by science, positivism and Enlightenment, and by the exclusive belief of the ‘most eminent representatives’ of ‘our age’ in extrovert thinking. He deplored Western Christianity’s failure to relate Christ to the mysteries of the ‘inner man’, its tendency to make sin external to the soul, and the Kierkegaardian neurosis which had given many Europeans an ‘unbearably I–You relationship to God’. His prognosis was that Europeans needed a 11

To use our language, not his.

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Nietzschean subjectivity to disclose ‘the eternal roots of the collective unconscious’ and that the symbols of their need were available in Taoism and Yoga, in the I Ching’s ‘shaking of the axioms of causality’, and in the account of self which he had found in Zen Buddhism and alchemy.

Like his pre-war writings about Germany, Jung’s writings about alchemy and Eastern mysticism were directed at the contemporary situation. And just as he had felt sympathy for the Wotan cult and the German Youth movement in the 1930s as examples of modern man ‘searching for his soul’ by digging down to its ‘primeval roots’ in the face of the ‘intellectual rationalism’ of the nineteenth-century university, so in the 1940s alchemy and Eastern mysticism were responses to the threat presented to religion by the European drive for ‘power and aggrandizement’ and the superficiality of Christianity’s treatment of the soul. Jung believed that modern Western man was psychically starved, that the unconscious in all its forms had to be brought into play in order to feed him, and that alchemy, Eastern mysticism and German irrationalism had all been attempts to do this. There is no need to assume that any of this was true in the forms in which Jung put it or that the union of opposites, the mandala, the connection of the masculine and feminine principles in alchemy, or the irrationalisms and occultisms that he extracted from Eastern and German thought, had anything to do with the religion which he found in the unconscious. The question remains why Jung deserves attention. He deserves attention in the first place because he was accommodating Protestantism to the modern world and was trying to insert into the pagan subject-matter which Freud had created a sense of the natural, unavoidable character of religious symbols. He is important, secondly, because he supplied for the very modern, undisciplined, antinomian mind to whom formal religion is anathema, the dubious benefit of a theoretical justification. He deserves attention thirdly because he expelled a wetly loving God by the more contemporary idea – whether one likes it or not – of a crazy, nasty God who had created the crazy, nasty world of the twentieth century. Finally, he deserves attention because, rightly or wrongly, he made the point that blind acceptance supplies no security for Christianity which, if it is to address the modern mind, has to avoid the rationalism that obstructs the experience which the unconscious brings from the depths of the psyche. In his seventies and eighties, Jung wrote a lot, none of it very persuasive. Answer to Job asked questions about God’s goodness in the age of the hydrogen bomb; The Undiscovered Self had Western man made defective and unnatural by the suppression of both religion and the ‘unconscious’, but failed to connect vatic analysis with nuclear diplomacy; while Memories, Dreams, Reflections (which Jung was writing when he died) recalled through

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the ‘spirits’ who crammed his house in Bollingen the ‘objective, non-temporal ecstasy’ which had enabled him to experience the feeling that everything which had happened ‘in time’ had been brought together in a ‘concrete whole’. Jung was a mystical humanist for whom the historic psyche was the irrational existent, he was much influenced, negatively, by Nietzsche and he felt most at peace in the ‘beauty of Africa’ in the 1920s (before Europe, ‘the mother of all demons’, had destroyed it) when his ‘liberated’ psyche had poured ‘blissfully back’ to the ‘primeval expanses’ and even baboons waiting for the sunrise had reminded him that for ‘untold ages’ men had shown their ‘longing for consciousness’ by worshipping the great God who had ‘redeemed the world by rising out of the darkness as a radiant light in the heavens’. VII Zaehner was not a Jungian, but Jung appeared often in his writing – as confirming God’s ‘savage’ nature, as giving a modern version of the similarities between mysticism and sexual union which were to be found in most of the world’s religions, and as showing that nature-mysticism, so far from being a theistic phenomenon, was a reversion to the primitive condition in which ‘consciousness’ had not yet separated itself from ‘the collective unconscious’. Zaehner thought of Jung as being closer to Hindu, Islamic and Taoist mysticism than to Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy, and made searching criticisms of Jung’s account of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism. It was, however, he believed, Jung’s identification of the ‘tyranny’ exercised over Western civilization by ‘the male principle of consciousness’, and his concern with the female, non-rational ‘structure of the human psyche’ as the ‘essential subject-matter of religion’, which had enabled him to understand that it was not Europe – ‘the home of rational and scientific enquiry’ – but Asia which had been ‘the birthplace of every religion that had stood the test of time’. In the middle 1950s, when Mysticism, Sacred and Profane was written, Asia had not become a public problem. By the time Zaehner became a pundit in the late 1960s, it had. In criticizing Learyism and the drug-based youth mysticism of the 1960s and 1970s, Zaehner highlighted the reaction against the Confucian moralism and ‘regimentation’ with which Taoism was helping the young to react against modern moralism, and drew attention to the ‘living experience’ of ‘goodness’ and ‘ultimate reality’ which Zen made available ‘to all, irrespective of race, colour and creed’. He agreed that LSD could ‘deepen’ religious experience where experience already existed, could ‘arouse’ it where there was a will to ‘have done with self and . . . selfishness’, and through its aphrodisiac effects might make available to all the experiences which historic mysticism had reserved for the few. His warnings were simply that mysticism was an arduous and difficult pursuit, that, in historic mysticism (apart from Sufism) sex had

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been accompanied by renunciation, and that the expansion of self, unless controlled by experienced advisers, induced a psychotic ‘illusion of omnipotence in relation to the whole of existence’. Zaehner offered sympathy to the young but did not intend them or their mentors to get away with anything. He was pleased to see Sartre, Ayer and Hampshire on the rubbish-heap onto which these had thrown nearly everyone else but was displeased by Aleister Crowley, by Leary’s description of the Mass as a ‘powerful psychedelic trip’ and by oriental cults like those of the Maharishi and the Ramakrishna Mission. In Our Savage God, Manson reminded him not only of the ‘odious’ part played by American ‘respectability’ but also of the inadequacy of the leaders of hippie-culture itself. Our Savage God provided a potted account of religion since the ‘creative age’ of the sixth century BC, sketched the history behind the assumption that ‘falsehood and wrong lay at the heart of truth’, and touched on the unity of opposites in Heraclitus and the Bhagavadgita, Shamanism’s role in introducing the body/soul dichotomy into Greek thought, and the attempt in Parmenides and the Upanishads to identify ‘the one Power’ in the Universe. Similar ideas were unearthed in Neoplatonism and in the ‘perennial philosophy’ which, after ‘eviscerating the positive beliefs of . . . every religious tradition’, had been used by Manson ‘to . . . hack to pieces those shadowy reflections of the One who . . . plead[ed] for their silly . . . individual lives before he plunged them into the ineffable Oneness of the All’. In sketching Manson’s pedigree and the pedigree of the hippie-tradition, Zaehner smeared many thinkers. But it was Plato who was smeared most as hater of the body, seeker after the Absolute and advocate of the Hindu and Shamanistic ideas which Aristotle was to give European thought its identity by destroying. Chapters entitled ‘The Perils of Plato’ and ‘Our Father Aristotle’ described Plato’s distaste for matter, his identification of the material world as a fallen world, and the nasty morality which had enabled ‘beautiful boys’ to be ‘built up’ and ‘adorned’ by the philosopher-pederast as gods for whom ‘secret rites’ could be performed. The attack on Plato and the ‘engodded boy’ was in every way below the belt, even when it also disclosed a Plato who loved matter and an ‘ascetic’ Plato who disliked sodomy. The aim was to show that Aristotle had ‘bridged the gulf between matter and spirit’ in a way in which no Platonist had even wished to do, and to present the Aristotelion refusal to loathe matter and the body as issuing in the conception of a ‘ladder . . . up which the superlatively complex combination of matter and form must climb if . . . Man . . . was . . . to come into the presence of that . . . living . . . eternal and superlatively good . . . Being’ which was God. ‘Our Father Aristotle’ was not really a statement about Aristotle. Rather it was an answer, via an attack on monism and Marcion, to the central question of the concluding part of Our Savage God – whether God was ‘mad or bad’?

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In Our Savage God, the Old Testament was a ‘“bloody” book’ and could not be interpreted ‘along nice, orthodox lines’. It had a God, like Jung’s God in Answer to Job, who had allowed his ‘mercy’ to be counterbalanced by his ‘judgement’ and ‘vengeance’, and had forbidden the ‘sitting posture’ which aimed to ‘find . . . Him . . . within [men]’. This was a raving God, ‘for ever buffeting, chastising and hounding his rational creation’ and, if not exactly the Thug with whom He had been identified by Kabir, was the God who had inspired the Dutch Reformed Church to apartheid. Above all, this God – a God to be ‘obeyed’ rather than ‘discussed’ – was the ‘strange . . . unbelievable God’ who, having revealed himself to the Jews, was later to reveal himself to their Arab cousins through the ‘engodded’ lips of the prophet Muhammad . . . spreading a more up-to-date version of the old Jewish Law among the Gentiles [and] using that very sword that Jesus Christ himself had promised to bring . . . Meanwhile he had not been idle in India . . . Later he is black, swarthy, murderous and fearful, a robber, cheat and deceiver, lord of thieves and robbers. This was the god that was to rise to the rank of supreme God. He is terrible, yet, like Yahweh, he is also mild . . . His necklace is of skulls and there are serpents in his hair. He is ‘Lord of the dance’, and when he dances he becomes raving mad – dancing the cosmos into existence and dancing it back again into chaos . . . Yet it was this same gruesome, hideous, cruel and raving God, whose symbol was the erect phallus, who aroused the passionate devotion of his worshippers, who said of him that he was Love itself, the answer to that yearning passionate love that moved Aristotle’s cosmos on to its final consummation. (R. C. Zaehner, Our Savage God, 1974, pp. 239–40)

Our Savage God was militant and more than faintly deranged. It attacked abortion, about which Zaehner had previously been accommodating, and the humanistic gas-chamber mentality of which he made it a symbol. There was more, and more contemptuous, condemnation of the ‘well-to-do in the materially-advanced countries’, of the ‘packaged, canned and plastic culture’ which had aroused the justifiable contempt of the children who had experienced it, and of the ‘secularized Methodism’ which intellectuals were offering in its place. In identifying himself with ordinary undergraduates who would not have been undergraduates before the university expansion of the 1960s, Zaehner urged them, since they were going to be academically undistinguished, to enjoy themselves at the State’s expense and to cast out the ‘pernicious eggs’ which intellectuals would try to lay wherever they found ‘health, strength, security and simplicity’ to lay them in. Zaehner’s comminations against the Western intelligentsia can no doubt be interpreted sympathetically. But there was something as theatrical, solemn and fantastic about his marriage of science and the non-Christian religions to Catholicism as there has been about most English attempts to effect a detailed marriage between science and religion in the last century and a half. Zaehner was a practising Catholic. Yet he left little of the structure of orthodox theology intact and, while imputing to God a character which spared Him the

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indignity of wetness, so inflated theology as to envelop Him first into the wet balloon of Teilhardian pantheism and then into an unintelligible savagery and vengefulness. Zaehner is not a thinker with whom it is possible to feel happy. If he deserves respect, it is for the negative insights that men had to love and obey God, however angry, opaque or unpredictable that, in the Semitic religions at least, self-realization had not been identical with God-realization; and that, in spite of its rigidifying of Aristotle, Christianity had been built around Aristotle’s rejection of Heraclitus who, ‘turbanned, bearded and brown’, was ‘stalking the United States’ in the 1970s. The point was that God was ‘unfair’, that he had crucified his ‘second self’ in crucifying Christ, and that he was ‘raging away’ in the ‘tick-tock machines of modern civilization’. A Christian was one who accepted the God-given courage to do what he ought to do – to submit to the trials God had inflicted on him; to denounce wickedness, whether ‘Fascist, Nazi, Stalinist . . . Establishment, . . . prelatical’ or the ‘intellectual’ wickedness involved in ‘chattering like a lot of linguistic philosophers’; and to ‘pray for . . . the monsters’ with whom mankind had been chastised, not only Hitler, Stalin and Brezhnev but also Nixon, and of course Manson himself, who, having been forsaken by the God of Zen and Vedanta, was the kind of ‘lost sheep’ whom Jesus had come to save. Our Savage God was a taut, painful book which brought out much of what Zaehner had been saying previously about the ‘utter transcendence’ both of the Jewish God and of ‘the great religions of Asia’. Much public rubbish was intertwined with a serious purpose as he absorbed the horror of Manson and denounced the ‘American Establishment’ for needing the murder of ‘nine people of its own class and kind’ before its conscience could be ‘aroused’.

Zaehner was not a priest, though perhaps he ought to have been. It was in part because he was not that he was undisciplined and utopian, and fell victim to antinomian rancour. On the other hand, he affected a decent, straightforward anti-intellectualism, professed an old-fashioned belief in the Resurrection (in spite of everything), and attributed the survival of the Catholic Church, which ‘progressive opinion’ a century earlier had expected to collapse ‘under the dead weight of its . . . conservatism’, to the fact that ‘the . . . faithful had gone on going to Mass’ through all the shocks which the French Revolution had created around them and all the theological games which ‘desiccated mandarins’ had played above them. In chapter 14 we shall examine two of the most uncompromising, unmystical and dogmatic thinkers we have examined so far.

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The creed of the English is that there is no God and that it is wise to pray to Him from time to time. (Alasdair MacIntyre, God and The Theologians, 1963, reprinted in Against the SelfImages of the Age, 1971, p. 26) The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. For theology, this must be a fatal disease because once theology surrenders its claim to be a meta-discourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God . . . A theology ‘positioned’ by secular reason . . . either . . . idolatrously connects knowledge of God with some . . . immanent field of knowledge . . . or it is confined to intimations of a sublimity beyond representation, so functioning to confirm negatively the questionable idea of an autonomous secular realm, completely transparent to rational understanding. (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 1990, 1993 edn, p. 1) Just as an education which purports to be neutral between rival controversial religious standpoints always ends up in teaching no religion at all . . . so an education which purports to teach a morality neutral between rival controversial standpoints concerning the virtues will end up in teaching a largely indeterminate morality. (Alasdair MacIntyre, How to Seem Virtuous Without Actually Being So, Lecture at the University of Lancaster, 1991, p. 16)

In many of the chapters in Part I, we have discussed thinkers who wished to reconcile Christianity with modern life and knowledge by ridding it of the theological and sociological encumbrances of two millennia. In this chapter we shall discuss two thinkers who have aimed to show this process up for what it is – a capitulation to modern mentalities, not only the modern mentalities which the Tractarians had resisted but, in Milbank especially, the wider and more aggressive mentalities which have both infected and challenged Christianity in the last hundred years. Among the original Tractarians, and in Newman particularly, there was a political component – a distaste both for Brougham and the Whigs and for the Peelite Conservatism of the 1840s – along with an ostentatious, almost provincial, hatred of the worlds of fashion and the higher thought. Many later Tractarians identified themselves as Socialists, even when they were coy about attributing Socialism to Christ. Milbank and MacIntyre treat Socialism as so integral to Christianity that they can only with difficulty (if at all) avoid the accusation that their primary motive is a distaste for modern capitalism more than a Christian unease at the character of the modern mind. 371

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I Milbank1 has been ‘radicalizing’ MacIntyre and bringing him up to date. He has been both bolder and more theological than MacIntyre, has criticized MacIntyre while counting himself a follower, and has acquired the energetic unintelligibility one associates with Eagleton and the literature on which Eagletonianism has been nourished. Milbank is a quarter of a century younger than MacIntyre, was at school at Hymer’s College, Hull, and read history at The Queen’s College, Oxford in the early 1970s towards the end of the period of student unrest. He then spent a period discovering the philosophical and theological persona which he began to exhibit in Theology and Social Theory and in a dissertation about Vico at the University of Birmingham. Vico was a natural avenue to such a discovery. But the first published volume of the dissertation bore the marks of its origin and did not suggest the imminence of a comprehensive œuvre. By the time it appeared in 1991, however, after Theology and Social Theory, journal-articles had sketched a christological poetics, the parallels between Derrida, Lowth, Hamann and Warburton’s Divine Legation, and a Christian ‘hermeneutic’, Trinitarian metaphysic and ‘transcendental constraint’ on culture to replace Derrida’s ‘gnostic hermeneutic’, Thomism’s neglect of ‘culture and history’, and the deification of man characteristic of all ‘mere humanisms’. In the 1980s, Milbank had four preoccupations. Since a Christian ethic was ‘concerned with the transformation of our entire lives through supernatural grace’, it had to avoid ethical minimalism, to ‘assess the ethical reality of economic systems . . . in the light of the Gospel’, and to recognize in the ‘highly compromised ties [of trade] which bound the world together economically’ a solidarity ‘quite other’ than the solidarity ‘to which Christianity aspired’. Secondly, since even value-free economics was ‘ideological’, a ‘system of production’ founded on capitalism’s moral and spiritual ‘machiavellianism’ had to be replaced by a system founded on the ‘ethical basis of perceived needs and desirable human goals’. Thirdly, England’s imperial and missionary past gave the English Churches, especially the Church of England, the chance to remind people ‘all over the world’ who ‘shared in the body and blood of Christ’ that food, so far from being merely a ‘commodity’, also signified the possibility of ‘human solidarity’. Finally, in aiming to increase academic involvement in Christian social teaching, Milbank demanded MacIntyre’s conflict of traditions within universities and a defence of the ‘quasi-religious consensus’ and ‘historically-received equilibrium . . . of . . . interactions 11

John Milbank (1952– ), educated Hymer’s College, Hull, The Queen’s College, Oxford and Birmingham University. Teaching Fellow Lancaster University, 1983–91. Lecturer in Ethics, Cambridge University and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1993–8. Professor at the University of Virginia, 1998– . Author of Theology and Social Theory, 1990; The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, 1991–2; The Word Made Strange, 1996; and The Mercurial Wood, 1997.

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between politics, religion, education and culture’ which, he believed, had been ‘swept away’ by the Thatcherite demolition of the public transport system, state-funded public education and universal health provision. Milbank was right to think of the consensus that Thatcherism was attacking as Arnoldian, Platonic and quasi-religious, and of the ‘qualms and flutterings’ of its ‘refined sensitivity’ as having nothing in common with the nonconformist individualism which he accused Mrs Thatcher of reviving. In this, however, he was over-egging the pudding and failing to understand both the limited nature of Thatcherite effectiveness and the Christian element in Thatcherite politics. Since the 1980s, he has been similarly dismissive of the ‘Whig’ character of Pope John XXIII and of Pope John-Paul II’s ‘right-wing’ and ‘incipiently fascistic’ mixture of ‘social democracy and social market’. In the decade or so before the publication of Theology and Social Theory, Milbank argued that there was a contradiction between Christian values and capitalist reality, that Socialism was ‘just’ because it was ‘right’, and that its credentials were to be found in Christianity’s affinity with ‘post-Marxist’ and ‘post-Modernist’ radicalism. ‘After modernity’, went an opaque announcement in 1988, lies a disappointment with scientific reason and natural law leaving only a formalist nihilism as their pale echo. But in the critique which runs . . . ‘alongside’ modernity, classical and Christian exemplars help to promote a more helpful metaphysic . . . For this Christian metaphysic . . . the harmonising of tensions is possible . . . if one is committed . . . to a specific sacred space, the Christian ecclesia, whose very specificity consists in the concrete actualising of a universal unity-in-difference. Only through this lived demonstration is such an ontological perspective of such a practical possibility maintained. The demonstration may be thin, yet there may be reasons to ask whether, at this particular historical juncture, only Christianity can restore the fortunes of Socialism. (John Milbank, On Baseless Suspicion in Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism, in New Blackfriars, January 1988, pp. 16–17)

The idea that Christianity can rescue Socialism, or needs Socialism as its political manifestation, though unoriginal, is one of Milbank’s central beliefs and in Theology and Social Theory achieved originality by reason of the links it established between historic Christianity, theological orthodoxy and recent developments in European and American thought. Milbank is ‘orthodox’ in the manner of Newman and W. G. Ward, admires Maurice, Coleridge, Noël, Figgis, Tawney, Demant and Mackinnon, and turns modernist and post-modernist insights to his orthodox purpose. Yet orthodoxy seems not altogether to be in control; the identification with Socialism and against capitalism is as solemn and naïve as in Tawney or Demant; and a certain cynicism (about human motive) and ridicule (of postmodernist solemnity) would have made his position very much stronger. Milbank is conscious of the amount of history and of the breadth and depth of the secularization that has happened since the middle of the nineteenth century. Even though its theology was Augustinian, however, Theology

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and Social Theory looked to the future rather than to the past in evaluating thought from the polis onwards. Milbank resembles Temple in his humourlessness and directness. But Theology and Social Theory had, fortunately, none of Temple’s optimism. It emphasized the extent of de-Christianization and the probability that modern thought would not easily be reconciled with Christianity. It assumed that the Christian unmasking of the secular needed to be as ruthless as Marx’s unmasking of alienation, and that Christian theology, so far from accommodating itself to the autonomous secularity of social and political theory, needed to issue in a social and political theory of its own. Theology and Social Theory had nothing to say about what should be done. It was about what should be thought and about what should be done only as an unexplored consequence of what should be thought. It swept away the timidities with which it accused Christian thought of accommodating itself to secular thought, called for a ‘sceptical relativism’ in which ‘secular discourse’ would be ‘heresy’ in relation to Christianity, and implied a coincidence between the Nietzschean and post-modernist view that ‘scientific social theories’ are ‘theologies or anti-theologies in disguise’ and the view that a ‘theology “positioned” by secular reason’ either ‘idolatrously’ connects knowledge of God with ‘some . . . immanent field of knowledge’ or gives negative confirmation to an ‘autonomous secular realm’. In building on this coincidence and exposing ‘finite idols’ like ‘historical scholarship, humanist psychology or transcendental philosophy’ as obfuscations of God’s word, it offered theology the chance to be relieved of its ‘false humility’ by regaining its status as a ‘meta-discourse’. This sounds simple and impressive, as from one point of view it is; if it does nothing else, it suggests that Christian theology might move on beyond parity of esteem with secular thought to the assertion of an ontological superiority. In this connection it is important to understand that, while admiring MacIntyre and putting him on the same eminence as Durkheim, Marx and Nietzsche, Milbank also criticizes him. II MacIntyre2 has had a distinguished career teaching in English and American universities and writing about morals, politics, philosophy, psychology and religion. His politics are naïve. Philosophically, he lacks the hard, boring clin12

Alasdair Chambers MacIntyre (1929– ), educated Epsom College and Queen Mary College, London. Lecturer at Manchester, 1951–7 and Leeds, 1957–61. Fellow of University College, Oxford, 1963–6; Professor of Sociology at Essex University, 1966–70. Professor at Brandeis, Boston, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame and Duke Universities, USA, 1970– . Author of Marxism and Christianity, 1954; (with Flew) New Essays in Philosophical Theology, 1955; ed. Metaphysical Beliefs, 1956; The Unconscious, 1958; A Short History of Ethics, 1965; Secularization and Moral Change, 1967; Marcuse, 1970; Against the Self-Images of the Age, 1971; After Virtue, 1981; Whose Justice, Which Rationality?, 1988 and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 1990.

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icality of English philosophers of his generation. But he writes eloquently, informally and sympathetically about history, and (by implication) literature, and has made his religious odyssey a matter of public concern. In MacIntyre’s religious odyssey so far there have been three phases – a phase of belief in Marxism and Christianity, a phase of disengagement from Marxism and Christianity, and a phase in the United States since the late 1980s when Thomism has been proclaimed as the right philosophy for the late twentieth century. Though he began adult life, like Eagleton a decade and a half later, as both a Marxist and a Christian, MacIntyre differed from Eagleton in being Protestant and in being neither working class by upbringing nor moved by a desire to give cultural significance to working-class origins. MacIntyre’s parents were doctors, he was at a middle-class boarding school in an outer London suburb, and he read classics as an undergraduate subject at Queen Mary College, London. Where Eagleton was part of the student revolution of the 1960s in Cambridge, MacIntyre was at its receiving-end while a professor at the University of Essex. In Marcuse in 1970 he made a withering criticism of one of its ‘intellectual patron-saints’ for his betrayal of rationality, tolerance and academic freedom, for the ‘comic pomposity of his discussions of sex’, and for his misunderstandings not only of Hegel, Marx, Wittgenstein, Freud, Reich, phenomenology, analytical philosophy, modern industrialism, Soviet Marxism and contemporary America, but also of the ‘hippy . . . and soul culture’ of the ‘parent-financed . . . children’s crusade’ which a less ‘senile’ thinker would not have mistaken for a ‘genuine’ revolution. When MacIntyre first appeared on the English intellectual scene, he had a political and philosophical doctrine, as well as a doctrine about religion. He also gave extended consideration to the nature and status of psychology. MacIntyre’s account of psychology was given primarily in The Unconscious which analysed the ‘sketchiness’ of Freud’s ‘theoretical background’ and criticized the ‘haze of aspiration’ which permitted psychologists to theorize without adequately understanding the logical character of their theories. MacIntyre’s point was that cures could be effected even when theory was imperfect, and that Freudian psychotherapy and psychoanalytical theory had to be treated as being ‘relatively autonomous’ in relation to one another. Not only was there a ‘clash’ in Freud between ‘the language of rationality and responsibility’ and the ‘determinism’ Freud assumed was exerted on the ‘conscious life by the unconscious’, there were also difficulties surrounding the transition from the ‘unfree’ character of ‘neurotic behaviour’ to the ‘free choice’ characteristic of the ‘normal person’. MacIntyre’s dissection was meant to be critical, not dismissive. But it showed that the unconscious was ‘metaphysics’ rather than science, and that Freud’s insight into the ‘specifically human’ needed completion by the sort of insight that was to be found in literature.

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MacIntyre was not exactly disengaging from Freud, since it is not certain that he had been engaged with him in the first place. But he made it clear in the course of the 1960s that psychoanalysts resembled priests, that their ‘pose of authority’ was not the same as ‘the authority of rational argument’, and that psychoanalysis was unique in the extent to which, ‘unbacked by political power or past tradition’ and ‘unjustified on the basis of the criteria to which it . . . appealed’, it had recommended itself to those parts of the ‘urban, middle-class intelligentsia’ in America for whom Christian and Marxist belief had become impossible. At the same time he began to explain why he too was beginning to find Christian and Marxist belief impossible. In his first book – published when he was twenty-four – MacIntyre had pictured Marxism as a ‘Christian’ rebellion against the Christian atheism which had identified Christianity with state or ecclesiastical control. Like Christianity, Marxism was declared to be a myth which had no claim to the ‘status of science’ since one of the things science could not sustain was a conception of ‘orthodoxy’. Also, like Christianity, Marxism had been corrupted by power, had displayed a ‘want of humility’ in claiming science’s ‘certainty’ for its ‘vision of society’ and in confining salvation to the proletariat, had replicated historic Christianity’s confinement of salvation to the ‘doctrinally orthodox’. The young MacIntyre was neither a materialist nor an admirer of positivism (which was a ‘faith . . . for intellectuals only’). He did not treat religion as illusion, and he criticized both the Labour Theory of Value and the doctrine of the ‘increasing misery’ of the proletariat under capitalism. He was a Marxist notwithstanding because, where Christianity was not, Marxism was ‘breaking through bourgeois self-satisfaction’ and might eventually lead to ‘liberation’. MacIntyre believed that Marxism was a ‘revelation of Christian eschatology’ and the form under which eschatology had had to ‘enter the modern world’. The motives which had been making modern men Marxists were the motives which had made them Christians in the Roman Empire, and Marx was to be admired for ‘translating’ Christ’s judgement on ‘all antitheses between rich and poor’ into an ‘immediate judgement on the capitalist society of 1844’. Marx had misunderstood the capitalist economy, but he had understood only too well the failure of capitalist civilization – the ‘freedom’ that it offered ‘without security’, the insufficiency of its ‘political rights’, and the alienation it had effected not only of the ‘workers’ but also of ‘the intellectuals . . . and the artists’. MacIntyre’s criticisms of English society were secular as well as Christian. They were also dramatized, nowhere more shallowly than in the contrast between the two ‘images’ that were available to the ‘intellectual’ – the image

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of Keynes as both beneficiary and ‘intellectual guardian of the established order’ who had provided ‘new policies and theories of manipulation to keep our society in . . . economic trim’, and the image of Trotsky who, where Keynes had ended his life with a peerage, had ended his life with a ‘pickaxe in his skull’ as the reward for a lifelong defence of the powers of human effort. MacIntyre’s dissatisfaction with English society in the 1950s and 1960s began from the idea that English intellectuals no longer had an ‘imaginative vision’ of the future and believed that the working classes were as apathetic and conformist as they were. He was especially contemptuous of the desire of ‘scholarship-boys’ to ‘sit at the feet of the port-drinkers’ of the older universities and to ‘get on’ in the great bureaucracies, including the scientific bureaucracies which ran the state and private industry. These, he believed, were symptoms of a degeneration which had been theorized into a ‘meritocracy’ and moralized into an ‘ideal’, and had come into their own with the full-scale, lower-middle-class invasion of English universities which began after the fall of France in 1940 and has continued ever since. In rejecting Namierite and Oakeshottian scepticism, the emasculating empiricism of Popperian sociology, and the divorce of the Kantian and existential ought from any sort of is, he called on the universities to perform the function he believed they had performed previously, of resisting the ‘moulding pressures’ of industry, advertising and the State. MacIntyre’s instruments of resistance were the liberationist Marxism which Lukacs had proclaimed during the Hungarian revolt of 1956, the ‘human agency’ which had been diminished by both bureaucratic Stalinism and the English welfare state, and the perception of the Gaitskellite Labour Party as an ‘alternative Conservative party’ waiting for its turn in power. For MacIntyre the ‘Marxist theory of class struggle’ was a corrective of individualism and an indication of the possibility of a shared humanity. Marxism, however, was declared to be as incompatible with Russian reality as Mill’s liberalism was with American reality. American theory was criticized for pointing Mill’s principles at Russian society without pointing them at American society and Russian theory for pointing Marxist principles at American society without pointing them at Russian society; while Trotsky, the Hegel of the Phenomenology, Marx in the 1840s, and Lukacs and Lenin, were instanced as proof that Marxism did not have to issue in Stalinist bureaucracy. MacIntyre’s political writings in the 1950s demanded everything that the student revolution was to demand thereafter. They denied that ‘revolutionary liberation’ was a fantasy and a flexible Marxism an impossibility; and they found in Goldmann’s hermeneutical suggestiveness a vision, through the ‘coherence of great art and philosophy’, of something which ‘the thought and action of ordinary men’ displayed only by implication. And if, as in the end he did, MacIntyre turned against the student revolution and blamed its emergence on the end-of-ideology ideologists of the 1950s (like Bell and Shils), that

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may merely have been a facet of the fact that, in acquiring his revolutionary posture before the revolting students had acquired theirs, he had mixed his Christianity up with it. Just as in The Unconscious MacIntyre was slimming down Freud, and in writing politically was slimming down Marx, so in writing about religion, he was slimming down Christianity. MacIntyre at this time was a practitioner of linguistic analysis. But he judged logical positivism insensitive to the diversity of human utterance and doubted its ability to define the nature of religious utterance once this was seen to be neither truth, transcendental ontology nor speculative metaphysics, and had failed to fall into any of the categories which Ayer had specified in Language, Truth and Logic. For MacIntyre in the 1950s, religion was a matter of ‘how men were to live’ and what their ‘fundamental attitudes were to be’. It needed ‘authoritative . . . rules’ which ‘defined the worshipful’. In metaphysics, so far from having a friend, as the Idealists had supposed, it had a rival which should not be allowed to appropriate theological language in constructing a set of ultimate beliefs, and should not think of God as an explanatory hypothesis since to do so would be to give either ‘too much certitude’ or ‘too little’, and would rule out the ‘free decision’ to love God which was of the essence of Christianity. From this point of view, religion shared with literature a concern for ‘the central situations in human life’, while transcending literature by reason of the believer’s decision that its ‘myths’ and ‘narratives’ told those who believed them ‘something about the universe’. But it was not the case that ‘religious practice’ was an ‘application’ of religious doctrine, and men could worship without being able to say clearly what they believed since, in the act of worship, they talked ‘to’ God rather than ‘about’ Him and formulated doctrine only as a way of ‘saying what they did’ when they were doing this. So far from dogma or doctrine being central, therefore, it was suggestiveness, reticence, vocativeness, praise, devotion, hopefulness and the imprecision characteristic of ‘the language of liturgy’ – in other words, almost everything apart from dogma or doctrine – which were central. MacIntyre did not say much about orthodoxy, except that each religion had an orthodoxy which determined what was and was not included in it. On the other hand, he said a good deal about authority and conversion, not least because they distinguished religious utterance and belief from ‘experiences of awe’, ‘intimations of immortality’ and the synthetic mish-mash which had been propagated – though he did not say this – by Toynbee and Whitehead. What MacIntyre was affirming was the impregnability of religious belief, its inaccessibility to philosophical proof or disproof, and its character not only as ‘humility’ and ‘obedience’ but also as ‘passion’, like the passion involved in married love. Belief, moreover, even when it could not ‘argue’, could ‘preach’, as preach it did, in a way that was beyond argument.

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These specifications of the nature of psychoanalysis, Marxism and Christianity were aspects of an attempt to mount an intellectual criticism of English public life. They were then followed by the process of disengagement. The disengagement from psychoanalysis, implicit in The Unconscious, was strengthened by the discovery that Freud’s sociology was incoherently individualistic and had been given a local habitation in the ‘cultural desert’ created by the ‘liberal intelligentsia of New York and the Californian cities’, where a psychological theory had been believed in which ‘perhaps was not as well confirmed as witchcraft or astrology’. In disengaging from Marxism, the objections were that Marx had failed to provide the ‘social psychology’ that his politics needed, that Marxist theory had had too little interest in the nature of morality and that Marxists had failed to move on to a ‘post-Marxist ideology of liberation’. In disengaging from Christianity, MacIntyre rejected almost all the arguments with which he had defended it in the 1950s. The ‘self-conscious . . . atavism’ of T. S. Eliot and the Tractarians, the neo-Protestantism which had been borrowed from Pascal, Kierkegaard and Barth, and the accommodating Protestantism of Tillich, Bultmann, Robinson, Bonhoeffer and van Buren, had all become equally impossible, religion could not be made ‘logically invulnerable’ by insulating it from culture and life, and it was ‘too late’ both for mediaeval Christianity, which had been the ‘corrupted religion of a subsistence economy’, and for that evacuation of ‘theistic content’ which had accompanied the attempt to ‘translate’ Christianity into the terms of modern thought. In reviewing the elder Chadwick’s Secularisation of the European Mind in 1976, MacIntyre remarked that Christianity had been secularized as well as the European mind and as a ‘Christian theologian’, that Chadwick might have been expected to write at the very least a history ‘which differed in [some] significant way from the history written by non-Christians’. It was to be MacIntyre’s own concern with Aristotelianism, Augustinianism and Thomism in place of Protestantism which were to issue in the two Catholicizing works he was to publish in 1988 and 1990. In the course of the 1970s MacIntyre wrote many articles about ethics, medical ethics and philosophy, A Short History of Ethics had a continuous circulation as a textbook; Against the Self-Images of the Age provided an accessible version of articles which had been published in less accessible form previously. It was not, however, until After Virtue was published in 1981 that a new MacIntyre began to take off, and not until the publicaton of Whose Justice, Which Rationality? seven years later that a prediction which Gellner had made seventeen years earlier was fulfilled by the announcement that MacIntyre was an Augustinian Christian. III Much of what MacIntyre had written about religion in the 1950s had been consistent with a Barthian hankering after Roman Catholicism as an antidote

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to theological Liberalism. He had then moved a long way from both by renouncing Christianity. It is also the case that After Virtue was almost completely devoid of direct religious significance. After Virtue disowned MacIntyre’s previous writing as ‘armchair’ analytical philosophy which, even so, had failed to avoid an ‘evaluate standpoint’. In attempting to be explicit about this he provided a Collingwoodian history of European thought in which the moral mode invented by Homer, Plato and Aristotle and extended into the Middle Ages, was the high point from which everything that had followed had been a deterioration and the ‘barbarians’ were not, as they had been in the third century, ‘waiting beyond the frontiers’ but had ‘already been governing us for quite some time’. This meant two things. On the one hand, that MacIntyre disliked the industrial and Weberian régimes which were governing Europe and the United States and deplored the dominance they were permitting ‘markets, factories and bureaucracies’ to establish over individuals. On the other hand, that moral enquiry had been impoverished by the destruction of Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century and the disconnection of ethics from the divine law in the eighteenth century; that the existing ‘languages of morality’ were merely fragments of a conceptual scheme which was no longer present in its entirety, and that G. E. Moore, Sartre, Nozick, Rawls and Berlin were as empty as Locke, Hobbes, Hume and Kant had been before them. Moreover, the breakdown of the attempt to ‘provide an independent justification of morality’ was manifesting itself in contemporary society’s inability to achieve either ‘moral consensus’ or a proper patriotism. Modern politics was ‘civil war carried on by other means’; government, especially American government, so far from representing a ‘moral community’, involved the imposition of a ‘bureaucratic unity’ on a society which lacked ‘genuine consensus’; and it followed that the ‘individualist . . . acquisitiveness and . . . market values’ endemic in the ‘economic order’ had to be rejected if ethics was once more to become ‘the science’ which enabled ‘man . . . as-he-appeared-to-be’ to become ‘man as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his essential-nature’. The search for a reputable way of criticizing the modern world had been one of MacIntyre’s earliest preoccupations. After Virtue now resumed the search, praising Jacobinism and eighteenth-century Republicanism for restoring the ‘classical’ conception of a ‘public good . . . prior to . . . individual desires and interests’, calling for ‘another St Benedict’ to do what the original St Benedict had done during the fall of Rome, and moving quickly through the destruction of teleological morality by Protestantism, Jansenism and Enlightenment to the ‘individual moral agent’s’ liberation from ‘hierarchy . . . and . . . the divine law’. Whose Justice? and Three Rival Versions presented Augustinianism, Thomism and Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris as capable not only of seeing off the ‘scientific’ truth about moral enquiry which was claimed by the ex cathedra

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encyclopaedism favoured by the Gifford Lectures but also of seeing off Nietzsche,3 who had interpreted ‘truth’ as a facet of the ‘will-to-power’, had admired as ‘nobility of instinct’ what St Augustine had stigmatized as ‘the vice of pride’ and while deserving credit for replacing the professorial and lecturing modes by ‘the poem . . . the aphorism . . . and the epigram’, had been a ‘moral solipsist’ whose Ubermensch was merely an incident in the ‘internal unfolding of . . . liberal individualist modernity’. MacIntyre adopted the idea of a ‘tradition’ or ‘succession of traditions’ as the route by which moral ideas became entrenched in the individual mind. He attributed a ‘unity’ to European philosophy between Socrates and Aquinas, showed Suarez and Descartes freeing reason from ‘the bonds of any . . . moral and religious community’, and argued the need to restore both reason’s ‘membership’ of a ‘particular’ community and philosophy’s role as ‘apprenticeship in a craft’ which required ‘moral’ in addition to ‘intellectual’ virtues. In the main chapters of Three Rival Versions there were three reasons why Thomism resolved MacIntyre’s problem: because, in ‘reappropriating the past’ towards a ‘particular yet eternal future’, it issued in ‘theoretical inquiry’ as well as ‘practical embodiment’; because its narrative of the past was ‘that from which we are to learn if we are to identify and move towards our telos’; and because it could resolve the ‘apparently antagonistic claims’ of Aristotelianism and Augustinianism through a ‘tradition- . . . and . . . craftconstituted’ form of moral enquiry. Whose Justice? reflected on the conflicting traditions in European morality – not only the tradition which ran from Homer to Aquinas and the Scottish tradition on the way from Calvinistic Aristotelianism to its encounter with Hume, but also on what it called ‘the liberal tradition’. For MacIntyre Liberalism was a ‘form of social order’ in which individuals appealed to ‘universal . . . norms’ independently of tradition, there was no ‘overall unity’ and there was a compartmentalization of the ‘spheres . . . within which . . . good was pursued’. Not only was Liberalism ‘intolerant’ of ‘rival conceptions of the good’, it also replaced ‘debate’ about the public good by forms of thought and action which accorded with ‘the market’ and with ‘liberal-individualist politics’. This was as much a condemnation of the United States in the 1980s as MacIntyre’s writing had been of England in the 1950s, but it was approached with an historical perspective which MacIntyre had not had in England, and it was dominated by a determination to establish that all ‘contemporary debates’ were conducted in liberal language through a political system in which ‘the consumer, the voter and the individual’ chose between alternatives controlled by the élite’s ‘cosmetic’ capability. In rejecting the Liberal assumption that every rational person was ‘free and 13

And by implication Foucault.

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. . . able to read every book’, MacIntyre took up from de Man the idea that there was a ‘moral relationship between author and text and text and reader’ which made it impossible to believe that ‘standards of rationality’ were ‘equally available . . . to all persons whatever tradition they happened to find themselves in’. It was ‘only by learning what the texts [had] to teach’ that the reader could ‘read [the] texts aright’ and only when there was ‘humility’, ‘faith in authority’ and a ‘redirection’ of the ‘perverse . . . will’ that a ‘rational understanding’ could be achieved of ‘that of which the text spoke’. What MacIntyre admired about Aquinas was his freedom from the ‘impartiality’ of academic philosophy, his ability to give ‘organized expression to . . . theories already embodied in . . . practice’ and the reminder he gave of the Marxist belief in the inseparability of practice from theory and of theory from practice. MacIntyre was as dismissive in the United States in the 1980s as he had been in England thirty years earlier of ‘academic . . . neutrality’ for being a ‘fiction of the encyclopaedist’, and he gave his imprimatur to the idea that ‘there [could] be no shared premises unless . . . the word of the scriptural preacher [was] heard as authoritative’. ‘The Augustinian scheme of theoretical and practical enquiry’ could only be justified by a ‘participant’ in it, the ‘practice of the moral virtues’ was ‘central to our acquiring knowledge of them’, and it was impossible to learn what Aquinas’s Summa taught unless men ‘already to some degree . . . possessed that virtue of practical intelligence and judgement’ which was an aspect of the moral virtues. It was Aquinas’s methodological merit that he had summarized on each question that he discussed the ‘strongest arguments for and against each answer’ which had been formulated in the traditions he had inherited, and had left open the possibility of returning to a question ‘with some new argument’ in the future. It was his substantive merit that he had married Aristotle’s account of the human good and practical reasoning to Augustine’s account of sin and the ‘defective will’, and had connected the Aristotelian ‘criteria for the ultimate good’ to the Biblical and Augustinian belief that ultimate good could only be found in the ‘relationship of the soul’ to that ‘state of perfect happiness which was the contemplation of God in the beatific vision’. It was, of course, convenient for MacIntyre that Aquinas held a ‘version of the Labour Theory of Value’, had ‘inherited from the patristic tradition’ a view of the limitation of property rights which Hume and Blackstone were to reject, and had drawn a distinction, which ‘lacked application in the . . . economics of free markets’, between ‘the value’ of ‘a thing’ and its ‘worth’ to a ‘particular person’. It was equally convenient that for Aquinas ‘unjust laws’ did not deserve obedience, that the ‘commercial and financial practices of capitalism’ were incompatible with justice, and that ‘metaphysical theology’ justified a ‘radical break’ not only with the practices and assumptions of the

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thirteenth century but also with the practices and assumptions of the twentieth century.

MacIntyre is an enemy of Liberalism in both an economic and a religious sense. His ratification of the pluralism of the modern university is not, therefore, a Liberal ratification, but a persuasion past Liberalism to that union of faith and enquiry which for him is the proper way to the higher knowledge. And he is clear that for the humanities, it is the setting up of a confrontation between moral or religious Liberalism and its alternatives that is the source of hope, because confrontation will not only undermine an ‘academic objectivity’ which is not objective but will also prove that the ‘virtue’ required of ‘those who claim public and political authority’ in England and the United States, is far from being virtuous. In a lecture in England in 1991, MacIntyre alleged a reluctance on the part of the ‘dominant liberal culture’ to ‘appoint teachers on the ground of their moral character’ and criticized this as an aspect of the ‘minimum’ morality which allowed the ‘political order’ to be ‘neutral’ between rival standpoints insofar as their adherents complied with ‘the requirements of public order’. It was this that was emptying morality of function and enabling men to ‘seem virtuous without actually being so’. The problem it presented to universities was to show why morality ought not to be emptied of function. The problem it presented to MacIntyre was to know how to proceed in the absence from the modern world of ‘independent forums for debate’ outside the universities. Towards universities, MacIntyre has been reluctant and standoffish, unwilling to accept the game they are playing but persuaded of the impossibility of financing the requisite seriousness and discrimination outside them. He has done nothing to theorize the confessional university and has been forced back onto the idea that universities should reflect the divided condition of the modern world and should initiate students into the ‘conflict’ about morals and religion that he wishes to uncover from beneath the blandness and illusoriness of the Liberal consensus. About all this, it is much later than MacIntyre supposes and, though he is travelling hopefully, it is to a destination at which he is unlikely to arrive. Certainly he understands that Liberalism is an oppressive and exclusive ideology. But equally certainly he seems not to take into account the depth of its entrenchment, the disguises it takes and the extent to which his tactical demand for conflict involves substantive acceptance of its inconclusiveness. Whatever their economic orientation and even when their language is postLiberal, humane studies in modern universities are in the grip of a secular correctness which detaches morality from religion, does not really expect anything new to happen (except in rhetoric) and leaves its mark on morality even where morality remains attached to religion. In a difficult situation, the

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conflict that MacIntyre wants is probably the only way forward. But if his objective is the entrenchment of Thomism where Liberalism and secular and post-Liberal correctness are entrenched at present, there is little reason to suppose that he will be successful. Taking his life as a whole, MacIntyre leaves the impression of flitting from flower to flower, sipping where he wishes, and then moving on. Such an impression is misleading. MacIntyre has manifestly believed all the positions he has adopted, even when they have been mutually contradictory. In the concluding pages of this chapter, we shall examine Milbank’s rather heavier consistency. IV While acknowledging MacIntyre’s indispensability to his own development, Milbank’s criticisms have been searching and fundamental. They deny the continuity MacIntyre identifies between Aristotelianism and Platonism and Augustinianism and Thomism. They replace MacIntyre’s realism by ‘linguistic idealism’, and they assert, far more than MacIntyre does, the difference between Christian virtue, classical virtue and ‘virtue, dialectics and . . . tradition’ in general. Extended analysis leads to the conclusion that, in spite of MacIntyre’s many merits, he is at fault in refusing to underline the critical tension between a philosophical perspective which forces the validation of Christianity into the ‘confines of a Socratic dialectic’ and a ‘theological’ perspective which deconstructs the heroic, male magnanimity with which Aristotelian ethics had distinguished itself from Christianity by excluding women and the poor. Up to a point Milbank accepts MacIntyre’s idea of tradition and faith. But he points out that Aristotelian virtue was ‘rhetorically locked within the bounds of the polis’ and makes an issue of the fact that where he, Milbank, writes as a theologian, MacIntyre, writing as a philosopher, is unable to ‘rescue us from secular reason’. On Milbank’s assumptions, moreover, ‘dialectics’ is more limited than MacIntyre implies, and the transition from one tradition to another more searing than MacIntyre supposes. Milbank’s invigilation is sympathetic as well as critical. It accepts the ‘perceived correspondence’ between our own ‘social-intellectual’ situation and the ‘social-intellectual situation’ of Plato and Aristotle, sees in the contemporary revival of Platonic and Aristotelian ethics the same reaction against a ‘debased democratic politics’ as had suggested their indispensability in the first place, and agrees that Plato and Aristotle had been ‘groping towards the linking of universal with particular . . . the individual with the whole, the family with the city, [and] contemplation with practice’ in a way which was to be achieved ‘more satisfactorily’ by Christianity. His criticism is, nevertheless, that MacIntyre elides what ought not be elided, and that the conception of a Platonic-Aristotelean-Augustinian-Thomist tradition is as much a capitulation to the secular as the capitulations which form the subject-matter of Milbank’s main critical chapters.

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In these chapters barbed wire was set up, the secular was surrounded and Christian thinking was warned off it. The whole of social and political thought since the sixteenth century was analysed for traces of secularity. Hobbes, Grotius and Spinoza were shown founding a secular political science and the Scottish economists a secular political economy. The contrast between Christianity and the ‘civic humanism’ of ‘the machiavellian moment’ was pursued with vigour and in detail. Political science since the eighteenth century was identified with the conception of ‘the political’ as a ‘field of pure power’ arising from ‘the necessity of . . . self-preservation’ and sociology, including Weberian sociology, with a ‘secular consensus’ which was so much ‘a theology and a church’ that Christian theology ought no longer to conduct a dialogue with it. Milbank took on board the deconstruction of the secular which had been effected by Hegel and Marx but declined to be ‘over-enthusiastic’ about either. He contrasted the complicity of the secular in ‘ontological violence’ with the Christian conception of ‘harmonic peace’, and declared that Christianity alone was capable of providing a ‘discourse of non-mastery’ which would overcome nihilism through the ‘imagination in action’ of a ‘peaceful reconciled social order, beyond even the violence of legality’. Theology and Social Theory drew attention to the complicated relationship between Bonald and de Maistre on the one hand and Comte on the other, and the unacknowledged theological element which had made Durkheim’s sociological explanation into a ‘religion’. It drew attention to German sociology’s acceptance of the ‘Kantian identification of religion’ with ‘the private . . . and . . . subjective’, to the ‘liberal-protestant metanarrative’ with which Weber and Troeltsch had imposed themselves on the modern world, and to their projection backwards to the ‘beginnings of Christianity’ of the ‘Kantian ethicization’ in which they were implicated. It was even more important that their sociology had failed to ‘discriminate between just and unjust power’, had set the tone for the ‘malign’ attitude towards religion displayed by Talcott Parsons and had made it desirable that the sociology of religion should ‘come to an end’. Chapters entitled ‘For and Against Hegel’ and ‘For and Against Marx’ praised Marx insofar as he had ‘de-constructed’ the ‘logic of capitalism’ as a ‘secular logic’ and Hegel insofar as he had criticized political economy and the ‘inward . . . purity’ of Kant’s soul. But in neither did Milbank find anything resembling Christianity; not in Marx because Marx’s ‘naturalistic mysticism’ postulated a ‘secular . . . unleashing . . . of . . . freedom’ after the collapse of capitalism, not in Hegel because Hegel had lacked ‘a fully Christian doctrine of creation’, had been too ‘intimately linked with “heretical” and “pagan” currents’ in secular society, and had placed ‘a certain level of finite reality’, including ‘the practice of Capitalism’ and the State’s ‘administration of punishment and discipline’, outside the reach of ‘divine goodness’. Milbank went over a great deal of old ground about Hegel. What came out,

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in spite of Hegel’s failure ultimately to question ‘modern “secular” assumptions’, was the insistence that the Crucifixion and ‘the early Church’s experience of Resurrection’ had had great causal efficacy in Western history, and had registered a fundamental break with the ‘Sittlichkeit’ of the polis. Milbank’s chapters on Marx and Hegel, like his chapters on sociology, political economy and political science, were sighting-shots. It was not until the account of Blondel and his successors in chapter 8 that positive statements began to be made, though even these were accompanied by the discovery, in Rahner and German and Latin-American liberationist Catholic theology, of the secularization which was present almost everywhere else in modern thought. Milbank agrees with the liberationist theologians that ‘the whole concrete life of humanity is . . . imbued with grace’, that political and social concerns are, therefore, inseparable from the ‘spiritual’ concern for salvation, and that the Church ought not to mark off a ‘secular sphere’ which is ‘autonomous’ under God and would ‘normally’ be ‘the concern of the laity alone’. At the same time, he accuses them of ‘naturalizing the supernatural’ and of associating Christianity with a ‘universal humanism’ which aims to effect a rapprochement with Enlightenment, Marxism and an ‘autonomous secular order’. And this, he believes, is inadequate not only because it treats Marxism as disclosing the ‘essence’ of man’s being but also because it arrives yet again, via Bonhoeffer and Rahner, at the ‘social’ as an ‘autonomous sphere’ of which a ‘theological critique’ is impossible. It was doubtless distressing, as Milbank claims, that these conclusions ‘coincided with those of reactionaries in the Vatican’. In making it clear, nevertheless, that he was not a reactionary, he limbered up for his final preliminaries by discussing Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Nietzsche and Foucault as both aids and obstacles to the achievement of a Christian political theology. The question for Milbank was whether post-modernism did or did not challenge theology. His answer was that, instead of ‘reducing’ theology to something else, post-modernism had revitalized it, and that Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity (as distinct from the attack on religion in general), was evidence both of Christianity’s uniqueness and of its avoidance of the ‘original primordial violence’ which had been affirmed by ‘all other myths or narrative traditions’. Whether there is ‘anything but power’, and whether a way of understanding thought, including social thought, can be found in which violence is not the ‘master’, goes to the heart of Theology and Social Theory. V In the final chapter of Theology and Social Theory, Milbank presented theology as both a ‘social science’ and ‘the queen of the sciences . . . on pilgrimage through this temporary world’. While avoiding a ‘tridentine deduction of

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Christian social teaching from Christian doctrine’, he claimed that it was only because there had already been a Christian ‘mode of action’ that there could be a Christian social theory, that this had to be ‘first and foremost’ an ‘ecclesiology’, and that it had to be concerned ‘not with the imagination of an ecclesial ideal’ but with the ‘actual genesis of real historical churches’. On this view, theology had to ‘reconceive itself’ as a kind of ‘Christian sociology’, to articulate Christian ‘difference’ in such a fashion as to make it ‘strange’, and to defend the ‘Christian Sittlichkeit . . . embodied in the . . . new and unique community’ which had emerged after the Crucifixion. This was ‘the true opposition’ to Nietzschean post-modernism. It denied that the ‘political, coercive community’ was a commonwealth, properly understood, and it contrasted the Ciceronian commonwealth as an ‘association’ united by a community of ‘interest and right’ with Augustine’s commonwealth as an ‘association . . . of rational beings united by agreement on the common objects of their love’. But it acknowledged also that the Church had ‘for the most part’ failed, that it had ‘ushered in’ first the ‘liberal’ and then the ‘nihilistic’ world of the ‘modern secular’ and, so far from establishing an ‘epoch of Christian dominance’ from which twentieth-century Christianity was a retreat, had confined Christianity since the eleventh century within the ‘cycle of . . . violence’ and ‘the self-torturing circle of secular reason’. Christianity’s rescue-package for the future included ‘charity . . . forgiveness . . . patience . . . ontological peace . . . a unique . . . structural logic’ which was expressed in mainly Augustinian terms and a new ‘social ontology’ which would pass ‘beyond . . . suppression of passion’ to the ‘pure consensus of a peaceful order’. There were difficulties about Augustine’s refusal to grant power an ‘ontological purchase’, and about the Augustinian assumption that women should be guided by men and the ‘intellectually and morally inferior’ by their intellectual and moral ‘superiors’. But Augustine was more central than Aquinas because Augustine had refused to recognize ‘social, economic and administrative life’ as ‘separate from the Church’, had not thought of the Church as ‘specializing in what [went] on inside men’s souls’, and had conceived of ‘the whole person’ or ‘body–soul continuum’ as replacing the ‘excessive compulsion’ with which ancient ethics had understood the soul’s control of the body and the polis’s control of its members. Milbank is conscious of the unreality of his Augustinianism and enquires how, ‘in a world of deep-seated conflict’, it helps to imagine ‘a state of total peace’. His answer, characteristic but unsatisfactory, is that ‘it allows us to unthink the necessity of violence’, and indicates that there is a way to act in a violent world which assumes ‘the ontological priority of non-violence and the “forgiveness of sins”’. Political Augustinianism, in Milbank’s (though not always in Augustine’s) sense, is about the Church and its ‘continuing story . . . already realized in a finally exemplary way by Christ, yet still to be realized universally in harmony

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with Christ . . . by all generations of Christians’. It is a philosophy of history in which the ‘interruption’ of history by Christ and the Church ‘interpreted all other events’, made it possible for ‘forgiveness’ and ‘atonement’ to redeem ‘an original, peaceful creation’ from the ‘negative distortion’ of ‘dominium’ and, while denying ‘ontological necessity’ to ‘absolute ownership and sovereign rule’, associated politics’ ‘tragic’ character with a ‘disciplining of sin’. Theology and Social Theory discussed questions of importance to all thinking Christians, made it difficult for even thinking Christians to understand what it was saying and envisaged a society from which the inconveniences (or sins) of existing society had been eliminated. Milbank is not, doubtless, expecting a relief from sin (or inconvenience). It is, nevertheless, the case that Christian hope in his hands glides easily into such an expectation.

Milbank is the last thinker we shall discuss in Part I, not because he epitomizes it, except in its ubiquitous ambiguity, but because he has carried out of the twentieth century a creative certainty which, however vulnerable, seeks, like any ordinary latitudinarianism, to restore Christianity to intellectual centrality. Milbank is spared the indignity of latitudinarianism by reason of his refusal to accommodate to any of the forms accommodation has taken in the last century and a half, indeed, in the last millennium and a half. The implication of his positions is that, with the exception of Socialism (which stands out like a sanctified sore thumb) Christianity stands over against all secular, intellectual achievements – not only the achievements of the modern world, during which secularity has been predominant, but also the achievements of the Middle Ages, during which, as he understands it, secularity infiltrated itself so completely as to exercise a subterranean predominance, even when Christianity seemed to be in control, and many subsequent historians were to congratulate the mediaeval church and mediaeval universities on the thoroughness with which control had been established. Except in discussing Socialism, Milbank highlights the differences between Christianity and all the doctrines with which it has come to be associated. Whether this obscures or illuminates Christianity’s character, whether it promises anything more than the self-regarding virtue with which Nonconformity rationalized and consoled itself for its exclusion from power and influence; whether ‘Christianity’ can be distinguished from historic Christianity with all the richness and variety it has deployed, and all the caution it has exercised, in its relations with the world, are questions to which Milbank provides no answer. But at least it can be said, on his behalf, that, though he is wrong to identify Christianity with Socialism, he is not a latitudinarian and does not capitulate to the post-Christian consensus.

II The post-Christian consensus

15 Modern knowledge and the postChristian consensus I The conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who thus denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance. (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871, 1981 edn, vol. II, pp. 395–6) It is easy to see how the man who has time for education, for self-culture, may strive towards the freethinker’s standard of morality. But what about the toiler, the man whose days are spent in the hard round of purely mechanical labour? I can only reply that so long as such a man has no time for the development of his intellectual nature he cannot be moral in my sense of the word . . . The existence of large masses of men in our present society incapable of moral action is one of the gravest questions of the time . . . Here the freethinker’s mission is at once religious and moral! His morality . . . his socialism, his religious cult is the pursuit of truth. (Karl Pearson, The Enthusiasm of the Market-Place and of the Study, 1885, in The Ethic of Freethought, 1888, pp. 127–8) Few things are more needed by us in England than a revision of our religion . . . A form of it is wanted that shall be founded on reasonable bases and enforced by reasonable hopes and fears, and that preaches honest morals in unambiguous language, which good men who take their part in the work of the world, and who know the dangers of sentimentalism, may pursue without reservation. (F. Galton, Restrictions on Marriage, 1904–5, in Essays on Eugenics, 1909, pp. 58–9)

In Part II we shall be concerned neither with the Christian resistance to infidelity nor with the Christian attempt to accommodate to infidelity. Part II will be about the abandonment of Christianity not only by science (which will be central to this chapter and the next) but also by history, philosophy, literature, music and sociology which, more even than ‘science’, have made Christianity seem marginal, eccentric or problematical without necessarily assaulting it as the assailants of Religion and Public Doctrine, volume II assaulted it. On the way to this outcome, there have been many styles of thinking. What unites them is the assumption that the upheaval which occurred between 1860 and 1930 is irreversible, that the high-toned literary and philosophical infidelity which supplemented and supplanted Voltairean and Humean infidelity is permanent and uncontroversial and that science has not only established its autonomy but has also either become a religion or made religion unnecessary. It is possible that in, say, 1940 many more scientists were practising 391

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Christians than the literature of science suggested. But it is unlikely that this is the case now and it is in any case the literature of science which is exemplary – not so much the literature of the learned journal as the public literature which since the eighteenth century has performed two leading functions: of educating the lay public as well as the scientific community into a knowledge of the methods and conclusions which operate within the natural sciences, and of persuading the lay public as well as the scientific community to the conclusions which science has been persuading it to reach about politics, religion and the conduct of life. Both types of literature have been extensive, and the professional indefeasibility of the one as much as the speculative intelligence of the other has made science an important feature of English public thought. The scientific chapters in Part II are not primarily about the conflict between science and religion which was limited in time and was won decisively by the protagonists of science. What they are about is the attempt to use science to create a public doctrine as a substitute for Christianity. No process has been more central. Nothing is more important to the understanding of this process than the claims to indefeasibility which have been made by scientific thinking. Science has already been discussed within a Christian framework in the chapters on Whewell, Eddington and Needham. It will now be discussed on the way out of a Christian framework in Darwin and in a post- or antiChristian framework in Galton, Pearson, Freud, Julian Huxley, Popper and Dawkins. Darwin’s religion was obscure, and Julian Huxley’s a strange marriage of mysticism and science. Freud explained religion away and Christianity (and Judaism) with it. In Pearson there was a blurred intellectual Marxism which had no Christian component and in Popper an anti-totalitarian rationalism which had virtually no Christian component. In Galton eugenics was presented as a religion: in Dawkins, there has been an ostentatiously Darwinian disregard for religion which Darwin on the whole avoided.

Galton1 begun adult life as a traveller, theorized geography as a liberal and synthesizing science and was much involved in the practical, commercial application of scientific invention. He did not invent the word ‘eugenics’ until 1883. But the idea had been present in his writing since the 1860s. It had led first to the claim that ‘genius’ was ‘hereditary’ and the incidence of genius 11

Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), educated King Edward VI School, Birmingham, King’s College, London and Trinity College, Cambridge. Author of The Teleotype, 1850; The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, 1853; The Art of Travel, 1855; Hereditary Genius, 1869; English Men of Science, 1874; Inquiries into Human Faculty, 1883; Natural Inheritance, 1889; Finger-Prints, 1892 and Eugenics, 1905.

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infinitesimally minute; then to the demand for a planned, tenfold increase in the number of men of ‘eminent gifts’; finally, to the sketch of an ‘august Valhalla’ of ‘grand human animals’ which he associated with the marking of ‘ancestral qualities’ in public examinations, the ‘intellectual ability’ of uppermiddle-class English families (which had been ‘largely recruited from below’) and the opportunity it was desirable to give the ‘highly gifted’ to achieve entrance into professional life through ‘exhibitions and scholarships’. In the late 1860s Galton believed that fecklessness and improvidence were threatening civilization, that the ‘steady workman’ was in retreat and that the average age of marriage ‘among the weak’ was being insufficiently ‘retarded’. At the same time, he was beginning to make religious statements which led through a famous article entitled Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer (1872) into a denial that there was any statistical correlation between ‘piety and godliness’ on the one hand and ‘prosperity, longevity and fecundity’ on the other. Galton contextualized religion as an ordinary human activity, compared the ‘frenzies’ and ‘profligacy’ of ‘religious revivals’ with the ‘epilepsy’ of the ‘criminal classes’ and deplored historic ecclesiasticism’s persecution of truthseeking and intelligence. This might make it seem that Galton was simply contemptuous of religion. But, in half-suggesting that relations between the planets and the earth paralleled relations between the ‘cells’ of the body and man’s conscious self, he ventured the thought that the conscious self might be the ‘transient but essential element of an immortal and cosmic mind’, and that there might be a similarity between the celibacy which had been enforced by religious authority in the past and the celibacy which might (in suitable cases) be enforced by eugenic authority in the future. Religion, moreover, included ‘any . . . sentiments or persuasions . . . strong enough to bind [men] to do that which [they] intellectually acknowledged to be [their] duty’ and there was a ‘sacred’ duty to encourage ‘voluntary celibacy’ among those who expected their children to be socially unsatisfactory. Galton met the moral objection which he expected eugenics to arouse and the protests to be anticipated from those who would be ‘elbowed out of the way’, arguing that the substitution of the superior for the inferior could be accomplished ‘without . . . unhappiness’, and that the ‘power of varying the future human stock’ could be carried on so unobtrusively that those who were being ‘varied’ would not notice. In writing about eugenic ‘improvement’ becoming an ‘orthodox . . . dogma’ sustained by ‘the sanction of religion’, he was as far from Dawkins as he was from Sherrington. Dawkins shared Sherrington’s2 assumption that Darwin had ‘disabused’ 12

Sir Charles Scott Sherrington (1857–1952), educated Ipswich Grammar School, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (Fellow, 1887–1901) and St Thomas’ Hospital. Professor at Brown Animal Sanatory, 1891–5; Professor of Physiology at Liverpool, 1895–1913; and Waynflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford, 1920–5. Author of The Integrative

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thought of the belief in nature’s benignity, and that the leading characteristic of nature’s early history had been its embodiment of the selfish gene. He had, however, no sense of Sherrington’s intuition that, though ‘evil’ had been more prominent than ‘good’ in the early struggle for existence, altruism was nevertheless real, had emerged out of human evolution, and had modified the selfishness and amorality with which nature had preserved man from extinction. It was dangerous, Sherrington had argued, to ‘decentre’ self and sympathize with the sufferings of others. But such decentring – ‘altruism as passion’ – was nature’s ‘noblest’ product, followed the replacement of conflict ‘between cells’ by ‘multi-cellular organization’, and heralded the insertion of ‘values’ where predators like the shark, the hawk and the panther had had only ‘mind’ to distinguish them from plants. There is no need to accept Sherrington’s sometimes sanctimonious adaptations of Darwinianism, or his idea that ‘altruism’, once established as a ‘reasoned emotion’, might indicate a future ‘lived by women more than men’. It is clear, however, that Dawkins3 does not take on board the claim that altruism has made man a critic of the régime under which he was evolved, that it has sublimated man’s ‘narrow obsession’ with the ‘drive for life’ and that there is a plausible sense in which the prospect of nature ‘reforming itself’ through man, has made man ‘master of his . . . fate’ and ‘yoked’ science to his purposes. Sherrington was uncertain about the future and recognized that nature might throw man over. His conclusions were, nevertheless, that socialized man was likely to prevail over ‘predacious man’, in spite of the ‘immense tradition’ which the latter had behind him and the ‘economic . . . commercial and . . . class warfare’ for which predacity was responsible in the modern world, and that Darwin’s legacy was not only complicated but was also compatible with socialized altruism as a form of evolving self-assertion.

Dawkins is an atheist to whom it seems that atheism became ‘intellectually fulfilling’ after 1859 in a way in which it had not been before 1859, that The Origin of Species removed the need for the God-hypothesis, and that Crick’s and Watson’s blurring of the distinction between ‘living material’ and ‘nonliving material’ justifies the conclusion that ‘mystical . . . and . . . supernatural views of life’ are anachronistic. footnote 2 (cont.) Action of the Nervous System, 1906; (jointly) School Hygiene, 1913; Man on His Nature, 1940 and The Endeavour of Jean Fernel, 1946. 13 Clinton Richard Dawkins (1941– ), educated Oundle School and Balliol College, Oxford. Professor at University of California, 1967–8; Lecturer in Zoology and then Reader at Oxford, 1970–96. Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, 1996– . Author of The Selfish Gene, 1976; The Extended Phenotype, 1982; The Blind Watchmaker, 1986; River Out of Eden, 1995; Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996; and Unweaving the Rainbow, 1990.

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Dawkins’s Darwinianism has a callous side in which ‘all our genes’ are inherited from an ‘unbroken line of successful ancestors’, nature – ‘pitilessly indifferent’ rather than ‘cruel’ – lacks both ‘purpose’ and man’s interest in purpose, and the ‘selfish gene’, where it acts on behalf of ‘the group’s welfare’, does so ‘fortuitously’. But even though genes which have helped to construct ‘a million bodies without a single failure’ constitute an ‘élite’, their chief characteristic is that they are ‘passed on’, life being merely a set of ‘abstract’ instructions or ‘bytes of digital information’ – a ‘river of DNA’ which makes of the ‘genetic code’ a ‘universal system’ for life on the planet. Dawkins is energetic and dogmatic, and caricatures his opponents, especially where they are ‘creationists’, anthropocentricists or believers in natural selection as evidence of ‘design’. He has a rhetoric about the ‘spine-chilling mystery’ of Man’s existence and in Unweaving the Rainbow was as poetic about science as Pearson had been ninety years earlier. So far, however, from thinking philosophically, he does little more than distinguish what is the case from what ought to be the case and, though virtuously ‘correct’ about moral issues like racism and homosexuality makes it difficult to see how virtue can find a foothold in the gene, even as a rebellion ‘against the tyranny of the selfish replicator’. Dawkins is part of a modern movement for which Darwin is the icon and the ‘replicator’, the ‘primaeval soup’ and ‘the game of atomic billiards’ some of the world’s most ‘haunting . . . origin-myths’. He seems, however, to have missed out on theology, critical epistemology and Needham’s mistrust of science outside its proper limits. There is, moreover, no reason to suppose that he understands Darwin. I Darwin4 was buried in Westminster Abbey. The letter requesting an Abbey burial was signed by many prominent Radicals. The coffin was carried into the Abbey by Huxley, Wallace and Hooker among scientists, by Sir John Lubbock, banker, naturalist, moralist and Liberal MP, by two Whig Dukes, Argyll and Devonshire, and by the fifteenth Earl of Derby, former Conservative Foreign Secretary and a member of Gladstone’s Cabinet, whose high Liberal presence helped to make the funeral a Liberal occasion. The question we have to ask is as to the effect of Darwinian evolution on Darwin’s Christianity. Darwin left an amazing œuvre, beginning with works about the earth, which adopted Lyell’s view of geological time, and moving through works about 14

Charles Darwin (1809–82), educated Shrewsbury School, Edinburgh University and Christ’s College, Cambridge. Author of The Zoology of The Voyage of HMS Beagle, 1838–43; The Geology of The Voyage of The Beagle, 1842–5; A Monograph of The Subclass Cirripedia, 1851–4; A Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidae, 1851–4; On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859; The Variation of Plants and Animals by Means of Natural Selection under Domestication, 1868; The Descent of Man, 1871; and The Expression of The Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872.

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plants to a conspectual survey of the development of man. In approaching Darwin’s view of man, we need to remember the immensity of the time which Lyell had postulated for human history in The Antiquity of Man, the microscopic character of the individual changes which Darwin was able therefore to postulate as the basis for evolution and the theological assumptions which were obvious in all his most significant writings. In the Sketch that he wrote in 1842, Darwin made preliminary statements about the variations effected in animals and plants under domestication and about the ‘abortive organs’ and ‘unity of type’ which proved that ‘specific forms [were] not immutable’. An animal was not ‘like a ship or other great work of art’. An animal was the outcome of ‘hereditary or congenital habit’ in which a ‘simple grandeur’ disclosed itself in the ‘breathing into matter’ of the power of growth, assimilation and reproduction, and in those ‘endless forms most beautiful and . . . wonderlike’ which had evolved by ‘gradual selection’ and ‘infinitesimal changes’. A roughly expressed passage about three species of rhinoceros in Java, Sumatra and Malacca, which appeared first in the Sketch of 1842 and reappeared in both the Essay of 1844 and The Origin of Species, made the point very clearly. The Essay of 1844 was nearly four times as long as the Sketch of 1842. It included Darwin’s first systematic statement about the variation of races and species and the nature and development of man; and it presupposed the structure of the so-called Big Book5 he was writing in the middle 1850s when the prospect of A. R. Wallace publishing his theory of natural selection first compelled him to write The Origin of Species in a hurry. Darwin had recorded many of his conclusions in his notebooks and in the Sketch and Essay, all of which were written by the time he was thirty-five. But he had mistrusted them, feared the reception he would receive if he published them and spent the following fifteen years convincing himself that they had been made impregnable enough for publication. This was what the Big Book was designed to show and it would, if finished, have been more comprehensive than any other of Darwin’s works. In its absence, his thought about man is best understood by following the line which runs from the Notebooks, the Sketch and the Essay to The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The subject of The Origin of Species was the evidence provided by variations in plants and animals about the question whether species had been created ab initio by God. Darwin’s answer was that differentiation had occurred in the course of historical time and, except in the case of plants, could not be explained solely by reference to ‘external conditions’. 15

The Big Book was not published in the form in which Darwin planned it, had only its early chapters published during his lifetime under the title The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication and insofar as it has been published since, has been published as an aid to historical study.

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In discussing differentiation under domestication, Darwin’s central declarations were that the laws of variation were ‘complex and diversified’, that the laws which displayed ‘the correlation of growth’ were ‘mysterious’ and that the laws which governed inheritance of variations were ‘unknown’. The doctrine that ‘our several domestic races’ of animals had originated from ‘several aboriginal stocks’ was ridiculous; but since it was impossible to make a positive statement, consideration of the selection which man had been making among animals from the beginning of human life moved quickly on to consideration of the selection which nature had been making from the beginning of time. In The Origin of Species, nature had two aspects. On the one hand it was nasty, prolix in its reproduction of itself and the scene of a Malthusian struggle in which, while those organisms which had lost, had had ‘prompt deaths . . . without fear’, the leading features were struggle as well as death. On the other hand, nature’s power was limitless, its concern for the good of the beings it tended was continuous and the selection of organisms it had selected to survive had been effected through innumerable instinctive actions over ‘thousands of generations’. Nature had more or less a will. It was ‘incessantly ready for action’ on ‘every internal organ’ and ‘the whole machinery of life’; it had ensured that variations would ‘tend to the preservation’ both of the individual in which variation was effected and in his offspring; and it had succeeded, ‘during whole geological epochs . . . throughout the world’, in working ‘daily and hourly’ at the ‘improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life’. Darwin emphasized that nature did not work through ‘catastrophes’ or ‘miraculous acts of creation’, and that natural selection, though it could ‘modify the egg, seed or young as easily as the adult’, acted through ‘infinitely small inherited modifications’, like the geological modifications which Lyell had described. This was a crucial argument, not only because the ‘beneficial’ character of ‘slight difference[s] in the offspring from their parent . . . gave rise to all the most important modifications of structure’ in nature’s ‘harmonious diversity’, but also because it was the ‘steady accumulation . . . of such differences’ which enabled ‘the best adapted to survive’. The ubiquity of struggle was one of the leading principles of Darwin’s understanding of nature. But in The Origin of Species it worked in conflicting ways – insofar as struggle was more intense among plants and animals than among men (because the former could not relieve themselves of the ‘geometrical ration’ of their reproduction) and insofar as the removal of excess population by plants and animals preying on one another left ‘complex . . . close-fitting relations’ of dependency in which an individual structure ‘could not be modified without benefiting the community’. Large parts of The Origin of Species were defensive essays in incorporating inconvenient facts. But much of it consisted of positive descriptions of the

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significance of morphology and embryology for the understanding of affinity, descent, variation and development, and of positive assertions that the ‘natural system’ was a ‘genealogical arrangement’ which made it possible to group together ‘all living and extinct forms’ so as to connect ‘the several members of each class . . . by the most complex and radiating affinities’. In The Origin of Species and Plants and Animals under Domestication Darwin was concerned with plants and animals. In The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals, he was concerned with animals and men. Long before these books were published, Darwin had taunted man with thinking himself a ‘great work’ which was worthy of the ‘interposition of the deity’, and with lacking that humbleness which would enable him to recognize that he was ‘created from animals’, including the ‘lower animals’. What he had not explained was the significance this had for understanding of the exact nature of human development and the present nature of man. Darwin’s research for The Expression of the Emotions had been going on for thirty years before it was published. Its most important conclusions were that the ‘reflex actions of the nervous system’ had effects on the body independently of both will and habit and were often more faithful than words as representations of ‘thought’ and ‘intention’; that man’s ‘chief expressive emotions’, though having a ‘definite purpose’ in his very earliest history, had often come in the course of civilization to be ‘beyond the control of the person who was expressing them’; and that emotions which had initially been ‘voluntary’ had become first ‘habitual and hereditary’ and had then been performed ‘in opposition to the will’. Above all, the point of The Expression of the Emotions was that, except in respect of blushing which was peculiar to men, there was so obvious a continuity of emotional expression between men and animals that ‘the whole subject’ needed the hypothesis that human expressions, like the ‘bristling of the hair . . . in extreme terror’ or ‘the uncovering of the teeth . . . in . . . furious rage’, showed that man had ‘once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition’. This was what had been stated in The Descent of Man a year before The Expression of the Emotions. In understanding The Descent of Man it is desirable to show why The Origin of Species had not really stated it twelve years earlier. II Darwin’s fame and contentiousness came into their own during the outpouring of post- and anti-Christian writing effected not only by Huxley, Spencer, Galton and Tyndall but also by Mill, Morley, Lewes, Tylor and Leslie Stephen in the 1860s. Intellectually, however, Darwin was rooted in the 1830s and 1840s when, like Marx, he had sketched his first inventive ideas in notebooks and essays. And, just as the mature Marx was to emerge from his notebooks between 1844 and 1848, so the mature Darwin had emerged from his note-

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books between 1836 and 1844 with the playing-down of man’s ‘pre-eminence’, the playing-up of man’s ‘arrogance’, and critical disparagement of the misplaced pride which had stopped man understanding that nothing in the long history of the earth had been as ‘wonderful’ as the ‘first living thing with thoughts’ (i.e. animals) where previously there had been only ‘living things without thoughts’ (i.e. plants). Darwin was brought up a Protestant and married a Protestant wife who was worried about his religious doubts before they were married and wished to play them down after his death. In his twenties he thought seriously about ordination, though his conception of the clergyman’s office was social rather than priestly. When ordination receded, his religious sense receded with it as the ‘sublimity’ of nature ceased to stimulate the ‘wonder and admiration’ he had felt when he was younger. In the main part of his life, while not believing in Christianity, neither did he wish to confute it, except where ‘divines opposed . . . the progress of knowledge’, or failed to acknowledge that Mosaic geology and anthropology were mistaken. He was not an atheist, and he no more wanted to make a fuss than his wife wanted him to. He stated reassuringly that the question whether an omnipotent God existed had been answered in the affirmative by the highest authorities in the past; it is almost certain that before his death, he returned to Christianity. Darwin attached the highest importance to scientific hypotheses and to the good which was done when scientific men, unlike literary men, were able ‘to push their science . . . a few years . . . in advance of the age’. The concept of science, however, was as problematical as in Marx, not only because all ‘scientific’ assumptions are contestable, but also because the progress of Darwin’s mind, like the progress of Marx’s mind, being discoverable through notebooks and correspondence, shows his scientific assumptions arising not just from science but from the moral and religious climate in which he lived and the moral and religious writing that he read. Darwin denied that he had ever thought systematically about morals and religion. But in certain respects he made statements which implied the opposite. He had been much impressed by Galton’s article entitled ‘The Efficacy of Prayer’ in 1872, did not believe that ‘there . . . had . . . ever been a revelation’, and denied that God could usefully be thought of as a ‘revengeful tyrant’. And not only was he exercised by historical study of the Bible and comparative study of religion into seeing that the Bible was no more to be trusted than ‘the sacred books of the Hindus’, he also borrowed Matthew Arnold’s idea that ‘culture’ elevated religion to that ‘highest’ form involved in the ‘grand idea of God hating sin and loving righteousness’. He took time to decide that, in spite of the beauty of its morality, the New Testament was riddled with ‘metaphors and allegories’, that its idea of miracles was ‘incredible’ and incompatible with ‘the fixed laws of nature’, and that the world of the first century had been so ignorant and credulous that ‘the Gospels [could] not be

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proved to have been written simultaneously with the events they dealt with’. Reflections of this sort led Darwin later to commonplace doubts both about Christianity and about God’s existence. They also led to doubts about immortality which jostled uneasily with a belief in human perfectibility and an instinct for immortality in the face of the ‘view now held by most physicists’ that ‘the sun with all the planets in time [would] grow too cold for life’. In discussing Darwin’s theology, it is necessary to draw a distinction. Darwin saw no evidence of design in sentient beings or of purpose in the Universe and, insofar as he half-believed, or wished to half-believe, that there was evidence of design and purpose, surrounded himself with the countervailing belief that it was through natural selection that these had been operative. This did not in the main part of his life involve rejection of the idea of God or – if it concealed rejection of the idea of God – did so through an intellectual cunning which found it ‘derogatory to the Creator’ that he should have created ‘the myriads of creeping parasites . . . which . . . swarmed each day of life . . . on the land and water of the globe’. In the 1840s Darwin wrestled with the question of God, and pushed back God’s providential government of the world so as to confine it to setting off the ‘process of selection’. Paley’s Natural Theology may well have been the only part of the academic syllabus that Darwin learnt from in Cambridge. In the course of time he became entirely explicit that, if God’s action did operate, it did so not, as Paley had believed, by direct creation of the races and species but, like the law of gravity, at second remove, in such a way, once animals had been created, that their futures were governed by the ‘fixed laws of generation’ which it was the task of science to discover. By the time Darwin wrote his Autobiography, he held two conflicting opinions about the government of the world. He believed that happiness predominated, that the species would not have been propagated if this had not been the case, and that ‘most or all sentient beings [had] been developed in such a manner through natural selection that pleasurable sensation serv[ed] as their habitual guide’. Conversely, he believed that the existence of suffering was an argument against the existence of a ‘First Cause’, that ‘the presence of much suffering agreed . . . with the view that all organic beings had been developed through variation and natural selection’, and that ‘a man who [had] no assured . . . belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward’ must have ‘for his rule of life’ those ‘impulses and instincts which [were] the strongest or . . . seem[ed] to him the best’. These sentiments had been arrived at in the 1830s and 1840s by reflection on Lyell and Paley, on Hume, Malthus, Whewell, Reynolds, Burke, Lessing, McCulloch, Dugald Stewart and Comte, and on Sir James Mackintosh, who was a close friend and whose Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy Darwin read with the closest attention. The effect of reading and reflection was to raise questions about the tail and canine teeth, about the ‘cramped’ character of

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the idea of special creation as assuming a God who had destroyed the ‘very laws he had created in . . . organic nature’ and about prevailing conceptions of instinct, free will, habitual action, pleasure, reason, moral sense and civilization. In his notebooks, Darwin was sensitive to, if not very subtle about, the Comtean truth that zoology was in the ‘theological’ phase of its development. He reflected on Lyell’s dictum that ‘each [geological] formation was merely a page torn out of a history’ and he agreed with Lyell that in examining it, it was the geologist’s business to ‘fill up the gaps’. In flirting with predestinarian atheism, he speculated about ‘the Devil under the form of a Baboon’ being the origin of man’s ‘evil passions’ and wondered whether ‘the idea of God’ had not arisen from a conjunction of man’s ‘confused idea of “ought” with . . . a necessary notion of “causation”’. In ridiculing the idea that certain plants had been created to ‘arrest mud at deltas’, he asserted that to raise the question why there was mud at deltas involved a ‘contemptible’ lowering of God ‘to the standard of . . . his weak creatures’, since all such facts flowed from ‘grand and simple laws’ which it was within the power of science to uncover. In the notebooks, there were pantheistic (or Wordsworthian) hints about the ‘one living spirit’ which did not differentiate between men and animals, and there was not only a baboon at the Zoological Gardens ‘behaving more like a man [than like a dog]’, there was also a domesticated orang-utan displaying a distinctively human feeling and an intelligence far superior to those of the primitive men Darwin had observed in Tierra del Fuego. Even birdsong was used to disparage the uniqueness of man’s vocal capability and, ‘he who would understand the baboon’ would be likely to do ‘more towards metaphysics’ than Locke had done. Darwin wished to avoid stating that he was a materialist, but he undoubtedly was a materialist. Moreover, he declined to understand why, if law governed the motions of the planets, it did not also govern the motions of the insect world, and he deployed a prolonged argument about the way in which the Creator must have allowed nature to act during the immensity of geological and historical time. It would be easy to view Darwin’s use of the Creator in The Origin of Species as an idea which was irrelevant to science. But that would be a retrospective view. When The Origin of Species is read in its own terms and context, and allowance is made for Darwin’s tactical caution, the Creator still retains serious status. In comparing the eye to a telescope, Darwin knew that [the telescope] had been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally inferred that the eye had been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be too presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man . . . In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will

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multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions on millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man. (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859, pp. 188–9)

In The Origin of Species, nature had to be understood independently of God, and it had also to be understood that God had not acted as orthodox Christianity claimed He had acted. Evolution had to be hypothesized over a timespan of which the human mind could not conceive the reality and, since geological formations had made evidence of the diffusion of the species and the existence of intermediate forms of life difficult to come by, much of what depended on the geological revolution had to be taken on trust. So small, indeed, was the ‘number of specimens in all our museums . . . compared with the countless generations . . . which had existed’ that it was not evidence that had to be used but the absence of evidence. The tone in which Darwin wrote The Origin of Species was defensive and apologetic, conscious as he was of giving a great heave to thought and suggesting a new view of delicate questions, but doing so with a caution and modesty which resembled Sidgwick’s more than it resembled Voltaire’s manner. Though Huxley drew out its implications for human evolution almost as soon as The Origin of Species was published, and Haeckel and others made them a commonplace on the Continent in the course of the 1860s, Darwin himself did not do so, in spite of passages about the descent of ‘all organic beings’ from ‘one primaeval form’. It was not until ‘the greater number of rising men’ had ‘admitted the principle of evolution’ and Plants and Animals under Domestication had posed the problem as between God’s preordination on the one hand and the ‘plasticity of organization’ required for ‘natural selection’ and ‘the survival of the fittest’ on the other, that The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals made it clear that Darwinianism applied to man more even than to plants and animals. In the conclusion to The Origin of Species Darwin had looked forward to natural selection producing ‘ennobling insights’ into the nature of man, the prospect of Man’s ‘corporeal and mental endowments . . . tending to progress towards perfection’, and the production of the ‘higher animals’ as ‘the most exalted object’ following directly from the ‘war of nature’. These were the ideas that were to be applied in The Descent of Man. III The Descent of Man showed man ‘in his rudest state’ as being ‘the most dominant animal that had ever appeared on the earth’ and the best suited for the ‘battle of life’. His suitability, however, was not physical since, if it had been,

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‘size, strength and ferocity’ would have made the gorilla supreme. Man’s suitability, on the contrary, was a result of his physical vulnerability and the consequent need to develop social instincts and the intellectual habits which the gorilla had not developed. In The Descent of Man the chimpanzee, as a ‘comparatively weak creature’, was man’s most likely ancestor. But the evidence was fragmentary or nonexistent, and it was only ‘probable’ that it was in Africa that mankind had developed out of a subgroup of ‘anthropomorphous’ apes. However cautious Darwin’s position, it was, nevertheless, categorical. Not only was there ‘no fundamental difference’ between man’s mental faculties and the mental faculties of the ‘higher animals’, there was also a ‘wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes . . . and one of the higher apes’ than between ‘an ape and Man’. Indeed, if man was unique, his uniqueness had to be understood in the light of the fact that animals had many experiences and capabilities in common with him, including disease, reproduction, the sense of smell and many other physical characteristics, along with the use of tools and language, a sense of beauty and property, the achievement of self-consciousness, individuality and abstraction, and a capacity not only for love, affection, pain, jealously, misery, sympathy, music, wonder, memory, curiosity, imagination, reason and religion, but also for sexual selection. Darwin was not arguing that any of these capabilities, except possibly the sexual capability, was as highly developed in animals as in man; but he was arguing that animals were in principle capable of all of them, that there were significant continuities between animal language and human language and that human reflection on past pleasures resembled the ‘self-consciousness’ of an old dog reflecting on his past pleasures. In chapter 3 there was a detailed comparison between the operations of the moral sense in men and animals. Chapter 3 was one of Darwin’s most important statements. It not only identified him with Kant’s and Mackintosh’s view of moral duty and with what he thought of as the best moral philosophy of the late 1860s,6 it also identified moral duty as the ‘noblest’ of men’s attributes which led them to sacrifice themselves either ‘in some great cause’ or for the good of a ‘fellow creature’. Darwin’s purpose in discussing moral duty was not, of course, to understand moral duty but to answer the question, for which he claimed originality, whether ‘the study of the lower animals [could] throw light on one of the highest psychological faculties of man’. This was an especially Darwinian question which not only undermined man’s uniqueness but also, in giving an answer – if only a ‘probable’ answer – implied a further undermining insofar as ‘any animal endowed with social instincts’, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as ‘well developed or nearly as well developed as in man’. 16

As displayed by Bain, Mill, Lecky, Lubbock and Brodie.

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Chapter 3 discussed the pleasure given by the social instincts, the ‘feeling of dissatisfaction’ which accompanied the failure to be governed by them, and the importance of both language and habit in bringing ‘the social instincts and impulses’ to bear on conduct. There was speculation about the feelings which cows had for dead companions, about the ‘common service’ which rabbits, sheep and monkeys performed in ‘warning each other of danger’ and about the service of ‘mutual defence’ among baboons. The burning alive of elderly parents by the Fuegians suggested the superiority of animal sympathies, and something was made of a dog ‘who never passed . . . a cat which lay sick in a basket without giving her a few licks with his tongue’. Darwin agreed with Agassiz that ‘dogs possessed something very like a conscience’. He added that it was a ‘strong feeling of inward satisfaction which [impelled] a bird . . . to brood . . . over her eggs’, and that the ‘feeling of pleasure’ animals gained from society was an extension of ‘parental or filial affection’ which, like the part played by pleasure as natural selection’s inducement to the avoidance of hunger, was natural selection’s inducement to the avoidance of solitude. Darwin’s account of morality was that it led in the end, as civilization advanced, to an extended sympathy which incorporated ‘all nations and races’ as well as ‘the lower animals’, and was something which animals could not achieve, not because an action needed ‘deliberation’ in order to be ‘considered . . . perfect or . . . noble’ (quite the contrary), but because the moral agent who was ‘forced to overcome his fear or want of sympathy’ before action, deserved higher credit than the moral agent whose innate disposition led him to ‘a good act without effort’. Darwin’s view of morality was demeaning to man insofar as it linked man with monkeys, dogs and baboons rather than with God, and attributed his achievement to instinct, habit and natural selection as much as to conscious effort. In that sense Darwin eroded both rationalism and human dignity in the way in which Freud was to erode them later. But in three major respects he did not erode them – in affirming the fact of moral progress, in identifying moral progress with victory in the struggle for survival, and in confirming the full reflective consciousness of Kant’s conception of duty to mankind. In The Descent of Man civilization was a scene of conflict in which shame, honour and the approbation of a man’s fellow-men were judge and regulator. In primitive man, too there had been the same conflict between the social and the self-gratifying impulses, with many un-Kantian features like slavery, infanticide, intemperance, lying and sexual licentiousness, but with an endurance, self-sacrifice and self-command in the service of the tribe which were good in themselves and enabled the tribe with the greater ‘patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy’, and the ‘greater number of . . . faithful members’, to ‘conquer’ in any competition between tribes. Darwin was against slavery, sexual irregularity, unnatural vice, racial dis-

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crimination, the ‘bigots of the anti-vivisection movement’ and the pre-eminence of the classics in English education, along with celibacy, religious selfmaceration among Indian fakirs and the Spanish Inquisition’s selection for burning and imprisonment of the ‘free-est and boldest’ among men. He believed that men were more competitive and accomplished, though less beautiful, than women, that women transmitted their beauty primarily to their ‘female . . . offspring’, and that marriage, of which he approved, needed female virtue to remedy the sexual jealousy which it had created. He favoured up to a point the accumulation and inheritance of wealth as a necessary precondition for high intellectual achievement and he believed that primogeniture, in spite of its effect on younger sons, helped ‘the members of our aristocracy’ to become ‘handsomer . . . than the middle classes’ by enabling them to choose the most beautiful women as their wives. In The Descent of Man Darwin rooted morality not in selfishness, as the Utilitarians had done, but in the desire for the ‘general good of the community’ which he specified, in words of extraordinary optimism, as ensuring that the ‘greatest number of individuals [could] be reared in full vigour or health with all their faculties perfect under the conditions to which they were exposed’. At the same time, his self-congratulation about virtue, the ‘social instincts’ and progress in the past was undermined by a sense of the threat from overpopulation in the present. About overpopulation, and the prospect of excessive reproduction by the ‘weak in mind and body’, Darwin’s fears had their origin in the flowering of philanthropy and democracy, and in the contrast he drew between savage societies, where the ‘weak’ were ‘eliminated’, and civilized societies where sympathy by keeping them alive, helped to deteriorate the race. Darwin had a practical caution and anti-Utopian instinct which made him mistrust some aspects of eugenics. Indeed, his study of the subject, and his remarks about it, disclose a dilemma rather than a conclusion. Sympathy was one of the ‘noblest virtues’, denial of which would involve ‘deterioration’. But reproduction of the ‘weak’ would also involve deterioration and, though he took comfort from the natural wastage which occurred through drink, infertility, bachelorhood, imprisonment, emigration, execution and the urban death-rate, he left little doubt that the natural selection through which humanity had pulled itself up in the past was no longer operating, that the very poor, vicious and reckless almost invariably married early, and that something had to be done, if only voluntarily, to prevent them reproducing.

Darwin helped to detach science from Christianity, confirmed as much as he deviated from the ethos of his time and contributed to the discussion through which Galton and Pearson were to undermine liberal optimism. Though Galton was doubtless a sterling person, his arguments were low and silly when

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compared with Pearson’s defence of eugenics as a form of thought and analysis, and a stimulus to public policy. IV The main part of Pearson’s7 professional life was spent in London in the Chair of Applied Mathematics at University College, which he combined with the Chair of Geometry at Gresham’s College. Between the first of these appointments in 1884 and his death in 1936, he poured out a succession of technical articles and books about genetics and mathematics; he completed Todhunter’s History of Elasticity and Clifford’s Commonsense of the Exact Sciences; he played a leading role in establishing the study of statistics in English universities, and he was for many years editor of Biometrika. According to his own account, Pearson spent ‘five years . . . struggling . . . out of the mazes of metaphysics and theology’ and, by the time he was thirtyone, was treating the ‘Christian verities’ as ‘ruins’ which were ‘outside the field of profitable discussion’. In propounding new verities, he achieved one culmination in The Ethics of Free Thought and another in The Grammar of Science which together responded to the ‘real want’ of his generation by providing a ‘higher religion and . . . morality’ consonant with modern science and a modern humanism. Pearson’s family had for a number of generations been farmers and sailors in Yorkshire, and had picked up a Quaker element on an upwardly mobile urban way. Pearson’s father was a London barrister. Pearson himself was at University College School, Hampstead, and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics before being elected to a Fellowship in 1880. It was not until after he had had a period in Germany studying philosophy and history, had read for the English bar and had written a good deal about Socialism, Lutheranism and feminism, that he began his professional career as a mathematical statistician. Pearson’s self-location was effected in three connected phases. In the first, he opened up the question of the ‘sex instinct’ and male domination, and deplored both Luther’s idea of marriage as the satisfaction of a merely sexual appetite and the choice supposed to have been forced on German women since the Reformation between ‘domestication’ and ‘subjection’ and ‘prostitution’ and ‘social expulsion’. The second phase began solemnly with The New Werther and a verse Passion-play entitled The Trinity and then began to 17

Sir Karl Pearson (1857–1936), educated University College School, London, King’s College, Cambridge and Universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. Director of National Eugenics Laboratory and Professor of Mathematics at University College, London. Author of The New Werther, 1880; The Trinity, 1882; Matter and Soul, 1886; The Moral Basis of Socialism, 1887; Socialism, Its Theory and Practice, 1887; The Ethics of Free Thought, 1888; The Grammar of Science, 1892; The Chances of Death, 1897; National Life from the Standpoint of Science, 1901; Nature and Nurture, 1910; Social Problems, 1912; The Life, Letters and Labours of Galton, 1914–30.

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transcend solemnity. In the third phase, religion was detached from individualism, sensuousness, faith and ritual, and was made consonant with the pursuit of knowledge. The New Werther and The Trinity were quite appalling juvenilia. As Pearson came to acquire a style, he denied that he was an atheist and made it obvious that Spinoza’s pantheism was a ‘scientific faith . . . founded in reason’, that man’s mind was a ‘small element of the Godhead’, and that independence of space and time and the intellectual love of God guaranteed to ‘human freedom’ the power to see things ‘sub specie aeternitatis’. Pearson’s Spinozism was not only pious, it was also aggressive. It dismissed Kant and the Balliolized Christianity which depended on Kant, and proposed in its place a doctrine of ‘renunciation’ which was put in the Buddha’s terms and in the terms of Eckhart, Averroes and Moses Maimonides. Pearson believed that metaphysical attempts to explain the suprasensuous had to be renounced and that one of the Buddha’s merits was that he could ‘free man’ from the ‘misery’ of ‘delusion’. Though unsure whether the Buddha or Spinoza ‘would leave the stronger stamp on nineteenth-century humanism’, he admired both for treating the gods as ‘hindrances’ to ‘mental and moral growth’, for indicating the ‘infinite’ opportunities for improving work in the ‘conditioned causality’ of the ‘phenomenal world’, and for their conviction that it was ‘almost immoral’ for a ‘great intellect’ which could help humanity, to lend itself to the construction of dogmas which, on the lips of ‘the ignorant’, might be the cause of endless misery to humanity. In Germany in the 1880s Pearson began to write about the Erasmian Reformation and the Erasmian Church, which might have kept up with the ‘intellectual development of mankind’ if only ‘dogma’ had been allowed ‘to slip . . . gradually . . . into forgetfulness’. He contrasted the simplicity, earnestness and apocalyptic violence of the Anabaptists with Lutheranism’s enmity to reason, its alliance with the princes and the ‘monied classes’ and its enslavement of both the craftsman and the free peasantry. In England, he identified ‘Manchester’ and the ‘laws of Political Economy’ as a ‘class-interest’, contrasted the hypothetical method of Ricardo’s economics with the historical method of Marx and Bakunin, and convinced himself that ‘a few assassinations’ and ‘a dozen toppling buildings’ would ‘paralyze . . . society’ and produce the ‘proletarian revolution’ of which anyone could see the possibility by walking across Blackfriars Bridge. Pearson believed that, since the revolution was going to happen, it should be ‘carried through from above’ by persuading the aristocracy to ‘part with its wealth’. He was not sure how society should be ‘graduated’ once wealth had followed ‘brute force’ into oblivion, but he was entirely sure that, though existing religion was no longer doing so, religion alone could drag man back from the ‘brink of . . . the abyss’. At this time, Pearson was a Liberal because the Liberal Party favoured

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working-class enfranchisement. For the long term he was a Socialist, identified the parliamentary parties as representatives of wealth, and did not believe that they could deal with working-class poverty. He also believed that Socialism would demand ‘measures of police’ against the ‘idleness’ which lived on ‘inherited’ or ‘accumulated’ property. Pearson was a Fabian for whom the primary events of the future would be a revolution in mentalities through which the ‘hard-working’ class would cooperate with the ‘educative’ class in continuing that re-education of the upper and wealth-owning classes which Ruskin and Morris had begun, and a ‘moral renascence’ creating a ‘higher morality’ and ‘sexualogical revolution’ would resemble in its completeness the revolution by which Christianity was being swept away. In his forties and fifties, Pearson was to introduce a distinctive tone into discussion of evolution and eugenics. But he had begun more basically – by emphasizing the similarity between the ‘crushing’ of ‘individuality’ suffered by ‘the labourer’ where ‘freedom of contract’ was irrelevant because of the absence of an equality of means and the ‘crushing’ of ‘individuality’ suffered by women where equality of opportunity was irrelevant because of the absence of an equality of brains. Pearson’s sexual reflections were connected with Socialism in two very practical ways: because mothers needed to be judged by their fitness and the fitness of their husbands to ‘carry on the race’, and because Socialism, in requiring everyone to make a ‘labour-contribution’ to the ‘common stock’, required everyone to be economically independent (which most women under existing arrangements were not). The ‘anti-social’ had, therefore, to be restrained in their desire to bear children, and positive punishment to be employed in order to limit the number of births ‘in times of overpopulation’. In the long term, moreover, there would be no ‘legal or state distinction’ between a man and a ‘non-child-bearing woman’, and the childbearing woman would be respected and rewarded for ‘fulfilling a high social function’. In the long term, moreover, Pearson looked forward to the conversion of marriage from being ‘a union for the birth of children’ into a remedy for solitude and ‘the closest form of friendship between man and woman’. In all his sociological writing, Pearson was searching for a new religion. But he took time to decide that ‘the ignorant’ could not be ‘moral’, that a ‘moral renascence’ leading to a ‘higher morality’ would destroy man’s centrality to the universe and that Christian pessimism had to be repudiated as a relic from a ‘decadent period of human development’. He acknowledged the ‘misery’ which was being created by the ‘collapse of . . . religious systems’ but, in making it free-thought’s ‘sacred trust’ to propose itself as Christianity’s successor, predicted the deification of man, the establishment of ‘poets, philosophers and scientists’ as ‘high priests’ and the elevation of ‘reason . . . doubt

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. . . and the . . . enthusiasm of the study’ above the ‘froth’ and ‘passion’ of the ‘marketplace’. The process might be a long one; but the victory of free thought was assured and the day would undoubtedly come when ‘its evangelists [would] . . . be heard in every house, and be seen on every street, preaching and teaching the only faith which was consonant with the reason, with the dignity of man’.

As Pearson’s opinions developed, he applied them over a very broad front – especially against Kidd and the ‘contaminated’ charlatanry which sustained the popular evolutionism of the 1890s. He praised Galton’s, and Weldon’s, success in making evolutionism into ‘a branch of quantitative science’ and predicted that the biologists of the future would need to be ‘trained mathematicians’ if they were to draw valid conclusions about social development. An enormous body of statistical writing, along with Malthusian, Mendelian and eugenic papers then imposed a mathematical treatment, giving discouraging statistical value to Galton’s belief that nature rather than ‘social, economic and industrial conditions’ determined the development of the ‘racial stock’ and offending philanthropists with the claim that the parents of ‘bad stock’ were as irrevocably ‘its trustees’ as the parents of good stock were its trustees. Gladstone’s re-statement of the Genesis account of creation, Salisbury’s reminder of science’s ‘fallibility’ and Balfour’s demonstration that ‘naturalism afforded no basis for ethics’, were dismissed as the ‘old bigotry’, ‘slip-shod’ reasoning and an epistomological ignorance which was trying to deconstruct science into being as ‘unsound’ as theology. These writings were a protest against the intellectual conservatism of the 1890s and an attempt to reclaim for science the regard which Tyndall, Huxley and Clifford had received from working-men’s clubs twenty years earlier. The tone was contemptuous and disparaging, and was respectful only of the ‘trained brain’ of which an account was given in National Life from the Standpoint of Science. National Life from the Standpoint of Science was a contribution to the ‘reorganization of the nation’ after the Boer War and a statement of the commonly perceived need for ‘organized brain-power’ to control the State’s ‘nervous system’. It claimed that the working-class standard of living depended on markets, trade routes and the expulsion of ‘inferior races’ like the Kaffirs, the Red Indians and the Australian Aborigines, that the decline in the birth rate among the professional, trading and provident working classes would have to be halted if the ‘brains and training’ of Germany’s ‘commercial and technical houses’ were to be resisted, and that improvements were imperative (like the improvements Baden-Powell had called for in Aids to Scouting) in the power of ‘observing and reasoning upon observation’.

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National Life did not propose the vast endowment for the sciences that was to follow in the twentieth century. But it implied it, and called both for an attempt to strengthen the nation ‘for the external struggle’ by reducing ‘glaring differences’ in ‘class . . . wealth and education’ and the creation of a new Establishment to replace the Establishment which Gladstone, Salisbury and Balfour had been defending. In the 450 or so pages of The Grammar of Science, these preferences became a professional ideology whose methods would free minds of ‘passion’, alert them to the danger from ‘feeble and degenerate stocks’, and define the strength and limits of scientific knowledge. The Grammar of Science was cautious about the origins of life but less cautious about evolution, struggle and the inadequacy of individualism. It warned biologists against the physicist’s assumption that life was a ‘mechanism’ and was explicit about the need for a eugenic history to replace dynastic history as guarantor of eugenic planning. It distinguished between ‘scientific laws’, ‘laws of nature’ and Austin’s conception of law in jurisprudence, and it applied to the philosophy of science the idea that the ‘conscious ego . . . seated at the brain-terminals of the sensory nerve’ knew nothing of the outside world except ‘the messages which flowed from the ends of the telephone-wire’. Science, in other words, as in Eddington, dealt with the ‘mental world’ inferred from sense impressions, was ‘cribbed and cabinned’ by its ignorance of anything beyond and had to regard ‘things-in-themselves’ as a ‘metaphysical’ idea of which, despite the contrary assumption of leading scientists from Clark-Maxwell to Thomson, it could not be said to have knowledge. All science could disclose was ‘brief expressions of the relationships and sequences . . . of . . . groups of . . . perceptions and conceptions’. ‘Doubt’ (as in Popper) was integral to science and part of science’s ‘mystery’; a ‘scientific hierarchy’ persecuting ‘scientific heresy’ would be fatal to progress. The vulgar idea that science had reduced the universe to a ‘dead mechanism’, obscured the ‘plasticity and complexity’ of the scientific mind, and the positively poetic inventiveness it displayed in pursuit of scientific truth. Pearson avoided the ‘glitter’ of ‘metaphysical systems’, dismissed ‘common-sense’ as an excuse for ‘intellectual apathy’, and claimed ‘the entire universe’ as the subject of science’s provisional inventiveness. Theology had taken two hundred years to renounce its authority over ‘cosmical problems’; but its renunciation was irreversible, and science was now free to display the disciplined imagination and aesthetic sense which issued in the ‘admirable economy’ of a ‘scientific law’. To Pearson it seemed that ‘great scientists’ were ‘great artists’, guardians of the ‘beauty and poetry’ of life, and proper occupants of the high tables of culture. Julian Huxley took the same view. Between Pearson and Huxley, however, there stood the reception of Freud.

16 Modern knowledge and the postChristian consensus II Many who started as rationalists but were disillusioned by the discovery that a too comprehensive rationalism defeats itself have indeed practically capitulated to irrationalism. . . . But . . . there are other tenable attitudes, notably that of critical rationalism, which recognizes that the fundamental rationalist attitude is based upon an irrational decision, or upon faith in reason. Accordingly, the choice is entirely open. We are free to choose . . . a critical form of rationalism, one which frankly admits its limitations, and its basis in an irrational decision, and in so far, a certain priority of irrationalism. (K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945, vol. II, p. 218) The motions of electrons and atoms do not resemble those of the parts of a locomotive so much as those of the dancers in a cotillion. And if the ‘true essence of substances’ is for ever unknowable, it does not matter whether the cotillion is danced at a ball in real life, or on a cinematograph screen, or in a story of Boccaccio. If . . . this is so, then the universe can be best pictured . . . as consisting of . . . the thought of what, for want of a wider word, we must describe as a mathematical thinker. (James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, 1930, p. 136). Any . . . religion of the future must have as its basis the consciousness of sanctity in existence . . . It must admit that this . . . high sense of sacredness and transcendent value may be vouchsafed in many ways and in many objects. Some may find it in poetry . . . art or music: it may be vouchsafed through love. It may be found in the pursuit of pure truth . . . It may be found in the practice of a life devoted to the service of humanity’s suffering . . . Still others . . . may find it in the solitudes of Nature: or, again, like born patriots, in a sanctification of their country. (Julian Huxley, Religion Without Revelation, 1927, p. 326)

Twentieth-century English science has not been unduly friendly to Freud and psychoanalysis. It has pursued its course in genetics, biology, mathematical astronomy and atomic physics and, in the last forty years, has brought them together in seminally striking ways. What it has not done is to incorporate Freudianism which, though it has had an effect on literature, on medicine and in making counselling both a quasi-religious and a State institution, has not established itself as a science. The new physics has been discussed primarily through Eddington. The development of biology will be discussed through Huxley and the understanding of the status and procedures of science through Popper. Freud will be discussed not only because the narrowness of English Freudians would make a discussion of their work unprofitable but also because in the 1920s Freud’s writings began to be published in English as soon as they were published in German, were naturalized as an adjunct to Bloomsbury, Marxism, sociology and socialist liberation, and made Freud a leading presence in 411

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justifying his therapy and urging the claims of psychoanalysis to be a science. Like Frazer justifying his interest in primitive man, Max Müller his interest in the Vedas, or Maine his interest in primitive law, Freud was pushed polemically to the fore, justifying the presence of Freudian man at the high tables of culture, dismissing Jung and Adler, who had begun by being followers, and inserting into English thought that diminution of self-determining individuality which had been prepared by Darwin and Marx in one mode and by the irresistibility of Evangelical grace in another. I In the quarter of a century before his works were translated, Freud1 had moved on from the study of hysteria and hypnosis to the study of jokes, dreams and slips of the tongue, from the study of infantile sexuality as the root of neurotic behaviour to the study of infantile sexuality as the root of normal behaviour, and from psychoanalysis as therapy for the neurotic personality to psychoanalysis as explanation of the normal personality. He had been resisted by professional scepticism and had dramatized his work as a contribution to the battle against prejudice and obscurantism. By the time translation began, he had replaced physical by psychical investigation, had abandoned hypnosis for association in the treatment of neuroses and had encountered unexplained resistances in persuading patients to disclose associations which, once disclosed, had arrested the neurotic action and shown it to be subject to a rational explanation of which the patient had been unaware. Among Freud’s earlier works, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious was a solemn dead-end which did not unfold, as almost all the rest of Freud’s works unfolded, into something else. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life made a strained application of the assumption that random verbalizations disclosed’ valid motives’ and ‘highly-composite thought-processes’ in which the ‘unconscious’ was reacting to the suppression of the disagreeable. In The Interpretation of Dreams even a dream which seemed to be an ‘anxiety dream’ or an ‘unpleasurable dream’, when interpreted correctly, would be seen, no less than a pleasurable dream, to be the fulfilment of an infantile wish. The Interpretation of Dreams had the adventurousness and innovativeness of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. It opened up a continent 11

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), educated Gynmasium, Vienna University and Vienna Institute of Physiology. Work in Vienna Hospitals and University Lecturer in Neuropathology then Professor. Migrated to England, 1938. Author of (with Breuer) Studies on Hysteria, 1895; Project for a Scientific Psychology, 1895; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905; Totem and Taboo, 1912–13; On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, 1914; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1915–17; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921; The Ego and the Id, 1923; The Future of an Illusion, 1927; Civilization and its Discontents, 1930; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933; Why War?, 1933; and Moses and Monotheism, 1939.

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of the mind, delineated the structure of a subject and implied the existence of a science. From chapter 6 onwards, ‘the most complicated achievements of thought’ were declared to be possible without the assistance of consciousness, while the condensation, displacement, contortion, symbolism, overdetermination and representation which registered the ‘conflict’ and ‘compromise’ between the ‘conflicting psychical forces’, registered also the extraordinarily purposive and ubiquitous ingenuity of the unconscious. In the concluding section of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud related this complication to the even deeper complication which arose from the fact that dreaming ‘involved resistance’ to the ‘progress of a thought into consciousness’, that the path into consciousness was opened in sleep by a ‘lowering of the resistance which guarded the frontier’ and that, in the formation of dreams, two kinds of psychical process operated – the first producing ‘rational dream-thoughts’ . . . of no less validity than ‘normal thinking’, the second treating thought ‘in a manner . . . which was bewildering and irrational’ and predominated over the first once ‘an unconscious wish derived from infancy and in a state of repression’ had been ‘transferred to it’. These announcements were of fundamental significance. The ‘core of Man’s being’ consisted of ‘unconscious wilful impulses’ which were ‘inaccessible to the understanding’, ‘the unconscious’ was ‘as much unknown’ to man as ‘the reality of the external world’, and the ‘censorship’ imposed on the passage between the two ‘psychical systems’, so far from being the result of ‘pathological disturbance’, was already present in the ‘normal structure of the mental apparatus’. The Interpretation of Dreams led first to a statement about the centrality of sexual experience in both psychic disorder and the normal psychic constitution, and to the vindications of psychoanalysis which were to be made in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Secondly, it led ‘virtue’ out of the ‘much trampled soil’ of the unconscious towards a ‘human character’ which was too complex to be understood through the ‘simple alternatives’ proposed by ‘our antiquated morality’. Finally, it led from the idea that dreams ‘gave knowledge of the past’ to the idea that man’s psychic constitution embodied ‘mental antiquities’ from the ‘earliest and most obscure beginnings of the human race’. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, sexuality had slowly become central to Freud’s doctrine. In his first systematic statement he described man’s ‘original . . . disposition’ as being ‘bisexual’, gave prolonged accounts of sexual aberration, infantile sexuality and sexual puberty, and denied that sexuality was confined either to ‘those regions of the body which were designed for sexual union’ or to ‘irresistible attraction’ leading to reproduction through ‘sexual union’ with a person of the opposite sex. Extensions of sexual activity beyond the regions of the body that were designed for sexual union included not only kissing but also anal intercourse,

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mutual masturbation, fetishism and sado-masochism; and some of the instances that Freud discussed were ‘so far removed from the normal’ that they had to be judged ‘pathological’. His view in general, however, was that there was an ‘unbroken chain’ between ‘normality’ and the ‘perverse impulses’ which constituted the ‘symptoms of psychoneurosis’, and that ‘a disposition to perversion’, especially incestuous perversion, formed part of the ‘normal constitution’ from childhood onwards. To sexual abnormalities, Freud had two conflicting attitudes. On the one hand, he had a yardstick of normality which assumed physical desire for union with the genitals of a person of the opposite sex. On the other hand, he drew attention to deviations from the norm, some of which were hereditary, some of which were the result of ‘repression’ or maternal affection and some of which resulted in the ‘sublimation’ by which a ‘highly-gifted individual’ developed an ‘aesthetic disposition’. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality left the impression that no one was sexually innocent. This impression was enlarged in subsequent editions and in subsequent essays. It formed the central theme in Freud’s defence of psychoanalysis and, as we have seen, became the cause of a major difference with Jung. Freud was not the only thinker to question English sexual reticence and respectability. Ellis, Shaw and Wilde, from Freud’s own generation, had done so before Freud’s writing had arrived in England. Russell, Lawrence and many others from the following generations were to do the same. Freud’s input was to provide a new vocabulary, a more complicated account of relations between sex and rationality, and a systematic description of the way in which society imposed its discipline on the pleasure-seeking individual. The science of psychoanalysis was not conceived of as operating simply. On the contrary, it recognized that a neurotic who was ‘making the best of’ a neurosis which ‘he could not prevent’ might need, more than he needed anything else, to ‘free himself’ from the ‘unpleasure’ of its ‘symptoms’ without ‘giving up the gain he was making from his illness’. Even more to the point, it made no attempt to subvert the discipline which civilization exercised in putting the sexual instincts out of sight. There was, it is true, the suggestion that ‘present-day sexual morality’, with its insistence on monogamous marriage and legitimate procreation, was a cause of frigidity, anxiety and sexual perversion, especially for women. But, however desirable Freud thought it to reform the Austrian marriage laws, he did not suggest that psychoanalysis made discipline unnecessary, or that the separation of reproduction from ‘orgasm and voidance of sexual products’ avoided a bar-sinister by comparison with ‘orgasm and voidance of sexual products’ in pursuit of reproduction. In any case, he believed, that science should follow its own instincts, and should ‘carry on its researches without consideration of any immediate effect’, even if the conclusion it arrived at was

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that all men were ‘ill’. It was of special significance and, as Freud claimed, a cause of psychoanalysis’s unpopularity, that the blows inflicted on ‘Man’s naïve self-love’ by Copernican astronomy and Darwinian biology were now being completed by psychoanalysis’s proof that the ego was ‘not to be trusted’, was not ‘master in its own house’ and was confronted in its inner recesses by a sexuality which had been the subject of a ‘special ban’ in the public mind. A substantial part of the Introductory Lectures which Freud delivered between 1915 and 1917, described the treatment given to individual cases of neurotic disorder. An equally substantial part described the evidence which neurosis supplied of men’s ignorance of the forces which operated within them, of the compensatory ‘phantasies’ they preserved from their pleasurelife when civilization compelled them to accept reality, and of the truth that some of the more glaring fantasies which psychoanalysis treated, like the threat of castration, had once been ‘real occurrences in the primaeval times of the human family’. The man that psychoanalysis disclosed was not, therefore, a fully selfconscious man. But the science which studied him was not only fully self-conscious but also imputed an unconscious rationality to his actions. The science of psychoanalysis could no more be achieved at one blow than any other science could. But the reason why it would compel the unconscious to yield up its secrets in the long run, was that the unconscious operated rationally at the level at which it operated and, though most likely to reveal its secrets when its delicate balance had been tipped, still operated through its secrets even when they had not been revealed.

From an early stage in his public career, Freud had been a hedonist. He had made it clear that man’s aim was pleasure, that pleasure meant primarily sexual pleasure, and that the anxiety which began with the child’s separation from the mother at birth, was continuous with the sexual anxiety which arose from libidinal unemployment and the under-achievement of pleasure thereafter. Mental illness happened when men (or women) were obstructed in satisfying their sexual wishes, and the ‘reality-principle’ was the almost Carlylean, or puritan, principle without which the pursuit of pleasure would destroy civilization. It was not always clear what Freud meant by normal sexuality. What was clear was not only that the ‘impulses’ which sought to substitute other organs for the genitals were ‘perverse’ but also that civilization, when successful, directed the libido into a ‘genital’ organization which enabled the child to meet maturity, prevent reproduction overtaking resources and devote to ‘work’ some of the energy which might otherwise have been devoted to reproduction. Work in this sense was a substitute for sex, and the achievements of

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civilization the work of men who had sublimated their sexuality into ‘the highest cultural, artistic and social creations of the human spirit’. The personality behind this process was subject to arrests and fixations. But it was able to replace a memory it did not want to revive by a ‘symptom’ which concealed the memory, and it was also violent, tenacious and duplicitous, as well as being subtle and mocking, in resisting attempts to remove the symptom by recalling the memory. It was, indeed, the scene of a conflict between the libido which could only with difficulty be educated and the egoistic, self-preservative and non-sexual forces, which brought evil consequences to neurotics while educating everyone else to recognize the requirements of economic necessity. In the writings we have examined so far, Freud just about succeeded in rooting his account of man in his therapy. At the same time, he was taking off into the stratosphere, not as thoroughly as Jung was to do and not in Jung’s religious way, but with a deliberateness which clamped the constituent elements of personality even more tightly than before into the discipline of civilization. And to those who complained that man had ‘a higher nature’ than psychoanalysis could cope with, Freud’s reply was that man’s higher nature was ‘the heir of the Oedipus complex’, that it was the ‘ego-ideal or super-ego’ which embodied a man’s ‘relation to [his] parents’, and that ‘religion, morality and the social sense’ – the chief elements, apart from science and art, in ‘the higher side of man’ – were ‘originally one and the same thing’ which, whether through the ego or the id, were ‘acquired phylogenetically out of the father-complex’. In the 1920s, Freud was even more discouraging than before. The ambivalences and uncertainties of the unconscious were part of the ‘darkness’ of depth-psychology; and it was ‘disappointing’ that ‘subtle and difficult intellectual operations’ which ‘ordinarily’ required ‘strenuous reflection’ could ‘equally well’ be carried on ‘without coming into consciousness’. It was even more disappointing that there was a contradiction between the sexual instinct which preserved life and the egoistic instinct for which the ‘aim of life’ was to return to the inanimate condition which had existed before life began. Indeed, in spite of half-hearted disavowals, Freud was impressed less by the instinct towards perfection which had brought human beings to their high level of intellectual accomplishment than by the ‘instinctual repression’ upon which was based ‘all that was most precious in human civilization’. II The account of the psychic personality at which Freud arrived in the 1920s was cautious and tentative, and was given in the knowledge that he was still the object of unfriendly criticism. This did not stop him following Spencer, Tylor, Frazer and other English anthropologists in reaffirming the dismissals of religion which he had been making throughout.

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To make understanding of religion central to Freud’s significance would be to look down the wrong end of the telescope since, in the main parts of his life, and especially when he was creating psychoanalysis in his forties, he had ignored religion much more than he had ignored art and culture. As early as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he had been ‘one of those unworthy persons in whose presence . . . the supernatural vanished away’. In an article in 1907, ‘the religious observance of the faithful’ resembled ‘obsessive acts in neurotics’, and there were overwhelming similarities between sin and the neurotic guilt of the obsessional neurotic, between the repression of instinct in religion and the repression of instinct in neurosis, and between obsessional neurosis as a ‘private religious system’ and religion as a ‘universal obsessional neurosis’. In Totem and Taboo (1912–13), a defunct ‘religio-social institution’ from which conclusions could be drawn about modern religion, i.e. totemism, was compared with taboo, which ‘still existed in our midst’ not only as ‘Kant’s Categorical Imperative’ but also as the ‘unmotivated’ prohibitions displayed in the ‘anxiety’ of the compulsion-neurotic. There were comparisons between primitive man and the infantilism of childhood, between primitive and neurotic feelings of ‘tenderness’ and between the primitive dread of incest and man’s natural proclivity to incest. The killing of the totem-animal having been connected with the Oedipus complex and the ‘guilt’ man felt at the killing of the primal father, ‘Christian doctrine’, was said to acknowledge the ‘guilty deed of primordial times’ and to find its ‘most complete expiation’ in the ‘sacrificial death of the son’. In Totem and Taboo, the tactic was to restate Christianity in naturalistic terms by relating it to primitive religion. In writing about religion in his seventies, Freud explained away the ‘oceanic feeling’ to which Rolland had drawn his attention after reading The Future of an Illusion, and found in the ‘madness and intoxication’ of religion’s ‘delusional remoulding of reality’ an intimidating of the intelligence, a depression of the value of life and an arrest of devotion ‘in a state of infantilism’. This made it even more striking that Civilization and its Discontents compared religion with art, science, love and narcissistic internalizing, emphasized its ability to prevent neuroses by ‘compensating’ for the restraints and compulsions of the social and external worlds, and reinforced the more decisive arguments of The Future of an Illusion. The Future of an Illusion began as an enquiry about civilization’s dual function – in acquiring knowledge in order to extract wealth from nature and in regulating men’s relations with one another in order to distribute the wealth extracted from nature. In both respects, civilization had been imposed by a minority who had known how to ‘obtain possession of the means of power and coercion’ and who, though they resented at the same time as they internalized the discipline of civilization, resented it less than the deprived majority who neither acknowledged its discipline nor had the will to support it.

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About the consequences which would accompany the replacement of ‘religious’ by ‘secular’ motives for civilized behaviour among ‘educated people and brain-workers’, Freud expressed no fear since these latter were themselves ‘vehicles of civilization’. Of the masses, on the other hand, his fear was acute. He despised their laziness and their foolish illusion that material well-being could outlive the renunciation of discipline, and he looked forward without pleasure to replacement of the priestly discipline which had exacted penance for sin, while leaving the sinner to sin again, by a scientific discipline based on acceptance of the results of science without the changes in mentality which it was science’s merit to bring about. Freud was not a Marxist, though his political analysis contained a Marxist component. His chief prognostication was that the masses, once liberated from religion, would ‘unleash’ their ‘hatred’, and would have to be ‘held down most severely’ in the future unless the relationship between religion and civilization was subjected to a ‘fundamental revision’. ‘Fundamental revision’ was Freud’s preference, and The Future of an Illusion explained what he meant – that religion which had been used to justify civilization in the past should now cease to be used for that purpose and that ‘the truths contained in religious doctrines were . . . so distorted’ and ‘unacceptable to the mass of humanity’ that the experiment should be made of an ‘irreligious education’ which would avoid God and highlight the ‘human’ character of civilization’s ‘precepts’ and ‘regulations’. To the objection that man, deprived of religion, would be unable to bear ‘the cruelties of reality’, Freud replied that, though true of men who had been brought up in religion’s ‘prison’, this would not be true of men who had been ‘sensibly brought up’, understood their ‘insignificance’ in ‘the machinery of the universe’ and were willing to undergo the ‘education to reality’ which marked the exit from ‘infantilism’. The argument was summarized (naïvely) at the end of chapter 9 where the withdrawal of human expectations ‘from the other world’ and the direction of liberated energies towards ‘life on earth’ would make life tolerable for everyone and prevent civilization being intolerable to anyone. In The Future of an Illusion, religion was a ‘lost cause’ and the ‘primacy of the intellect’, though it lay in the future, did not lie in an ‘infinitely distant future’. In aiming no less than religion at ‘the love of man and decrease of suffering’, it would be able, where religion was not able, to modify its hypotheses without losing its authority. Freud claimed to be a scientist, not a prophet, and blew on anything which claimed to be prophetic. But his ‘science’ was deeply prophetic. It denied that ‘virtue’ was ‘rewarded’ and ‘wickedness’ punished, and that religion gave ‘protection’ and ‘happiness’ in return for men ‘fulfilling . . . ethical obligations’. In making itself the sole judge of religion and philosophy, it claimed a ‘dictatorship over the human mind’ and an ‘uncompromisingly critical attitude’ to ‘any

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other power’ that ‘sought to usurp . . . its province’ – not art (since art did not pretend to be other than ‘illusion’), nor necessarily philosophy (since philosophy ‘interested only a small number of the thin upper stratum of intellectuals’) but certainly religion which transposed into the God-Creator and reactionary author of ‘ethical commands’ the ‘grandeur’ with which the father was invested by the ‘small child’.

Freud supplied a stimulus to criticism, literature and painting, helped to break down the moral security of rational liberalism, and came to be employed, alongside Marx, in the service of social and sexual liberation. His doctrine was, however, neither properly liberating nor properly uplifting, in spite of the coincidence between its reception in England and the spiritualizing, respiritualizing, or uplifting of ‘science’ which Eddington (and Jeans) extracted from the new ‘physics’ and Julian Huxley (and J. B. S. Haldane) from the ‘new biology’. III Jeans2 took the same view as Eddington and Pearson of the gap between science and ‘ultimate reality’ and of the ‘inferential’ nature of man’s knowledge of reality. He claimed that twentieth-century science had given men a better opinion of themselves than science had allowed them previously, that it was only through modern astronomy that men had been able to return to something like the ‘untutored’ conception of ‘choosing between good and evil’ and, in the midst of entropy and ‘life-destroying radiation’, that there was an ‘almost endless promise’ of a ‘secular millennium’ in which not only would the material world be ‘harnessed’ to men’s needs but the ‘poetical and . . . aesthetic . . . imagination’ would provide ‘something of the vision without which the people perish’. Jeans expressed a carefully contrived agnosticism even when describing the universe as the work of a ‘pure mathematician’ whose structures were ‘structures of pure thought’. Though J. B. S. Haldane read one of Jeans’s books during the process of composition, there is no reason to impute to Jeans either Haldane’s eventual sympathy for dialectical materialism as an explanation of science or his initial view that biology was a ‘free activity of Man’s divine faculties’. 12

Sir James Hopwood Jeans (1877–1946), educated Merchant Taylors’ School, London and Trinity College, Cambridge. University Lecturer at Cambridge, 1904–12; Joint Secretary of the Royal Society, 1919–29. Author of Dynamical Theory of Gases, 1904; Theoretical Mechanics, 1906; The Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism, 1908; Eos or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony, 1928; The Universe Around Us, 1929; The Mysterious Universe, 1930; The Stars in their Courses, 1931; The New Background of Science, 1933; Through Space and Time, 1934; Science and Music, 1937 and Physics and Philosophy, 1947.

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Haldane3 spent part of his childhood helping his father, J. S. Haldane, with scientific experiments. He was a schoolboy at Eton where he was extremely unhappy, read both mathematics and literae humaniores at New College, Oxford, immediately before World War I and, in the intervals of being twice wounded during the war, became an instructor at army bombing schools. After a short period as a Fellow of New College after the war and a decade as Reader in Biochemistry at Cambridge, he spent the rest of his English career as a Professor at University College, London, from which he emigrated to India with his second wife in 1957. In the course of his life, Haldane acquired extensive experience of the application of science through his father’s investigations into diving and mining, his own investigations into the sinking of the submarine Thetis and the assessments he made of the effect of ground and aerial bombardment during the 1914 and Spanish Civil wars. He wrote a long stream of books and articles about the nature of the medical profession, about enzymes, food-poisoning, vitamins, cancer and tuberculosis, and about the role which air raid precautions would play in any war against Hitler. He became a government scientist during the 1924 Labour government and remained one thereafter. Before, during and after a decade as a member of the Communist Party and chairman of the editorial board of The Daily Worker, he made innumerable statements about English and world politics. Like his father, he made ‘philosophical’ pronouncements about the significance of biology. Haldane’s scientific reputation derived from articles in professional journals and from mathematical interpretations of Darwinianism. These pointed to the prospect of a properly constituted genetics having the same relation to eugenics as astronomy had had to astrology. They showed the ‘facts of variation’, though different from what Darwin had believed them to be, confirming the principle of natural selection, and they singled out ‘beauty’, ‘tragedy’ and the incompatibility of ‘parasites’ with God’s ‘moral perfection’ as more striking features of evolution than ‘purpose’. There was a loose examination of monistic idealism as the explanation of evolution; there was discussion of the futuristic writings of Wells, Huxley, Stapledon and Shaw; and there was the hope that man, armoured with knowledge of evolution, would understand himself to be ‘an extremely primitive and imperfect type of human being who could look forward in the next few thousand years to the speed of evolution being vastly increased, and its methods made less brutal’. 13

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964), educated Eton and New College, Oxford. War service, 1914–19. Fellow of New College, 1919–22; Reader in Biochemistry at Cambridge, 1922–33; Professor of Genetics at University College, London, 1933–57. Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, 1957–62 and Head of Genetics Laboratory at Bhubaneswar, 1962–4. Author of Daedalus 1923; Callinicus, 1925; Possible Worlds, 1927; The Causes of Evolution, 1932; The Inequality of Man, 1932; ARP, 1938; Heredity and Politics, 1938; The Marxist Philosophy and The Sciences, 1938; Science in Everyday Life, 1939; Science in Peace and War, 1940; Keeping Cool, 1940; New Paths in Genetics, 1941; A Banned Broadcast, 1946; Science Advances, 1947; and What is Life?, 1949.

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Haldane summarized current genetical research in the shadow of Pearson’s dictum that the biologist of the future would have to be a mathematical statistician. He wrote illuminatingly about the formation and mutation of genes, the connections between genes and individual psychology, and the historic struggle between mutation and evolution as producing both congenital ‘human defects’ and ‘the wide range of human diversity’. He denied that genetics had a view about ‘the best form of society’. But, since ‘every human being’ (except perhaps monozygotic twins) was born ‘with different capacities’, he implied that genetics contained a built-in preference for a society in which there was ‘the greatest diversity of careers’ and the ‘greatest opportunity to choose the career’ for which each citizen was ‘best suited’. Haldane believed from the outset that biology was in process of becoming the central science and had a mission with which every scientific worker could identify. At the moment when Freudianism was arriving in England in force and mathematical astronomy was about to establish a decisive hold on the public mind, his own position was that biologists were ‘the most romantic persons on earth’, that they had a dedication to ‘reason’ which could ‘wreck . . . empires and civilizations’, and that in performing ‘a free activity of man’s divine faculties’, they could ‘remould’ religion so as to make ethics and morality as ‘provisional’ and ‘fluid’ as ‘Hindu mythology’. Haldane’s mission was announced to the public in Daedalus or The Future of Science in 1923 and was confirmed obliquely two years later in Callinicus or The Future of Chemical Warfare where social, intellectual and theological contempt mingled in the announcement that ‘the Scribes and Pharisees of our age’ were the sort of people ‘to be found in all . . . parties and . . . sects’ who were distinguished by a ferocious opposition to . . . any attempt at the solution of human problems by honest and simple intellectual effort . . . More respectable in every way [were] the candid reactionaries, like Lord Cecil, who [believed] in their hearts that in abandoning traditional religion of the medieval type for scientific thought, man ha[d] definitely chosen the wrong path, and who fought with their eyes open against its application . . . Behind these followed like sheep the predestined victims of the next war, the peoples of the civilized nations who [were willing to] undergo the extremity of suffering rather than think for themselves. (J. B. S. Haldane, Callinicus or The Future of Chemical Warfare, 1925, pp. 32–4)

The injunction to modern peoples both to defer to the ‘informed’ and to ‘think for themselves’ was a central feature of Haldane’s politics. In ARP and other polemical writings of the late 1930s, he became rancid and emotional, stating for the benefit of those who would be killed if Britain was ‘raided again from the air’, that the National government was fobbing them off with propaganda, that only a Labour or Popular-Front government could provide adequate protection and, though the major industries need not be nationalized, that a new mentality would be needed to replace the ‘bureaucratic’ mentality which was dominant at present.

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In making himself the proponent of biology, Haldane was both cautious and utopian. Laws of nature were statements of ‘facts, not commands’; biological action to control human evolution would take centuries to accomplish; and it was beyond the biologist’s competence to deduce conclusions about what should be done. On the other hand, the ‘co-operation’ of cells which comprised the body had made the ‘isolated individual’ of eighteenth-century rationalism irrelevant and Comte’s ‘Great Being’ as real as the human consciousness. ‘Within the biological sphere’, the questions asked and answers given depended on ‘political and economic orientation’, while beyond biology, ‘science itself’ could apply to the family, the nation and the human race the outlook which ‘had revolutionized industry, agriculture, war and medicine’. This was meant to be ethically neutral and to place ‘all phenomena on the same emotional level’. It left little doubt, however, that science ‘impinged upon ethics’ by breaking taboos,4 and that its method, when applied ‘both to individual problems and to the problems of mortality’ would effect a ‘moralization of science’ to go with the ‘rationalization of ethics’. Haldane had begun adult life as a Platonic Idealist but had come to believe that contemporary physics and biology were more easily reconcilable with a Kantian than with any other metaphysic. His conversion to Marxism in the middle 1930s was at least in part a reaction to Neville Chamberlain’s abandonment of collective security. It was only after his conversion that Marxism became the remedy for ‘agnosticism’ and a ‘valuable aid’ in understanding and extending contemporary scientific knowledge. The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences, however, was so strained, and the reasons for elevating Engels and Lenin so extraneous, that it is best understood as a continuation of Haldane’s belief that modern societies required both the ‘mass heroism’ he believed he had seen in Madrid and a philosophy which he believed would validate resistance to fascism. By the mid-1930s Haldane believed that religious liberty was as great in the Soviet Union as in England, that science was benefiting more from association with the Soviet State than from association with the English State and that in England there was a positive suppression of scientific thought, especially sexual thought. England was a ‘tired country’; he dissociated himself demagogically from its class structure, and affected, like Needham, to be simply a ‘trade unionist’ and ‘laboratory-worker’ in the ‘worst-paid of . . . intellectual professions’ whose members differed from Russell, Eddington and Jeans in having ‘no division in their souls’ and doing their thinking through their hands as much as through mathematical symbols. Haldane had no time for solar or astronomic catastrophe and anticipated 14

On the study of anatomy, physiology and birth control, on the attitude to corpses and on the conception of death which, after ‘the abolition of disease’, would look more like ‘sleep’ than the promise of immortality.

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no difficulty in harnessing ‘the wind and the sunlight’ when British coal and oil ran out. His problem was on two time-scales. In the long term, he wanted a stable industrial society to replace agricultural society, a scientific education to sweep away the reticences with which ‘our ruling class’ was obstructing the application of science to contraception and venereal disease, and a ‘scientific’ effort to rescue the ‘urban population’ from its ‘unplanned’ housing and ‘unplanned’ diet by giving it access to good food, good housing and ‘sport and country travel’. In the long term, he wanted to ensure that science, instead of being ‘an adjunct to the army, the factory or the hospital’, would become ‘of all things . . . the . . . most supremely worth doing for its own sake’ as ‘the average man . . . and average woman’ came to ‘think like Newton . . . write like Racine and . . . be as incapable of hatred as St Francis’. Haldane was brought up a Scotsman but in the late 1930s began to give Orwellian disquisitions on England and the English, including praise of Surtees and fox-hunting, of ‘the progressive’ character of English agriculture and of the tolerance and mistrust of theory which had sustained the ‘greatness’ of the ‘two-party system’. At the same time there had been a ‘remarkable fall’ in the moral standards of the ruling class since 1914; it was a world War which had begun in Spain in 1936; as a ‘socialist’ war to liberate India and China as well as Europe, it would involve the destruction of the German industrial class and the Japanese officer class, and a readiness to ‘fight’ in England if a minority attempted to obstruct Socialism ‘when a majority desired it’. Haldane denied that social inequality was necessitated by ‘the survival of the fittest’ and gave biological ratification to measures which would either ‘equalize incomes’ between the classes or equalize standards of living ‘between members of large and small families in the same . . . class’. Conversely, he assumed that men were unequal by nature as well as by nurture, that dangers arose when inequalities based on heredity were replaced by inequalities based on talent and that education should be sufficiently ‘experimental’ to allow everyone, apart from the feeble-minded, to ‘follow their own bent’ and achieve a ‘social value’. Haldane wanted to remove ‘abnormal sexual conduct’ from the criminal law and to destroy the chattel-relationship which the English law imposed on women. To crime generally, he wanted a ‘scientific’ attitude which would build on the explanatory irrelevance of free will.5 About euthanasia, he was cautious. In relation to eugenics, he disassociated himself from quackery and racialism, from Inge’s reactionary enthusiasm, and from the assumption that ‘care and pity for the weak’ had done nothing to ‘help civilization’. About ‘compulsory sterilization’ and ‘the procreation of gifted men by artificial insemination’ he was agnostic, while supporting ‘governmental . . . propaganda’ to encourage ‘drastic family limitation’. In ‘the present state of the 15

As established in J. S. Lange’s supposedly epoch-making book, Crime As Destiny.

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world’ where it was ‘the most aggressive people who rose in the social scale’, he found something to say for weeding out the factors which made for aggressiveness ‘even at the cost of a certain sacrifice of . . . the . . . factors making for intelligence’. In adding that ‘unskilled labourers’ – the class which was ‘breeding most rapidly’ in the twentieth-century – could be more easily dispensed with than skilled labourers and the professional classes, he advocated State provision of family allowances for the benefit primarily of the latter and thought it possible that the rich might become ‘less . . . infertile’ if the abolition of inheritance and the establishment of ‘a uniform and free school system’ enabled them to stop ‘restricting’ their families. About race, Haldane’s chief aim was to complicate – to show that racial characteristics, though ‘innate’ if they existed, did not coincide with physical characteristics, that the ‘pure Nordic race’, the pure Jewish race, and the racial division between ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semite’, were illusions, and that caution about intelligence tests was especially necessary where ‘conquered or exploited’ races, or the ‘alleged . . . superiority of whites over Negroes’, were involved. He recognized that racial segregation might succeed in extinguishing Australian aboriginals, while probably being ‘impracticable and . . . undesirable’ in South Africa. But so far from committing himself either for or against ‘racial intermixture’, he left it uncertain whether inter-mixture was advantageous ‘for the future of the species’ and urged the ‘extraordinary importance’ of ‘scientific study’ of its effects ‘for the future of the British Commonwealth’. These homilies were meant by and large to be dampening. They were matched by hints about the danger that ‘premature application’ to man of the ‘rather scanty knowledge’ acquired from the breeding of animals ‘would discredit the new biology’, and about the lessons to be learnt from the ‘overproduction of undermen’ which alcohol, venereal disease and consumption had wrought among Negroes once Emancipation had blessed them with ‘liberty, education and wealth’ in the United States. About religion, he moved from being rather vaguely Anglican to being explicitly secular. Haldane was not baptized, was brought up at home on science and philosophy, and had no direct experience of religion until he observed it first at Eton, then at Oxford, where he was taught philosophy by, among others, Rashdall. After a number of years as an Anglican churchgoer, he abandoned churchgoing in reaction to the Church of England’s failure to support Lloyd George and the ‘Christian’ position during the Chanak crisis in 1922. Haldane looked to Socrates for a good death and sympathized with Hinduism (despite caste and a ‘disgusting’ mythology) for refusing to suppose that ‘myth or dogma’ had to be believed in in order to be effective. But he littered his writings with quotations from the Bible, was conscious of a duty to ‘salvage’ what could be salvaged from Christianity and had Christianity’s historic role in mind in carving out a future role for science. Haldane disparaged the ‘courage’ of First War Protestant chaplains, dis-

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missed the Protestant clergy for being ‘the dregs of the universities’ and concluded that Protestantism would be saved, if at all, only by a ‘man like St Paul preaching the Gospel in the intervals of leading a normal life’. In endeavouring to re-theorize Christianity in the manner of L. P. Jacks, he made it clear that ‘creed’ would always be ‘out of step’ with ‘the thought of tomorrow’ and, if Jesus had lived in a modern capitalist society that he would have been an ‘infidel’ teacher of ‘science, psychology and economics’. Haldane accepted Toynbee’s claim that not only had the New Testament been a contribution to ‘the class struggle’ but also that the Emperor Constantine’s establishment of Christianity had involved a sell-out of the workers. In the 1920s Haldane had believed that there was ‘something true’ in theology because it was ‘beautiful’, that it led to right action in some cases and that mystical experience, if subjected to scientific investigation, might issue in a scientific theology. He then made it obvious that science had to be liberated from religion, that the ‘God-making tendency’ had to be sublimated into a social purpose and that no one with a scientific mind could think of the universe as ‘preparing a certain percentage of human souls for so much of perfection and happiness as was possible for them’. In all this, he was considerably glibber than Huxley. IV Like Haldane, and like his brother, Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley6 came from a family of high-Victorian intellectuals which included Matthew Arnold, T. H. Huxley and Mrs Humphry Ward. Like Haldane, he was a schoolboy at Eton before going as a Brackenbury History Scholar to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a degree in zoology and won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. After a short period teaching zoology at Balliol, he spent three years as a professor in the United States and a couple of years in the British Army. Six years as a Fellow of New College, Oxford were followed by a couple of years as a professor in London, an unbeneficed period as a writer, seven years running the London Zoo and a period of public fame which began with membership of the BBC’s wartime Brains Trust. 16

Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887–1975), educated Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Lecturer in Zoology at Balliol, 1910–12; Professor at Race Institute, Texas, 1913–16. British Army, 1917–18. Fellow of New College, Oxford, 1919–25. Professor of Zoology at King’s College, London, 1925–7 and of Physiology at the Royal Institution, 1927–31. Secretary of Zoological Society of London, 1935–42 and Director-General of UNESCO, 1946–8. Author of The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, 1912; Essays of a Biologist, 1923; Essays in Popular Science, 1926; Religion Without Revelation, 1927; Ants, 1930; What Dare I Think?, 1931; Problems of Relative Growth, 1932; A Scientist Among the Soviets, 1932; (with de Beer) The Elements of Experimental Embryology, 1934; If I Were Dictator, 1934; Scientific Research and Social Needs, 1934; (with Haddon) ‘We Europeans’, 1936; The Uniqueness of Man, 1941; Evolution, 1942; On Living in a Revolution, 1944; Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943, 1947; Soviet Genetics and World Science, 1949; Evolution in Action, 1953; ed. The Humanist Frame, 1961; and Essays of a Humanist, 1964.

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Huxley was a geneticist, a demographer and an evolutionist, wrote technically in all three areas, and was also a prophet of science’s relevance to life. In this section, we shall examine his public doctrine as a contribution to science, politics, culture and religion.

Huxley claimed that his family had had religion in its bones. It seems, however, to have given him very little Christianity which, like Haldane, he claimed not to have encountered until he went to Eton. At Eton, and especially in Eton College Chapel, he had what he thought of as a mystical experience – a ‘dark night of the soul’ which turned into the nervous breakdown touched on in chapter 4 of Religion Without Revelation. Huxley’s religious experience was not of organized, let alone of orthodox, Christianity. He had no sense of a ‘personal God’, was blown painfully about by adolescence and suffered an anguish (which Eddington seems to have avoided) in marrying mysticism to science. In Religion Without Revelation, he recalled the ‘austerities’ he had directed when young towards ‘moral perfection’, the ‘holiness’ as well as the ‘beauty’ he had come to believe was inherent in existence and the ‘passionate fervours’ entailed by his ‘faith’, even when the passages of deep obscurity which recorded his ‘misery’ did not lay bare either the operation of his subconscious or the invasion of the spiritual by the sexual. Huxley’s mystical experience, his experience of the ‘gospel of work’ and his understanding of science, took a long time to get mixed. They were mixed by the war’s disturbance of his academic routine, by a reaction against the ‘intellectual perversity’ of Lux Mundi (which he read under canvas near Canterbury) and by Morley’s dictum that ‘the next great task of science would be to create a religion for humanity’. By the time they were mixed, in the 1920s, his conclusions were that religion, in spite of its ‘sects and bigots’, was a crucial human accomplishment but that literature, art, poetry and music aroused feelings which were intenser and more mystical. Huxley had an unfortunate sense of his family’s duty to think and rethink on behalf of the community. He thought, and rethought, in politics, morality and religion, transforming the subjective mysticism of his twenties and thirties into the insinuating and dogmatic but faintly tedious humanism which he came to associate with science. Huxley’s biological politics included cautious accounts of race and eugenics, of sociology’s importance as an agent of rational control and of Marx as herald of a change which would replace the essentially ‘amateur politician and administrator’ of the 1930s by ‘a new type’ of professional specialist who would help to supply society with a ‘brain’. They were rooted in the promise of changes in the modes of experience, of ‘economic values’ becoming ‘subordinate’ to ‘social’ and ‘human’ values and of a multiplication ‘at least

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tenfold’, perhaps ‘fifty-fold’, of the number of organizations devoted to collecting and correlating information. Huxley did not expect these policies and processes to be popular. But he made the most of the duty to fight ignorance and complacency, to make selfconsciousness integral to ‘every individual’ and to proclaim the birth of a new age in which ‘spiritual values’ would prevail and the Darwinian struggle be transcended. Huxley paid his deference to ‘evil, pain, strife, death . . . suffering and imperfection’, to the obstacles presented to evolutionary progress by ‘blind alleys’ and ‘dead ends’ and to the distinction between ‘lower’ levels of ‘biological efficiency’ and the ‘upper’ levels where ‘all-round’ as distinct from ‘specialized’ progress was the norm. He also made something of the need for an ‘externally-grounded conception of God’ which he claimed to have found in Wells, Matthew Arnold and William James. In Evolution (1942), a full-scale, critical survey of evolutionary studies in the twentieth century was followed by an enquiry whether these studies sustained a conception of progress in the face of early-twentieth-century pessimism about progress. In establishing the fact of pre-human progress, it denied that animals were being judged by their ‘greater or lesser resemblance’ to man. In considering human progress, it added ‘human values’ and ‘human feelings’ to the relevant criteria. The concluding section of Evolution set off from the claim that man’s ‘biological dominance’ was a facet of his capacity for ‘speech and conceptual thought’, that these could not have been achieved by any other process than the process by which they had been achieved, and that it was the coincidence of ‘lungs’, ‘warm blood’, ‘multicellular organization’, ‘triploblastic development’, the ‘foetalization necessary for a long period of learning’ and ‘attainment of the upright posture after the descent from the trees’, which had permitted man to ensure that progress depended entirely on himself. Huxleyite evolution included the humanistic perception that all man’s competitors had fallen by the wayside, and that nature would be unable to recreate speech and conceptual thought if mankind were to be wiped out. The question it asked was about man’s future, to which it gave two sorts of answer; that ‘conscious and conceptual thought’ – a ‘very recent’ innovation, ‘less than ten million years ago’ – still had its crucial achievements ahead of it; and that man’s predominance would best be preserved by supplementing his ‘biologically unique capacity for tradition’ with improvements in his ‘genetic constitution’, ‘intelligence’, ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘control of emotional impulse’. Huxley thought it possible that telepathy and extra-sensory capability might become as common as musical or mathematical capability, that the level of memory, analysis, perception, and synthesis might be raised to the level of the ‘best-endowed’ thousandth or ten-thousandth of the population,

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but that, with man’s ‘present reproductive habits’ and in ‘existing society’, it would be impossible to emulate the ‘instinctive altruism of the social insects’. After speculating on the possibility of increasing altruism by separating ‘reproduction’ from ‘love’, or using the ‘gametes’ of a ‘few highly-endowed males’ to ‘sire’ the ‘next generation’, he concluded that the route to progress would run through ‘an increase in . . . co-operation’ until co-operation ‘preponderated over . . . competition’. Like many utopian thinkers, Huxley’s vision was less of a new society than of the new mentalities out of which a new society might emerge. He wanted not only ‘the ape and tiger’ but also ‘the donkey’ to die; he looked forward to the gain that would accompany replacement of the ‘mammal’ by the human element in man; and he asked himself, with unconscious urban prejudice, whether ‘man’s muscular power’, ‘irrational satisfactions’ and ‘hunting prowess’ might not be obstructing both ‘the higher values’ and ‘new modes of control over the environment’. The problem as Huxley raised it was, indeed, ‘a problem of values’, involving the claim that ‘true human progress consisted in increases of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual experience’ – through the power of ‘form and colour’ to create ‘aesthetic satisfaction’, through the power of ‘ideas’ to create ‘intellectual satisfaction’ and through the power of ‘mystical detachment’ to create ‘inner ecstasy’. In Huxley evolution not only did not manifest a ‘purpose’, it was so much ‘a product of blind forces’ that, if men wanted it to work ‘towards a purpose’, they had to embody their own values in the attempt to make life fully ‘human’. He listed two conflicts which were preventing this happening – the conflict between the individual’s ‘subordination to the community’ and his ‘superiority to the community’, and the conflict between ‘progress’ as designed for ‘this world’ and progress as designed for a ‘future life in a supernatural world’. So long as humanity lacked ‘a single purpose’, progress would be ‘slow’ and ‘fitful’. But once a single purpose had been identified, and there was a will to eradicate the ‘mythical gods’, ‘metaphysical abstractions’ and ‘extraneous purposes’ with which poets, philosophers and theologians had obstructed humanization in the past, then the prospects for progress would be endless. Huxley’s service as Director-General of UNESCO gave him a ludicrous sense of destiny, encouraged the claim that the ‘vast quantity of . . . human knowledge’ which was ‘lying around unused’ from the ‘knowledge-explosion of the last hundred years’ needed a ‘new revelation,’ and enabled him to believe that, if this could not be supplied by Bishop Robinson’s ‘humanist religion of fulfilment’, it could certainly be supplied by the integration and ‘global unity of . . . noetic organization’ with which Teilhard de Chardin had reacted to the ‘crisis of convergence between nations, cultures and branches of science and learning’. Analytically The Humanist Frame and A Philosophy for UNESCO retailed the small talk of the 1920s – the belief that Christianity was being vulgarized

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and trivialized (especially in the United States), the recollection, aided by Tawney, of the Church’s role in the Middle Ages, and the certainty, confirmed by Ronald Knox, that, among those who ‘used their leisure’ or ‘made it their profession’ to ‘cultivate the mind’, irreligion was advancing. It was in these circumstances – when the world needed a ‘common outlook’ – that Huxley aimed to dethrone the ‘arrogance of theology’, to make science see in ‘the highest flights of the human spirit’ realities no less real than ‘the doings of . . . atoms and molecules’, and to make art’s pursuit of beauty, science’s pursuit of knowledge and the moulding of minds as it had been effected by St Francis, Luther, Jesus and the Buddha, essential constituents of civilization. Huxley built on the collapse of theological religion’s ‘absoluteness’ and ‘externality’ and explained its ‘personified God’ as a ‘symbol’ which needed to be rescued from misunderstanding. But he expected religion to continue and made it a chief benefit of his rethinking that, by ending the conflict with science, and establishing a ‘Weltanschaung’ or ‘policy of values’ it would persuade the English that ‘each partial aim’ they had hitherto pursued ‘without reference to a general policy’, ought now to be ‘planned’ by reference to a ‘policy of values’. One merit of a ‘policy of values’ was that it would ensure for man a peaceful transition through the ‘gigantic revolutionary experiment’ he would be making on the way to his ‘evolutionary destiny’. Another was that the policy would be governed by the centrality of religion as Nazism (irreligiously), Soviet puritanism (less objectionably) and the youth movements of Central Europe had perceived it, and would not only suggest the desirability of a ‘religious order’ to sustain ‘corporate action and loyalty’, like the corporate action and loyalty of Wells’s New Samurai and Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement, but would also combine ‘God’s disappearance’ with the ‘shouldering by Man of the ultimate responsibilities which he had previously pushed off on God’. Why this mattered, indeed what it meant, had been explained at length in Religion Without Revelation in 1927. In Religion Without Revelation, a contrast was drawn between ‘bad, limited or distorted’ religion and ‘limited and grudging’ science on the one hand, and ‘pure and high’ religion and ‘full and unafraid’ science on the other. ‘Head and heart’ were said to be ‘torn in different directions’ and the most probable outcome to be the restoration of religion to the ‘forefront of civilization’ by excluding from it everything that was ‘theological, credal or ecclesiastical’, and rescuing ‘church-buildings’ and ‘religious services’ from the ‘vested interests’ which controlled them. Religion Without Revelation claimed that Christianity was dead and that religion had to be detached first from the ‘shackles of personality’ which had been ‘riveted’ on to God, and then from the idea of God Himself. The world needed an earthly religion which would sacrifice ‘certitude . . . on the altar of humility’ and help men ‘to transcend themselves . . . sacramentally’ through

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work. And it was the prospects and possibilities for religion as the form which love and sacredness took in the normal mind which connected it through an ‘organic relation with the community’ to Huxley’s specific proposals for town planning, conservation, education, psychology, eugenics and birth control. Huxley was secular, eloquent, disproportionate and at times emotional. He offered as much reinterpretation as Stirling had offered in The Secret of Hegel, with the three persons of the Trinity turning themselves respectively into ‘the power and externality of matter’, the ‘illuminative and compulsive power of thought, feeling and will’, and a ‘mediation’ which would ‘incarnate . . . more and more of spirit into matter’. A chapter entitled ‘Psychology and Religion’, drew parallels between the replacement of ‘conceptual thought’ when ‘the higher centres’ lost control, and the mystic’s attempt to ‘put the intellect to sleep’ so that the mystical experience could begin. Huxley drew attention to mystical selfishness and the danger of mysticism forcing the soul into ‘pathological’ or ‘low-level’ activity. But he also extracted from mysticism benefits of the highest order – a preference for ‘contemplative prayer’ over the ‘petitionary’ prayer of which Galton had made mincemeat and the belief that ‘contemplation’ could be achieved through the ordinary individual’s act of creation, however amateur or second-rate, in art, literature and music. Huxley did not explain how far down the social, aesthetic or intellectual scale creation was to be found. Further down, one suspects, in theory than in practice. But in theory at least, he was showing how the inner darkness of the soul, the concealed self of the unconscious and the rational self of the self-conscious, could all sit down harmoniously with faith and reason provided it was understood – what Puritanism had not understood – that art, literature, music, the cinema, wireless, the cheap colour-print and the secular university were all concerned with religion, and had all facilitated a more genuinely ‘religious life’ than the conventional religion they were in process of displacing. There were, as Huxley understood it, two major cleavages in modern thought – between theological religion on the one hand and culture on the other, and between organized religion on the one hand and instinct and impulse on the other; and what he wished to say to the modern public was that there had to be ‘singleness of heart’, that God had to be seen as ‘a creation of the human soul’, and that ‘the sense of spiritual relief’ which he himself had experienced on rejecting ‘the idea of God as a supernatural being’ should be made as widely available as possible. ‘A developed religion’ was ‘the relation of the personality as a whole to the rest of the universe’ and should not be confined to man’s ‘more or less immediate reaction to the mysterious’. On the contrary, it should extend its conception of what [was] sacred and a proper object of religious feeling to include man’s destiny and his relation with the rest of the world . . . and should

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. . . more and more consciously . . . aim at . . . putting forward a scheme of belief and a scale of values around . . . which man’s aspirations to sacredness in emotion, thought, and action might most securely grow. (Julian Huxley, Religion Without Revelation, 1927, p. 339)

Huxley was trying to reconcile a quasi-mystical experience with experience of science, to create a new religion out of the reconciliation and to enable it to contribute to life after the death of Christianity. In Popper, who had little direct experience of either science or religion but was a self-confessed ‘armchair’ theorist like ‘Kepler, Newton, Maxwell . . . Einstein . . . Bohr . . . and Heisenberg’, it was through the ‘philosophy’ of science that existential significance was claimed for a limited type of rationalistic liberalism. V Popper’s7 family was Austrian middle-class and had undergone conversion from Judaism to Lutheranism before Popper was born. Popper’s father was a lawyer and a freemason; Popper himself grew up in a cultured free-thinking atmosphere in which music, philosophy and psychoanalysis had an unproblematical centrality, and a mixture of pacifist and social democratic sentiment in a partly peasant Empire, were confronted first with the realization in 1918 that the State was disintegrating then, after the war, with the realization, brought home to him by his father’s financial collapse, that the European monetary system was disintegrating. Popper was educated at the University of Vienna, thought of becoming a mathematician, physicist or professional musician before being apprenticed to a cabinet-maker, and spent a decade or so as a schoolteacher (for a time in an experimental institute) until he and his wife, who was also a schoolteacher, emigrated before the Anschluss out of fear of an anti-Semitic future. After a period in New Zealand, where he became a University lecturer, he arrived, through Hayek and Robbins, at the London School of Economics, which he had visited before going to New Zealand and where he stayed from 1945, with many visits to the United States, until his retirement in 1969. Popper’s significance for present purposes lies in his explanation of the nature of scientific thinking which he brought to a head in 1934, and in the extensions he effected to politics, sociology and public doctrine of ideas which had originated in his consideration of science and music. Popper had been thinking about political problems for twenty years before he wrote about politics, claimed to have been a Marxist for only a very short time in his early twenties but claimed also that he had been unwilling to attack 17

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902–94), educated University of Vienna. Professor of Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics, 1949–69. Author of Logik der Forschung, 1934; The Open Society and its Enemies, 1945; The Poverty of Historicism, 1957; On the Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance, 1961; Conjectures and Refutations, 1963; Of Clouds and Clocks, 1966; Objective Knowledge, 1972; (with Eccles) The Self and the Brain, 1977 and All Life is Problem-Solving, 1999.

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Marxism so long as the Austrian Social Democrats were a going concern. With exile and the German occupation of Austria this source of inhibition (if inhibition it was) disappeared. Even so, it was not until 1945 that The Open Society and Its Enemies was published and not until 1957 that The Poverty of Historicism, which had been published in article form during the war, became a book. Like Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, these writings were emigré literature – reactions to the Austrian or Continental situation in which Popper had grown up. They were relevant to England less because of the objective reality of English politics than because they appealed to the anti-Utopian, anti-revolutionary opinions which the young extracted, sometimes mistakenly, from Oakeshott, Koestler, Butterfield and Orwell after 1945, and because grown-ups from the 1930s, having flirted with Marxist totalitarianism and supported a war against Nazi totalitarianism, now gave a middle-aged welcome to an aggressive justification of their often confused intellectual odysseys. Popper did not shift radically during his first decade in England. But he nevertheless shifted as he became aware, among ‘very many clever’ Englishmen, of an ‘irrationalism’ which went back to Burke, and in Oakeshott – a ‘really original thinker’ – found confirmation of his own arguments in favour of ‘tolerance’, ‘intellectual humility’ and freedom of discussion. By 1954 the critic of Russell’s pre-emptiveness against the Soviet Union, had become the populist, Hayekian, Mont-Pélerin guru who believed that many ‘simple men’ were ‘wiser than governments’ and that the British public was sometimes more sensitive than ‘those aristocrats of the mind’ who wrote letters to The Times. For the Mont-Pélerin guru, a democratic society was better than any other because a democracy could get rid of a government where a ‘tyranny could not’. The ‘free world’ of ‘the Atlantic Community’ was the ‘best . . . social world’ that had ever existed and, as heir to the ‘standards and values’ which had ‘come down to us through Christianity from Greece . . . and . . . the Holy Land’, had ‘very nearly . . . succeeded in abolishing not only poverty, unemployment, sickness, penal cruelty and slavery’, but also discrimination, both religious and racial, lack of educational opportunity, ‘rigid class differences’ and war. In the 1950s, Popper became an optimistic defender of the welfare state and an admirer of the progress which had been achieved since the Reformation. He became en enemy of nationalism (which, however, like Acton, he did not associate with the British State). He shared Acton’s belief in the tendency of power to corrupt, and mistook the Radical attack on the Boer War for a national ‘moral conversion to the cause of peace’. In face of the ‘absurd but terrible accusations’ which Khrushchev had been making against Britain, he developed the Cold War insight that the British should overcome that ‘scepticism about themselves’ which was blinding them ‘to their own achievements’ and making them into advocates of their opponents’ achievements.

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By the mid-1950s, Popper had come, retrospectively, to assume that wars of ideas had been of first importance ever since the Greeks. It is certainly the case that The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism were contributions to a war of ideas. In England Popper had established a professional reputation as a philosopher of science with the publication of his second book, Logik der Forschung, in 1934. His first reputation among the educated classes, however, owed nothing either to that book, which was not translated until 1959, or to The Poverty of Historicism,8 but was created almost entirely by The Open Society which registered the beginning of two decades in which Popper applied to politics some of the ideas which he had previously applied to science, suggesting similarities between scientific discovery and political openness, connecting the false claim that certainty was a feature of scientific thinking with the false claim that certainty should be a feature of political thinking, and drawing out of The Poverty of Historicism the conclusion that, though the application of ‘physics’ to politics had hitherto been obfuscatory, it was possible that a new ‘Galileo’ should make such an application. Popper’s account of science was that scientific discovery could not be achieved by the ‘inductive’ conversion of ‘singular statements’ into ‘universal laws’, and that an hypothesis in science could be ‘tested empirically’ only ‘after the hypothesis had been advanced’. He was anti-Baconian, distinguished deduction from induction and, in roping off the ‘irrational . . . intuitive . . . or inspirational’ process by which scientific hypotheses were acquired, used the gauntlet hypotheses had to run in the investigation of their ‘internal consistency’ to make it clear that ‘falsifiability’ was the test of an ‘empirical scientific system’, and that achievement of ‘irrevocably true statements’ was not ‘the end and purpose of science’. Science, indeed, not only had nothing to contribute to the building of philosophical systems, it also carried with it value judgements in favour of ‘freedom from dogmatism’ and, though it took off from myth as well as from dogmatism, was part of a ‘reckless . . . quest’ which had to be ‘tentative for ever’. Science ought not to claim ‘authority’, extirpate ‘heresy’ or degenerate into ‘Orthodoxy’. All that mattered was that it should ‘stand up to criticism’, should continue the cosmological guesses ‘of staggering . . . audacity’ which it had been proposing since Anaximander, and should act out the assumption that man was a ‘lawgiver’ who did not need prior observation to tell him what laws he was to give. There was at times a certain testiness on Popper’s part at the failure of other philosophers to take him seriously, along with a certain awe at the thought that ‘knowledge’ was ‘the greatest miracle in the universe’. In elaborating Tarski’s belief in truth as ‘correspondence to facts’, in restating Darwinianism 18

See below, p. 434.

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so as to make knowledge the outcome of the struggle for the fittest hypothesis to survive and in questioning the irrationalist ontological relativism which he found in Hegel, Quine, Kuhn, Whorf and the Frankfurt School, he left the impression that no experience was wasted and that all boundaries could be crossed. He crossed one set of boundaries in connecting Tarski’s doctrine with his own distinction between the ‘subjective self-expression’ embodied in Beethoven’s music and the ‘forgetfulness of self’ embodied in Bach’s assumption that he was the ‘servant’ of his music. He crossed another in connecting relativism, orthodoxy and incommensurability with the dangers which arose from the ‘increasing escalation’ in weapons of destruction. He crossed a third in blaming the ‘scholasticism’ of post-war English philosophy for the antiintellectualism of the student revolution which, when he experienced it at the London School of Economics in the 1960s, reminded him of Nazi antiintellectualism. VI Politically, Popper’s slogan was ‘piecemeal’ social engineering which was compatible with both State intervention and the absence of State intervention, and sought out ‘the greatest and most urgent’ evils of society in its ‘systematic fight’ against injustice and exploitation. Though the ‘piecemeal’ engineer could redesign ‘social institutions’, he would not redesign society ‘as a whole’, would be willing to see what happened to an hypothesis under critical investigation, and would so far act as a ‘scientific’ politician as to replace the assumption that he had ‘not made mistakes’ by the ‘greater’ assumption that he should learn from his mistakes and apply his knowledge so as to ‘avoid mistakes in the future’. Popper’s description of the methods of science may have been innocent. The similarity he suggested between the methods of science and the methods of politics, so far from being innocent, was already loaded with the demonology that was to be so crude a feature of The Open Society. In the 1944 version of The Poverty of Historicism, the demonology had not yet reached the intensity of the 1957 version which was dedicated to the ‘countless . . . victims’ of the fascist and communist belief in the ‘Inexorable Laws of Human Destiny’. Nor did it state – what Popper was to state in 1974 – that it was historicism which had sustained the Wagnerian illusion that the artist needed cliques and movements and a quasi-religious mentality in proving that he was ‘ahead of his time’. It was made obvious, however, by reference to Plato and Marx (there was no mention of Hitler or Stalin), that a false understanding of the nature of social processes, and unreal expectations about social theory, could have unpleasant consequences in political and social practice, and that ‘utopian social engineering’ was both a ‘powerful instrument in the hands of the politician’ and a way of ‘moulding’ citizens to ‘fit into a new society’.

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In the four hundred or so pages of its main critical chapters, The Open Society surveyed the advocates of historicism (and ‘mysticism’) from Hesiod and Heraclitus to Toynbee and Whitehead. It presented Plato as aiming to arrest ‘decay’ through a ‘fascistic politics’, Aristotle – ‘the dilettante . . . gentleman’ – as supporting a ‘sound and balanced feudalism’, and Hegel – the ‘mouthpiece of the reaction against the French revolution’ – as both a ‘despicable’ admirer of Frederick William III of Prussia and the impulse behind Haeckel’s ‘racialism’. Popper’s account of Aristotle was fragmentary, his account of Hegel adjectival and abusive and his account of Plato a simple condemnation of metaphysical reaction and ‘natural inequality’. By contrast Marx was admired for his hatred of ‘hypocrisy and pharisaism’, his ‘burning desire to help the oppressed’ and his wish to apply ‘rational scientific methods to the urgent problems of social life’. Marxism in practice had become totalitarian, but Marx was not, as ‘vulgar Marxists’ would have it, a vulgar materialist and he was a ‘moral radical’ who had failed to elaborate a moral theory only because he disliked moralizing. If he was, nevertheless, as Popper believed, a ‘false prophet’, it was partly that his prophecies had ‘not come true’, partly that he had misled scores of intelligent people into believing that ‘historical prophecy was the scientific way of approaching the social problem’. In three critical chapters, Popper undermined the Labour Theory of Value, and Marx’s expectations about the increasing immiseration of the poor under capitalism. He drew attention to the irrelevance of Marx’s analysis of the class system in peasant societies, and to the failure of Marxists and Social Democrats, by comparison with ‘a section of the Church’, to offer resistance to Nazism. While endorsing Marx’s account of nineteenth-century industrialism and the capitalist legal system, he not only denied that contemporary ‘liberalism and democracy’ were veils for the ‘gangsterism of wealth’, but also rejected Marx’s assumption that proletarian revolution would lead to the withering-away of the State. He deduced, on the contrary – what Marx had denied – that modern states could construct ‘social institutions’ to protect ‘the economically weak’ from ‘the economically strong’ and had used collective bargaining, trade-cycle intervention, taxation, death duties and anti-trust laws to create a middle way – a phrase he did not use – between capitalism and socialism. The Open Society and its Enemies, though primarily a political polemic, also located itself in relation to Christianity. It contrasted Christianity’s initial mistrust of ‘highbrow’ Idealism and Platonic-Aristotelian totalitarianism with its capitulation by the time of Justinian. It was unsympathetic to the Inquisition (as a continuation of Byzantinism), and disliked the religious mediaevalism which was being revived in ‘intellectual circles’ in post-war Britain. While denying that the Christian ethic ‘of equality . . . toleration and freedom of conscience’ could properly be accepted on ‘divine authority’, it

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was careful to state that the conception of ‘ethical laws’ being ‘man-made’ was ‘compatible’ with both ‘the centrality of conscience’ and the ‘religious’ view that ethical laws were ‘given . . . by God’. These were attempts to have Christianity both ways – to accept its ethic as a humanist ethic without its theological inconveniences, to associate Marx with Kierkegaard’s denial that the ‘official’ Christian morality of their day was Christian, and to think of the inspiration Marx had given ‘the workers . . . in the hour of their deepest misery and degradation’ as a ‘religious’ inspiration. Popper was a rationalist. He drew a ‘moral’ contrast which required a ‘moral’ decision between an irrationalist analysis of human nature in terms of ‘passion’, violence, crime, hatred and a ‘master-and-slave’ conception of the relations between ‘leaders and led’, and a rationalist analysis in terms of reason, experience, impartiality, responsibility, humanitarianism, the use of language as a means of communication rather than self-expression, and consultation of the conscience in religion as the equivalent of testing by experiment in science. As the child of a convert family, Popper justified assimilation on the ground that it ‘worked . . . in many cases’, adding that Jews ought not to provoke antiSemitism, and that Jewish nationalism was ‘no exception’ to the rule that nationalism and racial pride were ‘stupid’ as well as ‘wrong’. There was no wish to insist on his Jewish background; there was a disposition to blame Austrian Jewry for provoking the Austrian disaster; and there was a view of Christianity which made it the historic creator of science, the critic of authority, power and success, and the source of a sensibility which associated the ‘few fishermen’ on whom Christ had depended with those ‘unknown individuals’ whose ‘sorrows . . . joys . . . suffering and . . . death’ were ‘the real content of human experience down the ages’. Above all, there was the view that Europe’s ‘religious wars’ had proved that forced conformity was ‘pointless’, that faith was valuable only when it was ‘freely held’, and that Kierkegaard and Barth had exposed the historicist illusion that God had ‘revealed Himself’ in the world. Popper’s politics were defective in a number of respects. He was obsessed with ideology and was not interested in the force, fraud, intolerance, accident, subterranean prejudice and State power which help to create and destroy both historic allegiance and the sentiments of nations in the modern world. He ignored the relationship between the rise of totalitarianism and the collapse of the German, Russian, Austrian and Chinese States, and mistook the Cold War for an aspect of an ethical foreign policy where in truth it was an incident in the development of national interest, both aggressive and defensive, on both sides. And if one asks about his relevance to England, the answer is that, in spite of the dampening effect which The Open Society had on Socialist expectations in the 1940s and 1950s and the use made of his works, as junior

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adjunct to Hayek, by the Conservatives of the 1980s, the Labour Party was not an institution which his intellectual experience had prepared Popper for, he showed little sense of its uneasy marriage between class rancour, intellectual virtue, pork-barrel and machine politics and the minority-mindedness of the 1960s, and appeared to have no more interest in the realities of English politics than he had after 1938 in the realities of any other politics. In criticizing Mill in 1873, Fitzjames Stephen had observed that Mill’s libertarian principle would condemn every existing system of morals since the instances in which coercion had to be employed ‘for other purposes than . . . self-protection’ were so numerous as to make the principle irrelevant. But cannot the same be said of ‘piece-meal social engineering’? Ought one not to be as contemptuous of the following passage from The Open Society and its Enemies as Stephen was of many similar passages in Mill? The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell. It leads to intolerance. It leads to religious wars, and to the saving of souls through the Inquisition. And it is, I believe, based on a complete misunderstanding of our moral duties. It is our duty to help those who need our help. But . . . the use of political means for imposing our scale of values upon others, is a very different matter. Pain, suffering, injustice, and their prevention, these are the eternal problems of public morals, and . . . public policy. . . . ‘Higher’ values should be very largely left to the realm of laissez faire. (K. R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 1948 edn, vol. II, p. 224)

Of the thinkers discussed in this chapter, Popper was a secular libertarian whose liberal odyssey was tortuous and unconvincing and Freud an exacting and forbidding presence whose social ambivalence was ill understood in England in the 1930s. Only Huxley, whose search was hampered by vanity and loquacity, was certain that a religion was what he was looking for. Of the thinkers who will be discussed in the first part of the next chapter, Bosanquet and A. C. Bradley wrote eloquently about the religious implications of philosophy and literature at the same time as F. H. Bradley displayed his innate superiority by declining to push his opinions to any but negative conclusions.

17 Modern knowledge and the postChristian consensus III The extent and . . . nature of the influence, which a modification of history must exercise on religious belief, is a subject on which it is remarkably easy to come to a conclusion, and extremely hard to come to a right one. Courage to express one’s views has long ceased to be a virtue . . . and it is on the fair way to become a vice . . . Especially where religion is involved, there is one courage it is well to be free from, the courage to utter one’s (mere) opinions. (F. H. Bradley, The Presuppositions of Critical History, 1874, in Collected Essays, 1935, vol. I, p. 3) Everywhere from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery . . . it forces the mystery upon us, and makes us realise so vividly the worth of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the reflection that all is vanity. (A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904, p. 23). A visible Church, like the Church of England, or of Rome . . . may be a part of the kingdom of God on earth. But a family, or a nation like the English nation, is a far more sacred thing than any Church, because these are what prescribe our duty and educate our will. (Bernard Bosanquet, The Kingdom of God on Earth, n.d. in Essays and Addresses, 1889, p. 123)

In understanding the conflicts between schools of thought which have arisen in English culture in the last hundred and fifty years, it is necessary to listen carefully behind the sounds of battle. What we are describing in this chapter is some of the ways in which religious opinions have been inculcated under the cover of literature, philosophy and music. There have been many other activities under the cover of which religious opinions have been inculcated. But these subjects have been of the very greatest importance. Three of the thinkers discussed in this chapter were primarily dons and three were not. But all six were culturally influential. The questions we have to ask are, what conception of religion was contained in F. H. Bradley’s and Bosanquet’s view of philosophy, in R. B. Haldane’s view of the function of a university and in A. C. Bradley’s view of literary criticism, and how far were they, and Parry and Hadow in their musical theory, advocates of a postChristian consensus? Between Green’s death in 1882 and their own deaths forty years later, Bosanquet and F. H. Bradley became, with Caird and Wallace, the leading philosophical Idealists. Unlike Green’s, Wallace’s and Caird’s, however, and 438

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like Haldane’s and A. C. Bradley’s, their doctrines were secular rather than Christian and concentrated attention on the nation rather than the Church.

Bosanquet and F. H. Bradley were sons of Anglican clergymen, were schoolboys at public schools, and were undergraduates at Oxford – at Balliol and University College respectively. Though both wished to place Hegelianism at the centre of English life and thought, they differed about its significance. After a successful undergraduate career under Green and Nettleship, Bosanquet was a Fellow of University College where he taught Greek history and philosophy. He left Oxford in 1881 because he disliked the narrowness of his life and was enabled by his wealth to spend the following forty years in charitable work, as a philosopher, and as advocate of a doctrine which he preached to audiences in universities and training colleges, ethical and Fabian societies, and secular churches and working-men’s clubs. Bosanquet, though not a politician, was a public figure and was married to a Unitarian who was herself an author, a charitable worker and a member of the Poor Law Commission of 1906. Bradley, on the other hand, was a bachelor-invalid who during more than fifty years as a resident Fellow of Merton College did very little teaching, played no part in public life and mattered only because of his philosophical writing between The Presuppositions of Critical History in 1874 and Appearance and Reality in 1893. In an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, A. E. Taylor – a high and formidable authority – left the impression that Bosanquet had had a more accurate sense of Hegel’s meaning than Bradley had had. It is certainly true that Bradley’s philosophy, though it claimed to be Hegelian, stood on its own feet and demanded attention whether it gave an accurate representation of Hegel or not. I Bradley1 was one of about twenty children of two wives of an evangelical divine of whom he, A. C. Bradley and G. G. Bradley were the best known. It became obvious early in his life that his philosophy was closely connected with his view of religion. The Presuppositions of Critical History, published when he was twenty-six, was a reaction to Baur’s view of Biblical criticism, while Ethical Studies, published two years later in 1876, had a concluding essay in which religion proper was differentiated from both morality and Church religion. 11

Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), educated Cheltenham College, Marlborough College and University College, Oxford. Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, 1870–1924. Author of The Presuppositions of Critical History, 1874; Ethical Studies, 1876; The Principles of Logic, 1883; Appearance and Reality, 1893; Essays on Truth and Reality, 1914 and Collected Essays, 1935.

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The main drift of The Presuppositions of Critical History was that a history ‘without prejudication’ was a ‘delusion’, that history was a ‘matter of inference’ resting on a ‘presupposition’ and that a ‘critical’ history was a history in which ‘the historian was the real criterion’ and was ‘aware of his own presuppositions’. Bradley asserted that the past was dead, that it was man’s ‘present standpoint’ which determined his belief about it, and that this had implications for the ways in which ‘the Christian principle had brought itself home to the religious consciousness’. The Presuppositions of Critical History, finding it a ‘vice’ that modern theologians uttered their ‘mere opinions’ about religion, used irony and banter in showing how inadequate these opinions were. Bradley was coy about the content of his own religion, pointed to ‘the facts of the religious consciousness without drawing conclusions to the right or left’, and claimed to be describing these facts as he found them in the ‘modern Christian mind’, whether Christians accepted his description or not. It was obvious what he meant – that religion needed to be defended against the hostile witnesses who were plaguing it in the early 1870s, that it needed to be construed as differing from philosophy or art because it was essentially a ‘doing’ which implied a ‘realising of the good self’ and, though a philosopher might be a good philosopher and an artist a good artist or ‘even’ a theologian a good theologian without being moral in his actions, that ‘no one who knew what true religion was would call a man who on the whole was immoral a good man’. These opinions involved criticism of Mill, Frederic Harrison and Matthew Arnold and irritation at the pertness and certainty of Spencer, Huxley, Clifford and Winwoode Reade. They also involved the assertion that ‘orthodoxy’ was mistaken, that ‘right doctrine’ was not religion, and that churchgoing, the sacraments and prayer were not by themselves ‘religious’ and became ‘sinful’ and a ‘mockery of the divine’ when ‘duty to the afflicted’ was not performed as a means to ‘faith . . . will and practice in the world’. Actual churches were not ‘the Church proper’, and clergymen who thought they were or believed themselves to stand ‘in a more intimate relation with the divine Spirit than the rest of the community’ were abandoning ‘the first principles of Christianity’. In Ethical Studies, moreover, Bradley stated that morality left men dissatisfied with themselves and led on to a ‘religious point of view’ for which faith stood above ‘finitude and contradiction’ and permitted men to transcend appearance ‘in pursuit of an harmonious whole’. Religious belief was belief in an object ‘put forth’ by a ‘not-myself’ which stood over against the world and yet was ‘the ideal self considered as realized and real’. This ideal self was the ‘complete reality’. But the ‘pain’ of ‘sin’ and an ‘intolerable discord’ created the torment men felt at being ‘in contradiction with all that truly was’ in a world which was ‘alienated from God’, and the desire to end torment and alienation

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guided them in four crucial directions – towards Atonement and reconciliation; towards the ‘inseparability of the human and the divine’ which was affirmed ‘in and by’ the will; towards the belief that there was a ‘kingdom of God’ which realized itself in its members ‘on the subjective side’ and an ‘external world’ which realized itself objectively as a ‘divine organic whole’; and towards the truth which it was Protestantism’s ‘glory’ to have ‘sealed with its blood’ – that men were justified ‘not by works’ but ‘solely by faith’, which made man’s will one with God’s and enabled ‘Love . . . eternally’ to resolve contradiction. In all this, Bradley was being so unorthodox and uninstitutional that historic Christianity could be heard flying out of the window. What remained were the public purposes which were served by his commitment to ‘metaphysics’.

In spite of the diffidence and coyness of its manner, Bradley’s œuvre yields evidence of three public purposes. Bradley wanted late-nineteenth-century Englishmen to understand the nature of the universe; he wanted them to understand how they should conduct themselves in the universe; and he wanted these understandings to be achieved neither through theological nor through anti-theological dogmatism. He was marginally more sympathetic to the former than to the latter. But essentially, he was hostile to both and, insofar as he allowed Appearance and Reality to retain a Christian dimension, retained it in a more attenuated form than the form in which it was retained by Caird, Green and Wallace. Bradley no more claimed originality for Appearance and Reality than he did for Ethical Studies. He claimed to be speaking out against ‘stupid tradition and ancestral prejudice’ and as the beneficiary of thinkers from a time ‘shortly before his own’ who had established, sometimes ‘incautiously’, that Kantianism and Hegelianism were more important than Spencer’s ‘dogmatic individualism’. In presenting metaphysics as the attempt to know reality and the universe ‘somehow as a whole’, he discussed two conflicting ways of doing this: less modestly, in describing ‘the intellectual effort to understand the universe’ as a ‘principal way of experiencing the Deity’; more modestly in emphasizing the ‘narrowness’ of metaphysics’ scope, its failure to open up a ‘private road to the Deity’ and its inability to provide initiation into ‘something higher’ than was available to the ‘common herd’. Bradley in a serious sense was anti-élitist. As much about metaphysics as about ethics, he questioned Mill’s and Arnold’s assumption of a gap between higher thinkers and the ‘common herd’, insisted that metaphysics was merely the attempt to do thoroughly what ‘most of us did’ to ‘reflect and ponder the ultimate truth’ and claimed for himself and for metaphysics in general the merit of doing on behalf of the ‘common herd’ what in principle the ‘common herd’ would have done for itself if it had been able to do it.

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In thus justifying high thought in a democratic age, Bradley permitted no compromise with the arcane character of its discourse. But he also insisted, as Stirling had insisted in The Secret of Hegel, that his own version of Hegelianism was what ordinary men would have arrived at if they had succeeded in indicating the whole duty of man in relation to the whole human condition. The whole human condition, in Appearance and Reality, was related to Bradley’s conception of the nature of reality, of the possibility of human knowledge of reality and of the centrality of ‘experience’ in acquiring it. After disposing of philosophies, like Spencer’s, which were inadequate, inconsistent or self-contradictory, he achieved definitive statements which dissociated reality from the ‘merely mechanical’ and associated it with ‘the spiritual’. In Appearance and Reality, the metaphysical problem was to show that ‘being and reality’ were ‘one with sentiment’ and could be neither ‘opposed to nor . . . distinguished from it’; that ‘the Absolute . . . embraced every partial diversity in concord’, even though man could grasp only its general drift; and that its ‘harmony’ included the preponderance of pleasure over pain, a union of ‘will, thought and feeling’, and a merging of ‘phenomenal distinctions . . . without losing their richness’. Bradley denied that soul was a ‘bare adjective of body’, that body was independent of soul, or that either had any ‘title to fact which was not owned by the other’. He disparaged personal immortality, the ‘materialistic doctrine of the Real Presence’ and Christian attempts to ignore ‘the relation of an omniscient moral Creator’ to his Creation. He was particularly dismissive of the idea that Christianity was compatible with ‘progress’ and declared that only ‘stupid enthusiasm’ and ‘pernicious cant’ could suggest that ‘progress’ was a feature of the Absolute. II In the 1870s, Bradley considered that ‘the chaos of our philosophical literature’ rendered it incapable of explaining the ordinary moral consciousness. And, just as he offered his metaphysics as a representation of the opinions of ‘the vulgar’, so his ethical writings, in confirming the ‘vulgar’ conviction that morality could not be understood through utilitarian, Epicurean, materialist or mechanical conceptions, deployed the conviction that ‘not far from us’ (in Germany) there was ‘a world’ whose leading feature was that it thought what the vulgar believed. This meant two things. It meant first that ‘the moral’ was the realization of a ‘whole’ in which the ‘private self’ had ‘already ceased . . . to be’ and therefore that the phronimos was the man who ‘identified his will with the moral spirit of the community’. And it meant, secondly, that, though ‘the moral’ was to be loved and desired ‘for its own sake’, Hegel had been right to deny that moral philosophy told men what ‘in particular’ they were to do. Bradley bore the impress of Darwin as well as of Hegel, and of the moral

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relativism which was inseparable from evolution. But morality, though relative, was real, existed in objective form in the ‘accomplished will of the past and present’ and had been ‘worked out by the . . . sweat and blood of generations’ and handed down by ‘free grace’ as a ‘sacred trust’. Morality existed in the ‘wills of living human beings’, realized a ‘goodness’ which was ‘superior to themselves’ and was the ‘concrete’ universal because it was ‘not only . . . above’ but was also ‘within and throughout its details’. It was not the case that ‘the individual’ was ‘the reality’ and ‘communities . . . mere collections’. It was the case that the community was a ‘moral organism’ which operated through the will of self-conscious members and that it was ‘the realised idea . . . superior to me . . . yet here and now in and by me’, which could ‘confront our wandering desires with a fixed and stern imperative’ and give to ‘our duties’ in ‘our station’ our ‘function in the social organism’. These intense, quasi-mystical but secular utterances testified to the truth that the ‘individual man’ was what he was ‘by virtue of community’, that communities were not mere names but real entities, and that a contemporary Englishman would not be a man, let alone an Englishman, apart from the world of national, racial, cultural and linguistic relations into which he was born. The ‘mere individual’, in other words, was a ‘delusion of theory’ and a ‘mutilation of human nature’. Man was ‘real’ or could ‘realise himself’ only insofar as he was social, and this, though it did not resolve either the conflict between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ or collisions between duties, removed the contradiction between duty and the empirical self, identified ‘the universal on the inside’ with the ‘universal on the outside’, and made of the universal the will acting ‘against’ a ‘false private self’. When stated in this way, ‘My Station and its Duties’ seems obscure and uncontentious. It was neither. As much in writing about morality as in writing about religion, Bradley ‘heated himself’, displayed the Hegelian irritation which Stirling had displayed about ostentatious moral struggle, and caused to ooze out of his writing, as much as there had oozed out of Stirling’s writing, the belief that what was moral ‘in any particular case’ was ‘seldom doubtful’, had been ‘pronounced by Society’ and was known to individuals not only by precept and example but also by an ‘intuitive subsumption’ which ‘did not know that it was a subsumption’. In ‘presupposing the morality of the community as its basis’, moreover, individual morality anathematized the ultimate ‘immorality’ of encouraging men in the ‘conceit’ of setting themselves, their consciences and ‘ideals in their heads’, against the ‘morality already existing . . . in laws, institutions, social usages, moral opinions and feelings’. It was not wrong, standing on the basis of the existing, and in harmony with its general spirit, to try and make not only oneself but also the world better, or rather, and in preference, one’s own world better . . . It was another thing, starting from oneself, from ideals in one’s head, to set oneself and them against the moral world. The ‘moral world’, went the episcopal statement

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with its social institutions . . . is a fact; it is real; our ‘ideals’ are not real. ‘But we will make them real.’ We should consider what we are and what the world is. We should learn to see the great moral fact in the world, and to reflect on the likelihood of our private ‘ideal’ being anything more than an abstraction . . . all the better fitted for our heads, and all the worse fitted for actual existence. (F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 1876, p. 181).

Bradley lived in his writing, allowed his philosophy to disclose his enmities, and registered a deep-throated antagonism to superior, secular virtue. To the question, what did his moral philosophy disclose positively?, the answer must be that, though it disclosed the identity between ‘popular’ morality and ‘conservative’ morality (as Oakeshott’s philosophy was to do in imitative extension later), it was as little concerned as Oakeshott‘s was to be with the characteristics that distinguished Christian from any other morality.

The content of Bradley’s Hegelianism was public, but its manner was private, inward-looking and esoteric, and registered an arcane version of the reaction against the pretensions of Liberal progress which was registered politically by the reaction against Gladstone after 1886. Bosanquet’s Hegelianism, by contrast, was aggressively public and was much more explicit about the content of its religion than Bradley’s had been. III Bosanquet2 was primarily a philosopher for whom Hegelianism had its roots in Kantian aesthetic, in the influence exerted on Hegel by Schiller and Goethe and in Winckelmann’s ‘enthusiasm’ for Greece. It was by these routes and via Schelling that A History of Aesthetic traced the ‘modern’ Hegelian standpoint, connecting the ‘objectivity of the aesthetic judgement’ with a ‘union of sense and reason’ and designating the world which was made accessible through art as not being ‘dwarfed by anything of a real kind that remained beyond it’. Bosanquet ‘did not commit the impertinence of invading the artist’s domain . . . with critical principles and precepts’. But the ‘history of Fine Art’, including literature, was ‘the history of the actual aesthetic consciousness as a concrete phenomenon’; its ‘central matter’ was ‘the value of beauty for 12

Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), educated Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of University College, Oxford, 1870–80. Author of Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of the Fine Arts, 1886; Logic, 1888; Essays and Addresses, 1889; A History of Aesthetic, 1892; The Civilization of Christendom, 1893; ed. Aspects of the Social Problem, 1895; The Essentials of Logic, 1895; Companion to Plato’s Republic, 1895; Psychology of the Moral Self, 1897; The Philosophical Theory of the State, 1899; Education of the Young in Plato, 1900; The Social Criterion, 1907; Truth and Coherence, 1911; The Principle of Individuality and Value, 1912; The Value and Destiny of the Individual, 1913; Germany in the Nineteenth Century, 1915; Social and International Ideals, 1917; What Religion Is, 1920; and Science and Philosophy and Other Essays, 1927.

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human life’; and it promised ‘not merely a theoretical interpretation of what [was] past and gone, but also ‘aid . . . in our appreciation of . . . the least perishable inheritance which the world possess[ed] in the present’. A History of Aesthetic found the Greek idea that art was inferior to reality an obstacle to the development of theory, and, in spite of the ‘extraordinary’ aesthetic consciousness of the Middle Ages, discerned no movement in theory between Plotinus and the discovery of ‘the Sublime’ in the eighteenth century. After careful consideration, it arrived at the belief that Hegel had given beauty more secure links than Kant had given it with the moral order. Bosanquet had a low opinion of nineteenth-century English philosophy. It was in English literature, science and painting that he found philosophical significance and as their heir that he attached supreme significance to Ruskin who, if Hegel had been alive to read him, would, he believed, have persuaded Hegel out of the belief that ‘the realms of Nature had never been systematically criticized with reference to the attitude of beauty’. Bosanquet believed that contemporary English aesthetic had been influenced more by the French Revolution and the Elgin Marbles than by German aesthetic, that it was Romantic naturalism since Scott and Turner which had given England her standing in the aesthetic of the future and that it would be as beneficial to Germany to acquire a direct appreciation of English art and criticism as it would be beneficial to England if the orthodox philosophy of the older universities, and the associationist aesthetic which had developed in opposition to it, could be superseded by marrying the Idealism of Caird, Green and Wallace to the ‘precise lucidity’ of Herbart and Helmholtz. Bosanquet’s aesthetic writings were primarily analytic. But they responded to the ‘rising spirit of democratic solidarity’ even when, in Morris’s words, the practice of art ‘“for the people and by the people” . . . no longer existed’ in civilized nations. They also left a number of conflicting messages. On the one hand, that the fine arts had been damaged by ‘the intellectuality of modern life’ and could no longer be conducted through the artist-workman’s ‘routine of faith’. On the other hand, that the elementary teaching of natural science and a Froebelian training in arts and crafts would not only enable the workman to contribute to the creation of ‘beauty’ without regard to financial considerations but would also give to everyone who had a ‘disinterested’ feeling for beauty a heightened degree of ‘social compunction’. In the 1880s and 1890s, Bosanquet was moved by the conviction that Morris and Ruskin would have a ‘humanizing’ effect on the ‘wage-earning class’, would achieve ‘identity of enjoyments’ across the ‘brutalizing exclusiveness’ of the classes, and would transform the skilled workman into an ‘artist’ who would achieved a parity he had not previously achieved with ‘persons of financial and secretarial skill’. He looked forward to all classes participating in the creation of beauty. But since machinery could only diminish the monotony of labour, not remove it, he hoped that residual monotony

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would be overcome by associating leisure activity with ‘difficulty’, with Puritan intensity and with the severity and energy which the English had normally associated with athletics. Bosanquet felt obliged to prove that classical art and literature were more taxing than ‘decadent’ art and literature, and that the man-in-the-street could be rescued from the ‘hundred-best-books’ culture and the ‘oracles of the newspaper press’. A ‘masculine . . . asceticism and . . . humility’ and a decision to ‘fix hours of devotion’ for whatever aspect of art, literature (or science) a student was interested in, would help the ‘unpleasantly called . . . education of a gentleman’3 to be broadened into a high-minded education in which ‘all the Lord’s people would be prophets’ and ‘gentlemen’, and they would all ‘love culture, read books and speak English correctly’. A History of Aesthetic, then, had a social and political aspect which flowed into it from Bosanquet’s writings in the 1880s and flowed out of it into The Philosophical Theory of the State and his political writings from 1899 onwards. It rejected pessimism, discovered grounds of hope for the future, and insisted, ‘in spite of all hostile conditions’, that man was ‘more human now than ever . . . before’. Bosanquet’s world in the 1880s included the idea of the moralized or ‘Periclean’ State he had picked up at Balliol. By the end of World War I, though Green’s Principles were still relevant, both Balliol and Pericles were beginning to look ‘condescending and anachronistic’ in face of Sorelian syndicalism and working-class assertiveness, as the war made it necessary to establish that states might contribute to a new world-order by ‘cleansing . . . patriotism’ and ‘banish[ing] sinister interests and class privileges from the Commonwealth’. Bosanquet did not suppose that Hegel’s or Aristotle’s conception of ‘the social organism’ implied that private property was an expression of ‘individual greed’, though he was as much an enemy of the extreme individualist as he was of the extreme Socialist who had not to be allowed to obstruct natural selection, ‘competition’ or ‘individual initiative’. Towards Socialism as an idea, on the other hand, he was positively friendly, advocating worker-ownership of the means of production, incursions into unfettered property rights where the ‘continuity of society’ required them and the closest association between individual thrift and ‘a sense of . . . social purpose’. Bosanquet claimed that his own class4 was probably ‘the most selfish’ of all the classes. But he emphasized the ‘depth’ and ‘complexity’ of Hegel’s belief that ‘the essential elements of the social organism’ had to exist ‘as a structure of free individual wills’ and he sensed a fundamental difference between the Hegelian conception of a ‘socialisation of the will’ and the wide13 14

In words which Bosanquet quoted from Green. I.e., ‘the class which had enough to tempt it into a little luxury but not enough to constitute a notable responsibility’.

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spread Socialist failure to understand that a ‘socialisation of the will’ was a possibility’. For the communitarian politics which Bosanquet had begun to sketch in the 1880s, modern expansions of liberty were compatible with restrictions on manufacturing, commerce, education and the railway system, and the division between ‘a class of governors and a class of governed’ was slowly being broken down. The Philosophical Theory of the State moved on from Jowett’s minimalism and Green’s caution to the belief that the civic humanism of the modern nation-state was practically superior to the civic humanism of the Greek city-state and could be made theoretically superior by rescuing Rousseau from the Terror and making Comtean sociology and German Idealism joint indicators for the future. In The Philosophical Theory of the State, the State was ‘insulated’ from ‘party prejudices’, made itself accessible to all classes and took pains not to conceptualize ‘poverty’ as the ‘permanent function’ of a particular class. Examination of the ‘antagonism’ between State and individual in Bentham, Mill and Spencer then exhibited the ‘fundamental unity’ behind the ‘antagonism’. In exhibiting the State’s ‘unity’ and ethical character, Bosanquet took off from Hegel’s State as ‘the realization of freedom’. But he was conscious, even in 1899, of the accusation that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was a rationalization of Prussian bureaucracy. He pointed out that The Philosophy of Right was merely a section of The Philosophy of Mind, and drew on modern psychology to show that men needed a system of ‘law and order’ if they were to ‘assert’ their ‘true or universal’ selves at the very moment when the system was ‘constraining their private wills’ in a way they ‘resented or condemned’. Bosanquet discussed the ethical ideas that were embodied in family, neighbourhood, class and nation-state. He emphasized the role of tradition and habituation in ensuring that greed, selfishness and ambition would be overruled, and he made confusing statements which left it uncertain in what sense the State could ‘will . . . an immoral act’. In addition, there was a sardonic Burkean or Galtonian brutality – the belief that ‘a great part of the lives which [were] being lived’ were ‘not worth living’. Bosanquet was both a Garibaldian nationalist and a believer in the ‘rights’ which ‘belonged to man’ by virtue of his capacity for the ‘good life’. But, though the ‘ethical’ idea of humanity was ‘universal’, universality was a ‘problem’ rather than a ‘fact’ and involved philosophical and religious positions of the highest complexity. IV In contributing early in 1914 to a campaign to restore Germany’s image in Britain after the political tensions of the previous three years, Bosanquet wrote of the ‘intricate structure’ of nineteenth-century German philosophy,

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the challenges it had had to overcome in a society where science and mathematics had gone hand in hand with ‘material and political progress’, and the ‘vast organization’ it had acquired as the ‘intellectual activity’ of the German Empire had been supplemented by the ‘intellectual activity’ of the Austrian Empire. Bosanquet was unhappy with the ‘thinner vein’ he detected in recent German philosophy and agreed reluctantly that its history had to be written as a series of reactions to Kant. He made it clear, nevertheless, that it was Hegel who was philosophically central, Hegel who had rejected the postKantian idea that it was necessary to have ‘a critical theory of knowledge as a science’ before one had a ‘metaphysic’, Hegel who had insisted that, because reality was ‘everywhere and in everything’, it was necessary to go straight to metaphysics. Bosanquet remarked in passing on the ‘quaintness’ of Hegel’s knowledge of science and the defects in his philosophy of nature. But he defended him against contemporary Kantianism, repeated Stirling’s view that he had been down-to-earth and praised him not only for indicating the existence of a ‘spiritual . . . world’ but also for overcoming its ‘inaccessibility’. Bosanquet did not claim to be a Christian. He claimed to be living in a postChristian era and to be in tune with the era he was living in. His search was for a doctrine about the Absolute which began in the 1880s and achieved its completest statement in two sets of Gifford Lectures in 1911 and 1912. In Essays and Addresses (1889) and The Civilization of Christendom (1893), Bosanquet had asked a central question about the relationship between ‘culture’ on the one hand and ‘Christendom’ – the ‘civilization’ that had accompanied Christianity – on the other. In providing an answer, he had examined the ‘practical discipline’ with which Scholasticism had imparted ‘the elements of culture and dignity’ to new races and classes in the Middle Ages, ‘the modern free nation’ as a development of the personality and humanity into which Christianity had enlarged ‘the . . . Greek commonwealth’, and the culmination involved in the idea of the universe as an ‘open secret’ from which ‘accident, caprice [and] unknowable relativity’ had been excluded. Bosanquet was unfriendly to agnosticism which, though it pretended to avoid fundamental questions, was replacing the old orthodoxy by a ‘labyrinth of sophistry’. He denied that religion needed a new name or organization, or that there was any longer a ‘connected set of doctrines’ which could form the ‘centre and pivot’ of life. Like Turgenev, he wanted a ‘richer culture’ than Spencer and Huxley had been working with and a modern ideal which a silly passage about Tom Brown’s Schooldays described as suiting ‘something nobler than the battle-field’. In The Civilization of Christendom, the ‘modern spirit’ included an inheritance from Christianity; but it was civilization rather than Christianity of

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which Bosanquet was the advocate. The ‘excellence of souls’, the ‘consciousness of good’ and the realization of nature stated its substance; Dover Beach was the symbol of its meaning. Bosanquet was not just a consecrator of the modern spirit, he was also its Cassandra, ‘the facilities of thought and expression’ which had been opened up since 1789 having produced a ‘modern Dark Age’, there being ‘no absurdity so gross as not to find its able journalistic supporters’, and the ‘reverence of mystery’ which had surrounded the ‘irrational’ authority exercised ‘in intellectual and spiritual matters’ in the past needing to be replaced by the ‘reverence of knowledge’ if a ‘rational’ authority was to be established in the future. These prophecies were made in Essex Hall, South Place Chapel, Finsbury, the North Islington Liberal Club and other forums of ethical aspiration. They were made while Europe became an armed camp and they issued, like many other rejections of orthodoxy, in a theism for which it did not matter whether ‘intelligence created the universe . . . or the universe intelligence’ as the Christian conceptions of miracle, sin, grace, conversion and prayer gave way to the modern ideas which were to be systematized in The Value and Destiny of the Individual in 1913. In The Value and Destiny of the Individual Bosanquet described the ‘finite individual soul’ as ‘the climax or concentration of the nature beneath it and the community around it’, and as a ‘spark or fragment’ from ‘the transcendent soul of heaven’ above it. Existence was not dualistic, the ‘natural’ was ‘necessary’ to the ‘spiritual’, and the self, properly conducted and understood, was a ‘reasonable spirit’ working through ‘finite being’ towards a ‘union’ which was ‘at once logic and love’ and induced both the ‘force’ and the ‘secret’ of the ‘self-expansion’ which belonged to it as ‘participant’ in the universe. The inseparability of finite from infinite, like the inseparability of the individual from the ‘collectivity’, was the answer to the ‘absoluteness’ which men falsely claimed for themselves sub specie aeternitatis. Men were ‘fragments of a vast continuum’, and their ‘worth and destiny’ consisted in the fact that ‘the spirit of the whole’ worked through them by means of the ‘hazards and hardships’ of the soul’s ‘pangs’ and the ‘adventurousness’ of ‘self-transcendence’. This was what the ‘religious consciousness’ did; it stimulated a ‘dissatisfaction’ which ‘shattered the given’ and, through ‘progress’ and ‘trouble’, made possible the ‘relative attainment’ which it was man’s destiny to achieve. Bosanquet’s religion registered a de-Christianizing of Oxford Idealism, and announced a new religious identity which married Huxley’s and Spencer’s negativity to what may be called religious warmth – a conception of the individual as a ‘copula’ which ‘raised externality towards the Absolute’ and a conception of immortality in which personal consciousness of finite individuality was transformed into the ‘eternal reality of the Absolute’. In conceptualizing religion in these terms, Bosanquet implied three sets of connected propositions. He implied first that man’s nature was in ‘contradiction

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to his existence’, that man wanted to resolve the contradiction, and that resolution involved a ‘recasting of self’ as self’s ‘contribution to the Absolute’. Second, he implied that the distress which the self felt in recasting itself was resolved by its sense that the Absolute supplied the ‘stability and security’ needed by the ‘unhappy consciousness’. Finally, he implied that the ‘stability and security’ which the Absolute brought to the finite self could be brought to it because it was in the Absolute that the finite self found the possibility of ‘perfect satisfaction’. These Hegelianisms were offered not as philosophy but as religion, and were important because the religious consciousness did not in Bosanquet depend on philosophy. In the highest religious thinkers like Plato, Spinoza, Dante and Christ, there had been no clash with philosophy and philosophy had been able to help religion, as it had helped art and science, to separate out the ‘essential’ from the ‘inessential’. But where philosophy ‘in the first instance’ was ‘purely theoretical’ and, even in its higher developments, was little more than a ‘theoretical’ interpretation of religion, it was religion which ‘united . . . practice . . . and . . . conviction’, led up to a ‘vision of all that had value’ and drowned ‘commonplace orthodoxy’ in a ‘consciousness’ which did not necessarily have any connection with either ‘the divine’ or ‘the supernatural’. Bosanquet emphasized the ‘complexity of the religious attitude’ and the ‘vicious’ practices, including slavery, which ‘the religious temper’ had ‘hallowed’ in the past. In explaining in what sense religion was ‘true’, he dismissed the ‘extreme doctrine’ of a ‘supreme being . . . external to ourselves and to the world’, located God ‘in the greater self’ united ‘within the finite spirit . . . in love and will’ and claimed for Him a higher reality than any which could be derived from a God who existed ‘as a separate being after the model of a man’. Bosanquet’s philosophy was an unintelligible way of replacing Christianity by a new religious sensibility. In A. C. Bradley, the new religious sensibility was to be supplied by literary criticism. In R. B. Haldane it was to be supplied by the culture of the university.

Like his brother, J. S., Haldane5 began life as a Calvinistic Baptist. In the course of his education he borrowed much from Caird, from Green (whose memorial volume he helped to edit in 1883), and from Lotze in Göttingen where his parents sent him in order to avoid the Anglican infections of 15

Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane (1856–1928), educated Edinburgh Academy and Edinburgh and Göttingen Universities. Barrister, 1879–1905; MP, 1885–1911. War Secretary, 1905–11. Lord Chancellor, 1911–15 and 1924. Ed. (with Seth) Essays in Philosophical Criticism, 1883. Author of Education and Empire, 1902; The Pathway to Reality, 1903; Selected Essays and Addresses, 1913; Before the War, 1920; The Reign of Relativity, 1921; The Philosophy of Humanism, 1922; Human Experience, 1926; and An Autobiography, 1929.

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Oxford. His Edinburgh doctorate on ‘Immortality’ was failed, he claimed, by an ‘orthodox’ examiner ‘of the “old’’ [presumably Presbyterian] school’ and, though he agreed to his father’s request to undergo adult baptism, he announced after he had done so that he no longer shared his father’s beliefs. As a young barrister in London, he helped to translate Schopenhauer, became Liberal MP for a hitherto Conservative constituency in Scotland, and a couple of years later, in a book entitled Adam Smith, presented his subject as achieving ethical transcendence of the ‘mere . . . production and distribution of wealth’. Until World War I, Haldane was an ornament of the Liberal Party but, in spite of being a Liberal imperialist, was driven out of Asquith’s wartime Cabinet on the ground that his intellectual sympathies were German. Though he recovered himself as Labour Lord Chancellor in 1924, his own judgement on his career was that he had failed to bring ‘the Liberal and Labour parties into the unison’ which they ought to have achieved but had not achieved by the time of his death in 1928.

Haldane believed that religion ‘penetrated’ his ‘entire mental activity’, that it was associated, as in Greece, with ‘every department of public life’ and that it remained a ‘power as great and living as at any time in the world’s history’. The religion he was talking about, however, was a religion in which theology would be replaced by philosophy and the Church by the secular university as ‘the brain and intelligence’ behind ‘the whole educational structure’. Haldane’s ideal was a national system of civic universities which would avoid the Anglican conservatism of Oxford and Cambridge, would encourage the education of women and would respond to student needs, including student ‘anxiety’ about ‘the meaning . . . of . . . existence’, not only through curricular study but also through the reading of fashionable authors like Bosanquet, George Eliot, Emerson, Emily Brontë, Rabindranath Tagore and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (on which Haldane looked back gratefully for the help it had given his own generation in liberating itself from Byronism in one direction and orthodoxy in another). Haldane mistrusted ‘democratic’ pressure to lower standards of entry into the universities but (mistakenly) expected universities to have a democratic rather than an élitist future. He looked forward to a spiritual or quasi-religious mentality enabling them to do in a post- or para-Christian idiom what they had done in a Christian idiom in the past; he did not anticipate the alienation which from time to time was to afflict both the undergraduate and the academic mentality later in the century. For Haldane it was ‘moral force’ which ‘commanded performance in the world’. The State’s business was the realization of an ‘ethical purpose’, and the university’s business the realization of the ‘ethical significance’ of ‘moral

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and intellectual virtue’. He warned students against cynicism, and against the disregard of authority which, he alleged, was overdoing the resistance to orthodoxy. Haldane’s rhetoric looks at first sight like a conventional middle-aged rhetoric. In truth, it was energetic and contentious, and pre-dated the degeneration of philosophical Idealism. It related higher education to national efficiency, to German and American competition and to the establishment of officer-training units in the universities. In examining the implications for British students of the ‘code of ethics and chivalry’ of the ‘modern Japanese officer’, it meant something definite by that ‘power of the spirit’ which had enabled ‘some of the greatest poets and philosophers the world had seen for two thousand years’ to create the German State and the German university system as part of the German resistance to Napoleon. Haldane’s conception of a university-teacher was of a hero of the mind who at his greatest (as in Lotze or Caird) did more than a modern literature could do to supply unity of ‘faith, thought, religion, morality and art’. To the university student under such guidance, he imputed intensity, concentration and ‘intellectual humility’, the prospect of applying a ‘trained mind’ to ‘the service of the State’, and a strengthening of the ‘entelechy’ or ‘soul’ of the ‘people’ at a ‘level of affairs’ and with a ‘patriotism’ deeper than that of ‘ordinary politics’.

Haldane was important because he made it clearer than anyone else – clearer even than Mill – that the idea of a university, to say nothing of culture generally, should be one in which all subjects would be sacred, in which a secular sacredness would replace a Christian sacredness, and in which all university teachers and all proponents of culture, even teachers and proponents of ostensibly secular culture, would be instilling an elevating and spiritually enervating sanctity, secure in the modern truths, which A. C. Bradley announced – that God did not move the universe ‘from outside’, that a new metaphor was needed to describe God’s action and that God’s ‘presence’ had to be understood to be ‘immanent’. IV A. C. Bradley6 was a schoolboy at Cheltenham and was then at Balliol where he read Greats, played cricket and fell under the spell of Tennyson, Browning, 16

Andrew Cecil Bradley (1851–1935), educated Cheltenham College and Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of Balliol College, 1874–82. Professor of Literature and History at University College, Liverpool, 1882–90. Professor of English at Glasgow, 1890–1900. Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 1901–5. Ed. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883 and Nettleship’s Philosophical Lectures and Remains, 1897. Author of A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam, 1900; Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904; Ideals of Religion, 1907 (1940), Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 1909; and International Morality, 1915.

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Shelley, Goethe, Mazzini and Green, whose Prolegomena to Ethics he edited after Green’s death in 1882. Bradley was a college lecturer at Balliol until Jowett’s mistrust of a Green acolyte and Bradley’s own willingness to teach English Literature took him to Chairs at Liverpool and Glasgow after he had failed to get a chair in Oxford. From his fifties onwards, he was in virtual retirement in London after turning down the Chair of English at Cambridge. In addition to editing Green’s Principles of Political Obligation, Bradley produced a translation of Lotze, an edition of the posthumous works of Nettleship and biographical accounts of Nettleship, Bosanquet and Edith Sichel. Through Shakespearean Tragedy and Oxford Lectures on Poetry, he had both a presiding and a contentious influence on English studies in English universities in the first half of the twentieth century. Bradley was as little confined to the study of English as Bosanquet to the study of philosophy or Seeley to the study of history. He was conscious of a tension between Christianity and modern thought and claimed for criticism and literature, as readily as Bosanquet claimed for philosophy or Seeley for history, a spiritual authority of the highest importance. As his sixties came into sight, Bradley began to typecast himself as a Victorian who did not understand the younger generation. What we have to examine is the reasoning which enabled him to suppose that the study of English literature could provide guidance and ideals for the modern young he had been addressing between 1880 and 1910. At the time at which he delivered his first inaugural lecture – at Liverpool in 1884 in his early thirties – Bradley’s œuvre was slender; neither did it expand much while he was at Glasgow. It was not until he had left Glasgow in 1900 that he published his first book, A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Bradley’s early articles were continuous with one another and merged observations about politics and poetry into observations about mythology and religion. They borrowed, or swallowed, Green’s belief that the religion which was needed by modern man was different from the ‘orthodox’ religion which had satisfied man’s needs in the past and they made a point of the fact that classical Greece had had ‘no church’, ‘no orthodox doctrine’, and no conception of the State as ‘profane’. They also emphasized the difference between ‘modern, upper-class’ contempt for the ‘labouring classes’ and Aristotle’s belief that the ‘excellencies’ of life depended on the labouring classes. Bradley’s conception of politics included the implausibly optimistic idea that in modern nations ‘the struggle of classes for political power’ did not ‘as a rule rise predominately to the surface’. On the other hand, it included the more realistic idea that the ‘fixity’ of the State might not survive the transition to popular government, that a weakening of the ‘central power’ might produce ‘social strife’ and that representative institutions might be ‘misused’ by the ‘demagogue and the wire-puller’. This was matched in its turn by the

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idea that, since morality was to be identified with freedom and God with ‘the inmost spirit of humanity’, the State must be thought of as a ‘spiritual power’ embodying a ‘unity of life’ which made it possible to ‘fill up the gulf between religion and reality’. ‘Filling up the gulf between religion and reality’ was an important aspect of Bradley’s function, not only in ‘Aristotle’s Conception of the State’ but also in ‘Old Mythology and Modern Poetry’, which, in explaining that poetry could be written out of a mythology ‘known not to be fact’, concluded that this enabled poetry to retain something of the value of religion. Poetry could not contribute to religion unless it had passed through the imagination, but a poetry which had passed through the imagination could contribute. In explaining why in that case English poetry in the previous hundred years had contributed to religion mythologically rather than in a directly modern manner, Bradley stated that the ‘belief’ which had sustained Raphael and Dante was no longer what it had been, that Protestantism (and Catholicism under Protestantism’s influence) had so ‘spiritualized the central ideas of Christianity’ that they could no longer be given a ‘directly sensuous representation’ and, since so many poets and painters ‘disbelieved’ in Christianity while being inhibited against saying so, that its truths had simply been relegated to a mental limbo where mythological status and practical insignificance preceded ‘theoretical disavowal’.

Like most of Green’s pupils, Bradley shared Green’s mistrust of science. He distinguished religion as an end of life from happiness as an end of life, affirmed the importance of religion, while wishing to transform existing religion and believed that the ‘great religions of the East’ had more to say than English theologians had been willing to admit. On publication in 1882, Bradley declared Seeley’s Natural Religion to be seminal and innovative, and to have shown that religion would survive the abandonment of supernaturalism since it included any belief which enabled men to ‘worship . . . in whatever . . . form . . . the object of worship was approached’. Bradley was cautious about the ‘unconscious’ religion which Seeley attributed to the artist, the philosopher and the scientist. But he agreed that religion was indestructible, that it would eventually establish a foot-hold in the mind of the majority, and that the way to assist this would be to abandon the ‘cycle of dogmatism’ in favour of Mill’s idea that ‘no element . . . entered into the imagination’s idea of God which was not consistent with men’s own highest ideals’. In Some Points in Natural Religion Bradley imputed to the ‘insularity’ of English psychology and metaphysics the English failure to give an ‘adequate account of religion’. Instead, however, of becoming a psychologist or metaphysician, it was literature that he taught as part of ‘the religion of the future’.

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As a critic, Bradley had two main subjects – Shakespeare and Romantic poetry, which he discussed at length in Shakespearean Tragedy, Oxford Lectures on Poetry and A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam. It was these three volumes, in conjunction with his early articles, his lecture on Inspiration, and the Gifford Lectures of 1907, which connected his criticisms of poetry and tragedy as closely as Green had connected poetry and tragedy with religion.

The substance of Shakespearean tragedy as Bradley understood it was that it was about a person of high position whose death ‘affected the welfare of a nation or an empire’, with the suffering which led to death being the work of the principal participants, including the hero, ‘who always contributed . . . to the disaster in which he perished’. Bradley distinguished Hegelian and Greek tragedy from Shakespearean tragedy which, unlike them, concentrated on the ‘conflict of forces in the hero’s soul’. This was Shakespeare as Green would have understood him, with character and inward motive being predominant and heroes being exceptional men who stood ‘above the average level of humanity’. In other respects Shakespeare transcended Green, the heroism of his heroes manifesting itself ‘in a terrible force’, in extraordinary displays of ‘desire, passion and will’ and in an ‘identification’ of ‘the whole being’ with a single ‘interest or objective’ which was the ‘fatal’ trait that made tragedy possible. In Bradley’s idea of tragedy, therefore, there was not only an emasculated Rugbeian heroism, there was also ‘awe’ and ‘horror’ and a ‘profound sense of sadness and mystery’ at the ‘waste’ involved in the destruction of ‘greatness’ and ‘courage’. Shakespeare’s heroes were not necessarily ‘good’. But they were ‘great’; their stories were never ‘depressing’, and the ‘most confirmed of cynics ceased to be a cynic’ on hearing them. Bradley left it uncertain whether Shakespeare had had a theory of tragedy. All he showed was Shakespeare presenting God’s ways to men, confronting men with them, and offering them intimations of a world ‘travailing for perfection’ and ‘bringing to birth, together with glorious good, an evil which it was able to overcome only by self-torture and self-waste’. In thus having things both ways, he refused to credit Shakespeare with rational argument while translating what Shakespeare had written into rational argument and turning literature to a religious purpose while declining to translate it into dogma. This procedure was to be repeated in discussing poetry insofar as the ideas expressed by the poet were spoken through him rather than by him in the course of a process in which he did not necessarily understand the truths he was proclaiming. V In explaining what poetry did, and how criticism should judge it, Bradley argued, that a poem was a ‘succession of . . . sounds, thoughts, images and

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emotions’ with a ‘unity of substance and form’, and that any ‘ulterior worth’ it might have ‘as a means to culture or religion’ or a ‘copy’ of the ‘real world’ tended to ‘lower’ its value as poetry. Conversely, he emphasized the connection between doctrine and expression, evaluated poetry by reference to the doctrine it contained and presented it as ‘one kind of human good’ between which and life there was ‘plenty of connection’. What Bradley wished to say about poetry was connected with what he wished to say about philosophy. Poetry was not philosophy (or religion). But most ‘real poets’ found ‘reasoning on moral subjects . . . by no means tedious’; ‘poetic genius’ was almost always accompanied by ‘general intellectual power’; and there had been special affinities between English poetry in the age of Wordsworth and German philosophy in the age of Hegel. It was in this sense that philosophy and poetry were interchangeable, that not only Wordsworth and Hegel but also Byron and Schopenhauer were ‘expressing one substance in different forms’, and that the best way of understanding the poetry of English Romanticism was by the light of the ‘intensity and inspiration’ with which German philosophy had affirmed the ‘greatness’ and ‘possibilities’ of the human mind. Bradley looked back to the generation of the 1770s as a generation of genius and believed that ‘for many years after 1840 . . . scarcely any men of the highest genius’ had been born anywhere in the world. He also believed that Godwin for a time had desiccated Wordsworth, that the ‘narrowness’ and ‘self-complaisance’ of Shelley’s ‘habitual view of life’ was responsible for some of the defects of his poetry and that Matthew Arnold’s poetic judgements reflected Arnold’s inability to deal with real difficulties. In modifying Arnold’s critical canon, Bradley made many distinctive commendations. He commended Shelley as a greater lyricist than Shakespeare and the greatest lyric poet in the English language. He commended Keats for his consciousness of his own genius and for combining intellect, power, modesty, range and sympathy with the ‘pain . . . suffering . . . and conflict’ which had accompanied the ‘sweetness’ and ‘concreteness’ of his belief in beauty. In Tennyson in general, and in In Memoriam in particular, he found ‘consecutive reasoning and moral greatness’ expressing an ‘immortal love’ which was ‘the soul of the universe’ and resembled ‘the experience and utterances of men of religious genius’. These judgements rebuked Arnold and Arnold’s imaginative incapacity. Yet, behind them, there was the crisis which had liberated art, including poetry, from patronage and ‘the rules of the past’, and had induced in the artist and the poet a sense of the ugliness and alienation of the outward world. This was a variant of a problem which Green had pinpointed in the 1850s. But Bradley saw no reason to suppose that a ‘common . . . way of envisaging the world’ was in sight. His view was that unity had to be pursued piecemeal, that poetry would be damaged if unity was pursued wholesale and that the

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‘good’ which poetry had to do was to be done not by ‘obtruding’ good into poetry but by the poet making ‘beauty’ his ‘philanthropy’. Like many other English Idealists, Bradley was suffused with Hegelian caution. He knew the argument against mere moralizing and was careful to avoid it, while believing that the artist’s, and the poet’s quarrel with morality was not with morality itself but with a ‘stereotyped or narrow morality’. More important, he knew that poetry was important to life, that it was not simply a ‘succession of thoughts, sounds, images and emotions’, and that, in speaking when it did through the poet, it had, as In Memoriam had had, a crucial bearing on the reader’s own life.

Bradley’s conception of criticism was as closely related to his conception of religion as to his conception of poetry, and the idea of poetry’s vatic indirectness to the idea that dogmatic religion was dead. In other words, there was not only a connection between religion and ‘daily life’, there was also a connection between religion on the one hand and the ‘divine-human’ inspiration apparent in secular culture, including poetry and music, on the other. Ideals of Religion aimed to cover the distance between religious orthodoxy and the ‘creative spirits’ of the nineteenth century, to sketch the terms of a reconciliation by explaining what religion was not and to prove that religion had no quarrel with science or culture, properly conducted and understood. Religion was ‘worship’, inward as well as outward, a ‘movement of the . . . soul’ not merely a ‘theory of the world’. No secular products of the ‘higher kind since the Renaissance’ had been so ‘religious’ as those of the nineteenth century, but none had been so distant from orthodoxy, and to Bradley no problem was more congenial than the problem of ‘closing the rift’ with ‘progressive culture’ by accommodating religion to the intense mental life which that culture had produced. Bradley agreed that outward worship was easier to study than ‘inward feeling or devotion’. But the soul’s ‘internal’ condition was significant not only because it proved that there could be religion outside ‘the religious bodies’ but also because ‘some of the greatest religious movements’ had sprung from the ‘intimations of individuals’. Bradley believed that there had been progress in religion, while also believing that historic religion had produced much that was ‘degrading and cruel’, that man had ‘formed a notion of God only to become a torment to himself and an enemy of his brother’ and that both excessive individualism and outward inquisition had accompanied the belief that the monotheistic God was ‘the God of all men’. ‘God’, he emphasized, whether as ‘theoretic’ belief, ‘mode of feeling’, or ‘direction of the will’, need not involve a ‘personal God’, could include any object which attracted worship, and displayed superiority of power rather than superiority of morality.

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Ideals of Religion questioned the power of natural religion and of the religion of humanity to command the authority, or provide the satisfactions, which infinite objects had commanded or provided in the past. In avoiding the ‘antithesis’ between ‘an order of nature’ and ‘something beyond’ which ‘broke through’ it, it found, in the ‘practical working relationship’ between the worshipper and the object of his worship, something the soul ‘wanted . . . for its own sake’ rather than ‘a power to which it had to submit’. And from this, it drew conclusions: that nature, though unreasoning, unmoral and forever thwarting men’s efforts at morality, resembled man in her practice of ‘making one part of [herself] moral by suppressing another part’; that relations between empirical man and man’s ideals required a subtler metaphysic than positivism could supply; and that the prerequisite to such a metaphysic was the recognition that any morality which ‘rose at all high’, like Mazzinian morality, inevitably involved a religion. From chapter 6 onwards, the immanence of ‘intelligence’ and ‘will’ in matter and the prospect of liberating man from the evil ‘in his own heart’ were accompanied by a sense that religion and morality required immediacy, ‘perfection’ and ‘renunciation’ before they required anything else. Though Bradley had a turgid eloquence about religion, he did not avoid confusion in seeking for something else for religion to be once it had ceased to be ‘truth’. Religion may have been the attempt at ‘union with the infinite . . . on the side of the will’ where philosophy was union on the side of knowledge, and it may have been the case not only that ‘perfectly true ideas’ were not ‘essential for religion’ but also that it was not ‘essential for religion’ even to believe that ‘its ideas were perfectly true’. No one who reflects on Bradley’s confusion, however, and the recession which Ideals of Religion involved from religion as the Idealists had conceived it in the 1860s, will be surprised that Bradley, for whatever reason, did not publish it. Bradley had a secular piety and higher earnestness in which he suffused literary criticism in the way in which Seeley suffused history. It remains to examine the pieties in which music was being suffused at the same time. VII To treat music as a form of piety or doctrine is problematical since, like mathematics, music has a language which does not speak, has to be interpreted if it is to speak and may easily be misrepresented when interpretation is effected. In volume II of Religion and Public Doctrine, Shaw’s musical criticism was discussed as an aspect of his religious and social doctrine, and a similar discussion could doubtless be conducted about Ernest Newman. Such a discussion could not, however, without impatience have been conducted about Britten’s reflection on life, Solti’s reflections on World Peace, Menuhin’s reflections on res publica or Tippett’s reflections on the ‘transcendent element’ through which music was offering ‘enrichment of the personality’ to ‘more and more

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people’ in the 1960s. In this section, a glance at Elgar will be followed by examination of Parry and Hadow as apologists of the ‘English musical renaissance’, the musical high-point of which, apart from Parry, Elgar and Vaughan Williams, was Sullivan’s marriage of high musical knowledge to W. S. Gilbert’s deliberate moral ordinariness. Given the importance of music in the life of the Church of England it was likely that the musical renaissance would have a religious component. But it is important that it also had a secular component, that eyes were fixed on the concert hall or the musical festival as much as on the cathedral, and that the effect was to assist the transition to a musical culture which was predominantly secular. Vaughan Williams7 was the son of an Anglican clergyman, was musical adviser to The English Hymnal and interpreted hymns and carols as manifestations of an English musical tradition. He was also an admirer of Whitman and combined musical nationalism with belief in a United States of the World. He disliked the aesthetes and what he thought of as the foreign musical taste picked up on its Continental travels by the eighteenth-century aristocracy. He stated definitively that English music had survived only in ‘cathedral closes, parish churches and nonconformist chapels’ and among the ale-houses and labourers’ cottages in which the depressed peasantry of the Industrial Revolution had ‘gone on singing their age-old ballads’ to tunes of classical distinction and beauty. For Vaughan Williams music was a ‘spiritual exercise’ in which ‘all had their part’ from the ‘leading hierophant’ down to ‘the humblest worshipper’. Music was ‘the art of the common man’ and the ‘soul’ of a ‘nation’; in focussing on the ‘shock of sound’ as having a ‘spiritual’ quality which transcended ‘sense and knowledge’, and on the prospect of a ‘new Bach’ giving musical expression to the ‘ferment’ of twentieth-century England, his mentality was predominantly secular if, indeed, in his symphonic compositions, it was not as noisily pagan as Wordsworth had been quietly, pagan. Vaughan Williams shared Trevelyan’s engagement with nature and Englishness and Hardy’s, Leavis’s and Sharp’s regret at the destruction of peasant culture by the popular newspapers and the Education Act of 1870; he may also have shared the nostalgia for the mediaeval village-community which Tawney had implied in The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. In building on folk-song, plain-song and madrigal, he shared with Holst the ambition to connect music with the ‘emotions of healthy people’ and the ‘responsibilities and realities of life’. 17

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), educated Charterhouse, Trinity College, Cambridge and Royal College of Music. British Army, 1914–19. Author of The Music in the English Hymnal, 1906; National Music and Other Essays, 1934; Some Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, 1953; The Making of Music, 1955; and Heirs and Rebels, 1959.

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Vaughan Williams not only wrote music, he also used prose in order to announce his musical intentions. Elgar8 did not make such announcements, except in the lectures that he gave at Birmingham in 1905 when he was nasty about dandyism, eccentricity and exaggeration, and was pessimistic about the musical renaissance’s ‘hold’ on the ‘affections of . . . the . . . people’. Elgar held that Noyes – a Catholic apologist – was a better poet than Kipling and that the English (as distinct from the British) disliked imperial bombast. He praised the intelligence of English working men and compared the spread of musical festivals with the spread of the Salvation Army. In general, however, he had little sense of the ‘popular public’ which was to arrive in the twentieth century, and believed that it was only by addressing ‘literary men, artists, sculptors [and] scientists’, indeed, any ‘cultivated’ person ‘who [was] concerned with art in any . . . form’, that ‘the advance of music’ would be assured. Elgar pointed to the improvements which had been effected in musical education since 1880 and predicted further improvements – in the training of conductors and singers, the building of concert halls and the quality of musical journalism – during the quarter of a century which was to come. He looked forward to an indigenous music, ‘big’, perhaps ‘symphonic’, in conception and execution, which would generate an English ‘soul’, a musical language ‘loftier than . . . speech’ and a ‘lever in Heaven’ with which it would be possible to ‘move . . . the world’. In private Elgar was against ‘those fellows’ like Shaw who were trying to make Christianity ‘fit their civilization instead of making their civilization fit . . . Christianity’. But he expressed nothing of this in public, nor the distaste for radicalism which he expressed as strikingly in private when Gordon was killed at Khartoum as when Campbell-Bannerman won a landslide victory at the general election of 1905. Hadow and Parry, on the other hand, gave extended attention to music’s public role and conceptualized both the ‘vision . . . of beauty’ that it had borrowed from ‘Gainsborough, Chaucer, Constable and Wordsworth’ and the challenge that it offered to the advance of democracy.

In the 1920s Hadow9 was an educational theorist and administrator, wrote flatteringly about Froebel and Pestalozzi and praised Rousseau for ‘working 18

19

Sir Edward William Elgar (1857–1934), educated Littleton House, Worcester, articled to solicitor. Organist St George’s Catholic Church, Worcester. Master of the King’s Musick, 1924–34. Sir William Henry Hadow (1859–1937), educated Malvern College and Worcester College, Oxford. Fellow of Worcester College. Principal of Newcastle College of Science (including Vice-Chancellor of Durham University), 1910-18; Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, 1919–30. Author of Studies in Modern Music, 1893–5; Sonata-Form, 1896; A Croatian Composer, 1897; The Viennese Period in ed. The Oxford History of Music, 1901–5; Citizenship, 1923; Music, 1924; Collected Essays, 1928; English Music, 1931 and Richard Wagner, 1934.

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out from the child’s mind’ towards the ‘freedom and flexibility’ of a modern education. In the ‘national debate’ about education, he preferred the ideal of ‘service’ to the Arnoldian ideal of ‘self-perfection’ but claimed for ‘the culture of humane letters’, including music, an Arnoldian capacity for ‘bring[ing] the soul into direct contact with the best and noblest thoughts of all ages’. Politically, he presented the State and ‘civil relations’ as manifesting ‘moral universals’ and the citizen’s ‘communal self’, associated Hegel, Mazzini and Sir Henry Jones with a ‘Federated Empire’ and a League of Nations, and pushed Green’s conceptions to the point at which, in principle if not in practice, the State was morally competent to control wealth and industry. Hadow had spent twenty years teaching music and Greek philosophy as a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford before becoming in succession Principal of the Newcastle College of Science and Vice-Chancellor of Durham and Sheffield Universities. After wartime service organizing educational facilities for the British Armies on the Continent, he would probably have become Lloyd George’s Minister of Education if Fisher had declined to do so in 1916, and in the 1920s was both a regular adviser to the Board of Education and the main author of the Hadow Report on the Education of Adolescents. Hadow did not marry until he was sixty-one. His sister, to whom he was devoted, was a Suffragette, translator, literary critic and rock-climber, and played a part in the early development of the Oxford English School as a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. She combined Anglican good works with renunciation of Anglican observance, attempted, while Secretary of Barnett House in the 1920s, to build up an educated ‘village democracy’ in Oxfordshire and, as Vice-President of the Women’s Institute later, did her best to make ‘cultural subjects’ more accessible to women. Hadow himself did not take to the Suffragette Movement, opposed the abolition of compulsory Greek in Oxford and followed his father, who was an Anglican clergyman, in remaining an observing Anglican. At the same time he was a romantic Hegelian, a follower of Lotze as well as of Green and the high-liberal theist he showed himself to be in Studies in Modern Music, The Viennese Period, and the articles, pamphlets and books he published about the substance, significance and politics of music in the thirty years following. From one point of view, Hadow’s musical writing was an assertion of music’s ‘right’ to the ‘intellectual’ citizenship which had already been granted to poetry, painting, oratory, science and philosophy. From another point of view, it showed why music was ‘poetry expressed through tones rather than words’, deserved a larger role in England’s ‘soul’ from the elementary school upwards and in Parsifal had subsumed man’s ‘trivial sorrows and . . . ambitions’ in ‘renunciation’ and ‘redemption’. Hadow was eloquently expressive about music’s inability to flourish ‘as an exotic’, its duty to deliver an ‘English’ message and the need for a ‘more manly . . . attitude’ if ‘foreign influences’ were not to ‘obliterate our national style’.

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Music was neither ‘independent of nationality’ nor ‘the monopoly of a privileged class’, musical ‘inspiration’ and ‘appeal’ were present in all classes and ‘national melodies’ representing ‘the voice of the people’ had issued in the past in ‘tunes’ as ‘fine’ as any of the tunes of Mozart. It was right, therefore, that music should appear alongside battles in English history books, that the schools should make ‘a page of Beethoven’ as intelligible as a ‘page of Shakespeare’ and that the music of the élite should be replaced by a music which would bring to the enfranchized masses a glimpse of that ‘numinous’ quality which would carry them up ‘through the empirical . . . and sensuous’ as near as they could be carried ‘to the expression of the divine’. Church music had achieved a special freedom from ‘commercialism’, but all music which had stood the test of time was rooted in vibrations and chords ‘touched by the Divine Artificer’. ‘We are dimly and imperfectly conscious’ went a central passage, of something in ourselves which we call Divine; which is on the further side of reason as emotion is on the hither side; which ennobles, absorbs, transfigures our whole being so long as we are under its influence. It finds, I believe, its fullest embodiment in our religious experiences, in those moments of intimate communion with God which, and not petition, are of the central essence of prayer. These moments the purest and most spiritual music can recall as can nothing else in the world; we are not stirred by picture or poem or temple as we are by the Missa Papae Marcelli, the last chorus in the St. Matthew Passion . . . the Sanctus of Beethoven’s great Mass, or the slow movement of his Choral Symphony: by these and such as these we are lifted altogether out of the world of experience – we ‘are caught up into Paradise and hear unspeakable words’. (Sir Henry Hadow, The Place of Music in Life, 1926, in Collected Essays, 1928, pp. 248–9)

For much of his life, Hadow was on the wave of the future as a laureate of cricket as well as of music. In Squire’s English Heritage and The Oxford Treasury of English Literature, which he edited with his sister, he discovered an English idyll in literature as well as music, played up the difference between its mentality and the mentality of the Northcliffe newspapers and looked forward to emulating Mozart’s wish to ‘found a reputation in the suffrages of the people’. It was only in his fifties that he began to be uneasy as Richard Strauss edged out Brahms and Wagner and the cynicism of the young welcomed the absurdities of Bolshevik aesthetic and the mathematical, sociological and political ‘externalities’ through which Schoenberg was achieving a decadent, Alexandrian, liberation from ‘intelligibility’. As general editor of The Oxford History of Music thirty years earlier and as a music critic before that, Hadow had laid it down that in music ‘beauty of form’ was identical with ‘beauty of meaning’, that music was unique among the arts in neither distinguishing between ‘the formal’ and ‘the material’ nor in having ‘analogues in the world of nature’, and that it had normally had only two subdivisions – the ‘Classical’, in which the ‘work of Art’ was governed by ‘a priori laws and traditions’, and ‘the Romantic . . . assertion of liberty’

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through which the composer threw off the ‘servile’ status which ‘genius’ had suffered in all the arts until Haydn and Mozart had effected a liberation. The liberation of genius had not of course been idyllic, since it had brought the ‘poverty and privation’ of the garret. But it had also brought a realization that the laws of music were subject to a dialectical process and ‘bloodless revolutions’, that the ‘rules of Harmony and Counterpoint’ were no more ‘eternal verities’ than the laws of political economy and that there were ‘psychological laws . . . coeval with humanity’ which formed ‘the permanent code’ within which ‘composers of genius’ could innovate and be accepted. Studies in Modern Music called on audiences to liberate themselves from academic taste and to replace ‘subservience’ by criticism. It was designed, like the rest of Hadow’s writing, to make the world safe for the music he was promoting, to help the public to approach ‘the platonic distinction between opinion and knowledge’ and to replace the ‘hazardous dogmatism’ of ‘personal predilection’ by doing for music what Lessing, Winckelmann, SaintBeuve, Vinet and Arnold had done for sculpture and literature. What Hadow asked of critics was both renunciation of the pretence of being part of an initiated fraternity and avoidance of the conservative obscurantism which had resisted Beethoven, Schumann, Dvorak and Wagner on first appearance. What he asked of composers was avoidance of the antiquarian and the esoteric, and that ‘command over materials and methods’ which would be necessary if continuity and style were to be achieved. Hadow cannot be said to have wanted a revolution in composition since, in his properly Hegelian way, he believed himself to be systematizing what the evolution of music had actually been. But he certainly wanted an audiencerevolution, a willingness to respond to ‘the unfamiliar’ and an unprejudiced approach to the ‘utterances of genius’.

Hadow’s musical criticism was a propaganda in favour of establishing music in the nation’s life and a depiction of the evolutionary development of its ‘great principles’ since their origins in the age of the Odyssey. About messages he was ambivalent, believing that music, if it had a ‘moral bearing’, had it indirectly, that its ‘meaning’ was ‘inherent’ and that it gave sensuous, emotional and intellectual satisfaction by being ‘beautiful’. But he also believed that ‘one of the surest tests between good and bad music’ was that bad music did not mean anything, and he made it as plain as Wilde was making it at the same time that the pursuit of beauty could be religious in the way in which the practice of religion could be beautiful. VII In his first series of Studies in Modern Music, Hadow wrote of ‘the presence among us’ of a composer who was ‘capable of restoring our national music

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to its true place in the art of Europe’. If he had been writing in 1910, he might well have meant Elgar. If he had been writing in 1935, he might well have meant Vaughan Williams. As it was, in 1893, he meant Hubert Parry. Parry was the pinnacle in English music, ‘the spokesman of all that was best in our age and country’, the ‘poet, prophet and evangelist’ who in some of his cantatas had brought men out of ‘the glare and turmoil of the street’ into a ‘quiet sanctuary’ where, ‘their heads bowed’, they could listen ‘with a heart attuned to worship’. It might be inferred from this that Parry, like Hadow, was a Christian. Yet so far was this from being the case that Parry had suffered as total a withdrawal from Christianity as Bosanquet and A. C. Bradley had done. Parry10 came from a landed family in Gloucestershire, was unhappily married to a daughter of Gladstone’s Sidney Herbert and moved naturally in musical and rural society. At Eton he was an energetic games-player as well as a musician; after failing to get into New College, Oxford, he was at Exeter College where he helped to found the Oxford University Musical Club. He had started composing at the age of nine, was an accomplished performer and singer and had some of his works performed at both Eton and Oxford. After seven years as a member of Lloyds, he devoted his life to music and yachting and for over a quarter of a century was Director of the Royal College of Music, with which he had been associated since its foundation. Parry was brought up a High Anglican and throughout his life performed some of the duties of a Church-composer and country gentleman. At the same time, he developed a complicated post-Christian mentality which appeared in his diary, correspondence and public writing, and was accounted for in a book entitled Two Witnesses, in which his daughter contrasted his religion with the religion of von Hügel, who was her uncle. The argument of Two Witnesses was that Parry had been repelled in his youth by the condition of the Church of England and might well have been less hostile if the Church of England had adopted the tone which von Hügel and others had injected since. The obverse truth is that, on arrival in Oxford, Parry had become rebarbative about orthodoxy and a ‘Personal God’, had been infected by Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Strauss, G. H. Lewes, Lecky, Samuel Butler, Morley and Cotter Morison and in the 1870s had not only ceased to take communion but had also declined to attend the christening of his eldest child. At Eton Parry had combined devoutness with critical consideration of the Bible; throughout his life he was a connoisseur of churchmen and sermons. 10

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848–1918), educated Eton and Exeter College, Oxford. Director of Royal College of Music. Composer. Author of Studies of Great Composers, 1887; The Art of Music, 1893; The Evolution of The Art of Music, 1896; Style in Musical Art, 1900; The Music of The Seventeenth Century, 1902; Johann Sebastian Bach, 1909 and College Addresses, 1920.

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On renouncing Christianity he continued to admire Christ, to express moral beliefs which were ‘old-fashioned’ in their strictness and to make a Cromwellian equation between Roman Catholicism and the surrender of private judgement. Parry approved of The History of Robert Elsmere, praised Literature and Dogma for expressing what he had never been able to ‘put into words’ and was moved by John Inglesant to a ‘peculiar feeling of sadness and pain’ about the ‘unhealed . . . conflict’ which remained after ‘early mental wrestling and bewilderment’. As a rebel against his class, he advocated a ‘more equal distribution of the luxuries of life’. He believed that aristocratic Conservatism was ignorant and snobbish, that Toryism was a ‘form of atrophy . . . induced by centuries of overfeeding’ and that the most laughable feature of the politics of the 1870s was the ‘grovelling’ of English country gentlemen before the ‘crafty, mean . . . semitic . . . fetish’ by which the Conservative Party was being led. Parry supported the Suffragettes and blamed the Russian ruling-class for the 1917 revolutions. While denying that Socialism was desirable, he deplored the want of moral sense among profit-hunting ‘commercial men’ and the emergence, as symbol of a ‘competitive commercial epoch’, of men of ‘vast fortunes’ who had neither ‘courtesy . . . education . . . nor . . . understanding’ and were entirely lacking in ‘appreciation of anything noble or beautiful’. Democracy was inevitable and might be humanized by music, but he associated it with the herd-instinct and popular journalism, with a dampening effect on inventiveness and accomplishment, and with the Crucifixion as ‘the most significant achievement’ of the ‘force, fury, intolerance and persecution’ which ‘the great mass of the human herd’ had always shown towards ‘people of intelligence’. As an historian of music, Parry traced an evolutionary continuity between savage and modern music. He described the damage folk-music had suffered when its ‘tunes’ had been edged out by ‘vulgarized’ replicas of middle-class taste, and he emphasized music’s ‘spiritual’ effect in bringing sound to bear on ‘human sensibilities’. Though conspectual in range, his history’s central subject was European music – and particularly ‘Teutonic’ music from the replacement of the mediaeval ‘modal systems’ by harmonic music, through Bach’s achievement of the ‘highest degree of feeling and emotion’ ever achieved by a composer to the modern music which had reached its peak between Beethoven and Wagner. By ‘modern music’ Parry meant two things. He meant first of all the ‘decisive and abrupt’ change which had occurred in the seventeenth century when music, edging out of the Church’s control, had stimulated ‘devotion . . . and . . . reverence’, by inducing ‘psychical states’ which were not included in the ‘conventional circuit of . . . religion’. Thereafter, he meant a music which had rebelled against the ‘superficiality’ of the eighteenth century, had inspired a ‘fervour of spirit’ like the ‘fervour of religious enthusiasm which had sprung

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up at the time of the Reformation’, and, in Mozart and Haydn, had achieved a ‘technical perfection’ which had needed for its completion only Beethoven’s expression of man’s ‘joys and sorrows’ and Wagner’s Ring as the ‘most completely organized system of musical expression that the world had ever seen’. Parry was not only a leading composer and musical ideologist, he was also, as Director of the Royal College of Music, the head of a professional institution which had aimed, as he believed, to break the hold of the oratorio and the ‘old-fashioned cantata’ on English music and, in spreading appreciation of ‘secular music’, including especially ‘instrumental music, chamber music and opera’, had done a ‘special service to the nation’ by bringing ‘diverse people’ corporately together in giving music the place it deserved in the nation’s life. Parry conveyed to his students the sense that the history of music was a history of ‘vital forces’, ‘great heroes’ and a ‘brotherhood of artists’, that the Royal College was a place of ‘generous ideals’ which would ‘radiate through all the country, and, that the English, though ‘deficient’ in the ‘intensity and fervour’ which ‘foreign nations’ gave to ‘the expression of artistic ideals’, had to be true to their ‘highest native qualities’ if English musicians were to find ‘a niche of their own in their art’. Not only could music ‘obliterate’ class and heredity, it could also, like education itself, help men to be fair to one another . . . abolish the stupid worship of wealth, luxury and deceptive titles; and . . . put the genuine delight in art, . . . in its proper pre-eminence, as a better thing to live for and help other people to than all the things mere possession of millions can give. (Sir Hubert Parry, Routine and Understanding, 1911, in College Addresses 1920, pp. 106–7)

Parry was a patriot as well as a radical. His addresses during the first World War combined sadness at Germany’s abandonment of culture, apprehension at the threat presented by military service to his students’ ‘rare and special gifts’, a ‘thrill of regard’ that musicians had done their duty as part of a modern nation and the warning that the post-war England which he did not live to see might not be as uniformly attractive as reconstruction-rhetoric was suggesting. Parry wrote poetry, including the libretto for his symphonic poem, The Vision of Life, and was an indefatigable visitor to picture galleries. In Instinct and Character he explained as fully as he could why music was a ‘form of devotion’. Instinct and Character was turgid and muddled, was turned down by publishers in Parry’s lifetime and has not been published since his death. But Parry compared it to Kidd’s Social Evolution and put into it all that he wished to say about the nature of man, the indispensability of ‘genius’ and the suffocating of genius which had been effected by social and political progress and the antiquated curricula of English public schools. In urging men to make ‘not only their own lives but the lives of others worth living’, he complained

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about the ‘docility’ which accompanied even essential State activity and supplied the culminating account of the view of music to which he had been giving public expression since becoming assistant editor to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the 1870s. In Instinct and Character, evolution was man’s work and could not be understood as a manifestation of the supernatural. It was fear which had distinguished men from animals, had given each man a conviction of the ‘universality of mutual dependence’ and had enabled him to understand the duty to ‘respect . . . the welfare of living beings’ outside himself. Instinct and Character did not reject religion; but it emphasized religion’s tendency to exaggeration, particularly monastic and ascetic exaggeration, its failure to make a proper impact on conduct and its proclivity, once its ‘genius-hero’ had departed, to replace reverence for his ‘morality’ by ‘superfluous glorification of his person’. Parry did not say what Shaw and Russell said, that the religion of the Church was being replaced by the religion of the concert hall. But this was what he meant. No reader was left in doubt that music in its ‘highest moments’ enriched experience ‘in the noblest manner’ and was more than capable of filling the gap which had been left by Christianity.

18 Modern knowledge and the postChristian consensus IV The moral problem of our age is concerned with the love of money . . . The decaying religions around us, which have less and less interest for most people unless it be as an agreeable form of magical ceremonial or of social observance, have lost their moral significance . . . A revolution in our ways of thinking and feeling about money may become the growing purpose of contemporary embodiments of the ideal. Perhaps, therefore, Russian Communism does represent the first confused stirrings of a great religion. (J. M. Keynes, A Short View of Russia, 1925, in The Collected Works of J. M. Keynes, 1972, vol. IX, pp. 268–9) It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depends. Historically this has been achieved by religious creeds and by traditions and superstitions which made man submit to those forces by an appeal to his emotions rather than to his reason. The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these benefits as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. (F. A. Hayek, ‘“Conscious” Direction and the Growth of Reason’, February 1944 in The Counter Revolution of Science, 1955, p.92) He could not tear himself from Cambridge . . . ‘My last two years of residence’ he said in 1895, ‘were a mistake. I became heartily sick of University life, which had now become objectless enough’ . . . These were the years when he made up his mind once and for ever about religion. He left Christianity behind him, and much more as well . . . He is one of our liberators. (F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 1906, pp. 144–5)

In modern societies the sources of doctrine are numerous and diverse and have not been circumscribed by academic inventiveness. Academic inventiveness can become original and powerful: it can become arcane and self-regarding once it loses contact with the sources from which its inventiveness is derived. Active academic thought is neither arcane nor self-regarding and in every generation is a living aspect of the intellectuality of the group of which it is a reflection. It is not necessarily the case that the best scholars demonstrate best the assumptions on which the best scholarship depends, though even in scholarship, it is sometimes necessary to scrutinize assumptions where normally scholarship proceeds by verifying or falsifying assumptions. Verification and falsification have a glamour of their own, as Housman, Shackelton Bailey and Cooper have shown, and academic communities tend, or perhaps tended, very properly, to admire the conjunction of discipline and sensitivity which enables scholars to puncture pontification. Puncturing, nevertheless, is parasitic, and 468

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scholars who puncture, as much as those who do not, are suburban appendages to the movements of opinion which constitute public doctrine. In modern universities, doctrine manifests itself in all the humane subjects, whether their proponents realize this or not. Sometimes doctrine remains inventive through subtlety, irony and self-criticism; sometimes it becomes a deflated relic which registers the institutionalization of invention. Whether inventive or not, academic thought in the humanities has been significant in the last hundred years not only in modifying Christianity but also in subverting, diminishing or disregarding it. In this chapter we shall examine these latter attitudes as they have been displayed by Maitland, Hobhouse, Keynes and Hayek. I Maitland’s1 interest in historical writing was as contemporary as Macaulay’s. Throughout his comparatively short life, he was a fully sentient person. In an extraordinary phase of productivity after 1887, he laced sentiments about the nature and history of English law and society with observations of strength and power which ensured for him the high-Liberal untouchability of a secular saint who thought Tractarianism ‘backward’, Sidgwick’s religion ‘watchfully honest’ and the closed Anglicanism which had prevented Acton as a Roman Catholic entering Cambridge in his youth, regrettably intolerant. In his biography of Leslie Stephen, which showed high talent for biography and deep sympathy for the process of secularization, he wrote of Stephen’s renunciation of both Christianity and his orders when a Fellow of Trinity Hall in the 1860s as the act of a ‘liberator’ who had made his gestures even before Sidgwick had made his. Maitland was a scholar; his interest was in disclosing the past, not in using it to affect opinion in the present. But his academic knowledge issued in opinion as much as Eddington’s academic knowledge issued in opinion, and it is necessary in Maitland’s case as much as in Eddington’s to relate knowledge and opinion to one another. From his middle thirties, Maitland was conscious of living on borrowed time. He was in the poorest of health throughout the last decade of his life when he published an edition of The Yearbooks of Edward II, a major statement about the history of English towns, an account of the relationship between politics and religion in sixteenth-century Scotland, and an introduction to his own translation of part of Gierke’s Das deutsche Genossenschaftrecht, which considered the State and the corporation as ‘species’ of a ‘genus’, 11

Frederic William Maitland (1850–1906), educated Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. Fellow of Downing College and Downing Professor of the Laws of England, Cambridge, 1884–1906. Author of Mr Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Society, 1883; Justice and Police, 1885; (with Pollock) The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 1895; Domesday Book and Beyond, 1897; Roman Common Law in the Church of England, 1898; Township and Borough, 1898; Political Theories of the Middle Ages, 1900; English Law and the Renaissance, 1901; The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 1906; The Constitutional History of England (1887–8), 1908; and (ed. Fisher) Collected Papers, 1911.

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attributed to mediaeval corporations the analytical significance vis-à-vis mediaeval states that Figgis was to attribute to modern corporations vis-à-vis modern states, and made it clear that he, Maitland, shared some of the doubts which Maine had already expressed about modern democracy. In an article published just before the local government reorganization of 1888, Maitland had made a polemical case for the ‘country gentlemen’ who had been at its heart for the last five centuries and criticized the boards, county councils and ‘barristers of seven-years standing’ who would constitute the paid professionals of the future. In the same article he made an historical case for believing that justices of the peace deserved no less attention than the ‘flashy episodes’ of party and parliamentary conflict and that this ‘most distinctively English part’ of English government, in addition to being the fruit of ‘experience’ rather than ‘theory’ and avoiding corruption, extravagance and party-political clamour, had succeeded in ‘representing’ the State while requiring little control from central government. Maitland agreed with Maine that the volume of legislation had been greater in the nineteenth century than in the previous six centuries, that there had been an unprecedented growth in the use of statutory powers since 1830 and that the Reform Act of 1884 had created a ‘highly-privileged class’ which had ‘ample political rights and few political duties’ and was incapable of judging ‘issues of national politics’. Though the new county councils were likely to be corrupt, incompetent and extravagant, however, they should be guided towards ‘able and just administration’ by men who would have played their part in the old system standing for elected office in the new. Maitland was not often as politically expressive as in ‘The Shallows and Silences’. But even in his lectures on The Constitutional History of England which he delivered to undergraduate lawyers in 1887, he approved of the idea of a ‘permanent civil service’, underlined his contempt for the House of Commons when it treated ‘questions of privilege’ as though they were ‘party questions’ and described it as a ‘curious’ hangover from the ‘blending’ of governmental and judicial functions in the past that the Lord Chancellor was a ‘politician actively engaged in party warfare’. Maitland betrayed his sympathies even when he did so obliquely. Censure of Star-Chamber torture and of the penal code against Irish Catholics was simple. But the description of the England of 1887 as a ‘much-governed nation’ was far from simple. It is difficult to be sure what Maitland thought of the attempt to ‘protect the economically-weaker classes’ by legislation and whether he objected to the 1884 Reform Act for replacing ‘the representation of communities’ by ‘the representation of numbers’. Nor is it clear what he implied when he stated that there were hardly any ‘ancient peerages’ in England, that ‘further reform’ of the Poor Law had been needed in 1834 ‘if England was not to be made bankrupt by its paupers’ and that the slave-trade had been abolished by a ‘vast interference in the rights of property’.

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Maitland proclaimed his interest in ‘results’ rather than in political arguments and aimed to cut away at political history in order to disclose the institutional continuity beneath it. In the concluding part of The Constitutional History, he borrowed not only from Maine but also from Anson’s and Dicey’s proof that the constitutional Blackstonianism which had constituted average wisdom among English lawyers had become anachronistic. Unlike Leslie Stephen or H. A. L. Fisher (his brother-in-law and biographer, who read the proofs of Domesday Book and Beyond), Maitland wrote very little about the modern world, except a small book on Justice and Police in 1885, the nineteenth-century chapter in The Constitutional History and recurring descriptions of Dutch, French, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English law as contributions to the law of the British Empire. His view of the modern world poured out, nevertheless, from a past in which withdrawal of the clergy from ‘lay tribunals’ and the halting of the progress of Roman law in the middle of the thirteenth century had made English law more ‘insular’ and ‘absolutism’ more difficult to establish, and the legislation of Edward I had done more than was to be done in the following four centuries to ‘settle and establish the distributive justice of the kingdom’. Like Maine on primitive Indian law, Maitland argued that mediaeval English law was unintelligible as Austinian sovereignty and was ‘independent of the will of any ruler’. In describing a society which had been moving towards a feudal organization ‘for centuries before the Norman conquest’, he edged towards the conclusion that feudalism as a concept had not really predated Spelman in the seventeenth century, that the ‘political importance’ of ‘tenure’ had been reduced when ‘all classes’ had been brought into direct connection with King and Parliament and that the ‘public rights and . . . duties of . . . Englishmen’ in the Middle Ages had not been ‘the mere outcome of feudal compacts between man and lord’. The Constitutional History was densely descriptive and, despite the distinctiveness of its tone, was a replay of opinions which had been established by earlier historians. It was not until The History of English Law and Domesday Book and Beyond that Maitland displayed his own historical mentality. Maitland belonged to the new phase in Cambridge development in which history, law, economics and the moral sciences were studied in faculties of their own, first in a way which did not fully differentiate between them, then in a way which did. Maitland took his degree before differentiation was complete, was aware of the continuum out of which the differentiated faculties had emerged and not only argued that the Law Tripos should not necessarily be vocational but also, as a member of the law faculty throughout his teaching life, took the closest interest in the development of the history faculty. Maitland was conscious of the vast flood of ‘historical stuff’ which was coming from the nation’s presses and creating the nation’s mind, and he

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imposed on history faculties a duty to ensure that the history involved would be as professionally competent as it could be. He believed that the narrow political history of the past should be converted into a history of ‘literature and art, religion and law, rents and prices, and creeds and superstitions’, and should be ‘lengthened . . . and widened’ to include Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and primitive man at one end and Indian, Chinese, Japanese, American, Australian and modern European history at the other end. In asserting history’s autonomy vis-à-vis the physical sciences, Maitland emphasised the centrality of ‘inference’ and ‘generalization’, wrote with Bradleyesque suggestiveness about the historian’s role in ‘predicting the past’ and rejected the demand that history should issue, by analogy with ‘the science of the body natural’, in a ‘science of the body politic’. He acknowledged the richness which the physical sciences, especially the biological sciences, had brought to historical metaphor and he accepted Comte’s principle of ‘the interdependence of political, religious and economic phenomena’. But the historian ought not, he explained, ‘to hand himself over body and soul to . . . any one science’ or any one ‘method’, and ought especially not to hand himself over to sociology since it was not the business of history to issue in sociological laws. Maitland denied that history was a ‘fine art’. He did not write the sort of popular history that was to be written by Fisher, Trevelyan and A. J. P. Taylor. He wrote a scholar’s history in which each political organism was ‘so unique’ that ‘wider . . . generalisation’ was not required and the history of law did not need to be prefaced by ‘philosophical discussion’ of ‘general notions of jurisprudence’. It was of the greatest importance that law was ‘a matter of fact’ – the ‘sum of the rules administered by the courts of justice’ – that it did not have to be ‘consistent’ or ‘uniform’, and that its history registered the ‘common knowledge’ which ‘every tolerably settled community’ had of the ‘rules’ by which men were expected to ‘order their conduct’, whether or not these rules assumed a coincidence between law, morals and religion. II Maitland was born in 1850 of an academic and legal family and was a grandson of the historian, S. R. Maitland, from whom he acquired a small estate in Gloucestershire. He was an unremarkable schoolboy at Eton, and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge where he was a friend and contemporary of Cunningham. At first he rode, ran, listened to music, read mathematics (idly and unsuccessfully) and was both an Apostle and a wittily radical President of the Union. Eventually he gave himself seriously to the study of the moral sciences under the influence of Sidgwick but failed, like Cunningham, to get a Fellowship and moved to London where he worked (until his return to Cambridge in 18842) as a backroom, conveyancing barrister. In London he 12

First to a Readership (endowed by Sidgwick) and then four years later, to the Downing Chair of the Laws of England.

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became an enthusiastic Wagnerite, a lecturer to Working Men’s Institutes and both a close friend of Leslie Stephen and the husband of a niece of Stephen’s wife. In London, too, he was affected by Stubbs, began translating Savigny and started working, with help from Vinogradoff, on the mediaeval manuscripts in the Public Record Office. In this period, Maitland was thinking and writing along three chief lines – as a political philosopher and historian of political philosophy, as a critic of English Land Law, and as founder of the Selden Society and editor of mediaeval documents whose introductions and articles gave pointilliste accounts of the ways in which mediaeval English law was to be understood. In Mr Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Society (1883) Maitland pointed an analytical gun at Spencer’s sociology, criticized his ‘ideal state of society’ for being a problemless, unequal and unfree millennium and developed the dismissive argument that the ‘law of equal liberty’, if it was practically conceivable, would make religious, legal, social and internal sanctions unnecessary. The ‘sinless innocence of the jelly-fish or the angel’ was as much an obstacle to the construction of a ‘model Commonwealth’ as the gap between ‘ethics’ (or ‘the ideal’) and history (or the positive) had been in Maitland’s Fellowship dissertation eight years earlier, and it was obvious in both works that Maitland was as much exercised as Cunningham by the uncertainty of the relationship between practice and theory. In his Fellowship dissertation, Maitland had examined the ‘antinomies’ between ‘free’ government and the ‘arbitrary’ capabilities of ‘democratic’ government and had dismissed thinkers who took ‘the road to democracy . . . to be the road to freedom’ as mistaking ‘temporary means’ for an ‘ultimate end’. In identifying two accounts of political legitimacy, he had affirmed the element of truth in divine right theory while criticizing the theory of consent which, having appeared in Hooker, Milton and Sydney, had come through Locke to be thought of, not altogether reasonably, as the theory of ‘civil liberty’. Maitland questioned Hobbes’s claim that ‘positive laws’ were ‘the measure of justice’ but he also questioned the Puritan claim that ‘laws which were not good were not to be obeyed’. After a complicated account of the failure of the ‘invisible hand’ to ‘harmonize . . . economic interests’, he justified laissezfaire as a route to diversity and a remedy for the ‘ignorance of rulers’. While welcoming the collapse of James Mill’s deductive science of politics, he admired both J. S. Mill’s ‘inverse-deductive’ method and its assumption that ‘any useful ideal of government’ had to be ‘relative’ to the ‘nature’ which a people had disclosed in its ‘history’.

Maitland’s Fellowship dissertation and his article about Spencer were statements of doubt about political philosophy. ‘The Law of Real Property’ was a

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carefully defined call for reform of the English land laws to be brought ‘at some no distant day’ within the sphere of practical politics. In ‘The Law of Real Property’, Maitland touched on the ignorance of the English about ‘the civil law under which they lived’, and on the difficulty they would face if they tried to understand either Blackstone or ‘the theory of the Middle Ages . . . concocted by the lawyers of the last century’. It had become particularly important, moreover, as the Constitution had become more ‘democratic’, that ‘our civil laws should be widely known’ and the movement for law reform, which was weaker than it had been fifty years earlier, not obstructed by democratic indifference. Maitland agreed with Matthew Arnold that ‘‘‘to our law of inheritance’’ was due the ‘‘very unequal distribution of property”’ in England, and he found it ‘brave’ that Arnold had used the words ‘materialise’, ‘vulgarise’ and ‘brutalise’ about it. But he dodged the question whether land reform should ‘secure a more equal distribution of landed property’ in order to ‘lessen the power . . . of the . . . aristocracy’; he wished to avoid controversial interference in the ‘manners and customs of landlords, farmers and labourers’; and he took his stand instead on the ‘low . . . Conservative’ but ‘impregnable’ ground that a properly conducted reform would ‘save quarrels and costs’. The Law of Real Property was sardonic and satirical, brought Macaulayesque erudition to bear on ‘Blackstone and orthodoxy’ and used the tricks Maitland had learned at the Cambridge Union to ridicule the modern Englishman’s assumption that, ‘feudalism’ having been a form of unreasonableness’, the law of real property, which was unreasonable now, must always have been unreasonable. In The History of English Law and Domesday Book and Beyond, he pursued the suggestion, which had been implied, but not stated, in his Fellowship dissertation, that law on the one hand and the common sense of mankind on the other were connected and significant subjects, that historical analysis could ‘rethink’ the ‘common thoughts’ our ‘forefathers’ had thought about ‘common things’ and that the history he was writing made more significant statements about the nature of society than could be made by a history of high political theory. In The Constitutional History of England, Maitland had submerged the narrowness and glossiness that he attributed to political history into the history of public constitutional law. In the 1890s, he abandoned public constitutional law for a history, up to the accession of Edward I, not so much of the criminal law, which Fitzjames Stephen had already examined, as of the theory and practice of the law relating to the social and economic actualities which Cunningham’s economic history was beginning to describe. In providing a new content for the history of law, Maitland did not abandon the old framework. He elaborated the ethnology described at the beginning of The Constitutional History, restated the ‘Germanic’ character of pre-Conquest law and the absence of any assignable ‘Celtic’ character and argued that the

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distinctiveness of English legal procedure derived, more than anything else, from the ‘exceptional malleableness of a thoroughly conquered . . . kingdom’. Maitland believed in ‘the unity of history’, as he showed in chapter 2, where the central event was the development of canon law since the Roman Empire and its intrusion into English statute and common law under Norman and ecclesiastical influences between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. But his interest was in law rather than religion and he accepted the possibility that law could be separated from religion. Unlike Acton, he did not associate Catholicism with freedom. He associated the mediaeval separation of Church from State with the absence of a doctrine of sovereignty and, insofar as he discussed mediaeval freedom, discussed it as an aspect of the restraints which had been made theoretically binding through the assumption that the King was ‘below the law’. To canon law, Maitland had two attitudes: that, like Roman law, it was an intrusion which it was to the credit of the English that they had absorbed, and that it had taught the King’s law and the common law how to turn themselves into ‘articulate systems’ which could resist the advance of Roman law. In discussing Hildebrand and Innocent III, he discerned none of the spiritual weight which other historians were to give them, made no attempt to take seriously Christianity’s transformation into a politico-social system and regarded it as more than desirable that the royal power and the common law had kept the canon law ‘in its place’. By the end of the thirteenth century, Maitland was sensing an ‘insularity’ and inability to innovate among English judges, and the beginnings of that tendency to prop up ‘archaic institutions’ which was to preserve ‘wager by battle’ into the nineteenth century. But he was also emphasizing the pride which Englishmen were taking in the ‘Englishness’ of English law and the continuous involvement of ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ in preventing the law becoming the rarefied preserve of the legal profession. The History of English Law and Domesday Book and Beyond pinpointed the achievements of a ‘strongly legislating kingship’. They traced both the conquest of other courts by the royal court and the royal court’s conversion from being a ‘court for great men . . . and . . . great causes’ into being ‘an ordinary tribunal’, and they showed the feudal state, insofar as the English state was a feudal state, as a system of land tenure for which the distinction between ‘bond and free’ was merely an ‘appendix’ to ‘property law’. To the question what, in these circumstances was central to Maitland’s historical thinking, the answer is, an essentially secular history in which Christianity was a ‘noise-off’ and the chief focus was the economic, social and legal relationship between man and man and men and institutions. Maitland claimed to be using a positive method and to be organizing the facts of legal cases neither according to a modern nor according to a mediaeval classification. But the truth is that, whatever he thought he was doing to

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disclose the ‘practical working’ of the rules which governed legal actions, what he was really doing was impose himself on the vast new material which had become available since the 1830s by undercutting politics and political philosophy and doing in an historical mode what sociology had implied should be done in a sociological mode to describe the evolving practical character of legal institutions. Maitland’s works were monuments to the secularized Cambridge of which Maitland was an ornament, even when they resembled Cunningham’s Growth of English Industry and Commerce. But whereas Cunningham’s economic secularity was tangled with an articulately Christian doctrine, Maitland’s was tangled with relief that it was possible for a self-respecting Cambridge thinker to avoid being tangled with Christian doctrine. Men were not for Maitland in primary relationship with God and eternity, and nor was there any sense either of a complicated connection between Christianity and ‘normal’ life or the brooding suggestion of either a Christian pessimism or a Christian hope. Maitland read the Bible to his children while reacting against the clerical Cambridge of Leslie Stephen’s youth. But he went far beyond anti-clericalism to a stigmatization of Christianity as ‘legend’ or ‘mythology’ and to rejection of the idea that taxpayers’ money should be used to teach Christianity as a public doctrine. What Englishmen were mainly in Maitland’s view was members of a ‘land and race’ whose ‘innermost history’ had reached a ‘perilous moment’ in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when ‘old custom had been brought into contact with new science’ and the ‘intrusion’ of ‘alien’ institutions, which would have happened in the sixteenth century if it had not been handled so skilfully in the thirteenth, did none of the damage which it might have done in either century. ‘We have stood’, went the concluding paragraph of The History of English Law at the parting of the ways of the two most vigorous systems of law that the modern world has seen, the French and the English . . . The fate of two national laws lies here. Which country made the wiser choice no Frenchman and no Englishman can impartially say: no one should be judge in his own cause. But of this there can be no doubt, that it was for the good of the whole world that one race stood apart from its neighbours, turned away its eyes at an early time from the fascinating pages of the Corpus Iuris and . . . made the grand experiment of a new formulary system. Nor can we part with this age without thinking once more of the permanence of its work. Those few men who were gathered at Westminster round Pateshull and Raleigh and Bracton were penning writs that would run in the name of kingless commonwealths on the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean; they were making right and wrong for us and for our children. (F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law, 1895, vol. II, p. 670)

Maitland’s mind was liberal, patriotic and agnostic, and projected itself on to his historical thinking. Hobhouse used sociology rather than history as his vehicle of self-expression. In addition to sharing Maitland’s preference for

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historical sociology, he was far more explicit than Maitland about the intimacy of the connection between sociology and religion. III Hobhouse3 was born in 1864 of a Cornish county family which had connections with Bristol commercial wealth. At school at Marlborough he ceased to believe in Christianity and his father – the Archdeacon of Bodmin, who had spent most of his life as a parish clergyman – decided not to send him to Balliol. Once arrived in Oxford, he became an admirer of the usual people – Browning, Comte, Spencer, Mazzini and Mill – and remained an admirer of Green’s moral and political doctrine even after his philosophy tutors had cured him of Green’s philosophy. A short period as a Fellow of Merton College was followed by seven years as a Greats tutor of Corpus Christi College. At the age of thirty-three he left Oxford and spent five successful years as a member of the editorial staff of C. P. Scott’s Manchester Guardian in Manchester before a couple of unsuccessful years as editor of The Tribune in London. Hobhouse’s Oxford politics had been Toynbee–Hall politics and had been expanded by contact with the trade union movement and the eccentric politics of Castle Howard. By the time his most famous work was published in the Home University Library under the title Liberalism in 1911, experience as a journalist had given his political writing both a suspect fluency and the very widest range of reference. Of Hobhouse’s two earliest political works, The Labour Movement (1893) envisaged an alliance between municipal Socialism, the trade unions and the co-operative movement, and the long-term possibility of ‘the community’ becoming ‘the sole owner of Capital and Land’. While urging a greater regard for ‘the welfare of the masses’ and a greater readiness to ‘forgo personal advantage for the common good’, however, it adduced the English aversion to ‘revolution and confiscation’ as the reason why graduated taxation and the taxation of ground rents were the best instruments for making ‘rent, interest and profits’ available for ‘public purposes’. In Democracy and Reaction eleven years later, the argument was not only broader and deeper but also more rancorous as evidence was offered that ‘a completely enfranchised people’ might be as subject to ‘sinister interests’ as an unenfranchised people and might act ‘as selfishly, callously or cruelly’ in relation to other nations as classes habitually acted in relation to one another. 13

Leonard Trelawnay Hobhouse (1864–1929), educated Marlborough College and Corpus Christ College, Oxford. Fellow of Corpus, 1894–7. Manchester Guardian, 1897–1902; Secretary of Free Trade Union, 1903–5 and political editor The Tribune, 1906–7. Professor of Sociology, London University, 1907–29. Author of The Labour Movement, 1893; The Theory of Knowledge, 1896; Human Knowledge, 1896; Mind in Evolution, 1901; Democracy and Reaction, 1904; Morals in Evolution, 1906; Liberalism, 1911; Social Evolution and Political Theory, 1911; Development and Purpose, 1913; The World in Conflict, 1915; Questions of War and Peace, 1916; and Principles of Sociology, 1918–24.

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Democracy and Reaction was written between the Boer War and the Liberal victory at the General Election of 1905 and was rather an indictment of reaction than an anticipation of its defeat. It looked back to the ‘great humanizing movement’ of the previous century when ‘fetters’ had been removed, ‘opportunities’ opened and ‘the humblest’ brought to the ‘banquet of civilisation’, and it argued that what had happened since was that the Conservative Party had blunted the thrust, ‘sensational journalism’ had lowered the tone and ‘the new public opinion of the streets and the tramcar’ had shown itself incapable of applying principles to politics. In accounting for the failure of the Education Act of 1870 and the Reform Act of 1884 to perpetuate the Liberal ascendancy, Hobhouse pointed to the short-term mentality and ‘unblushing self-advertisement’ of the ‘democratic’ politician, to Darwinian biology’s belief that ‘might’ was ‘right’ and man an ‘animal’ rather than a ‘spiritual’ being and to suburban villadom’s ‘collective selfishness’, imperviousness to ideas and lack of a ‘corporate life’. Above all, he pointed to imperialism – not just the expenditure and expansion of the previous thirty years and the Bismarckian Hegelianism which Milner was enacting in South Africa but also a mentality which was treating the coloured races as inferior, was giving English workmen a sense of racial superiority and was turning the English working class into as cynical a governing class as the upper classes had been before it.

In making the moral conflict between imperialism and Liberalism the main theme of his book and the central political problem, Hobhouse distinguished the Liberal theory which had sustained the old Empire under Durham in Canada from the theory of the new Empire which was sustaining Milner in South Africa. The old imperialism had flourished in an age when Liberalism had been advancing. The new imperialism was flourishing in an age when high officials and financiers, whether Aryan or Semitic, and the democratic public, were assuming that force and fraud were acceptable instruments of political action. In Democracy and Reaction, the remedy Hobhouse proposed was threefold: recognition of ‘rights’ in Green’s sense if the individual was to develop his personality ‘as a moral being’; renunciation by all classes of the racial contempt which had restored slavery and made the ‘yellow man’ as well as the ‘black man’ pay for his ‘racial inferiority’ in Africa; and subordination of the ‘expert’ and the ‘executive’ to the rule of law if governments were to stop being arbitrary within States and States to stop being arbitrary to one another. What Hobhouse was proposing was a popular front against reaction in which Socialism would liberate itself from materialism and national efficiency, ‘no one community in the Empire’ would ‘impose its will’ on any other, and Cobden, Mill and Gladstone would be reinterpreted in order to prove

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that ‘departures . . . from the principles of liberty and equality’ were ‘in reality’ extensions of ‘the principles of liberty and equality’. This was his programme not only at Liberalism’s nadir and during its resurgence but also during the post-war Liberal ‘catastrophe’ when new principles of social order were making ‘government from above’ and law as ‘a command imposed by a superior’ irrelevant and anachronistic, and international anarchy required an ‘international State’ to emerge from a League of Nations. During the Liberal Party’s recession in the post-war world, Hobhouse lost confidence in party politics as a ‘hyper-excited nationalism’ gave ‘political power’ to the ‘reactionary elements’, ‘war-profiteers’ and ‘the new rich’ filled the void left by the ‘decay of the older wealth’ and the ‘imitation-Fascism’ of ‘athletic, well-fed . . . young men’ justifying the ‘indiscriminate shooting of an Indian mob’ disclosed a ‘Freudian wish . . . to see the same treatment meted out to Welsh miners’. About post-war England, Hobhouse was as pious and rancid as the Webbs; he made it even more obvious than before the war that ‘public service’ was a better motive than ‘individual self-sufficiency’, that ‘unregulated . . . inheritance’ was an obstacle to ‘self-reliance’ and that there was an overriding duty to transform industry from ‘an unorganized mass of competing individuals’ into a ‘co-operative service’ whose ‘governing inspiration’ would be the needs of ‘all members of the community’. This was the verbiage of 1904 and 1911 for which Liberalism was a construction for protest against an authoritarian order. In Morals in Evolution (1906), The Roots of Modern Sociology (1908), Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911) and The Problem (late 1920s), along with the four volumes which made up his definitive sociology,4 Hobhouse explained why Liberalism was sociology’s natural and necessary culmination. IV In his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Sociology, Hobhouse, though faintly defensive, was fortified by advances in jurisprudence, ethics, anthropology and the study of Egyptian and Babylonian civilization, and argued that Adam Smith had failed as a sociologist because his economic science had limited itself to man as a ‘money-making machine’. Comte was criticized for ‘imposing the rigidity of a dogma’ on analysis and history, and Spencer and Weismann for forgetting that civilization was a ‘machinery’ for the ‘suspension or mitigation’ of the evolutionary struggle for existence. From the ‘new data’ which had been acquired about Indian and Chinese religion, comparative method was said to be understanding ‘all religions as manifestations of one single religious spirit’. 14

I.e. The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918), The Elements of Social Justice and The Rational Good (both 1921) and Social Development (1924).

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Hobhouse’s philosophy was arrived at in three stages. The first stage, after work as an experimental psychologist in Oxford and elsewhere, issued in an account of animal evolution in Mind in Evolution (1901). The second, contemporaneous, stage, resulting from philosophical teaching in Oxford, issued in a huge work entitled Human Knowledge (1896) which explained that philosophical Idealism, while replacing an ‘elegant scepticism about theology’ by a popular scepticism about science, had failed to break down the walls which separated ‘the natural’ from ‘the supernatural’. The third issued in another huge work – Morals in Evolution – which provided a high-toned academic justification for the doctrine which Hobhouse had begun to sketch in his political writings. The argument in Morals in Evolution (1906) was that Hobhouse’s cause was no ordinary cause and that ‘the new fabric of the civic state’ was the outcome of a long ethical progress in which egalitarianism and ‘quasi-communism’ had been the rule among ‘primitive peoples’, free contract, individual ownership and ‘differences of class or caste’ had been later developments, and the scant respect for women which was attributed to primitive societies had been followed by the idea that women had to have a ‘sphere of their own’ if they were to ‘establish their diversity’. In examining society’s intellectual foundations, Hobhouse led from military power and ‘the separation of rulers and ruled’ via the ‘partial . . . moralization’ of ‘authority’, to the replacement in ‘the higher civilizations’ of the ‘sword’ or the ‘self-constituted authority of government’ by ‘the impartial justice of public tribunals’, and a ‘society of nations to which each independent State owed its allegiance’. Hobhouse’s agenda was that social Darwinism was mistaken, that the Darwinian element in eugenics was deleterious and that sociology did not see ‘the principle of force’ as the only principle which had sustained human development. ‘Human brotherhood’ was ‘alive in every man and woman’; ‘liberty of conscience’ and ‘religious equality’ had gradually been established as a ‘corner-stone of the modern State’, and it had come generally to be understood that ‘intellectual sincerity . . . was . . . of profound importance . . . in relation to the deepest problems of life’, including the problem of religion. As Hobhouse discussed it in Morals in Evolution, religion was ‘an effort to get on terms with the world’ by making use of experience ‘or . . . such interpretation . . . of experience’ as its adherents were ‘capable of forming’. The ‘religious interpretation of life’, therefore, was ‘relative’ to ‘thought’ and Christianity was merely one interpretation whose persuasiveness, being addressed to a particular context, was likely to be superseded once the context had been altered.

Morals in Evolution was yet another long, detailed and committed book in which the connections between morality and the main religions of the world

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were examined at length and contrasts were drawn between the risk in Catholicism of morals being degraded into a form of ‘spiritual calculation’ by a system of ‘rewards and punishments’, and the risk in Protestantism of religion’s ‘ethical side’ being degraded by the idea that conduct followed ‘naturally’ from the ‘convinced faith’ of a Christian. It was ethical monotheism’s defect that it had not understood the good man as the man who was ‘nearest to God’ because of his goodness. It was historic Christianity’s defect that it had compromised the Sermon on the Mount to the requirements of power and respectability, had allowed ‘the doctrine of salvation’ to encourage a missionary aggression and had created an ‘antithesis’ in which nature, ‘including ‘marriage, fatherhood and citizenship’ – the ‘great institutions of humanity’ – ‘partook’ of the character of ‘sin’. Hobhouse’s ultimate objection to Christianity was that it had ‘degraded’ ordinary life and pursued an ideal of ‘ascetic . . . self-negation’ which ‘few or none could realize’. Though it had done well to abolish slavery, establish justice for women, insert ‘clemency’ into ‘criminal justice’ and instil a heightened sense of the ‘sanctity of life’, its destruction of Roman matronhood, its establishment of religious persecution and its reliance on a priestly ‘exegesis’ which had taught men to ‘assert principles . . . and ideals’ of which they knew how to ‘escape the application’, had all been evil. Christianity, in other words, had failed, and the last four chapters of Morals in Evolution examined systems which had avoided ‘the divine’ or not made moral perfection dependent on it. In the Confucian and Mencian tradition through which a ‘cultivated class’ had governed China for two thousand years and in the ‘order and harmony of the . . . state’ which the Greeks had extracted from moral philosophy, the positive feature was ‘an ideal of conduct’ which every man was called on to conform to because it was ‘best for himself and . . . humanity’. It was important to Hobhouse that Confucian man was untainted by sin and that the Confucian ethic, so far from aiming to ‘chain’ men ‘up’, aimed at their ‘full and harmonious ethical development’. It was equally important that Greek thought had had the same aim and, through its probing of the ‘brutalities’ of ‘the struggle for existence’ and its replacement of ‘random’ (or arbitrary) by ‘thought-out’ rules and ideas, had effected a reconstruction which, ‘interrupted’ but not ‘arrested’ by the arrival of ‘theological ethics’, had formed the basis for modern ethical theory. Hobhouse thought of modern ethics as tainted by the Christian conception of sin. But he was untainted by it himself; he interpreted the ethical theorists he admired as they would have been if they too had been untainted; and he praised them for integrating ‘the moral law’ as a ‘subjective’ law which was binding on men who obeyed it with the ‘moral law’ as an ‘objective’ law which was binding on men ‘even when they did not obey it’. As Hobhouse understood it, the law of nature, once released from ‘theological ethics’, would give ‘human personality’ its rightful place as ‘the

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groundwork of political obligation’, and would move through ‘self-realisation’ towards a ‘common humanity with a common aim’. This, though described as humanitarianism, was the Liberalism which had been described in Democracy and Reaction. It supplied a substitute for Christianity in which ‘a few men’ with a ‘genius for love’ felt for mankind what ‘ordinary men felt for wife and child’, and, through ‘the devotion of the martyr and the fire of the prophet’, replaced the ‘selfish’ pursuit of ‘personal salvation’ by the ‘healing of the sick’, the ‘advancement of knowledge’ and the ‘liberation’ of nations, classes and sexes. Hobhouse acquired his opinions early and spent the rest of his life elaborating and applying them to the situations he encountered. What needs to be emphasized is that, though these were to be as self-consciously subject to evolution in the future as opinions had been in the past, they were surrounded with the pungent, quasi-religious certainty with which he wished English thought to be conducted. ‘Social forces’ had to be ‘controlled’ by ‘social science’ as surely as ‘natural forces’ were controlled by ‘natural science’ and ‘meaning and . . . purpose’ to be extracted from the idea of a ‘self-conscious evolution of humanity’. ‘It is, at any rate, something to learn – as, if our present conclusion is sound, we do learn’ – he wrote at the end of Morals in Evolution that this slowly wrought out-dominance of mind in things is the central fact of evolution. For if this is true, it is the germ of a religion and an ethics which are as far removed from materialism as from the optimistic teleology of the metaphysician, or the half-naive creeds of the churches. It gives a meaning to human effort, as neither the pawn of an overruling Providence nor the sport of blind force. It is a message of hope to the world, of suffering lessened and strife assuaged, not by fleeing from reason to the bosom of faith, but by the increasing rational control of things by that collective wisdom . . . which is all that we directly know of the Divine. (Morals in Evolution, 1906, II, p. 284, 1925 edn, p. 637)

Hobhouse was serious, solemn and out of touch with the twentieth century. With Keynes, a witty, rebarbative Liberalism sustained a disingenuous denial of religion’s centrality. V Keynes5 was a brilliant schoolboy at Eton and an equally brilliant undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge where his earliest interests were in philosophy, logic and aesthetics, undergraduate oratory (at the Cambridge Union) 15

John Maynard, 1st Baron Keynes (1883–1946), educated Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. Fellow of King’s College. H.M. Treasury, 1906–9 and 1915–19. Author of Indian Currency and Finance, 1913; The Economic Consequences of The Peace, 1919; A Treatise on Probability, 1921; A Revision of The Treaty, 1922; A Tract on Monetary Reform, 1923; The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, 1925; A Short View of Russia, 1925; The End of Laissez-Faire, 1926; A Treatise on Money, 1930; Essays in Persuasion, 1931; Essays in Biography, 1933; The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936; and Two Memoirs, 1949.

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and undergraduate intellectuality (with the Apostles). He was rooted in the anti-Protectionist internationalism of pre-war Liberalism and combined political and economic support for free trade with a theoretical and practical desire for moral Liberation which rejected both his family’s Nonconformity and his family’s Anglicanism. By the time he was twenty he was entirely liberated from Christianity. Like Maitland, Keynes was a client of the new Cambridge Triposes which had been set up from the 1860s onwards. He used practical experience of the economic policy of the Government of India as Maitland used experience of legal conveyancing to construct an academic orthodoxy which had little to say about religion once the self-fingering post-Christian religion recalled in My Early Beliefs (in Two Memoirs) had been forgotten. In My Early Beliefs in 1938, Keynes looked back both admiringly and critically at the ‘immoralism’ of the ‘religion’ which he and the Apostles had borrowed from Moore at the turn of the century. He did this admiringly because his early beliefs had followed the ‘English Puritan tradition’ in being concerned with ‘the salvation of one’s soul’, and ‘morals’ had been made unnecessary by ‘knowledge . . . aesthetic experience and . . . love’ preferably for another person; he did it critically because the ‘natural and scientific character’ of these beliefs had made them insensitive both to ‘the spontaneity of human nature’ and to ‘the life of action’ including the pursuit of ‘power, politics, success, and wealth’. Keynes was well aware of the importance of religion in early Marshall, of the standing presence of religion in Newton and of the moral basis for the economic opinions of many economists. In three articles written after a visit to Russia with his wife in 1925, he gave an unexpected account of Marxism. In A Short View of Russia, Keynes recorded his boredom with the obsolescence of Marxist economics, his certainty that ‘Russian Communism’ had nothing to contribute to economic understanding and his belief that even in the Soviet Union its practical effectiveness was for the moment in question. What seemed not to be in question was Marxism’s status as religion. Keynes did not suggest that ‘commissars’ were ‘High Church mystics, dancing dervishes or Rasputins in mufti’. There were, however, he believed, two ways of sublimating materialistic egoism – by merging it into ‘mystic union’ and by merging it into an ‘ideal life for the . . . community’. Lenin had done the latter and was ‘detestable’ to the ‘educated, decent intelligentsia of Western Europe’ insofar as he had compelled the ‘soldiers’ of the ‘revolution’ to ‘crucify’ their natures by becoming ‘ruthless’ and ‘unscrupulous’. Lenin was, nevertheless, to be taken seriously not only because, in an age which was ‘without religion’, many would feel ‘a strong emotional curiosity towards any religion which was really new’; but also because, in constructing a new ‘framework’ to replace capitalism’s loss of ‘idealism’, Marxist-Leninism was giving a changed relative importance to ‘pecuniary motives’ and ‘the accumulation of money’.

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Keynes disliked the crudeness of Russian government and the Methodistical element that he noticed in ‘the average Communist’. But he convinced himself that ‘chemicals’ were being ‘mixed’, that the Soviet Union was being more inventive than the United States and that Russian Communism might well represent ‘the first stirrings of a great religion’.

In Keynes’s intellectual life, the major influences were Moore and Marshall, Moore because his philosophy helped the process of liberation, Marshall because he had invented economics as an English academic subject. Keynes wrote at length about Marshall, indeed, his economic writing is an extended commentary on Marshall’s economic writing. About the liberating effect of Moore’s philosophy, on the other hand, he wrote chiefly in papers he gave to small groups in Cambridge when young. Nor did he make public disclosure of the homosexual aspect of his interpretation of Moore’s ethic which, though highly physical and including the assertion that ‘women were inferior’ and ‘love of young men . . . ethically better’, did not impinge directly on the widely publicized economic writing that began with The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Like Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler – also written in its author’s thirties – The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) was a world-historical scoop. As a high official in the British delegation to the Peace Conference, Keynes wrote with weight and authority. He dramatized persons and depicted characters in a lucid, penetrating prose which coined phrases of searing originality in the course of showing how President Wilson – ‘the old Presbyterian’ – had lost control of the conference as Clemenceau and Lloyd George had ‘debamboozlised’ him. Whether justly or unjustly, The Economic Consequences displayed a sense of the dishonour involved when the ‘wise and magnanimous programme’ embodied in the Armistice had become a ‘Carthaginian’ peace treaty involving ‘deception . . . insincerity . . . and hypocrisy’ on the part of all the Allied statesmen apart from Hoover. While pretending to, The Economic Consequences did not avoid moralizing. But its primary concern was with the foolishness of the Allied demand for ‘penal’ justice against Germany, the threat to the working of the international economy presented by the reparations, coal, rivers, tariffs and colonial clauses of the treaty, and the ‘black’ and ‘revolutionary’ future that execution of its terms ‘au pied de la lettre’ would promise to the German financial system, to European industry and to Society and civilization. That Germany was being compelled to pay more than was safe was blamed on Clemenceau as well as on Lloyd George. But Lloyd George’s conversion was a particularly ‘gross’ debauchery, a capitulation to the ‘greed . . . and . . . prejudice’ which had been blatant on Conservative platforms during the 1918 election, and a ‘definite breach’, after a war ‘waged . . . ostensibly in defence

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of the sanctity of international engagements’, of ‘one of the most sacred possible of such engagements’. These were the poisoned darts of a Liberal internationalist whose closest friends had hated the war, whose banking friends in Germany hated the peace and who was conned into borrowing their rejection of the ‘unveracities’ surrounding Germany’s capacity to pay. At the same time, Keynes predicted that the vast powers of the Reparations Commission might be turned into an ‘organ of justice’ if they were ‘transferred to the League of Nations’. The Economic Consequences of the Peace described the nature of European civilization, the threats which the Peace Settlement was alleged to present to it and the actions that would be necessary if these threats were to be met. The Russian revolutions had shown what happened when an economic system collapsed, but the Peace Conference had simply ignored them, had disregarded ‘the . . . immensely complicated organization’ through which the pre-war industrial population had maintained itself by importing food and raw materials and had failed to understand not only that the diehard idols of ‘hatred and nationalism’ were irrelevant but also that the capitalist class, which had seemed a very few years ago before to be the ‘all-powerful master’, was being ‘intimidated’ and ‘ruined’ by ‘governments of its own making’ and a newspaper press which in the main it owned. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes focussed attention on inflation, currency-reform, Allied indebtedness and the rehabilitation of Central Europe through economic alliance between Russia and Germany. But his real aims were to facilitate Germany’s re-establishment in the delicate mechanism of the economic system and to give effect to the liberal hope that opinion could be changed, the imagination instructed and ‘hearts and minds’ enlarged as ‘the true voice of the new generation’ made its impact on the world. The Economic Consequences was a policy polemic. But it did not suggest that the relationship between the economic process and the political process was simple. On the one hand, ‘human endurance’, though it could sustain a great deal of ‘economic privation’, might eventually loosen ‘the bonds of custom’; on the other hand, there was an ‘immanent will’ in the ‘complex world’ of contemporary Europe which might ‘bring in’ a revolution ‘no less inevitable’ than anything that might be brought in through the ‘bloodthirsty philosophers of Russia’. What was needed economically was adjustment in the interest of all the nations of the world. What was needed politically was the opening of a path between Marxism and chauvinism so that ‘the souls of European peoples’ might give effect to the ‘happiness and solidarity of the human family’. In these and other respects, Keynes was to experience considerable disappointment in the twenty years that followed. Keynes’s intellectual influence began in the 1920s when he assumed that Britain was unlikely to experience either ‘catastrophe’ or ‘general social

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upheaval’ and that the Liberal Party, even if it could not win general elections, could broaden the ‘progressive cause in the constituencies’, provide a Liberal element in Conservative governments and bring a ‘coolness of tone’ to bear on the ‘passion for social justice’ which was the ‘proletarian’ aspect of the Labour Party. He wanted to reconstruct the mentalities of the world’s economic leaders, to ‘control’ economic forces ‘in the interests of social justice and . . . stability’ and, in an admiring review of Churchill’s World Crisis in 1929, explained that ‘frontiers, races, patriotisms . . . and . . . wars’ would no longer be seen, in the way Churchill saw them, as ‘ultimate verities for mankind’. To Keynes it was obvious that ‘intellectual and scientific’ questions were ‘above the heads’ of the ‘vast mass’ of ‘more or less illiterate voters’. He admired the control exercised over the Conservative Party by its ‘autocratic . . . inner-ring’ but denied that the party had any interest in ‘ideals . . . intellectual standards . . . or . . . the defence of civilization’. The Labour Party, on the other hand, was a ‘class-party’ fighting a ‘class-war’ in which he himself was ‘on the side of the educated bourgeoisie’ while even the Liberal Party’s status as ‘the best instrument of progress’ was qualified by the considerations that ‘the historic party-questions of the nineteenth century’ were ‘dead’, and that Liberals had to take risks for ‘peace . . . arbitration . . . and disarmament’, to give gambling as much attention as the pre-war party had given to drink and to stimulate a ‘living interest’ among all classes of electors by questioning the prevailing ‘medieval . . . orthodoxy’ about marriage, divorce, birth control, contraception, the family and sexual abnormality. Throughout the 1930s, Keynes was an active director of the New Statesman and Nation where he combined sympathy for some aspects of Labour thinking with a revulsion against the more dogmatic versions of intellectual Socialism. As an investment adviser who had seen boardrooms from the inside, he was a critic of the New Statesman’s commercial ignorance. As a man-of-the-world who had worked happily with Baldwin and Bonar Law, he accused Kingsley Martin, the editor, of conducting a continuous ‘indignationmeeting’, and found in Martin’s ‘uncontrollable minority-mindness’ the ‘nonConformist urge to save one’s own soul’. Few of Martin’s regular contributors escaped censure, apart from Crossman, who was singled out as the man of the future. Keynes was opposed to direct action about foreign policy and wished to persuade the readers of the New Statesman that ‘the collective possession of preponderant force by the leading pacific powers . . . was the best assurance of peace’. He believed that Mussolini could have been stopped in Abyssinia, that it was British and French interests rather than ‘the interests of Spaniards’ which required Franco’s defeat in Spain and that the New Statesman’s willingness to risk war for the sake of Spanish democracy was not shared by the English public. He disapproved of ex-conscientious objectors proposing pol-

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icies which would send young Englishmen to their deaths for a cause which ‘the average Englishman did not support’ and he was incensed by the claim, made on the Left, both before and during the war, that the Conservative leaders preferred Hitler to Stalin, wished to ostracize the Soviet Union or aimed to delay a Second Front in order to weaken the Soviet Union in relation to Germany. He was especially scathing about the New Statesman’s treatment of the Bretton Woods Agreement which he had in effect negotiated and which he claimed had rescued the 1945 Labour government from bankruptcy. Keynes believed that Baldwin had had popular opinion behind him in refusing to draw premature lines against the dictators, and he reminded New Statesman readers of the contradiction between resistance to rearmament and willingness to resist aggression. He criticized Shaw, Martin and Low, the cartoonist, for their gullibility in the Soviet Union, did not see how it was possible to ignore the illiberal character of the Soviet régime and was entirely contemptuous of the idea that foreign policy could be understood in terms of a fundamental conflict between capitalism and Communism. Having been an advocate of treaty revision in the 1920s, he wanted a revision of the Czech frontiers in early 1938 and judged the Munich agreement, ‘viewed . . . dryly’ from that point of view, a ‘good thing in the long run’. But he then made Chamberlain’s ‘spinelessness’ the excuse for supporting an alliance between the Liberal Party, the Labour Party, the League of Nations Union and antiappeasement Conservatives in order to fight the next election whenever it might come in the future. Like The Daily Express, he believed that there would be no war in 1939. Though he approved of some of the changes which the 1931 National Government effected in economic policy, Keynes disapproved of its tone and ethos. In registering the replacement of the ‘self-made barons’ of the Industrial Revolution by a joint-stock and civil-service ‘salariat’, he looked forward to the Labour Party ‘always having a majority’ against ‘the power of self-interested Capitalists’ when ‘reasonable and disinterested persons’ agreed with it. Similar assumptions were apparent in his economic thinking. VI Keynes gave three sorts of attention to the economic issue. At one level in the 1920s, he showed why Lloyd George was right and why Churchill and Mond, though right to become Conservatives, were wrong about contemporary economic possibilities. At another level, he described the damage which Locke and Hume had done to ‘Church and King’ and the process by which – as ‘buttresses of property and prescription’ – these in their turn had had to be superseded. At the highest level, there was a theoretical development which culminated in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. In supporting Lloyd George in 1929, Keynes had attacked the ‘fatalistic

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state of mind’ which had allowed the Treasury to ‘pigeon-hole’ proposals put forward for several years by Royal Commissions, local authorities and government departments. He had made detailed analyses of the policies proposed in the Liberal Yellow Book6 and the Liberal pamphlet We Can Conquer Unemployment and, in reaching the conclusion that they were viable, had restated his earlier predictions about ‘the end of laissez-faire’. In The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, Keynes’s attack on Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer was an attack on the restoration of the Gold Standard, on Churchill’s ‘feather-brained’ justification of the advice he had received from the Bank of England, and on the sinister possibility that, behind Baldwin’s ‘good heart’ and ‘vague cogitations’, a back-stairs intrigue had benefited rentiers at the expense of miners and compelled the miners to choose between ‘starvation’ and ‘submission’. This was a political polemic in which a ‘sound-money’ policy was said to be restricting credit and increasing unemployment, Churchill was denying that wages should be fixed by what was ‘fair and reasonable’ between the classes, and the Gold Standard had become an ‘emblem’ of the fact that wages were to be settled by economic pressure. It was accompanied by an historical polemic in which the ‘miraculous union’ between ‘the conservative individualism of Locke, Hume, Johnson and Burke’ and the ‘social and democratic absolutism of Rousseau, Paley, Bentham and Godwin’ was no longer viable; laissez-faire was a ‘vulgarizer’s’ doctrine which was not only not to be found in Ricardo, Adam Smith ‘or even Malthus’ but had also been strongly resisted by ‘economists of authority’ since the 1870s; and the affronts to modern ideas which were being given by governmental attempts to impose a ‘stronger dose’ of monetary policy than had been imposed in the nineteenth century, were unacceptable. The General Theory had a heavy dose of arcane economics which was unintelligible to many who professed to admire it. It also had that sense of the political and cultural relevance of economic theory which had been apparent in most of the English and Scottish economists from Petty and Adam Smith onwards. Keynes knew what he was doing, culturally as well as politically, and the purpose of The General Theory will be missed unless its political and cultural provenance is understood.

In the thirty years which preceded The General Theory, Keynes had been involved in the management of the Indian and British currencies, in the investment policy of King’s College, Cambridge and in the running of The New Statesman and Nation. He had expressed contempt for the Bank of England and for the level of economic intelligence that was to be found 16

Britain’s Industrial Future.

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among leading statesmen in England and the United States, and had implied that, given a higher level of understanding, economic theory could be brought to bear, as it had been brought to bear in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, on the problems of justice and human need. The Economic Consequences of the Peace had been a pessimistic book. By 1928, however, the world economy was said to be suffering not from the ‘rheumatics of old age’ but from a painful readjustment between one economic period and another. ‘Compound interest’, which had demonstrated its ‘staggering’ power in the previous two hundred years, suggested the possibility of an equally staggering improvement in the standard of living in the future as the problem of life was transformed from the problem of work into the problem of leisure, and the duty to work joined possession of money as a ‘disgusting morbidity’. By 1932, Keynes was looking back on the late 1920s as a period in which the ‘perturbations’ described in The Economic Consequences had run their course, an enormous increase in wealth had occurred in the building, electricity, road-construction and motor-car industries and the prospect could be entertained, given a few more such ‘quinquennia’, of an ‘economic Eldorado’ in which ‘all our reasonable economic needs would have been satisfied’. Even at his viewiest, Keynes did not question the need to conduct life as though the millennium was in the distance. But his long-term assessment was reflected in his short-term assessment and in his explanation of the crisis not as a crisis of poverty but as a crisis on the way to abundance. Thus the slump of 1930 – ‘one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history’ – would ‘pass away’ since nature’s resources and man’s devices were as ‘fertile and productive as they had ever been’, it was as possible as before to provide everyone with a high standard of life and the root reason for the crisis was a ‘colossal muddle’ resulting from blunders and ‘breakdowns in organization’ within ‘the delicate machine’ described by ‘economic science’. In 1932, Keynes repeated the analysis of disinvestment he had given in his Treatise on Money, condemned hair-shirt, or Puritan, economics, as a recipe for ‘universal bankruptcy’, and gave as his reason for rejecting the lowering of salaries and wages the monetary indebtedness and social injustice this would cause, and the revolutionary shaking it would give to the ‘Capitalist order’. The central bankers of the creditor countries were enjoined to understand that, short of ‘going over to Communism’, there was no cure for unemployment except by restoring employers’ profit margins, and that governments, municipalities, the May Committee and ‘patriotic housewives’ all had a duty to encourage ‘expansion . . . boldness . . . and . . . enterprise’ in order to ensure that ‘the wheels of economic progress’ would begin to ‘go round again’. At times, Keynes seemed almost to be transposing the Pax Britannica into an economic world empire in which the City of London would play the

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leading role. This certainly was why the City had to be educated to its responsibilities and to beware of the Gold Standard as ‘part of the apparatus of Conservatism’. After Britain’s decision to leave the Gold Standard in September 1931, Keynes welcomed the conversion of the British manufacturer into ‘the cheapest’ and ‘most prosperous . . . in the world’ and was happy that this had been accomplished without industrial strife or social injustice. The call for British leadership in setting up a World Economic Conference to deal with the banking crisis was accompanied by optimistic analyses between Essays in Persuasion in November 1931, when ‘want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations’ were ‘transitory and unnecessary’, and four articles entitled The Means to Prosperity in The Times in March 1933, when the world’s predicament involved a failure in the ‘immaterial devices of the mind’ and in ‘the motives . . . decisions and acts of will’ necessary to put in motion the ‘resources and technical means’ which the world already had available if it knew how to use them. In explaining his contempt for the banking mentality and for bankers’ blindness to the collapse in the ‘money-value’ of their real assets, Keynes derided their attachment to ‘conventional respectability’, their arrest at caution and economy and their failure to understand that restraints on expenditure and the ‘competitive struggle for liquidity’ were an ‘internecine . . . antisocial . . . beggar-my-neighbour’ policy which, in spite of capitalism’s inherent toughness, would end in disaster unless ‘cheap-money policies’ were to ‘rally the constructive forces of the world’. What Keynes professed to fear was not the bankers’ conspiracy of Marxist mythology but ‘fools and madmen’ announcing that disaster would only be avoided by giving effect to ‘theoretical presuppositions applicable to a society . . . in equilibrium, with all its productive forces already employed’. By 1933 the policy of price rises, increases in loan expenditure, and a World Economic Conference to ‘release . . . a million rivulets of spending-power’, was firmly settled in Keynes’s mind as both the high-academic and the commonsense solution to the world’s problems, and the justification for rejecting the idea that hard work, abstinence and invention were sufficient reactions to the crisis. Kahn’s Multiplier, which was unveiled in 1931, was brought in to prove that government loan expenditure would cost less and be more effective than its critics supposed, and that the budget could only be balanced by increasing employment and the national income. All this achieved its theoretical justification in The General Theory.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money translated Keynes’s previously stated preferences into a ‘scientific economics’, created a theoretical structure to give it weight and plausibility, and showed why the classical economists from Ricardo to Marshall had mistaken a theory relevant to one

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phase of development for a general theory which covered all phases of development. It showed how the mentalities Keynes had been moving towards in the previous fifteen years could be licensed by high economic argument, and that the ‘extent of effective saving’ was determined not by moderately high interest-rates to encourage the investor – particularly the rich investor – but by low interest rates involving the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’. Keynes’s future was not to be Cobden’s bag-man’s paradise. It was to be an aesthete’s paradise in which ‘spiritual fruits’ would be reaped from ‘material conquests’, freedom from economic necessity would transform character and the State would play a larger part than hitherto in the fostering of culture, the ‘beautifying of the public world’ and the intensifying of civic pride. A passage from The General Theory about relations between savings and interest rates had a limited and specific application. We may take it more generally and extract a moral message from the assertion that the more virtuous we are, the more determinedly thrifty, the more obstinately orthodox in our national and personal finance, the more our incomes will have to fall when interest rises relatively to the marginal efficiency of capital. Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward. For . . . after all, the actual rates of aggregate saving and spending do not depend on Precaution, Foresight, Calculation, Improvement, Independence, Enterprise, Pride or Avarice. Virtue and vice play no part. It all depends on how far the rate of interest is favourable to investment, after taking account of the marginal efficiency of capital. This is an overstatement. If the rate of interest were so governed as to maintain continuous full employment, virtue would resume her sway; – the rate of capital accumulation would depend on the weakness of the propensity to consume. Thus, once again, the tribute that classical economists pay to her is due to their concealed assumption that the rate of interest always is so governed. (J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, pp. 111–12)

In the concluding chapter of The General Theory, Keynes drew together the political clues he had given in earlier chapters, doubting existing capitalism’s ability to maintain full employment and dismissing State Socialism as unnecessary, but requiring of the State an ‘indication of the nature of the environment’ which the ‘free play of economic forces’ depended on to achieve ‘the full potentiality of production’. Extensions in the functions of the State would be needed if the ‘propensity to consume’ was to be adjusted to the ‘inducement to invest’, and the ‘private initiative and responsibility’ of ‘economic individualism’ to preserve efficiency, decentralization, ‘personal liberty’, ‘the variety of life’ and the ‘traditions which embodied the most secure and successful choices of former generations’. The political implications were that the ‘abstinence of the rich’ and a moderately high rate of interest were not necessary for the growth of wealth and in certain circumstances obstructed it; that there were, therefore, no economic reasons why the redistribution of wealth and incomes which had been going on in Britain should not be completed; and that there was every reason to believe that direct taxation would allow ‘the

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intelligence . . . determination and executive skill of the financier or . . . entrepreneur’ to obtain ‘reasonable terms of reward’ at levels substantially lower than those which obtained at present. And these, it was added, were ‘the only practicable means’ of avoiding the total destruction of ‘existing economic forms’, since, if ‘effective demand’ was deficient, ‘the public scandal of wasted resources’ would become ‘intolerable’, and the entrepreneur who sought to ‘bring these resources into action’ would be ‘operating with the odds loaded against him’. In considering The General Theory as Keynes’s contribution to a secular, revisionist Liberalism, three points may be made in conclusion: that, more than any other writer discussed in these volumes, Keynes was conscious of the power of thought and the superiority of ideas to interests; that it was one of his most cherished beliefs that ‘practical men who believed themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences’ were ‘usually the slaves of some defunct economist’; and that his own intellectuality, though ostensibly the servant of economic technicality, was in truth the slave of a moral or quasireligious intention as compelling and pervasive as any we shall find in Part II.

Keynes and Hayek shared many assumptions about the working of economic systems. The contrast between them, and the resulting conflict between their followers, disclosed more than anything else, fundamental differences about the moral and economic function of law money and political power. VII By birth, Hayek7 was an upper-middle-class Austrian, a distant cousin of Wittgenstein, and the son of a professor of botany at the University of Vienna. While taking his degree in the early 1920s, he developed an interest in philosophy and psychology as well as in economics and in his view of knowledge was much influenced for a time by Mach and logical positivism. Thereafter, he paid a brief visit to the United States, was a civil servant and academic economist and wrote two works of technical economics before coming to England in his early thirties at Beveridge’s suggestion in order to be a professor alongside Lionel Robbins – also in his early thirties – at the London School of Economics. He and Robbins then made of the Economics 17

Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), educated University of Vienna. Austrian Civil Service, 1921–6. Director of Austrian Institute for Economic Research, 1927–31. Professor of Economic Science London University, 1931–50; of Social and Moral Science at Chicago, 1951–62 and of Economics at Freiburg, 1962–9. Author of Prices and Production, 1931; Monetary Theory and The Trade Cycle, 1933; Monetary Nationalism and International Stability, 1937; Profits, Interest and Investment, 1939; The Pure Theory of Capital, 1941; The Road to Serfdom, 1944; Individualism and Economic Order, 1948; John Stewart Mill and Harriet Taylor, 1950; The Counter-Revolution of Science, 1952; The Sensory Order, 1952; The Constitution of Liberty, 1960; Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, 1967; and Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1973–9.

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Department a centre of resistance to the Socialism which was being taught in other departments at the School and went on doing so until Hayek, who had become a British subject in 1938, left for Chicago in 1951. In Austria Hayek had grown up in the shadow of an entrenched Socialism – both political and theoretical – of which he appears, like Robbins in England, to have been an adherent for a time when young. Having become an enemy of Socialism and a follower of Menger and von Mises, he did not immediately turn his attention to politics. It was not until he had been in England for some years that he began to design moral, legal and political doctrines which would make the world safe for classical analytical economics. Hayek’s first version of classical analytical economics was expressed in The Pure Theory of Capital in 1931 which, however, was no more political than The Sensory Order’s treatment of psychology was to be in 1952. It was through The Road to Serfdom in 1944 that he made a polemical statement of what he had been saying more arcanely since the Inaugural Lecture he had delivered eleven years earlier in 1933. The 1933 Inaugural – delivered before Hitler had arrived in office – was as crucial a statement as Oakeshott was to make in his celebrated Inaugural as Professor of Political Science at the School eighteen years later. It pointed out that the economic views of the public were the views which had been held by professional economists a generation or so earlier, that professional economists were ‘out of tune’ with them and that divergence centred on a difference of opinion about Socialism and planning. It claimed that classical, analytical economics was the wave of the future and that the immediate problem was to enable its proponents to insulate themselves against the climate of the age. This was an academic fantasy. Classical, analytical economics was not, in 1933, the wave of the future, and it is not surprising that Hayek was more effective in pinpointing the antagonism political economy had aroused by its supposed indifference towards human misery than in arguing that emotion and governmental interference had to be restricted in obedience to it. Hayek recognized the validity of the ethical impulse to reconstruct the world where the world was unsatisfactory. But he rejected the ‘anthropomorphic’ assumption that economic systems ‘served a definite function’ only when ‘willed by individuals’, and he made a great deal of the idea that the order which men had been trying to achieve deliberately might as easily be achieved ‘without any mind . . . regulating . . . [or] understanding it’. Not only had Hume and Adam Smith presented the economic mechanism as so ‘immensely complicated’ that nobody could understand it, they had also made it clear that co-ordination of individual effort had in large part not been ‘the product of deliberate planning’. The unique feature of classical economics, indeed, at the time at which it had been invented, had been the conception of ‘extensive State activity [being] so predominately more harmful’ than ‘the absence of any

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new form of State activity which . . . might be . . . suggest[ed]’ that the economist ‘in practice [had] almost inevitably [been] drawn into a mainly negative position’ about it. The Trend of Economic Thinking was embarrassed by the identity between the principles of classical analytical economics and the ‘selfishness’ which was leading ‘the forces of stability’ to share its view of State activity. It affirmed, nevertheless, that an ‘increasing number of economists’ believed that ‘the field for . . . State activity in the service of . . . the . . . ethical ideals . . . held by the majority of men’ was ‘very much narrower than . . . was . . . often thought’ and looked forward to a time when planning and Socialism would be abandoned as the ‘warm-hearted person’s’ remedy for the sufferings of the poor. The virtue and optimism of 1933 were to be mocked by the events of the following two decades. Many disappointments were to occur, a dark terrain was to be traversed and nearly thirty years were to elapse before Hayek’s optimism was to be justified. It was in these decades of intellectual opposition that Hayek sharpened the sword of his doctrine and found in the undermining of both managerial responsibility and the competitive system in Germany, Russia, Austria, Britain and the United States proof of the impractibility of a ‘competitive socialism’ to which ‘central price-fixing’ was crucial. These, by and large, were economic considerations which flowed out of the economic works Hayek had published before 1935. After 1935 he became more directly political, arguing that there was a threat to intellectual and cultural liberty and progress, that civilization would not survive their demise and that it was ‘no . . . accident’ that ‘a socialist [was] often . . . regarded as a potential recruit in the Fascist states’ where the ‘liberal of the old school was . . . the arch enemy’. Democratic government would work only so long as ‘the functions of the State were limited to fields where real agreement . . . could be achieved . . . among the majority’ and it was because ‘authoritarian’ Socialists ‘openly admitted’ Socialism’s incompatibility with consumer choice that they were to be praised for perceiving, where libertarian Socialists were ridiculed for denying, that ‘life under socialism would be like life in a barracks’. When Hayek began teaching, and preaching, a public message in the middle 1930s, he was preoccupied, therefore, with the threat presented to economic science by antipathetic political systems. He explained why there was tension between Liberalism and the type of ‘present-day’ Socialism which was often ‘misnamed Liberalism’, and why Burke, Tocqueville, Acton, Lippmann and Adam Smith between them were capable of illuminating the tension. Hayek’s methodological preoccupations were with the difference between a properly conducted sociology, including economics, and the science and engineering which had ‘dominated the outlook of . . . educated men during the last hundred years’. It was said to need the ‘special training’ of the economist to understand that the idea of an order which was ‘not due to the conscious action of a directing mind’ was not ‘mediaeval rubbish’.

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Hayek’s targets were Voltaire’s cult of Newton and Mannheim’s assumption that politics required a new ‘spiritual foundation’ based on the ‘reorganization of . . . knowledge’. In half a dozen articles between Dunkirk and Tobruk, he ridiculed Comte’s ‘scientism’ and St Simon’s early authoritarianism, and accused a long line of thinkers from Carlyle to Hobhouse of enthusing over a ‘deliberately constructed . . . spiritual power’. Hayek’s account of the ‘spiritual power’ was an aspect of his opinions about the methods suitable for understanding society. This was stated between the fall of Tobruk and the Battle of the Ardennes, when the ambition to imitate science in its methods, ‘though it had dominated social studies’ since the 1820s, had ‘contributed scarcely anything to . . . understanding’, and science, though right to replace ‘anthropomorphic’, ‘animistic’ and ‘purposive’ by ‘mathematical’ explanations, had elevated statistics about a ‘particular time and place’ into generalizations about society as a whole and, in doing so, had been as misleading as historicists had been in elevating history. To Hayek, historicism was misleading because it implied that changes in social ‘wholes’ could be explained generally, failed to notice that choices were made specifically and had no sense of the fact that the satisfactory operation of society depended not on control of the social process but on trust in its operation. Large parts of social life were outside reason’s control, many of the greatest things which men had achieved were ‘the result of . . . a process in which the individual played a part he never fully understood’, and it was of special significance that merchants, markets and the price mechanism, in matching needs to resources, used knowledge which was ‘dispersed’ among many people where planners used knowledge which was ‘concentrated in the hands of experts’. These articles sketched some of the principles to which Popper, Collingwood, Oakeshott and Butterfield in their differing ways were to persuade their followers in the decade after 1945. That Hayek did not at first acquire so large a following is to be explained by the polemical character of The Road to Serfdom, with its linking of Socialism to the Gestapo and the claim, which did not sound like a description of the Labour members of Churchill’s coalition, that Socialism could be achieved only by ruthless methods in the hands of leaders chosen from the worst, most xenophobic and most morally obtuse elements among the masses. In many respects The Road to Serfdom repeated what Hayek had been saying since 1933. It also developed conceptions which had not been developed previously – about the rule of law as guarantor of a free and competitive society, about the danger involved in the ‘Middle Way’ and Cripps’s, Mosley’s and Lord Eustace Percy’s ‘cry for an economic dictator’ and about the ‘syndicalist or corporative organization of industry’ which had left planning powers ‘in the hands of independent monopolies of the separate industries’. Most important of all, it explained that Socialism would replace a ‘commercial’ and ‘competitive’ by a ‘military’ and ‘totalitarian’ society in

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which cynicism about abstract thought and about the disinterested pursuit of truth would follow necessarily. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek differentiated law as the framework for economic activity from law as the determinant of economic activity. He identified competition within a ‘carefully thought-out legal framework’ as the only method by which men’s activities could be ‘adjusted to each other’ without arbitrariness or coercion, and he made of European federation a restraint on Socialism, planning and democracy and a way of limiting the powers of the nation-state without creating a ‘super-state’. Hayek argued that the law should ‘fix rules’ so as to permit productive activity to be ‘guided by individual decisions’, that it was this rather than economic planning which would safeguard the ‘Rights of Man’; and that it was by enabling ‘unknown people’ to make ‘whatever use of . . . it they liked’ that the rule of law could act as ‘almost an instrument of production’. In discussing incentives, Hayek was concerned more with freedom than with growth. It was freedom that was the British tradition and the source of British progress, Liberalism which ought to be the leading feature of British war propaganda and the restoration of Liberalism which alone could present the war against Nazism as a war against the tyranny of State power. There were reminders about the Socialist origins of Laval, Quisling and Mussolini, a certain Liberal foppery about the ‘masses’, and a nostalgia for the lost ‘liberal world’ of pre-1914 Britain when working men had achieved ‘comfort . . . and independence’ and the growth of commerce had joined the tradition of Periclean individualism to liberate citizens from custom and satisfy an ‘ever-widening range of desires’. The Road to Serfdom expressed the resentments of a dispossessed Liberal. So far from being conservative, it was designed to achieve Socialism’s ethical objectives without resorting to Socialist methods. VIII After 1944 Hayek’s horizons widened. From being principally English, he became American as well as English. From being a university professor, he became a public figure whose authority was increased by the Mont-Pélerin Society and other institutions dedicated to the propagation of his ideas. On the way to fame (or notoriety), he began to express a Toynbeean sense of destiny, a Toynbeean belief that Liberal civilization was at the crossroads and the political conviction that English Liberalism and English Conservatism, while differing about privilege, should come together to restrict the damage which Socialism was doing to ‘the character of the [English] people’. When peace returned in 1945, Hayek began to feel that the crossroads had been passed. The Road to Serfdom had sold in an unprecedented way, it had been lavishly praised by those who had liked it and it indicated, as he was to explain in 1956, a subterranean change in the climate of public thought, even

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when in practice there was an increasing tendency to rely on ‘state-control or . . . monopolistic institutions’. Hayek’s writing in these years was uneasy about democracy which too easily slid into a ‘superstitious belief in the omnicompetence of majority decisions’. There was admiration for Toynbee as an ‘exceptional man’ who had ‘the power and courage’ to ‘make the human universe’ his province, and there were adaptations of Toynbee’s warnings that academic specialization was preventing scholars who ‘recognized the beliefs . . . which led to totalitarianism’ in their own fields of study knowing whether similar beliefs were having the same effect elsewhere. There was an obsession with the Webbs’ contempt for the ‘average sensual man’ and for the success which Wells and Keynes had had in recommending themselves to official, educated and public opinion. And there was the characterization of Socialism as the work not only of intellectuals who had none of the experience of the economic system which the aristocracy and gentry had had through ‘the administration of property’, but also of ‘second hand dealers in ideas’ who acquired the ‘pseudo-reputations’ which were available to publicists who supported the Marxist movement to ‘undermine western civilization’. The Constitution of Liberty (1960) was Hayek’s contribution to the defence of Western civilization.

In The Constitution of Liberty Hayek systematized and justified his political preferences, distinguishing democracy’s belief in ‘majority opinion’ from the Liberal belief in the limitation of governmental power, and advocating the exclusion of Communists and other supporters of ‘intolerance’ from the grant of tenure in universities. After comparing ‘state-medicine’ as an instrument of ‘industrial discipline’ in the Soviet Union with the National Health Service’s conversion of the doctor into an ‘agent of the state’ in Britain, he predicted that the burden imposed by the Labour Party’s pensions policy would turn the young who made up the police and the army into advocates of ‘concentration camps for the aged’. Hayek’s treatment of the welfare state in principle was friendly. He saw no reason why governmental involvement in health, ‘the dissemination of knowledge’ and provision for the ‘indigent, unfortunate and disabled’, should not grow as wealth grew, and he distinguished those aims of the welfare state which could be, from those which could not be, achieved without destroying liberty. In contrasting Beveridge’s conceptions with the ‘progressive taxation’ which was being ‘smuggled in’ under the slogan of ‘ability to pay’, he added the warning that government-led determination of the relative ‘positions of citizens’ was discouraging capital formation and the development of individual fortunes. In The Constitution of Liberty, the rule of law ministered to human values when a general rule that ‘everybody obeyed’ enabled everybody to obey

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without ‘being subject to . . . another person’s . . . will’, and the ‘evolution’ of civilization was the discovery of the ‘not-yet-known’ to which individuals were most likely to contribute ‘new experiences’ when they knew in advance that they would not be obstructed in ‘using their mental powers to the full’. By 1960 Hayek was attacking the politics of envy and denying that merit could be rewarded (since there was no authority capable of assessing it). He eulogized the consequences of inequality – the ‘new knowledge’ which was the work of the élite, the mass production which had made luxuries available to the poor and the certainty that the advanced nations would not have achieved what they had achieved if there had been a ‘world authority . . . seeing to it that material benefits were distributed throughout the world’. As laureate (including Cold-War laureate) of the West, he asserted that its material progress was the envy of underdeveloped nations and that the generation of wealth, though a value, was a value which the majority would never have made ‘sacrifices’ to achieve. It is important for present purposes that the only weight he gave to religion was retrospective. IX In 1944, Hayek referred to that ‘most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization’ when ‘men . . . regarded . . . as superstitious . . . all those . . . religious truths . . . beliefs and traditions . . . which made [them] bow to . . . forces [they] could not hope fully to understand . . . yet on which the advance and . . . preservation of civilization had depended’. Most of Hayek’s writing was designed to teach a lesson of humility to those who sought to reconstruct society out of their own heads, and to remind them that law, reason and experimentation within their proper limits had to be defended against law, reason and experimentation beyond their proper limits. Hayek acknowledged the anti-rationalism and anti-perfectionism which were to be found in ‘religious . . . humility’ and the Christian traditions of ‘sinfulness and fallibility’, and he claimed that ‘religious awe’ had made men contribute to civilization in the past by persuading them to submit to forces they did not understand. But if one asks whether his doctrine was either Christian or religious, the answer must be that it was as little Christian, or even religious, as it was conservative. Everything that Hayek wrote about religion was antipathetic to the message of this book. Contemporary religion as he understood it had no role to play in the government of nations, morality was a private matter between a man and his conscience and the imposition of religious conformity became dangerous to freedom once a people had ceased to believe in that ‘collective responsibility’ towards a deity who would ‘visit the sins of [its] members upon it’. ‘Arrangement of [the individual’s] own life according to conscience’ was ‘the air in which the moral sense grew’; arrangement of life according to ‘the will of a superior’ was not the air in which it grew; and the growth of civiliza-

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tion had been accompanied by a ‘diminution of the sphere in which the individual’s actions [were] bound by fixed rules’. Throughout his public life Hayek repeated the attempt which Burke had made in the 1790s to find an ideology for a free world – against Nazism primarily (with Communism being played down between 1941 and 1945); against Communism after the Cold War had begun in 1946; and against English Socialism throughout. But whereas Burke had advocated an alliance to unite European Christianity against Jacobinical atheism, Hayek proposed a post-Christian politics which would enable men to pursue their own interests, consult their own consciences and find in the secularity of a postChristian world a sufficient arena for moral endeavour. Hayek was right to draw attention to the dangers inherent in the over-production of intellectuals, the bias of the social sciences and the threat to freedom presented by ‘psychological techniques’ and the pursuit of educational equality. Nor was he necessarily wrong to believe that ‘the traditions and institutions of universal education’ were so firmly established that government no longer needed either to provide or to finance them. The suspicion remains, nevertheless, that he borrowed an American mistrust of the association between State power and religion and connected the claim that ‘moral values’ would grow ‘only in an environment of freedom’ with an implied dismissal of the morality of those who had spent their lives under monarchical, aristocratic or totalitarian régimes. In all his writing Hayek was being practical while being theoretical and was both ignoring and emphasizing the complications surrounding the connections between the two. Most of the progress which society had achieved was said to be the work of an advance guard which had thrown up losers as well as winners in man’s evolutionary struggle. But at the same time State activity was said to be acceptable (and progressive) in the form of a legal system designed to protect the ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ involved in spontaneous reactions. This was Hayek’s response to the intellectual situation in Britain and the United States between 1935 and 1980 when he urged the beneficiaries of inequality to protect the possibility of inequality from which not only they but also society benefited. And it was this that gave him political fame, or notoriety, and a role in Reaganism and Thatcherism which Oakeshott would have found it difficult to play, even if Conservative politicians had been able to understand what Oakeshott was talking about. Between Hayek and Oakeshott there were differences about religion, which Oakeshott treated sympathetically where Hayek had nothing to say which could not as well have been said by any secular thinker about any doctrine that had prevailed in the free market in intellectual opinion. But there was also another difference – between Oakeshott’s nihilism, conservatism, Augustinianism and belief in freedom and the innocence of Hayek’s belief in the structure he described in The Constitution of Liberty.

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It is true that Oakeshott’s governing distinction in On Human Conduct resembled Hayek’s distinction between socialistic planning and the rule of law. But Oakeshott also took an irresponsible attitude to the distinction, offered a Bradleyan or Augustinian resistance to all temporal or political certainties and, in distancing himself from policy recommendations, equated Conservatism with an indefiniteness which could operate within the interstices of any system, including the Hayekean system. While Hayek criticized modern governments for obstructing the march of progress to which The Constitution of Liberty was dedicated, Oakeshott, following F. H. Bradley as well as St Augustine, regarded progress as a dangerous, intrusive, insensitive delusion. Both, nevertheless, were enemies of the Socialism which will be discussed in the next chapter.

19 English Socialism as English religion

Social questions are the vital questions of the day. They take the place of religion. (Beatrice Potter, i.e. Beatrice Webb, 22 April 1884, in ed. N. and J. Mackenzie, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, 1982–5, I, p. 115) The religious spirit is an influence suffused through life, not a function that is performed by an organ, even if that organ is called a Church. (J. R. MacDonald, Parliament and Democracy, 1920, p. 9) Only when western civilization has shaken off the shackles of the past and created a new social order worthy of the human dignity of the common man, will democracy and religion be once more realized in human society. Till then both must remain faiths, filled with prophetic anger at the sight of the nations and societies which use their name in vain. (R. H. S. Crossman, Plato Today, 1937 p. 300)

It may be desirable to state that this chapter is the work of a cynical Conservative who has never had the slightest enthusiasm for the rhetoric of progress, virtue and improvement, yet who wishes to do justice to English Socialism, which is one of the forms taken by the rhetoric of progress, virtue and improvement, and which, during the last hundred years, has made it impossible for English political discussion to be conducted without reference to it. By English Socialism is meant here not the Labour Party nor the syndicalist, co-operative and trade union movements, though all four have been servile to its imprint. What is meant is an intelligentsia attempt to supply the State with a new public doctrine to replace the Anglican and aristocratic doctrines which, since the 1830s, had been made obsolete by Liberalism, by the progress of opinion, by the advance of the middle and of the working classes, and by the emancipation from their civil disabilities of Nonconformists, Jews, atheists and Roman Catholics. But before this is discussed, there are three preliminaries. First, although Socialism will be discussed in terms of principle, the reality of Labour politics in England has been a complicated relationship with the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, a primarily conservative popular press, and a predominately Liberal or Socialist intelligentsia press, in which the moral and social conservatism of many Labour and trade union voters has made the Labour Party more cautious and broken-backed in practice than Socialist theory might suggest and the leaders of the Labour Party from 501

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MacDonald to Attlee and Wilson to Blair only too conscious of the public’s pragmatic ambivalence about principles. Secondly, not only will no sharp distinction be drawn between Socialism and Marxism, but more attention will be paid to Marxism than to Methodism or Dissent. Methodism and Dissent mattered in local government and among Labour MPs, especially up to 1945, and the distinction between Socialism and Marxism was vital for party identity at many points in Labour history. But Marx, though someone the Labour Party has sometimes wished not to know about, has also, and especially in the 1880s, the 1930s and the 1960s, supplied the educated young with a belief both in the injustice of existing society and the need for a fundamental revolution in mentalities of which the Fabians were the first proponents. English Socialism began for practical purposes in the 1880s, as a serenade to the big battalions of working-class voters who had been enfranchised in 1867 and 1884 and whom thinking Socialists hoped would adopt the culture and mentalities which thinking Socialists wished to protect and to propagate. There was a dislike of poverty and inequality. But there was also a desire to restore authority – the authority which feudalism and monarchy were supposed to have established and which capitalism and Liberalism were supposed to have undermined; and to do this by persuading the working classes and everyone else that professional and public-service conceptions should replace the immoral forms of free-for-all Cobdenite competitiveness in which the middle classes professed to believe, but which the middle-class professions in practice had avoided. Socialism, therefore, was doing what had been done, or was being done by Tractarians, by Young Englanders, by Philosophic Radicals and by Philosophical Idealists, and by the followers of Coleridge, Carlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, most of whom were haunted by a sense of loss and were responding to the challenge presented by the death of Whig, Anglican and aristocratic attitudes. Socialists faced the challenge with a special zeal, not only because they were tuned into the doctrines propounded by some of these others but also because, through Marxism, they had access to a comprehensive doctrine which accused Liberalism of not meaning what it said and of being so riddled with false consciousness and bad faith that the Socialist vanguard had the duty, and the opportunity, to think a way out of it, by moving forward not only from capitalism but also from Protestantism insofar as Protestantism had established a free market in God and helped to destroy the mediaeval Church’s canonistic attempt to control economic activity. It has been essential to the Socialist argument at all periods in the last hundred years that relativism, whether Marxist, Darwinian or Weberian, puts a question mark against capitalism and indicates an imminent reconstruction out of which theory will acquire new scope for practice through the institutions – the democratic, bureaucratic and welfare institutions – of a modern state.

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There are two further things to be said generally. First, that English Socialism has to be approached through the universities and publishinghouses as well as through newspapers; through the pulpit as well as through Parliament; and through poetry as well as through prose: that the practitioners of literature, philosophy, science, history, psychology, architecture, sociology, anthropology, art and so on, have been important in establishing its credibility, and that indeed, Dobb, Joad, Carpenter, Wootton, Read, Calder, Postan, Balogh, Ritchie, Leach, Blackett, Briggs, Bernal, Kaldor, Rowse, Spender, Priestley, Wallas, Ayer, Cole, Townsend, Titmuss, Hoggart, Lindsay, Abel-Smith, C. P. Snow, C. H. Waddington, Naomi Michison, Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, J. M. Richards, Joan Robinson and Anthony Blunt – to name a few who will not be discussed at length – have been merely tips of an iceberg which needs to be understood in its full cultural depth. The other thing to be said generally is that English Socialism has always had a problem about expectations arising from the vagueness of the undertaking and the consequent prospect of disappointment. Intimations of disappointment have been present, alongside the grandest optimism, in many Socialist thinkers – in Shaw, in Wells, in Hampshire and in Raymond Williams; in the great political diarists – Citrine, Dalton, Crossman, Castle and Benn – who have boiled down the millennium into the high politics of Cabinets, Trade Union Congresses and the Labour Party’s National Executive; and in the complexity of disillusionment effected in their unintentional and in some cases unsocialist ways by Wittgenstein, T. S. Eliot, Freud, Ibsen, Sartre, Brecht and even Oakeshott, who have all helped English Socialists to understand how difficult it is deliberately to achieve anything. And what is to be emphasized is that, whatever English Socialists have achieved, which is quite a lot, and whatever disillusionment they have experienced, which is also quite a lot, they have been armoured against disillusionment by rectitude and ethical virtue, by the social, tactical sensitivity common to Wilson, Gaitskell and Blair, and by the religious assumptions about their duties which were put most clearly by William Morris’s biographer, J. W. Mackail, in Socialism and Politics (1903) where ‘over and above Socialism as an economic doctrine . . . a condition of society . . . and . . . a protest against misery’ stood Socialism as an ‘ideal and a religion’. There is an intellectual history to be written of English Socialism’s encounter with Hinduism in the person of Gandhi, with the Indian ‘secular state’ in the persons of Nehru and Krishna Menon, and with Judaism and post-Judaic Judaism from Laski at one end to Hobsbawm at the other. But the religion that English Socialism encountered most in the course of becoming established, was Christianity and among English Socialists, there have been four reactions to it. At one end there has been the claim that Christianity involves Socialism (or

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Communism) as expounded by Gore, Tawney, Temple, Cripps, Macmurray, Needham, Benn, early MacIntyre and Milbank among Anglicans; by Graham Greene, Longford and early Eagleton among Roman Catholics; and, among the leaders of the Labour Party, by Lansbury, who was a high Anglican, by Henderson who was a Methodist, by Attlee, who was a lowkeyed, Oxford-educated, suburban gentleman, and by Smith and Blair whose Christianity, lower-keyed in the first case than in the second, differentiated them from Kinnock, who was a 1960s secular bore. This is one end. At the opposite end, there has been a demand that Socialism should destroy Christianity and replace it by the new religions which were proposed, in their differing ways, by Shaw, by Wells, by Bertrand Russell, by Havelock Ellis and by Karl Pearson. Third, there has been a demand, or rather the unstated implication which can be unearthed from knockabout platform, intellectual and parliamentary politicians like Dalton, Crosland, Healey and Cunningham that Socialism has to be built out of an average, public-house, football-stadium, local government-corruption or high-table, post-Christian secularity. Finally, there has been the attempt to collapse Christianity into thought or culture which we have found initially in non-Socialist forms in Carlyle, Lecky, Sidgwick, Seeley and Leslie Stephen and which, in different forms, has been a central feature of English Socialism from William Morris onwards. In this and subsequent chapters, it will be discussed through the writings of Morris, MacDonald and Beatrice Webb; of Laski, Crossman and Orwell; of Raymond Williams, who became a hero of the student revolution of the 1960s; and of Terence Eagleton, who is the student revolution of the 1960s, living on, leather-jacketed, prolific and intellectually repulsive, into the professorial Oxford of the twenty-first century. I Morris1 was a critic of ‘commercialism’. He contrasted it with the ‘democratic’ life of the early guilds and the mediaeval union of art and life, and associated it with the disjunction between art and life which was a ‘disease peculiar to modern civilization’. Ruskin’s Nature of Gothic was ‘one of the . . . very few . . . inevitable utterances of the century’ and Morris took on board not only Ruskin’s but also the Idealists’ and the Aesthetes’ sense of disjunction, Thorold Rogers’s sense of rural impoverishment and his own belief that 11

William Morris (1834–96), educated Marlborough School and Exeter College, Oxford. Painter, printer, poet and decorator. Author of The Defence of Guenevere, 1858; The Life and Death of Jason, 1867; The Earthly Paradise, 1868–70; Love is Enough, 1873; The Story of Sigurd Volsung and the Fall of the Niblings, 1877; Hopes and Fears for Art, 1878–81; Lectures on Art, 1882; (with Hyndman) A Summary of the Principles of Socialism, 1884; Socialism, 1886; The Aims of Art, 1887; Signs of Change, 1888; A Dream of John Ball, 1888; A Tale of the House of the Wolfings, 1889; News from Nowhere, 1890; The Socialist Idea of Art, 1891; Gothic Architecture, 1893; The Well at the World’s End, 1896; and Communism, 1903.

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England since the sixteenth century had been scarred by a corruption so fundamental that anger was the only appropriate reaction. In Morris’s mind there was no guilt. There was materialism and an interest in bodily beauty and the open air. There was a concern for domestic design, for (unspecified) rearrangements of the more unpleasant social necessities and for an improvement in the condition of women. In one direction, he looked back to the Icelandic Sagas as ‘intellectual . . . representatives’ of the ‘Gothic family’ and to Iceland as a land holy to the ‘religion of the Germanic race’. In another direction, he looked back to the freedom art had established for itself in Byzantium and amidst the ‘barbarism and confusion’ of the early Middle Ages. Morris’s interpretation of history was crude and derivative but took him to the heart of his doctrine. It was art’s severance from daily life, the replacement of mediaeval man’s ‘pleasure’ in labour by modern man’s ‘pain’ in labour and the prospect of modern men continuing ‘in pain’ until ‘beauty’ once more became ‘labour’s natural and necessary accompaniment’ which were eating the heart out of the modern world. Morris wanted to stop art being the preserve of a ‘clique’, to enlist the working classes under art’s banner, and to bring the poor within the framework of the aesthetic constitution. A social system which made it impossible for ‘all the works of Man’s hands’ to be ‘beautiful’ was immoral, and not only were ‘painting, sculpture, and architecture’ but also the ‘shapes and colour of household goods’, the ‘management of towns . . . and highways’, the ‘arrangement of . . . fields for tillage and pasture’, in other words ‘all the externals of our life’, capable of being made beautiful. The demand for the expansion of art as the central revolution assumed that modern society was corrupt not only because of recessions in the appreciation of art but also because of the dominance of the profit-motive over the motives which led men towards the creation of beauty. The pursuit of profit meant that the poor and the working classes, though they alone did productive work, alone did not benefit from it, that the aristocracy and the middle classes lived parasitically off them, and that the ‘deprivation’ they suffered was rendered odious and acute by the Industrial Revolution’s creation of desires which the savage and the barbarian had never experienced the pain of being deprived of. Morris’s slogans were ‘refinement of life for all’, the ‘life of a gentleman for all’ and the chance for all to enjoy the pleasure of creating beauty by labour. It was only in a reconstructed society, where everyone would ‘work according to his ability’ and no one would ‘shirk his duty’ as a man, that the working classes would resume pleasure in work and acquire that improved housing, education and leisure which ‘the profit-grinding system’ was incapable of supplying, even with the help of machinery. Morris believed, as many Socialists were to believe about subsequent

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economic crises, that foreign competition and the ‘depression of trade’ in the 1880s were bringing the problems of commercialism to a head. He drew lines between the ‘transforming issues’ raised by Socialism and Communism and the Whiggism or Constitutionalism of the parliamentary parties, and he looked forward to the Socialists (or Communists) of the future ‘disrupting Parliament’, destroying the State as the agent of class-predominance, and enabling the working class to become a triumphant army. Morris’s policies included State control, decentralization and the ‘voluntary organization of production’, legal definitions of both minimum wages and maximum prices, and the abolition of ‘all laws enforcing contract’. His ‘creed’ was to be the ‘only religion’; its morality was to drive out ‘theological morality’ and the consecration of commerce as a ‘religion’; and, just as he himself had been ‘born again’ on becoming a Socialist (or Communist), so Socialism (or Communism) would put an end to ‘moral baseness’, help labour to ‘produce wealth’ without having to ‘find a master’ and enable England to govern herself not, as hitherto, through the ‘squabbling’ of political parties but through the liberation which village, municipal, trades and county councils would achieve from political squabbling. Morris sensed a reservoir of upper- and middle-class goodwill which was ‘pushing forward education’, ‘striving to extinguish poverty’ and ‘asserting public rights against private greed’. But he no more believed that the working classes would renounce the struggle against the ‘superior classes’ than that the latter would renounce exploitation of the former; he did not expect the distinction between culture above-stairs and culture below-stairs to be removed easily; and he feared, above all, perpetuation of the division unknown to healthier ages between ‘the people’, who had little interest in art, and artists who had become ‘shy, over-sensitive, narrow . . . cynical or mocking’ and were failing to be – what handicraftsmen ought to be – ‘the only . . . people . . . who were really happy’. Morris believed that Socialism’s immediate work had to be done outside Parliament, and that the people had to be ‘educated . . . by every means . . . that might be effective’. But though he made a profit out of the artefacts in which his doctrine issued and was to leave his mark on many influential thinkers in the future, it was the Webbs who gave Socialism the intellectual strength it began to exert in marrying political thinking to practical government in the early twentieth century.

In the development of Socialism, the Webbs were crucial. They created an argument on its behalf and through the London County Council, the London School of Economics, The New Statesman, the first two Labour cabinets and innumerable governmental committees, became executors of the demands which this argument implied. Municipal government, London education, the

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redistribution of wealth, conditions of work and the length of the working day, the role of women in industry and of the agricultural labourer in rural society, and many other problems which were to become central to twentiethcentury politics, were made central by the conceptions the Webbs entertained as Fabians in the 1890s, as permeators of the political and bureaucratic system before the first World War and as part of the Labour leadership after 1917. The Webbs’ first achievement was to take the random conjunction of sometimes cranky conceptions which constituted Socialism before the 1880s and to impose on it the didactic structure through which it was to break into English thought in the forty years following. They did this as contemporaries of Havelock Ellis, in association, despite hiccups, with Wells, and as close friends of Shaw, all of whom were discussed as enemies of Christianity in volume II of Religion and Public Doctrine. They also did it as critics and colleagues of Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald was seldom a friend of the Webbs and was often an enemy, though he had Sidney Webb in two of his Cabinets and succeeded Webb as MP for Seaham in 1929. Beatrice’s view, expressed during the 1924 government, was that MacDonald was ‘never a Socialist’. The view taken here is that MacDonald contributed to Socialism the deeply felt, emotionally expressed and carefully judged versions which he helped to create on his way to the top. II As Prime Minister in the National Government of 1931, MacDonald2 played a part in the formation of policy, especially foreign policy, but in terms of doctrine was a fading influence. The ‘National Labour’ ideology did not take root, mattered only to his immediate followers and was in any case a windy replica of the Socialism of the 1920s. In the course of the 1920s MacDonald had acquired the limiting precision of a party and parliamentary leader in sight of office. This, however, though the opposite of his wartime experience, was a continuation of the coalition potentialities which had beckoned while he was chairman of the parliamentary Labour Party between 1910 and 1914, of the co-operation he had negotiated with the Liberal Party in 1903 and of the opinions he had expressed in his earliest period as a public figure when Socialism, among other things, was a 12

James Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), educated Drainee School. Lossiemouth. Secretary, then Chairman, of Labour Representation Committee, 1900–14. Labour Member of LCC, 1901–4. MP, 1906–18 and 1922–37. Prime Minister, 1923–4 and 1929–35. Author of What I Saw in South Africa, 1903; The Zollverein and British Industry, 1903; Socialism and Society, 1905; Socialism, 1907; Labour and The Empire, 1907; Socialism and Government, 1909; The Awakening of India, 1910; Margaret Ethel MacDonald, 1912; The Socialist Movement, 1912; Syndicalism, 1913; The Social Unrest, 1913; National Defence, 1917; The Government of India, 1919; Parliament and Revolution, 1919; Parliament and Democracy, 1920; Socialism, Critical and Constructive, 1921; and Wanderings and Excursions, 1925.

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‘hand-to-hand battle’ in which Socialists had to live ‘from hand to mouth’. Between 1923 and 1931, he had lived from hand to mouth, displaying a pragmatic capability and proving by what he did not do as much as by what he did do that he was what he had always said he was – a conventional parliamentary politician. This phase of MacDonald’s life was not less important because it was to end in tears. It applied the propaganda he had been conducting before 1914 in describing the transformation that would be needed in theory if Socialism was to be made acceptable in practice. MacDonald was an advocate of theory and of Socialism as the central theory in British thought. He advocated it as author, orator and journalist – indeed, as a man-of-the-world who had no more time for ‘the professors’ than Salisbury had had but who wished to establish Socialism’s appositeness to the modern intellectual situation. MacDonald was self-taught, lacked academic credentials and had been prevented from lecturing at the London School of Economics because Sidney Webb thought he was not good enough. By 1914, nevertheless, he had written ten books which, though lacking the thoroughness of the Webbs’ books, expounded a new ‘ethic of the State’ which would bring about a ‘higher and more human stage of evolution’. And the question we have to ask is, did this new ethic – the ethic of Socialism which citizens could be said, in a Kantian or Rousseauvian sense, to be really willing – did this new ethic have any significant connection with Christianity? MacDonald was educated at the Scottish Free Church School in Lossiemouth, worked for a few months at the age of nineteen in an Anglican boys’ club in Bristol and in later life when in Scotland on a Sunday went to the Scottish Free Church. But he began early to be influenced by the religion of nature and by literature as an expression of the higher feelings. Having written short stories and a novel and contributed both to newspapers and to Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography, he then tangled himself in a crossfire between Swedenborg and Renan and in the mid-1890s began describing himself as a Unitarian. At the same time he announced that the ‘chief motive’ for future ‘democratic advance’ should be an ever-sharpening ‘ethical’ intelligence for which personal and public liberty would involve the most ‘sacred’ of human aspirations. This, in effect, was to be MacDonald’s religion for the rest of his life. But it was to be complicated by his wife’s Christianity and by his own search for a religious pedigree to go with his political pedigree. MacDonald’s political pedigree included the assumption he was to develop between 1914 and 1918, and was to find almost respectable in the war-weariness of the 1920s, that armies and fleets should disappear, that a League of Nations, though a necessary step on the way to world government, would achieve nothing if run by an ‘international committee of the governing classes’

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and that only an ‘international Labour diplomacy’ could be trusted to get the best out of a ‘democratic German Republic’ and a ‘negotiated peace’. He held commonplace views about ‘the higher tasks of the white races’, shared Salisbury’s view of ‘the financier’ as someone that ‘no state could allow its international relations to be decided by’ and condemned Milner’s, Curzon’s and Chamberlain’s imperialisms for being marred by ‘mailed fists’, ‘racial superiority’ and the pursuit of private profit; and by a failure to understand that the Empire did not have to remain a ‘perquisite’ of the ‘rich classes in England’. In a contribution that he made in 1900 to a volume entitled Ethical Democracy, MacDonald argued, that the Conservative and Liberal Parties had been highly skilful in inducing apathy, thwarting idealism and preserving ‘some of the most degrading forms of class ascendancy’ under working-class enfranchisement. ‘Nothing had become clearer’ since 1886 than that ‘class government’ was being restored, that ‘democratic electors’ under electioneering agents were as ‘docile’ as ‘potwallopers . . . under a patron’, and that ‘influences’ were at work – particularly ‘plutocratic’ influences – which were ‘subverting the democratic instinct’. MacDonald’s Socialism both was and was not élitist and authoritarian. On the one hand, the Socialist State was to ‘think for the whole’ and ‘force the individual to be free’. On the other hand, it was to be neither centralizing nor confiscatory, was to be a friend of the child, the mother and the family and, by ‘adapting each organ to its natural function’, was to create an ‘intellectual and scientific atmosphere’ that would be ‘pregnant with . . . improvement’. More emolliently still, it would protect the middle classes from the ‘immoralities . . . of a wealthy plutocracy’ and would extract from the bourgeoisification of ‘the worker’ a proof that the ‘professional or middle class’ and the ‘working or lower class’ were ‘complementarities of each other’. MacDonald believed in ‘one nation’ and in the possibility that even a ‘bourgeois’ state could rise above material interests and prejudices. What is uncertain is whether he expected Socialism to acquire teeth, and whether the ‘lumbering coach of parliamentary progress’ would be capable of transforming material interests and prejudices. This was MacDonald’s political pedigree; his religious pedigree included not only Milton and Cromwell and the ‘masculine strength’ of puritanism, but also the Scottish Kirk as embodiment of the ‘Scottish national genius’ and the Evangelical movement as predecessor of Socialism in England. MacDonald knew that some of the early Socialists had rejected religion. But he excused them on the ground that the only religion they had known had been a ‘hypocritical, bourgeois . . . weapon for keeping the poor quiet’. Modern Socialists, by contrast, so far from being hostile to religion, objected only to credal and dogmatic religion, to the religion of wealth and respectability and to the ‘set formulae and . . . clockwork methods’ of orthodox, ecclesiastical Christianity.

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In Edwardian Evangelicalism MacDonald sensed a recession from dogma and an evolution of ‘individualist morality’ into the ‘social morality of Socialism’. He asserted that the ‘competitive system’ was ‘irreconcilable with Christianity’, that ‘the man through whom Socialism was to come’ was the man ‘in whose intelligence religion . . . would have a dominating influence’ and that ‘the Pluto’ which ‘was heaving beneath society’ and ‘sending tremors’ through it during the first phase of Labour electoral success after 1920, was ‘the spirit to which we do homage as Christianity’. MacDonald’s view of the Church was that it was an ‘organization of the community for moral and spiritual purposes’, but that its influence had been outlasted by the influence of the Christian spirit. And it would not have been surprising if this had led him into a secularized Presbyterianism or secularized Anglicanism. In relation to the Kirk, there are hints of this, though highly residual ones. In relation to the Church of England there are no hints. MacDonald associated the Church of England with ‘snobbery’ and the ‘spirit of commercialism against which Sir Thomas More had complained in the sixteenth century’. His criticism of Liberal disestablishmentarianism was that it did not go far enough, and did not believe in ‘freedom of thought’ because Liberal Nonconformity would not let it. In relating Christianity to ‘religion of the true kind’ he was at his most explicit in discussing India. Like many English politicians, MacDonald fell in love with India when he went there in 1909, and published two large books about it in 1910 and 1919. In these he criticized the hill-station mentality, Curzon’s partition of Bengal as the trigger to Bengali terrorism and the incapacity of the crammed beneficiaries of competitive examinations who ruled British India to maintain the close relations with Indian society which were maintained by the upper-class men-of-the-world who represented Britain in princely India. He agreed that the future would ‘belong to nationalism’ but argued that, since British sovereignty was going to remain, the British should become ‘more hesitating in asserting the superiority of their materialist civilization’ and should try harder to understand that Indian nationalism and civilization were religious. In discussing South Africa during the Boer War, MacDonald had urged respect not only for the Boer tradition, but also for the native African traditions, for which separate development was appropriate since the mixing of the races, which would normally increase ‘virility’, would not do so where ‘blood’ was diverse. In discussing India, he abandoned these racist or eugenicist assumptions, which he shared with the Webbs, discussed the Islamic tradition on the one hand and the Hindu tradition on the other, and welcomed the fact that Christian missions, which had originally attacked Hindu belief and provoked a Hindu counter-attack, were now abandoning credal Christianity in favour of a social Christianity which was indistinguishable from Westernization. As an enemy of orthodoxy, MacDonald could consistently have welcomed

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this replacement of Christ’s ‘body’ by his ‘spirit’, as in one major respect he did – by supporting the emancipation of the Untouchables. In general, he did not. He disparaged the Christian convert as a hanger-on of imperialism, and assumed that modern Hinduism would assimilate modern Christianity as thoroughly as Brahminical Hinduism had assimilated Syrian Christianity in southern India. MacDonald gave sympathetic accounts of the initial Muslim mistrust and eventual Muslim acceptance of Westernization, and of the Persian and Turkish revolutions as stimulants of Muslim political consciousness. But his primary sympathies were with the ‘Bengali Babu’, with historic Hinduism and with the effect which the rise of Japan was having on them. MacDonald believed that Hinduism ‘penetrated’ Indian life as ‘consciousness penetrated the body’, that to the ‘Hindu faithful’ India was a ‘sacred vision’ like the vision which Heaven had been to the Christian saint, and that even to the Buddhist or the Muslim she was the ‘temple . . . of his spiritual culture’. In Indian terms, indeed, he was a Hindu latitudinarian, even when the Hinduism he was praising was not latitudinarian, and he believed that Indian nationalism’s rediscovery of Indian art, literature and religion was replicating Socialism’s rediscovery of the historical spirit in Europe. MacDonald recognized that terrorists were as important as Tagore, and that Bengali terrorism in particular was heedless of consequences. He expressed revulsion as well as sympathy, saw ‘reason . . . being dazzled . . . into blindness’, but related the ‘stormy strife of today’ to the ‘calm decrees of the Eternal’. In the terrorist’s addiction to bombs as well as prayers, he saw the ‘ecstasy and self-surrender of the Bhagavad Gita’ being used as ‘the most awful of the Old Testament passages’ had been used by the ‘austere fanatics of . . . Scottish Covenanting . . . history’. MacDonald’s later rhetoric was notoriously without direction. But this was not so in his most constructive phase when his rhetoric was rooted in his ethics, when he assumed that it was possible to have an integrated, ethical, infinitely latitudinarian spirituality as the motivating force of State-action in England or India, and when the emotions he expressed and the assumptions he made were the emotions and assumptions of a substantial slice of the educated classes in a period of religious uncertainty. MacDonald’s religion was a religion of hope – an attempt to show how moral romanticism could be suffused throughout life. For Sidney Webb religion was not a problem, or had been solved as a problem by rejecting it before he began to write.

Sidney Webb was a Cockney – the son of a Millite hairdresser – whose family sent him to Germany to learn German in preparation for a life in business. As a clerk in the City of London, he took to examinations as Gladstone and

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Macaulay had taken to examinations, becoming a civil servant in the Colonial Office, winning the Whewell Scholarship in International Law to Trinity College, Cambridge (which he did not take up) and taking a London University law degree before being called to the Bar in 1886. Webb was brought up, rather vaguely, as an Evangelical, became a follower of Huxley and Spencer and for a short time, while in the Colonial Office, was a Comtean. By the time Shaw introduced him to the Fabian Society in his middle twenties, he had once and for all become an agnostic. Webb was the Macaulay of Socialism as William Temple was the Macaulay of Anglicanism. He had Macaulay’s omniscience and, when young, was as cocksure and abrasive as Macaulay had been. His writings were statements of a mind which had been made up, had no desire to be unmade and found in the past the confirmation it required of the certainties that it had. Webb’s past began with the economic history of the nineteenth century as an ‘almost continuous record of the progress of Socialism’. This was the core of his earliest teaching – that the ‘sanguinary conflict of the streets’, the ‘homespun virtue’ of the ‘ideal community’, and the ‘joint-stock individualism’ of the ‘factory workshop’ – all respected Socialist archetypes – were incapable of interpreting the world, that what had happened since 1789 was that democracy had destroyed the ‘nexus’ by which feudal society had been held together and that what had to happen next was the absorption of the ‘isolated individual’, as Huxley and Ritchie had begun to absorb him, into a ‘new synthesis’ which would prove, whatever Maine might say, that ‘the workers’ had ‘inevitably’ to become ‘the rulers’. Webb was warning the rich of the threat the poor would present if handled carelessly. But he was also pointing out that a fifth of London’s population died in the workhouse or the hospital, that ‘in some rural districts every aged labourer was a pauper’ and that the freer the ‘free labourer’ became, the more he became a ‘landless stranger in his own country’. In all this he was emotional as well as analytical. Webb’s rhetoric was not about whether ‘the existing social order should be changed’ but about how to change man from being the ‘victim’ into being ‘the midwife . . . of the . . . womb of time’. It was government’s business to decide ‘what kind of fitness’ should survive in the ‘struggle for existence’, how a social system based on ‘the maximum inequality over one’s neighbours’ should give way to a social system based on ‘salaried public service’ and whether the ‘natural leaders’ of the nation could properly permit ‘poverty . . . repression and injustice to go on breeding . . . brutality . . . revenge . . . and social cataclysm’. Webb raised no objection to ‘liberal treatment’ of the ‘present generation of proprietors’. Neither was he proposing a give-away to the poor. His aim was vague and uninviting – to put an end to the ‘tribute’ paid by ‘the workers’ to ‘the drones’, not by ‘sharing . . . the tribute . . . out’ among the workers but

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by reclaiming it for ‘the community’, substituting ‘consciously-regulated coordination’ for ‘internecine competition’, and co-operating with both the Liberal Party, where Haldane was unable to prevent disappointment later, and the Conservative Party, where Balfour provided a certain measure of treacherous reassurance. The Webbs3 continued throughout to believe that the historic objectives of trades unionism were as they had described them in Industrial Democracy in 1897. But by the 1920s, they were addressing a working-class movement which had arrived and needed to be instructed in the fine-tuning involved when its members’ interests as producers conflicted with their interests as consumers. They looked forward to trade unions acquiring the professional authority which had been exercised by the middle classes in the respectable professions in the past; the establishment of a ‘social’ parliament and bureaucracy to supplement the political parliament and bureaucracy; and the conversion of owners and managers into ‘strictly regulated intellectual piece-workers’ remunerated according to ‘results ascertained . . . by accurate scientific measurement’. At the highest level, they looked forward to a restoration of the ‘manners . . . and . . . humane courtesy’ which were the preserve of ‘academic families . . . old-fashioned vocations and . . . ministers of religion in . . . poor denominations’. ‘The disastrous assumption on which the Capitalist System was based . . . that man in society . . . should be inspired in the exercise of his function by the passion for riches’, went a ridiculous passage, was a morbid obsession into which Western Europe passed less than three centuries ago, and out of which it is now emerging. The assumption was never accepted by the learned professions, nor, in Great Britain, by the typical civil servants. It never even penetrated to the bulk of the manual workers, who were saved from the assumption by the fact that, as a class, they had only the smallest possible opportunity of acquiring riches . . . We think that the tide has now turned. The rapid growth of the consumer’s Co-operative Movement on the one hand, and of State and Municipal enterprise on the other, has given the community a large and constantly growing class of administrators and technicians who are debarred by economic circumstances and by professional honour from making profit out of each day’s transactions. From these men and women society is accustomed to ask and to receive assiduous and honest public service in return for their accustomed livelihood. It is 13

Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield (1859–1947), educated Birkbeck Institute and City of London College. Civil Service, 1878–91. Member LCC, 1891–1910. Cabinet Minister, 1924 and 1929–31. Author of Socialism in England, 1889; (with Cox) The Eight Hour Day, 1891; The Reform of London, 1892; London Education, 1904; etc. Beatrice Webb, 1st Baroness Passfield (1858–1943), educated at home. Author of The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain, 1899; ed. The Case For A National Minimum Wage, 1913; My Apprenticeship, 1926 and (ed. Drake) Our Partnership, 1948; etc. Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Authors of The History Of Trade Unionism, 1894; Industrial Democracy, 1897; The History of Liquor Licensing In England, 1903; English Local Government, 1906–29; ed. A Break-up Of The Poor Law, 1909; The Public Organization Of The Labour Market, 1909; English Poor Law Policy, 1910; The State And The Doctor, 1910; The Prevention of Destitution, 1911; A Constitution For The Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, 1920; The Decay of Capitalist Civilization, 1923; Methods of Social Study, 1932; and Soviet Communism, 1935.

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this assumption of honest public service that, with a better organization of industry, we hope and expect to generalize. (Sidney and Beatrice Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, 1920, pp. 350–1)

III Up to 1914, whatever their difficulties with permeation, the Webbs supposed themselves to be on the wave of the future. They then experienced the First World War, world economic depression and the devastating defeat of the Labour Party at the General Election of 1931, from which they drew the conclusion that Western civilization was doomed, that Soviet Marxism was to be the leading idea of the future and that it was necessary to understand Marxism as a religion. There is no reason to suppose that Sidney did not find in the Soviet Union as admirable a demonstration of what he wanted as Beatrice did. But Sidney’s religion was simple; he was a Frazerian free-thinker who thought of religion as a sociological artefact and treated Beatrice’s religion as an eccentric facet of the fact that she was a woman. Beatrice’s religion began with schoolgirl Christianity, a phase of Anglican Evangelicalism after a very deliberate decision to be confirmed and a period of admiration for the ‘Christian devotion’ she encountered as a sociological investigator among her poorer relatives in the North of England. It was complicated by her family’s willingness to permit doubt, and by the doubts she began to entertain about the Atonement and immortality, about Christianity’s emphasis on ‘individual’ salvation and about its superiority to the other religions of the world. She flirted with Buddhism, with Spencer’s First Principles and with Roman Catholicism. She did not, however, become a Buddhist or a Roman Catholic, decided that Spencer’s religion was ‘dreary in sorrow and ill-health’ and on turning her mind to Comtean positivism, became highly resistant to it. Throughout her life she affirmed the power of prayer, the goodness of God and the indispensability of churches, doubted whether a woman could ‘live satisfactorily’ in agnosticism, and, even at her most agnostic, looked to religion to supply ‘consolation for grief’ and ‘stimulation for action’. Beatrice’s religion was intermittent and was accompanied by contempt for fashionable, or respectable, Christianity. But, except when she attacked it herself, she disliked hearing Christianity attacked – by Marx’s Jewish daughter, for example, or when Zionist attacks on Sidney’s Palestine policy as Colonial Secretary in the 1929 MacDonald government, made her indignant on behalf of the Holy Land of Christianity against the Marxist Mongols who constituted the Jewish immigration. Beatrice disliked ‘flunkey Anglicanism’, and found it ‘ugly and distressing’ to observe the ‘rotting away’ of the Church of England. But she found herself slipping back into conformity with it and often wished that she had remained

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a ‘conforming member’ of it. She knew and admired a number of Anglican Bishops, when she also admired the ‘page of puritanism’ which she read in Arthur Henderson, she was merely broadening her Anglicanism as many more conventional Anglicans of her generation had broadened theirs. In completing the latitudinarian picture, she justified ‘theosophical ethics’ by its results, and praised, while also fearing, the Salvation Army (which she much preferred to Buchman and Moral Rearmament). Like MacDonald’s, Beatrice’s religion was a high kind of latitudinarianism. On the one hand, the ‘words in which Christians clothed their religious aspirations’ were unattractive and Christ himself was inferior to the Buddha, Plato and St Francis. On the other hand, if the ‘natural life’ was to have its ‘consciously religious side’ as she thought it should, then it had to transcend rationalism and selfishness, to combine ‘metaphysics, music and mental hygiene’, and to provide, as Holy Communion provided, both ritual and ‘symbolical expression of . . . the power of self-sacrifice for the good of the community’. She found ‘the lie of materialism more . . . false and . . . pernicious’ than anything which was to be found in Christianity. Beatrice was a Victorian who reacted as Gilbert Murray reacted to the mind of the 1920s, rejecting its ‘animal’ conception of sexuality, ‘clinging’ to the thought that ‘physical . . . appetites’ were inferior to ‘spiritual and intellectual’ appetites and retaining a preference for a clearly defined sexual code over the ‘free love’ which had accompanied the ‘break up’ of Christian conventions about conduct. In identifying an ‘entrenched Christianity’ which she believed the English more or less hoped would always be around, provided they did not have to do anything about it, she wondered in 1911 whether a political party ‘based on religion and applied science’ might not have a wider appeal than a ‘Socialist party . . . with a worked-out philosophy . . . of Socialism’. Unlike MacDonald, Beatrice supported British intervention in the 1914 war, but believed that the ‘spirit’ which had caused the war would only be halted by ‘world-suffering and . . . conversion’. Liberal pacifism did not impress her; neither did she believe that ‘social salvation’ would be achieved through the ‘dissidence of dissent’. She wanted discipline as well as dissent, became fearful for ‘the race and the universe’ and, for the first time since becoming a sociological investigator, doubted whether she had the ‘strength and elasticity’ to understand the issues. Beatrice’s conversion to sociological investigation thirty years earlier had been a facet of her failure to marry, and of the need to keep sane while keeping house for her dying father. The Booths, the great social investigators, were close friends, Spencer was a close companion; and Joseph Chamberlain, on the way from being the radical leader to becoming Colonial Secretary in a Conservative government, a suitor. She studied psychology and mathematics and read many of the books which an intellectual – not only a lady intellectual – would have read in the 1880s. The outcome of study, and the heart of

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the matter, was a mystical sense of the vastness of modern humanity, St Francis’s wish to go among it and to know it, and a determination to achieve significance for herself by discovering its significance. This was put in terms of a decision to have books rather than babies, and of the conflict she had suffered between her conscience and her feelings for Joseph Chamberlain who, if he had invited marriage, which he had not done, would have insisted, she believed, on her ‘selling her soul’ to him politically. Destiny approached through a sense of instrumentality to a ‘greater power’, through the connection she felt between the ‘spirit of religion and the special work’ she had to do on behalf of society, and through the duty she assumed of identifying herself, as John Stuart Mill had identified himself, with the ‘whole intelligence of the country’. Destiny was arrived at with the perception that the ‘higher grounds . . . of political action’ depended on the ‘facts’ to which they were to be applied. Beatrice’s celebrated concern with facts was not therefore a simple positivist concern, even when she thought that it should have been. On the contrary, it was rooted in sadness and sympathy as much as in ‘cold-blooded enquiry’. As she walked the crowded streets of London in the 1880s watching the faces of the men and women who pushed past her, ‘lined, furrowed, and sometimes contorted by work, struggle and passion’, a Spencerian or Schopenhauerian pessimism wondered whether ‘all this desire and pain, this manifold feeling and thought’ was anything more than a ‘condition of force and matter, phantom-like forms’ which had been ‘built up’ in order to be ‘destroyed’. Beatrice was in her late twenties when her destiny became fixed as Spencerian individualism and the Booths’ belief in philanthropy were replaced by the ‘communal or state ownership of Capital and Land’ as the only tolerable form of competition and the best way of preventing the propertied classes protecting themselves against competition. Once settled into sociological investigation in London, and even more when married the year after the publication of her first book, she began her lifelong contribution to the social transformation at which she and Sidney aimed to assist in all their writings. After the failure of permeation before 1914 and MacDonald’s failure to build on the work which she and Sidney had done for the Labour Party under Henderson’s leadership since 1917, she moved through the belief that Labour’s decision to accept office as a minority party in the House of Commons in 1924 had been premature, to the further, perhaps resentful, belief that loyalty had now to be given to the civilization over the water. For the Webbs to be prognosticating about civilization was nothing new. But whereas previously Beatrice had looked forward to the replacing of capitalism by Socialism, she now reached the conclusion, of which her autobiography, My Apprenticeship, was the announcement – that Matthew Arnold’s ‘communion’ of man’s ‘soul’ with the ‘spirit that makes for righteousness’ and an ‘authoritative ethics associated with the spirit of love in the universe’, were

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the only routes by which ‘values’ could be ‘raised’ or behaviour ‘ennobled’. It was her growing faith in the ‘truth-seeking’ of the ‘scientific mind’ and the ‘personal holiness’ of the ‘religious life’ which were to turn My Apprenticeship into the vast work she and Sidney then wrote under the title Soviet Communism, in which the Soviet Union differed from the rest of the world by reason of its ‘strictly disciplined vocation of leadership’, its Samurai or Jesuit dedication and the opportunity it had been given, by the ignorance and illiteracy of the ‘mass of the population’ and the ‘abandonment of their posts by nearly all the members of the governing classes’, to match the ‘voluntary mass-conversions’ to Christianity effected in Dark Age Russia by ‘voluntary mass-conversions’ to the ‘creed of Lenin’. The Webbs did not, it is pretty certain, observe any voluntary massconversions to the creed of Lenin. In Soviet Communism, they gave their reasons for believing that the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was the proper successor to feudalism, would share science’s antipathy to the ‘disease of orthodoxy’. What the Webbs wanted ultimately for Russia was the ‘making known’ to every citizen of ‘all that is known of the facts of the universe’; what they thought they saw for the time being in Russia was freedom of discussion among ‘thinkers’, ‘unfettered communication between thinkers’ and Matthew Arnold’s caesura between thinkers and the ‘unthinking public’. And they looked forward to a ‘new type’ of ‘non-coercive’ state through which the ‘people themselves’ would operate a ‘varied texture of . . . collective organization by the universal membership of which the interests and desires of all different sections of the community would be fulfilled . . . to a degree never yet attained in any other community’. What the Webbs admired most about the Soviet Union was a local variant of Samuel Smiles’s (or Mrs. Thatcher’s) ‘gospel of work’, its emphasis on socially useful behaviour and recognition for the first time in world-history that, since the individual was indebted to the community for what he was, he had a duty to render ‘constant service’ to it. And this, they believed, had extended to the Russian nation and would demonstrate to the whole world, far better than the Comintern would ever do, the dedication and cultivation which could be achieved by a Marxist intelligentsia. The Webbs went to a good deal of trouble to sell Soviet Communism and, beyond their need for money in old age, attached a positively missionary significance to it. It is still the case that it was only really in her diary that Beatrice disclosed its significance for her. From one point of view Beatrice’s diary in the 1920s and 1930s was a geriatric rambling about England’s ‘decadence’ by comparison with Gandhi, Hitler and the new Japan. From another point of view it expressed a Victorian regard for the ‘virile cultures’ of Russia and the United States and for the ‘clash of creeds’ through which their ‘stupendous social experiments’ were

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challenging the world. In coming down on the side of the Soviet Union, Beatrice did not pretend that it was a paradise. But she explained and excused, and finally affirmed that Soviet Communism was responding to the loss of religious belief suffered by Russian intellectuals in much the way in which Italian Fascism was responding to the loss of religious belief among Italian intellectuals, and that the organization of ‘production and consumption’ for the ‘common good . . . without the incentive of profit to the Capitalist or the lash of starvation to the wage-earner’, which she looked to finding in Russia when she went there in 1932, was what she and Sidney had been talking about before 1914, with ‘creed-oligarchy’ in place of permeation to make it work. Beatrice found this an odd conclusion for a Fabian to have come to. But she was in no doubt that she was right, and that ‘the spotlight of intriguing difference’ between the live creation of Soviet Russia and the dead body of the Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, which she and Sidney had published in 1920, was ‘the presence . . . of a religious order . . . as the determining factor in the life of a great nation’. ‘The Communist Party’, went one of her statements at this time, with its strict discipline, its vows of obedience and poverty . . . and the expectation that communists will be puritan in their personal conduct . . . and . . . not waste energy, time or health on sex, food or drink . . . will in fact . . . be the exact opposite of the D. H. Lawrence cult of sex which . . . I detest.

After the excitements of Beatrice’s diary, Soviet Communism is an anticlimax – a bland, or boring, interpretation, or misinterpretation, of the facts of Russian life leading to a bland, or boring, statement, or misstatement, about the nature of the Russian Revolution. But it is not as an account of the Russian Revolution, let alone of Stalinism, that Soviet Communism is interesting. What is interesting is that more than any other work which has appeared under the banner of Socialism in England, it embodies those assumptions about the complicated relations which will obtain between Christianity and any successor religion that were contributed not only by the Webbs and MacDonald but also by many other Socialist thinkers to the instauration of the post-Christian consensus in Britain. IV British general elections are not always intellectually significant. The General Election of 1931 was highly significant, not only for the Webbs. It indicated that the Labour tactic of the previous three decades had been a failure and that something sterner and stiffer, and more in line with contemporary thought, was needed. This, certainly, was Laski’s conclusion. When Laski4 died at the age of fifty-seven in 1950, he had spent thirty years 14

Harold Joseph Laski (1893–1950), educated Manchester Grammar School and New College, Oxford. Lecturer at McGill University, 1914–16 and at Harvard University, 1916–20. Lecturer, then Professor, at London School of Economics, 1920–50. Chairman

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at the London School of Economics, had taught a large number of Labour MPs and ministers and had been a leading member of both the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. Having begun to write early, he had been a prolific journalist and had written six, and published five, substantial books, as well as occasional academic articles before succeeding Graham Wallas as Professor of Political Science in 1926. Laski’s fame began after the fall of the Labour government in 1931, was confirmed by his involvement alongside John Strachey in Gollancz’s Left Book Club and continued right up to his death at the point at which Attlee’s Socialism had run its course nineteen years later. Having made himself into a prolific publicist on behalf of the Labour Party and having been elected to the Labour Party’s National Executive in 1936, he achieved an expensive form of fame through unsuccessful litigation against a Conservative attack while he was Party Chairman during the General Election of 1945. Up to the Russo-German Pact, which he attacked when it was made in 1939, and again when Soviet sympathies became fashionable after the German invasion of the Soviet Union two years later, Laski’s Socialism invoked Soviet Communism as the answer to continental dictatorship. Laski was less gullible than the Webbs. But he used Soviet Marxism as a criticism of the Western world and, when first Hitler and then Franco joined Mussolini as targets for attack, made it his leading theme, since ‘men who were passionately attached to a way of life’ could rarely be ‘persuaded’ to ‘abandon it’, that the ‘class-relations’ of Western society had become ‘incompatible . . . with social peace’. In the 1930s Laski compared the contemporary rich with the French aristocracy before 1789, presented Socialism’s rational and moral superiority as the cause of capitalism’s determination to subjugate reason and morality to the rifle and the jackboot, and predicted a ‘new dark age’ in which there was no reason to assume that the worst would not happen. Like John Strachey, Laski taught that the era of capitalistic expansion was over, that contraction had removed the one feature which had made capitalism attractive, and that capitalism’s failure made it desirable to take a new look at the Liberalism with which it had been associated since the seventeenth century. His conclusions were that capitalism’s aim was to use State power to of Labour Party, 1945. Author of Studies In The Problem of Sovereignty, 1917; Authority In The Modern State, 1919; Political Thought In England From Locke To Bentham, 1920; The Foundations of Sovereignty, 1921; A Grammar of Politics, 1925; Communism, 1927; The Dangers of Obedience, 1930; Liberty in The Modern State, 1930; Studies In Law and Politics, 1932; Democracy in Crisis, 1933; The State In Theory And Practice, 1935; Political Theory In The Later Middle Ages in Cambridge Medieval History, 1936; The Rise of European Liberalism, 1936; Parliamentary Government In England, 1938; The Danger Of Being A Gentleman, 1939; The American Presidency, 1940; Where Do We Go From Here?, 1940; The Strategy Of Freedom, 1941; Reflections On The Revolution Of Our Time, 1943; Faith, Reason And Civilization, 1944; The American Democracy, 1948 and Trade Unions In A New Society, 1949.

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‘compel acceptance’ of existing class-relationships, that the war against Russia in 1919 had been the beginning of a world war which was still going on and that democracy and Liberalism could be defended only by ‘such a unity of the Left forces . . . as would leave the chances of a Capitalist victory . . . unattainable’. Laski illustrated the State’s partiality by reference to anti-New Deal sentiment in the United States, the ‘Right’s . . . hostility to Democracy’ in France and the ‘barbaric overthrow of democratic institutions’ in Germany, Italy, Japan and South America. His clinching example was Britain, where Baldwinian freedom meant capitalist freedom, where the army at the Curragh in 1914 and Birkenhead and Austen Chamberlain in the 1920s, had been willing to stimulate ‘civil disruption’ and where, unless something was done soon, the struggle could easily end as it had ended in Germany. The struggle for the possession of State power – on the part of the rich in order to defend wealth, privilege and the profit-motive, on the part of the poor in order to assert their moral rights – was a fundamental struggle, with the poor developing a ‘revolutionary’ mentality against the rich, and the rich failing to adopt Arnold’s admonition to ‘eschew greed’ and ‘prefer equality’. There was, however, no suggestion that the rich were going to capitulate, the suggestion, on the contrary, being that they believed in, and were good at justifying, the moral desirability of their privileges, and, with the bourgeoisification of the ‘bank clerk . . . shop assistant and . . . office-worker’, had driven so deep a wedge into working-class unity that a ‘thoroughgoing Socialist victory’ would ‘mark an epoch in the history of the world’. In the early 1930s Laski was criticizing the diffidence and respectability of the Labour Party, and its insensitivity to the truth that ‘every revolution . . . revealed a mass of unsuspected talent for the business of government’. The next Labour government might have to ‘suspend the constitution’, effect a ‘radical transformation’ of Parliament, and show ‘unceasing vigilance’ not only towards the judiciary, the civil service and the armed forces but also towards anything the monarchy might do to repeat what King George V was alleged to have done to keep the Labour Party out of office in 1931. In the Soviet Union by contrast he found ‘discipline and authority’, the new institutions through which Vishinsky – the Russian Bentham – was enabling the legal system to do what the English legal system was unable to do in England and a pervasive ‘contempt’ for both ‘the profit-motive’ and Russia’s historic institutions. Laski’s Socialism was sustained by informed discussion of English, French and American politics and of the history of European political thought. It was also, like the Webbs’, Shaw’s and Strachey’s Socialism, a response to the ‘decline’ of civilization and a specification of the changes that would be needed if civilization was to be reconstructed. In the last phase of his life he was to be full of grandeur about civilization’s future, expressing the preference which

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Toynbee was expressing against the United States in the Cold War and, in a posthumous work published in 1951, excusing Stalinist illiberality on the ground he had been offering since at least 1927 – that its purpose was religious.

Laski’s family was Jewish, his paternal grandfather, who founded the family fortunes, was a Polish immigrant who had lived under the Czarist Empire and, by the time Laski was born, was playing a leading part in commercial life and the Jewish community in Manchester. At Manchester Grammar School Laski’s Macaulayesque memory was turned on to Plato, Swinburne and Byron. On marrying a Gentile wife who was a gymnast, a Fabian eugenicist and a feminist, Laski was disciplined by his family and bribed to live apart from her. He worked under Pearson in London, wrote a certain amount of eugenicist journalism and was singled out as a eugenic phenomenon by Galton himself. At New College, Oxford, an incompetent year reading the natural sciences was followed by two years absorbing Maitland, Figgis, Gierke and Acton under guidance from H. A. L. Fisher, Murray and Ernest Barker. In addition, he became an advocate of Jewish assimilation, and wrote an unpublished novel entitled The Chosen People which rejected Judaism much as Froude’s Nemesis of Faith had rejected Tractarianism sixty years earlier. At Oxford Laski was a success at the Union, was involved in the Suffragette movement, and became acquainted, through his future wife, with Lansbury (who had founded The Daily Herald in 1912). On leaving Oxford he became a syndicalist and was writing syndicalist leading articles for Lansbury when the First World War began. At Harvard, where he went (before the introduction of conscription) in 1915, he studied law at the same time as he taught politics, aroused antipathy by his sympathy for the Boston police-strike of 1919 and was book-review editor, and wrote Maitland-style articles, in the Harvard Law Review. In his first published books, in 1917 and 1919, his subjects were the disruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, the Oxford Movement up to Manning’s conversion in 1851 and Roman Catholic political theory in nineteenth century England, France and Germany. These books, along with an unwritten book about fifteenth-century Conciliarism, were Laski’s statements about the legal pluralism of which he gave further accounts in The Foundations of Sovereignty (1921). They were important, however, not only as contributions to the historical study of law but also because of the attention they gave to religion. From time to time, in the wake of Weber and the young Trevor-Roper, Laski was to explain religion away in non-religious terms. In general he respected religion’s autonomy, partly no doubt because of his upbringing, also because, for many historians of his generation, modern history had begun when canonism and mediaeval theocracy had disintegrated.

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In Authority in the Modern State Laski touched on the idea that political power was a manifestation of economic interests. But the main arguments in that work, and the only arguments in Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, were that Austin and Hegel had misrepresented the nature of law, that State authority was not the only authority and that there was a need to theorize other authorities as well. Laski combined a radical, or Jewish, interloper’s distaste for entrenched establishments with a Namierite desire to be thought an insider in an influential establishment. He was both raw and simple, and subtle and sensible, about this. He was especially sensible in his first book in using Chalmers, Manning, Newman and de Maistre against the ‘mystic monism’ which Hegelianism claimed on behalf of states. The significance of these arguments was twofold. On the one hand they diminished the State, and in particular the State of Hegel, Bismarck, Bosanquet and Bradley. On the other hand they rooted State authority in the wills of individuals, and identified the obedience given to Churches with the obedience given to voluntary or ‘group-willed’ associations within States, as well as to the Papacy which (like the League of Nations later) was important because it operated across States. What Laski admired about the writers he discussed was their reserve about the State and their ‘guelfic’ or ‘mediaeval’ insistence that English Anglicanism, French Gallicanism, Scottish Presbyterianism and Prussian Protestantism lacked the authority which their advocates claimed for them. He acknowledged the genuineness of de Maistre’s and Bismarck’s Christianity and the integrity of their political intentions. But he pointed out that both were pursuing the Austinian or Hegelian chimera, that German unification under the Prussian King resembled Catholic unification under the Pope and that the Bismarckian conception of the Church as a ‘police department of the State’ was not very different from the mediaeval conception of the State as ‘the police department of the Church’. And just as de Maistre’s ‘atavistic . . . theocratic’ insistence on Catholicism’s role as ‘keystone of the arch of the social structure’ had added one more ‘wreck’ to the ‘infallible systems’ with which history had been strewn, so Bismarck’s ‘journey to Canossa’ after the failure of the Kulturkampf had proved that men belonged to a variety of groups of which the State was only one. In developing this argument in Authority in the Modern State, Laski gave respectful attention to Bonald’s, Brunetière’s, Bourget’s and Maurras’s reactionary identification of democracy with ‘moral error,’ to the equation they made between ‘individualism’ and ‘anarchy’ and to the conception they entertained of the ‘sanctions of authority’ as alone being able to guide the ‘individual soul’ across the ‘unending ocean’ in an age of ‘chartlessness’ and ‘disruption’. To the hatred which they had felt for Liberalism, and their inability to understand the irreversibility of the French Revolution, he replied that

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time could not be overcome, that ‘dogmas could not be made immortal’ and that the aristocratic, even snobbish, element in their ‘paradoxes’ had ‘misread . . . the character of the age’ and made a ‘holocaust’ of the ‘truth’. These arguments were arguments about enemy-thinkers from whom Laski wished to extract a moral. In discussing Lamennais, he followed the searing process which had converted Lamennais’s antipathy to the French Revolution into the judgement that the Revolution had embodied a ‘political truth . . . fundamental to the understanding of modern life’. Laski was interested in Lamennais from two points of view. In early Lamennais he found an ultramontane rejection of Gallicanism and Erastianism, and the claim that obedience to a Roman theocracy was necessary if Christianity was to free itself from them. In later Lamennais he found a critic of property, a lyrical version of the Communist Manifesto and the claim that, since Pope Gregory XVI had sacrificed him to the requirements of secular diplomacy, the Christianity of the future would have to ally itself with the people. Laski praised Lamennais for asking a ‘gigantic’ question about the ‘nature of a corporate personality’, and accepted his conception of the Church as a ‘living society which . . . remained true to itself . . . even in chains’. While much preferring later to early Lamennais, his argument was the approving argument that the search for religious freedom which had made Lamennais into a papal theocrat was the same search which had led him to the ‘free church’ as a ‘spiritual society’ governed by the ultimate sovereignty of the conscience. Laski’s language about Liberal Catholicism was so eloquent that one wonders whether he was tempted. Whether he was tempted or not, he was also crafty, using St Francis, the Jesuits, Newman and Manning to underline the inevitability of both Dissent and doctrinal evolution, and concluding that a ‘modern’ justification of tolerance had to be rooted in the conviction of an ‘antitheocratic age’ that it was ‘too uncertain of the truth of any spiritual interpretation to give it the final sanction of complete authority’.

Laski’s study of religion was a study of law and politics and led him to the principles which were to be made systematic in A Grammar of Politics – that power corrupts and that the reason why states could not be ‘the supreme embodiments of power’ was that they represented the economic interests of those who controlled the means of production. The economic interests of those who did not control the means of production had to be pursued through associations like trade unions as expressions of will and conscience in resistance to the State which had emerged from the Industrial Revolution in exactly the way in which the ideas of Chalmers, the Tractarians and ultramontanism had been expressions of will and conscience in resistance to the State which had emerged from the Reformation. For the future a new phase of

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world history was predicted in which States would resemble other associations in being subject to the authority of will and conscience. Morally and philosophically, Laski’s conceptions were individualistic. Politically, he rejected individualism, arguing that modern democracies were unfree because access to education was uneven, the influential experience was the experience of the ‘able man’, and ‘power went with the ownership of land and capital’. He wished it to be understood that the ultimate remedy for the situation was the ‘reserve-power’ of revolution. In the 1920s, Laski ‘yielded to no one’ in his support for the Disraelian conception of the need to bring the two nations together. At the same time he claimed that Labour denied capital’s ‘authority’, and that the ‘legal order’ was a ‘mask’ behind which capital had been accumulating power since the 1750s. The questions he began to ask towards the end of the 1920s were, could Communism replace power by authority? and could British, and Western, society find ways of pursuing Communist objectives without the methods which had been objectionable in the Soviet Union? The conception of the Soviet Union providing a response to a crisis of authority had been established in Laski’s mind by 1927, when the Communist Party had had the dedication of the Jesuits, Communists had made a Jesuit equation between ‘disagreement’ and ‘sin’ and Communism itself had been ‘as vigorous . . . and compelling’ a faith ‘as any in the history of religions’. Communism demanded a ‘new spirit’ rather than a new religion. After the collapse of the Labour Government in 1931, the demand for a ‘new spirit’ became the demand for a ‘new orthodoxy’ to stand up to Fascism’s replacement of divine sanctions by the sanction of force. After Dunkirk and the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1942, the crisis of authority began to be explained as a crisis of religions.

During the war, while working up to a nervous breakdown, Laski’s output was continuous. In addition to producing the normal flood of books, pamphlets and newspaper articles, he went on teaching at the London School of Economics during its evacuation to Cambridge, began a punishing régime of lecturing to Labour and service audiences throughout England, and in Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time associated Socialism with ‘humility’ before ‘Youth’ and youth’s courage at ‘Dunkirk, Stalingrad, El Alamein and Bataan’. Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time was modelled on Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. It compared the contemporary revolution to the French Revolution and the fall of Rome, and argued that a ‘growing proportion of citizens’ not only in Europe and America but also in India, Africa and the Far East, regarded capitalistic civilization as ‘unjust in its principles’, ‘irrational’ in its operation, and the cause of a class-cleavage so

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deep that the equilibrium established after 1789 was finally disintegrating. The war from this point of view was a war against the ‘traditional values’ of ‘middle-class government’ which, being unable to ‘build a relation of affection’ with its subjects, tried to ‘discipline’ the poor through ‘the impersonal mechanism of the market’. It was for this reason that wartime developments of state control should continue into the peace and the merely ‘negative . . . freedom’ which the worker had in capitalist society should be replaced by the ‘positive’ freedom which came to a citizen who identified himself with a ‘formulated . . . social purpose’. Laski claimed to be reporting facts and to be avoiding the brutalization of truth which he associated with the Nazis. A fraudulent repertoire included the claims that ‘time was short’, that failure would be dangerous, and that the outcome of even the most ‘generous’ attempt to formulate a social purpose would be idle if ‘the premisses . . . of rulers’ turned out to be too distant from the ‘premisses of the masses’. A chapter entitled ‘Freedom Under Planning’ echoed Tawney’s claim that an ‘unplanned society’ meant an ‘acquisitive’ and ‘unequal’ society and that the inroads which acquisitiveness and inequality were making into the ‘dignity of the masses’ were rendering existing society fundamentally insecure. The idea that distance was obstructing sympathy was a rhetorical idea. But it went to the root of Laski’s doctrine, linking it to the doctrines of Mill, Green and Matthew Arnold, and finding its misleading fulfilment in the Soviet Union.

In Reflections in passing and in Faith, Reason and Civilization at length, the problem was to redeem the decaying civilization of the West and to enable all men to participate in the benefits which Western civilization had hitherto confined to the few. The question this raised was, why could Christianity not hold out this prospect itself ? Laski’s account of Christianity was an account of deterioration – from the accommodations which the Church had made with power and wealth in the Middle Ages, through its post-Reformation cravenness in relation to power and wealth, to the attitude exemplified in Wilberforce’s dictum that ‘Christianity made . . . inequality of social scale less galling to the lower orders’. Laski made virtually no criticisms of the idea of Christianity, except that from the start it had been ‘unhistorical’. He gave friendly accounts of primitive Christianity’s commitment to equality and conscience, of the Christian contribution to mental ‘revitalization’ during the break-up of Graeco-Roman civilization and of the part played by Christianity’s contempt for ‘the things of the world’ in making the world ‘endurable’ for those who did not prosper in it. In the Waldensians, the Béguines, the Levellers, George Fox and St

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Francis he recognized exponents of a social doctrine and in the twentiethcentury Church the beginnings of a critique of capitalism. His difficulty was that the mediaeval church had allowed its own wealth, and its consecration of the wealth of others, to effect a ‘deformation’ of its purpose, that modern Christianity generally was incurious about the poor and incapable of responding to the other religions of the world and that it was a ‘supernatural’ religion in a world which no longer believed in the supernatural. Some basis for a ‘recovery . . . of values’, had, nevertheless, to be found, and the reason why Communism could provide it where modern ecclesiastical Christianity could not, was that Communism resembled primitive Christianity in being less parasitic in relation to the secular order than modern ecclesiastical Christianity was. Laski claimed that the old world of the twentieth century was dying, as the old world had been dying in the first century, that Christianity and the other great religions were incapable of reviving it and that a new religion was required for the ‘common man’ among whom, since the French Revolution, the decay of religious faith had been ‘rapid and decisive’. To Eliot and Dawson, who supposed that decay could be reversed, he replied that ‘the task which had been performed by Wesley and Chateaubriand for millions’ was now effective ‘merely for a handful’, that a ‘profound’ faith could not be made out of counter-revolution and that the ‘qualities of heart and mind’ with which the Russian State was ‘raising the moral stature of its citizens’ had entered ‘more deeply into human thought . . . and . . . created a more intense volume of hope . . . than any rival faith . . . or any series of events in the history of mankind’. In 1944 Laski imagined himself to be wanting what Lenin had wanted – ‘creed’ as the basis of a ‘social order’, devotion to an end beyond the private satisfaction of personality and the building of a ‘heaven upon earth’ by ‘writing the precepts of . . . faith into the inner fabric of a universal humanity’. This was the ‘purpose’ which was driving the Communist leaders, as Mohammed, Luther and Calvin had been driven, into ‘compressing into less than a generation’ developments which had taken half a century ‘even in the United States’, and it was this that enabled him to relate Communism to English needs, and to find an English precedent in the Puritan ‘consciousness of election’ and the Puritan conviction that ‘whatever derived its central truth from the devil . . . could not be destroyed too early’. It might seem on reflection that Laski’s religious obsessions were exercises in irreligion, like the exercises of J. M. Robertson, whom he greatly admired. It is difficult to be sure. Laski was a rationalist and an unbeliever, and a believer, insofar as he came to support a Jewish state in Palestine, in the secular state which he used such influence as he had under Attlee to protect. On the other hand, he experienced religion early, never escaped its influence intellectually, and, when confronted by Attlee’s ‘pragmatism’, reached for a

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new religion as a commentary on it. This was what he spoke for in the Labour Party and why, behind fantasies as serious as Gilbert Murray’s, he made the same sorts of claim to public leadership as Murray had made. That Laski had fantasies about his own importance is well understood. But Kramnick and Sheerman have shown how real some of these fantasies were, not only in relation to Holmes and Frankfurter but also in relation to Sankey, MacDonald, Roosevelt and the Jewish immigrant ships which Laski addressed at La Spezia in 1946. Laski was a symbol of the Labour Left and was read by the reading classes who borrowed a mental structure from him. At the same time he was hated by Dalton and by many Labour and trade union leaders as an intellectual, a political embarrassment, and a Jew. His prose and politics were the object of unpleasant attacks by Orwell. V Orwell5 has for long been sanctified as a sane Socialist – one of a select band who have had minds genuine and free enough to disconnect themselves from the Socialist intelligentsia and to effect a real identification with both working-class Englishmen and decent, freedom-loving Englishmen of all classes everywhere. And it is easy to see why this is so, why Orwell did great damage to English Socialism by associating it with modern totalitarianisms and why Animal Farm, though a meditation on human foolishness as much as on political freedom, was also a continuation of the resistance Orwell had been building up since the middle 1930s to the adulation of Stalin which had been led by Laski, Gollancz, Shaw, Priestley, the Webbs, Bernal and E. H. Carr. Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the other hand, though it was located in postatomic England, was not really about England or atomic war. In part it was an expansion of Huxley’s Brave New World and Burnham’s Managerial Revolution (in spite of Orwell’s doubts about Burnham) and was yet another manifestation of that hostility to Stalinism which had led Orwell to supply the Foreign Office with a McCarthyite list of fellow-travellers (including rightly or wrongly, Crossman and A. J. P. Taylor). Principally, however, it was an enquiry whether free men could resist modern inquisitions; to which its answer was that they could not, that hedonism and materialism were stronger in modern souls than love and loyalty, and that the rats who were waiting to gnaw through Smith’s face had a Swiftian, Stalinist or Koestlerian way with the free man’s delusions about his freedom. 15

George Orwell (Eric Blair) (1903–50), educated Eton. Imperial Police in Burma, 1922–7 Overseas Service of the BBC, 1942–3. Literary Editor Tribune, 1943–5. Author of Down And Out In London And Paris, 1933; Burmese Days, 1934; A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935; Keep The Aspidistra Flying, 1935; The Road To Wigan Pier, 1937; Homage To Catalonia, 1938; Coming Up For Air, 1939; Inside The Whale, 1940; The Lion And The Unicorn, 1941; Animal Farm, 1945; Critical Essays, 1946; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949; and Shooting An Elephant, 1950.

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Orwell claimed that Nineteen Eighty-Four was an attack on the ‘perversions’ introduced into a ‘centralized economy’ by Communism and Fascism. But for anyone who interprets it as an affirmation of freedom, it must be problematical that O’Brien was both aware of, and immune to, the ‘promptings of humanity’, and that the Smith problem arose because, not being a prole, not being permitted to remember life before the catastrophe and being far too intelligent to be left to vegetate in solitude, he had had to be given the chance to feel as the élite needed to feel if the revolution was to be made permanent. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell identified himself with ‘impulse and feeling’ and with so poignant a version of proletarian decency as to confine critical attention to the élite. It was the élite which was his subject, the élite which was trying to control thought and eliminate from history all those whose memories of pre-revolutionary thought-modes made them unreliable agents of the revolution. And it was Big Brother and Hate-Week, the Thought-Police and Newspeak, the Junior Anti-Sex League and ‘2 + 2 = 5’ – all of them inventions of the élite – which suggested that liberty was not worth having without a belief that was strong enough to sustain it. In England after 1945 it was easy to justify a positive libertarianism by associating the Labour victory over the Conservative Party with the Allied victory over Hitler and Mussolini. While contributing to this association, Orwell was more interested in the Katyn massacres than in the Holocaust, mistrusted de Gaulle’s marriage of ‘religion and tanks’ as much as he mistrusted the proliferation of secular dictatorships and discovered grounds for disquiet in the objectionable power of ‘Anglo-American millionaires’, ‘the tendency towards oligarchical rule based on forced labour’ in the Soviet Union and the cravenness towards the Soviet Union which had imposed on English newspapers a voluntary silence about Mihailovitch and the Chetniks in Yugoslavia. Orwell’s family was depressed middle class or, as he preferred to put it, ‘shabby-genteel’. He received an upper-middle-class education and was acutely aware of class distinctions at all levels of English society. One of his earlier adult letters was written to an epicene Etonian Byzantinist; from Eton onwards he was a friend of Connolly, who, in spite of proletarian political sympathies, was among the least proletarian of twentieth-century English writers. Orwell used his life as material for literature, had literary opinions before he had much to write about and developed his view of literature as he developed his view of life. Of the seven works he published in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia specified the Socialism which was to become his hallmark during the war. But in all seven works, alongside doctrine, there was hostility to doctrine and in place of doctrine a personal disengagement from the class and political structure in which he had been brought up. In Burmese Days he was not only a hostile observer of the

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‘master-and-slave’ relationship he discerned in the imperial régime to which he had belonged as a Burma policeman, but was also the decent Etonian as against the prejudiced suburbanites of the Kyauktada Club. A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air described clerical gentility, the ‘poverty-stricken officer class’, the boredom of ‘middlemiddle-class’ life and the ‘mingy decencies’ of ‘lower-middle-class life’ in England. In addition, there were accounts of the boredom of marriage, the profit-motive as the enemy of self-expression in education and the rootlessness, monotony and callousness of suburban respectability. Throughout there was Swift’s sense of bodily discomfort, a Mill-like fidelity to internal freedom and the Joycean consciousness, and a translation into the vernacular of D. H. Lawrence’s, Waugh’s and The Waste Land ’s distaste for the uprooting effected by industrial capitalism and the First World War. Within suburbia, it is true, there were decent sensibilities, like Comstock’s and Bowling’s. But these were merely pendants to the negative arguments that in England snobbery and aristocratically orientated gentility were endemic, that suburban mentalities were disabling and capitalistic mentalities inhuman and that ‘the typical member of the House of Lords was a money-lender disguised as a crusader’. It was not, moreover, the ‘triumphs of modern engineering . . . the five thousand novels that were published every year, nor the crowds at Ascot’ which redeemed the age but the ‘working-class interiors’ Orwell encountered in Wigan and the ‘warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it was not easy to find elsewhere’. These feelings were disarming, and have disarmed many generations of readers. It is desirable, therefore, to point out that Orwell was slumming it in Wigan, that his life even more than his writings was a theatrical enactment of the intelligentsia preoccupations which he despised in others and that the decencies, solidarities and conventions that he found among porters in French hotels, tramps on English roads and miners in English pits provided for him ‘the low door in the wall’ out of middle-class respectability which was provided for Waugh by the landed aristocracy.

Before 1936 Orwell had had a social, but not much political, edge. By the end of 1938 he was fully politicized. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he had given an angry sketch of the intelligentsia’s misunderstanding of the working class. In Homage to Catalonia he gave an even angrier sketch of the innocence shown by middle-class Socialists and English newspapers of the Left and Liberal Left about the alliance between the Spanish Republic, the Popular Front and the Spanish Communist party, its anti-working-class and ‘counter-revolutionary’ effect, and its connection with the Russian conspiracy to draw ‘British capitalist-imperialism’ into alliance against Germany. Orwell had volunteered to fight in Spain because he identified the Spanish

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Civil War as a working-class revolt against fascism; he became highly resentful on discovering that it was nothing of the kind, and spent the rest of his life conducting a political vendetta against the Soviet Union. Homage to Catalonia and Looking Back to the Spanish Civil War denounced the betrayal of the Spanish working class to the interests of Russian policy, and were as emotional about the face of an Italian militiaman whom Orwell had encountered in Barcelona as Koestler was to be about the ‘little Andalusian peasant’ he had encountered in Seville prison, in much the way in which The Road to Wigan Pier was to draw an emotional contrast between the ‘noble bodies’ of Wigan miners, and the ‘Nancy poets . . . the editor of The Times Literary Supplement and the Archbishop of Canterbury’ who could not have ‘remained superior’ if miners had not ‘sweated their guts out’ in order that they should do so. The Road to Wigan Pier was sponsored by Gollancz and the Left Book Club and was in two parts, of which the second alienated its sponsors by attacking the contradiction between bourgeois-Marxist enthusiasm for the working classes politically and the revulsion which bourgeois Marxists were alleged to feel for the working classes personally. There were recollections of Orwell’s adolescent guilt as both ‘snob’ and ‘revolutionary’, and of the decision he had made on leaving Burma to expiate imperial guilt ‘among the oppressed’ in England. Where ‘childhood training’ was said to have convinced most bourgeois that the working classes had ‘disgusting manners’ and gave off disagreeable smells, it was the ‘strangeness’ Orwell felt at being ‘for the first time on terms of equality with working-class people’ which connected his life as a kitchen-porter in France and a tramp in England with his sociological investigations in Wigan. The Road to Wigan Pier included political material supplied by Wigan activists about the capitalistic oppression and bureaucratic insensitivity to which the Wigan working classes were said to have been subjected. It led on to the need to abandon upper and middle-class attitudes to life by creating a Socialist mentality which would take its tone from working-class attitudes to life. Orwell was much struck by the ‘stupid handling of the class issue’ which was obscuring Socialism’s merits. He contrasted the ‘theoretical bookishness’ of the ‘rootless, townbred’ Socialist with the ordinary working man’s interest in ‘better wages and shorter hours’, and turned the sharp side of his knife against Labour MPs and trade union officials who had climbed out of their class by claiming to advance its interests. His conclusions were that, though a revolution was necessary, a necessary pre-condition of success was an ‘objective’ which ‘fairly ordinary people would recognize as desirable’. In the late 1930s, Orwell’s Socialism was a climate rather than a programme. He joined the ILP in 1938 in protest against the Labour Party’s jingoistic

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war-mongering, war to establish a fascist regime in England and strengthen the ‘professional army’s’ hold over any ‘democratic’ army that might be raised, and hoped for a Europe-wide pacifist movement to do Hitler in ‘for good’. He was deeply roused by the capitalist trap sprung after Munich by alliance between Labour and anti-appeasement Conservatives in England and he deplored the misleading impression which Strachey was creating of the English public’s willingness to go to war. It was not until the Russo-German pact in August 1939 that he understood that war was actually going to happen. Orwell’s commitment to the war, once it began, was slightly crazy. He dismissed the possibility of a negotiated peace, attacked pacifists who wanted to impose moral restraints on military conduct and looked to Cripps, Lloyd George or even Beveridge to succeed Churchill after the fall of Singapore. When told that the war would come to an end in 1942, he wanted it to go on because peace would make revolution less likely. With one part of his mind Orwell wanted to keep hold of patriotism and public-school militarism in order to prove that ‘Socialism could be built on the bones of a Blimp’. With another part of his mind, he was the nastiest kind of class-warrior, announced that ‘the people’ would have to be ‘armed’ if the war was to become ‘revolutionary’ and, in the ‘conversations that were going on in a million pubs and air-raid shelters’, heard the promise of a Socialism which would be ‘willing to use violence if necessary’. His mind was saturated with class viciousness – about the titled ‘bitch’ whom a ship’s steward compelled to ‘take her turn in the queue’ during the evacuation from France, about the ‘corruption’ and ‘treachery’ with which the ‘rich swine’ would react to a German victory and about the prospect of ‘London gutters running with blood’ when the ‘red militias’ came to be billeted in the Ritz. He argued that the Labour Party should have made the Home Guard its private army, that ‘proletarians’ should not have been kept out of ‘positions of command’, and that even Churchill, who sometimes was and sometimes was not the English Danton, was trying to put out the revolutionary flames which had been lit at Dunkirk. The high point of Orwell’s revolutionary expectations was reached in 1942 when he was thirty-nine. Except as a propagandist for the BBC Overseas Service, his interest in the war waned thereafter, with the waning of the prospect of revolution. Once the war was over, he admitted that he had overestimated the prospect. But after the war, though he wanted extensive nationalization, a ‘purge’ of the bureaucracy, Indian independence and the ending of colonial exploitation (even at the expense of working-class standards of living in Britain), he was less immediately interested in English politics than he had been in The Lion and the Unicorn in 1941. The Lion and the Unicorn blamed the fall of France on ‘private capitalism’ and the profit motive, stated that Hitler’s victories had proved that ‘planned’

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capitalism could always defeat ‘unplanned’ capitalism and concluded that revolutionary Socialism alone was capable of winning the war. It added that the position of the monied classes had ‘long ceased to be justifiable’, that ‘ability’ had decayed in the English upper classes since 1920, and that ‘sham-feudalism’, public-school ‘immobility’ and ‘impenetrable stupidity’ about capitalism’s defects, had produced a total misunderstanding of the twentieth century. By contrast, there were vague, and by no means flattering, hints about the people of ‘indeterminate’ class on whom the war was conferring significance in Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Hayes and Letchworth. Orwell was not exactly advocating indeterminate classlessness. Rather he was demonstrating that ‘class privilege’ was disappearing and that the war had convinced not only the working class but also the middle class and ‘a section of the business community’ that working-class suffering in war had made the case against capitalism unanswerable. From an economic standpoint The Lion and the Unicorn was modishly naïve. It explained that Socialism could ‘solve the problem of production and consumption’, that ‘a socialist state’ would simply ‘calculate what goods would be needed and . . . do its best to produce them’, and that money under Socialism would become a ‘coupon or ration-ticket’ issued ‘in sufficient quantities’ to buy goods when these were available. From a wider standpoint it wanted to replace the Empire by a ‘Federation of Socialist States’ and to put the submerged England of the ‘factories and newspaper offices’ in charge of its own destiny. Whether the revolution was to be bloody or peaceful was not important. What was important was that a ‘lady in a Rolls Royce car was . . . more damaging to morale than a fleet of Göring’s bombing planes’, that Socialism would be as ‘deadly to the German power-dream’ in a German-occupied England as the ‘memory of the French revolution had been . . . to Metternich’ in Restoration Europe and that it was revolution which would put an end, once and for all, to the Tatler and the Bystander, ‘and the lady in the Rolls Royce car’. ‘The heirs of Nelson and of Cromwell’ went the Noel Coward theme-tune, were ‘not to be found in the House of Lords.’ They were ‘in the fields and the streets, in the factories and the armed forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back garden’. Orwell’s Socialism, in addition to highlighting the working-class interest in material betterment, lined up Whitman, the Levellers, Morris, Rousseau and the early Christians against snobbery and class-consciousness, and showed Continental Socialism’s proximity to power forcing working-class Socialists to choose between liberty, equality and human brotherhood on the one hand and the prosperity and stability promised by Russian and Nazi Socialism on the other. By 1946, he was by no means confident that the English working class, once faced with the choice, would make the right choice. But he

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remained a Socialist, notwithstanding, because Socialism aimed to destroy the existing class structure, willed the ‘real England’ to come to the surface and rejected all the ‘lies’ which had been told about it since the 1917 revolutions in Russia. Orwell aimed to escape from his class and to make mincemeat of the illusions with which the chattering classes had tried to put themselves right with the working classes. But his escape was as illusory as their illusions. He remained a literary intellectual who, though he looked forward to a monolithicity of tone spreading out from the working classes, expressed the fears which professional conservatives like Charles Whibley had been expressing, inadequately, and professional writers like Alfred Austin, who eventually became a professional conservative, had been expressing more adequately about the prospects for ‘the Republic of Letters’ (Austin’s phrase) in a murky and threatening future. In the essays that he wrote between 1940 and 1949, Orwell made many statements about the meaning and significance of literature. Inside the Whale was only the first of many, and there is no need to do more than notice the account of Henry Miller’s refusal to be political and the reasons why Frank Richards was political, the claim that Dickens’s Liberalism was infinitely superior to the ‘smelly . . . orthodoxies’ which had taken its place in the twentieth century and the contradiction Orwell examined between the existence of totalitarian régimes and the existence of literature. Orwell wrote at length in praise of Gissing, Conrad, Winwoode Reade and E. M. Forster. He did not write at length about Mill or Arnold, but he discussed their topics, contrasting high literature with low literature, the commercial view of life with the literary view of life and the Koestlerian anguish that writers would suffer if the ramshackle freedom of liberal capitalism gave way to the oppressive constrictions of totalitarianism. In Burma Orwell had read Thackeray, Maugham, Samuel Butler and D. H. Lawrence as well as Dickens, but had not established a total orientation. The beginning of the orientation that we know now was formed after his return to England by admiration for Galsworthy as critic of ‘cruelty, injustice . . . and oppression’, by the sometimes religious pessimism Orwell borrowed from Eliot, James Joyce, T. E. Hulme and Aldous Huxley, and by a temperamental rebarbativeness which enabled him not only to foul his own nest as a Socialist but even, almost, to say something in favour of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. As Orwell interpreted it, the pessimism of the 1920s had replaced optimistic enlightenment by a ‘tragic sense of life’. In the early 1930s for a short time he was a practising Anglican and was almost certainly genuine in his practices, however blasé he may have been when discussing them with his girlfriends. This phase of his life was incorporated in an account of Joyce’s Dedalus as an ‘ordinary modern whose mind was poisoned by his inability to believe anything’, in a sympathetic review of Adam’s book The Spirit of Catholicism and

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an exchange of letters with Father Martindale, the Jesuit, and in criticism of the ‘sloppy idealisation’ of the physical and sexual side of life which had occurred once the ‘breakdown of religious belief’ had destroyed the genuine pessimism of the Christian centuries. Even A Clergyman’s Daughter had the heroine wanting to do good in a school when she could no longer do it in a church, and implied something deep and gnomic when it left her doing from habit what she could no longer do from conviction. In Orwell’s religion there were important ambivalences. While rejecting, he could understand, Maritain’s belief that Christianity was compatible with democracy, Chesterton’s and Dawson’s wish to restore a ‘more primitive society’, and the refusal of reactionaries from Eliot and Waugh to Muggeridge and Wyndham Lewis to believe that society could be improved fundamentally. There were genuflexions towards Cardinal Hinsley, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, and suggestions that the papacy might ‘come to terms with Socialism’ in resisting the post-war Soviet Union. Roman Catholicism was also denounced for being anachronistic, throwing its weight behind the ‘torture’ and ‘exploitation’ which Orwell associated with private property, and demanding a degree of obedience which was incompatible with literature. There were criticisms of Chestertonian ‘ignorance’, of the ‘cult of the sanctified sinner’ in Graham Greene and of the Catholic apologetic of Lunn, Knox and Noyes. It was held to be significant that Eliot – ‘the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts’ – who might have become a Roman Catholic, had preferred, by joining the Church of England, to become ‘the ecclesiastical equivalent’ of a Trotskyite. It is possible that Orwell might have seen his way to admiring Roman Catholicism as a manifestation of popular decency but for its ‘superstition’ and the ‘silly-clever’ convert-pessimism which put him off. Articles he wrote in the Manchester Evening News in 1946 acknowledged that, though many Christians were reactionary or indifferent about material improvement because it was immortality which they regarded as central, an increasing number had become convinced of the ‘inherent wickedness of capitalist society’ and the need to abolish both ‘property rights’ and the priority of ‘money-making’. Orwell believed that, Christianity having ‘decayed’, he was living in an age of unfixed opinions which it was his business to fix. He had prepared himself by excluding himself from his class, by missing a university education, and by setting himself up as a missionary to the intelligentsia. It was the intelligentsia whose opinions he wanted to fix, not the opinions of the poor or the working class. It was the intelligentsia that he wanted to bring back to its senses, the intelligentsia that needed to be put back into touch with the ‘common people’ rather than the other way round, the intelligentsia whose duty it was to free Socialism (as well as literature) from the Marxist as well as the Catholic straight-jacket which was being imposed on

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it. So, given the assumption that middle-class life and Western civilization had been ‘debunked’, that religious belief had ‘vanished,’ and that there was both intellectual anarchy and ‘intellectual revolt’, the question that remains is, what did Orwell believe the English could be persuaded to swallow? Orwell had no desire to restore ‘the doctrines of the church’ in the forms they had taken in European civilization; but neither did he approve of the denial that anyone had ever taken the doctrines of the church seriously. Loss of belief in personal immortality – more important than loss of belief in God – played a large part in his analysis of the ‘modern cult of power-worship’, though even about that his point was that it was no longer reasonable to demand belief in immortality when ‘hardly anyone’ any longer ‘felt himself to be immortal’, when immortality was being used ‘semi-consciously’ to maintain inequality and when a long line of ‘wreckers’ from Gibbon onwards had been ‘sawing away at it . . . for two hundred years’. Orwell approved of the ‘wreckers’ but was exercised by the brutalization of life and the prominence achieved in the totalitarian states by ‘human types supposedly extinct for centuries’. It was the coincidence between the disappearance of Christian belief and the reappearance of ‘the robber-chieftain and the Grand Inquisitor’ which made it necessary to find new ways of distinguishing right from wrong and new formulations of the principle that happiness could be achieved only when it was not made life’s object. What Orwell wanted was a ‘rational’ attitude to the universe, the ‘decency’ that he found in Bertrand Russell, and the ‘quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed’ which Dickens had retained from Christianity. He looked for an ‘organism’ which would be ‘greater than men’, and would provide a sense of brotherhood over time, like the brotherhood of beer and bawdy that had persisted for centuries among the ‘common people’, whether bishops and dissenting divines had approved of it or not. He praised Shakespearean normality, attacked Tolstoy and Gandhi (whom in a way he also admired) and, in this ‘Yogi-ridden age’ judged sanctity something that should be avoided. This was a ‘humanist’ attitude, and Orwell’s statement of it was by implication post- or anti-Christian, emphasizing the ‘sadness and loneliness’ of human life and the need for consolation, but explaining sin in terms of guilt about sex, and disparaging the selfishness and inhumanity of the saints by contrast with the human desire to ‘fasten one’s love upon other human individuals’. Orwell had little sense of the variety of forms that Christianity had taken in the past. He made monochrome assumptions, drew facile contrasts and assumed too readily that love and humanity were to be found exclusively in popular culture. His mind was sharp and intelligent, as well as aggressive and antiseptic. He had a lean, clean prose. He was grim and humourless, had a

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touch of sadism and, apart from the sadism and the high-quality prose, lacked most of the qualities that he admired in Waugh. Like Waugh, he saw failure everywhere among established classes and institutions. If he had lived, like Waugh, into the 1950s, he would probably have shared Waugh’s experience of producing new writing which was less significant than his writing had been in the past. Orwell was against ‘Them’ in the sense in which most men are against sin, but the ‘Us’ this implied was unconvincing, contained few women and no successful men, and, apart from a vaguely defined working class, consisted mainly of a Rousseauvian rag-bag of tramps and porters, Comstocks and Bowlings, and Winston Smith. In spite of the violence of his rhetoric, Orwell did not leave the impression of expecting the ‘impulse which had moved the Paris workers in 1793, the Communards in 1871, and the Madrid Trade Unionists in 1936’, to come into its own in England. What are we left with? Not a realist œuvre, in spite of the rats and the truncheons, but an escapist one; the construction of an imagined world – a warm and nice world, like Tolkien’s world, in The Road to Wigan Pier, and in Nineteen Eighty-Four a world that was nastier than Swift’s – but indubitably a more escapist world than Waugh’s world and a curious register of Orwell’s death to middle-class respectability and his resurrection to the aversions which the ‘common people’ of England, like the ‘common people’ of Sir Keith Thomas’s England, were supposed to have felt for all attempts by their ‘betters’ to ‘improve’ them. Orwell had a nasty mind and, probably, a nasty body. It is one of the odder ironies of modern literature that a class-warrior or Swiftian sadist should for thousands of schoolchildren have become a hero of modern freedom. Orwell was older than Crossman and obviously mistrusted him. In Crossman, however, there was the same affectation of toughness as in Orwell, the same uncertainty about Socialism’s prospects, the same obscure conviction that Christianity was somewhat important. VI Among the English Socialist thinkers of the 1950s and 1960s, Crossman displayed more articulately than anyone else the defensive nature of the Socialism of the 1930s and the disappointments which were to follow electoral victory and victory over Germany in 1945. In a party in which intellectuals were listened to, even when they were disliked, Crossman embodied intelligentsia preoccupations in a way and on a scale which was peculiar to himself. He had extensive experience of politics and public communication, had a prodigious and effective output as author, speaker, journalist and parliamentary politician, and addressed himself throughout to the difficulties involved in relating the political authority of the élite to such consent as was possible, or unavoidable, in a democratic society.

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Crossman6 was the son of a High Court judge, had a conventional Anglican upbringing, and was a brilliant schoolboy at Winchester. He then became a brilliant undergraduate at Oxford, rebelled against his family and conventional respectability, and had both heterosexual and homosexual affairs, including one of the latter with Auden who shared his interest in Freudianism, Marxism and D. H. Lawrence and agreed that liberalism was an anachronism, Christianity problematical and modern civilization in need of a doctrine. At the age of twenty-three, Crossman was elected to a teaching fellowship at New College, while H. A. L. Fisher was Warden, and held it, after a year in Germany, until the decision to become a politician, the breakdown of his marriage to a German-Jewish wife, and elopement with the wife of a Fellow of his college, made it desirable to join the staff of the New Statesman. By September 1939, Crossman had published three books and a lot of articles. He had been Labour leader of Oxford City Council and, after being New Statesman correspondent in Berlin and Labour candidate at a parliamentary by-election in Birmingham, was Labour parliamentary candidate for Coventry. He was then held up in his party-political career by the prolongation of the 1935 Parliament. He spent the first year of the war on and off the New Statesman, helped to write an anonymous pamphlet against the Foreign Office and the ‘Old School Tie’ and ran a New Statesman campaign against the detention of German refugees in English ‘concentration camps’. He spent the next four years learning the working of the governmental system as it applied to propaganda and political warfare against Germany and, after entering Parliament in 1945, was appointed to the Anglo-American Commission on Palestine. This led to unpopular lobbying on behalf of Palestine Jews and the writing of two books – Palestine Mission in 1947 and A Nation Reborn in 1960, the latter of which depicted Israel as both a modern city-state and a modern social democracy. As an MP in the 1950s, Crossman contrasted the narrowness of most Labour MPs with the breadth of his own experience as a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive, as a leader of the New Statesman’s intelligentsia audience, which he addressed continuously throughout his public life and as missionary to the mass-audience which was delivered by The Daily Mirror and The Sunday Pictorial. None of this did him much good either with Attlee, who had known and disapproved of him as a family friend since Crossman was a boy, or with Gaitskell, who, having known him at Winchester 16

Richard Howard Stafford Crossman (1907–74), educated Winchester College and New College, Oxford. Fellow of New College, 1930–7. Editorial staff New Statesman, 1938–9. Government service, 1940–5. MP 1945–74. Cabinet Minister, 1964–70; Editor of New Statesman, 1972–4. Author of Plato Today, 1937; Government and The Governed, 1939; How Britain Is Governed, 1939; ed. The God That Failed, 1950; The Charm of Politics, 1958; introduction to W. Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1964; The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, 1975–7 and (ed. Morgan) The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, 1981.

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and New College, mistrusted him profoundly. It was not until the Wilson government of 1964, when the young thinkers of the 1930s had become unbearably respectable, that he held office – as Minister of Housing, Leader of the House of Commons and Secretary of State for the Social Services. The two years he spent as editor of the New Statesman after the Labour defeat in 1970 were a garrulous croneydom from which the New Statesman board dismissed him in 1972. After 1945 Crossman’s version of Socialism was a combination of tough, tender and high-political – tough in its illusionlessness, tender through the belief that it was still necessary to do something about the new caring society which the Fabians had invented, high-political because Crossman was interested in the nature of British government about which he had written a short book in 1939. In 1964 he picked up the idea (which Beatrice Webb had picked up forty years earlier) that cabinet government had become prime ministerial government. He spent his six years as a Minister recording the evidence in diaries which, when published after his death, disclosed intimate details of the politics of the Wilson era within a decade of their occurrence. Crossman’s diaries were significant not just because they gave intimate accounts of recent events but also because they avoided the solemnity which Socialism implied the need for. More than any other of the Labour diarists, Crossman showed what Socialism had come to mean in the real world of Parliament, Fleet Street and Whitehall, and how it was that the high purposes of its founders and theorists had become the subject of personal antagonism and conflict. Crossman was witty, sarcastic and offensive. He judged politicians below the belt rather than as embodiments of principle, and left little reason to suppose that his friends behaved differently from his enemies or the Conservative Party differently from the Labour Party. He was without doubt a Socialist (of a libertarian kind), and assumed that it was desirable to subvert middle-class respectability by a Socialist use of state power. But his principles, when not merely the cocksure excesses of an undergraduate mind, were the loquacious excesses of a theoretical mind and made him an object of mistrust in the Labour Party and among some of the trade union bores of his generation. Whether accurate or not, the four published volumes of Crossman’s diaries record his view of the way in which democratic politics functioned in his lifetime. They are better than the Castle, Dalton and Citrine diaries, because Crossman was a cleverer and more articulate thinker that Castle, Dalton and Citrine. They are more interesting than the Benn diaries because Crossman’s were not, where Benn’s were, governed by the desire of a still active politician to create a myth about himself. Through accounts of Labour Party and Tribune Group discussions in opposition, through disclosures of the internal politics of The Daily Mirror, The Sunday Pictorial and The New Statesman and Nation, and through reconstruction of his own successes and failures with

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Wilson, the Wilson Cabinet, and Dame Evelyn Sharpe,7 Crossman played out the assumption that neither politics nor journalism could be understood without a strong dose of cynical deflation. Crossman’s diaries were intended to be his monument. They are, indeed, the most reflective statement yet made by an important English politician about the nature of high politics and, though needing to be appreciated as literature rather than truth, have a verisimilitude which only literature can achieve. The disruptive arrogance of Crossman’s character, the closeness of his connections with the newspapers, and the suspicions aroused by both his arrogance and his connections, may have prevented him understanding some of the transactions he recorded. But his solipsism was enervating; incisive charactersketches of journalists, politicians and civil servants, and a highly developed sense of situation suggested that even Labour high politics have to be understood as a matter of ambition, manoeuvre and situation. VII Crossman’s academic interest as an undergraduate and a young don was in Greek philosophy. His first writing was to have been an account of Aristotle’s view of the soul, in preparing which he went to Germany in the early 1930s. Germany introduced him to National Socialism, gave a political edge to the teaching he undertook on returning to Oxford and equipped him with the belief that ‘democratic Socialism’ alone could respond to the crisis of public authority created by the fall of the empires in the First World War and the supersession of the Lockean pieties of Versailles by the Hobbesian Machiavellianism of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. In his first systematic discussion of international politics in the mid-1930s, Crossman attacked utopian sentimentalism in the Labour Party and the amateur nature of its understanding of foreign policy. He pointed out that the German Social Democrats, on arriving in office after the 1919 revolution, had discovered that a Socialist foreign policy could only be conducted in terms which were acceptable to the ‘generals, admirals and foreign offices who had conducted . . . foreign policy . . . previously’. So far as British policy was concerned, realism should be directed, as Dalton’s realism was being directed, not only against pacifist, open-diplomacy and League-of-Nation mentalities in the Labour Party but also against the Communist belief that Russian foreign policy was dedicated to world revolution. All foreign policy, Russian as much as any other, Crossman implied, was dedicated to the pursuit of national interests, the world was ‘still a jungle in which national states fought one another for existence’ and a Socialist government in England, whatever its public ‘ideals and aspirations’, would have to face the fact that international relations were a matter of power not sentiment. 17

Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1955–66; after retiring from the Civil Service, a Labour life-peer.

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There were, of course, sentimentalities in what Crossman was saying, and also tactical concessions. It was, nevertheless, of first consequence that the ‘man-in-the-street’ connected the idea of the Conservative Party with ‘the idea of the nation’, that the Labour Party ought to start connecting itself with the ‘idea of the nation’, and that it should ‘tell those nations which were interested in aggression exactly at what point they would meet an armed resistance from England’. Some Elementary Principles of Socialist Foreign Policy was an attack on the ‘airy neglect of the significance of power’ which had marked ‘English liberal thought’ in all parties for the previous fifty years and reflected the anti-liberal mentality which Crossman was to display in Plato Today, Government and the Governed and The Theory and Practice of British Freedom. By academic profession Crossman was a political philosopher who believed that conflicts between political philosophies were the most important feature of the modern world. He contextualized political philosophies historically and relativistically and wished to say of all of them that they derived as much from ‘poetry . . . hymns and newspapers’ as from formal philosophical writing. He assumed an identity between mediaeval feudalism, natural law and Catholicism, dwelt on the ‘blind forces’ by which these had been destroyed between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries and in highlighting their supersession by Protestantism, predestination, thrift and the nationstate, distinguished the ‘masses’ who had still needed ‘morality and religion’ from their ‘amoral rulers’ who had needed them, if at all, only as ‘instruments’ to ensure the masses’ subjugation. None of this was original to Crossman. But he achieved a cumulative weight in approaching the ‘Frankenstein monster’ which the Industrial Revolution had become, and the failure first of the Enlightenment and then of ‘nationalism and progress’ – the ‘established religion’ of most European states – to achieve the control which Christianity had achieved over political and economic activity in the Middle Ages. In Government and the Governed Crossman showed science and capitalism strengthening the ‘conservative forces’ of the world and reminded the world that democratic freedom had stood a chance only where bourgeois freedom had been established before industrialization had begun. Nazism, fascism and Stalinism were blamed on Liberalism’s failure to impose a democratic worldorder at Versailles, and it was declared to be urgently necessary to take deep breaths of the illusionlessness with which the ‘trained Marxist’ and the ‘intelligent conservative’ viewed the ‘Collective Pacifism’ of Woodrow Wilson’s post-war order. Mussolini’s fascism was ‘the first mass movement in Europe which was . . . anti-liberal and anti-socialist’ but it was Hitler’s ‘complete dogmatic religion’ which had made it its aim to get rid of ‘the ideas . . . culture and religion of the West’. There was, in Crossman’s mistaken view in 1939, no reason to expect the

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‘millions to whom freedom had meant unemployment’ to offer loyalty in a war against Hitler. All he was permitting himself to hope before the RussoGerman pact in 1939 was that, the liberal social order having been destroyed, Hitler was the ‘whirlwind’ out of which history would construct a ‘new social order’. Crossman had already stated, before Government and the Governed, that English thinkers from Locke to Bentham had been sham Liberals who had had nothing positive to propose once Parliament had removed the obstacles to capitalistic development, that F. H. Bradley and Bosanquet had ratified the arrival of Joseph Chamberlain’s middle classes by inventing a nationalistic ‘metapolitics . . . as dogmatic as . . . divine right’ and that neither the syndicalism of the Coles, the bureaucratic socialism of the Webbs, nor Laski’s ‘emotional’ progress from Liberalism to Marxism, had met the needs of the situation. The needs of the situation arose from the decay of Liberalism, which was common to England and the Continent, and from an unreflective Conservatism, which was peculiar to England. Crossman was on the side of innovation. But he was as well aware of the unpopularity of innovation (as he was to be in the 1950s) and gave considered accounts of the complexity of the resistance which the class system would offer to democratic Socialism. Crossman’s criticism of the ‘theological setting of capitalistic economics’ was that it had identified the ‘economic system’ as a ‘divine command’ and had enabled the great humanitarians from Wilberforce to Florence Nightingale (he did not mention Shaftesbury) to conceptualize modern capitalism as a divine kingdom without first reforming its structure. British Socialism had ‘accelerated a process of social amelioration and class conciliation’ which by the middle 1920s had become the ‘accepted philosophy of British government’, whatever party was in office. It was the dominating principle of British political life that ‘kindliness’ was more important than ‘principle’, that the ‘social order’ was ‘fundamentally good’, and that ‘peaceful friendship between the classes’ should be preserved. It was in reaction against this that Labour’s ‘army’ had to ‘tilt the balance in favour of the masses’, to break the ‘permanent dictatorship’ through which ‘a few hundred men’ had controlled industry, finance, and the Civil Service and to achieve the tight identification between theory and practice which Crossman had sketched first in Plato Today. Plato Today was originally a set of BBC talks which were later reprinted in The Listener. It characterized Athenian democracy as ‘the pre-eminence of a class’ rather than the ‘reconciliation of class-conflict’ and found parallels in post-Periclean Athens to the breakdown in art, philosophy and tradition which had followed the First World War in Europe. In the course of disembowelling liberal pieties about education, sexuality and the family, it claimed that the English polity was as reactionary as Plato had wished the Athenian

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polity to become, imputed to Plato a cynical approval of the ‘noble lie’ with which the ruling classes had persuaded the English that they were part of a self-governing democracy and judged Plato to be an authoritarian who had made the most savage and profound attack on liberal ideas and progressive thought, and had given the most ‘grimly realistic estimate of the moral and intellectual capacity of the masses’ of which history had knowledge. Crossman was filled with animus against the ‘modern Platos’ by whom he had been taught in Oxford, by their high-minded belief that politics, industry and finance were ‘activities unworthy of a gentleman’ and by the idea of a conservative Plato who would provide a guarantee of elevated public-school cosiness. On the other hand, he was less rancid than Popper was to be, presented The Republic as ‘the greatest book on political philosophy’ and argued that Plato had in any case to be understood in the light of Socrates. Crossman’s Socrates was a ‘common man’ and a member of a ‘real community’ in which ‘every individual had a living sense of . . . integration in the social order’. Socrates had faced up to the destruction of ‘aristocratic religion and morality’, had tried hard to replace the authority of ‘priest and noble’ by the authority of reason, and had appealed to youth to understand that Athens could be saved only when ‘rational . . . self-discipline’ replaced both traditional morality and the ‘laissez-faire philosophy of individual licence’. In Socrates Crossman found a hero who had invented analysis, had taught philosophy while rejecting dogma, and had absorbed realpolitik while also transcending it. Socrates had been a ‘humorous’ Athenian who knew how little he knew. He had been a ‘conscientious objector’, the ‘first man to see what intellectual integrity implied’ and a critic so candid that ‘established authority’ had had to react violently to him. He had avoided fin-de-siècle languor and had believed so passionately in ‘the cause of truth’ as to demand its embodiment in human society. Not only had Socrates’ life and death turned Plato from a reactionary recluse into becoming the inventor of the Academy, they had also challenged theory to issue in practice and ‘scientific . . . enquiry’ in the ‘inspiration . . . that had . . . moulded the innermost being of Europeans’. Plato Today claimed to be making a better case for democracy than anyone else was making in England in the 1930s. It was an attempt to show why democracy was worth dying for not only as it had been died for in Spain and Austria, but also as it might have to be died for in Britain. It was accompanied by a high-toned justification in terms of a coincidence between Socratic irony and the Christian personality. By 1937 Crossman had abandoned Christianity. But he had a sense of the mediaeval consensus and of modern history as unfolding within its shadow, and in providing a Socratic justification for democracy, emphasized not only that Socrates had meant the same things as Jesus was to mean, but also that the two of them, along with St Francis, had been the ‘great figures’ of European civilization.

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These thoughts were sketchy and imperfect – as sketchy and imperfect as most justifications of democracy have been. But they pursued the idea that Socrates was a ‘mystic’ and ‘citizen of the heavenly city’ who had subjected Athenian ritual and ceremonial to rational investigation. In both Christianity and Socratic democracy, reason was the lynch-pin – not the dogmatic reason of the Platonic Republic, but the ‘negative’ reasoning which rejected dogma and (like English thought itself) asserted the endless quest of the dialectic; and both the Christian and the Socratic belief that every citizen could become a ‘member of the élite’. This appeal to the ‘critical faculty of the ordinary man’ against the ‘structures of established orthodoxy’ was for Crossman the link between Socrates’ attack on Athenian democracy and Jesus’ attack on the Pharisees. It was because the ‘modern . . . democratic spirit’ had failed to find a ‘new basis’ from which to attack dogma that Socialism and Radicalism had not only become ‘received’ doctrines but had also robbed the ‘Conservative forces’ of the ‘healthy impact’ which ‘dynamic’ criticism would make upon them. And this had created a ‘crisis’, the ‘crisis of the modern world’, in which the ‘refusal of the powers-that-be to face the necessity of change’ would only be resisted if, ‘holding fast to our denial of the infallibility of established dogma and believing still in the infinite possibilities latent in human nature, we awoke once more that spirit of conscientious objection to prejudice and Pharisaism of which Socrates was the first example’ (R. H. S. Crossman, Plato Today, 1937, p. 300).

Crossman was learned, ‘realistic’ and irresponsible, and represented a genial version of the rancour of the student movement of the 1930s. By the late 1960s, this phase of thought was dying and its death being registered, negatively, by Hampshire’s despair, less tortuously, by the new Socialism which will be described in chapter 22.

20 Literature and the post-Christian consensus Wisdom and spirit of the universe Thou soul that art the eternity of thought, That giv’st to forms and images a breath And everlasting motion – not in vain, By day or starlight, thus from my first dawn Of childhood did’st thou intertwine for me The passions that build up our human soul, Not with the mean and vulgar works of man, But with high objects, with enduring things, With life and Nature, purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, And sanctifying by such discipline Both pain and fear, until we recognize A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. (William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805, lines 428–41) ‘Is it correct that most are atheists in England now?’ Hamidullah enquired. ‘The educated thoughtful people? I should say so, though they don’t like the name. The truth is that the West doesn’t bother much over belief and disbelief in these days. Fifty years ago, or even when you and I were young, much more fuss was made.’ ‘And does not morality also decline?’ ‘It depends what you call – yes, yes, I suppose morality does decline.’ (E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924, Kingfisher edition, pp. 110–11) And whoso will, from pride released. Contemning neither creed nor priest, May feel the Soul of all the East, About him at Kamakura. (Rudyard Kipling in ed. Cortazzi and Webb, Kipling’s Japan, 1988, p. 203)

Earlier chapters of this work considered the idea of a Christian literature. In this chapter consideration will be given to the idea of the post-Christian (or anti-Christian) literature through which the young Wordsworth projected a mystical and radical ideology, Hardy a pessimistic, pagan ideology, the young Kipling a conservative and sociological ideology, and E. M. Forster the rancid pieties of a virtuously liberal ideology. Of these four, Kipling claimed least for literature and confined himself almost entirely to writing it. So did Wordsworth, except in Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude. Hardy’s novels and poetry, though sustained by a doctrine, did not really need a doctrine. Forster, on the other hand, was almost as preten544

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tious as Shelley, whose Defence of Poetry made ridiculous claims for literature’s role in the preservation of civilization. The problem of civilization as Shelley envisaged it was the ‘mammonizing’ of ‘money’ and the effect on man’s ‘internal world’ of the increasing control exercised by the sciences over his ‘external world’. The function of literature was to restore ‘rhythm and order’, to embody ‘the beautiful and . . . good’, and to rescue man from the mental slavery he had imposed on himself through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Only when poetry inserted its ‘divine’ understanding by bringing ‘light and fire’ from the ‘eternal regions’ where ‘calculation . . . did not . . . soar’ and the ‘curse’ which bound men to the ‘accidents of surrounding impressions’ had been removed by the ‘electric life’ which, ‘burnt within the words’ of the most celebrated contemporary writers, would civilization be saved. It would be possible to compile a dossier of the language in which Shelleyites were to repeat these claims over the following hundred years. It would be equally possible to point out that Shelleyism has been resisted not only by a Tractarian doctrine which questions its pantheism and an economic doctrine which questions its analysis of the Industrial Revolution, but also by a deliberately philistine doctrine (as in Peacocke and Mallock) which subjects it to critical demolition by an ‘average’ sensibility. The Defence of Poetry was an attack on contemporary life, implied a poetic duty to expose its awfulness and claimed that ‘energetic development’ in literature had always preceded a ‘new birth’ of the ‘national will’. Twenty years earlier, Wordsworth’s conception of poetry’s social duty, though politically radical and morally populist, had included a self-regarding conception of its orientation. I Wordsworth1 was born in 1770, was at Hawkshead Grammar School and St John’s College, Cambridge and, after Poems of 1793, published his first serious volume of poetry in 1798. Thereafter, he had a legacy from a friend but no regular employment until he became Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland in 1813 and Poet Laureate in 1843. In time Wordsworth became a popular, central and acceptable Victorian as poet of nature and liberty and of a spirituality which mixed nature as idyll with nature as mystical presence. It was his rejection of materialism, and his eventual affirmation of immortality, which blurred the impact of his pantheism and spared him the demeaning attention which Zaehner was to give to Aldous Huxley. 11

William Wordsworth (1770–1850), educated Hawkshead Grammar School and St John’s College, Cambridge. Poet Laureate 1843–50. Author of Lyrical Ballads, 1798–1805; Poems, 1807; The Convention of Cintra, 1809; The Excursion, 1814; Two Addresses To The Freeholders of Westmorland, 1818; Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 1822; Kendal And Westmorland Railway, 1845; and The Prelude, 1799, 1805 and 1850.

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In 1793 Wordsworth spoke of nature’s power and man’s relation to it. But he spoke in a borrowed voice and with a borrowed rhythm which he then abandoned. In 1798, as co-author (with Coleridge) of Lyrical Ballads, in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (which included an extra volume of his own), and in the two-volume Poems of 1807, he associated poetical and theoretical statements about relations between nature, poetry, man and life first with a political doctrine and then with the intellectual ambition which was announced in the first two versions of The Prelude. Almost everything Wordsworth published up to Lyrical Ballads was about pride and oppression, the injustice of landowners and the inadequacy of the Poor Law, man’s misery, sadness and (occasionally) wickedness, his inhumanity to man, and the distant prospect of ‘Love . . . Truth . . . Liberty and . . . Virtue’ emerging from revolution. The cohesion between nature and human sentiment, the need for love as the antiseptic to contempt and the revolting nature of meanness played a part. But the prevailing impression, apart from the impression that Wordsworth’s interest in character was confined to interest in his own character, was of the fanaticism of women about their children, the hardness and intensity of feeling of the rustic poor, the ‘meddling’ nature of the intellect, and the ‘wise passiveness’ of the ‘still, sad music of humanity’. In Poems of 1807, though these sentiments were repeated, there were also countervailing sentiments – about human happiness and the nobility, simplicity and benignity of nature, about the demands of patriotic duty and about the joy with which earthly life should be conducted. There was a comparative absence of inhumanity and there was the natural melancholy of the Highland maiden, the natural humanity of the leech-gatherer, the natural liberty of Rob Roy, the natural tendency of Wordsworth’s heart to be ‘dancing with the daffodils’ and the natural connection between tears, happiness and ‘the light that never was on land or sea’. There was nonsense about the fidelity of dogs and the utility of spades. But there were also contrasts between French ‘slavery’ and Napoleonic ‘tyranny’ and the depth and loneliness of English freedom as it had manifested itself in Shakespeare and in the radical politics of Milton, Sydney, Marvell, Harrington, Vane, Fox and Clarkson. Poems of 1807 was a lamentation for a dead past and a deterioration in English religion, and the proclamation of a future which would be under ‘Divine’ protection. It was through the soul rather than through battle that nations became ‘great and free’, and Nelson was superior to Napoleon because of his ability to face pain in the pursuit of virtue. Not only for Nelson but also for Wordsworth, it was God’s leadership by which ‘virtue’ was ‘tried’ and a personal God who had been man’s ‘Lord and Friend’ against the depredations of the world. Later Wordsworth was a poet of the Church of England. But later Wordsworth was poetically boring. If we are to understand Wordsworth in his

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most impressive period, we must examine the transformation of the liberated Wordsworth of the French Revolution into the libertarian, secular Tory Wordsworth who had emerged by the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

In the prefaces to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had claimed that poetry could be written about ordinary life, that it should avoid the pomposity of artificial life and, when written on the principles of volume I of Lyrical Ballads, would ‘interest mankind permanently’ and contribute to understanding of the ‘quality’ and ‘multiplicity’ of ‘moral relations’. The prefaces to Lyrical Ballads contrasted a genuine poetic diction with both the expectations entertained by contemporary readers and the ‘gaudiness and insanity’ of the poetic diction that they actually got. Good poetry would use a ‘selection of the language really spoken by men’, would ‘recollect . . . emotion . . . in tranquillity,’ and would display the ‘want of restraint’, simplicity of ‘elementary feeling’ and ‘maturity’ in the ‘passions of the heart’ which were to be found in ‘low and rustic life’. The prefaces to Lyrical Ballads elaborated these dicta. They stated that the poems were the outcome of ‘long and deep’ thought, had been agitated by ‘great and simple affections’, and had ‘more enthusiasm and tenderness . . . a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul than [were] supposed to be common among mankind’; moreover, that poetry was ‘the most philosophic of all writing’, aimed at a ‘general and operative . . . truth’ which was ‘spread . . . over the whole earth and all time’, and was ‘carried along into the heart by passion’. Wordsworth’s conception of poetry had socio-political overtones which were addressed more or less directly in Descriptive Sketches but were not then really addressed again until Sonnets on Liberty. And just as the religious burden of this aspect of his poetry will be understood best in the light of The Prelude, so its political burden will be understood best in the light of A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff which was written (but not published) in 1793 and The Convention of Cintra and Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland which were published in 1809 and 1818 respectively. The Convention of Cintra criticized both the terms of the Convention and the British commanders, including Wellington, who had signed it. It systematized Wordsworth’s previously stated opinion that the French Revolution, though justified by Louis XVI’s tyranny, had been morally damaged by the Terror, and that the British war against it had been as much a war for liberty as the Revolution had been in 1793. In making himself the spokesman of liberty in Spain and Portugal, Wordsworth claimed that there was ‘not a man’ in Britain who did not agree with him, that the defeats suffered by the Spanish army had placed the burden of warfare on the Spanish people and that they would be well able to bear it, provided their rulers were neither ‘timid’ nor

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‘jealous’ of the harmony which guerilla warfare would create between the ‘military’ spirit and the ‘moral virtues and . . . passion’ of ‘the people’. The idea of Spain as a moral unity which could deal with military defeat and of Britain’s duty to act as the agent of an armed liberty repeated many of the ideas which Wordsworth had expressed unenthusiastically in the 1790s about Austria and Prussia as allies against the revolution. But The Convention of Cintra also inserted into the assumptions Wordsworth had made fifteen years earlier, the assumption that there was a natural order of society in Spain, just as Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland was to insert the assumption that there was a natural order of society in Westmorland. Two Addresses idealized Westmorland as a society in which there were few great landed proprietors, in which the dominance of the Lowther family was beneficial and in which, as The Prelude had already stated, neither ‘wealth nor blood’ by themselves commanded respect, and there was more of ‘frank simplicity’ than in ‘any other nook of English land’. In attacking political economy, manhood suffrage and annual parliaments, and in accusing Brougham, the opposition candidate at the Westmorland by-election, of carpet-bagging, Wordsworth gave a distinctive account of Tory patriotism during the Napoleonic wars and of the Whig failure to ‘prize’ British religion, morals, manners and literature by comparison with those of France. These were Wordsworth’s version of the party Conservatism of 1818 which, though expressed in the language of freedom, meant by freedom not what he had meant in 1793 – freedom to destroy tyranny – but the gradation of ranks, the defence of tithe and of the Anglican Establishment against Catholic emancipation, the preservation of property and the constitution and reform of the administration of the Poor Law. Two Addresses did not equate the freedom of 1818 with the freedom of 1793. But they implied a connection of consonance rather than command between landed magnates and freeholders; they treated the predominance of the Lowthers as acceptable because Lowther opinions coincided with freeholder-opinion; and they declared that the Radical demand to make law conform to opinion ignored the fundamental truth that ‘laws should remain till long trial had proved them an encumberance’. Wordsworth’s mature politics varied with the circumstances. But even when hardest on his youthful innocence, they expressed his hatred both of the ‘atheist crew’ which had taken over the French Revolution and of the reaction and suppression with which Pitt had conducted the war against it. In recalling the aspiration to liberty which had survived from the great ‘dawn’ of the early 1790s, they recalled the shock felt by ‘the best youth in England’ at Britain’s decision to declare war. In A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), Wordsworth used a sermon by

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a comparatively liberal bishop to disparage the Church of England’s approval of ‘civil and religious . . . slavery’, to emphasize the insignificance of Louis XVI’s execution and to criticize Burke – an ‘infatuated moralist’ – for wanting the French Republic to be replaced by a ‘servile adoption of the British constitution’. He justified revolutionary violence, the expropriation of the French clergy and the abridgement of French liberty on the ground of ‘the safety of the people’. His positive principles were that ‘the great evils which decimated states’ proceeded ‘from the governors having an instinct different from the governed’, that ‘a republic, legitimately constituted, contained less of oppressive principle than any other form of government’ and that the French Republic, once its ‘destructive . . . machiavellian . . . phase’ had passed, would acquire the character of a popular government in which the ‘herdsman’ would have ‘the staff in one hand and the book in the other’. In A Letter, Wordsworth distinguished inequalities which were, from the inequalities which were not, inseparable from civil society, described as a ‘helot’ anyone who had no share in ‘the election of a representative’, and praised what he supposed the English people to mean by liberty – not reactionary, aristocratic liberty, but the ‘plain living’, ‘high endeavour’ and stern independence which he was to find in Rob Roy, Toussaint l’Ouverture, the Scots, the Swedes, the Swiss, the Venetians, the men of Kent and the antislavery movement, as well as in Charles James Fox whose death in 1807 marked the passing of a ‘mighty being . . . from the earth’. This was a polemical, partisan and patriotic liberty – the liberty which Wordsworth had seen first in Belgium in 1790 and which issued in the claim that human nature in ‘lowly cottages’ was ‘less under the action of social vanity’ than any other form of social life. It remains to relate this to the sense of religion which was present throughout. II The sanitized Wordsworth whom his executors presented in the 1850 Prelude played a part alongside In Memoriam in creating the spiritual religion which A. C. Bradley among others was to spread upon the world in Oxford Lectures on Poetry. The Excursion, on the other hand, was an attempt to convert the natural religion of the 1805 Prelude into the regular, rural Anglicanism which was to be the norm in Wordsworth’s published poetry after the 1820s. The Wordsworth who wrote his greatest poetry between 1798 and 1807, however, had no ambition to incorporate Christian doctrines and images, and had underpinned both idyll and gloom without creating Christian complications. In this poetry, indeed, though the clergy were rural sages and churches part of a rural landscape, there was nothing more specifically Christian than a Coleridgean resistance to materialism, the mistrust of urban life which Keble was to borrow later and a mentality which, though it was to be admired by many of the latitudinarians who appeared in Part I of the present volume, was

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post-Christian more than it was latitudinarian and in some respects resembled Shelley’s mentality more than it resembled Tennyson’s.

Lyrical Ballads and Poems of 1807 dropped hints about the depth, power and calm of nature that would have been disclosed more fully in The Recluse if it had ever been written. But neither got very far, except in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the ‘Immortality Ode’, beyond the outward romanticism of physical nature and the consonance between physical nature and human nature; neither disclosed the ‘mystical’ relation between man and nature or the contrast this implied with historic, orthodox Christianity. The Prelude of 1805 was conceived of as part of The Recluse, which was to deal on the widest panorama with nature, man and god. The Prelude’s own themes were Wordsworth’s imagination, his wish to write a major poem and the intimations of divinity that he convinced himself had been operative throughout. The Prelude was remarkable by reason of the theological character of its egoism, the sense of difficulty it conveyed about the act of writing and the overcoming of difficulty as a work which God had been doing for Wordsworth through nature. There was in The Prelude a low-level depiction, which only occasionally became a symbol, of the role of conventional religion in peasant life. There was also an elevated depiction of a powerful religion which, though it did not exactly ignore conventional Christianity, had almost as little connection with it as Kipling’s religion was to have later. In The Prelude there were many sub-themes, including an idyllic distaste for ‘the first industrial nation’, a contrast between man’s ‘natural graciousness of mind’ and the ‘unquiet heart’ displayed in revolutionary politics and the suggestion that nature and the power of thought (i.e. not the cunning or responsibility of politicians) were the remedy for revolutionary terror. There was denigration, like Macaulay’s denigration, of eighteenth-century Cambridge, gratitude to Wordsworth’s mother, sister and wife and to the ‘lowly cottagers’ of his childhood, and an account of the birth of his illegitimate daughter. And there were meditations on the gap which separated educated men from ordinary men, and on the use made of books by the wealthy in order to divide men and conceal truths which ordinary men understood naturally. Like Tennyson, the young Wordsworth stood aslant the England of the future, both economically and politically, while creating images with which industrial society could console itself for the loss of the pre-industrial world. Unlike Tennyson, however, his sensibility was unproblematically pagan, felt the ‘grandeur’ of ‘the beatings of the heart’ and ‘Godlike’ intimations of nature’s ‘strength’ and employed an imagery which treated ‘the life of . . . verse’ as a ‘holy’ life. Relations between Wordsworth and nature as The Prelude explained them

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were not without complication. But in essence they were demonstrations of the ‘genius, power, creation and divinity’ which Wordsworth spoke of in discussion of himself and of the ‘mighty mind’ which he had believed in since he first felt the force of its presence on Snowdon when he was young. It is easy to take Wordsworthian metaphor too literally and thus to theologize what was intended poetically. It is even easier to ignore the theology of Wordsworth’s poetry and to neglect the sense in which, ‘chosen’ as nature’s ‘son’ and ‘sanctified by nature’s discipline’, he had ‘walked with Nature’ in ‘religious love’.

The problem in The Prelude was not so much to describe nature as to explain and justify the task Wordsworth had set himself – of relating his imagination to the divinity by which he believed himself to have been protected. It was in this respect that poetry (and music) were credited, as nature was credited, with a divine afflatus and from this point of view that the primary subject was less Wordsworth’s own mind than the difficulty he experienced in expressing his relationship with divinity. Certainly The Prelude’s account was extraordinary in its claim to divinity, and was not only quite different from the Anglicanism of The Excursion but also went far beyond the average mysticism of the rest of Wordsworth’s poetry.

It is not the intention of these pages to deny the stimulus which nature brought to Wordsworth in puberty and beyond. But it is their intention to recall that in England poetry has done much to subvert historic orthodoxy, that, in spite of retreats and evasions, Wordsworth’s greatest poetry was such a subversion and that the consequence was a God who was not only less Christian than the God of Paradise Lost but was also, even in His lip-service to love, scarcely more Christian than Hardy’s or Kipling’s God. III For long periods in his life, Hardy2 did not theorize either his poetry or his fiction. After The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude The Obscure, he theorized explicitly, made the same complaint as Wilde was making at the same time about the magazine and circulating library audiences whose patronage was crucial to the prosperity of ‘Grub Street’, and insisted 12

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), educated school in Dorchester. Ecclesiastical architect, 1856–70. Author of Desperate Remedies, 1871; Under the Greenwood Tree, 1872; A Pair of Blue Eyes, 1873; Far From the Madding Crowd, 1874; The Hand of Ethelberta, 1876; The Return of the Native, 1878; The Trumpet-Major, 1880; The Laodicean, 1881; The Dorsetshire Labourer, 1883; The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886; The Woodlanders, 1887; Wessex Tales, 1888; A Group of Noble Dames, 1891; Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1892; Jude The Obscure, 1896; Poems of the Past and Present, 1902; and The Dynasts, 1904 and 1911.

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that literature would be unable to fulfil the responsibilities which had been fulfilled by Elizabethan and Periclean drama unless it transcended the intrusive narrowness of the morality which the conventional public expected of it. Hardy’s father was a Dorset builder who had a passion for folk-song and Church music. Hardy was brought up an Anglican and was educated at a Nonconformist school in Dorchester. As a young man, he was a devout churchgoer, an admirer of Keble and William Barnes and beneficiary of the stylistic influence of Tate and Brady. After rejecting ordination, he renounced Christianity like many others in the late 1860s, and became yet another enemy of dogma. Thirty years later, he made Tess Christianity’s victim. He allowed Jude to misinterpret his yearning for the High Church stuffiness of Christminster (i.e. Oxford) as a call to religion and throughout the ghastliness of the concluding chapter held out less hope for mankind, and paid even less tribute to Christianity, than in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard had his own brand of blasphemy, was the victim of coincidence, concealment, irresolution, drink, gossip, the corn-market and an Iago-like destiny, and was driven by hate, jealousy, enmity and pride, even when the will he wrote before his death exuded a renunciation engendered both by love and ‘the cravings of the heart’. The Mayor of Casterbridge dealt in subterfuge, and mixed motives. It displayed callousness, thoughtlessness, impulse and passion, and in Henchard supplied a character who not only created his own destiny but also deserved the destiny he created. In the end, the heroine achieved an ‘unbroken tranquillity’ and Henchard the conclusion that ‘even he’ was in ‘somebody’s hand’. But Henchard also suspected that he was being punished by ‘some sinister intelligence’, that happiness was but an ‘occasional episode in a general drama of pain’ and that the gods had an ‘ingenious machinery’ which ensured that man’s ‘wisdom to do’ should be paralleled by ‘the departure of the zest for doing’. Hardy recorded the arrogance of farmers and the inconsiderateness of landowners, the uplifting of the rural labourer by the example of Joseph Arch and the general weakening of religion which had accompanied the weakening of rural society. He lamented the subversion of the Wessex idiom by the National Schools, the difficulty experienced by ‘noble natures’ in living successfully in the world and the deplorable consequences for morality and quality of life induced by the ‘concentration’ in ‘slums and alleys’ of a population ‘hitherto . . . distributed evenly over the country’. Hardy thought of his poetry as meditating on God’s death, expressing ‘unorthodox opinions’ about God’s immanence, or abandoning both the ‘masculine pronoun’ and the ‘anthropomorphic’ conception of ‘fundamental energy’. He thought of his novels as a register of ‘truth’ about ‘feeling and action’, as the disclosure of a consonance between the novelist’s mind and his treatment of his subjects, and as supplying the ‘aesthetic training’ which readers received from the beauty of construction in Tom Jones, Clarissa

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Harlowe, The Bride of Lammermoor and the first thirty chapters of Vanity Fair. But what he imputed most to the novel, was something deeper and more demanding – a contrast between Society’s ‘vocal formulae’ and men’s ‘tacit opinions’, acknowledgement of the tragedy involved in the ‘adaptation of human instincts to rusty . . . moulds’, and a demonstration of the fact that the ‘waves of human impulse’ had been so little ‘modified’ by education that ‘the peer and the peasant’ stood on much the same level in the face of moral and literary judgement. Hardy’s pessimism involved the sense of ‘a worse’ as ‘the first step’ towards the ‘betterment’ of both soul and body. But he became almost wholly pessimistic, intuited that men had been ‘less pitiless’ towards one another in the Roman Empire than they were in the twentieth century and, like Beatrice Webb and Gilbert Murray, anticipated a ‘barbarizing of taste’, a ‘degrading thirst after . . . stimulation’, and the disparity between ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’ symptomatic of a ‘new Dark Age’. Hardy claimed for literature properly conducted a dedication to truth which avoided didacticism and distinguished the ‘temporary’ from the ‘eternal’. It had a ‘humanizing’ use; it rejected the interference with ‘spontaneity’ typical of the ‘charlatanry’ of contemporary fiction; and it not only interfused reason with religion, it also helped by that route to ensure the world’s survival. Hardy’s novels depicted a ‘natural society’ in which the individuality of the poor was more menacing than Wordsworth’s nature, ‘waves of human impulse’ were standing up to the pressure from ‘culture’, and marriage, when it ‘thwarted nature’, was ‘no real marriage’ and should be ‘dissolvable’ once it became ‘a cruelty to either of the parties’. At times, after 1918, he looked vaguely and despairingly to the Church of England to do what Catholic modernists had failed to do in Rome to ‘keep the shreds of morality together’. More generally his view was that Christianity, having had a ‘fair trial’ for nearly two thousand years, ‘deserved’ to be ‘thrown over’ not necessarily by Buddhism, as he had suggested flippantly, during the Boer War, but by almost any other religion which could be thought of. Hardy may, indeed, as Parry’s daughter claimed for Parry,3 have had the anima naturaliter Christiana which Lord David Cecil claimed for him. But Hardy’s effect was undoubtedly that of a pagan beacon in the doom-laden world of which Kipling’s paganism was to supply a confirmation. IV Kipling4 was born in 1865 into a cultured and vaguely Methodist family whose head, J. L. Kipling, was architectural sculptor to the Bombay School 13 14

See above, chapter 17. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), educated United Services College, Westward Ho. Journalist in India. Author of Quartette, 1885; Departmental Ditties, 1886; Plain Tales

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of Art and was later to become Principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore. At the age of six, Kipling was sent home to England, where he spent his time between a ‘disagreeable and pious household’ in Southsea and the Burne-Jones household in Fulham. In 1878 he began four years at a services orientated public school which, unlike the major Victorian public-schools, laid little emphasis on Christianity. Kipling was close to the headmaster and edited a school magazine. At the age of sixteen, he returned to India in order to become a journalist on an English-language newspaper in Lahore before moving in 1887 to become a journalist on an English-language newspaper in Allahabad. Though he left India for good in effect when he was twenty-six, Kipling went on writing about India until the publication of Kim a decade or so later. Slowly, then, India was replaced as subject and background by South Africa, Sussex, England and the Empire. The Empire which Kipling celebrated – the Empire of Rhodes and Milner, of Roberts and the British soldier, and of those ‘outlying colonies of men’ who enhanced the honour and dignity of their country ‘wherever that country might be’ – was to come to an end within twenty years of his death. From some points of view he associated it with the superiority of Western civilization. From other points of view, like Rider Haggard, he associated it with the high degree of moral solidarity achieved in the ‘backward’ civilizations by which it was surrounded. Kipling’s wars were wars of duty and energy; they were also wars of sadness, heroism and gloom. Kipling was critical of the philistine democracy which had been disciplined by machinery and deceived by political mentors. It was the people and their Queen not democracy or ‘the democratic politician’ that he admired; he used the verb ‘Gladstoned’ as a term of abuse; he accused even the Salisbury government in 1885 of being unlikely to take the action which democracy was preventing all governments taking in Africa and Asia. His death in 1936, like King George V’s death, marked the death of a mentality. In India, Kipling was not a settler and was conscious of his ‘grimy trade’ as a journalist (until Dufferin bestowed Viceregal favours on his family). On the other hand, the newspapers he wrote for were the newspapers of the middle- and lower-middle-class English at the conventions of whose lives he declined to sneer, as Forster and Orwell were to sneer later. footnote 4 (cont.) From The Hills, 1888; Soldiers Three, 1888; The Story of the Gadsbys, 1888; In Black and White, 1888; Under the Deodars, 1888; The Phantom Rickshaw, 1888; Wee Willie Winkie, 1888; The Courting of Dinah Shadd, 1890; The Light That Failed, 1890; The City of Dreadful Night, 1891; The Smith Administration, 1891; Letters of Marque, 1891; Life’s Handicap, 1891; Mine Own People, 1891; The Maulakha, 1892; Many Inventions, 1893; The Jungle Book, 1894; The Seven Seas, 1896; Captains Courageous, 1897; The Days Work, 1898; Recessional and Other Poems, 1899; Stalky and Co., 1899; Kim, 1901; etc.

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Kipling’s first collection of poems was published at his parents’ expense when he was sixteen and was followed by letters in verse, love-poems, poems about his schooldays and poems which reflected both the externalities of Indian life, and day-to-day experience of English life in India. By the time of Departmental Ditties (1886) he had published parodies of poets from Cowper to Browning and had acquired a distinctive and fertile poetic manner and message which had given him an assured reputation in India. By the time of Barrackroom Ballads (1892) he had the assured reputation which he had always wished to have in England. On arriving as an English man-of-letters at the age of twenty-seven, Kipling brought with him a new tone. Like Shaw and Wilde in one direction and Conrad and Stevenson in another, he eroded the high-minded simplicity of mid-Victorian virtue, borrowed Carlyle’s preference for the man-of-action over the man-of-letters, and went back to the unelevated virtue which Fitzjames Stephen had immortalized, also in India, when writing Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Though in some respects in an English context, Stephen was liberal, Kipling was not. He did not identify himself with Lecky’s middle-class moment and he disliked Civil Service high-mindedness. His Indian poetry was satirical, lowminded, heroic, tombstone, even satirically tombstone. It was pessimistic about civilization (in the face of the ‘ten-rupee jezail’), gave serious attention to the incidence of revenge (including decapitation) and had a more than ordinary interest in the Boh Da Thone who ‘filled old ladies with kerosene’. In The Gods of the Copybook Headings (which was published after World War I), Kipling was an individualist reacting against the ‘uplift’ and ‘breadth of mind’ of the early 1920s. In India and the aftermath of India, he was a reactionary communitarian for whom solidarity was primary and an ‘Inner Circle’ of tribe, regiment and service enabled everyone who was not a ‘Bear or a Blacksheep’ to be intimate with everyone else. About this, Kipling was consistent and systematic. Just as he personified machinery and the determinism to which it was subject, so he personified the animals of the jungle and the communal identity embodied in the law of the jungle. In ‘The Ballad of East and West’ the protagonists proved their manhood, strengthened the Empire, and stood by the ‘blood of their clans’. If If, ‘The Ballad’ and The Gods, are read together, the rebarbative character of Kipling’s social conceptions will be unmistakable. Kipling’s Indian writing was about historic India, the striking character of nature in India and the oppressive character of the Indian climate. It was about the ‘law’, the North-West Frontier and the pre-eminence of ‘women . . . horses . . . power and war’. In addition, it was about the Cockney and Irish character of the British Army, the Army’s loyalty to the Queen, and even Mulvany’s determination to punish the renegade who had promised the Sikhs Irish support against the British in the Punjab.

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Kipling’s idea of Indians was less adequate than his idea of the British in India. There were magnificent Maharajas and admirable soldiers, and there was Gunga Din. But there was also the underlying filth, a sanitary-reforming prince who really wanted a knighthood, Indian servants who needed to have everything explained to them, workmen, clerks and railway drivers who were less efficient than their equivalents in England, and Westernized Indians who were eloquent but impractical replicas of Westernized Japanese. Among the English, one of Kipling’s main subjects was the class which did the work. This was neither an hereditary ruling class nor an intellectual ruling class (except among the higher reaches of the Civil Service). It was distinctly ungrand; it included wives who lost their looks, often in conditions of extreme isolation; and it was compelled by the climate to send its children to England for long periods in childhood. Its members had little culture; they suffered acutely from currency fluctuations; and there was both the darkness which enveloped a ‘well-educated’ Bengal Civil Servant in The Phantom Rickshaw, and a pessimism which was relieved only by the belief that community and law could check the defects of man’s nature. Yet, despite all discouragements, there was a devotion to work which gave India more than India gave and showered on Indians benefits they could not provide for themselves. In fictionalizing English society in India thirty years after Tolstoy had fictionalized Russian society in central Asia, Kipling’s miniatures implied a general conception. Though a child was to be central to The Jungle Books (which, however, he wrote in England), there was not much family life. He was cynical and ironical about love and sex, described Mrs Hawksbee – a secular priestess – as better than any clergyman, and in ‘Thrown Away’ achieved a moving combination of irony, sympathy and pity. In prose as in verse, Kipling was deliberately philistine. He praised the lower ranks of the army as well as the lower ranks of the Civil Service, celebrated the engine-room of English rule and achievement, and created original characters out of the builders of ships, railways, roads and dams. He accused Colvin, Aitchison, Hunter, ‘fluent Ilbert’ and other ornaments of the higher Civil Service of keeping a ‘liberal’ distance from the average English and of preferring the ‘Chatterjees, Banerjees and Mookerjees’ to them. These were radical convictions which were not less radical because they were hostile to a Liberal Establishment and dignified the illusionless underclass which was alienated from the ethos of the higher functionaries. They reached their high point in a vendetta against Ripon, Gladstone’s Viceroy, for giving Indian judges authority over the mofussil English, for wishing to bring Indians into positions of responsibility in government and for encouraging the politically conscious Indian middle class to suppose that they represented the Indian people. Kipling’s India was numinous and elemental, as in ‘Lispeth’ and ‘The Mark

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of the Beast’. It dredged up from the English and Irish vernacular, as Dvorˇák and Brahms were dredging up from a different vernacular, an art form of the very highest possibilities. The question we have to ask is, what did Kipling think about religion? V Kipling’s writings were littered with references to God as judge, task-master and creator of the law, including the jungle law, the law of machinery, the seafarers’ law and the copybook laws, through all of which He had discouraged cheats and weaklings and had done nothing to consecrate the idea of progress. There were disparagements of ‘heathen idols’; affirmations about love and a famous sneer (later) at F. E. Smith for introducing Christianity into English politics. The tone, though occasionally anti-Christian but more usually contemptuous of the modernity which was expelling Christianity, did not leave the impression that Christianity had anything relevant to say and did leave the impression, so far as it left that sort of impression, that Buddhism and Hinduism had something relevant to say. The religious background that Kipling sketched in both poetry and prose in the 1880s and 1890s included holy men, both Buddhist and Hindu, contemplation as the natural culmination of a Hindu life, and an unfriendly treatment of missionaries, missionary ignorance and missionary enthusiasm. There was mockery of the Comteanism and Spencerianism of Aurelian McGoggin whose ‘rarefied . . . religion’ drove him to imbecility ‘in the service of humanity’, and of the ‘moral text-book’ based on ‘the principles of natural religion’ which high authority was proposing should be taught in Indian colleges. Some of this was almost certainly borrowed from Sir Alfred Lyall. But if Kipling believed, as one of his biographers claimed, in ‘one filled with . . . God’s . . . spirit who voluntarily died in the belief that the human race would be spiritually better thereby’, his belief was not expressed publicly and was marginal to his public thought until long after he had left India. In Kipling’s account of Indian religion, there were important implications – that religion was deeply rooted in Indian minds, that Indian gods were ‘Gods of Things as They Are’ and that Indian priests would exercise themselves vengefully on missionary or European intruders. Indians wanted gods and would find them wherever they could, even in a young British officer whose family-authority persuaded the Bhils who had divinized his grandfather, to accept from him the vaccination they would not accept from an army instruction. Finally, that the intellectually-motivated desire to make men better than they were capable of being made would separate the ‘highminded’ from ‘the people’, reduce the agent of improvement to ‘idiocy’ and damage that ‘historic naturalness’ which could not be forced without damage and should not be forced in fact. This moral, quasi-religious and sociological conservatism was endemic. It

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assumed that mankind had well-understood conventions, and that infringement of the law would bring retribution. There was also the hint that, in the shadow of eternity, ‘all . . . creeds’ were both ‘alike and colourless’. In this phase, Kipling used religious subjects as he used other subjects to tell stories or make poetry. In Kim, there seemed to be an almost positive statement. Kim had three main subjects: Kim’s own ambivalence as sahib and Indian; the Russo-British struggle to establish political control in Afghanistan and Central Asia; and the lama’s search for a religion which would ‘wrench . . . the soul back’ from ‘sin’ and ‘freedom’, and enable it to ‘obtain salvation’. Kim was the orphaned son of an Indian woman and an Irish NCO who had dropped out of railway employment after leaving the army and had died as ‘poor whites died’ in India under the influence of opium. Kim’s achievement as an orphan, up to the point at which Kim began, was to have ‘done nothing with immense success’, to have avoided missionaries and ‘white men of serious aspect’, and to have moved with ease between Indian and European life and his Indian and his European identity.

Among the subjects that Kipling wrote about in his Indian phase religion was prominent not only in the poetic experiments in the stylized manner of ‘Evarra and His Gods’ and ‘The Sacrifice of Er-Heb,’ which were included in the definitive edition of his poetry, but also in ‘Itu and His God,’ ‘The Seven Nights of Creation’ and ‘Liberavi Animam Meam’, which appear, along with other similar poems, only in Rutherford’s edition of the early poetry. Though religion was not to become central before Kim, therefore, Kipling had made many statements about it in the course of comparing Roman Catholicism with Japanese Buddhism and relating man to the elements, to death, to duty and to God. Kim was primarily about the transposition of cultures which became possible as its subject moved from being an Indian to being a sahib and back again, like Giffen in ‘Giffen’s Debt’ and Strickland, the policeman, in ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais’ a decade earlier. Kim was not only a spy who admired his superiors in the Great Game, while having intimate experience of the lower departments of the Indian city, he was also manager of the lama’s beggingbowl and of the lama’s religious quest. A novel which almost vindicated the babu also treated the British Army less respectfully than before and made its hero glaringly eccentric in relation to conventional respectability. To Kim’s second theme – the Great Game in Central Asia– the lama was irrelevant since it touched none of his interests and, insofar as it provoked him to violence, threatened the peace and inwardness of his religion. But it enabled Kipling to contrast religious heroism with secular heroism, to underline the uncertainty of Kim’s attitude to the contrast and to insert a

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secular element into a work which would otherwise have been arcanely religious. Kim was, of course, primarily a story. But it seemed to imply the judgements Kipling wanted to imply – that Protestantism in the person of the Mavericks’ Protestant chaplain, who ‘lumped nine-tenths of the world under the title of “heathen”’, was less adequate than Roman Catholicism in the person of their Roman Catholic chaplain, who believed that the lama was a ‘good man’; and that the lama’s religion, with its want of interest in ordinary freedom and its Buddhist belief in ‘bodily liberation’ through the transmigration of souls, pointed an almost pre-Raphaelite commentary at modern materialism and secularity.

Kipling had no time for niceness and easy optimism and was contemptuously illiberal where Forster’s liberalism condemned the expatriate English as thoroughly as Kipling appreciated them. It was only in religion that they had anything in common. VI Even at the millennium, Forster5 retains an air of secular sanctity. The critical literature about him is vast and pious. The time for admiration, however, has long been over. This section will rough him up, as he was roughed up by Simon Raven who, in addition to entitling his first novel A Passage to Biarritz in parody of A Passage to India, pointed out that, even at King’s College, Cambridge which, as Annan described it in Our Age, was the core and centre of sexual liberation in the 1940s and 1950s, there were articulate dissidents who did not see why homosexual liberation, which they supported, need be accompanied by the sourer sorts of resentful Liberalism. Forster’s first major success as a novelist was Howard’s End, which was published in 1910, by which time he had also established himself as a journalist. By the mid-1920s he had been literary editor of the Daily Herald under Lansbury and was writing regularly about politics as well as about literature. His period as a Liberal sacred cow who was really a Labour propagandist began in the mid-1930s and continued right up to his death in 1970. Thereafter the publication of Maurice, the novel he had suppressed since 1914, and half a dozen homosexual short stories which he had also 15

Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970), educated Tonbridge School and King’s College, Cambridge. Author of Where Angels Fear to Tread, 1905; The Longest Journey, 1907; A Room With A View, 1908; Howards End, 1910; The Celestial Omnibus, 1911; Maurice (1914), 1971; The Government Of Egypt, 1920; Alexandria, 1922; Pharos and Pharillon, 1923; A Passage to India, 1924; Aspects Of The Novel, 1927; Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 1934; Abinger Harvest, 1936; Nordic Twilight, 1940; Two Cheers For Democracy, 1951; The Hill of Devi, 1953; Marianne Thornton, 1956; and Albergo Empedocle, 1971.

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suppressed, gave him a posthumous lift in the Wolfenden era as advocate of the positive merits of homosexuality. In a note about Maurice which he wrote in 1960, Forster acknowledged his debt to Edward Carpenter and attributed the decision to write the novel to an episode in which he had been touched on the backside by one of Carpenter’s followers during a visit to Carpenter nearly fifty years earlier. Generally, however, he was pessimistic about homosexuality, believed that the public attitude had shifted since 1914 from ‘ignorance and terror’ to ‘familiarity and contempt’ and held out no hope either that the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations would pass through Parliament, or that the ‘generous recognition of an emotion’ and ‘reintegration of something primitive into the common stock’ which Carpenter had looked to, would be achieved in England in the foreseeable future. In the writing that he published in his lifetime, Forster gave little positive indication of the importance of homosexuality. There was continuous disparagement of marriage and of suburban, prep-school, public-school, donnish and Indian respectability; and there were celebrations of the male beauty exemplified, among others, by the court punkah-wallah in A Passage to India. But even when exercised about the pressure which society was bringing to bear on ‘minorities’ – his shorthand for homosexuals – Forster ignored the problem in his biography of Lowes Dickinson (though it had been a major problem), apologized when mentioning it in relation to The Well of Loneliness and, except in The Longest Journey, left little clue that the contempt and resentment he was propagating about the dominant ethos in England had anything to do with it.

In Maurice Forster gave a fictional depiction of the life of a homosexual in Edwardian England, describing his subject’s slow realization at home, at school and at Cambridge, that he had to be homosexual, and his belief that man had been created to feel ‘pain and loneliness without help from heaven’. Maurice was emotionally raw about the vulgarity of the average heterosexual in talking about his sexual preferences and about the claim that homosexual love could issue in a ‘particular harmony of mind and body’, ‘happy and permanent union between . . . partners’ and ‘eternal and unforgettable’ intimations of an ‘exquisite beauty’ which transcended differences of class and station. It was made obvious that Maurice, though written as an unpublishable novel, was confession as well as art and was drawn up from the deepest areas in Forster’s experience. There is, therefore, a difficulty in dealing with Forster’s public doctrine – that in one central respect it was not what it seemed. Its cynicism about respectability included an unspoken cynicism about sexual respectability. Its resistance to conformist respectability included an unspoken resistance

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to conformist sexual respectability. And, in spite of a doctrine about sincerity, a major slice of any sincerity that Forster was capable of, was a deferred sincerity which was entirely missing from the works he published in his lifetime. In reviewing Conrad’s Notes on Life and Letters in 1920, Forster criticized Conrad’s ‘dread of intimacy’, his refusal to expose his character to the public, and the ‘rigid conception he entertained as to where the rights of the public stopped’. Yet his own claim that literature ‘came . . . from the bottom of the heart’ and his belief in ‘sincerity’ as the author’s, or artist’s, contribution to civilization, were confined sexually, apart from Maurice and the homosexual short stories, to the private letters of extraordinary frankness that he wrote not only to Lowes Dickinson but also to the wife of a friend from King’s, who received detailed accounts of Forster’s sexual life in Alexandria. Forster’s sincerity was conditioned, more even than Maugham’s sincerity6 was conditioned, by his audience. Though Furbank’s E. M. Forster has redressed the balance, the works that Forster published in his lifetime would have been less misleading if they had encompassed, as a brief passage in A Passage to India seemed to encompass, the possibility, even the social desirability, of concealment and hypocrisy.

Forster was born into a cultivated family which had Evangelical banking in the background and was respectable middle class, rather than upper class, in social character. After school at Tonbridge, he was an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, where he read classics under Wedd, attended Acton’s lectures and, as a member of the Apostles, came to know Keynes, Lytton Strachey, H. O. Meredith and G. M. Trevelyan, whom he thought ‘very clever’. Whatever was going on inside while he was at King’s, Forster behaved like an average and contented undergraduate, attending chapel, writing to his mother and aunts about the position of the King’s boat on the river, recording with approval Kitchener’s visit for an honorary degree in 1898, and describing both his own limited academic success and a paper he had read to the College Classical Society about ‘The Greek Feeling for Nature’. On leaving Cambridge, a legacy enabled him to avoid an immediate choice of profession. He travelled in Italy with his mother, took up extra-mural and working men’s college lecturing, and began to contribute literary articles to a radical political magazine which was being run by friends from Cambridge. Apart from short periods in Germany as a private tutor, in Egypt with the Red Cross and in India as a functionary, he lived in his mother’s home thereafter until buying a flat for himself in London in the 1920s. 16

For Maugham’s sincerity, see Religion and Public Doctrine II.

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Forster published his first novel at the age of twenty-four and had published five further novels by the time he retired from novel writing, nearly half a century before his death. In 1912 he made a tour of India including a brief stay in the State of Dewas Senior, to which he was to return a decade later as the Ruler’s stand-in private secretary after turning down opportunities of employment in the Foreign Office and the Inter-Allied Commission in Germany. Between his two visits to India, Forster had his wartime period with the Red Cross in Alexandria which, after initial distaste for Egyptian life, produced accounts of Middle Eastern politics, with Mohammed Ali being the protagonist of ‘guns’ and ‘aggressiveness’, Cromer a ‘tool of the Imperialists,’ and Zionism a threat to ‘the peace of the world’. In a Labour Party pamphlet of 1920, he acclaimed the Egyptian rebellion of 1919 as a disproof of Egyptian ‘inferiority’, the Egyptian Legislative Assembly as a ‘symbol of Liberty’ and Zaghloul as a genuine representative of Egyptian grievances. Forster interpreted post-war British policy towards Egypt as he had interpreted the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 in relation to Persia – as a power-political betrayal of constitutional nationalism. In attacking Lloyd George’s Greek alignment in 1922, he represented it as an affront to Hindu as well as to Muslim India. It was in relation to India, moreover, that he developed his most searching criticisms of the English ethos. As in Alexandria, so in Dewas Senior, Forster pursued, and wrote privately about, his homosexual connections – with a tram conductor in the former and with servants in the Ruler’s palace in the latter. But his view of India, like his view of Egypt, was first and foremost political. Forster’s last visit to India was to a literary conference in 1945 when he urged ‘English people who liked Indians’ to go to India ‘in order to be with them’. During his earlier visits, he had been working his passage, acquiring an intimacy with Hindu life and opinion in the palace in Dewas Senior, and with Muslim life and opinion while staying with a rising Muslim, Syed Ross Masood7 at whom he had made a pass when Masood was a youth in England. In the articles that he wrote from 1913 onwards, Forster reflected Masood’s, and to some extent Dewas’s points of view, lamenting the coolness which the advent of wives and the steamship had brought to relations between Englishmen and Indians (apart from princely Indians) and the recession in the official Englishman’s contact with Indian culture which had been symbolized when Sir Alfred Lyall8 alone retained the cultural inquisitiveness of an older generation. 17 18

To whom A Passage to India was to be dedicated in 1924 and who, after being ViceChancellor of Aligarh University, was to die in 1937 as Sir Syed Ross Masood. See above, chapter 3.

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These articles explained away the ‘increased civility’ which the Indian princes were receiving from the Government of India as a reaction to Gandhian nationalism, and the reforming ‘constitutions’ which had ‘burst into sudden bloom’ in the Princely States as anticipations of the Prince of Wales’s visit in 1921. But they doubted whether the princes could move faster than the landowning classes would let them and dismissed Lugard’s idea of a British alliance with them as certain to end in disaster. Forster’s policy for India resembled his policy for Egypt. He believed that a ‘new spirit’ was abroad, that the Calcutta Hartal of November 1921 had shown educated Indians creating a ‘new social fabric’ which would take only what it needed from the West and that it was essential to erase the ‘hatred’ which existed between them and the Indian Civil Service. During his pre-war visit, Forster had deplored the ‘reactionary party’ in Delhi. In 1922 the last hope depended on whether anything could be done to destroy the ‘pedestal of race’ with which Englishmen and Englishwomen of all classes were digging the grave of a ‘democratic Empire’. It also required an attempt to make sense not only of Masood but also of the Ruler of Dewas Senior. Forster enjoyed the company of ‘Bapu Sahib’ as he knew the Ruler, dedicated the Everyman edition of A Passage to India to him as well as to Masood and expressed an exaggerated regard for the Ruler’s public reputation. To some extent this was a response to the Ruler’s decision to protect him when the goings-on with the servants became a problem; to some extent it was a result of ignorance and naïveté. Forster acknowledged defects in the Ruler’s character and the financial incompetence which were eventually to lead to his deposition. But he believed him to be a ‘genius’ and a ‘saint’, seems not to have understood until very much later that there was financial duplicity as well and did not at any time understand the mistrust with which the Ruler was viewed by the India Office in London. His account of the Ruler’s downfall, like his account of his own and the Ruler’s relations with the Ruler’s regular private secretary, was a fine piece of high-political narrative which, however, displayed a monotonous rancorousness towards the ‘wheels of Western righteousness’. Forster believed in the ‘happiness’ and ‘peacefulness’ that he found in India and was embarrassed by Lowes Dickinson’s preference for China. In a lecture to Indian students in 1913, he claimed that Indians who knew ‘the Elizabethan drama, the Lake Poets and the Victorian novelists’ would know that the English were neither ‘cold’ nor ‘unimaginative’. A Passage to India, on the other hand, a decade later, created the impression that the English in India hated literature and culture. In A Passage to India, Forster began with the contrast between the ‘low . . . form of life’ the city of Chandrapore appeared to be by the Ganges, and ‘the city of gardens’ it appeared to be in the European quarter, and proceeded to

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the suburban and public-school language and mentalities with which English racial prejudice had driven educated Indians to misery and absurdity. In the course of recording the English regard for the ‘staunchness’ and ‘straightforwardness’ of the Indian landowning class, he returned continually to Fielding, the Principal of the Government College, and to Mrs Moore (the mother of an official) who shared neither the distaste nor the contempt which most English people expressed for their ‘Aryan Brother’, whether in his ordinary dress or in the ‘topi and spats’ which were his incongruous uniform for social or ceremonial occasions in the 1920s. The Indian characters in A Passage to India had their own class, sectarian and caste divisions, treated English ‘literary culture’ as an examinationsubject and were incapable of conducting political discussion without meaningless compliments to ‘Justice and Morality’. They were not only forward, touchy, resentful, obsequious and brutal, they also talked in emotional spasms and were incapable of dealing with the snubs and casualness which their English superiors showered upon them. And their failures were meant to be significant. Aziz’s friendship for Mrs Moore was embarrassing in its effusiveness, while Fielding, after standing out like a ‘lantern of reason’ against the herd and keeping up relations with Indians especially after Aziz’s arrest, left India with relief, first for the ‘harmony’ and ‘joy of form’ that he discovered on leave in Venice, then for the ‘tender romantic fancies’ he rediscovered in the ‘buttercups and daisies’ of an English June, finally for marriage to Mrs Moore’s daughter with whom he returned to India more committed than previously to the English side of the unbridgeable gulf. Like Mrs Moore, Fielding was a pin-up, tolerated by English men because of his ‘good heart and stout body’ (in spite of ‘disruptive’ jokes about the ‘pinko-greyness’ of the ‘white races’) but disliked by English women because of his insistence on ‘keeping in’ with Indians. Yet one of the more important aspects of the novel was that, even as a pin-up, Fielding could not ‘bridge the gulf’ between his own and the educated Indian mentality. A Passage to India was not, in other words, just parti pris. The courtroom scenes were as quintessentially Hollywood as the crowd scenes in Kingsley’s Hypatia. The Indian magistrate was a Hollywood hero, ‘Esmiss Esmoore’s’ memory a Hollywood effect and Miss Quested’s withdrawal of her allegations a vindication of Hollywood truth and right. But beyond this, there was the suggestion that in India it was civilization which had been undone and that there was a want of harmony between ‘the works of man and the earth that upheld them’; indeed, that ‘spirit’ did not exist in India as it did in Europe ‘in a reasonable form’. Even Miss Quested who had begun with an eirenic desire to understand, was perverted into the lying agency of Aziz’s downfall as ‘evil propagated itself in every direction’, Mrs Moore’s son discovered a Jewish conspiracy and the Collector only just managed to control his real desire to ‘flog every native that he saw’.

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Politically, socially and morally, A Passage to India gave out the same noises as Forster’s Egyptian writings, with the difference that the time for ‘tinkering’ had passed, Aziz had liberated himself from dependence on the British and conflict had achieved a Tolstoyan inevitability. About religion, it gave out a message which needs to be understood as an aspect of Forster’s doctrine generally. VII In old age, Forster was to be wheeled out as an oasis of sanity and as a humanist critic of religious and political obscurantism in the conservative England of the 1950s. In these respects, his positions were boringly consonant with everything he had been saying since he had become a public pontificator in the first decade of the century. Before World War I, Forster had taken his first steps as an anti-imperial internationalist for whom Kipling’s bloodiness was as ‘monotonous’ as Sidney Webb’s greyness. The war seems not to have affected him very much. Some of his friends were conscientious objectors. But he did not oppose the war publicly, did his first war work cataloguing at the Tate Gallery and eventually went to Egypt with the Red Cross after declining Trevelyan’s offer to take him to Italy as part of an ambulance unit (on the ground that to accept Trevelyan’s offer would involve leaving his mother alone in England). Forster shared Dickinson’s certainty that ‘emotion’ was being preferred to ‘reason’. He praised the Quaker attempt to staunch the ‘spiritual death’ of the Marne and the Meuse in 1915, and, on seeing some obviously working-class Welsh soldiers laughing at a Cambridge undergraduate ‘in . . . cap and gown’, felt (ponderously) that ‘the tradition he . . . loved’ was being ‘derided by militarism’. However, he did not cut himself off, as Dickinson had done, and seems somehow to have kept his head below the parapet, in spite of agreeing privately with most of what Dickinson said in public. Like Dickinson, Forster welcomed the American declaration of war, the Russian revolutions and the foundation of the League of Nations, while feeling that ‘the class to which he belonged was sliding into the abyss’. In addressing the post-war world he was a self-conscious rentier whose leading antipathy was to the middle-class character which, having created the Empire and the Industrial Revolution, needed to be modified now that the idea of ‘the gentleman’, which was all that remained of Thomas Arnold’s idea of the ‘Christian’ gentleman, had shown itself to have ‘no natural roots’. The changes Forster was advocating concerned in the first place sympathy and emotion; the middle-class English public school male had too little of the first, was too good at buttoning up the second and would be unable indefinitely to maintain the Empire if he was not freer with both. Moreover, the middle-class English public school male had an ‘undeveloped heart’, ignored both the ‘sensitiveness’ and ‘romanticism’ which English literature had

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extrapolated from the ‘national character’, and was unable to ‘use’ either emotion or brain-power to ‘dispel prejudice’. In 1925 Forster stated very clearly that poverty – ‘the most shameful aspect of our civilization’ – was ‘caused by wealth’ and the ‘heaviness of outlook’ that went with wealth. He had, however, as he also stated, no intention of ‘giving away his surplus’ in order to help the poor, even when he looked forward to the ‘great change’ that would occur when middle-class supremacy ended, the working classes (who at least ‘would not . . . have been educated at public schools’) intruded themselves into the public domain and the international situation. It did not take him long to realize that Labour, once it achieved respectability, would be as stuffy as the middle classes, would be as much involved as everyone else in ‘mechanisation’ and would acquire a ‘sausage-and-mashed quality’ which was ‘unknown’ even in existing ‘suburbia’. Forster’s arguments about the English middle-class public school male were the arguments which Lytton Strachey was using about their Victorian mentors. They coloured Forster’s writing and made nonsense of the claim that he ‘did not know how to take sides’. Forster knew how to take sides and used the pretence of not taking sides as an influential way of doing so. In the 1930s, Forster was more specifically political than his unworldliness suggested. He emphasized the ‘good’ as well as the ‘evil’ in Communism, and might have become a Communist himself if he had been ‘braver and younger’. He attacked ‘braying patriots’ and ‘the fighting services’, sneered at adequate rearmament as a sure way to war and claimed to have been voting for ‘inadequate’ rearmament in voting Labour at the 1935 General Election. At the same time, he urged the public to boycott the Aldershot Tattoo and the manufacturers of chemical weapons, and presented the two-minute silence on Armistice Day as ‘the first instance in England of that drilled man-emotion’ which played ‘such a large part in the street-life of Italy and Germany’. Forster felt threatened by the railway bookstall, the popular entertainer and the ‘thé-dansant of the crooner’ and deplored the arterial roads which were destroying the ‘pastoral’ England of the seventeenth century. As the 1939 war approached, he came slowly to understand that ‘the liberal’ was beginning to look ‘silly’ but, unlike Noël Coward in his wartime films, disparaged ‘the civilization . . . of . . . Balham . . . Ealing . . . Clapham and Torquay’ by comparison with rural life and his Thornton ancestors. Though he made a point of avoiding the claptrap of politicians and bishops, he had a claptrap of his own which, when Auden and Isherwood were attacked for fleeing to the United States in the summer of 1940, drew attention to the greater threat from the ‘Quislings’ who were to be found in ‘the City and the Aristocracy’. During World War II, Forster was an anti-Nazi propagandist for whom, in a world which had been ‘unified by science’ and made ready for ‘reconstruction’, Hitler’s real villainy was to have ruined the ‘golden moment’ which

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science had given. In searching for instruments of reconstruction, Forster convinced himself that scientists were so ‘indifferent . . . to humanity’ and so craven towards politicians that all that was left was personal relations (within the limits imposed by psychology), democracy (for bridging the gap between ‘the bosses and the bossed’) and an ‘aristocracy of the sensitive . . . considerate and . . . plucky’ including a gallery of heroes from Erasmus and ‘the great Buddhist emperor, Ashoka’ to Mendel and the BBC Third Programme whose climax was achieved in the person who would rather ‘betray his country’ than ‘betray a friend’. In arriving at these engagements, Forster denied the relevance of Christianity, whose influence in the modern world was derived, he believed, from ‘the money behind it’ and whose ‘indwelling spirit’ might ‘have to be restored’ in a ‘non-Christian’ form ‘if religion was to regain the spiritual power it had had in the past’. VIII Forster stated repeatedly – what he stated most explicitly in criticism of Toynbee – that the modern age was bloody because it was an age of belief that ‘our tormented planet’ needed less belief and that he himself did not believe in belief. At the same time, he had at the very least a voyeur’s interest in a confused form of post-Christian belief. Religion was a background presence in some of Forster’s earliest writings. After 1913, it came to the fore as Maurice’s realization of his homosexuality coincided with his rejection of conventional Christianity, Wells’s insensitivity to ‘mysticism’ was criticized in an otherwise flattering review of his Outline of History and the Alexandrian fathers were given the imaginative run-through which A Passage to India was to give to popular Hinduism. Forster expressed a commonplace enmity to religious bigotry and in two pot-boilers contrasted the eclecticism of Alexandrian Judaism with the Rabbinical intolerance of Palestinian Judaism, and Athanasius – dictator, demagogue and ‘modern street-type’ – with the ‘scholarship and tolerance’ for which Origen and Clement had made Alexandria famous. Hinduism was ‘complex, priestly and superstitious’ but was credited with reversing Protestantism’s preference for ethics and conduct over the ‘infinite and incomprehensible’. Islam’s merit was that it had fought a ‘sterner fight’ than Christianity had fought against idolatry and illogicality, and had had an incarnationless God who had left ‘no cradles, coats or handkerchiefs . . . to . . . complicate devotion’. In the University of Aligarh, which had been founded by Masood’s grandfather, moreover, Islam had had the further merit of being been brought up to date, even though the up-to-date rationalist Muslim wedding Forster had attended in India in 1913 seemed to him as unsatisfactory as the up-to-date rationalist wedding Mrs Humphry Ward had ‘tinkered up’ for Trevelyan’s marriage to her daughter in Oxford in 1904.

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Forster liked some of the missionaries whom he met and believed that many of them had tried harder than English officials to get close to Indians. But he did not believe that many of them had succeeded. Neither did he expect anything to be done for India by a public school religion which approved of Christianity chiefly as an endorsement of the National Anthem Forster was much affected both by the Ruler of Dewas Senior’s own religion and by the access which his friendship with the Ruler gave him to Hindu ceremonial, to the Ruler’s meditations and devotions and to the Ruler’s belief in Krishna, who laughed and played where Christ did not. Religion, indeed, was ‘the deepest thing’ about the Ruler. He responded to promptings which ‘most of us scarcely heard’ and displayed what Forster understood by ‘the religious sense’ – the habit of ‘thinking always of others . . . refusing to take advantage of his position in his dealings with them . . . [and] believing that his God acted similarly towards them’. By the time of his second visit to India, Forster believed that ‘everything in India took a religious tinge’. He found Indians ‘easy and communicative’ about religion where the English were uptight and offended, and believed that the railways were doing more for the fairs and pilgrimages of popular Hinduism than they would do against it. In talking to Indians he was fascinated as well as repelled by Hinduism’s ‘energy’; he took seriously the ‘missionary’ force which Ramakrishna and Vivekananda had achieved in the West; and he was deeply impressed by the similarity between his own ‘inspiration’ when writing novels and the ‘inspiration’ described to him by a fakir who wrote Sanskrit poems. Except in discussing Bengali culture, Forster expressed a low opinion of Indian artistic and intellectual life and believed that it was only ‘in the direction of religion’ that India had anything significant to say. What this was, was explained mistily and fundamentally, so far as he was equipped to explain it, in A Passage to India.

In A Passage to India the tension between Islam and Hinduism is easy to understand, whether through Aziz or through Azis’s Hindu acquaintances. What is more difficult to understand is the suggestion that there were similarities between Godbole whose ‘song’, as a Brahmin, produced ‘delight’ in the servants who heard it, and Mrs Moore who, as an unorthodox Christian, had intimations of terror and the ‘cynicism of a withered priestess’. In the Krishna cults, as they appeared in A Passage to India, there were three important features. They encompassed the whole of society, including the ‘unclean sweepers’. They showed the ‘omnipresence’ and ‘Infinite Love’ of ‘Shri Krishna’ without the inconveniences of the Christian Incarnation. And they disclosed a ubiquitous but unintrusive God who transcended human processes and avoided the peculiarities of the Trinity.

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It cannot be said that Forster established the relevance of this sort of Hinduism to his narrative. Rather it was a noise off, a welcome relief from ‘poor, little, talkative Christianity’. On the other hand, it was meant to be more than a noise off, mixing, as it did, in insinuating contrast, the solemnity of missionary, public-school and Trinitarian Christianity, the Hindu god’s capacity for ‘drawing chairs away from beneath His own posterior’, and the ‘maggots . . . and . . . serpents . . . of eternity’ by which Mrs Moore’s mind was consumed. As in his Alexandrian writings, so in A Passage to India, Forster was flirting with alternatives to Christianity, not committing himself to them but not allowing Christianity the priority either, and leading himself into what he thought deeper regions than Christianity could enter. We need not be misled. Forster claimed to have been moved to tears on visiting a Sufi shrine in India in 1945, and to have enjoyed the discussion about religion that he had in a second-class railway carriage on the way to Baroda during the same visit. But India in a sense was Forster’s religious sabbatical. He may have had the ‘religious temperament’ which he attributed to Dickinson. But he also had Dickinson’s hatred of ‘religious weapons’; he no more wished to be a Muslim or a Hindu than he wished to be a Christian; insofar as he had a religion, it was the silent, post-Christian religion embodied in the half-dozen novels which constituted his contribution to ‘sincerity’. IX Readers who think of Forster’s novels as contributions to ‘sincerity’ have Forster’s authority for doing so. Yet his sincerity was tempered by the absence from the novels which he published in his lifetime of any extended consideration either of homosexuality or of the abandonment of Christianity. Forster’s novels, as Leavis knew by instinct, were the post-Christian consensus in literature – rejections of Christianity and embodiments of silence as the central feature of a post-Christian intelligence. Apart from A Passage to India, the novels that Forster published in his lifetime, though often treated as the sacred scriptures of a watchful humanism, were flat, insipid and wanting in humanity, energy and narrative capability. A Passage to India was written in the 1920s; otherwise all of the novels were written by 1914, while many of Forster’s statements about the novel were written later. His most celebrated statement, Aspects of the Novel, was delivered as lectures in Cambridge in 1927. Aspects of the Novel was a cautious work. It was delivered to a critical academic audience, had as its main subjects story, people, plot, rhythm and pattern, and discussed ‘human and eternal interests’ only in muted variation of the claims which were made elsewhere – that men ought to be ‘noble . . . gentle and brave’, that ‘beauty . . . truth and goodness’ had their ‘earthly

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dwelling’ in man’s soul and that books were ‘spiritual possessions’ which, if only ‘indirectly’, could show why ‘hatred and revenge’ were ‘wrong’.

The idea of the novel as a reversal of normality and of the novelist as believing in the normality of the reversal, supplied the spiritual justification which Forster made of the novelist’s and the artist’s freedom to put question marks against the prejudices of the age. The artist’s, or novelist’s, critical function ‘came upon’ him as The Longest Journey had ‘come upon’ Forster ‘without [his] knowledge’ and, instead of preaching, as George Eliot had preached, achieved a beauty which came up, as imagination came up in the Freudian twenties, from the depths of the ‘lower personality’. Forster rejected the cult of authorial personality, wrote feelingly against the ‘aseptic awfulness of the seer’ and suggested that books had in some sense to be anonymous. The ‘creative’ novel, nevertheless, transformed the reader into ‘the condition of the writer’, created a ‘spiritual home’ in which the imagination could ‘assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion’ and did more towards ‘altering . . . human nature’ and summoning men to ‘infinity’ than could be done by science, conscience or a ‘doctrine’ about the universe. Almost all the writers whom Forster discussed between the address he gave about Ibsen, Zola and Tolstoy to the Working Man’s College in 1906 and the address he gave about Order in New York forty-three years later, were discussed in the light of their messages for civilization. Indeed, the more closely Forster’s criticism is examined, the more obvious it becomes that these messages were more central than any strictly critical messages – that Jane Austen’s ‘six great novels’ were about the sacredness of ‘birth and relationships’ and Whitman’s writings, the writings of a ‘true optimist’ who had ‘seen and suffered much . . . yet rejoiced’; that Gibbon’s Decline and Fall had ‘prefigured’ the convulsions of the modern world and Eliot’s Prufrock the fate of the ‘human heritage’ in the midst of Armageddon; that D. H. Lawrence could not have been a poet without his ‘preaching’; that T. E. Lawrence had ‘lifted us up’ into a ‘region of tenderness and unselfishness’ where love for the Arabs reflected ‘disgust’ at twentieth-century civilization, and that in Proust ‘art’ was more important than ‘life’, art’s integrity deeper than moral integrity and art an expression of ‘the spirit of our age’.

21 Modern knowledge and the postChristian consensus V The potentialities of human experience in any age are realized only by a tiny minority, and the important poet is important because he belongs to this (and has also, of course, the power of communication) . . . If the poetry and intelligence of the age lose touch with each other, poetry will cease to matter much, and the age will be lacking in fine awareness. (F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, 1932, 1972 edn, pp. 16–17) Consider . . . the isolation of the human situation, the facts of birth, and of death, . . . man’s place in the perspective of time and the enormity of his ignorance, not . . . as targets for doctrine, but as . . . objects for meditation . . . then in the glow of their emotional reverberation, pass the poem through the mind, silently reciting it as slowly as it allows. Whether what it can stir in us is important or not to us, will, perhaps, show itself then. Many religious exercises and some of the practices of divination and magic may be thought to be directed in part towards a similar quest for sanction, to be rituals designed to provide standards of sincerity . . . It might be said, indeed, with some justice, that the value of poetry lies in the difficult exercise in sincerity it can impose upon its readers even more than upon the poet. (I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, 1929, pp. 290–1) Where else in prose . . . [except in] . . . the incomparable end of Part Two of The Pilgrim’s Progress . . . can a like sustained exaltation be found? . . . It is something, clearly, that could not be reproduced today. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress must leave us asking whether without something corresponding to what is supremely affirmed in that exaltation, without an equivalently sanctioned attitude to death that is at the same time ‘a stimulus to further living’ . . . there can be such a thing as cultural health. (F. R. Leavis, Bunyan Through Modern Eyes, in The Common Pursuit, 1952 p. 210)

In chapter 17 we saw F. H. Bradley and Bosanquet using philosophy, A. C. Bradley literary criticism, and Parry and Hadow musical criticism, to demonstrate the range of application of which a post-Christian mentality was capable in the late nineteenth century. By the time Leavis and Richards appeared on the scene after World War I, Darwinism had become irrelevant, Idealism, in spite of Collingwood, had degenerated into piety and aspiration, and Richards and Leavis, like Wittgenstein, were able to put in their very large boots.

After his initial annexation by Moore and Russell, it turned out that Wittgenstein was a Viennese not an English thinker, that he had been much influenced by Kirkegaard and Schopenhauer and that he had something important to say, in a manner quite different from Russell and Moore, about culture and religion. 571

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Wittgenstein’s1 message about religion was post-Judaic and post-Christian; his emphasis on practice and commitment in religion applied to all religions, not especially to Judaism or Christianity and included a latitudinarianism so ingrained as to leave as little of orthodoxy standing as was left by almost any thinker in Part II of this present work. The Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief and the journal entries which von Wright edited under the title Culture and Value were so idiosyncratic, so obsessed with Jewishness and so dismissive of doctrinal, dogmatic and ecclesiastical religion as to render questionable the claim that, in resisting the dominance of science, Wittgenstein had staked out a space for religion. Wittgenstein doubted whether man can know what is ‘eternal and important’; he was resistant to theological vocabularies; and he dissolved religion into the subjectivity of struggle, torment, suffering, salvation and the wretchedness of man’s imperfection. Examination of Leavis and Richards will show that what they in relation to Christianity, as much as he in relation to Judaism, were proposing was a substitute religion. Leavis and Richards were enemies of the literary taste they found in occupation when they came to adult life and of the intellectual preconceptions with which it was connected. And any account of their significance must begin with the nature of their reactions as literary critics. Having understood these, one still has to ask what difference they made to religion. Our conclusion is that they found new ways of using literature as an instrument of the post-Christian consensus, that the comparative absence of religion from their writing was symptomatic and that it was through significant silences that they exemplified a religious standpoint. I Richards2 came from a middle-class family in late-Victorian Cheshire, was at school at Clifton before going to Magdalene College, Cambridge and intended for a time to be a psychoanalyst. Because of illness, he did not serve in the 1914 war, though his brilliance as a mountaineer, and his survival to the age of eighty-six, make it unlikely that he was an invalid. Just as he was to spend the Second War in Harvard, so he spent the First War in Cambridge, 11

12

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889–1951), educated Linz Technische Hochschule, Berlin-Charlottenberg, University of Manchester and Trinity College, Cambridge (Fellow, 1930–6). Schoolmaster and architect, Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge, 1937–47. Author of Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, 1921–2; Philosophical Investigations, 1953; etc. Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979), educated Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. Fellow of Magdalene College, 1926–39. Professor of English at Harvard, 1939–63. Author of (with Ogden and Wood) The Foundations of Aesthetics, 1922; (with Ogden) The Meaning of Meaning, 1923; Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924; Science and Poetry, 1926; Practical Criticism, 1929; Mencius on The Mind, 1932; Basic Rules of Reason, 1933; Coleridge on Imagination, 1934; Basic in Teaching: East and West, 1935; The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936; How to Read a Page, 1943; Basic English and its Uses, 1943; and A World Language, 1944.

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reading philosophy under Johnson and Moore, and beginning a long-term collaboration with Ogden. As a Fellow of Magdalene in the late 1920s, he taught and had a major impact on Empson. Empson was Richards in action, the executor of arguments which Richards had fought for before Empson had begun to write. Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of Pastoral and The Structure of Complex Words – Empson’s three earliest prose works – are unintelligible without Richards even if, in the end, and especially in Milton’s God, Empson transcended Richards’s opaqueness about meaning. Ogden, on the other hand was marginal except in The Meaning of Meaning, became obsessed with Basic English which he and Richards had invented and, in spite of editing The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method, achieved neither the depth nor the strength of the influence which Richards was to achieve through lecturing, through practical criticism and through Leavis. In Ogden and Richards, alongside grandiose claims and an insufferable rhetoric, there was philosophical discontent with both realism and late English Idealism. In Leavis there was no philosophy, there was rancorous eloquence and there was a missionary rhetoric more insufferable even than theirs was.

Leavis3 was brought up in Cambridge, was at the Perse School and Emmanuel College where he read first history, which he disliked, and then English, before a harrowing period, at once ghastly and unglamorous, in his early twenties as an ambulance orderly in the First World War. On returning to Cambridge after the war, he wrote an historical dissertation entitled ‘The Relationship of Journalism to Literature’, spent a number of unestablished years teaching its new syllabus for the English Faculty, and became a Fellow of Downing College in 1936 at about the same time as he became an established university lecturer. Leavis’s doctoral dissertation was not published in the form in which it was written. His first pamphlets were not published until he was thirty-five: his main output did not begin until the foundation of Scrutiny when he was thirty-seven. From then on, in the company of his wife Queenie, whose Fiction and the Reading Public was published in that year, and without any diminution in quality until the 1960s, he made as continuous a statement about literature and criticism as Richards had made between 1922 and 1934. 13

Frank Raymond Leavis (1895–1978), educated The Perse School, Cambridge and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Editor of Scrutiny, 1932–53. Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, 1936–78. Author of Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, 1930; D. H. Lawrence, 1930; New Bearings in English Poetry, 1932; For Continuity, 1933 (with Thompson) Culture and Environment, 1933; ed. Determinations, 1934; Revaluation, 1936; Education and The University, 1943; The Great Tradition, 1948; Mill On Bentham and Coleridge, 1950; The Common Pursuit, 1952; D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, 1955; The Two Cultures, 1962; Scrutiny, A Retrospect, 1963; and Anna Karenina And Other Essays, 1967.

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Between 1912 and 1930 Leavis underwent a complicated development and acquired a sense of critical destiny. In the course of forty years’ teaching, editing and writing thereafter, he produced a social and literary doctrine, a classical body of detailed criticism and an extension of the adjustment in the canon of English literature which Eliot had started in The Sacred Wood. During a low-pensioned retirement in the 1960s and 1970s Leavis restated, sometimes powerfully, the judgements about fiction and poetry that he had been making since 1930, made of The Two Cultures the occasion for an unanswerable philippic against Snow, and in Wain, Amis, Annan and Kermode found recyclings of the critical incapacity he had been exposing in the previous thirty years. There was self-congratulation about the battles which Scrutiny had won, criticism of the academic industries which had grown up around it and a continuation of a tone and manner which had smelt of the ghetto in the first place. If the quality of Leavis’s thought is to be appreciated, it needs to be examined as it appeared, before it had been consecrated, between D. H. Lawrence which was published as a pamphlet in 1930 and D. H. Lawrence, Novelist which was published as a book in 1955. In Leavis’s accounts of his own and Scrutiny’s struggles there was a class component, a suggestion that the classically educated public-school littérateurs who dominated Cambridge English during his lifetime had been persecuting the son of a Cambridge tradesman. It is possible that there was a class element in reactions to Leavis, and other elements in reactions to his wife, who had quarrelled with her parents and had had difficulty with her synagogue in the process of deciding to marry him. But such persecution as there was was almost certainly related to the language both Leavises used about other members of Leavis’s faculty and to the resentment which both of them felt at the dilatoriness of his inclusion in it and the total character of her exclusion from it. In any case, such personal tension as there may have been in their Cambridge life was subsumed in the tension which Leavis aimed to create in his first phase as a critic between his own admiration for Eliot, who at that time was merely an avant-garde poet and critic, and the obtuseness he discerned in almost all contemporary reactions to him. Like Richards, Leavis argued that Eliot’s critical revolution had depended on his poetic revolution, that the two between them had provided the correct response to the post-war English situation, and that it was inconceivable that either ‘intelligent opinion’ or poets themselves could have been more than ‘superficially’ interested in the ‘Victorian-poetical’ through which poetry had had to be written ‘for forty or fifty years’ at the least. He welcomed the modernity of ‘idiom . . . imagery . . . and cadence’ which marked Eliot off from almost everyone who had written since the seventeenth century and in the

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‘vitality’, ‘concentration’, ‘poise’, ‘control’ and ‘difficult sincerity’ which Eliot had achieved by the end of the 1920s, found the ‘detachment’ and ‘impersonality’ of great poetry. As a critic Leavis avoided subservience. He took a lower view of Pound’s poetry apart from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley than Eliot did, made no concession to Eliot’s enthusiasm for Joyce and sneered at the open-house which Eliot’s Criterion kept for Auden, Spender and the ‘so-called poetical renascence’ of the 1930s. He was deeply indebted, notwithstanding, to the criticisms which Eliot had made of Milton and the ‘dream-world’ of Victorian Romanticism, and to the high estimates which Eliot had made of Shakespeare and the Metaphysical poets. It is unnecessary to look in detail at the judgements through which Leavis projected himself in the 1930s – the praise of Keats by contrast with Shelley and the account of relations between poetry and philosophy in Wordsworth; the rescuing of Hopkins from Bridges and the elevation of Hopkins above all other Victorians; the elevating of Pope above Dryden and of The Dunciad Book IV above the rest of Pope; the ease with which initially encouraging, were turned into ultimately contemptuous, appraisals of the ‘undergraduate’ quality of Auden’s talent. What matters in the present context is the role Leavis claimed for poetry and the conception he entertained of criticism’s function in relation to it. About poetry the primary argument was that it was ‘about words’, that the poet’s ‘interest in his experience’ was inseparable from his ‘interest in words’ and that the first duty of critical discrimination was to give ‘concrete’ evaluation of poetry as an ‘employment of words’. Critical discrimination as it was employed in New Bearings, Revaluation and Scrutiny was not, however, merely an examination of words. For not only had the poet to have ‘something to communicate’ which was communicable in the words that he used, he had also to communicate it in a context. Except inadequately in relation to Pope, Revaluation’s account of poetry between Donne and Keats failed to establish the contextual connections which New Bearings had established in relation to Eliot. Revaluation, on the other hand, was a companion volume to New Bearings, sought retrospective proof of Eliot’s ‘divorce between . . . intelligence and sensibility’ and reinforced its account of The Waste Land as a major statement about the relationship between poetry and ‘the consciousness of the age’. What The Waste Land was supposed to have done was to reflect the crisis of civilization about which at first, along with Richards’s rational optimism, Leavis reflected Spengler’s, and also Eliot’s, gloom, while being reassured by the poetic ambivalence which had neutralized the religious character of Eliot’s response. Thereafter, he began to be doubtful. Long before he started rooting out the preaching behind Eliot’s religious poetry, he found Eliot’s religion a distracting intrusion into Eliot’s criticism and an important aspect

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of Eliot’s illiberalism, distaste for sex and insensitivity about Lawrence’s greatness.

In understanding Leavis’s view of Lawrence, his view of the novel has to be understood as he began to sketch it between the middle 1930s and the middle 1940s, when favourable judgements on Swift, Dos Passos and Forster and adverse judgements on Wells, Priestley, Bennett, Dreiser and Joyce were transformed into the systematic attempt which was to be made in The Great Tradition to consider the novel, or rather the English novel, as thought. As in evaluating poetry, so in evaluating the novel, Leavis’s prior insistence was that it was ‘made of words’, that its essential ‘discriminations’ concerned ‘particular arrangements of words on the page’ and that the critical problem was to ‘go beyond the words on the page without losing touch with them’. The Great Tradition showed in what ways the novelists it discussed were concerned with ‘form . . . style . . . and composition’ or by their technical originality had ‘changed the possibilities of the art’. But it was also about the ‘human awareness’ which the novel could promote, the ‘possibilities’ the novel could disclose in ‘life’ and the ‘seriousness’ with which novels could reflect the main movements that constituted modern English development. In highlighting the merits of the novelists whom he praised, Leavis highlighted the demerits of the novelists whom he disparaged. Meredith and Hardy, Pater and George Moore, Defoe and Scott were disparaged at the same time as significant superiorities were asserted – on behalf of Disraeli marginally among the dead and L. H. Myers and Koestler among the living, and on behalf of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, James and the Dickens of Hard Times, to whom Hawthorne, Melville and Twain were to be added subsequently. Balzac was judged by contrast ‘essentially rhetorical’ and Flaubert’s ‘boredom and . . . disdain’ aesthetically odious, while, among critics of the novel, Lord David Cecil, the only arbiter of taste whom Leavis hated as much as he hated the Sitwells, was a class enemy whose Anglican and aristocratic sympathies debarred him from understanding either puritanism and nonconformity or the ‘moral intensity . . . and . . . reverent openness before life’ which were the mark of the great novel. The Great Tradition rejected the idea that great novelists aimed primarily ‘to create characters’, ‘discuss problems and ideas’ or give a ‘convincing picture of life’. Their ‘moral seriousness’ was achieved on the contrary when moral preoccupations were impersonalized into irony and a ‘civilized sensibility’ employed the ‘finest shades of . . . implication and . . . nuance’ in engaging with ‘a complex moral economy’. In the ‘profound concern with spiritual facts’ of early James, the ‘analytic exhibition of the inner complexities of the individual psyche’ of parts of Conrad and the ‘fineness of human valuation’, greatness of ‘psychological insight’ and ‘Tolstoyan depth and reality’ of late

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George Eliot, it found ‘adult art’, exhibitions of ‘responsible moral agency’ and a sense of religion which was captured best in chapter 2. ‘George Eliot . . . went developing to the end, as few writers do’, went a passage there, and achieved the most remarkable expression of her distinctive genius in her last work: her art in Gwendolen Harleth [Leavis’s title for the ‘good’ part of Daniel Deronda] is at its maturest. And her profound insight into the moral nature of man is essentially that of one whose critical intelligence has been turned intensively on her faith. A sceptic by nature or culture – indeed no; but that is not because her intelligence, a very powerful one, does not freely illuminate all her interests and convictions . . . She exhibits a traditional moral sensibility expressing itself, not within a frame of cold articles of faith . . . but nevertheless with perfect sureness, in judgements that involve confident positive standards, and yet affect us as simply the report of luminous intelligence. She deals in the weakness and ordinariness of human nature, but doesn’t find it contemptible, or show either animus or self-deceiving indulgence towards it; and, distinguished and noble as she is, we have in reading her the feeling that she is in and of the humanity she presents with so clear and disinterested a vision. For us in these days, it seems to me, she is a peculiarly fortifying and wholesome author, and a suggestive one: she might well be pondered by those who tend to prescribe simple recourses – to suppose, say, that what Charlotte Yonge has to offer may be helpfully relevant – in face of the demoralizations and discouragements of an age that isn’t one of an enthusiastic assent to old articles of faith. (F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, 1948, pp. 123–4)

‘Moral preoccupation’, the lighting up of what ‘lies within’ and the ‘larger aims without which a life cannot rise into religion’, figured more frequently in The Great Tradition than did religion itself. But the same point was made in relation to both: that ‘comment’ and the ‘homiletic’ were intrusive, that ‘moral evaluation’ required a ‘concrete’ psychological rather than an ‘adjectival’ notation and that simple endorsement or simple condemnation were not what the ‘great novelist’ should be expected to deliver. What the great novelist should deliver was a ‘subtle . . . irony’ about the ‘egocentric naivetés of moral conviction’, an ‘intimation’ from the ‘depths of . . . the . . . mind’ of the ‘interplay between the diverse actualities of . . . experience’ and appreciation in a way ‘proper to art’ of the ways in which moral problems transcend individual judgement. The Great Tradition had an abundance of Leavis’s power and eloquence. It attributed to Jane Austen, Conrad, George Eliot and Lawrence what it attributed especially to Henry James – a ‘constant profound pondering of the nature of civilized society and the possibility of imagining a finer civilization than any that he knew’. What was missing, except in the chapter on Hard Times as a ‘confutation of utilitarianism by life’, was the account which D. H. Lawrence, Novelist was to give of the experience that England had undergone since the eighteenth century. As Leavis presented him in the 1930s Lawrence had had Blake’s ‘“terrifying honesty” . . . and the power to distinguish his own feelings and emotions

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from conventional sentiment’. He had had ‘exquisite spiritual manners’ and a ‘sense of value’ which had been both ‘quick and sure’. He had vindicated ‘impulse and spontaneity’ against self-consciousness, had had ‘poignant intuitions’ about life’s ‘common flame’, and, so far from being either ‘narrow’ or ‘fanatical’, had felt towards sex as a ‘stern moralist’ would feel towards a ‘mystery’ which was the ‘centre of a religion’. Leavis was embarrassed by Lawrence’s ‘dark god’, his evocations of the ‘dark power’ in The Plumed Serpent and the absence from Lady Chatterley’s Lover of the ‘qualities of intelligence and civilization’ which he believed Forster to have displayed in A Passage to India. But the failure of the literary establishment and of Bloomsbury, apart from Forster, to appreciate Lawrence made it a duty to assert that Lawrence had had a ‘magnificently sensuous vitality’ and sexual perceptions which had been closely connected with his ‘artistic success’, that he had been a great prophet because he had been a great artist, and that his understanding of the Industrial Revolution had embodied the ‘essential human tradition’, a ‘magnificent’ human normality and the prospect of restoring the ‘sensuous and emotional life’ which modern England was in process of losing. In D. H. Lawrence, Novelist in 1955, a great deal of this was repeated. But by then it had also become possible to state that, though ‘our age’ was the ‘age of Lawrence and Eliot’, Lawrence was ‘immensely the greater genius’, ‘represented . . . vital and significant development’, and, as the ‘highly conscious and intelligent servant of life’, had ‘devoted himself’ to working out the ‘new things that . . . he saw to be necessary’. In defending Lawrence against Eliot, Leavis questioned Eliot’s idea that Lawrence was uneducated. Lawrence had been brought up among the ‘selfrespecting poor’ in a ‘still vigorous part of the country’ and had acquired a ‘real education’ through undergraduate study, his own reading and discussion with his friends. He had learnt whatever was to be learnt from anthropology, Darwin, Dostoevsky and Bergson, and in Sons and Lovers had arrived ‘independently’ at the main conclusions of Freud and psychoanalysts. His life and writing had reflected not only the ‘social transformation’ of the nineteenth century and the Great War, but also an ‘intense cultivation’ derived ultimately from provincial Nonconformity, which had given him a better education than Eliot had been given, had made him the finest critic of his generation and had enabled him to see through the inexperience, ‘brittleness’ and ‘sophistication’ of Russell and Keynes during his famous visit to Cambridge in 1915. These statements were emphatic and definitive. But the difficulty remained that Lawrence was still not understood even after Leavis’s ‘long battle on his behalf’. Eliot’s late conversion to Lawrence’s merits had been tainted; Eliot’s ‘ignorance of the possibilities of life’, his ‘standing off’ from the facts of life, and the obstacles which his Anglo-Catholicism presented to understanding of the nature of life, made it even more necessary to insist that it was Lawrence

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who had known the difference between what ‘made for life’ and what made ‘against’ it, Lawrence who had become, what Eliot had failed to become, the ‘great writer of our phase of civilization’ and ‘one of the greatest English writers of any time’. Leavis wished it to be understood that Lawrence’s ‘genius’ was not primarily ‘lyrical’, that it was not to be found mainly in ‘poetic evocations’, and that Lawrence had been neither spiritually sick, a humourless lump, nor a fellowtraveller of Carlyle and the Nazis. Lawrence had had an ‘integrated psyche’ and no ‘profound emotional disorder’. He had been the culminating point of the tradition of prose fiction which had been the real line of succession to Shakespeare and, through his ‘extraordinary sensuous immediacy’, had been more ‘poetic and creative’ in his novels than any English poet since the beginning of the nineteenth century. As usual in a work by Leavis, D. H. Lawrence, Novelist was embarrassed by explicitness, theory and the homiletic and, in confining itself to the ‘concrete’, protruded its message through its method. The message – Leavis’s as much as Lawrence’s – was a manifesto against Anglo-Catholicism, the public school poets and metropolitan opinion, and praised Lawrence’s provincial sensibilities in preference to them. It examined the ‘rapid . . . development’ Lawrence had undergone after Sons and Lovers, the ‘seriousness’ he had acquired in the process, and the ‘reaffirmation of life’ with which Aaron’s Rod and Lady Chatterley’s Lover had transcended his wartime pessimism. The ‘supreme’ proof of Lawrence’s ability to transmute experience into art, however, was the ‘consonance’ between ‘originality . . . of . . . method and style’ and the ‘originality’ of his ‘treatment of life’ in The Rainbow and Women in Love, where the ‘challenging paradigm’ was between ‘immemorial farm-life’, the ‘advancing railway’ and the ‘integrative sanctions’ of a ‘living tradition’ which had to grow out of them in the future. Leavis did not detach Lawrence from The Great Tradition; on the contrary Lawrence was its fulfilment, surpassing George Eliot in understanding of provincial life, inserting a sexual element which she had lacked, and relating the ‘large movements of civilization’ to the ‘disorders of the individual psyche’. The disorders of the psyche included the ‘anaesthesia of habit’ in marriage, snobbery in social relations, and ‘idealized, personalizing love’ as an ‘end in itself’. The antidotes included ‘complexity’ and ‘delicacy’ in marriage, marriage’s capacity for transcending both self and the producing of children, and acceptance of the fact that ‘lasting and satisfactory . . . personal relations’ required individuals to be both ‘themselves’ and appreciative of the separateness of others. In the ‘stillness’ that Lawrence had found in a person’s ‘depths’ and the ‘spontaneous-creative fullness of being’ with which he had answered doubts about life’s purpose, Leavis found not only poetry and vibrations which were ‘religious’ but also a puritanism – ‘untheological, and avoiding evangelizing bigotry’ and ‘provinciality of ethical temper’ – which had

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enabled Lawrence to perceive in industrial society both a ‘flight from intelligence and responsibility’ and a ‘reduction of . . . life . . . to instrumentality’. Unlike Johnson, Eliot and Arnold, Leavis was a critic only. He gave no sign of being competent in any mode except the critical or critical-historical and, even when acknowledging the relevance of contextualization, expressed deep contempt both for critics who substituted contextualization for critical discrimination and for historians, like Trevelyan, whose want of ‘inwardness’ with literature obstructed the requisite immediacy in their reactions to the literature of the past. Yet there is a sense in which Leavis took an historical view of English literature, associated it with what he had learned about the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution from Tawney, Weber and the Hammonds, and contaminated the intensity of his belief that ‘works of art enacted their moral values’ with the second-hand character of his historical opinions about ‘the major problem of our time’. For Leavis, as for Eliot and Lawrence, the ‘major problem of our time’ was ‘the automobile’ and ‘the machine’ which between them had destroyed ‘the old order’, disconnected life from its ‘natural rhythms’ and dissolved the ‘organic community’ into ‘suburbanism’. This was the crisis of civilization as The Waste Land had reflected it; in addressing the ‘vast . . . inattention’ which had caused it, the ‘levelling-down’ and ‘mass-production’ which had accompanied it and the ‘low taste’ enforced by the enfranchized literates of the Education Act of 1870. Leavis projected on to ‘civilization’ the difficulties encountered by small-circulation magazines like Scrutiny and The Calendar of Modern Letters and small-circulation authors, as he and Eliot still were in the 1930s in face of wireless, advertising, the cinema, the suburban Book Societies and the Northcliffe newspapers. This was a dirge for the death of culture, a lamentation over ‘lowbrow’ aggression towards the ‘highbrow’, and the announcement of a catastrophe which had rendered great writers unable to write, as great writers were said to have written between Shakespeare and Hardy, for both at once. It was also nonsense. But it had a function – to help Leavis explain that criticism should avoid mere uplift, should resist the ‘meretricious’ crudeness with which Eddington and Jeans were inserting ‘technical vocabularies’ into a cultural void and, while displaying ‘a perception of the problems of social equity and order’, should preserve that purity of critical intention and ‘delicate . . . response of sensibility’ which were the ‘concrete’ contribution that criticism could make to civilization. Much more in the 1930s when Marxism was becoming fashionable than in the 1950s when anti-Marxism had become a form of orthodoxy, Leavis was an anti-Marxist, not on libertarian political grounds but because Marxism was as materialistic as capitalism, derived culture too readily from the ‘method of production’ and was insufficiently concerned to protect the ‘finer values’ against the threats presented by capitalism in England and America.

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Even when half-persuaded by Trotsky, or Edmund Wilson, that Marxism could be made an ally against materialism, he questioned its intentions, attributed the deterioration of English literature in the 1930s to its political intrusiveness and had no doubt that the last thing the ‘discipline of culture’ needed, or was likely to survive, was fifty years of class-warfare. More confidently in the early 1930s than later in the decade, and with varying degrees of self-confidence thereafter, Leavis hated religious fancydress and the logic of Christian discrimination. Sometimes he agreed that the ‘recovery of religious sanctions’ and perhaps even of ‘theological creeds and rituals’ might be ‘necessary to the health of the world’. More often he judged ‘formal’ religion as remote from himself as he judged it to be from most of Scrutiny’s readers. Leavis rejected Arnold’s and Richards’s belief that religion was about to be replaced by poetry. What he believed – or rather the way he put it – was that the disintegration of ‘traditions and social forms’ had placed an almost unbearable burden on literature and that it was literature’s destiny to carry the ‘continuity of consciousness’ and the ‘freeplay’ of the ‘collective experience’ into the ‘monotony’ of a world without ‘art, culture, morality or religion’.

Leavis was an élitist, but he no more wished to be one than Richards or Eliot did. What he supposed literature to need was an audience and what he wanted was a restoration of the ‘homogeneous culture’ he believed, naïvely, had represented ‘the finer consciousness of the race’ and provided for the ‘people at large’ the ‘currency of finer living’ in the age of Shakespeare. This was a longterm need connected with the ‘new status and importance of leisure’ and the prospect, if things went well, of a widespread realization of the ‘benevolent potentialities of machine-technique’. The immediate need was to rescue culture’s ‘autonomy’, to clear out the agents of subversion (from Russell and Wells at one end to Spender and Auden at the other) and to make the world safe for the ‘common reader’ whose taste alone was capable of preserving literature’s inheritance. In the 1930s Leavis argued that the chief reason why ‘the acquiring of taste’ was more difficult than it had ‘ever . . . been before’ was the proliferation of books and the difficulty involved in capturing an audience and ‘training . . . its . . . sensibility’. The audience he wanted to capture was the ‘intelligent young men and women who went down . . . every year . . . from the universities’ and what he wanted to encourage them to do was to stand up to the ‘isolation’ of the ‘school common-room’ and help schoolchildren to see that metropolitan criticism had to be disregarded. Hatred of metropolitan criticism was as strong in Leavis as in early Newman and remained with him, as it had remained with Newman, for the rest of his life. He was as eager to warn the young in the 1950s as he had been

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to warn their fathers and mothers in the 1930s that the BBC, the Arts Council, the Third Programme, the Times Literary Supplement, the literary pages of the New Statesman, the reviewers in the Sunday newspapers and the Bowras, Sitwells, Connollys, Lehmanns, Rowses, Spenders, Pryce-Joneses and Keyneses who constituted the ‘London literary racket’, were agents of cultural corruption and inventors of a ‘literary world’ which had no idea of ‘literary criticism’. And it was Leavis the class-warrior for whom Lord David Cecil was the class-enemy, the enemy of Puritan seriousness, and the Paterian heir of an aristocratic culture. Cecil’s manner was slick and camp, and his historic writing breathless and Plumb-like. But he believed that the religious insensitivity of the young of the 1930s debarred them from understanding the literature of the past, that the ‘orthodoxy’ out of which he had selected the Oxford Book of Christian Verse had something to recommend it and that Shakespeare, Hardy and Cowper were unintelligible outside a Christian framework. His treatment of literature, and Leavis’s distaste, made it clear that, for Leavis, as for the Tractarians, criticism conducted as Leavis wanted it conducted entailed both class resentment and an intellectual indoctrination. The indoctrination took two chief forms – the school-education which Leavis and Thompson, the Gresham’s schoolmaster, described in Culture and Environment in 1933, and the university education which Leavis himself described in Education and the University in 1943. In both cases a plan for indoctrination was associated with the denial that indoctrination was intended. Culture and Environment repeated that the ‘organic community’ was dead and that the transition to suburbanism was the vastest and ‘most terrifying disintegration’ and the ‘most important fact of recent history’ in the West. On the other hand, progress could not be reversed, the machine abandoned or the rural order restored. Progress had to be faced and it would not be faced by building garden-suburbs. It was the ‘memory’ of the old order which alone would enable progress to be faced and the tradition embodied in language to be restored. It was the need for intellectual continuity that made literature and literary education vital, not only as substitutes for the ‘immemorial’ way of living which had been lost but also as the best instrument that teachers had for resisting ‘the cheap emotional responses’ endemic in modern public communication. What was needed in schools was ‘more consciousness’, which would rescue teachers from ‘cynicism’ and ‘aimlessness’ and enable them to show how modern capitalism was having a destructive impact on ‘taste, habit, preconception, attitude to life and quality of living’.

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‘informal intercourse’ and ‘unspecialized intelligence’ admired in both which had enabled ‘a not altogether inconsiderable, if very small minority’ of their pupils to become ‘educated’. This was a variant of his emphasis on the ‘common reader’ as literature’s audience, and it issued in the belief that the problem of the future was to produce ‘specialists’ who, because they were in touch with a ‘humane centre’, would be better able than other specialists to understand that ‘organic decay’ had accompanied ‘technical complexity’, that ‘control’ would be needed if decay was to be halted and that control required situations to be judged by reference to ‘the realisation of . . . human values’. This, however cautiously it was put, imposed a purpose on university education, imputed to educators a duty to move against ‘the bent of civilization in our time’ and claimed for the teaching of English a special place in a ‘liberal education’, a special ‘access to the inherited wisdom of the race’ and ‘special perceptions’ about the nature of ‘contemporary civilization’. In making these claims Leavis did not suppose himself to be describing existing English faculties, which he thought of as employment agencies for metropolitan journalism. What he was describing was the ‘idea’ of a literary education as he sketched it during the Second World War, again by analogy with Newman, in Education and the University. Education and the University was Leavis’s contribution to post-war reconstruction, a report about the ‘tyrannical complexity’ of wartime ‘machinery’ and a restatement of the idea he had expressed ten years earlier that, even if England was unlikely to become ‘the Athens of the English-speaking world’, such ‘prepotency as . . . she . . . might hope for’ in the future would be ‘cultural’. The ‘cultural realm’ was said to depend on universities more than it had done in the past and the work which universities could perform to be performable through the ‘actual and particular’. Education and the University dissociated itself from doctrinal humanism, which was as irrelevant as Marxism or Christianity. The balkanization of knowledge was a fact; ‘syntheses and Summas’ would be premature for many years to come, and a ‘liberal’ education should neither start with a ‘doctrinal frame’ nor be directed at ‘inculcating one’. ‘Reconstruction’, if it was to be effected, had to be effected ‘concretely’, and a properly conducted School of English would provide a better aid to reconstruction than Oxford Greats precisely because of the concreteness of its procedures. In chapters 2 and 3 Leavis made practical proposals for a School of English which would encourage the critical originality he accused Greats of discouraging, and would equip the pupil ‘to go on for himself’ and make ‘first-hand judgements’ of any literature including any contemporary literature that he encountered. The specialized subject of study was to be ‘appreciative habituation to the subtleties of language’. But this was to be supplemented by reading in history, sociology, anthropology and political thought and only when amalgamated with them would produce that fusion between the study

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of literature and the study of civilization which Leavis expected to be achieved when the ‘inner kind of possession’ and ‘deliberative considering responsiveness’ necessary for the ‘perfect reading’ of a poem inculcated into the ‘nonspecialist intelligence’ the ‘profound sense of value’ necessary for the ‘most important choices of actual life’.

Leavis had a tactical, as well as a rancorous, mind, pretending to avoid exhortation while wishing to exhort and imagining that he could indoctrinate by disparaging indoctrination. No one needs to be deceived; he remains, what he was in his lifetime, an instructive reminder of the narrowness of the line which divides education from indoctrination, and of the odd nature of the impetus which a foolish doctrine can sometimes give to high intellectual achievement. Leavis was an enemy of hypocrisy and moral rigidity. But in both respects he was reticent and used criticism as a way of not saying what he meant. He had a disingenuousness which went deeper than critical detachment, hampered moral expressiveness and arrested him at the thought that liberal idealism was a sham, that the psyche was in disarray and that a properly trained literary sensibility was better than reactionary anachronism in responding to it. In making the study of English the groundwork for the ‘anti-competitive moral bent’ that he wanted to induce in schools and universities in the future, Leavis was blatant, more blatant than Tawney or Russell, and as blatant as Orwell, to whose political writings Leavis’s wife gave the warmest commendation. But we should, perhaps, be cautious, or even charitable. For if Leavis had read this chapter, he would doubtless have replied, and in certain respects would have replied rightly, that religion and politics were not his business, that his achievement was his criticism and that he should be remembered first, and perhaps solely, for the strength of mind and tenacity of purpose with which he had converted Richards’s ‘principles’ into a concrete body of literary judgements. In the mid-1930s, having previously been an admirer, Leavis began to attack Richards – for his vagueness, for his Benthamism and for his interest in Basic English. But Richards had been as important as Eliot and Lawrence in Leavis’s development and Leavis’s intensity is unintelligible without the intensity which Richards had invented in Cambridge in the 1920s. II Richards was in Cambridge with interludes in China and the United States from his arrival as an undergraduate in 1912 until his emigration to Harvard in late 1939. In the 1920s he was one of the most striking lecturers in any Cambridge faculty. In Harvard he was still a powerful teacher and capable critic but as a writer succeeded mainly in replaying the tunes he had been

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playing beforehand, exposing the silliness of his politics, the woolliness of the ‘Complementarity Principle’ as antidote to religious narrowness and the slickness of the idea that the world’s population-explosion and ‘computercontrolled satellite-conveyed communication and instruction services’ justified an urgency on behalf of Basic English as a world language which he had not thought of in the 1930s. These ideas were consistent with Richards’s early teaching. But whereas his early teaching demanded an intellectual revolution as the foundation stone of a new university syllabus, in Harvard he was merely a famous figure who, having risen with Eliot but lacking the intelligible religion with which Eliot had reconstructed himself in the 1920s, had said so much by the time he was forty that he had nothing new to say that was worth saying afterwards. Richards’s original message was delivered in Cambridge in the shadow of the Armistice of 1918. It was an Arnoldian message to undergraduate congregations who were as enthusiastic as Newman’s congregations had been for contact with truth. The question arises, what sort of truth was it that Richards was teaching? Ostensibly – ostentatiously even, and, since it was delivered in lecturerooms, naturally – it was not religious truth that was being taught but the truth about meaning which began with the claim that truth had been blurred and would require effort if it was to be put back into focus. In Cambridge by silence and omission more even than in Harvard by explicit statement, it was reluctance to take religion by the hand, even if only to throw Christianity to the lions, which made Richards vaguer than Eliot had become about his ultimate orientation. In the English context in the 1930s Richards was conscious chiefly of a disease – the ‘habit of using words without attention to their meaning’. This, as in some sense a cultural reactionary, he accounted for in terms of a deterioration in the quality of schools, a weakening of the family and the upper classes, and the replacement of the ‘few great books’ which had been central to English life in the past by modern means of communication which had been responsible for breakdowns in morality, ‘quality of living’ and ‘intellectual . . . imaginative and . . . emotional discrimination’. This was the problem Basic English was to address; and it was to address it not only by bringing as great an ‘insight into the structure and articulation of . . . meaning’ as the Bible had brought to earlier generations, but also by supplying a ‘LanguageMachine’ whose 850 primary words would do among the people at large what Practical Criticism was already supposed to be doing to improve discrimination among Cambridge undergraduates. Basic English made large and justifiable claims about the similarity between its prose and the great prose of English, especially Biblical, literature. At the same time it claimed that, though ‘different nations’ had ‘different ways of thought’, one purpose in ‘taking’ a language ‘to bits’, as Basic Rules of Reason

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had taken English to bits, was to bring ‘nations, governments, sciences, religions and societies’ into ‘connection’ with one another. This idea was applied in passing to India and Russia. It was applied systematically to China not only because his visits there had taught Richards that the Chinese were undergoing the ‘unparalleled . . . mixing . . . of cultures’ which was occurring throughout the world, but also because the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and Sun-Yat Sen’s exposure of traditional culture as the cause of Chinese weakness, had made it possible to claim for Basic English an immediate relevance to a consumer-led demand for a Chinese ‘Renaissance’. The Chinese Renaissance was not, on Richards’s interpretation, a renewal of contact with a ‘past phase of tradition’, as the European Renaissance had been, but a revolutionary attempt to create the ‘intellectual basis’ for a new political order. Richards sympathized with the new order intellectually as well as politically, while being conscious of the durability of the old and its incompatibility with Western ideas and methods. The problem was to translate Western ideas and methods into a culture in which there was no sign of the ‘critical reflective examination of meanings’ characteristic of Western thought, and where a pragmatism, more real and entrenched than the philosophical pragmatism of the twentieth-century West, had created a ‘queer sense’ that the ‘unwritten rules which governed decency in . . . western . . . dealings with philosophical principle were being broken’. In these circumstances Basic English, by neutralizing Chinese ‘irresponsibility . . . about meanings’, might play an historic role in the naturalizing of Western thought and scholarship into Chinese thought and language, especially as they applied to psychology, ethics, logic, sociology, grammar, politics and literary criticism whose ‘queer new blends of meaning’ were subverting the orthodoxy which had been discussed in Mencius on the Mind in 1932.

Mencius was an aristocratic Confucian of the fourth century BC whose writings interested Richards because they had ‘inculcated a great portion of the orthodoxy of China in matters relating to ethics and social order’. Mencius’s writings were proof of the strength of orthodoxy, the deviousness of the morally conservative disposition and the strategic cunning that would be needed if orthodoxy was to be reconstructed. In particular Richards suggested that, since Western thought was not the only thought which had guided a civilization, the Chinese would make ‘fewer avoidable mistakes’ in responding to it if, instead of ‘turning their backs’ on their own thought, they made the complicated effort necessary to relate Western thought to it. In Mencius on the Mind Chinese orthodoxy was said to be based on ‘myth, custom . . . and ritual’, to have had little conception of the difference between mind, will and desire, and to deal in ‘condensed poetry’ or the ‘indicated

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guess’ rather than the ‘explicit logic’ of a ‘cognitive’ philosophy. In China thought had entered into life by being ‘learnt by heart’; its elliptical fluidity had made it possible for thought to be present even when Western observers could not discern it; and a large part of the book related ambivalences and ambiguities in a short passage by Mencius to the ‘unwritten and unelucidatable tradition’ which had ‘accompanied and directed’ Chinese interpretations of it. Richards praised the Chinese conception of ‘wisdom’ as a ‘skill’, the Chinese insistence on the ‘ethical’ connection between verbal error and ‘the whole personality’ and the moral subtlety and Freudian sinlessness which had distinguished Confucianism from the Judaic element in Western culture. Even thought that was cut off, as Chinese thought was cut off, by being the ‘servant of accepted morality’, was taken seriously on the ground that its ‘casuistical’ preference for ‘social’ over scientific statement had produced a ‘widely diffused civilization’ whose ‘fineness’ was to be respected, however incompetent it had been to formulate those doubts about the ‘ritual system’ which had enabled Western thinkers to clear the way for the modern world from Aquinas onwards. Mencius on the Mind made a case for orthodoxy but only as a preliminary to replacing it. It left no doubt that Confucianism in its ancient forms was dying and needed only crocodile-tears and a helping hand in order to be replaced by something better. What this was was explained in the concluding chapter. The concluding chapter, ‘A Technique for Comparative Studies’ argued that translation into Chinese required a ‘deliberately devised technique’, and, though a philosophy like that of Mencius could just about be translated out of Chinese in view of Mencius’ lack of interest in logic, that the probability of mistranslation was far greater where a philosopher was interested in logic. What was needed was an ‘expanded’ logic and word-consciousness to match the self-consciousness, sex-consciousness and race- and world-consciousness of the post-war generation, in the West, even greater ‘mutual comprehension’ than had been achieved in the ‘previous twenty thousand years’ and comparisons between the types of thought in order to subvert dogmatic attachment to any one of them. Though Richards claimed to have only ‘a plan for a technique’, his assumptions demanded open-mindedness in pursuing them. ‘Hypothesis’ was rejected as well as ‘dogma’ and ‘new hypotheses’ condemned as ‘old dogma writ large’. In their place were to be found a ‘multiplicity of meaningcomponents’, the prospect of resisting the ‘coercive suggestion’ of ‘any one interpretation that seemed for the moment to fit’, and the idea of the ‘total meaning of a word’ as involving a ‘complex’ combination in which gesture, intention, feeling and tone were of first importance and an ‘almost unlimited spiders-web of radiating . . . meanings’ would emerge from ‘persistent study’ of the ‘forms of ambiguity’. This was not only important in itself. It was even

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more important insofar as it would eliminate philosophical ‘combativeness’ and cultural nationalism, and produce both an increase in human power and an immense step forward in human progress.

Richards’s statements about comparative studies were stronger and deeper than his statements about Basic English. But they were sales talk just the same, for goods that he had bought by the 1920s. So the next questions we have to ask are, how much sales talk was there in Practical Criticism? Practical Criticism listed the reactions of Richards’s pupils and colleagues to unidentified poems he had offered for critical consideration, and highlighted the defects of linguistic capability and poetic sensibility of which these reactions implied the existence among all classes in Britain and the United States. The intention was to show by ridicule and demonstration how a properly poetic sensibility would behave, to elaborate a view of poetry as the ‘central . . . denizen’ of a world which contained ‘everything about which civilized man cared most’ and to provide a principle which the missionaries of the new Cambridge English syllabus could propagate in the schools. Practical Criticism affirmed poetry’s complexity, the need for intensity and technique in reading it and the interconnection between the poet’s ‘control’ of the reader’s ‘thought’ and his control of the reader’s ‘feelings’. It also made statements about literature and literary criticism as remedies for the decline of civilization and about the part which both could play in controlling those ‘tricksey components of our lives’ which centred on aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics and religion. In Practical Criticism the decline of civilization was a result of the ‘expansion and dissolution of . . . communities’, science’s effect in carrying even the greatest of modern thinkers ‘out of their depth’, and the ‘stereotyping’ and ‘standardisation’ of both ‘utterance’ and ‘interpretation’ which had accompanied deterioration in the use of language. What was offered as the remedy for decline was poetry’s autonomy vis-à-vis science, a training of the feelings at all levels of education and the prospect of poetry being made accessible to the ‘average mind’ by a ‘training’ in ‘critical reading’. There were here two chief conceptions – of a subtle, high-level or Confucian ‘sincerity’ which was compatible with irony, and of the critical process which was undergone when the ‘realised poem’ was ‘taken into’ the ‘fabric of experience and habits of mind’ of the discriminating reader. Poetic discrimination was neither a dictate of ‘authority’, a continuation of ‘fashion’ nor a ‘social ordeal’; it was a matter of struggle and decision which expressed the ‘needs of the whole being’ and gave to those to whom it happened the ‘sanctions and authority of the self-completing spirit’. It was by ‘momentous decisions of the will’ that poetry acquired a Toynbeean role at least as important as scientific discrimination in preserving, or restoring, civilization.

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In Practical Criticism, the sales talk though primarily about poetry (and literature), was also about the prospect of psychology and a ‘science of language’ establishing a control over men’s minds as revolutionary as the control which the theory of relativity was establishing over material nature. These were odd claims to be making for a new, indeed for any literary, syllabus in a university. But made they undoubtedly were – in a popular form in The Principles of Literary Criticism, more austerely in The Meaning of Meaning which Richards wrote with Ogden. Like Basic English, The Meaning of Meaning aimed to liberate thought and action from the treachery of words, to enable a ‘theory of signs’ or ‘Science of Symbols’ to break down the barriers which separated the ‘special sciences’ from each other and to effect a ‘Copernican revolution’ by distinguishing ‘symbolic’ utterances from ‘emotive’ utterances, and what could be talked about intelligibly from what could not be talked about intelligibly. The accounts of ‘reference’ and ‘symbol’ as the paradigms of science and knowledge were designed to diminish ‘metaphysics’ and ‘theology’, to complicate relations between thoughts and things and hearers and speakers, and to restrict symbolic logic to an under-labourer function in relation to all bodies of knowledge whatever. One feature of the book was the account of the erroneous views of language which had been predominant in philosophy and theology in the past. Another was the account of the keys to the future which were to be found in Plato, Locke, Helmholtz, Whewell and Malinowski, and of the chief key – The Meaning of Meaning itself – as reconciling vitalism with mechanism, materialism with idealism and religion with science. As in everything else that they wrote, so in The Meaning of Meaning, Ogden and Richards were missionaries, servants of truths which needed to be propagated. They needed to be propagated academically because language as the most important of the ‘instruments of civilization’ had to be updated. They needed to be propagated socially because, in the new circumstances of the last hundred years, the new truths, by revolutionizing all thought above the merely gestural thought of the ‘butcher and the paper-boy’ would bring help to ‘the new millions’ who had now to form opinions for themselves which ‘the few’ had previously formed for them. The Meaning of Meaning was a tough, Gladstonian book which assumed debility where it may not have existed and one consequence of which in the lives of its authors was the Basic English propaganda which both of them were to conduct later. From Richards’s point of view the most important consequence was The Principles of Literary Criticism. The Principles of Literary Criticism was a description of the arts, including literature, as a ‘storehouse of recorded values’ and the ‘loom’ on which Richards proposed to ‘reweave some ravelled parts of our civilization’. But first and foremost, in continuation of The Meaning of Meaning, it was a

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polemic – against the idea of beauty as a quality inherent in objects, against the ‘preciousness . . . and . . . aloofness’ of the ‘private heaven’ of the aesthete, and against anything resembling a Kantian or Idealist account of aesthetic experience. Whistler, Bosanquet, Mackail, A. C. Bradley, Croce and Clive Bell were deflated, as were Moore’s intuitionism, almost all literary criticism between Aristotle and Arnold and ‘hypostasised Ultimates’ like mind in psychology, life in physiology and good in ethics on the ground that, like beauty in aesthetics, they ‘brought . . . investigation . . . to an arbitrary full stop’. The positive corollaries were a theory of value in art and literature which took off from a ‘scepticism’ about ‘immediate intuitions’, an anthropological relativism about the ‘states of mind that were . . . recognized as good’ in different ‘races and civilizations’ and a conception of Progress in which conduct was the ‘organization of appetencies’, and the nervous system played a crucial role in co-ordinating the ‘hierarchy of appetencies’. This was the sense in which men ‘were’ their bodies; their minds operated by ‘impulses’, and the discoveries which had been made by behaviourist, psychoanalytical and gestalt-psychology would receive further stimulus from a new phase of biology in the future. Richards’s conception of ‘value’ was a public conception and dilated on the ‘waste’ involved when moral systems became obsolete. The immensity of the changes which had occurred in the previous hundred years was contrasted with the smallness of the changes which had occurred before that and with the ‘plasticity’ that would be needed if the changes of the next fifty years were not to be ‘overwhelming’. ‘Free, varied and unwasteful life’ was civilization’s proper objective, and it was their ability to assist at the ‘intricate’ systematizations required by changing conditions that made art and literature vital public activities. It was through the idea of a coenesthesia or ‘bodily consciousness’ representing the whole personality, that The Principles of Literary Criticism postulated an ‘energy system of extreme . . . delicacy’ which ‘ordered’ the repercussions experienced in the body’s reaction to stimulating, including aesthetically stimulating, situations, outside it. One crucial image, extended from The Meaning of Meaning, was of an ‘energy system’ with an ‘indefinitely large number of stability-poises’ being thrown by its experiences from ‘one poise to another’. Another was of these experiences as memories of past contexts in which the ‘partial return of a context’ caused the nervous system to behave ‘as though conditions were present which were not’. An important feature of The Principles of Literary Criticism was its account of attitudes, not as bodies of opinion but as the ‘incipient’ or ‘imagined’ activity that was stimulated by artistic artefacts. It was the capacity, conscious or not, for ‘imagined or incipient action’ which did not go as far as muscular movement that distinguished the ‘intelligent or refined’ from the ‘crass or stupid’ person, and the process of making emotional adjustments at this stage through the ‘resolution, reanimation and balancing of impulses’ which constituted the essence of literature and poetry.

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In The Principles of Literary Criticism communication between the poet and the ordinary person was declared to be a complicated process, ordinary persons having normally to suppress impulses where the poet had to be accessible to them, and the poet’s refusal to suppress his impulses permitting him to form free connections between ‘different elements’ of experience. It was the poet’s ‘vigilance’ which enabled him to do this, his ‘systematized complexity’ which the ordinary person mistook for ‘mental chaos’, and the ordinary person’s misunderstanding which prevented him seeing that the poet (or the artist), even when élitist or esoteric in manner was not necessarily élitist or esoteric in experience. Richards shuffled around the difference between normality and eccentricity in poetry, arguing that poets (and artists) had to depart from the average in order to achieve a ‘fuller life’ or ‘finer organization’ but concluding, nevertheless, that, ‘within racial boundaries and the limits of certain very general types’, men had ‘many impulses in common’, and that ‘mentalities’ like those of Blake, Nietzsche and Boehme, to which the ‘ordinary man was not capable of approximating without loss’, could ‘almost always be shown to be defective’. Richards did not argue that poets need be conscious of a need to communicate, and he declined to be interested in their motives. All he emphasized was that it was their ‘normality’ which gave them significance and that it was the ‘correspondence’ between their ‘impulses’ and ‘possible impulses in their readers’ which made their ‘creative moments’ vital to civilization. As in Eliot and Leavis, the battle with commercialism provided the stage on which poetry and literary criticism were to perform. It was the dominance exercised over popular literature by the ‘sales-manager’ and the ‘advertising agent’ which had turned popular ideals into ‘stock responses’ and it was the artist’s and the poet’s business to assert, on behalf of those who had tasted both, that stock responses were less valuable than the ideals of the higher literature. Richards believed in the leadership of the élite while being aware of the distance between literary tradition and the ordinary person, the variety of experiences that had become available since the ‘common culture’ and ‘unity of experience’ which Gilson had pointed to (rightly or wrongly) in the Middle Ages and the variations in quality of intellectual response stimulated by works which had achieved wide popular appeal or ‘stood the verdict of the centuries’. Among public experiences, morality was the pursuit of value. But morality was ‘too subtle’ to be reduced to ‘general ethical maxims’ and was not to be understood as a suppression of emotion. It involved both a complicated orchestration of impulses ‘in the individual life and the adjustment of individual lives to one another’, and a flexibility to which poetry and poetic appreciation were vital because, in ‘ordering what . . . in most minds . . . was disordered’, they suggested an ‘appraisal of existence’, a more perfect

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emotional organization and a ‘perpetuation of the experiences’ which were ‘most worth recording’. What Richards was demanding from critical appreciation, properly conducted, was a sincerity and sanity which transcended the personal preference of the critic and established that some reactions to a poem were more valuable to life and civilization than others. It remains to be asked what he supposed himself to be implying about poetry’s relation to religion.

One of the arguments in The Meaning of Meaning was that Christian theology was a ‘word-system’ whose interest was chiefly ‘psychological’. But there was also an historical argument – that, although Christianity had acted in the past as Europe’s system of knowledge, it was no longer a system of knowledge, its role as a system of knowledge had been replaced by science, and it was the business of poetry, as distinct from prose, to resolve the problems which had been created as science ‘set’ Christianity ‘aside’. Though Richards denied that Christianity was a system of knowledge, he did not attack either Christianity (or religion) as such. The statements he made in defence of poetry could have been made in defence of religion, or indeed of Christianity once it had been latitudinarianized to his specification, and it was central to his understanding of modernity that the destruction of Christianity’s (and religion’s) ‘magical’ view of existence since the seventeenth century, had been followed by a loss of emotional coherence and a degree of stress which was unique to the modern world. Science and Poetry, The Principles of Literary Criticism and Coleridge on Imagination emphasized the seriousness of modern stress and claimed that poetry alone could save civilization from it. Poetry would do this obliquely but would do it significantly, showing what men were ‘frightened by . . . trusted or desired’, and rearranging their emotional organization while avoiding the claims to knowledge which had made Christianity anachronistic. Richards was not sure whether the claims to truth which had been made by Christianity could be suspended and whether poetry would be able to avoid ‘pseudo-statements about God . . . the universe . . . and the soul’. What he was sure about was that the disappearance of poetry would be a ‘biological calamity’, that it would not be long before the ‘Hindenberg-line’ behind which ‘religion’ and ‘traditional belief’ had retreated in face of science and psychology would be stormed and, in a crisis which was ‘religious’ before it was ‘biological’, that poetry (including tragedy) since it alone was able to imply without the inconvenience of affirmation alone could ‘construct an order’ for men’s minds without befuddling them with complications about truth. Richards wished to destroy religious, aesthetic and philosophical pretension and in negative respects was reasonably successful. But he had aesthetic, philosophical and sociological pretensions of his own and a portentousness

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which sat oddly on his tough nominalistic Benthamism. He was a friend, as Matthew Arnold had been a friend, of culture against both the philistinism of science and the dogmas and philistinism of the narrowly religious. But he had an inflated, if ingenious, conception of the ‘completeness’ of poetry, and of poetry’s relations with science, criticism and psychological and sociological duty. Whatever may be thought of Leavis’s message, it is difficult to think of Richards’s, once filleted for inspection, as anything more than brilliant, distinguished, earnest prattle.

For over a quarter of a century Richards and Leavis, or rather Leavis and Richards, and really, in the end, Leavis and Scrutiny, were the most articulate exponents of a systematically post-Christian treatment of literature and literary criticism. It was only with the student revolution of the 1960s that they were replaced by Williams and Eagleton, and not until Eagleton had edged Williams aside that an equally comprehensive statement about literature’s public significance was arrived at.

22 Modern knowledge and the postChristian consensus VI The ‘aesthetic’ is too valuable to be surrendered without a struggle to the bourgeois aestheticians, and too contaminated by that ideology to be appropriated as it is. It is, perhaps, in the provincial, strategic silence of those who refuse to speak ‘morally’ and ‘aesthetically’ that something of the true meaning of both terms is articulated. (T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 1976, p. 187) The one vital lesson which the nineteenth century had to learn . . . was that the basic economic organization could not be separated and excluded from its moral and intellectual concerns . . . Others besides Marx insisted on this, and worked towards it, but Marx, in giving a social and historical definition to the vaguer idea of ‘industrialism’, made the decisive contribution. The materials for restoring a whole and adequate consciousness of our common life were given into our hands. (Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950, 1958, p. 271) The scientific attempt to explore the depth of human things is accompanied by a singular danger. For it threatens to destroy our response to the surface. Yet it is on the surface that we live and act: it is there that we are created, as complex appearances sustained by the social interaction which we, as appearances, also create. It is in this top-soil that the seeds of human happiness are sown, and the reckless desire to scrape it away – a desire which has inspired all those ‘sciences of man’, from Marx and Freud to sociobiology – deprives us of our consolation. Philosophy is important, therefore, as an exercise in conceptual ecology. It is a lastditch attempt to ‘save the appearances’. (Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy, 1994, p. 244)

Between 1965 and 1985 there was a major transformation of the English intellectual Left as the thinkers discussed in chapter 21 were forgotten. Hampshire, Crosland and Jenkins were edged aside, and a new body of sages delivered a more uncompromising and revolutionary message in their place. Of these sages, apart from Anderson, the most important were Williams, Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. All three were, or became ‘tenured radicals’, all three used academic subjects as instruments of persuasion and all three had a stimulating effect on the English student revolutionaries of the late 1960s as these came to maturity without the restraint and respectability which the English student revolutionaries of the 1930s had acquired through participation in ‘the just and unavoidable war against Fascism’. I Williams1 earned his first reputation from the publication of Culture and Society in 1958. But it was through the student revolution that he achieved 11

Raymond Henry Williams (1921–88), educated Abergavenny Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Captain in anti-tank Regiment, 1941–5; Oxford Extra-Mural

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fame not only in England but also in the United States, where he had as devoted a following as in England. Indeed, his American followers were more devoted, none of them being as disrespectful as Eagleton, his most distinguished English follower whose Criticism and Ideology (1976), along with much praise, made withering criticism of Williams’s ‘provincialism’, ‘humanism’ and ‘idealism’, and of the ‘parody’ he had given of the ‘classic relations between the revolutionary and the proletariat’. Williams adapted himself sartorially to the student revolution, borrowing as his symbols the duffle coat, leather jacket and Mosley-ite black sweater in which he was photographed in 1982. But those who glamorized him as a proletarian forgot that modern England is a suburb and that Williams was a ‘scholarship-boy’ who had risen, like Powell, through education while, unlike Powell, feeling guilt about his elevation. In the 1970s and 1980s Williams came to stand for feminism, ecology and Welsh nationalism, and for the armed struggle against imperialism in the Third World. In the 1950s and early 1960s, before he was carried away by euphoria, his schoolmaster’s tweeds embodied an earnest, secular version of the inherited decencies and resentments of Welsh Nonconformity and the Welsh Labour movement, and joined the amiable but slightly rancid seriousness of a believer in culture and literature to a puritan, or Marxist, mistrust of anyone who had power or position in education, politics and society. From the mid-1960s, Williams was in continuous demand, wrote more than it was sensible to have written and found outlets for almost everything that he wrote. One result was an endless œuvre which dealt with culture, language, politics and society. Another was that he became both fluent and reminiscent, and finally assumed the rectitude of opinions that he had had originally to argue for. In the three volumes published immediately after his death, there were interesting essays about the Labour Left and the Labour Party, about the significance of Modernism and about the connections between popular opinion and the ‘ordinariness of culture’. But what Williams had ‘come to say’ had for so long been so obvious that only comrades, hagiographers and disciples found much to detain them. Williams wrote at two levels – colloquially and self-confidently in confirming for audiences of his own persuasion the truths that they shared with him; opaquely and mistily in establishing the truth and coherence of these persuasions. Intellectually he was without power; he wrote no work that persuaded Deligacy, 1946–61. Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Lecturer, later Professor, in Cambridge English Faculty, 1961–88. Author of Reading and Criticism, 1950; Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, 1952; Culture and Society, 1958; Border Country, 1960; The Long Revolution, 1961; Communications, 1962; Second Generation, 1964; Modern Tragedy, 1966; Public Inquiry, 1967; Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, 1968; The English Novel, 1970; A Letter from the Country, 1971; Orwell, 1971; The Country and The City, 1973; Television, 1973; Keywords, 1976; Marxism and Literature, 1977; Politics and Letters, 1979; The Fight for Manod, 1979; Towards 2000, 1983; and Writing in Society, 1983.

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by the cogency of its argument. His originality was an originality of manner: his achievement was to deploy ordinariness and reasonableness in recommending opinions which were neither ordinary nor reasonable, and which became entirely unreasonable in response to the nightmare of abnormality that swept the universities of the Western world when he was in his middle forties. Williams’s ideas were few and simple. They had all been stated by 1977 and, even at their most emphatic, involved either retreats from opinions he had seemed to be expressing earlier, or accommodations to climates created by others. He may, as Eagleton claimed, have had an ‘intuitive knack of preempting intellectual positions’; he was at least as good at picking up already existing positions, and it is difficult to believe that Culture and Society would have been as conservative as it was without the anti-revolutionary climate of the 1950s or that the cultural Marxism of Marxism and Literature would have been arrived at if others had not arrived at it earlier. It was also of first importance for Williams’s reputation that the young in the mid-1960s were willing to hear from an attractive lecturer who had working-class credentials and active service as an officer attached to the Coldstream Guards, a justification of revolution which swept aside the caution of Culture and Society with the violence that was implicit in Modern Tragedy.

Williams was the son of a rural Welsh railwayman and went from a Welsh grammar school to Trinity College, Cambridge in order to read the Cambridge English Tripos at the end of the 1930s. He became a member of the Communist Party in his first year as an undergraduate and collaborated with Hobsbawm – an undergraduate contemporary – in writing a pamphlet in defence of the Russian invasion of Finland. Two undergraduate years at Cambridge were followed by conscription into the British army, active service as a tank officer during the Allied invasion of Europe and a further undergraduate year at Cambridge when the war was over. After a short period editing small circulation magazines in London, he settled first in Sussex and later in Oxford as a salaried lecturer for the Oxford Extra-Mural Delegacy, expounding for the benefit of (putatively) working-class audiences that trust in culture and mistrust of capitalism, and that admiration for D. H. Lawrence, which some Marxists and ex-Marxists shared with the followers of Leavis. On joining the army, Williams seems to have lost touch with the Communist Party and only later to have become a supporter of the Labour Party. Though he appealed successfully on conscientious grounds against being called up as a reserve officer for the Korean War, his interests seem for a long time to have been less in the political than in the cultural objections to capitalism. After the Labour victory at the General Election of 1966, Williams

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resigned from the Labour Party in protest against Wilsonian cynicism and encouraged the outrage with which the New Left and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament made the Labour Party as unelectable as like-minded Democrats were making Democratic presidential candidates in the United States. From an early stage, Williams wanted to be a writer rather than a don, and a novelist as well as a critic, and from his first period in Cambridge was a journalist and public-speaker. Public speaking and small circulation journalism remained with him for the rest of his life, along with an interest in film and television, while Border Country – his first and only tolerable novel – gave confusing insights into what he was trying to say morally and politically. Border Country gave a low-keyed account of relations between a father and a son and was dominated by gratitude, nostalgia and death. The idyllic solidarity of a rural Welsh village resisted the idea that the meritocratic son or the entrepreneurial trade unionist were better than the dying railwayman, and suggested the anti-intellectual implication that a natural, unreconstructed, conservative life was more real than the academic life which the son had adopted. Though published later, Border Country was written at the same time as Amis’s Lucky Jim and Wain’s Hurry On Down. But Amis and Wain had no experience they were willing to disclose to match Williams’s experience, no yardstick except a satirical yardstick with which to compare a farcical university with the University of Oxford, and no more interest in explaining what they had learned from their mandarin education in Oxford than Williams had, as a novelist, in explaining what he had learned from his mandarin education in Cambridge. In 1961 Williams returned to Cambridge for a third time, now as a lecturer (later a professor) in the Faculty of English. At the same time he became a Fellow of Jesus College, to which he was brought by M. I. Finley, the American Marxist historian, who was a Fellow of the college already, just as Williams himself was later to bring Eagleton, who at the time was a Roman Catholic Marxist. In a review of works by Eagleton and his collaborators in 1966, Williams gave a mistrustful welcome to ‘radical Catholicism’s’ attempt to ‘find Christ in the world’. But nothing in the review or the rest of his writings suggests any wish to relate Christianity to the ‘civilized paganism’ with which he halfidentified himself even then. In Williams’s writings religion scarcely existed, except as a memory from the past. At no point did he consider religion in its own terms, certainly not in The Long Revolution, where it would have given backbone to boneless arguments, in The Country and the City, where the Church of England should have been of central significance, or in Culture and Society, where many of the thinkers discussed were obsessed by Christianity and hardly any can be understood once its centrality is disregarded.

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One is in the difficulty in dealing with Williams, therefore, that, since his assumptions about religion were not stated as such, a decision against Christianity has to be wrenched out of them. This can be done the more confidently when we remember Marxism and Literature’s judgement that in England ‘organized religion’ was ‘predominantly residual’ and the secular complication not only of significant passages in Modern Tragedy but also of a celebrated interview in Politics and Letters. Williams’s mind was historical and meditative rather than theoretical. Such standing as he had as a theorist derived from Marxism and Literature, in which he woke up to the fact that a cultural Marxism had for some time been available in Continental authors, and that the amalgamation of linguistics, semiology, and Freudian psychology into ‘cultural materialism’ had liberated Marxism from the ‘deformation’ associated with Stalinist practice. Marxism and Literature denied that Marx and Engels had had a rigid belief in a base/superstructure model of culture, questioned the idea that they had made a simple equation of the ‘social’ with the ‘collective’ and argued that Marxism could overcome the ‘reified’ or ‘abstracted . . . psychological’ conceptions based on the ‘isolated modes of production’ which had been created by capitalist society. Thought and culture were to be understood not as ‘distortion’ or ‘disguise’, but as a Gramscian ‘hegemony’ which ‘saturated the whole process of living’ and came to exist ‘in the fibres of the self’; and ‘tradition’, which orthodox Marxism had normally dismissed as inertly ‘superstructural’, was ‘the most evident’ or ‘shaping expression’ of ‘hegemonic pressures and limits’. In other words, ‘theory’ could be exonerated from the charge of being ineffectual in relation to tradition and could meet the perennial Marxist demand for criticism that would ‘change the world’. In the 1970s Williams was catching up – doing to Marxism what others had been doing in the 1950s and 1960s and what Carlyle, Matthew Arnold and many others had been doing to Christianity between 1840 and 1880 – ridding it of features that made it unacceptable to the modern mind. But just as Carlyle, Arnold and other fellow-labourers had thrown out so much of dogmatic Christianity that nothing distinctively Christian was left, so Marxism and Literature, like Hobsbawm’s later works, threw out so much of dogmatic Marxism that what was left was either vacuous and banal or not distinctively Marxist. Williams was too limp and amiable a thinker to understand that hegemony, though distressing for those who wish to have hegemonic authority but are excluded from it, is necessary in the modern world not only in the interests of peace and stability but also, where historic liberties and equalities have been established, in the interests of liberty and equality. He wobbled uneasily between wishing to protect intellectual autonomy within a Marxist or Socialist consciousness and accepting Mao Tse-Tung’s vision of writers being absorbed into ‘new kinds of popular . . . collaborative writing’. So much so

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that the more closely one looks at Marxism and Literature, the more difficult it is to see what it left of Marxism beyond the name once Williams’s ‘complexities . . . tensions . . . shifts . . . uncertainties and confusions’ had been applied to it as Carlyle and Arnold had applied theirs to Christianity. If Marxism and Literature lacked bite and edge, it also carried Williams out of his depth. He had been much more in his depth in discussing the decline of the English theatre twenty years earlier, when the ‘most valuable drama’ would be achieved by the dramatist controlling the ‘technique of performance’ and a ‘technical’ enquiry about the relation between ‘text’ and ‘performance’ would reflect the changes in the ‘structure of feeling’ which were going on ‘where reality was . . . being formed, at work . . . in assemblies . . . and . . . in the streets’. These were the hankerings of 1954, towards the end of the Attlean consensus. Though given a wider range in Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, and a more distinctly political thrust thereafter, they did not achieve their proper stature until Modern Tragedy and Marxism and Literature answered Culture and Society’s call for a systematically Marxist account of culture’s significance.

In providing critical exposition of the social doctrine that Williams found in approximately fifty British thinkers since Burke, Culture and Society worked with three conceptions: that English society before the eighteenth century had been ‘organic’, however defective in humanity; that the English thinkers with whom it dealt had been reacting primarily to industrial and democratic upheaval; and that ‘culture’ had provided these thinkers with a ‘court of appeal’ and ‘scale of integrity’ which would enable Marxists and Conservatives to identify ‘liberalism’ as the common enemy. In the closing pages of Culture and Society Williams made the first widely read statement of his political opinions, defending a ‘democratic attitude’ against ‘fear and hatred’ and inserting into the ageing Socialism of the 1950s a Luddite or Leavisite version of the resentments of the 1930s. Williams did not have to invent for himself the working-class persona which public school Marxists like Auden and Spender (or an alienated Etonian like Orwell) had had to invent for themselves twenty-five years earlier, and he was better placed than they were to write dispassionately about the ‘ethic of service’ and ‘real personal selflessness’ which had been inculcated by the public schools, the professions and the regular army. On the other hand, he attacked the scholarship ‘ladder’, denouncing it not only because it ‘sweetened the poison of hierarchy’ but also because it pretended that the ‘hierarchy of merit’ was different from the ‘hierarchy of birth and wealth’, when in fact both were hierarchies which were diminishing ‘community’, creating élites and obstructing the ‘effort’ that ‘every man’ ought to make to value his own skill and the ‘skill of others’.

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What Williams wanted to say was that the British working class was not a ‘mob’, that it had not behaved like Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’ and that existing ‘popular culture’ was not only not its work but had been produced cynically and deliberately by mass-circulation functionaries who believed that they were ‘writing . . . for morons’. What he proposed was to give ‘all sources . . . access . . . to the channels . . . of communication’ and to replace the ‘dominative’ view of mass communication by a common culture. In Culture and Society Williams did not advocate violent revolution, which it would have been ridiculous to do in England in 1958. What he said instead was that democracy was ‘in danger’, that there was a ‘sullenness’ and ‘withdrawal’ which would end in the ‘unofficial democracy’ of the ‘armed revolt’ if they were not dealt with, and that the only way to deal with them was to deprive newspapers, television, cinema and radio of the power that was enabling the ‘insincerity of a minority’ bent on protecting its own interests to persuade the masses to ‘act, think and know as it wished them to’. Williams was a class warrior as surely as Orwell had been. But he had Orwell’s sense of complexity, and also Orwell’s mistrust of panaceas. In the discouraging circumstances of 1958, his virtuous but self-defeating conclusions were that freedom was ‘unplannable’, that the ‘human crisis’ was always a ‘crisis of understanding’ and that culture was a ‘natural growth’ which could only be achieved by comprehending the ‘long revolution’ that had been going on since the eighteenth century ‘at a level of meaning which it was not easy to reach’. Culture and Society supplied an historical and theoretical basis from which The Long Revolution vacuously, Communications piously, and the May Day Manifesto of 1967 politically, deduced policy conclusions about the ways in which public ownership and control could make the media minister to a common culture. It was only in Modern Tragedy that expansion was effected. Like Culture and Society, Modern Tragedy discussed texts – the main tragic texts and texts about tragic theory which had been written in Europe and the United States since Ibsen – and extracted from them a political message about the inadequacy of individuation and the desirability of revolution. Modern Tragedy was written in a dense coded prose. Decoded, it manifests the confusion between the cultural élite and the people which was a feature of Williams’s doctrine throughout and became particularly troublesome in this book, where dramatic and fictional tragedy were presented as realizations of the ‘shape and set’ of modern ‘culture’ and the dramatists and novelists who had produced it were assumed to represent ‘our’ minds and experience. This was both élitist and anti-élitist, naïve about the prospect of bridging the gap between the cultural élite and the people, but emphasizing the affiliations which kept Williams, as a member of the former, in conscious empathy with the latter. The effect was nevertheless odd, implying that Strindberg, Brecht and Arthur Miller, for example, were not arcane, and amalgamating the ‘we’ who went to their plays or listened to Williams’s lectures in Cambridge with

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the ‘we’ who had been described appreciatively in Border Country. However deep Williams’s desire to make ‘critical discrimination’ relevant to the people among whom he had grown up, moreover, it neglected the consideration that critical discrimination was a minority activity which spoke meaningfully mainly to those who had heard Leavis’s voice. In Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952) Williams had criticized the English theatre for failing to achieve ‘the communication’ of an ‘experience’, a ‘radical reading of life’ or that ‘total performance’ which reflected ‘changes in the structure of feeling as a whole’. In Modern Tragedy the central contentions were that ‘liberal’ tragedy, while being liberal because it emphasized the ‘surpassing individual’ and tragic because it recorded the individual’s defeat by society or the universe, reflected the inability of the money-oriented privacy of the bourgeois ethic to provide a ‘positive’ conception of society. It was the ‘individual’s fight against the lie’ embodied in ‘false relationships, a false society and a false conception of man’ that Ibsen had made central, but it was the liberal martyrs’ discovery of the lie in themselves and their failure to relate themselves to a ‘social’ consciousness which heralded liberalism’s ‘breakdown’ and the need for a Socialist perception of the primacy of ‘common’ desire and aspiration. Williams wished to give tragic theory a social function. He pointed out that ‘significant suffering’ was not confined to persons of ‘rank’, and that personal belief, faults in the soul, God, death, and the ‘individual will’, which had been central to the tragic experience of the past, were not central to the tragic experience of the present. It was the ‘human agency’ and ‘ethical control’ manifested in revolution and the ‘deep social crisis through which we had all been living’ that were the proper subjects of modern tragedy, and human agency and ethical control that tragic theory needed to accommodate. In all this Williams was moving out from the defensiveness of Culture and Society and making a central feature of the argument that, when the revolutionary process was complete, ‘revolution’ would become ‘epic’, suffering would be ‘justified’ and pre-revolutionary institutions, so far from being the ‘settled . . . innocent order’ they had claimed to be, would be seen to have been rooted in ‘violence and disorder’. This was the route by which tragedy and tragic theory could remove cynicism and despair, could give revolution the ‘tragic’ perspective that Marx had implied and could show what tragedy had hitherto failed to show – that ‘degeneration, brutalization, fear, hatred and envy’ were endemic in existing society’s ‘tragic’ failure to ‘incorporate . . . all its people as whole human beings’. It was also the route by which tragedy and tragic theory could incorporate the fact that further ‘degeneration, brutalization, fear, hatred and envy’ would be integral to the ‘whole action’ – not just to the ‘crisis’ and the revolutionary energy released by it, nor to ‘new kinds of alienation’ which the revolution against alienation would have to ‘overcome . . . if it was to remain revolutionary’ but, supremely, to the connection between ‘terror’ and ‘liberation’.

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Williams’s rhetoric was ruthless, and yet in retrospect looks as silly as some of Hadow’s rhetoric. Nor were the tasks that he attributed to tragic theory plausible. It remains true, nevertheless, that Modern Tragedy, while denying that revolution was to be identified with the violent capture of power and identifying it rather as a ‘change . . . in the deepest structure of relationships and feelings’, suggested more than any other of Williams’s works a circuitous but indubitably evil attempt to encourage the young to think of civil violence as morally reputable.

In evaluating Williams, one wishes to be just. Justice requires it to be said that his condemnation of existing society was a trick, that it raised expectations for the future by ignoring the expectations that were fulfillable already and that it claimed academic or tragic authority for its condemnation of existing capitalist society while being uncritical about the prospect of an imagined post-capitalist society in the future. Who but the theorist of a ‘children’s crusade’ would justify the infliction of pain and suffering on the off chance that the pain and suffering entailed in an existing hegemony might be replaced by a hegemony from which pain and suffering had been eliminated? Williams is best understood as the politicizer of Leavis, the man who, while he criticized Leavis, brought him out of the closet and converted ‘critical discrimination’ into a set of Marxist slogans. Williams lacked Leavis’s power and his pretence that critical discrimination was not political. But he helped to make an impact – not necessarily the impact he wished to make – by stimulating the media editors of later generations to replace the public-school argot of Reith’s BBC by the deliberately dumbed-down argot with which they have aimed to effect their levelling political purposes, and he did this in spite of lacking Eagleton’s fluency and obscurity, and the intellectual brutality which has saved Eagleton from being merely the playboy of the movement of the 1960s. II Eagleton2 was twenty years younger than Williams, resembled him in coming from a working-class family (in his case in Salford); also, if that is a resemblance, he is at least partly Irish (where Williams was Welsh) and, to some 12

Terence Eagleton (1943– ), educated Christian Brothers, Salford and Trinity College, Cambridge. Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, 1964–9, of Wadham College, Oxford, 1969–89, and of Linacre College, 1989–92. Professor of English Literature at Oxford and Fellow of St Catherine’s College, 1992– . Author of (with Cunningham) Catholics and the Left, 1966; The New Left Church, 1966; Shakespeare and Society, 1967; (with others) From Culture to Revolution, 1968; The Body as Language, 1970; Exiles and Emigrés, 1970; Myths of Power, 1975; Criticism and Ideology, 1976; Marxism and Literary Criticism, 1976; The Rape of Clarissa, 1982; Literary Theory, 1983; William Shakespeare, 1986; Against the Grain, 1986; St Oscar, 1989; The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 1990; The Significance of Theory, 1990; Ideology, 1993 etc.

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extent, in his fifties, has allowed his Marxist persona to give way to his Irish persona. Eagleton was at school at the Christian Brothers school in Salford before going, again like Williams, to Trinity College, Cambridge in order to read the English Tripos. While there, and as a young don at Jesus College, he tried to incorporate Marx’s, Leavis’s and Williams’s conceptions into each other and into a Roman Catholicism with which none of these had had any sympathy. In writing in the late 1960s as a Christian Marxist, Eagleton resembled MacIntyre, who had done the same in the 1950s. And just as Christianity disappeared from MacIntyre’s writings in the late 1960s along with Marxism, so it disappeared from Eagleton’s writings in the 1970s, though Eagleton remained a Marxist and attracted the prediction, which Gellner had made about MacIntyre, that his writing might eventually reunite him with ‘MotherChurch’. Eagleton’s earliest writings were about the ways in which dialogue between Christianity and Marxism could be incorporated into literature and criticism. In a body of work which was unusually fertile for a don in his twenties, he explained why literature had a social function which coincided with the function of the Church and why Church and literature had to support a Marxist revolution against capitalism. Eagleton claimed to be developing the ‘traditional’ British connection between ‘political radicalism’ and ‘imaginative creation’ to which Culture and Society and the New Left after Hungary and Suez had shown the way. But he was stretching the argument, insinuating Christian ideas of ‘grace and charity’ and deducing political duties from the duties he imposed on the poet, the dramatist, the novelist and the literary critic. What these had to do, and what the poet in particular had to do, in effecting a ‘dynamic interaction between consciousness and reality’, was to avoid both an alienated realism which saw ‘objects and people’ independently of man, and a romantic or symbolist reductionism which, in making reality merely ‘emblematic’ of the poet’s consciousness, reflected the ‘imperialist expropriation’ characteristic of the phase of capitalism with which philosophical idealism had been associated. The idea was, positively, that perception made ‘reality’ into a ‘human creation’ by ‘interpreting the world in the process of seeing it’ and that language, by ‘sharing in the reality . . . it expressed’, enabled men to ‘control’ objects by ‘naming’ them. In addition, there was hatred of the ‘condescension’ of ‘modish Leftism’ and Leavis’s wish to persuade the ‘metropolitan young’ that they should resist the ‘manipulation’ to which they were being subjected by the ‘cultural liberalism of the Sunday newspapers’.

In The New Left Church and elsewhere Eagleton replayed Williams’s and Leavis’s tunes about ‘commercial . . . metropolitan’ culture and defended their

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insights against the ‘cynical’ boredom with which trendy liberalism was reacting to them. The political situation of the early 1960s, moreover, was said to be ‘difficult and confused’, the Labour Party, though the only party worth supporting, to be unlikely to deliver very much, and ‘the radical’ to have no alternative but to follow Williams in monitoring ‘capitalistic ideology’s’ domination of the media. Eagleton’s targets were ‘duplicity’, ‘exploitation’ and liberalism’s desire to keep culture away from ‘grubby . . . louts’ who were ‘likely to revile it’. Mill’s intellectualism and the Cartesian antithesis between body and mind were castigated, as were the Bloomsbury and pre-Raphaelite attempts to construct ‘reality’ out of ‘beautiful feelings’. ‘Community’ alone constituted man’s ‘humanity’, literary culture could create the ‘depth of belief’ that ‘Leavis would call religious’ and a ‘revolutionising of structures’ was necessary so as to enable ‘the people as a whole’ to achieve ‘controlling participation in the making of culture as a way of life’. In thus following Marx, Leavis and Williams in pursuit of a common culture, Eagleton laid out for Christians a destiny of tragedy and martyrdom in resistance to philistinism, commercialism, racialism, neo-imperialism, meritocracy, bureaucracy and centralization, as a modernized Christianity brought culture to ‘the masses’ and ‘Christian, Marxist, Third-World, BlackPower and hippie . . . intensity’ converted ‘monopoly capitalism’ into a ‘just material community’. Eagleton was juvenile and repetitive, dismissing the ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ Christianity of Rahner, Daniélou and Teilhard de Chardin, and looking to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Küng and Schillebex to collaborate with Marxism in cutting across ‘existing’ ‘patterns of . . . meaning’ and the ‘carefully-weighed values . . . of the conventional world’. This programme was described as ‘reckless’, as reflecting God’s ‘extremism and ruthlessness’, and as being likely to ‘tear through the fabric of the common life’. But it was also the indispensable preliminary to the creation of a society in which love would be bestowed generously and the Church be disembarrassed of the ‘reified’ conception of the sacraments which reflected the ‘reified’ conception of money under capitalism. In The New Left Church, these ideas were applied initially to nuclear disarmament, which Eagleton and his friends believed (naïvely) would destabilize the English political establishment. They were then applied to ‘liberal individualism’ which, since ‘capitalist society’s’ books ‘had to balance’, left no room for worker-satisfaction and the ‘free giving of energy’, and needed liturgy, a ‘theology of work and society’, and the ‘spontaneous life of grace’, as ‘alternatives to alienation’. Eagleton claimed to be pinpointing a ‘general failure in Christian social thinking’. He wanted Christianity to abolish ‘cult and ritual’, to merge the sacred into the secular, and to consider the ‘paraphernalia . . . of religion . . .

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outdated’. The time had come to put an end to the authoritarian paternalism of the Roman Church in England, its ‘interiorising of a Capitalist mentality’ and that mistrust of the body of which clerical celibacy was the guardian. The time, in other words, had come to make the Church a revolutionary vanguard, the clergy ‘revolutionary leaders’ and the Eucharistic congregation a ‘party cell’ which would resist the ‘false consciousness’ characteristic of ‘popular thought and feeling’ under capitalism. The young Eagleton thought like a Liverpool-Irish Catholic rather than like the socially conservative convert Catholics who were the norm among the educated classes. In his own way, notwithstanding, he was smooth and slick, interpreted Christ’s death as a ‘definitive dying to the status quo’ and urged Christians not only to renounce that ‘inward-soul life’ which was ‘full of stains and fluids like an invisible stomach’ but also to understand that they fell from Christ (and ‘fell apart as persons’) in ‘falling away from community’. These statements had a Seeleyite, or latitudinarian, boldness which rejected ‘traditional’ certainties and ‘external rules and laws’. They also had a silliness for which ‘authenticity’ involved contact with the ‘dung of the earth’, the ‘scum’, the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘exploited’ of every generation; for which the opposite of the sinner was the ‘rebel’ who needed to rebel in order to be an ‘authentic man’, and Marx’s worker, who could not find ‘personal significance’ in his work under capitalism, was the analogue of Laing’s schizophrenic whose social self was a ‘front’ behind which his ‘inner’ self alone remained ‘authentic’. Eagleton wanted a society in which discipline and hierarchy would give way to an ‘achieved freedom in brotherhood’, men would no longer be ‘tools’ or ‘objects’ to be ‘manipulated’ by one another and political involvement would avoid the contentions that are inseparable from political involvement. Why he abandoned these fantasies is a biographical question. What is of intellectual interest is his theorization in the 1980s of the sociological assumptions which were all that remained once the tension between ‘Church, Politics and Literature’ had become as absent generally as it had been from his earliest works of literary criticism.

To those who encounter Eagleton on television or through the photographs which are attached to his books, the first impression is of a sartorial disavowal of élitism. On reading him the first impression is of a search for predecessors in which Wilde, for example, was a contributor to deconstruction and Carson, Wilde’s prosecutor, a symbol of Establishment ‘arrogance’ in England in the 1890s and in Ireland in the 1980s. One then receives the impression that Eagleton wishes more than anything else to re-register the exhaustion of ‘liberal humanism’ which he had already registered through Eliot, Joyce, Pound and D. H. Lawrence, and to bring Marxism up-to-date by making

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literature and culture intelligible aspects of the ‘great theoretical explosion’ of the 1970s. ‘The great theoretical explosion’ imposed a duty, as Eagleton imagined, to incorporate into Marxism the ‘horse’s mouth of theory’ which was being created in France, Germany and the United States. Eagleton’s achievement has been to effect such an incorporation, though with much vanity and vulgarity and with an unconvincing tension between his academic, or élitist, mentality and that mistrust of academe and élitism which symbolized his selfidentification as a member of the working-class. III Like Marx’s, Eagleton’s œuvre is rooted in history and attributes everything ultimately to the establishment of bourgeois-capitalist hegemony in the late seventeenth century. Eagleton is aware, however, of the accusation of naïveté, of the need for historical complication, and of a duty to look critically at the ‘heady negotiations’ which the ‘theoretical explosion’ demanded. Eagleton’s contribution to the ‘theoretical explosion’ reached its climax in The Ideology of the Aesthetic and The Significance of Theory, in which historical consideration of ‘the aesthetic’ provided a long-term way of restoring the class struggle to the centre of the scene. In both works the ‘theoretical explosion’ involved a ‘crisis of identity . . . about . . . the role of the humanities in late capitalist societies’ and a wish to restore that sensitivity about culture which had been present in Marx, Trotsky and Lukacs. On the other hand, there was depression or irritation. There was a fear that ‘the politics of race and gender’ was obscuring ‘the politics of class’ and that Schoenberg and James Joyce were ‘sidling’ into American ‘concert-halls and university syllabuses’, and Bakhtin and Benjamin into academic bookshops, without making any difference to American society. More depressing still, the ‘loss of nerve’ which ‘the global capitalist crisis’ and the ‘aggressive turn to the Right of . . . Western bourgeois régimes’ had effected among Marxists in the 1980s, was attributed to the ‘lowness’ of Derrida’s and the ‘liberal . . . crudity’ of some aspects of Adorno’s politics, to the Frankfurt School’s inability to differentiate the power-structure of fascism from the power-structure of lateliberal capitalism and to the inadvertent ‘hymning’ of the ‘public-school virtues’ by later Foucault, about whose homosexuality Eagleton permitted himself some not very sly teasing. In spite of all this, The Ideology of the Aesthetic was a handbook for latitudinarians and a Marxist analogue to Stirling’s Secret of Hegel. It emphasized the ‘revolutionary heritage’ of the early bourgeoisie, the replacement of external authority by the ‘internalized repression’ of possessive individualism and the coincidence between the arrival of the artist as ‘transcendental genius’ and the subjection of ‘cultural production’ to the ‘miseries’ and ‘meaninglessness’ of ‘commodification’. Consideration of the problem in the modern

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philosophy of aesthetics, was illustrated by Kant’s eunuch-like attitude to reality, the ‘idealist virility’ which had enabled Hegel to ‘penetrate its essence’ and Nietzsche’s sado-masochistic ‘self-abasement’ before the phallus; by Marx’s desire to ‘think everything again from the standpoint of the body’ and ‘work upward’ to ‘mystical ecstasy and the military-industrial complex’; and by the effect of irony, faith and ‘spiritual individualism’ in ‘wrenching open’ the ‘life of . . . degraded desire’ characteristic of bourgeois society as Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard had understood it. The Ideology of the Aesthetic is a remarkable book; like many remarkable books, it has a simple, and scarcely credible, message: that up to Marx the aesthetic had been virtually an ‘anaesthetic’, that, since Marx, it had been the only way of finding ‘inter-subjectivity and reciprocity of feeling’ in a social order marked by class-division and market competition and that the test of a truly radical aesthetic would be its ability to operate as social critique ‘without simultaneously providing the grounds of political ratification’. In The Rape of Clarissa and Shakespeare, these ideas were applied to literature; in Shakespeare by what Eagleton thought an ‘exciting’ infusion of Marxism, feminism and deconstruction, in The Rape of Clarissa, by considering Richardson’s novels as ‘cogs in a culture industry’ (like The Archers and Coronation Street) and agents of the ‘English bourgeois attempt to wrest . . . ideological hegemony from the aristocracy’. Eagleton’s Shakespeare wrote world-historical plays whose central features were the conflict between the ‘punning and riddling’ which accompanied his ‘unquenchable flow’ of ‘textual productivity’, the ‘settled meanings and . . . regularities of grammar’ which were required by his ‘belief in social order’, and a contradiction between the ‘spendthrift . . . excess’ of feudalism’s dying aristocracy and the emergent bourgeoisie’s preoccupation with bodily ‘appetites’. Thus, Antony and Cleopatra embodied the ‘Nietzschean, Yeatsian ethic’ with which an aristocracy danced ‘demonically . . . on the edge of its own grave’, Hamlet a ‘Brechtian type of complex seeing’ for which melancholia and ‘deferral’ were central, and Hamlet himself an awareness of both a revulsion from the sexuality which had produced the symbolic order and of a ‘transition’ from the traditional social order to which he was marginal to a future epoch of bourgeois individualism to which he was related proleptically. The Rape of Clarissa was primarily about this future and the hegemony which the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie was to initiate politically, symbolically and in ‘the more elusive textures of subjectivity’. It recognized that in England, there had been no ‘mortal combat’ with the nobility, that the middle class had been ‘content to shelter peacefully’ behind traditional society and that the eighteenth-century ‘feminisation of discourse’ had not amounted to a ‘revolution’. Richardson’s characters, nevertheless, were declared to have raised ‘pitched standards around which battle was joined’ and Richardson’s access as printer, publisher and author to both ‘the State

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ideological-apparatus’ and ‘the most inconspicuous crevices of middle-class culture’, to have produced ‘kits’ for novels which had co-ordinated a ‘mighty moral debate’ and converted ‘the process of . . . the . . . heart’ into an ‘act of ideological solidarity’. Eagleton wished to understand Richardson as an enemy. But he took him seriously, because Clarissa connected the women’s writing of the eighteenth century to the ‘women’s writing of our time’; because instruction in the forms of discourse suitable to polite society which had been Richardson’s interest up to the end of Pamela Part I had been torn tragically ‘down the middle’ when Clarissa exposed the contradiction between a ‘commitment to individual freedom’ and a ‘bourgeois . . . obsession’ with ‘contracts and regulations’; and because Clarissa’s model of truth as embodied in the ‘confessional letter’ was incompatible with a patriarchal society where women were ‘stripped of power’ and were ‘instantly falsified’ on ‘entering’ the ‘power-game’. The Rape of Clarissa was used to show, even more implausibly, that women were ‘the fundamental unit of exchange’ in ‘patriarchal societies’, that Clarissa’s body was Marx’s ‘universal commodity’ and that Clarissa herself was the ‘phallus’ or ‘transcendental signifier’ whom Lovelace needed to possess in order to ‘reunite himself’ with the penis he had lost on discovering that his mother did not have one. Clarissa had offended the ‘deconstructionist, male-iconoclast’ and ‘debunking’ assumption that ‘virtue is boring’, had used the narcissism and masochism of her elaborately arranged death to give men a ‘glimpse of that terrifying condition in which women might be independent of them’ and, through her ‘shocking, surreal act’ as ‘saint and martyr’, had made men understand that ‘every nail’ in her coffin was a nail in the coffin of ‘sexual oppression’ and bourgeois patriarchy’. The Rape of Clarissa was used to show, finally, that Clarissa was the ‘totem’ by which Lovelace protected himself from his own ‘terrible lack of being’, that he had a ‘crippling incapacity for an adult relationship’ and that his awe in face of the phallus was awe in face of that ‘stable system of gender roles’ which ‘for the most part’ he was ‘unable to enter’. The ‘virile panache’ of his rakishness was, as Carlyle might have said of Byron, ‘narcissistic and repressive’, and denoted a ‘bisexuality’ manifest even in the rape around which the two-thousand page text revolved. Towards the end of The Rape of Clarissa, Eagleton declared that the novel hardly contained a single proposition which was not ‘refracted through the play of power interests’, that its ‘wary negotiation of nuances and implications’ was the central constituent of a ‘battle . . . between the classes and the sexes’ and that Clarissa’s forgiveness of Lovelace ‘reflected’ both the ‘bourgeois impulse to make peace with the traditional ruling-class’ and Richardson’s desire to bring ‘Christian piety’ into ‘devastating interaction’ with ‘social aggressiveness’. Eagleton’s rescuing of ‘the self’ from the ‘shibboleths’ of ‘liberal individu-

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alism’ and his linking of the ‘unity of the self’ to the politics of manoeuvre and the ‘unconscious’, had something to recommend them. But the more closely The Rape of Clarissa is looked at, the more obvious it becomes that the conceptions Eagleton was using were being used to express thoughts which could have been expressed better without them, and that the feminist and psychoanalytical treatment which he brought to the ‘sheer radicalism’ of Richardson’s ‘astonishing text’, were only crudely co-ordinated with the claim that ‘eroticism and écriture’ were ways of delivering readers ‘to the political enemy’. The question The Rape of Clarissa was raising was how to employ the new language of discourse in uncovering the ‘deep structure’ of literature; and it is important that Eagleton’s own language often required interpretation. It was not obvious what he meant by two typical passages which are best relegated to the footnotes3 nor by the unintelligibility which the reader of Criticism and Ideology, Marxism and Literary Criticism, Literary Theory and the second half of Walter Benjamin, was almost invited to associate with a recent, presumably marital, crisis. What we have to ask is what account of literature Eagleton expected a latitudinarian Marxism to provide.

Eagleton believes that certain of the ‘ideas, values and feelings which constitute ideology’ are only available in literature. But one of his main purposes has been to complicate the relationship between literature and ideology. He does not deny that texts are ‘in a certain sense, self-producing’ and have an ‘air of freedom’ which arises from being ‘unconstrained by the necessity to produce any particular “real”’. But the ‘pseudo-real’ of a text, nevertheless, is the product of the ‘ideologically saturated demands of its modes of production’ and its ‘determination by the constituents of its ideological matrix’. The complication was summarized, if one likes that sort of thing in the following passage: History, then, certainly ‘enters’ the text, not least the ‘historical’ text; but it enters it precisely as ideology, as a presence determined and distorted by its measurable absences. This is not to say that real history is present in the text but in disguised form, so that the task of the critic is then to wrench the mask from its face. It is rather that history is ‘present’ in the text in the form of a double-absence. The text takes as its object, not the real, but certain significations by which the real lives itself – 13

E.g. Though Conrad’s fiction, like his life in the Merchant Navy, was a re-creation of an ‘organic unity which had been splintered in Poland’, Conrad had also been ‘alive with . . . a subversive negation of . . . organic unity’ as ‘ideological dissonances emerged . . . in the calculative organization of interlacing patterns around a central absence’. Or, again, Henry James’s later work ‘represented the astonishing enterprise of rescuing and redeeming inorganic material existence by ceaselessly absorbing its raw contingencies into the transmutative structures of consciousness . . . and . . . the complex interlacings of syntax . . . threatened with dissolution by the heterogeneous materials it just succeeded in subduing’.

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significations which are themselves the product of its partial abolition. Within the text itself, then, ideology becomes a dominant structure, determining the character and disposition of certain ‘pseudo-real’ constituents. This inversion, as it were, of the real historical process, whereby in the text itself ideology seems to determine the historically real rather than vice versa, is itself naturally determined in the last instance by history itself. History, one might say, is the ultimate signifier of literature, as it is the ultimately signified. For what else in the end could be the source and object of any signifying practice but the real social formation which provides its material matrix? The problem is not that such a claim is false, but that it leaves everything exactly as it was. For the text presents itself to us less as historical than as a sportive flight from history, a reversal and resistance of history, a momentarily liberated zone in which the exigencies of the real seem to evaporate, an enclave of freedom enclosed within the realm of necessity. We know that such freedom is largely illusory – that the text is governed; but it is not illusory merely in the sense of being a false perception of our own. The text’s illusion of freedom is part of its very nature – an effect of its peculiarly over-determined relation to historical reality. (T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 1976, p. 72)

Eagleton has for long been conscious of the naïveté of English Marxism and, in straining past naïveté to portentousness and obscurity, has also been saying that Marxist literary criticism has to replace its ‘egalitarian unease’ about the propriety of drawing ‘qualitative distinctions’ between texts by recognizing that to study literature ‘without in the least valuing it’ is like being a Marxist ‘without being a revolutionary socialist’. This led first to a ‘re-enactment of the founding gesture of Marxist political economy’ by ‘reconsidering . . . value on the site of literary production’, next to the concept of a ‘science of the ideological conditions of the production of value’, finally to consideration of the connections between ‘the ideological matrix of reading’ and the ‘ideological matrix of production’. These enquiries were meant to be important from two points of view. First, because reading had to be rescued from critical ‘authoritarianism’ and the critic to stop acting as ‘midwife . . . between text and reader’. Second, because the identification between ‘fact’ and ‘value’ which Marx had achieved by translating the ‘initially ideological conception of alienation’ into a scientific enquiry into the ‘mechanisms’ by which ‘surplus value was extracted from [human] labour power’, had been matched in aesthetics by the way in which the ‘aesthetic effect’ of a text ‘inhered in . . . it’ not only by ‘distance and denial’ but also by ‘remaining silent’. What Marxists were being told was that literature was a ‘peculiar mode of linguistic organization’ which ‘merged . . . and elided . . . its signs’ with an extraordinary freedom, and that the way to avoid value-relativism was not by expecting a text to be ‘either simple in representation’ or the bearer of ‘progressive values’, but by asking whether it entered into ‘relations with . . . the historically determined . . . values, interests, needs, powers and capacities which surrounded it’. The restoration of value was thus as complicated a matter as relations

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between criticism, literature, ideology and modes of production. It was ‘absences’, – the ‘not-said’ of a text, which prevented the text constituting a ‘unified plenitude of meaning’ and criticism’s function – of theorizing a text by revealing the things which the text’s ‘unconscious . . . knew were not to be spoken of’ – projected across the ‘phenomenal’ text which ‘offered itself’ to the inspecting glance the ‘real text which the phenomenal text existed to conceal’. There is no need to be beguiled by these Collingwoodian firecrackers, by the high seriousness of Eagleton’s rhetoric or by the erroneous claim that ‘ideology cannot survive the traumatic recognition of its own repressed parentage’. But we may still sympathize with some of the conclusions – that the ‘internal bonds’ which ‘leash . . . a literary text . . . to ideology’ may leave the text ‘relatively autonomous’, that texts can ‘force . . . ideology up against the wall of history’ and ‘terrorise it into handing over its secrets’ and that in examining a text which ‘denies the determinants of its productive process’, the function of criticism – never an ‘innocent discipline’ – is to show what its ‘real determinants’ are. Criticism and Ideology was tense, turgid and intelligent, and was highly successful in showing how complicated Marxism was capable of becoming. By the side of some of Eagleton’s later works, it was narrow in the range of complication that it discussed. Eagleton’s attitude to the latitudinarianizing of Marxism resembles in some respects Sidgwick’s attitude to the latitudinarianizing of Christianity. He is against narrowness while wishing to retain some parts of the orthodoxy which narrowness had made possible, and he lets it be known that he is bound by loyalties which are neither professional nor academic. Exposition and evaluation, he implies, are too important to be left to the ‘bourgeois university’, and, since some of the major Marxist aestheticians had written ‘at a time when the class-struggle was on the down-turn’, there was an overriding duty (well understood in the ‘Marxist criticism-collective of the University of Oxford’ and the associated sub-sects it had established throughout Britain) to emphasize the class-struggle and ‘the living voice of comrades quelled by wrong’. Since Criticism and Ideology, Eagleton has developed arguments designed to upset narrow Marxism, liberal humanism and conventional literary criticism, and to establish that the ‘meaning of a literary work’ is so little ‘exhausted by the intentions of its author’ that it is theoretically impossible to ‘know the literary text’ ‘as it was’. The ‘toppling of the text’ and the establishment of an equality between reader and author was thus of the greatest importance, and it was reception theory’s opening-up of the text, its closing down of the domination of authorial intention, and its undermining of the belief in fixed literary values which confirmed his judgement that the poem was not a ‘transcript of the living voice of a real man or woman’, that the

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study of literature was a study of ‘the system of codes, genres and conventions by which literary works were to be interpreted’ and that it was right, in dividing ‘the sign’ from ‘the referrant’, to insist that meaning ‘would never stay quite the same from context to context’. Just as in the other doctrines which he inspected, so in post-structuralism, Eagleton found much to regret. What he did not regret was that it permitted the ‘privileged . . . transcendental signifiers of historic and contemporary Europe – God . . . Family, Democracy, Independence, Authority . . . and so on’ – to be ‘deconstructed’ into ‘products of a particular system of meaning’, and showed writing to be a ‘flickering, spilling and defusing’ which ‘evaded all systems and logics’ in exactly the way in which language spoke in all its ‘swarming, polysemic plurality’. Eagleton was well aware that deconstruction could be used to legitimate ‘bourgeois hegemony’ and to reduce the proletariat to ‘trace, symptom or effect’. He also believed, however, that it could be a radical or Marxist force, and that it need neither entrench the scepticism which had accompanied poststructuralism in ‘left-academic circles’ nor sustain the ‘last uncolonised enclave in which the intellectual . . . could savour the sumptuousness of the signifier in . . . disregard of whatever might be going on in the Élysée Palace or the Renault factories’. What Eagleton wanted was what he supposed Derrida to want, in spite of Derrida’s inability to deliver it – deconstruction as an ‘ultimately political practice’ which would dissolve liberalism, male dominance and commonsense, and would minister to a Freudian Marxism which, since the ‘motive of society’ in Freud as much as in Marx, was ‘in the last resort . . . economic’, would show that every human being, in responding to the need to work, experienced the repression of the ‘pleasure-principle’ by the ‘reality-principle’. Eagleton is capable of satire, as the send-up of Wittgenstein at the beginning of Saints and Scholars (1987) shows. And there has been a continuous (if solemn) polemic in favour of ‘students’ and ‘schoolteachers’ reading ‘literary texts in ways unacceptable to . . . ruling ideologies’. But Eagleton can scarcely be said to have avoided ‘incorporation into the bourgeois academy’, to have created anything more than an ‘enclave of ersatz radicalism . . . for teachers and students . . . in a period of relative political deadlock’ or to have done more, morally, than to consolidate his own integrity in face of a contradiction between the expectation of revolution and the indefinite deferment of expectation. He accepts Hobsbawm’s account of the ‘global disorder’ of the twentieth century, but balances against the ecological crisis, the slaughter of two hundred million men and the ‘harsh authoritarian doctrines’ which have ‘planted themselves deep in the human psyche’ since World War I, the benefits he assumes have been brought by decolonization, feminization, urbanization and the world-wide expansion of university education. Eagleton is a public performer of high confidence who wishes it to be

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understood that he has resisted the blandishments of academe and the corruptions of embourgeoisification; that, indeed, Marxism is not a ‘subject’ in the academic sense but a scientific narrative of ‘the struggle of men and women to free themselves from exploitation and oppression’. And in that sense he is speaking to an audience which is located in Camden, Haringay and Oxford in much the way in which the ‘Latin’ sect of Anglo-Catholics was located by Inge in the areas served by the ‘London, Brighton and South Coast Railway’. But what, one asks, does Eagleton do for his audience? Is there anything more than a resentful exposure of the deviousness and unavoidability of hegemonic power? Does he understand that hegemony can be suggestive as well as limiting, that to be what a writer, or citizen, is capable of becoming within a hegemonic framework is as meritorious as resistance to the hegemonic framework, and that the appreciative intimacy which discloses the failure of every person and society to be what he or it might become, provides a stimulus, as Marxism itself has provided a stimulus, for which everyone should be grateful who can absorb this truth without being unnerved by it? To no modern thinker is it more necessary to point out that neither a proletarian origin and sympathies, nor a Trotskyite identification with both culture and the working classes, can rescue either culture, or the culture-worker, from the élitism which Eagleton affects to dislike. Eagleton is a solemn writer as Williams was a solemn writer and on many occasions is finely balanced between solemnity and self-parody. But he also has a bracing lack of respect for his profession. If two passages from the closing pages of the chapter entitled ‘Psychoanalysis’ in Literary Theory are thought about carefully, the justice of this judgement will become apparent. ‘The reason why the vast majority of people read poems, novels and plays is because they find them pleasurable’, went the first passage. This fact is so obvious that it is hardly ever mentioned in universities . . . Many university literature courses seem to be constructed to prevent this from happening, and those who emerge still able to enjoy literary works might be considered either heroic or perverse. As we saw earlier in this book, the fact that reading literature is generally an enjoyable pursuit posed a serious problem for those who first established it as an academic ‘discipline’: it was necessary to make the whole affair more intimidating and dispiriting if ‘English’ was to earn its keep as a reputable cousin of Classics. Meanwhile, in the world outside, people carried on devouring romances, thrillers and historical novels without the faintest idea that the halls of academia were beset by these anxieties. (T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 1983, p. 192)

‘We live’, went the second passage, in a society which on the one hand pressurises us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and on the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population an endless deferment of fulfilment. The spheres of economic, political and cultural life become ‘eroticised’, thronged with seductive commodities and flashy images, while the sexual relationships between men and women grow diseased and disturbed. Aggression in such a society is not only a matter of sibling-rivalry: it becomes the growing

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possibility of nuclear self-destruction, the death drive legitimated as a military strategy. The sadistic satisfactions of power are matched by the masochistic conformity of many of the powers. (T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 1983, p. 191)

Eagleton began adult life as a Roman Catholic apologist. Kenny, having begun adult life as a Roman Catholic priest, has been laicized and married, and has used the secularized scholasticism which has grown up in the Roman Catholic Church in his lifetime in order to broaden analytical philosophy and to provide a secure intellectual basis for the academic study of philosophy. Kenny’s disengagement from Catholicism has in some ways been a replay of Clough’s and Sidgwick’s disengagements from Anglicanism. Even as an excommunicated agnostic, he has gone into churches, chiefly Anglican churches, while neither taking communion nor reciting the creeds. But there is a manifest nostalgia and a determination to speak as well as a lapsed Catholic can speak about Catholicism, even when nostalgia and sympathy do not override his contention that the ‘secularization of scholasticism’ has been desirable. IV Kenny4 came from a partly Irish-Catholic family in the lower-middle-class Liverpool suburbs and was much influenced by an uncle who was a priest and a Biblical scholar. After a seminary training in England in the late 1940s, he spent seven years studying philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University in Rome, where he claims to have found scholastic philosophy ‘dull and dead’ but to have been excited by Ryle’s Concept of Mind when he was introduced to it by one of his teachers. He was ordained in Rome in 1955 and, after beginning work under Lonergan on a dissertation about relations between linguistic analysis and the language of religion, spent a period in Oxford under Anscombe’s guidance, learning the jargon and arguments of post-war Oxford philosophy and writing an Oxford dissertation which was eventually published under the title Action, Emotion and Will. A curacy in Liverpool was followed by withdrawal from the priesthood in 1963 and appointment almost at once to a philosophy Fellowship at Balliol College, of which in 1978 he became Master. Kenny is a distinguished person who, after an early and unfulfilled beginning as an historian of Elizabethan recusancy, has been a philosopher of law 14

Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny (1931– ), educated Gregorian University, Rome and St Bene’t Hall, Oxford. Roman Catholic priest, 1955–63. Fellow, later Master, of Balliol College, Oxford, 1964–89. Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford, 1989–99. Author of Action, Emotion and Will, 1963; Descartes, 1968; The Five Ways, 1969; Wittgenstein, 1973; The Anatomy of The Soul, 1974; Will, Freedom and Power, 1975; Freewill and Responsibility, 1978; The God of The Philosophers, 1979; Aquinas, 1980; The Computation of Style, 1982; Faith and Reason, 1983; Thomas More, 1983; The Legacy of Wittgenstein, 1984; A Path from Rome, 1985; Wyclif, 1985; The Logic of Deterrence, 1985; A Stylometric Study of The New Testament, 1986; The Road to Hillsborough, 1987; Reason and Religion, 1987; God and Two Poets, 1988; Frege, 1995; and A Life in Oxford, 1997.

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and of religion, a translator of Greek, German and Latin philosophical writings and the author of a cautiously expressed guide to stylometrics which he has applied to both Aristotle and the New Testament. He has published political works about the Irish question and the nuclear deterrent, an autobiographical account of his disengagement from Catholicism (which was serialized in the Sunday Times), and a full-length discussion of Clough’s and Hopkins’s disengagements from the Church of England. As a subscriber, late in the day, to the philosophical orthodoxy which had begun to emerge from Oxford in the 1940s, he has explained at length why he prefers Aristotle, Aquinas and Wittgenstein to Descartes and Hegel. Kenny was formed by professional religion at first hand early in life, embodies the worldwide withdrawal which occurred amongst Roman Catholic priests in the liberated climate of the 1960s and 1970s and illustrates one of the ways in which modern thought, and especially modern philosophy, can both empathize with and subvert Christianity. His nuclear politics are crude. During his crisis of conscience in the 1960s, they became tense; in the 1980s they became moral and prudential rather than Christian. His Irish politics are bland; his political opinions generally bear the marks of an unbearable correctness which, however, includes opposition to abortion and a carefully defined acceptance of the idea of a just war. In Kenny’s writing there is a tantalizing dispassionateness, an absence of religion until the mid-1980s, and the presence, especially after laicization, of a high-level seminar expositoriness which conceals the face behind the mask. What there has also been in positive abundance is historical and analytical philosophy. Kenny’s earliest writings bore the marks of his scholastic as well as of his Oxford training. It was as obvious in a review of Teilhard de Chardin and a talk entitled ‘Aquinas and Wittgenstein’ before laicization as in The Use of Logical Analysis in Theology just afterwards, that he wished to show what scholastic and analytical philosophy had in common, and why Wittgenstein, Aquinas and Aristotle had been on the right lines where English philosophy in the previous eighty years had been on the wrong lines. Kenny uses past thinkers as illustrations of philosophical arguments rather than as subjects for historical explanation and writes an exemplary history in which the first exemplar was Descartes, who had destroyed mediaeval philosophy, substituted ‘privacy’ for ‘rationality’ and produced an erroneous epistemology which many modern philosophers had adopted. Descartes reported Kenny’s admiration for its subject’s ‘breathtaking’ power, while denying that the Cartesian system was a ‘means of rescue’ from the ‘morass of doubt’ it had created and pointing out that Descartes’s ability to popularize his misconceptions about the nature of mind had been so much longer lasting than his ability to popularize his misconceptions about the nature of matter that it was not until Wittgenstein had ‘decisively refuted’ them in the twentieth

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century that ‘the grasp [of the former] . . . on the imagination of a large part of the human race’ had been broken. In Wittgenstein (1973) Kenny emphasized the continuity of Wittgenstein’s thought between the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. In The Legacy of Wittgenstein (1984), he contrasted the situation of the 1970s, when ‘Wittgenstein’s contribution to the philosophy of language and . . . mind’ had been judged ‘an irreversible advance’, with the situation of the 1980s when Wittgenstein’s philosophy had lost much of the ground it had gained previously. Like The Metaphysics of Mind five years later, The Legacy mounted a counterattack on resurgent Cartesianism and on philosophers, especially American philosophers, who ‘mimicked the . . . precision . . . of mathematics’ and propounded a philosophical ‘scientism’ which Wittgenstein would have ‘abominated’. Attention was given to Wittgenstein’s two different views of philosophy – as an ‘overview of language and . . . the world’, and as a ‘therapy’ for the ‘sick understanding’ which, in neutralizing the ‘original sin’ men had acquired with language, subjected them to something resembling a ‘conversion’. It added, somewhat innocently, that philosophers should ‘stand outside . . . current régimes’, intellectual fashions and ‘the human community’, should replace the conception of philosophy ‘as a kind of science’ by a conception of philosophy ‘exorcising’ the ‘bad implicit philosophy’ imbibed with language and should effect a ‘reordering of things’, even when this resembled, as it undoubtedly did resemble, the reordering which had been achieved by the ‘system-building’ of some of the ‘traditional, almost imperialistic’ philosophies of the past. Kenny differentiated the history of mathematics (which could be done without ‘doing mathematics’) from the history of philosophy, which could only avoid ‘doing philosophy’ by restricting itself to ‘quotation and biography’. Detection of ‘hidden premises’, evaluation of ‘coherence and cogency’ and exposure of the entrenched assumptions which had been created by conflicts between philosophical schools, though not, it seemed, expository irony, were ‘full-blooded philosophical activities’ which transcended critical exposition, ‘reached up to the great mines of the past’ and aimed to shed light on the nature of philosophy, not only as Wittgenstein’s allies and contemporaries were conducting it but also as Aristotle and Aquinas had conducted it. Long before a popular volume of 1980, Kenny had shown that Aquinas had addressed the problems which Wittgenstein was to address, that Aquinas’s adaptation of Aristotle to the Christian West had been conducted in the face of ‘the lifelong opposition of conservative theologians’ and that modern philosophy’s mistrust of both scholasticism and ecclesiasticism had not prevented it acknowledging that Aquinas was ‘one of the dozen greatest philosophers of the western world’. Kenny’s philosophy is derivative, middle-rank and wanting in the higher creative power. What has to be asked, given the curious nature of his religious history, is how he is to be understood when he discusses God, as he did in

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Descartes, The Five Ways, The God of the Philosophers and Faith and Reason between 1968 and 1983. God is one of the most important conceptions in Kenny’s writings, but it is not in his hands either moral, theological or devotional. Kenny’s God is ‘the God of the Philosophers’. As such, he is only a fragment of what God has been in European religion and of what he may or may not have been for Kenny when his Gregorovian dissertation about the ‘logical status of propositions concerning God’ subjected God to the ‘techniques of logical analysis’. The God of the Philosophers, indeed, seems from one point of view, to be merely a methodological aid towards the aim Kenny records himself feeling tempted by as early as 1952 – ‘a life of scholarship . . . untied to a set of dogmas . . . in the congenial surroundings of Oxford’. Kenny’s philosophy of religion is a tight construct, replete with gatherings from European thinkers between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries, and issuing in a very definite self-positioning. It is, however, chess rather than religion. There is much ‘reason’, there is no ‘faith’, and the reader is not encouraged to believe that any faith is present. There is exposition rather than evaluation and, though the exposition is often critical, the juxtaposition of mediaeval with linguistic philosophy is at times an end in itself. Kenny is not alone in being a philosopher of religion who neither practises a religion nor discloses what his religion is. But he is one of the more remarkable and is made not less remarkable by the thawing of the ice that has occurred since Wyclif (1985) supplied his first serious discussion after he had ceased to be a priest. Part of Wyclif discussed the replacement of Wyclif’s Victorian reputation as ‘the morning-star of the Reformation’ by his more modern reputations as a founder of Cartesianism and a student of problems which were ‘current among Oxford philosophers’ in 1985. Both this volume and Kenny’s lecture on Wyclif as a master mind (which compared Wyclif with Wesley and Newman as ‘favourite sons’ who had defected from Oxford’s ‘religious establishment’), resembled Kenny’s past-master volume on Thomas More, which had explained that More had believed in ‘toleration’ and ‘sincerity’ and had not been martyred on behalf of the Papacy which was to achieve its ‘triumphant expression . . . at the . . . Vatican Council in 1870’. There was an Ingelike engagement with More as source of the ‘sang froid’ with which the English had reacted to crises ‘up to the Somme and the Battle of Britain’ and praise of More’s idea that conscience had to be informed by ‘God’s law’ and the ‘public universal court of Christendom’ if it was to avoid the Kantian ‘court of [its] own will’. It is likely, however, that, in admiring More for resisting the ‘imposition’ of an ‘ideology’ and looking to an ‘international community’ as an antidote to Henrician Erastianism, Kenny was offering merely secular pieties and calculations. There was little sign of the religious seriousness which is to be found in God and Two Poets.

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God and Two Poets was about the connection between poetry, philosophy and religion in the ‘two most significant poets writing in English in the nineteenth century’. These were not, as might have been expected, Browning and Tennyson but Hopkins and Clough, and a contrast was drawn between the ‘climactic change’ Hopkins underwent on conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism and the ‘lingering’ character of the conversion Clough underwent on moving from Anglicanism through Unitarianism to agnosticism. In suggesting, without mentioning, the similarity between his own experience and the undermining of Clough’s attachment to ‘any of the forms of Christianity between [which] his tormented soul [had been] drawn’, Kenny examined the religious odyssey which had prevented Clough achieving the success his contemporaries had predicted for him in Oxford. Kenny was more sympathetic to Clough (who was unstable) than to Hopkins (who was a failure as a priest). Though Hopkins was the better poet, Clough was better as a poet of ‘human relations’ and, where Hopkins saw ‘only one side’ of the many questions about which he saw clearly, Clough had an endless capacity both for agonizing about, and for absorbing, all sides of every question into the eirenical position for which he had been reaching in Dipsychus. In Hopkins, moreover, there were problems about prayer and an inverse correlation between certainty of belief and poetical use of the Bible, along with a virtual disregard of Biblical criticism and an acceptance of the Bible’s literal inspiration (which Kenny found incredible). Clough’s Adam, on the other hand, suggested ‘uncanny anticipations’ of Wittgenstein and his Cain a ‘grafting’ of the ‘Christian doctrine of inherited guilt’ onto a Hegelian conception of humanity as a stage in the ‘development of the self-consciousness of spirit’. In evaluating Hopkins’s acceptance of the authority of the Church because of the Church’s ratification of the Real Presence, Kenny stated critically that most Roman Catholics believed in the Real Presence because they ‘accepted the authority of the Church’.

In the account in A Path from Rome of the discussions he had had with Archbishop Heenan in 1963, Kenny tried to remove the impression that his loss of faith was the result either of the social or of the intellectual attractions of Oxford. He may have been right, and it may be, since he says so, that his faith was actually strengthened by encounters with Oxford free-thinking. But a modern priest does not become laicized merely because of difficulties about transubstantiation. A. N. Prior – a close friend whom he consulted at the time – believed that what Kenny wanted was not the ‘authority’ which was given by the priesthood but to be ‘listened to’ by virtue of the ‘force and truth’ of what he had to say, and we in our turn may be right to deduce that what Kenny associated with ‘force and truth’ in the early 1960s was the secular philosophy he had been studying in Oxford by contrast with the ‘ramshackle’ philosophy he had been studying in Rome.

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In examining Kenny’s philosophy of religion, therefore, it is impossible to pretend that the ostentatious insistence on being a ‘philosopher’ or ‘historian of philosophy’ is unconnected with the fact that he is no longer a theologian. In Kenny, philosophy of religion is part of philosophy not of religion, and is distinguished from theology by the fact that it (i.e. the philosophy of religion) is concerned with theology primarily in order to establish that theology is neither philosophy nor truth. Not only is there no suggestion that the philosophy of religion discusses the truth of Christianity, there is no suggestion either that God exists, or does not exist, or that anything can be said about God philosophically beyond the methodological presumption that He is a convenient, and historically ubiquitous, instrument of philosophical doctrine.

Kenny has learning, energy and power, a prose whose misleading clarity is impressive, and a religion which has desiccated itself into professionalization. In Skinner, professionalization was present from the beginning. Of the twelve Regius Professors of Modern History at Cambridge since Kingsley’s appointment in 1860, all but four disclosed considered views of politics, literature and religion. Kingsley, Seeley, Acton, Knowles, Butterfield and Chadwick have been discussed already. Bury, though a dry-as-dust historian of Rome and Byzantium, wrote The Idea of Progress and A History of Freedom of Thought, while Trevelyan’s secular, literary and political engagements were conspicuous and influential. The four exceptions are Collinson, who is the historian of a sect, Butler, who sank back after good beginnings into official history, Clark, whose historical writing recalled his early commitments only by stealth, and Elton, who was the subject of reassessment by Skinner just after Skinner had become Regius Professor in 1997. As Skinner5 pointed out, Elton’s theoretical works about history were crude and inadequate. What he did not point out was that Elton’s writings about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not only registered the intelligent, Machiavellian sympathy for the pursuit of profit and power which other Cambridge historians of his generation had placed at the centre of historical enquiry, but were also the outpouring of an exuberant, Tory positivism which hated Figgis’s preciosity and pretentiousness, had a rude sense of the location of power and deserves credit for reminding his audience for the Ford Lectures at Oxford in 1972 of a ‘commercial traveller who had detained them too long in the saloon bar’. About Skinner there is no smell of the saloon bar, let alone of the public 15

Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner (1940– ), educated Bedford School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Fellow of Christ’s College, 1962– . Lecturer in History, Professor of Political Science and Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, 1967– . Author of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1978; Machiavelli, 1981; The Return of Grand Theory in The Human Sciences, 1985; Reason and Rhetoric in The Philosophy of Hobbes, 1996; and Liberty Before Liberalism, 1998.

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bar. His tone is elevated and pure, and much concerned with ideas; and he has felt it necessary to attack Namier who, as we shall see, was subtler and more cynical about ideas than it seems likely that Skinner is capable of recognizing. Skinner’s career began with discussions of Hobbes (about whom he reached a dead-end from which Reason and Rhetoric in The Philosophy of Hobbes did not really rescue him since it missed both Hobbes’s religious architectonic and Leviathan’s ambiguity about Christianity). He then acquired a distaste for Hobbes and a regard for Machiavelli, not for his ‘Machiavellianism’ but as an exponent of Republican virtue. In the first volume of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought he noticed the theoretical relief achieved by States from ‘upholding any particular faith’ between 1250 and 1500 but failed to notice that the practice of States – Protestant and Catholic between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; Nazi, Communist and secular-liberal thereafter – suggests that this did not happen on the ground, so to speak, and in any case that a secular religion, no less than Christianity, can provide a basis for the tyrannical exercise of State power. The other complicating factor in Skinner’s career has been the demand to confine the history of political thought to what political-thought texts were ‘intended to mean’ not as timeless statements about perennial problems but as ‘acts of communication’ in the contexts in which they were written. This worked well in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought where an informed intelligence located innumerable texts in exactly this way, illuminating relations between thought and religion, while making it obvious to deconstructing vigilance, even if it was not obvious to Skinner himself, that it concealed a deep animus against Christianity. As a theorist, Skinner by-passed the central question whether even contextualization can prevent historians finding whatever they want to find in the historical material that they consider. He did nothing for the ‘exciting possibility’, to which Newman, F. H. Bradley, Collingwood and many Biblical critics had contributed but which his own subsequent performance was to disappoint, of ‘dialogue between philosophical discussion and historical evidence’. He did not justify his political preferences and he made it impossible to tell whether his expositions of Republican thinkers, and his chairmanship of the ‘European Science Foundation Network’ on ‘Republicanism; A Shared European Heritage,’ hid an agenda for the destabilization of monarchy. And his silence prevented scrutiny by others of assumptions at which he had merely hinted – in the thin prescriptions of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Harvard in 1984 and in the letter he wrote to The Times along, among others, with Dawkins, in which academic courtiers, rather later than others, gave banal reasons for wishing to see an end of the Conservative government three days before the 1997 general election. In fact there are three Skinners. There is the Skinner who uses the ideas he picked up in the Cambridge History Faculty in order to contribute brilliantly

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and energetically to his subject. There is the Skinner who wishes to put himself right with fashionable virtue and the era of good feelings but hides behind historical exposition as his Inaugural Lecture hid behind such among the ‘neoRoman’ theorists of the seventeenth century as had anticipated the trite emptiness of one of Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. And there is the Skinner who began by being either tone-deaf to religion, or merely political about it, then became positively hostile, and finally arrived at the egregious conclusions that theism is ‘dangerously irrational’, that ‘the death of God’ will help men affirm the value of their ‘humanity’ and that nothing which has been said or written since Hume has rescued theism (or Christianity) from being a mere ‘whistling in the dark’. To credit Skinner with a secular religion would be to dignify a space which is mainly an emptiness. On the other hand, he describes the attempt to impose a ‘theistic perspective’ on mediaeval Europe as a ‘catastrophe in human terms’, ‘readoption’ of theism as a ‘cure for our ills potentially worse than the disease’, and the ‘ethic of family life and work’, which had been engineered when ‘powerful ruling-groups . . . hoodwinked’ previous generations into abandoning their ‘traditional pictures of spirituality’, as making feminism desirable and ‘the Citizen and the Monk’ (the latter hardly a Skinnerian pinup) into ‘casualties on History’s roadside’. Christianity’s transformations and continued existence are problems central to the modern world. But the skill, subterfuge and self-deception with which Christian mentalities and institutions have resisted extinction will not be understood where a panelled facade of professional detachment conceals the muted and inadequately stated atheism which it has been one of Scruton’s purposes to avoid. VII ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ is a familiar conception. But, as many leaders of the academic profession have shown during cautious and successful careers, there is also a ‘conservatism that dare not speak its name’ when the climate is unpropitious. In Scruton there is no such caution. He perceives the climate as a challenge, wishes, like Leavis, to be beleaguered, and has set up a personal resistance to a body of error of which in England Eagleton is the most explicit exponent. Eagleton and Scruton were contemporaries at Cambridge and share common interests in philosophy, literature, the theatre, sexuality and religion. Each has a distinctive prose, Eagleton’s being intelligible, however, chiefly as code, Scruton’s making difficult conceptions intelligible and in his Xanthippic Dialogues achieving a comic seriousness which makes up for the solemnity there has been on the way. If the present writer declines to identify himself with either, that is not because his sympathies are not with Scruton but because he believes that both take thought far too seriously.

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Scruton6 was born in 1944 into a lower-middle-class English family which was infected by his father’s hatred of the ‘injustices of the English class system’. Scruton was at a good grammar school from which he won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge where he read philosophy after an abortive term reading the natural sciences. On taking his degree, he taught in France where he encountered the conflict, which was to leave a permanent mark on his understanding of politics, between an embattled Gaullism which he admired and French Marxism which he very much disliked. For a number of years Scruton was influenced by the conservative intelligence of John Casey, the Cambridge literary critic who, if he taught him nothing more, taught him that everything is connected with everything else. In the early 1970s Scruton was a research Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he learned to box and ride a horse, made the acquaintance of the late Professor Edward Shils and began to conceptualize architecture with help from Watkin. After leaving Peterhouse, Scruton married his first, French wife from whom he was subsequently divorced. He qualified as a barrister, and established himself at Birbeck College where he stayed first as a lecturer, then as Professor of Philosophy. A few years in his early fifties in a part-time Chair at the University of Boston were then followed by a period as a full-time public thinker. Scruton has written novels, an opera, a work entitled Animal Rights and a defence of fox-hunting. As editor of the Salisbury Review – a small-circulation magazine – he has invented a novel type of Conservatism which connects Maurras, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Powell, T. S. Eliot, Oakeshott and the English Common Law, and has produced a classically diverse critical output which, after beginning as a polemical answer to the moral and intellectual heroes of the student revolution of the 1960s, has become an Arnoldian and Wagnerian answer to contemporary threats to high culture. In Scruton’s first book – Art and Imagination (1974) – the polemic was muted. But he had by then already been noisily polemical, against Eagleton’s ‘bigotry’ and Foucault’s ‘encomium of madness’ and was preparing the way for the targets that were to come – Mrs Huffington’s life of Picasso, the emp16

Roger Scruton (1944– ), educated Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe and Jesus College, Cambridge. Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1969–71. Lecturer and professor at Birkbeck College, London, 1971–92 and Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, Mass., 1992–5. Editor of Salisbury Review, 1982– . Author of Art and Imagination, 1974; The Aesthetics of Architecture, 1979; The Meaning of Conservatism, 1980; From Descartes to Wittgenstein, 1981; Fortnight’s Anger, 1981; The Politics of Culture, 1981; Kant, 1982; A Dictionary of Political Thought, 1982; The Aesthetic Understanding, 1983; (with Cox) Peace Studies, 1984; Thinkers of the New Left, 1985; Sexual Desire, 1986; Spinoza, 1986; Untimely Tracts, 1987; The Philosopher on Dover Beach, 1990; Francesca, 1991; Xanthippic Dialogues, 1993; Modern Philosophy, 1994; An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, 1996; The Aesthetics of Music, 1997; and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, 1998.

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tiness and tastelessness of Gilbert and George, the ‘musical vapidity’ which had made Stockhausen the idol of the avant garde of the 1960s, and the ‘architectural Leninism’ which was transforming architecture from ‘aesthetics’ into ‘mathematics and engineering’. It was, Scruton declared, ‘impossible’ for semiology, semiotics or structuralism to retain the ‘authority and objectivity of science’ while transcending ‘scientific’ modes of understanding, or for Derrida and the Yale Deconstructionists to ‘open the door’ which did not need to be opened between the reader and ‘figurative language’. In addition, there were disparagements of Lacan’s ‘bombast’ and ‘incomprehensibility’, and of Laing’s subversion of the family, ‘sentimentalisation’ of the insane, and advocacy of a ‘third-world, female- and gay-’revolution as the cure for family-, institutional- or capitalist-induced schizophrenia. In Thinkers of the New Left (1985), and in articles that he wrote for the London Times in the mid-1980s, Scruton disclosed a new, aggressive and slightly wooden voice which was deeply offensive to those who wished primarily to use English and American universities as instruments of ‘goodness’ and ‘correctness’. ‘Noble figures’ like Berlin and Bernard Williams, who spoke out in favour of individual freedom when universities were disciplining the Left, were said to have fallen ‘instantly silent’ when it was by the Left that discipline was being imposed. Skinner – as mugwump of contextualism – was despatched as briskly as Raymond Williams. Chomsky was despatched for his emptiness and political arbitrariness and Marcuse for the dishonest pretence that he had been the object of ‘repressive tolerance’ in the United States. Dworkin was ‘radical chic’, in spite of his ‘conservative legal naturalism’, and Wallerstein ‘paranoid’ about the ‘sun-drenched tribalism of the African bush’; J. K. Galbraith combined Veblenite ‘sarcasm’ at the expense of the American business executive with a Veblenite hatred of the spectacle of property in the hands of ‘ordinary uneducated Americans’. In England Scruton praised the working-class elements in the Labour movement as an expression of moral conservatism but pilloried ‘whimsical’ middle-class people for whom Socialism meant primarily anti-racism, Greenham Common and modern art. Even Mrs Thatcher was criticized for making the Conservative Party ‘throw in its lot with freedom’ where ‘traditionally’ English Conservatism had regarded freedom unless ‘constrained by . . . allegiance’ as ‘a sickness’ for which government was ‘the remedy’. Scruton did not write at length about the Soviet Union. But he stated summarily that Soviet Marxism was Voegelin’s chiliasm, that the ‘Potemkin justice’ of the Soviet Empire had nothing to do with liberation and that a conception of law as power and ideology rather than justice was sustaining an ‘unnatural’ attempt to constrain free association. Throughout the Communist world ‘and much of modern Africa’, a ‘goal-directed’ politics was degrading the State into an egalitarian machine for disparaging traditional institutions and was expelling from the description of power both the idea of

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‘personality’ and ‘those spontaneous exchanges through which people met each other and . . . reconciled their varied interests’. It was only after visits to Poland and Czechoslovakia that Scruton looked forward to the ‘deep spiritual resource’ of the East European underground ‘vomiting up’ . . . ‘forty years of . . . Marxist . . . poison’ and restoring the popular historic normality of which Michnik and Havel were making ‘hesitant, often sceptical reaffirmations’. Before 1989 Scruton had been involved in the underground university in Czechoslovakia and could but approve when the revolution happened. More recently his approval has been renewed as he has developed educational interests under the new régime. But there was a period in the early 1990s when the revolution was giving ‘little constructive guidance’, was failing to create a ‘genuine and truth-converging culture’ and was to be mistrusted in the way in which the parliamentary régime in England had been mistrusted in The Meaning of Conservatism (1980). From the start, Scruton had assumed that alienation had been induced in modern societies by the ‘mechanization of production’, the idea of property as consumption, and the nihilism which modern means of mass communication had made out of the ‘commonplace babble of the urban mind’. He had asserted that pluralism was a form of ‘rot’, that the State should be thought of as society in action, and that a properly constituted State would put an end to the value-free neutrality which was separating conduct from culture. If English Conservatism was to re-emerge from behind the individualism, Socialism and social Darwinism which had given Liberals and Socialists their ‘moral inspiration’, the State would have to give positive expression to ‘fundamental suppositions’ about hierarchy, inequality, stratification, allegiance and tradition and to enable citizens to see themselves as fragments of a ‘great social organism’. This was a ‘natural’ human condition in which, ‘however vociferously they might declare their attachment to other ideologies’, men were ‘in their most solemn and silent innervations’ conservative, and Scruton presented, as the ‘culmination of this conservative standpoint’, property as a representation of permanence and a ‘legitimate establishment’ as linking ‘individual feelings’ and the authority created by autonomous institutions to ratification by the State. At the same time, though the doctrine was emphatic, the tone was contorted and gloomy. ‘The conservative’ went a significant paragraph, who has risen above the fragments of his inheritance and reflected on the desolation that has been wrought to it, cannot return to an innocence which his own thinking has destroyed . . . He knows what he wants and knows the social order that would correspond to it. But in becoming self-conscious, he has set himself apart from things . . . The reasons that he observes for sustaining the rights of society are myths that he cannot propagate: to propagate his reasons is to instil the world with doubt. Having struggled for articulacy, he must recommend silence.

‘This problem’, went the paragraph which followed,

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is insoluble. It stands in the way of every creed. The ‘natural right’ and ‘freedom’ of the liberal, the ‘classless society’ and ‘emancipation’ of the radical; the ‘social justice’ and ‘equality of the socialist – all these are myths. They all have immediate appeal. But when we examine what they . . . mean, we see that they . . . can be defended to the élite . . . only . . . by . . . emerging from the sea of politics onto a strange desert shore of public opinion, a place of doubt, bluff and subterfuge [in relation to which] the wisest course is to turn back and re-immerse oneself. (Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 1980, p. 191)

Scruton’s politics as he explained them in the 1980s, though ‘conservative’, bore little relation to party Conservatism in England, were positively discouraged by the English Conservative Party and denied too readily that democratic politics could supply the necessary loyalties. It was both Scruton’s strength and his weakness that he neglected the cynical truth that there is no necessary correlation between political rhetoric and political practice, that a corrupting liberal rhetoric can function in a cohesively conservative manner and that there is a conservative case to be made for the mainstream duplicities of democratic politics. Scruton’s political writing is not, therefore, best understood in practical political or party political terms. It is part of an attempt to consider the role of public utterance – not only political utterance but also sexual, philosophical, religious, musical and architectural utterance.

About music and architecture Scruton has written at length, attacking the dominance of ‘experts’ and the avant-gardes of the day-before-yesterday, criticizing Marxist and Freudian interpretations, and finding in music ‘the symbols of western civilization’ as much as he finds in architecture a ‘public art’ which the public has to look at whether it wants to or not. Scruton’s philosophical manner is analytical rather than popular. Nevertheless, he has tried to defend the musical and architectural judgements of the average person against the inward-looking, self-validatory fashions of the musical and architectural professions. Under pressure he insists not only that the difference between ‘great music and bad music’ is ‘in the end’ the difference between ‘virtue and vice’, but also that some ways of building are ‘right’ and others, including those which were fashionable in the 1970s, ‘wrong’. In discussing sexuality, he has, if anything, been even more morally populist. In his main phase of anti-liberal polemic, Scruton gave two sorts of attention to the liberal consensus about sexuality. On the one hand he sneered at the threat to women presented by the feminist claim that ‘the division of sexual roles, the institution of the family and the ideals of modesty and chastity’ are ‘male inventions’. On the other hand, he attacked the abortionist identification of the ‘unborn child’ as a ‘non-person’, the treatment of pregnancy as a ‘misfortune’ or ‘disease’ and the view of the bond between

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mother and unborn child as a ‘provisional’ contract which the mother could revoke at will. In a famous article entitled ‘Sexual Morality and the Liberal Consensus’, he highlighted the intolerance which forbade parents to condemn the proselytizing homosexuality from which they were ‘seeking . . . to shield their children’ and gave cautious support to the ‘revulsion’ which had ensured that homosexual union (especially between men) would be interpreted as a step towards the ‘desanctifying of the body’. Except in his first novel, Scruton’s treatment of homosexuality has been self-consciously reactionary. He recognizes that ‘certain people in any generation . . . are . . . attached to their own sex’. But he not only praises the morality which prevents them acknowledging this, he also praises the avoidance which leads to the ‘sublimated interest in the young’ shown by ‘priests, teachers, scout-masters and so on’. An equally strong ‘sexual legitimacy’ was evident in Sexual Desire. The five hundred pages of Sexual Desire sought the truth about sexuality, beginning from the assumption that the ‘scientific’ explanations to be found in psychology since Krafft-Ebing had treated sexuality as ‘animal’, and raising the question ‘what a person experienced’ when he or she ‘desired another’. Desire in Scruton is a ‘distinctively human phenomenon’ related to the ‘restricting . . . decency’ that ‘once forbade its discussion’. In the face of Foucault, he argues that ‘there can be neither [sexual] arousal nor [sexual] desire . . . without the presence, in the very heart of these responses, of the moral scruples which limit them’. He has extracted from world-literature between Aristotle and D. H. Lawrence a universalization of the ‘bourgeois’ sexual order, has attributed to it the belief that ‘the natural telos of desire’ is ‘moral unity with another person’ and has drawn disparaging contrasts between the ostentatious friendships of ‘those famous [Platonic] lovers who were always in each other’s company’ and that ‘friendship of the hearth’ which he describes, somewhat innocently, as anticipating and defusing quarrels by ‘learning to read in the expression of the face the whole secret of the other’s need’. Scruton rejects Plato’s distinction between ‘sexual desire’ as pertaining to the ‘lower’ part of man’s nature and ‘erotic love’ as pertaining to the ‘higher’ part, and affirms that sexuality can only be experienced when a ‘rational’ being engages in an ‘inter-personal’ response founded on an ‘epistemic Intentionality’. This is a prelude to replacing morality as a liberal calculation of ‘cost and benefit’ and a ‘first person’ idea of a social order with a ‘thirdperson’ idea for which human action is the perspective each ‘might take were [he] to step outside the limits imposed by [his] present motivation’. As in the rest of Scruton’s work, so in Sexual Desire an essential feature is the demolition of error including the ‘dangerous’ error that ‘sexual desire’ is a ‘force from the deep’ which morality only ‘impedes’. In a survey of

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perversions and deviations, he has condemned some and sympathized with others but has judged all by reference to the central norm he associates with the ‘chastity, modesty and sexual hesitation’ of monogamous, heterosexual marriage. In Scruton’s account desire is directed towards the ‘embodiment of the other’ and makes the ‘perspective of the other’ the ‘most immediate image’ of the other’s ‘irreplaceable individuality’. This is what makes sexual pleasure that does not require the arousal of the other ‘perverted’ (just as ‘orgasm’ as the aim of sexual desire is ‘instrumental’). ‘The aim given by the intentional content of desire’ is for ‘the other’ to have knowledge of ‘me and my body’ and it was, Scruton believes, neglect of this principle which prevented Kant and Kant’s disciples formulating a satisfactory theory of sexual desire. Scruton proposes ‘fidelity’ as the remedy for sexual ‘jealousy’, Aristotelian temperance as a middle way between ‘timorous frigidity’ and ‘animal lust’, and ‘purity’ in ‘thought, word and deed’ as being ‘truer to human nature’ than the ‘irony or ridicule’ with which liberal and utilitarian moralists have treated it. His way back to ‘sexual integrity’ is to spray on the modern theory of gender the antiseptic that he sprays on the whole of the modern theory of sex. Whatever retreats he has countenanced on the way, he declines to retreat from the central positions – that the male and female bodies ‘develop according to a different rhythm’, that men and women possess ‘different intellectual aptitudes’ and that the genetic ambitions of male and female are ‘furthered by different psychological dispositions’. Nowhere more than in his sexual writing has Scruton been more willing to concede. Nowhere is he more resurgent after concession, or more determined to state that ‘persons [are] beautiful’ as ‘men or women not as persons’ that the distinction between them is not only a ‘distinction of sphere . . . activity . . . and response’ but also ‘a distinction within the structure of desire’, and that ‘the existence of gender’ unites sexual natures to the moral life that has grown from it. In all these matters, Scruton writes in the highest mode possible. He identifies marriage as containing ‘deposits’ of historic experiences of intimacy and associates the idea of marriage as a ‘contract’ with the ‘desacrilization of the world’ effected by Hayek and Adam Smith (of whom in some respects he approves). He dwells at length on the ‘sacred’ obligations which arise from ‘domestic proximity’ and the damage which is done to ‘the experience of erotic love’ when religion ceases to carry with it the ‘lamp of the sacred’.

As an undergraduate philosopher Scruton was taught for a time, unsatisfactorily, by a Cambridge Kantian who in the 1960s was an Idealist relic. He also absorbed Wittgenstein and analytical philosophy as remedies for cant and jargon, while recognizing that analytical philosophy would need to be broadened if it was to avoid aridity. This is the programme he has carried out in the

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last two decades as a citizen of the world for whom philosophy reached its high point when Modern Philosophy and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy offered the ‘layman’ or ‘common reader’ a sense of engagement with both a ‘spiritual discipline’ and the ‘aching questions’ of the human spirit as they had been addressed by Continental philosophers between Hegel and Heidegger. In these works there is not only an intellectual enemy – the ‘parcelling-out’ of knowledge into ‘specialisms’ and the ‘scientizing’ of philosophy into mere scholarship – there is also a humanizing agency or ‘literary’ philosophy which supplies a ‘therapy for our modern confusions’. In both works there are demonizations of Descartes as the creator of modern scepticism, warnings against deconstruction and Nietzschean iconoclasm and criticism of the ‘human sciences’ both for damaging man’s response to ‘the surface . . . on which . . . he lives and acts’ and for dragging him down from a ‘sacred pedestal’ in order to ‘dissect’ him in the laboratory. Positively, there is an ambition to ‘resurrect the human person’, to ‘replace the ‘sarcasm which knows that we are merely animals with the irony which sees that we are not’, and to consider men as ‘social phenomena’ inhabiting communities in which they ‘live by negotiation’, creating through ‘rational dialogue’ the ‘space’ which their projects require, and expecting to be protected in their ‘rights’ only insofar as they treat others as ‘ends in themselves’. These Kantian asseverations, and reminders of the Roman law and Christian conceptions of ‘the person’, were as innocent as the conservative asseverations of 1980. They paid as little theoretical attention to the dislocations, disappointments and dissonances in which all social action is involved and they assumed too readily the possibility of squaring the circle between human desire and moral self-fulfilment. Scruton is a Kantian in the way in which he was a conservative in 1980. But just as his conservatism then was coloured by a reaction against Liberalism and Socialism, so his Kantianism now is coloured by a reaction against Marxism and Nazism, by approval of the superficialities of Orwell, Koestler and Aldous Huxley and by the desire to preach a positive politics which will spare society the inconveniences from which all societies suffer. One is relieved when An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy moves on from politics to religion. In Modern Philosophy Scruton declared it characteristic of ‘modern people’ that they were ‘puzzled’ by ‘the concept of the divine’ which had arisen ‘spontaneously’ in ‘every pre-modern society’. He compared religious experience with aesthetic experience in respect of their common status as both ‘play’ and ‘contemplation’, and showed ‘the aesthetic attitude’ leading to a ‘religious attitude’ which restored sinful or erroneous men to an eternal community in which ‘free beings’, who saw themselves ‘apart from nature’, could ‘find their home in the natural order’. ‘And this’ went a clinching passage,

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is how we should understand such concepts as the miraculous and the holy. A miraculous event is one which wears for us a personal expression. We may not notice this expression, just as someone may stare at a portrait, see all the lines and colours which compose it, and fail to see the face. Similarly, a sacred place is one in which personality and freedom shine forth from what is contingent, dependent and commonplace – from a piece of stone, a tree, or a patch of water. There is an attitude that we direct to the human person, and which leads us to see, in the human form, a perspective on the world that reaches from a point outside it. We may direct this very attitude, on occasion, to the whole of nature, and in particular to those places, things and events where freedom has been real. The experience of the sacred is the sudden encounter with freedom; it is the recognition of personality and purposefulness in that which contains no human will. In this way, our experience may be understood as a revelation of the divine. It is our hunger for that revelation which causes us, in an age without faith, to invest so many hopes in aesthetic values. (Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy, 1994, p. 456)

In Modern Philosophy and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, Scruton brought his subject to the edge of religion, attributing to the ‘ghostly residue of religious feeling’ the ‘cause of our intractable philosophical problems’, identifying the devil with Cartesian doubt and relating deconstruction to the displacement of ‘objective order’ by ‘self’ as ‘the test of reality’. It was, he declared, religion which affirmed the ‘first-person plural’ and told men that they were ‘members of something greater than themselves’, religion which maintained, in the midst of the ‘estrangement’ or ‘alienation’ typical of this ‘vale of tears’, an ‘image of safety’ and ‘final redemption’ – religion which provided the ‘third movement of Hegel’s dialectic’, a ‘return to the place from which men had started’, and the essential antidote not only to Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism and deconstruction but also to Kierkegaardian despair. VIII In locating Scruton’s religion, we notice his claim to have been confirmed into the Church of England at the age of fifteen ‘without [his] parents knowing’, his pitying disdain for the connection between Williams’s lack of religious feeling and Williams’s ‘posturing sentimentality’ about a ‘common culture’ and the accusation he levels at the revolutionary movement since 1789 of betraying ‘the hatred of a new priesthood for the old’ and treating the Roman Church as a ‘rival in its quest for the possession of men’s souls’. And the reader might be excused who deduced from his disdain for the present condition of the Church of England, for Protestantism’s abandonment of Catholic ‘ritual’ and for the Protestant reduction of Christianity to a ‘confrontation of God with the soul’, that Scruton is a hard-line Roman Catholic. Such a judgement would be mistaken. Scruton is self-consciously ‘On Dover Beach’. He prefers St Augustine to Sartre on sex, praises the Roman Catholic association of sex with procreation and, in addition to despising Spinoza’s attempt to ‘save theology’ by ‘sacrificing its purpose’, also despises

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the French Revolution as a ‘supreme act of Christian disobedience’. Acceptance of the ‘transcendent bond’ implicit in a conservative society does not, however, he believes, ‘require belief in transcendent beings’, and a ‘conservative vision of society’, though it ‘benefits’ from religious belief, can perfectly well survive its absence. For Scruton, nevertheless, religion has become a problem. He has celebrated the instruction given to Roman Catholics by the late Monsignor Alfred Gilbey7 – a very ‘traditional’ English Roman Catholic priest – whose avoidance of the ‘secular superstitions with which the faith of Rome had recently been confounded’ was the reverse side, as Scruton claimed, of a doctrine ‘sufficiently complete . . . and . . . beautiful’ to make ‘conversion possible’ if it was true, even though Gilbey, as the son of a Spanish mother, might not have lined up with Scruton against the ‘spiritual tyranny and secular arrogance’ of Counter-Reformation Spain or behind the ‘secular and inquiring character’ and ‘constitutional’ politics of the seventeenth-century Netherlands. For a time Scruton was unfriendly to the relativizing of Christianity, especially by the clergy, and to the ‘multi-culturalist . . . deference’ to all beliefs which he saw insinuating itself out of modern thought into the Church. If he has sometimes suggested that desacrilization can be subverted by the ‘unforced’ account which Christianity has given of the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit and the Church, he has not developed the suggestion and more recently has rather implied the opposite. Scruton insists that religion is ‘natural to man’. He accepts the Marxist, Nietzschean, Jungian, Durkheimian and Weberian testimonies to its importance, and offers tentative explanations of its power to impose a ‘unity and . . . order’ on ‘all experiences, actions and ideas’. It is the ‘unknowability’ of the ‘supernatural’ which makes the ‘mental act’ constitutive of ‘religious conviction’ different from the ‘truths of science’ and ‘probabilities of common sense’, and projects into the ‘transcendental’ a ‘mythic thinking’ which unites the tribe, embodies ‘in sacred form’ the ‘primal mysteries’ of birth and death, and assumes a ‘functional connection’ between heresy and rejection of community on the one hand and between sanctity and the community’s ‘chance of survival’ on the other. Scruton, in other words, wishes to have a religion ‘than which no better way has . . . been devised of giving substance to human vows and . . . values’. But he believes that ‘belief can . . . survive . . . only . . . so long as we are persuaded by it’ and, if he may for a time have been persuadable, he seems now not to be persuaded by Christianity. There are too many Spinozian, Goethean or latitudinarian overtones about the ‘new enchantment’ arising from the idea that ‘God is in everything’ and about the demystification of 17

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theology as justifying the transfer to ‘morality’ of the images of traditional religion. There are mind-boggling references to ‘the noble suicides of Japan’, to the ‘religious faith’ which Einstein built upon his theory of relativity and to Kant’s achievement in turning ‘the Kingdom of God into the Kingdom of Ends’. And there is the account, crucial to Scruton in his fifties, of the displacement of religion by high culture in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture in 1998. Like many modern thinkers, Scruton wishes to avoid atheism and infidelity while acknowledging that religion cannot remain as it has been in the past. Yet he gives way too readily to the idea that the Enlightenment has put an irreversible end to Christianity’s plausibility, and he defends Arnoldian high culture rather as religion’s successor than because of its Christian residues. An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture began with Herder’s invention of ‘culture’ in the eighteenth century. It described a ‘common’ culture as the ‘shared spiritual force’ which gives ‘self-identity’ to the ‘customs, beliefs and practices’ of a ‘tribe, people or nation’ and ‘high culture’ as a ‘form of expertise’ which is both universal in scope and ‘the property of an educated élite’. Though emphatically élitist, it enabled Scruton to represent himself as an ‘old-fashioned . . . educated’ Englishman who wished to restore the connections between high culture and the deteriorated variant which Europe’s common culture had become since Herder described it. Scruton assumes that a society which has lost its gods, as he believes Europe to have lost its gods, should neither go on ‘faking’ the ‘higher emotions’ when they can no longer be ‘lived’ nor ‘collapse’ into the anarchic individuality which accompanies their abandonment. There is a Kantian earnestness about his claim that, in a situation of this sort, it is necessary to endure an ‘inner tension’ as we tread the ‘secular path’ to the ‘ethical life’ amidst the ‘splendours and miseries of modern culture’. This does not mean that religion should go the way of Christianity. It does mean that religion should absorb the lessons of both the Enlightenment and the rebellion against Enlightenment, and should reach the conclusion that high culture, and even a ‘common culture’ under the influence of high culture, needs to do what Christianity once did, ‘rejoining . . . the self to its rightful congregation’ and teaching men to live ‘as if their lives mattered eternally’. Scruton’s difficulty, as he understands it, is that the ‘idea of the sacred’ is no longer fully available, that ‘the decline of Christian faith’ has coincided with the ‘rise of aesthetics’, and that ‘the aesthetic’ has now replaced ‘the religious’ as the central strand in humane education and experience. He writes nostalgically about the ‘doubt, fear and selfishness’, and loss of natural piety, which accompanied ‘technological mastery over nature’; he draws a line between the ‘means’ supplied by technology and the ‘deep-down . . . ends’

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which are independent of it, and he praises high culture’s ‘allusive’ ability to approach the ‘ineffable meaning’ with which religion approached the ‘why and whither’ of man’s ‘being’ on earth. In separating high culture from religion, Scruton also emphasizes their continuity and the consolation which ‘vision’ grants to all of its supplicants. He admires Mozart, Goethe, Schiller, Blake and Rousseau, for recovering an ‘ethical vision’ from the Enlightenment and helping to create the ‘richest’ phase of European culture. But he is most at home with Wagner, Manet, Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot and their insinuating sneer that, for the ‘modern commercial mentality, everything, including the sacred, is for sale’. To the modern world, Scruton brings Spenglerian gloom and a Leavisite demonology. He censures the ‘culture of repudiation’ which he finds in the replacement of ‘criticism’ by ‘theory’ and in the academic mentalities he pillories through Foucault and Derrida. He is even more censorious of youth culture and popular music, of the failure of modern parents, as he believes, to relate to their children, and of the cynicism, sentimentality and self-regarding subjectivity which underline the modern failure to ‘refocus emotion . . . in the context of an imaginative redemption’. In claiming for the aesthetic imagination the space left by the death of Christianity, Scruton does not expect the aesthetic imagination to propagate doctrine, enjoin practice or ‘interrogate the world’, as Christianity interrogated it, ‘in order to sniff out heresy and error’. All he claims is that the aesthetic imagination can ‘show what it is like’ to believe a doctrine, can will the re-emergence of ‘the old spiritual forces’ from beneath the world’s ‘spiritual limbo’ and, by achieving an indefiniteness, like the indefiniteness which was noted in Jowett,8 can ‘venture’, like Jowett, into ‘spiritual territory which has no place on the Christian map’. ‘High culture’ has as its destiny, in Scruton’s version, to make ‘the cynic as well as the salesman wither before the transcendental’. But if one asks what Scruton wishes modern men to believe, it is as difficult to be certain as it is to know what Fitzjames Stephen wished them to believe. What are we to make of Parsifal as a ‘pagan’ enactment of the ‘modern soul’, of Wagner as burying the idea of God or of The Ring as embodying a mythical Valhalla in which ‘the old hierarchy of theology is reversed’ and ‘the divine achieves salvation’ through ‘incarnation in a human being’? And what, when ‘belief and disbelief’ have both been lost, can be said about the idea that the remedy for loss is to be found in Confucius? At the end of An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, Confucius is suddenly wheeled in as a ‘conformist . . . both temporal and spiritual’ who, unlike Christ, ‘deplored innovation’, demanded no ‘leap of faith’ and was concerned not with ‘hopes and fears for the next life’ but with ‘orderly 18

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conduct’ in this life. ‘Confucius did not offer any metaphysical system or religious creed’, went a statement. Instead he enjoined us to live as if it matters eternally what we do: to obey the rites, the ceremonies and the customs that lend dignity to our actions and . . . lift them above the natural sphere; to cultivate the heart and the tongue so that beauty is always in and around us; and to live in the condition which Wordsworth called ‘natural piety’, acknowledging the greatness of creation, and the imponderable mystery of time. In this way, even if we have no religious beliefs, we acknowledge the existence of sacred things, and endow our gestures with a nimbus of the supernatural. Living thus we peer serenely into the eternal. And if you ask . . . what it is like to live thus, then listen to the closing bars of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. (The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, 1998, pp. 137–8)

Scruton is not afraid of ridicule and sometimes deserves it. He has now made his way through ridicule and incomprehension, and looks fresh, intelligent and plausible as a consequence. The question remains, nevertheless, as in considering Arnold, whether Scruton’s religious rhetoric is more than fashion, what will be left of religion once it has abandoned belief and dogma and whether anything will be left once it has been absorbed, as Needham wanted it absorbed, into culture or conduct.

23 Judaism and the post-Christian consensus Hitler will be defeated: and yet, unless the Jewish problem is faced in the light of history and with a courageous, realistic approach, it will continue to poison our lives and the minds of non-Jews. Normality must be our aim: to be no longer either ‘prodigies’ or outcasts, or both. Jews with a national consciousness and purpose must be given an honest chance to build on the foundations which they have laid in Palestine: a Jewish National State must arise there once more . . . . There must be a country where Jews can live, work, and amuse themselves as they please; be good, bad, great, or ridiculous: but, like all nations, among themselves, not under the eyes of strangers. (L. B. Namier, The Jews, in The Nineteenth Century and After, November 1941, reprinted in Conflicts, 1942, pp. 134–5) One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals . . . the belief that somewhere in the past, or in the future, in divine revelation, or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. (Isaiah Berlin, The Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958, p. 58) The educational system in most countries requires that a child on entering school should receive religious instruction. The decision whether he will be instructed in Catholic, Protestant or Jewish dogma . . . depends on the hazard of [the] parents’ denomination. The proper thing for parents who reject all dogma is to say: ‘If my child must be brought up in a definite religion, then let it be the same in which his playmates are brought up, and not one which sets him apart by its archaic racial doctrine, marks him out as a scapegoat and gives him mental complexes. (Arthur Koestler, Judah At The Crossroads, 1955, in The Trail of the Dinosaur, 1955 pp. 134–5)

An important feature of English intellectual life in the last century – and one about which the Tractarians were scathing in anticipation – has been Jewish emancipation and the prominence achieved in major areas of English thought by thinkers who have been Jewish either by origin or by profession. Jews were not the only non-Anglicans to receive the civic rights which nonAnglicans were to receive with Catholic Emancipation, and it is important to remember the dissenting reactions which have been described elsewhere. But there is something special about Jewishness which began to manifest itself extensively once the small, inward-looking Jewish community of eighteenthcentury and Victorian England had been transformed by the immigrants of the twentieth century. One of the main themes in this volume has been the process by which English thinkers have created a ‘post-Christian consensus’. In the second half of the twentieth century, the post-Christian consensus has owed much to a 634

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post-Judaic consensus, in which Laski, Gellner, Daiches, Hobsbawm, Bronowski, Finley, Gombrich, Ayer, Balogh, Kaldor and Pevsner have played a part. Laski has been examined already, as well as Wittgenstein and Popper, who may or may not be regarded as Jewish. In this chapter we shall examine Namier, Koestler and Steiner (and also Berlin, who was a Jewish atheist and the proponent of a distinctively latitudinarian Judaism). What Jewishness means and should imply are questions which each of these thinkers has answered in his own way. All four have focussed on the ‘Jewish character’ and Gentile contempt as a problem. Three of them have identified improvement of the Jewish character as the overriding duty. One consecrated the Palestinian violence of 1948 after it had occurred. Two argued before 1948 that improvement might necessitate violence. Of these two, one ended his life as Sir Lewis Namier. I Namier1 was primarily an historian. But not only was he not a professional historian, he was also proud of the fact. After taking a degree at Balliol, he spent most of the next twenty years in the British Foreign Office, as a journalist and businessman in the United States and Czechoslovakia, or as a full-time official of the Jewish Agency in London. It was not until he was appointed to the Chair of Modern History at Manchester at the age of forty-three that he resumed the full-time teaching he had done for two years at Balliol in the early 1920s, though even at Manchester he spent a great deal of time on Jewish Agency work until the university released him in 1939 for full-time war-work as one of the Agency’s chief liaison officers with the British Government. In 1945 Namier returned to the duties of his Chair. Taking his life as a whole, these duties were comparatively unimportant – far less important than the fact that he was a backroom politician who kept up a constant output of journalism which he collected in a dozen or so volumes of essays from Skyscrapers onwards. As an historian, Namier’s main achievement was the account he gave of eighteenth-century English politics in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III in 1929, England in the Age of the American Revolution in 1930 and the Ford Lectures of 1934. All of these approached English history, however, in the frame of mind in which he had approached European history previously. 11

Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888–1960), educated Lvov and Lausanne Universities, London School of Economics and Balliol College, Oxford. Political Secretary to Jewish Agency, 1929–31. Professor of Modern History at Manchester, 1931–53. Jewish Agency, 1939–45. Author of The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 1929; England in the Age of the American Revolution, 1930; Skyscrapers, 1931; Additions and Corrections to Forstescue’s Correspondence of King George III, 1937; In The Margin of History, 1939; Conflicts, 1942; Facing East, 1947; 1848:The Revolution of the Intellectuals, 1948; Diplomatic Prelude, 1948; Europe In Decay, 1950; Avenues of History, 1952; In The Nazi Era, 1952; Personalities and Powers, 1955; Vanished Supremacies, 1958; and Crossroads of Power, 1962.

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The high point of Namier’s writing about Europe was his British Academy Lecture of 1944 which presented the Revolution of 1848 as an ‘insurrection morale’ whose aim was to subject Europe to the ‘modern ideology’ through which the ‘middle classes’ under the leadership of ‘intellectuals’ had tried to achieve a ‘share in government’ by replacing the feudal principle of ‘dynastic property in countries’ by the ‘principle . . . of national sovereignty . . . based on . . . reason . . . ideas . . . and human rights’. There was nothing new about this analysis, which had formed the basis for liberal enthusiasms for nearly a century. But in Namier’s hands it was rebarbative in three important respects: in describing the popular principle as a ‘crude oversimplification’ which lacked ‘roots in the soil’ and was ‘unsuited to living organisms’; in discerning behind the ‘lip-service’ which the middle classes paid to ‘the people’ a deep fear of the damage which ‘mass action’ and a ‘communist . . . proletariat’ might do to ‘property and education’; and in affirming that it was because the ‘ultimate control of the state machine and of the armies of the Great Powers . . . had . . . remained with the Conservatives’ once the proletariat had been defeated in Paris and the peasantry bought off in the Habsburg dominions, that European peace had been preserved and the insurrection exposed as a ‘sham’. 1848 gave many instances of the ‘sham’ nature of the insurrection, the persistence of the dynastic principle, and the deliberateness of the Conservative reaction after the Galician jacquerie of 1846. It also insisted on the instability of constitutional régimes except where these were ‘ingrained in the habits and instincts . . . of [a] political nation’. Towards the end of the lecture Namier sketched a theme – the part played by the nationalism of the 1848 intelligentsia in starting the ‘Great European War’ of every nation against its neighbours which had been going on in central and south-eastern Europe ever since. There were sceptical accounts of the effect of French interests in evaporating the Polish enthusiasms with which the revolution had begun in Paris, of the contrast between the German intelligentsia’s admiration for the French Revolution in 1789 and its chauvinist mistrust of France in 1848, and of the contempt felt in the Habsburg territories by the Poles, Magyars, Germans and Italians for the peasant peoples by whom they were surrounded. In the proceedings of the Frankfurt Parliament, it was German revolutionary ‘idealism’ that was the sham and ‘aggressive nationalism’ the reality, as German interests were preferred to Polish and Czech interests and the Czechs were forced into the hands of ‘their old enemies, the Habsburgs’. The Revolution of the Intellectuals was a high-level anticipation of the lowlevel anti-appeasement analyses of pre-1939 diplomacy which Namier was to provide in the course of extensive book-reviewing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was also a continuation of the attacks he had made in the 1920s and 1930s on the ‘rabbits’ who had governed England and France since the removal of Lloyd George in 1922, on the insane mistrust which the

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Conservative Party and the National Government of 1931 had had of the Soviet Union, and on the English failure to appreciate the ‘deliberate savagery of the German character’ not only in Hitler and Prussian militarism but also in Kant, Goethe and the Frankfurt Parliament. In Namier’s discussions of the Hitler régime, there were demands for a Churchillian, or Jewish, hatred of the urban barbarism of ‘half-baked intelligentsias’, and for a recognition that a ‘true Conservatism’ or ‘Tory Radicalism’ would have provided a ‘realistic’ foreign policy to resist it. Once the 1939 war had begun, Namier saw it as a war ‘to the bitter end’ in which American support, the English Channel and the expanse of Russia would inflict as total a defeat on Hitler as had been inflicted on Napoleon. Most important of all, he distinguished the Bolshevik revolution on the one hand from the ‘horrible counterfeit’ Nazi revolution on the other, and condemned both the ‘German Internationale’ of princes in the nineteenth century and the ‘German Internationale’ of minorities in the twentieth century. As a young Austrian Pole, Bernstein (Niemirowski) had been a Socialist, a Nationalist, and an admirer of Pilsudski. After a nasty encounter with Dmowski-ite anti-Semitism, he had withdrawn prematurely from the University of Lvov and had gone to the University of Lausanne, where he had attended Pareto’s lectures and acquired an admiration for France and Italy. At the London School of Economics, to which he had gone next, he had attended Mackinder’s lectures, and had encountered many undesirables at Fabian summer schools. Finally, in the course of an undergraduate career at Balliol from 1909 onwards, he had anglicized his name and nationality, had encountered Toynbee, Cole, G. N. Clark and Lionel Curtis, and had absorbed the view taken of the British Empire by Sir Reginald Wingate, the Sirdar of the Sudan, who was the father of an undergraduate friend. On taking his degree in 1912, Namier began writing about ‘The Colonial Conference of 1887’, ‘The Imperial Problem During the American Revolution’ and the ‘likely attitudes among Austria, Germany and Russia in case of war in East-Central Europe’. In other words, as a research student, he was interested in imperialism. A short period on his father’s business in the United States immediately before the 1914 war was followed by an awkward period as a private in the British Army at the beginning of the war, from which he was found employment in the Foreign Office by Lord Eustace Percy. During five or so years in the Foreign Office, Namier was a controversial journalist, wrote a memorandum about the future of Austria-Hungary for the International Advisory Committee of the Labour Party and, after an unpleasant clash with Dmowski personally, turned against Pilsudski’s new policy of Dmowski-ite expansion. The high points of this phase of activity were accounts of the Russian Revolution, of the inter-war politics of central and eastern Europe and of ‘The Downfall of the Habsburg Monarchy’ which he wrote for volume IV of Temperley’s History of the Peace Conference of Paris in 1921.

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During the war Namier had wanted Austria-Hungary to collapse. But ‘The Downfall of the Habsburg Monarchy’ was an appreciative essay in ancienrégime politics. It emphasized the ruthlessness of the use to which the Magyars had put their power in the Dual Monarchy, the tensions and commitments which had bound the master races to one another and the racial conflicts which had divided them from the subject or peasant races. It showed the monarchy allying itself with the subject races in 1848 and with the master races in 1867. In following the process by which war between Russia and Germany had unhinged the ‘delicate system of compromises and balances’ on which the monarchy had rested, it exposed the ‘sublime naïveté’ with which the Habsburgs had welcomed the Bolshevik destruction of the Russian army and the demonstration that had been given, in the Habsburgs’ last hopeless phase in 1918, before ‘any enemy army had reached the frontiers’, of the ways in which ‘mass psychology’ operated and ‘ideas talked about yet unthinkable one day . . . could acquire . . . life on the next’. ‘The Downfall of the Habsburg Monarchy’ related constitutional forms to real forces and showed the latter predetermining the former by laws as ‘iron as those which determined the movements of the stars’. Earlier writings had explained that the East European problem was a peasant problem, that Russia was a peasant nation and that the Russian monarchy and aristocracy were French-speaking Germans who were disliked and mistrusted by the Slavs they ruled. The vast Russian plains were pictured populated by an ‘infinitely patient peasant folk’ who, in their Dostoevskian ‘sadness’, had declined to be transformed by the ‘conceit’ and ‘philosophy’ which were emitted from the ‘impervious Teutonic skull’. Russia was ‘one hundred million men . . . united in speech, feeling and thought’ who were ‘immortal and indestructible’ and who, if the 1917 Revolutions were ever to establish themselves, would take the world by storm. Namier took the Russian Revolution seriously because the Bolsheviks were asking the ‘parent-question of humanity’ – the question of ‘hegemony’ – and, in aiming at a ‘turn of the wheel’, were holding out hopes which would make an impact on ‘the consciousness of the masses’ once the replacement of the old empires by nationalist states had put the ‘class’ war at the centre of the stage. Like Carlyle in relation to 1789, he blamed the ancien-régime for the 1917 revolutions and expected the Bolsheviks to ‘speak over the heads’ both of ‘imperial’ and of ‘bourgeois’ régimes everywhere. Trotsky, moreover, having been hunted by the ‘most highly-organized secret police in the world’, knew, like ‘the man of principle that he was’, that the only way to fight ‘material weapons . . . was . . . with the arms of the spirit’. It followed that, if Bolshevism was to be resisted, the master-races of central and eastern Europe would have to improve their behaviour towards the peasant races. Namier acclaimed Masaryk as ‘one of the master-minds of our time’ and expected Pilsudski’s imperialism to destroy Poland by driving the peasant races into Russia’s arms. He wanted Britain to restrain the Poles, to support

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the Ukranians and Ruthenians and to effect the neutralization of Eastern Galicia under the auspices of the League of Nations. It was the British failure to do this, the French creation of an unworkable security system in Eastern Europe and the Polish annexation of Eastern Galicia, which persuaded him that the League of Nations was a load of ‘hypocritical cant’. In the course of the 1920s Namier underwent a political conversion and developed a Conservative mentality which, though compatible with a Socialist desire for social welfare, was inimical to Liberalism and to a Liberal understanding of foreign policy, peasant politics and high politics. In an article entitled ‘Metternich’s Doctrine’, he explained why this had happened. ‘Metternich’s Doctrine’ criticized Metternich for associating conservatism with Voltaire and for believing in both ‘abstract laws’ and the ‘infinite power of the human mind’. Metternich was a ‘classic in an age of romantics’ and an ancien-régime aristocrat in the age of Rousseau and Napoleon, who, while honouring ‘prescriptive rights and interests’, as an ‘instinctive’ conservative had to, had failed to conceptualize ‘human limitation’, the superiority which historic forms had over the ‘genius’ of any ‘single generation’ and the objectionable nature of the assumption that ‘nothing . . . could be . . . attempted without leading to the collapse of the entire social fabric’. In explaining why the English found it difficult to understand peasantries, Namier became sociological as well as Conservative. In discussing peasant politics in the 1920s, Namier insisted that the revolution which was breaking-up ‘big . . . capitalist . . . agrarian enterprises . . . over a vast expanse of Eastern and Central Europe’ was inevitable, that the peasant to whom the land was being given would ‘work it in ways known since time immemorial’ and that the depression in culture which might result from peasant egotism, class-feeling and contempt for the intelligentsia and squirearchy, could only be prevented by a ‘hierarchical, traditional’ church run by priests of ‘low culture and peasant extraction’. At Oxford Namier had been persuaded by Wingate to despise the babus and effendis whom British rulers in the East had improperly preferred to the peasantry. He pointed to the peasant’s anteriority to the State, to the peasantry’s resistance to State action and taxation and to the ‘invincibility’ of the peasantry’s ‘organic conservatism’. He argued that this was true even of the peasantry of Eastern Europe, which, after fighting a world war for ‘causes . . . incomprehensible to it’, had broken first the army and then the State in Russia, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary, and was likely to be even more resistant to the ‘educated . . . town-dwellers’ who were trying to ‘reconstruct society’ in the states in which they lived.

The significance of Namier’s writings about Europe was threefold. On the one hand, they took ancien-régimes seriously, and sympathized with the mixture

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of manipulation, negotiation and force which were their ways of dealing with Socialism and bourgeois nationalism. On the other hand, they extracted from the peasant’s mistrust of the State the cynical conclusion that the ‘State was an institution constructed by those who needed it and were prepared to pay for it’. Third, they argued that parliamentary government, though inapplicable where based on a ‘levelling down’, was applicable where based, as in Britain, on the ‘ingrained’ ubiquity of the ‘proprietary principle’. These writings were about the politics of interest and property, about the pathology of nationalism and about the superior significance of aristocracies and peasantries. They turned illusionless eyes on intelligentsias and the politics of progress, and denied that a liberal interpretation of European history was a possibility. A similar illusionlessness was then turned onto eighteenthcentury English politics, which, like mediaeval English politics for Stubbs, were important for Namier both as a consecration of England’s political genius and as the occasion for designating the method appropriate to the study of political history. In The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution Namier explained that things were not what they seemed, that rhetoric did not explain why men acted as they did and that, behind the rhetoric of virtue, there had been motives and interests which would need sympathetic attention if historical explanation was to be achieved of the ‘ill-fated manner’ in which the House of Commons had failed to preserve the first British Empire during the American Revolution. Namier did not get to the American Revolution, and neither did he write a narrative account of policy-making even in the Seven Years’ War. All he did was provide a conceptualization of the ‘community’ and ‘political nation’ which showed that neither could be understood in the innocent language of idealism. Though Namier had published a handful of short articles on English subjects before 1929, none of these had anticipated the arguments he was to articulate then. Nor had they anticipated the power and distinction with which he was to assert that literary sources were misleading as guides to political practice, that the political practice of the eighteenth century could not be understood in terms of the ideas and practices of the twentieth century and that the preliminary to understanding was a close study of the ‘pathetically intent human antheap’ which constituted the House of Commons. Like Butterfield’s English history, this was an attack on liberal piety in which ‘men . . . no more dreamt of a seat in the House of Commons in order to benefit humanity than a child dreamt of a birthday cake in order that others might eat it’. It was also a sociological history in which the English social structure was not, as in Tawney, the creation of an oppressive plutocracy but was a normal, unproblematical system in which inequality was not felt to be oppressive.

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The Structure of Politics had four aims: to discover in the raisons d’être of MPs in the 1760s the reality of the ‘electoral structure’ which reformers and historians had ridiculed from 1790 onwards; to prove that the ‘moral and mental dishonesty’ of the eighteenth-century system resembled the moral and mental dishonesty of the twentieth-century system; to establish that electoral corruption was a ‘well-spring of freedom’ which responded to popular needs and was so ‘inevitable a result of open voting by people in dependent positions’ as to seem ‘quaint’ only to those who assumed that modern ‘electoral stunts’ were ‘normal’; and to show that any elected assembly took its tone less from the mode of election which its members had undergone than from the (Pareto-like) fact that they belonged to circles which were concerned with the nation’s political business. In investigating governmental influence under Newcastle, Namier made two points – that the power of the Crown and the distribution of SecretService money were less anomalous than Burke and the Rockingham Whigs had implied, and that the mid-eighteenth-century connection between membership of the House of Commons, acquisition of government contracts and appointment and advancement in the Civil Service, the armed forces and the ‘legal profession’ – the most ‘democratic’ of the professions – was as reasonable as the ‘comparative independence’ of the House of Commons which competitive examinations had given the Civil Service in the twentieth century. Royal power had been exercised normally in the eighteenth century and the attack on the ‘double-Cabinet’ from Burke onwards had been a work of partisan misrepresentation. The assumption that constituencies expected ‘benefits’, and ‘the politically active part of the nation’ maintenance from the State, had also been normal, and, by the middle of the eighteenth century, had made it as ‘legitimate’ for ‘noblemen’ to ‘live on the dole’ as the Liberal legislation of 1906–1914 had made it for all classes to live on the dole. It was especially important that the House of Commons had valued ‘personality, eloquence and debating power’ in the eighteenth century much more than it had valued them since the fall of Lloyd George and had given practical effect, without thinking about it, to the principle established in France in 1789 and in Germany in 1919 – that ‘a fair field . . . should be . . . given to ability’. In the main part of England in the Age of the American Revolution, there was a high-political narrative of relations between Pitt, Grenville, Bute, George III and Newcastle. In the section entitled Social Foundations, historical comedy was prefaced by massive and moving intuitions. Social Foundations was not just a statement of Namier’s admiration for England and English institutions, including that ‘peculiar club . . . the House of Commons’. It was also a statement about the variety and relativity of political forms, the connection between social and political power, and the continuities which had ensured that the House of Commons would become neither class-ridden and hierarchical nor contemptuous of commerce and finance,

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and would demonstrate the paradox that, though it had tended to ignore ‘democracy’ as a doctrine, ‘England . . . had always practised it as a fine art’, retaining ‘to this day’ in its ‘social structure’ more traces of feudalism than anywhere else in the world while avoiding that social militarism which was the opposite of a ‘true Conservatism’. This was the heart of English ‘freedom and independence’ and the outcome of England’s freedom from invasion – a ‘continuous society’ with an immense ‘snobbery’ in which ‘classes were the more strongly marked’ because the ‘aweinspiring gate was open to all’, and ‘a man’s status’ depended ultimately on achievement as well as birth, on ‘his own consciousness’ of his own capability, and on the ‘unbought grace of life’ which was the ‘truest expression’ of ‘subconscious self-evaluation’. ‘Unbought grace of life’ was connected with the claim that English landowners, through their concern for trade as well as landed property, had raised a ‘political system and . . . civilization’ on their rentals, that ‘English civilization’ had reflected the English dislike of ‘specialization’, and of ‘abstract knowledge as a profession’ and that it had been the work of a leisured class which unlike the leisured classes in America and the Ukraine, had transplanted the ‘atmosphere and character of town civilization’ on to rural estates. In The Social Foundations, the central interpretative statement was that ‘the relations of men to plots of land’ and of ‘organized communities to units of territory’ constituted the ‘basic content of political history’. And, just as English businessmen had believed that there was a ‘well-nigh mystic power in the ownership of space’ which ‘the tiny garden at the back of the worker’s house’ replicated among the beneficiaries of twentieth-century democracy (or, Namier might have added, nineteenth-century industrialism), so among the eighteenth-century aristocracy, Parliament had represented not individuals but ‘men rooted in the soil of Great Britain’.

Namier’s writing about England reached a peak in 1929–30 and did not recover. In the future there were to be streams of journalism, Additions and Corrections to Fortescue’s Correspondence of King George the Third, and the Ford Lectures of 1934, which were to consolidate the view that ‘mid-Victorian constitutionalism’ was inapplicable to the eighteenth century. But The History of Parliament, which Namier had announced the need for in the 1920s and took a lead in starting in the 1950s, was a retreat into intellectual bureaucracy, and there was to be no return after 1930 to his creative intensity about England once his attention was distracted by the 1929 Labour Government’s hostility to Zionism, by Hitler’s arrival in power in 1933 and by the Arab rebellion in Palestine in 1936. Namier’s account of eighteenth-century England involved as high a degree of self-identification as Kingsley’s account of Amyas Leigh, and left the

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impression that the society he was describing was the sort of society he would have wished to be part of if, as a dispossessed Jew, he was capable of being part of any society. It jostled awkwardly with his Zionism even in England in the Age of the American Revolution, where it was only the Jews, in ‘surviving for two thousand years’ without a ‘native’ land, who had ‘enshrined . . . the authority of a State in the God-given law’ and the ‘idea of a Mother-Country’ in the ‘God-promised’ land. II Namier was born in Russian Poland into a family of Jewish lawyers, scholars and landowners who had identified themselves as Poles and in effect Roman Catholics. He grew up in Austrian Poland, where he was devoutly Catholic, but was then upset and alienated when his father, who was an admirer of John Stuart Mill, explained to him on his tenth birthday that the family was in reality neither Catholic nor Jewish. For much of his life Namier regarded himself as a lapsed Jew rather than a lapsed Catholic, spoke of the Virgin as a ‘poor little Jewish girl’ and declined to join his family in making their formal entry into the Roman Catholic Church while he was at Balliol in 1912. His first wife, who may originally have been either Orthodox or Roman Catholic, became a Muslim after they had separated and left a legacy, which Namier executed, to the Islamic Mosque in Woking. Namier himself was baptized into the Church of England in his late fifties in preparation for an Orthodox marriage to his second, Russian, wife, and justified this, over Weizmann’s not yet at all dead body, with the Disraelian claim that one aspect of Zionism’s destiny was to make Palestine the scene of a reconciliation between Christianity and Judaism. Namier had a tense temperament and intuitions of crisis. There is a sense in which his religion resembled T. E. Lawrence’s religion, as Namier himself described it, doing, for much of Lawrence’s later life, a ‘penance’ which was ‘neither Catholic nor devout’. In any case, there can be no doubting the seriousness of Namier’s interest in religion, and the heavy, learned, pessimistic sociological predestinarianism which he had acquired from Calvin’s Institutes, from the Authorised Version of the Bible and from seventeenthcentury puritanism and dissent during the self-imposed reading he undertook while he was an Oxford undergraduate. As propagandist of the Anglo-Russian alliance during the Second World War, Namier contrasted the ‘democracy of conceit’ which linked English Liberalism and Marxist Socialism to the French Revolution, with the ‘democracy of respect’ which had its source in the ‘priesthood’ of every Puritan believer. His references to Jesuits, Caesaropapism and Roman Catholicism were dismissive; his references to the Anglican clergy as the ‘intelligentsia’ of England’s ‘national organization’ were flattering; he praised the ‘individual . . . rights and feelings and . . . prescriptive rights and social superiorities’

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which had sustained ‘English monarchy, Christianity, conservatism and progress’. His Zionism was designed to enable Jews to enjoy similar felicities.

Namier was concerned about the Jewish problem from a very early stage. While at Balliol, he investigated anti-Semitic demonstrations in South Wales during the summer of 1911. He was deeply impressed by Jewry as he encountered it in the United States in 1913 and was much involved in helping Polish Jews at the end of the First World War. His interest in Zionism, aroused by Turkey’s entry into the war and confirmed by Weizmann after the war, led to his being disinherited by his father and reached a climax when he disappointed American (and, as it happened, Jewish) benefactors who had subsidized his writing about English history by abandoning history in order to join the Jewish Agency as its paid political secretary in London in 1929. Between 1929 and 1945 Namier devoted more of his time to the Jewish Agency than to anything else. He took part in Weizmann’s negotiations with the second Labour government, conceived a bitter distaste for the ‘lower middle-class’ attitudes of the Labour ministers involved and acquired a reputation as the acerbic, unreasonable, but extremely clever eminence behind Weizmann. He was a close associate not only of Weizmann but also of Sharett and Ben-Gurion and, while conscious of being criticized from within the Agency and at times of being let down by Weizmann, acted throughout as a resentful participant in the retreat he believed the Palestine Conference of 1939 to have signalled from a satisfactory solution of the Jewish problem. The Jewish problem as Namier had understood it in the 1920s was a facet of the fact that Jewish orthodoxy was ‘melting’ and ‘messianic hope’ disappearing. Zionism, on this view, registered the separation in terms of nationality which orthodox Judaism represented in terms of religion, and the problem was that, if ‘national tradition’ was to be lost as well as ‘theology and ritual’, Jews would have simply to ‘merge into the surrounding nations’. Namier wrote in sorrow more than in anger about assimilation, anticipated the probable disappearance of the ‘Jewries of Western and Central Europe’ and found in the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe the challenge which it was the duty of the ‘intellectual and financial leadership’ of American Jews and the political leadership which the Palestine Mandate had given to English Jews, to find a solution for. His Zionism, in other words, had been formulated – before Hitler’s arrival in office – as a response to the lack of normality in the Jewish character and as a demand for a national home in which Jews could reclaim their ‘normality’ by acquiring that ‘strength to fight’ which came from ‘home and country’. Namier was a populist, emphasizing the importance of the ‘Jewish masses’, belittling Herzl’s ‘backstairs methods’ in pre-war Austria-Hungary and demanding from Jews not only the ‘sacrifices’ which ‘other nations’ had made

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when their ‘existence was threatened’ but also the sacrifices which alone could ‘wash us clean of all that the Exile has done to us’. From the 1920s onwards he wanted a ‘real Jewish militarism’ which would fight its way if necessary into Palestine and allow a ‘radicalism of deeds’ to effect a solution to the Jewish problem ‘in our time’. It was only when Jewish terrorism began to be directed against the British in 1944 that this sort of exuberance was abated. About the Nazis, though Namier’s hatred was deep, it was also realistic; the Germans had ‘never recognized . . . the services rendered by the Jews to Germany’, so the Nazi decision to ‘cut the . . . threads’ had loosened a connection which had never been genuine. Towards the Arabs, Namier was chauvinistic and imperialist, arguing that they had had no more love for the British than the Indians and Egyptians had had, and had failed to attract Jewish cooperation by reason of Jewish loyalty to the British Empire. The high point of this line of argument was that ‘the Arabs [had] enjoyed . . . national existence in a number of states’ and could not find it ‘unreasonable’ to be asked to make the necessary renunciation in Palestine. Both before 1939 and during the Second World War (under Weizmann’s guidance), Namier was a supplicant on behalf of a nationalist movement in the British Empire as Masaryk had been a supplicant on behalf of a nationalist movement in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But, whereas Masaryk appealed to the enemies of Austria-Hungary, Namier’s and Weizmann’s tactic was to specify the strength which Jews could bring to Britain, and the damage the British Empire would suffer from the emasculation of the Balfour Declaration. Namier praised Amery, Churchill and the Zionist lobby in the House of Commons, was sarcastic about Toynbee’s and Chatham House’s prejudice against Zionism and made bitter attacks not only on the anti-Semitism, Arabophilism and appeasement which he attributed to British administrators in Palestine and the Colonial Office but also on Malcolm MacDonald, whom he had once supposed that he could influence, when the White Paper of 1939 ‘condemned . . . tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Jews who might have been saved, to slavery, torture and death under the Nazis’. For a long time he repeated what he said first in 1936 – that a Jewish state would be so useful in protecting the Suez Canal that ‘if Italy had obtained the Mandate’, Mussolini would have settled ‘two or three million Jews in Palestine’ and would have trained and armed them so as to have a ‘white army of some 300,000 men’ to hold the ‘key position in the Eastern Mediterranean’. It seems possible that ‘Namier didn’t basically like Jews’ and particularly didn’t like either the ‘rootless . . . petty-bourgeois’ Jews of the modern world or the clerical-rabbinical Jews whom he encountered in Israel; it is certainly the case that he refused to settle in Israel not only because he needed to be close to his archives in England but also because of his wish to live in a ‘traditional established society’ which he had no reason to imagine that Israel yet

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was, or was likely to become. His Zionism aimed, nevertheless, through violence at the sort of national State that England had had after 1745 more or less without violence, and offered, in all its intellectual complication, a singular example of the rough, paradoxical conclusions which can be drawn from modern, post-liberal illusionlessness. Like Butterfield, who was personally antipathetic, Namier heralded the end of the era of liberal good feelings and the opening of an era in which not only Trevelyan and Toynbee (justly) but also H. A. L. Fisher (somewhat unjustly) were to be done to death by Elton, Taylor, Trevor-Roper, and the slow intrusion of an historical, sometimes lapsed Marxist cynicism which was to be one of the leading features of English historical writing in the thirty years after the Second World War. Namier’s immediate followers in eighteenth-century English history were professional and epigonic. But his historical manner and interests contributed so much to the common currency that it is difficult to be sure where his influence has been operative. What it is easy to be sure is that the mind of his friend and admirer, Sir Isaiah Berlin, though smoother, was very much less powerful. III Berlin2 was born in Tsarist Russia in 1909 and was brought up by adoring parents in Riga, Andréapol and Petrograd. His father – an Anglophile – was a Jewish timber-merchant, the dignity and emolument of whose business, inherited from a great-uncle, exempted him from the restraints of the Pale. After co-operating commercially with the revolutions of 1917, but having had disagreeable experiences in their wake, the Berlins migrated to Surbiton and Long Ditton (on the way to Holland Park and Hampstead) and began importing hog-bristles as well as timber into England. St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College Oxford (after rejection by Balliol) were followed by Berlin’s election as the first Jewish Fellow of All Souls in 1932, war work lobbying against isolationism for the British Embassy in New York and Washington and a short period with the British Embassy in Moscow, where the danger to which she was exposed with the Russian authorities by Berlin’s incautious attentions to Akhmatova, the Russian poetess, was accompanied by the beginning, on his part, of a transforming mistrust (which had not been visible in Karl Marx in 1939) of Marxist-totalitarianism’s impact on Russian culture. 12

Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–98), educated St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Fellow of New College, Oxford, 1938–50 and of All Souls College, 1933–50 and 1998. Professor of Political Science at Oxford, 1957–66; President of Wolfson College, Oxford, 1966–75. Author of The Hedgehog and The Fox, 1953; The Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958; Historical Inevitability, 1958; Four Essays on Liberty, 1969; Vico and Herder, 1976; Russian Thinkers, 1978; Against The Current, 1979; Personal Impressions, 1980; Washington Despatches, 1981; The Magus of The North, 1993 and The Sense of Reality, 1996.

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In 1946 Berlin resumed the teaching Fellowship to which he had been elected at New College in 1938 but returned to All Souls in 1950 on the ground that he was overworked, did not really like teaching undergraduates and judged the Fellows of New College to be boring hacks. In 1955, he married an aristocratic Jewish Frenchwoman, who had left a Fellow of New College in order to marry him, and lived with her in style for the rest of his life in Oxford, London and Italy, being fêted as a celebrity, especially in Kennedy’s America, and being honoured almost as much as Max Müller had been honoured eighty years earlier. It was not obvious that the academic appointments for which Berlin was responsible were admirable. His criticisms of the ‘ancient straight-jackets’ and ‘narrow’ confines of conventional academic subjects were genuflexions to fashion. Though a riveting lecturer, he was described by Oakeshott as the ‘Paganini’ of the lecture platform and by the less courteous as its ‘Sergeant Bilko’. There can be no doubt that, beneath the sixth-form-essay following and well-orchestrated public acclaim which he began to acquire in the 1950s, his detractors were numerous. In Isaiah Berlin, Berlin’s authorized biographer achieved a certain frankness about the priggishness, celibacy and gossip of Berlin’s bachelor-life up to his courtship and marriage; and about his friendship with Guy Burgess who persuaded Harold Nicolson (in 1940 a junior Minister) to arrange for Berlin to receive the offer (later withdrawn) of the post of press officer in the Moscow Embassy so that Burgess and Berlin could go to Moscow together. Nor did Isaiah Berlin neglect the view of Ryle, Hampshire and Wittgenstein that Berlin was not a very good philosopher, its author’s own opinions that Berlin’s father was a more religious Jew than Berlin had wished to believe and the judgement that, in leaking to American newspapers in 1943 (and denying that he had leaked) an Eden proposal for an Anglo-American declaration against a Jewish State in Palestine, Berlin had preferred his ‘Jewish loyalties’ to his ‘British loyalties’. In implying that Berlin in the 1930s had differed politically from Hampshire, Hill, Hart, Ayer, Austin, Crossman, Spender and Goronwy Rees – the intellectual Left in Oxford in the 1930s – who were all friends or contemporaries, Isaiah Berlin spoilt the effect by recalling Virginia Woolf’s initial judgement that Berlin was a Communist, the jig Berlin danced on hearing of the Labour landslide at the general election of 1945, and his public response to the student revolution of the 1960s which was to deny that The Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) had intended a consecration of laissezfaire, to dwell on the iniquity of the public-school system and to dig up the ‘blood-stained story’ of ‘unrestrained capitalist competition. By descent, upbringing and sensibility, Berlin was Russian, Jewish and English. But he misunderstood Russia, Israel and England almost equally. His England was characterized by ‘toleration . . . liberty . . . pluralism and . . . untidiness’ and by a combination of practicality, eccentricity, fair-mindedness,

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empiricism and common-sense. He did not mention the respectability, prejudice, xenophobia, moral conservatism and low-keyed mistrust of the higher thought which are – or perhaps were – also English characteristics. Berlin’s Jewishness involved ritual not belief, was a matter of racial solidarity and family piety, and was averse to the orthodoxy he associated with historic Jewry. But it enabled him, in essays about prominent Jews from Heine to Namier, to make sensitive statements of the forms taken by Jewish sensibilities in a gentile world, while observing a decent reticence about the Holocaust from which his family had suffered, feeling the greatest contempt for the Holocaust industry and preferring the ‘free, unbroken . . . personalities’ of Russian Jews to the ‘better educated’ Jews of the West who had been turned by their desire to please into the ‘humped hunchbacks’ they were judged to be by Western Europeans. Berlin was an intimate of Weizmann and shared his ‘latitudinarian’ devotion to a ‘traditional way of life’ which by-passed the question whether Israel should be ‘religious, secular, socialist or bourgeois’. He refused to shake hands with Menachim Begin when he met him in the United States, and idealized Israel as a kind of ‘welfare state’ built on the ‘liberal foundations’ of ‘1789 and 1848’. On the other hand, he had no wish to emigrate, and refused the Director-Generalship of Israel’s Foreign Ministry when offered it by BenGurion. Unlike Begin, Stern, Koestler and Namier, he did not take to the idea that violence would be necessary if the Jewish character was to be improved, Palestine to be converted into Israel or a Jewish State to have any chance of survival. In Berlin’s writing about Russia, there was a good deal about the conversion of the Russian intelligentsia from Orthodox dogma and eighteenthcentury rationalism into a ‘secular priesthood’ dedicated to the spreading of ‘something like a gospel’; about the non-occurrence of the 1848 revolution in Russia as explaining Russia’s ‘grim’ abandonment of the ‘softness’ and ‘sentimentalism’ characteristic of Western Socialism; and about the ‘acute selfconsciousness’ which gave almost all Russian thinkers and writers after 1880 a sense of testifying through a ‘vast’ and by now ‘unreadably tedious’ literature to the total philosophy which the Russian people were supposed to want. Berlin did not ask whether, if true inside Russia, this was not also true outside Russia, or why it provided an ‘almost ideal soil’ for Stalin’s expulsion of ‘life’ from one of the ‘most gifted and productive societies in the world’. There were many fine passages about the nineteenth century’s anticipations of the twentieth century. But Hamlet always seemed to be missing. There was no attempt to understand Tsarism, the Tsarist bureaucracy, or the eastern expansion with which Russia had matched America’s western expansion. It was assumed that resistance to Tsarism had been right (except where it was odiously nationalistic), and that Russia was defective in having failed to achieve the liberalism which the United States had achieved.

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These failures of understanding were significant. Berlin had a defective sense of the ubiquity of force, reaction, accident and institutions. He rejected the Christian monolithicity of which Burke and de Maistre had been the advocates and expressed the deepest suspicion of both mediaeval Christianity and neo-mediaevalism. In spite of his Zionism, he fled from any suggestion that religion should ‘consecrate the Commonwealth’, theodicies resolve agonies of ‘perplexity’, or the Christian belief in ‘the sacred mission of the Church’ escape the condemnation which was deserved by all ‘the sacred missions of nations and cultures’. What he had chiefly was a sense of liberal aspiration and affront. In Berlin’s liberalism, Herzen played the leading part. Herzen had not only rebelled, as the young Berlin had rebelled, against the consecrating complacency of Idealism, he had also given prophetic anticipations of the ‘cataclysm’ which would accompany the rule of the masses if the gap dividing them from the ‘free and civilized élites’ was not bridged before they began to rule. Berlin returned repeatedly to Herzen, praising his hatred of the ‘despotism of formulae’ and his sense of the ‘complex, crooked texture of men and institutions’. One feels, however, that Herzen’s role was as a social as well as an intellectual pin-up which Berlin found comforting because, like Mirabeau, Fox, Roosevelt, J. F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson and Churchill, Hertzen had been an ‘aristocrat by birth’ who had ‘gone over’ to a ‘freer and more radical mode of thought and . . . action’ in part out of a ‘frantic . . . loathing of the bourgeoisie’. ‘Such men’ went the embarrassing self-disclosure, are intellectually on the side of everything that is new, progressive, rebellious, young, untried, of . . . the open sea, whether or not there is land that lies beyond it . . . living . . . between the douceur de la vie which is about to pass and the tantalising future, the dangerous new age that they themselves do much to bring into being.

These fantasies, harmless in themselves and doubly harmless in the Camelot that was shot out of the Dallas motorcade in 1963, disclosed a liberal nostalgia which made no attempt to appreciate the double-faced character of democratic politics and offered as the pinnacle of political wisdom a secular free-for-all from which religion as well as managerialism and totalitarian utopia had been expelled, and an ill-defined liberty was the yardstick in politics, morality and religion. Many of Berlin’s expository essays had the grandeur and loftiness of later Acton. But his best known ideas – about positive and negative liberty, hedgehogs and foxes, historical inevitability, and pluralism and relativism – were rhetorical, his fame, even after Henry Hardy’s exercises in recovery, registering less a pinnacle of wisdom than a coincidence between fashionable reputations acquired as lecturer, conversationalist, guest and wartime rapporteur, and eloquence deployed by implication against fellow-travellers – some of them old friends – who were still in the 1950s defending Stalinism against the ‘decadence of the West’.

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One of the CIA’s tactical responsibilities at that time was to drum up a stage-army of the good to provide an intellectual justification of NATO. In this, Berlin played a doubtless spontaneous role as an enemy of Stalinist totalitarianism. The real justification of NATO, however, was not the stranglehold Stalin was exercising over Russian culture but any military threat he may have presented to Western Europe and the United States; and it would have been better if an historic exercise of political will and a necessary military resistance to Russian power had not been confused by Berlin and others with windy vapourings about liberal virtue. Berlin had range and eloquence and an affectation of normality which concealed abnormal assumptions. He was insensitive, except in the case of Israel, to community and cohesion, and was against ‘historiosophy’ and the ‘higher thought’. But he was implicated himself, and had a secular, Judaeocentric historiosophy, which was not less historiosophical because it pretended not to be. In Koestler a different experience led out of Zionism and Marxism into the Socialist Humanism he believed in from the 1950s onwards. IV When Koestler3 achieved fame in England between 1945 and 1955, he did so as a novelist and political prophet and by bringing to disengagement from Marxism a conversion-experience which seemed to be more authentic than the conversion-experiences of the drawing-room, lecture-room and publicschool ex-Marxists who had achieved prominence as Marxists in the 1930s. In five novels, The Yogi and the Commissar, and two volumes of autobiography, he outshone them all by reason of the clarity and fluency of his prose and the direct acquaintance he had had with, or the good story he had to tell about, the oppressions which these others had merely confined themselves to writing about. Koestler was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest in 1905, became prominent in Zionist student politics at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in the 1920s, and dropped out of the Hochschule just after his father had been bankrupted. After a short period as a Zionist settler in Palestine, he was dropped by the settlement which he had joined. Poverty and unemployment in Haifa and Tel Aviv were followed by a rescue-operation set up by an old friend from Vienna as a result of which Koestler began to work for the Ullstein newspaper chain in Jerusalem, made his way up the Ullstein ladder 13

Arthur Koestler (1905–83), educated Technische Hochschule, Vienna. Journalist and novelist. Author of Spanish Testament, 1937; The Gladiators, 1939; Darkness at Noon, 1940; Scum of the Earth, 1941; Arrival and Departure, 1943; The Yogi and The Commissar, 1943; Thieves in the Night, 1946; Insight and Outlook, 1949; Promise and Fulfilment, 1949; The Age of Longing, 1951; Arrow in the Blue, 1952; The Invisible Writing, 1954; The Trail of the Dinosaur, 1955; The Sleepwalkers, 1959; The Lotus and the Robot, 1960; Hanged by the Neck, 1961; The Act of Creation, 1964; The Ghost in the Machine, 1967; The Thirteenth Tribe, 1973; Life After Death, 1976 and (with Cynthia Koestler) The Stranger in The Square, 1984.

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in France, and by 1930 was in Berlin as a senior science editor. Having either supplanted or supplemented his Zionism with a new engagement to Marxism, Koestler then became a clandestine Communist, was betrayed, if his account is to be believed, by one of his Ullstein’s assistants in whom he had confided and, after being dismissed from the Ullstein organization, played a part in cell politics and on the edge of street politics as an open Communist in the later days of the Weimar Republic.

Between 1932 and 1938, Koestler was a journalist in Russia, Hungary, Spain and France, met many Communist functionaries and intellectuals, and hid a realistic assessment of conditions in the Soviet Union under an ideological commitment to the Communist Party. In this phase, in addition to an attempt at suicide, he wrote an account of the Soviet Union, a fragment of a novel about the Jewish dilemma, a best-selling Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge, and both The Gladiators and Spanish Testament (which gave his version of the period he had spent under sentence of death in a Franco prison during the Spanish Civil War). In Spain Koestler was once more a clandestine Communist – under instruction to find evidence of German and Italian involvement in the Franco rebellion. Though admitted to Franco territory with (tenuous) accreditation from a Hungarian government newspaper, he also had accreditation from the London newspaper, the News Chronicle, whose liberalism enabled him, where necessary in Spain and throughout Spanish Testament, to proclaim his reverence for John Stuart Mill and his wish to complete the pacifist novel he claimed to have been writing when the civil war broke out. Having been imprisoned during Franco’s occupation of Malaga, his release became the subject of a campaign orchestrated by the Communist Party and taken up by a Conservative MP, the Duchess of Atholl, and other members of the British Parliament who did not know, or to whom it was not explained, that he was a Communist agent. On release from prison, Koestler returned to France, where for a time he was interned. In late 1940 he arrived in England, where he was again interned until his release from internment was secured by pressure from Laski, Harold Nicolson, Wickham Steed, Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, the News Chronicle and the Duchess of Atholl. After eleven months in the Pioneer Corps of the British Army, he spent the rest of the war as an auxiliary fireman and lecturer to service audiences, getting to know prominent intellectuals of the London Left, combining drinking and womanizing in an apparently excessive combination, and emerging early in 1948 as a cold-warrior against the Soviet Union. In 1948 Koestler left England, allegedly in dislike of the Attlee government’s failure to tackle the ‘old ruling-class’ head on, also probably because he was bored by life in a cottage in rural Wales, wished to enjoy the celebrity

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status he had achieved in France and the United States, and disliked both the anti-Semitism he sensed in Bevin’s Middle Eastern policy and the English public’s unfriendly reaction to Irgun Zvei L’eumi’s hanging of two British sergeants in Palestine. In 1952 he returned to England, where he and his third wife committed suicide together in 1983, she ‘in perfect health’ and fifty-five, he at the age of seventy-seven and suffering from Parkinson’s disease and terminal leukaemia. In the course of time Koestler took root in England, wrote in English and dramatized his life in order to instruct the Western world in the truths he had learnt about both kinds of totalitarianism in the 1930s. There were confessions of the crookedness of Spanish Testament and calls to Americans to stand up to Stalin. And there were accounts of the Holocaust and of the urgency of the Palestine problem. From the 1950s onwards, there were accounts of science and culture which sketched the post-Judaic humanism Koestler had arrived at in the course of disentangling himself from Zionism after a symbolically disastrous visit to Israel in the wake of the establishment of the new State in 1948. Among Koestler’s works of political reportage, Spanish Testament made a drama out of the prison situation and villains out of Franco’s generals. In keeping with Koestler’s liberal cover, it treated Nicholas, a ‘little Andalusian peasant’ who had been executed in the prison in which Koestler was held, to a bogus liberal panegyric: ‘Little you were . . . with soft, slightly humble eyes, one of the poor and humble’ it went, this book is dedicated to you [though] you could not read it even if you were still alive. That is why they shot you, because you had the impudence to wish to learn to read. You and a few million like you, who seized your firearms to defend the new order which might perhaps some day have taught you to read. They call it armed rebellion, Nicholas. They call it the hand of Moscow, Nicholas. They call it the instinct of the rabble, Nicholas – that a man should want to learn to read. (Arthur Koestler, Spanish Testament, 1937, pp. 30–1 and 332–3)

Spanish Testament denied that there had been a Communist plot in 1936, blamed the war on the ‘Franco clique’ and justified resistance to Franco as part of a struggle against agrarian inequality and in favour of the ‘raising of the Spanish State, which had never yet succeeded in emerging from the clerical, feudal state, to the constitutional, material and spiritual level of the great European democracies’. Where Spanish Testament dissected Franco’s ‘bestiality’, Scum of the Earth dissected Stalin’s betrayal of the 1917 revolution, the reactionary indifference and anti-Semitism to which Koestler attributed France’s collapse in 1940 and the complicity of the leaders of European Marxism in ‘the shooting of scores of their comrades in Russia and Spain’. After the Russo-German pact of 1939, Spanish Testament was followed by Darkness at Noon. Among Koestler’s political novels, The Age of Longing was boring and

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Arrival and Departure opaque; in The Gladiators neither Spartacus nor the Roman leaders achieved credibility, even when the collapse of the slave State was attributed to Spartacus’s failure to turn manual labour into a religion. It was only in Darkness at Noon that Koestler’s talents were working at full steam. In enquiring whether it was possible to ‘rule guiltlessly’, Darkness at Noon imagined a conflict of doctrine and will between Rubashov, Ivanov and Gletkin. But its most striking feature was its detachment both generally and in relation to the dilemmas of Stalinist Machiavellianism, Rubashov’s decision to confess, instead of remaining silent during his show-trial, being put in terms of the realization that he ‘no longer believed in [his own] infallibility’, and Ivanov – a survivor from the ‘old intelligentsia’ who was eventually executed for cynicism – being permitted speeches against Tolstoy, Gandhi, Christian individuality, the ‘humanitarian fog-philosophy’ of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, and the idea that the world was a ‘metaphysical brothel for emotions’. Darkness at Noon was meant, no doubt, to reject Ivanov. But Gletkin too – unproblematical, ex-peasant apparatchik – was permitted statements about the need for force in face of peasant indiscipline and high-speed industrialization, while Rubashov’s eventual conviction that his own life had been a ‘running amuck of pure reason’ and had left it uncertain whether mankind ought to free itself from the ‘oceanic sense’ and ‘the old illogical morality’, got stuck in a passage of wet prognostication. ‘Perhaps later, much later’, it went, the new movement would arise – with new flags [and] knowing of both . . . economic fatality and the oceanic sense. Perhaps the members of the new party will wear monks’ cowls and preach that only purity of means can justify the ends. Perhaps they will . . . introduce a new kind of arithmetic based on multiplication: the joining of a million individuals to form a new entity, which, no longer an amorphous mass, will develop a consciousness and an individuality of its own, with an ‘oceanic feeling’ increased a millionfold, in unlimited yet self-contained space. (Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1940, p. 243)

It would be easy to read Darkness at Noon as though Rubashov was a sort of hero of the mind, perhaps even a Jewish hero of the mind. It is better read as a grim essay in Rankean impartiality for which the essence of historical method was to treat all positions as equidistant from God. Darkness at Noon did not describe Koestler’s life as a Marxist. It suggested, however, what he was to state later, that rank-and-file Marxists had had their hearts in the right place, that Marxism resembled a ‘traditional faith’ more than it differed from one and that its ‘over-sensitivity’ to ‘social injustice’, though verging on the ‘neurotic’, had been a reaction to a situation of ‘social . . . decay’ in which the neurotic rebel ‘caused more joy in heaven than the sane executive who ordered pigs to be drowned under the eyes of starving men’. The fate of Marxism, indeed, was a tragedy in which the ‘dialectical method’

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had been as ‘closed’ a system as mediaeval Catholicism, Stalin had jumped from ‘the Age of the Apostles to the Age of the Borgias’ and the ‘abjectness and misery of the remnants of the International Brigades’ (once the ‘pride of the European revolutionary movement’) – when Koestler observed them in their internment in barracks at Vernet in France in 1939 – had been symptoms of a tragedy that was ‘religious’ in its nature. Where Scum of the Earth and Darkness at Noon dealt primarily with the impact of Stalin on Marxism, The Yogi and the Commissar, written mainly after the Allied invasion of France in June 1944, dealt primarily with the threat which Stalinist cynicism presented to the rest of the world. It argued that the Soviet Union would absorb Eastern and Central Europe, that appeasement from the Left would be as bad as the pre-war appeasement of Germany from the Right, and that the gestures which Stalin had been making towards militarism, pan-Slavism and the Orthodox Church, his growing use of forced labour, mass deportation and social inequality, and his abandonment of any attempt to reform the divorce, abortion and homosexuality laws, were not only discouraging but were also reminiscent of Nazism. As an exile from Marxism, Koestler at first had had scarcely any positive doctrine beyond distaste for the ‘intellectual incest and . . . masturbation’ which the intelligentsia had engaged in during the previous decade and the desire he shared with Orwell and Crossman to keep on the ‘normal’ side of the line which divided the nonconformist from the crank and the heterosexual from the homosexual. He quickly made it obvious, however, that England’s survival was essential to the survival of civilization, that ‘the struggles of Economic Man’ had to be replaced by ‘new ethical values’ and that a new role had to be found for the intelligentsia. In theorizing a future for the intelligentsia, Koestler pointed out that its role as proponent of bourgeois liberalism had been subverted by the conservativization of the capitalist classes and by the working-class preference for their own unions and parties as proponents of socialism. One role only, therefore, was left – to be the ‘sensitive . . . membrane’ which would keep the ‘oppressed’ who existed socially beneath it and ‘those who [were] . . . tucked into the social hierarchy’ above it in touch with one another by using ‘science, art [and] technique’ to contrast ‘the way we live’ now with ‘the way we could live according to the contemporary level of objective knowledge’. Koestler was saddened by the death of Marxism, while defending the renegades who had killed it. He was careful to propose new illusions in its place – a ‘League of Liberty’ as incubator of a ‘European spirit’, ‘a vow of poverty’ to tie socialist leaders to ‘the life of the masses’, and a new humanism to quench men’s thirst’ and ‘re-establish the . . . balance between rational and spiritual values’ which the Enlightenment had upset. The Yogi and the Commissar, and other works in the 1940s, surveyed European science and spirituality since God’s conversion into a mathemati-

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cian in the seventeenth century, and made portentous utterances about the ‘crisis in biology’, the ‘revolution in physics’ and the need for both ‘saint and . . . revolutionary’ if European civilization was to be restored. The statements Koestler made on behalf of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1949–50 and his advocacy of a European army used every available cliché from the ‘trahison des clercs’ to an ‘ideological Munich’ in attempting to establish that ‘there [could] be no stable world so long as mankind . . . remained divided into “haves” and “have nots” with regard to freedom’. Conservatives who have never needed to be disillusioned may properly make fun of this, appreciating its usefulness in relation to those who needed to be disillusioned about the Soviet Union in the late 1940s but denying that Koestler’s, Orwell’s, Berlin’s, Talmon’s and Popper’s anti-totalitarianisms spoke relevantly to the English situation. In any case, though irrelevant to England, and also marginal to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Koestler’s cold-warrior phase was part of a transformation in religion which he discussed most clearly in discussing Zionism. V In the European context, Koestler’s disclosure of himself was of a passive victim, many of whose friends had been killed, or had killed themselves, as Walter Benjamin had killed himself, with pills which Koestler claimed to have shared with him. Yet in disclosing (while to some extent concealing) his experience as a Zionist student politician in Vienna, a youthful settler in Palestine, and a war correspondent during the Arab–Israel war of 1947, he disclosed not passivity but the transformed Jewish character which Jabotinsky, his mentor, had hoped would accompany the establishment of a Jewish National Home. Koestler’s Zionism was revived by rumours of the final solution which reached England in 1942 and by his subsequent involvement in campaigns to persuade the Allied air forces to bomb the death-camps. His message to the English (and to Americans) about Zionism, however, did not become fully public until after the defeat of Hitler when, Weizmann having already reintroduced him to the Zionist movement, Koestler’s anonymous collaboration with Crossman, Gollancz and Foot in favour of partition and the admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, was followed by Thieves in the Night’s fictional account of Jewish life in Palestine, and by Promise and Fulfilment’s polemical account of the Palestine question since the Balfour Declaration. Thieves in the Night was located in a Jewish settlement in Galilee in the late 1930s. It described the human aspects of the process of occupation, the benefit it had brought to Arabs as well as to Jews and the absence of money, bureaucracy and economic inequality from the settlement’s social arrangements. What might have been a ‘romantic stunt’ was shown becoming an historic achievement as the high culture, scholarship and complication which had been mixed up with manual labour among the earlier settlers had become

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the ‘phlegmatic . . . sturdiness’ which was making subsequent generations into Hebrew peasants. For the benefit of English readers who were ‘kind and sympathetic’ but had ‘no idea what it was about’, Koestler detailed the traumatic scars with which Jewish refugees from Europe were wrestling and the fact that in Buchenwald ‘people had been hung on hooks by their mouths like carp’ just as, in British prisons in Jerusalem, prisoners were being ‘bastinadoed, beaten on their genitals and questioned while having water poured into their nostrils’. Thieves in the Night contained passing references to Orde Wingate as ‘a Hebrew Lawrence’ . It was unfriendly to Neville Chamberlain, the British government’s White Paper of 1939 and the decisions to halt Jewish immigration, limit Jewish land-purchase and ensure that Jews would remain a minority in any Arab state, and it taught what Koestler wished to teach in 1946 – that there was a corrupt complicity between British administrators and the Arabs, that the British attitude to Jewish settlement was a ‘poisoned absurdity’ and that prohibition of the free sale of property to Jews was ‘unique in the world’, except in Nazi Germany. There were portraits of Arab corruption, backwardness and homosexuality, of suburban anti-Semitism among the wives of British administrators and of a conflict between Jews who wished to ‘win . . . over’ the British and the Arabs by non-violent means, and terrorists who believed that Palestine Jews were ‘too weak to afford to be polite’. The question of terrorism was endemic in Thieves in the Night, in which the only appropriate language since Dollfuss’s ‘shooting-up’ of ‘red Vienna’ in 1934 had been the language of ‘bombs and landmines’, and an extended passage of self-conscious symbolism, pictured a Zionist headquarters in the basement of a building meant initially to serve as a ‘synagogue or bible seminary’, where Jewish youths were broken by terrorist instructors of their inherited, sing-song slavishness towards the Book, and copies of ‘the first Hebrew military manual’ were ‘secreted in the traditional . . . bags in which Orthodox [Jews] carried their prayer-books and scarves to the synagogue’. By the end of Thieves in the Night Jewish violence was seen to be unavoidable and was justified by the fact that, in making nuisances of themselves in the ways in which the Irish, the Serbs and the Indians had made nuisances of themselves, terrorists would produce both a secure Jewish majority and a new sort of Jew. Through all the celebrations that were given of the ‘normality’ which Jews thirsted for, the bottom-line argument was that the new hardness which violence would bring to the Jewish character would persuade the British that a ‘Hebrew Dominion’ tied to Britain and the British Empire by ‘European tradition and mutual interest’, would be more trustworthy than the Arabs and of much greater value than a ‘standing garrison in a hostile population’. These illusions Koestler had discussed with Menachem Begin in a darkened room when Begin was on the run in Tel Aviv in 1945. They were as unrealis-

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tic when Thieves in the Night was published in 1946 as they had been in 1939, when Koestler’s fictional Jewish ‘fascist’ was supposed to have expressed them. It is odd to find them reappearing in Promise and Fulfilment during Bevin’s period as British Foreign Secretary. In Promise and Fulfilment Israel was described as a ‘prototype’ of ‘the human condition’ about which, as in Darkness at Noon, Koestler had ‘absorbed the . . . truth contained in each of the conflicting pleas’. And it is certainly true that the Balfour Declaration – ‘one nation promising another nation the country of a third’ – was described as being bound to ‘lead to trouble’, that British hypocrisy, in pretending to be the ‘friend’ of the Jews, had been matched by Haganah’s and the Jewish Agency’s hypocrisy in both supporting and denouncing terrorism and that it was ‘only human’, after the outrages they had suffered from the Stern Gang, that ‘groups of men’ in the Palestine Police and British Army had retaliated against Jews in the closing days of British rule. On the other hand, though the Balfour Declaration was said to have involved ‘injustice’, it had involved a ‘relatively mild injustice’ which had brought economic progress to the Arabs. Appeasement of the Arabs was identified with the British desire to keep them out of the clutches of the Nazis before 1945, and with the desire to keep them out of the clutches of the Russians thereafter. Churchill, as a Zionist, was exempted from criticism. But the Churchill and Attlee governments were condemned for refusing entry to the ‘death ships’ and Bevin for encouraging the Arab League to destroy Israel by force between 1946 and 1948. One side of the argument in Promise and Fulfilment was that it was Bevin’s ‘vindictive irrationality’ which had compelled the Jews to fight, and that Arabs had been persuaded to flee, when they could have stayed (after the massacre of Deir Yassin), by the ruthlessness of Arab propaganda. The other side of the argument was that by 1940 Jewish immigration had become the ‘supreme ethical commandment’ and that terrorism, which Thieves in the Night had treated obliquely through fictional characters was a necessary contribution to the ‘logic of history’. In describing Israeli politics after his visit to Israel, Koestler criticized the defects of charity and imagination which had accompanied Ben Gurion’s showdown with Begin and the elimination of Irgun Z’wei Leumi as a state within a state. Begin by contrast was praised for turning the Irgun into a ‘democratic’ political party and the Stern Gang condemned for its foolish connection with the Soviet Union. The Histadruth was treated as a ‘creed and a cult’ rather than a ‘western type of trade union’, its ‘bureaucrats’ as ‘priests of a new temple’, and the ‘Workers’ State’ which it had become ‘within the State’ as one which had no intention of sharing the benefits it ‘justly regarded as [its] own creation’. Towards the end of Promise and Fulfilment Koestler contrasted Jabotinsky, who had combined the merits of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Trotsky, with the

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‘chauvinistic . . . biblical bombast’ and want of a ‘liberal and . . . European spirit’ which, along with much else, he found in Begin. He was also hostile to ‘Kosherness’, to the rebirth of and refusal to latinize the Hebrew language and to what, in his best latitudinarian manner, he characterized as the unsatisfactory nature of ‘relations between Church and State’ in Israel. In attacking the ‘machiavellian’ influence which rabbinical Orthodoxy was exerting in spite of its minority status, Koestler looked forward to removal of the barriers between Jew and Gentile which he accused both the Orthodox and the Socialist Left of wishing to preserve. He bestowed benedictions on the Sabras who had given Israel its strategic defences and ‘moral right to possession’ and, as peasant harbingers of the twentieth century in a country which had ‘stood still since the fifteenth’, had been the ‘decent and humane’ agents of the ‘amoral workings of history’. It was the Sabras who were symbols of the future, the Sabras who were proving by their ‘character and physique’ that the ‘eerie odour’ of the ghetto had been dissipated, the Sabras who, by separating ‘Church from State’, would liquidate the Jewish problem and make Israel into a ‘non-Jewish country’. These reflections, physical as much as ecclesiastical, provided a natural conclusion to Promise and Fulfilment, which was then concluded again with an epilogue about the ‘anachronism’ created by Jews who refused to emigrate to Israel.

Like Thieves in the Night, Promise and Fulfilment was a Zionist work in which the distaste Koestler had felt for the ‘provincial chauvinism of Palestine’ in the 1920s had been swept away by Hitler. In ‘Judah at the Crossroads’ in The Trail of the Dinosaur (and later The Thirteenth Tribe), he expanded what Promise and Fulfilment had said against the Jewry of the Diaspora, especially in the United States. In Judah at the Crossroads the essential contentions were that Orthodox Jewry had either been killed off by the Nazis or had emigrated to Israel, and that liberal, enlightened and agnostic Judaism had renounced the attempt at a distinctively Jewish culture. ‘Ethnic assimilation’ and ‘the Mosaic faith’ were declared to be incompatible, Jewry itself, on Toynbee’s authority, to be a ‘fossilised remnant’ and the long-term solution of the Jewish problem to be either emigration to Israel, where the faith would be killed by Sabra latitudinarianism, or ‘renunciation’ of the faith leading to disappearance into whatever nations would permit disappearance to occur. These alternatives were not offered in any conciliatory spirit, and neither was the criticism which accompanied apparent genuflection to Isaiah Berlin, whom Koestler had disliked on first encounter and who, in believing it possible to remain a Jew without emigrating to Israel, was associated with the idea of wishing the ‘timber’ of Jewish humanity to be kept ‘crooked for crook-

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edness’s sake’. Judah at the Crossroads was especially emphatic that the choice had to be made, that to ‘cling to an outworn status of “negative Jewishness” out of . . . fear of being called a coward’ was ‘an inverted form of cowardice’, and that it was desirable to close down the international Zionist organizations and put an end to the ‘paradox’ of a Jewish state ‘proud of its sovereignty . . . going round [these organizations] with its begging bowl’. When asked in 1955 whether he ‘still regarded himself as a Jew’, and what religious education he wished for for the children of ex-Jews, Koestler gave two sorts of reply. To the first question he replied that it had been ‘a chance occurrence’ that his father had been ‘of the Jewish faith’, that he himself had ‘identified [himself] with the Zionist movement’ only so long as there was ‘no haven for the persecuted and harmless’ and that the conversion of Israel into a reality had freed him to become a ‘European’ of British citizenship who accepted the ‘ethical values’, while rejecting the ‘dogmas’, of our ‘HellenoJudeo Christian tradition’. To the second question he replied that the children of ex-Jews should be brought up believing in a God, of whatever sort, ‘like the other children of the environment in which they lived’, but should be left free, on reaching maturity, to make up their own minds. When Koestler came to evaluate the course of his life in the 1950s, he dramatized the search for the governing truths embodied in three transitions: the transition from the ‘romantic’ Zionism of the 1920s to the terrorist Zionism of the 1940s, the transition from the ‘Judeo-Christian’ mixture of Kant and the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the materialistic Marxism which he claimed to have combined with it thereafter, and the trauma which had begun in the death cell in Seville prison in 1936 when an ‘incommunicable’ but ‘mystical’ experience had shown him, as he wished his readers to believe, that ‘finite statements about the Infinite’ were a possibility and ‘a higher order of reality’ could ‘alone invest . . . existence with meaning’. The association of the condemned cell with the abandonment of Marxism was made paradoxical by the fact that Koestler had been put into the cell by the Franco government. The paradox was removed by discussion of ‘religious conversion’ in The Invisible Writing seventeen years later when the experiences Koestler had had – in prison first but later also – of ‘the veil falling’, the ‘hidden order of things’ being disclosed, and a ‘peace’ being achieved ‘which passeth all understanding’, had come slowly, he believed, to determine the course of his life since. In The Invisible Writing Koestler was anxious to avoid ‘nebulous gushings’. He was also anxious to insist that ‘genuine mystic experiences’ might ‘mediate . . . conversion to practically any creed’, and that the ‘prophets, saints and seers’ who had founded the historic religions, while able, through such experiences, to ‘read a fragment of the invisible text’, had so much ‘padded . . . and ornamented’ what they had read as no longer to be able to tell ‘what parts of it were authentic’.

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This belief in the possibility of mystical experience, and of its tendency to degenerate into dogma and ecclesiasticism, was a continuation of Koestler’s previously-expressed belief that Marxism was riddled with dogma and ecclesiasticism, and, like Catholicism or psychoanalysis, enclosed acolytes in a ‘vicious’ circle where apostolic gurudom was paramount and ‘each member of the inner caucus . . . radiated some of this apostolic authority’. And not only had the death-cell cured Koestler of materialism, gurudom and the conspiratorial ‘thrill’ which was the ‘rigid etiquette of Communist parties all over the world’, it had also cured him of that dogmatic rigidity which, for latitudinarians, whether Christian or post-Christian, Judaic or post-Judaic, is the enemy of truth, progress and spontaneity. In Koestler’s case the latitudinarianism was post-Judaic rather than postChristian and found the ‘Christian love’ which ‘some eminent converts of his time were showing their neighbours, as ‘convincing as a Communist peaceoffensive’. He denied that it mattered ‘what set of symbols’ was ‘taught to our children’. But he spoke, he claimed, for ‘all of us’ who were ‘filled with transcendental yearnings’, and yet were ‘too honest’ to accept a dogmatic version of ‘extra-sensory . . . reality’, in recognizing in ‘the historical accounts’ of the lives of the Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed ‘eternal . . . archetypes of transcendental experience and spiritual aspiration’. Koestler’s first announcement of these opinions was in The Yogi and The Commissar, which attributed Socialism’s failure to the rationalism it had inherited from the French Revolution and the absence after 1848 of any European movement capable of filling the vacuum left by the destruction of Christianity. His most extended announcement was in The Lotus and The Robot which, having compared European with Eastern spirituality after a Somerset Maugham-style visit to India and Japan, came to the conclusion that European spirituality was healthier. Koestler was obviously against the restoration of Christianity. But he discerned a continuity with ‘magic and animism’ which had rooted Christianity in ‘layers of the consciousness’ inaccessible to the ‘conscious reason’ of the Enlightenment and had enabled it to satisfy that craving for ‘faith’ which gothic had satisfied in the past, which Marxism, fascism and (he might have added) Zionism had tried to satisfy in the present, and which Richard Hillary, the airman, Olaf Stapledon, the philosopher, von Wiesl, Koestler’s first intellectual intimate, and Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, had all helped him to search for. Of the hundred-and-twenty thinkers discussed in this work, Koestler was the nearest to being an ‘uprooted intellectual’. His life was a succession of lurchings from one search for identity to another and was accompanied not only by a drunkenness so chronic as to be fundamental but also by a relentless sexuality which, except by accident, avoided procreation and disclaimed responsibility when procreation ocurred.

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Koestler’s intellectual odyssey may be interpreted as a form of self-regarding irresponsibility or as a religious quest in which, in dramatizing himself as the suffering representative of modern man, he was destined to assist at the creation of a post-Judaic secularism. In Steiner, who shared Koestler’s obsession with Jewishness, there has been both a more stable life and personality than in Koestler and a more ‘normal’ affirmation of positions which Koestler had arrived at abnormally. VI Steiner’s4 father was Viennese and was a friend of Namier, of whom Steiner claims to be a sort of godson. Steiner was born and brought up in France and was sent to the United States just before the German invasion of France in 1940. After an undergraduate career at Chicago, where he was influenced by Tate, he went via Harvard to Balliol College, Oxford, where he published poetry and a prize essay, and was rescued from his research supervisor by, among others, Berlin, with whom his relations were later to be difficult. Steiner left Balliol in 1952 and became a political journalist on Crowther’s Economist, for which he wrote chiefly about France, Germany and England (as he was to do about America for Ascoli’s Reporter in New York a little later). In the main part of his life, however, he has not often been a political journalist or written about politics in vacuo, as it were. A few pages about Corneille’s politics in The Death of Tragedy and a treatment of Marxism which is cultural rather than political, constitute the sum of his specifically political doctrine which, so far as it concerns the day-to-day politics of the contemporary world, teaches chiefly that the ‘vulgarity, imprecision and greed’ of ‘mass-consumer democracy’ have been almost as damaging as the ‘murderous falsehood’ of totalitarianism. From his point of view, it is more important that, in the course of his education, he acquired an amateur’s interest in mathematics and the natural sciences and, after a period at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, became an early Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. Unlike most Cambridge colleges, Churchill was founded as a primarily scientific college and had among its Fellows not only a large number of distinguished scientists but also C. P. Snow, whose low-level conception of ‘the two cultures’ Steiner borrowed and made better use of than Snow was capable of 14

George Steiner (1929– ), educated Chicago and Oxford Universities. Staff of The Economist, 1952–6; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and Lecturer at Princeton, 1956–60. Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, 1961– ), Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Geneva, 1974–94 and Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford, 1994–5. Author of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 1958; The Death of Tragedy, 1960; Anno Domini, 1964; Language and Silence, 1967; Extraterritorial, 1971; In Bluebeard’s Castle, 1971; After Babel, 1975; Heidegger, 1978; On Difficulty and Other Essays, 1978; The Portage to San Cristobal of AH, 1981; Antigones, 1984; Real Presences, 1989 and Errata, 1997.

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making by himself. Having failed to be appointed to a post in the Cambridge English Faculty, Steiner has spent most of his life using Churchill and his home in Cambridge as a base from which to teach in English, American and European universities. In addition to being part of the English, and of the New York, intellectual scenes, he thought of himself, while a professor at the University of Geneva in the 1980s, as part of the French intellectual scene. Steiner is an insinuating lecturer in French, English and German, and a prolific journalist and reviewer in English and American magazines. But the central features of his mind and message are to be found most readily in a dozen or so books which, sometimes recklessly, have turned specialist knowledge to a moral, cultural and religious purpose. In Steiner there are three main interests. There is an interest in literature and literary criticism and an Arnoldian desire to protect them against science and barbarism. There is an interest in language and the degeneration he believes it to have suffered since 1870. And there is an interest in religion which, though central to Tolstoy or Dovstoevsky in 1959, receded for many years thereafter except insofar as discussions of Hellenism and Hegelianism in Antigones and a concern with the Holocaust reflected a concern with religion. Whatever he may be in France or the United States, Steiner is an English phenomenon, addressing the English about their ‘linguistic laziness’, the amateurish frivolity of the ‘banking sector of the City of London’ and the ‘class antagonisms’ which, in his ignorance, he supposed were making England in the 1990s ‘in some ways the last classical marxist case and model’. He has aimed to prise open what he regards as English parochiality, to remind the English of their aversion to intellectuality and professionalization and to give effect to Leavis’s desire to elevate English teachers to ‘a very high rank in Society’. Like many literary critics, Steiner uses criticism as a vehicle of doctrine. But his literary criticism, though continuous since the late 1950s, was interrupted by a diversion through linguistics which had been going on for nearly a decade before the publication of After Babel in 1975. Linguistics, particularly Chomskyite linguistics, was a fashionable and politically loaded subject among the young in the 1960s, and Steiner’s linguistic writings were in that sense fashionable. But they did little to pander to the student revolution, were concerned rather to affront it and instanced both the deterioration of language and the student revolution itself as special cases of the deterioration of culture. Steiner had published articles about linguistics before After Babel. After Babel then said in six chapters all he had to say about linguistics since Saussure, about the supposed extent to which literature, which had been ‘housed in language’ since the Greeks, had begun to find language a ‘prison’ since Mallarmé and Rimbaud and about the fact that a human being, ‘when receiving a speech-message from any other human being, was performing a

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complicated act of translation’ in which the ‘cognitive . . . aggression’ of the translator’s ‘incursive and extractive . . . encirclement’ was an ‘incorporative or hermeneutic’ act which restored equilibrium to the text that had been translated. Steiner’s conception of translation was thus active and dramatic. The translator could sometimes ‘know better than the author’ what a text’s ‘integral presence’ was; and could effect a ‘projective fabrication’ which produced the text the author ‘would have written’ had he been working in the translator’s language ‘more or less now’. In the same breath, Steiner dismissed Skinner’s naïveté about contextualization and concluded (rightly) that, so far from there being a ‘single . . . verifiable method’ for ‘interpreting texts from the past’, all interpretation of past texts was a ‘selective . . . intuitive . . . subjective . . . proceeding’ in which ‘presuppositionless reading’ was impossible. As Antigones was to explain, although readers of translation were ‘reading the translator’, scholars who could read the original were also subject to false echoes and subsequent associations which made their understandings ‘incomparably thinner’ than those of ‘the most uncouth natural speaker’ among Sophocles’ contemporaries. About language, Steiner was both subtle and cynical. He was subtle about the ‘immensity’ of language’s ‘projections’ and the ‘discriminations’ it was able to make between ‘anticipation, doubt, provisionality . . . fear . . . hope and conditionality’. He was cynical about its capacity to ‘leave’ what it meant ‘unspoken’ through variations in ‘cadence, speed or intonation’, and to engage in lying when this was ‘indispensable’ to privacy, sacredness, the ‘equilibrium of . . . consciousness’, or man’s social development. Steiner’s conception of speech was of an ‘opaque shorthand’ with a ‘slippery . . . sub-conscious or traditional’ character which had been ‘misunderstood’ by linguistic philosophy. In face of the levelling, monochrome impress of the mass media and the ‘technological milieu’, he asserted that induction and the ‘future subjunctive’ would have been impossible without language’s capacity to ‘go beyond and against that which is the case’. After Babel’s account of language was in many respects reactionary. Falsity was ‘the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is’ and ‘ambiguity and . . . the capacity to lie’ linguistic capabilities without which ‘the species would have withered’. Fifteen pages showed how ‘syntax’ enabled men to ‘dream themselves free of the organic’. The doctrine of After Babel had no obviously political content. It had, however, a cultural content which Steiner had been stating since The Death of Tragedy in 1961.

The Death of Tragedy began with the belief that tragic writing had been unique to Europe, that it had been Greece’s contribution to ‘our legacy’ and

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that ‘Oedipus, King Lear and Phèdre’ were the high points of the ‘noblest . . . poetic form’ yet wrought by the human mind. Greek tragedy was said to have had neither Judaism’s faith in divine justice nor Christianity’s belief in the possibility of redemption, and to have been obsessed by ‘demonic energies’ and the ‘mysterious force of destiny’ which had carried men ‘through flame’ to a ‘resurrection of the spirit’. Since these had also been features of Shakespearean and neo-classical tragedy, Steiner asked why, apart from German tragedy between 1790 and 1840 and the prose tragedy of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, there had been no ‘great’ tragedy since. The answer was a Toynbeean history which highlighted the breach with the historic European mind ‘in the age of Descartes and Newton’, the Romantic failure to turn back the clock after Voltaire, and the modern artist’s dependence on the ‘rags and leavings’ of the ‘worn-out mythologies’ disclosed by Freud and Frazer. Socially it highlighted the replacement as audience of the ‘organic . . . literate aristocracy’ of the eighteenth century with its interest in tragedy’s cohesive public world, by the ‘bourgeois family’ with its interest in ‘entertainment’ and ‘happy endings’ and its preference for the fragmented, urban, rationalistic, sadistic, middle-class world of the novel. In The Death of Tragedy, Steiner explained that Wagner had got nearer to ‘complete tragedy’ than anyone else since Goethe and that Ibsen’s failure as a tragedian registered his belief that tragic dilemmas were resolvable. Brecht knew that ‘there would be . . . suffering . . . along the way . . . to the . . . accomplishment of the Marxist ideal’ and had come near to a ‘tragic’ depiction of the ‘salvation’ that it offered. But Marxism itself – ‘the third principal mythology to have taken root in the Western consciousness’ – was as ‘anti-tragic’ as Judaism and Christianity, and suffered the almost fatal disadvantage of being ‘created by political fiat’ rather than by a ‘ripening of collective emotion’. For the significance of these judgements, it is necessary to examine In Bluebeard’s Castle. In Bluebeard’s Castle took up the idea of cultural crisis, turned it into a moral crisis in which the bestiality and inhumanity of the twentieth century were the natural consequences of antecedent cultural contradictions and described ‘the major part’ of Western literature as ceasing to be accessible to ‘natural reading’. The ‘museum status’ of historic culture had already by 1971 become a recurrent theme not only by reason of the ‘academicism’ of ‘specialist culture’ and the ‘dumping’ of ‘the products of classic literacy’ on the ‘mass-market’, but also by reason of the inroads which music had made into literature. It is not easy to be sure what Steiner has wished to say about music. On the one hand the ‘modern phonograph’ had made the ‘private sitting-room’ into an ‘idealised concert-hall’ and ‘pop and rock’ a ‘universal dialect’ among the young. On the other hand, music was a collective rather than the private experience Steiner associated with reading, and had driven back the ‘authority of

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the verbal order’ at the same time as ‘seventy-five per cent of the most talented individuals in the developed nations’ had involved themselves in mathematics, the natural sciences, bio-medical engineering, electronic data-processing and electro-chemical control of human behaviour. Steiner sometimes does and sometimes does not emphasize the inaccessibility of these subjects to the non-mathematician. He leaves the impression, not withstanding, that ‘the shapes of reality’ are mathematical, that the period of the humanistic word deserves to be over, and that ‘the language of Shakespeare and Milton’ really did ‘belong to a stage of history’ where words were ‘in natural control of experienced life’. Steiner has given serious attention to the Frankfurt School’s attack on the ‘tyrannical obscurantism’ of ‘rational scientific truth’. His response thirty years ago was that the pursuit of truth was ‘imprinted on the fabric . . . of our cortex’, that ‘flower-power’ was an ‘infantile charade’, and that science had provided ‘metaphor, myth, love . . . elegance . . . quickness . . . merriment of spirit’ and a ‘belief in the future’ which justified the conviction that it was ‘enormously interesting to be alive at this cruel, late stage in western affairs’. The claims Steiner makes on behalf of science, music and mathematics are ambivalent, even perhaps pessimistic. They are, nevertheless, the one ray of light, insofar as he has recognized the possibility of light, in the midst of modern darkness.

In Bluebeard’s Castle included a contrast between the ‘inhumanity’ which had been dominant from the ‘apocalyptically exact’ disaster of 1915 onwards and the ‘liberal culture’ which had been predominant in the ninety years before that. But it also included the claim that liberal culture had been skin-deep, had concealed ‘sexual hypocrisy’ and ‘deep fissures of social exploitation’ and had depended on an ‘economic and military dominion over . . . the underdeveloped or third world’. So far from being free from the ‘inhumanity’ of the twentieth century, moreover, nineteenth-century liberal culture had been its source. The ‘inhumanity’ of the twentieth century consisted not just of the ‘modes of terror’ which had produced violent death for ‘seventy million human beings’, nor the secular revival of the bestialities which Voltaire had associated with religion. What twentieth-century inhumanity consisted of was the ‘conjunction’ in the ‘modern city’ and the ‘military-industrial complex’ of the ‘de-humanisation’ of the ‘assembly line’, the ‘dissociation between ordinary educated sensibility and the . . . technological artefacts of daily life’ and the impact of ‘enforced social immobility’ in creating an ‘explosive mixture’ which had been a recipe for disaster. This was a compressed and fraudulent style of historical thinking, which was not made more persuasive by references to Engels, Ruskin and Canetti.

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Yet Steiner insisted on it. He discerned a ‘theory of aggression’ in the ‘theory of personality’ as it had developed between Hegel and Freud, found in the ‘pluralistic simultaneities’ of Sade’s ‘sexual assaults’ a ‘consummate’ representation of a ‘piece-work model of human relations’, and, in the ‘prophetic images of subterranean danger’ which had appeared in Poe and Victor-Hugo, saw anticipations of the ‘arms race’, a ‘reversion to torture and mass-murder’, and the choked psyche ‘lashing destructively out’ against the ‘stifling proximity of the industrial-urban hive’. These were genuflexions to fashion, attempts to speak to the student revolution in a language it would understand. They were also attempts to link the Holocaust to the currency deflation of the 1920s and the ‘blanket-bombing’ of 1944, and to see in the ‘quiet of the city after the fire-storm’ as much as in ‘the emptiness of the field after the mass-murder’ a ‘destruction of inner forms’ which registered in post-war Europe a transition out of the ‘major orders and symmetries of western civilization’. The idea of a ‘post-culture’, though not original to Steiner, was central to Steiner’s message in the early 1970s. Kierkegaard had spoken, ‘ontological utopia’ had disappeared and ‘culture’ could not be conceptualized in its absence. Steiner denied that the ‘humanities humanized’ and stated that, since ‘the frailty of culture’ was self-evident, the question that mattered was whether culture could be preserved at all. In Bluebeard’s Castle criticized Eliot’s refusal5 to relate culture to the Holocaust or to any other of the bestialities that had occurred in Europe in Eliot’s lifetime. But Steiner, though he would have wished to believe in high culture and had spent most of his life writing about it, could but agree with Eliot that ‘a defence of culture’ on an ‘immanent secular basis’ was ‘implausible’. This was as far as Steiner got in Bluebeard’s Castle, where the posture of the ‘student . . . of today’ was different from the posture of the student of his own schooldays, and the ‘decibel culture’, the ‘bomb-culture’ and the resolute determination of the ‘counter-culture’ to destroy those ‘ties of identity and social cohesion’ which were produced by a ‘common language’, had destroyed even the hope that high culture would survive. When delivered as lectures in the middle of the student revolution, this disclosed an ‘intimation of . . . menace’. In understanding what it implied, it is necessary to understand Steiner’s view of Judaism and Christianity. VII In Steiner’s attitude to the Jewish problem there have been three elements: outrage at Jewish suffering together with guilt about his own exemption from it; contempt for the Jewishness which may have provoked the suffering; and 15

In Notes toward the Definition of Culture.

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pride in the ‘intelligence and feeling’ which ‘some of the major Jewish communities now surviving had preserved or recaptured’. Steiner’s outrage has been emotionally intense and has been directed less at a style of politics than at European civilization – its rottenness, its desire to destroy the Jews (even after the defeat of Nazism) and the centrality of the connection between German anti-Semitism, post-war German amnesia about the death camps and the German belief in ‘the book’. Steiner has been immune to the argument that the Jews were supine under persecution, and that in many cases the victims co-operated with their murderers. What he has not been immune to is the feeling expressed in The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. that a case can be made for anti-Semitism. The Portage to San Cristobal was not the first fictional representation that Steiner had given of the Jewish problem. But it was the most striking and problematical, and used the Jewish determination to hunt down Nazis in South America as the occasion for a novel (later a play) in which Hitler, brought back to civilization at the age of ninety by a team of Israeli kidnappers, makes a long speech in Steiner’s most savage and ironical manner, incorporating everything that Nietzsche had said or implied about European thought and culture. Hitler’s speech was a statement of his indebtedness to the Jews for inventing the idea of a ‘chosen people’ and for making Zion an ‘eternity’ beside which a ‘thousand-year-old Reich’ would have been as nothing. The reason why there had had to be a ‘final solution’ was not only that ‘the murderous pack of Marxist Jews’ had created situations no less terrifying than the situation Hitler had created, but also that the Jews had invented the conscience, made man into the ‘guilty serf’ of a ‘vengeful’ God and demanded subjection to the ‘terrible sweetness’ of the ‘white-faced Nazarene’. Most important of all, Hitler was allowed to say that it was not Herzl who had created Israel but Hitler himself who had fought the ‘blackmail’ of the ‘ideal’ with which the Jews had ‘hounded mankind’ and had given Jews the ‘courage of injustice’ without which Israel would have remained an aspiration. The emotional intensity of The Portage to San Cristobal was of a different order from the emotional intensity of Steiner’s work in the 1950s and 1960s. It raises the question whether his Jewishness is not as tenuous and theatrical as his emphasis on religion.

Steiner’s pride in Jewish achievement includes a manifest pride in the Old Testament, in the Jewish Scriptures and in the ‘brilliant’ phase of ‘co-existence’ in Islamic Spain. But primarily he is a prophet of the Jewish contribution to bourgeois culture between ‘emancipation’ after the French Revolution and the extermination of ‘central European humanism’ by Hitler and the Nazis. This contribution he describes as ‘secular’, as reflecting the ‘reserves of

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consciousness’, ‘sharpening of wit’ and ‘nervous insight’ which had been stimulated by persecution in the ghettos, and as creating the ‘visionary logic’, ‘problematic’ restatements and ‘abstract . . . imagination’ which had enabled Jews, lapsed Jews and half-Jews to create the ‘tenor of modernity’. In an essay entitled ‘A Kind of Survivor’ Steiner sketched the types of Jewish regard for Goethe, Shakespeare, Balzac, Stendhal and Zola, the unease of the Jewish regard for Wagner, and the recognition which Jews had achieved of the ‘liberation of . . . spirit’ they had sensed in Tolstoy and the Russian novel and in Ibsen and the Scandinavian theatre. He examined the ‘similarity between Messianic and Communist utopianism’, and the contradiction which distinguished the ‘irony . . . heresy and . . . dissent’ characteristic of Jewish Marxism down to Pasternak from the nationalism and technocracy of the managed Russia of which Stalin had been the leader. ‘Being new to the plastic arts’ and ‘free . . . in its responses’, moreover, ‘Jewish taste, in the guise of dealer, patron and critic’, had improved relations between ‘serious music and society . . . through Mahler’, had ‘backed Impressionism’ and ‘the renovation of the theatre . . . through Reinhardt and Piscator’, and, ‘in its golden period’ from 1870 to 1930 had ‘given to Prague, Berlin . . . Vienna and Paris . . . an . . . offbeat . . . vitality of feeling and expression . . . which had been . . . quintessentially European’. This was the humanism which Nazism, Stalinism and the ‘militia and police of European appeasement’ had exterminated, and the extermination of which, except in Denmark, Norway and Bulgaria, had been greeted with a ‘silent indifference’ in ‘the universities and the art and book worlds’, and with a failure, on the part of the British and United States governments, to bomb the death camps during the Second World War. It was the ‘common . . . accent’ that Steiner heard in Arendt, Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Kehler and LeviStrauss which sustained the paradox that ‘modern barbarism sprang in some intimate, perhaps necessary, way from the very core . . . of humanistic civilization’. Steiner has had no desire either to live in, or to identify himself with, the State of Israel. Insofar as he has spoken about Israel, he has spoken as a Jew of the Diaspora who has his ‘anchorage not in place but in time’, and equates Jewishness not with ritual or belief but with ‘tricks of feeling’, mutual recognition and the ‘darkness’ that Jews share with one another. What distinguishes him from his Gentile contemporaries is not, therefore, a difference of religion. Rather it is the ‘black mystery’ of what happened in Europe and the possibility that it might happen again, in Russia, Latin America and North Africa, and also in the United States, where Negro anti-Semitism was ‘open and raw’ and the support given to Israel by American Jews, though ‘generous’, was ‘self-interested’, since a revival of Jewish immigration might turn the ‘covert’ anti-Semitism of a Christian and nationalist society into something positively antagonistic.

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Steiner accepts Namier’s and Berlin’s belief that the pre-Zionist Jewish character had needed improving, and that its ‘self-image’ had been improved by Israel’s demonstration that Jews could ‘fly jets’, ‘handle modern weapons’ and ‘turn deserts into orchards’. But he also believes that nationalism is the ‘venom of the age’, that every ‘burst’ of nationalism has focussed suspicion on the Jew, and that, in any ‘Gentile nation-state’, the Jew not only ‘sits near the door’ but has also, from Dreyfus to Oppenheimer, been ‘mistrusted’ because he does so. Steiner has made repeated statements about the fateful legacy which parenthood brings to Jews and about the fear and concern Jews feel for their children. The difficulty in reading him is to know why he thinks it important to maintain the nebulous, if visible, character which has been created by ‘6,000 years’ of Jewish ‘self-awareness’, and whether he is in truth more friendly to Judaism as a religion than he is to Christianity as a religion.

Steiner’s attitude to Judaism is negative and nostalgic. He neither practises nor believes, nor wishes to do more than disclose the mentality of a survivor. It is in this context that one asks what he means by the claim that the crisis in European culture was a religious crisis revolving around two features which Eliot had ignored – the reluctance to contemplate ‘the wager of transcendence’ without which culture would have none of the impulse to futurity that it needed, and the hatred of the Jews which modern secularism had inherited from historic Christianity. The wager of transcendence was central because ‘Art and Mind addressed those who were not yet, even at the risk . . . of being unnoticed by the living’, and because culture issued in an ‘obsession to outlast . . . or out-manoeuvre the banal democracy of death’. These were the ‘ontological and hermeneutic’ modulations which would only be restored by silence, even though ‘silence’ is as paradoxical in Steiner as it was in Carlyle, since he has been far from silent about the ‘crisis’ which he associates with the Holocaust. About the Holocaust, Steiner’s point is that it was neither an ‘accident’ nor a German neurosis, that Christianity had had an ‘ontological . . . intent’ to punish the Jews for the ‘unequalled . . . moral demand’ they had made in the Old and New Testaments and that the proximate cause of Christian hatred was not only the Jewish invention of the monotheistic God which trinitarian and polytheistic Catholicism had been unable to invent but also the Jewish conceptualizing of the ‘exigent Utopia’ with which Marxism and Messianic socialism had called on men to ‘leap out of the shadow of their paltry needs’. ‘Three times’, went the duplicitous pomposity, ‘Judaism produced a summons to perfection. Three times it became the bad conscience of Western history’ and, since men hated ‘those who . . . held out a goal which they . . . could . . . not reach’, history had had to be ‘made commensurate with the natural savageries, intellectual torpor and material instincts of unextended man’.

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Steiner’s view of historic Christianity is as critical as Carlyle’s or Lecky’s, is far more critical than that of Matthew Arnold and issues in the claim that the ‘grace, damnation, purgation, blasphemy and . . . chain of being’ which had provided the ‘architectonic’ of Christianity’s ‘imagination’, had become so ‘private . . . abstract . . . and problematical’ that they had been replaced by Marxism as ‘the third principal mythology to have taken root in the Western consciousness’. After Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which showed its subjects ‘wrestling with the angel’ in 1958, however, it was not until Real Presences thirty years later that Steiner wrestled with the angel himself. Though Steiner was probably not tempted by either of the types of Christianity which he examined in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, there was something more than exposition in the idea he had brought with him from Chicago that ‘criticism’ should make ‘great works of art . . . pass through’ the critic ‘like storm winds’, that these winds were ‘transforming powers’ which ‘pressed upon’ the ‘architecture of our beliefs’, and that it was only through the ‘monuments of reason and artistic creation’ that men could ‘lay claim to transcendental dignity’. These were bold statements with which to preface a discussion of the novel; but Steiner did not apply them to Western Europe, where the novel, as the artform of the bourgeoisie, had assumed that ‘religious feeling was not a necessary adjunct to a . . . comprehensive account of human affairs’. It was Russia and America, by contrast, which in ‘coming of age’, had felt the ‘immensities of space’ and the heroism of the frontier, and had had about them the ‘fanaticism of youth’, a desire for the ‘absolute’ and uncertainty about the artist’s ‘identity’. In Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, the central themes were Russia’s ‘golden age of creativity’ between the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the revolution of 1905, the ‘certainty of disaster’ experienced by Russian thinkers in that period and the difference between the ‘religious range of reference and action’ in Dostoevsky’s novels and the ‘absence’ of ‘religious themes and actions’ from Tolstoy’s novels (apart from Resurrection). Tolstoy’s preference for truth to Christ, his contempt for liturgy, ceremonial and theology, and his belief that only a creedless Christianity could establish God’s Kingdom on earth were contrasted with Dostoevsky’s preference for Christ to truth, and his assumption that Christ had wished to convert men not through ‘outward miracle’ but through the ‘freedom’ of ‘belief’. Steiner’s Dostoevsky was a seminal figure who had suffered a ‘lacerating exposure to every species of disbelief’ but whose ‘anguished’ characters were ‘servants of God’, and a long way from Hegelianism, rational humanitarianism and worldly Utopia. If one asks why Dostoevsky was more admirable than Tolstoy, the negative answer was that Tolstoy led on from a ‘theology without God’ to a theology of ‘totalitarian utopia’ and the subordination of private to public life. The positive answer was that Dostoevsky’s freedom was

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the power to ‘choose’ between good and evil, and that it was their ‘homage to the absurd’ which made his Letters from the Underworld a founding document of existentialism and gave to ‘poets . . . in the . . . Nazi . . . death-camps’ the will to survive. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky was much influenced by the existentialism which was fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic in Steiner’s youth, and by the idea that high culture without religion would be as cramped as high culture had been in the Western world. In Real Presences (1989) there was a respect for religion which laced the respect of the 1950s with Heideggerianism and deconstruction. Real Presences stated Steiner’s belief that consumerism had degraded culture, that the ‘canon’ of acceptability in art, music and literature, which he attributed to ‘the few’ who ‘cared deeply’ about them, had helped ‘the few’ to assist at high culture’s destruction, and that in modern culture, there was a ‘Byzantine’ or ‘Alexandrian’ predominance of the ‘secondary and parasitic’ and a ‘totalitarian’ mixture of journalism and advertising which had ‘anaesthetized’ the reader against ‘visceral, personal and appropriative’ reactions. In Real Presences, Steiner pointed out the ‘ontological inapplicability’ to art, music and literature of ‘quantification . . . symbolic coding . . . and formalisation’ and exposed the ‘open secret’ which ‘hermeneutics and aesthetics . . . had . . . laboured to conceal’ – that ‘talk could be neither verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense’. Positively his problem was ‘theological and metaphysical’, and could only be resolved by restating After Babel’s view of language’s inventive and anarchic ‘ubiquity’.

Real Presences rejected Leavis’s belief that linguistics could contribute nothing to the understanding of literature; it argued that ‘current hermeneutic and grammatological speculation’ was ‘witty and challenging’; and it concluded that ‘the new semiotics and the acrobatics of deconstruction’ repeated Steiner’s own account of the ‘crisis of . . . meaning’ or ‘break of covenant’ between ‘word’ and ‘world’ which had occurred in ‘culture and speculative consciousness’ between the 1870s and the 1930s. This crisis was described as ‘one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history’. It had established a phase in world-thought in which the time of ‘the Logos’ had gone, the time of the ‘after-Word’ had begun, and psychoanalysis, the ‘science of language’, the ‘non-verbal methods’ of the computer clerisy and, above all, ‘deconstruction’, had ‘distanced speech from the empirical and historical’ and established that ‘words and sentences’, so far from having a ‘pre-established affinity with objects’, were merely ‘units in a conventional algorithm’. Steiner criticized deconstructionist jargon and portentousness while completing the account of God and religion that he had given in Heidegger, in

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which, in spite of his sympathy for Nazism, Heidegger was presented as having been to the twentieth century what Descartes and Newton had been to the seventeenth century. Steiner’s Heidegger was amazed at the fact of being, demanded suspension of ‘the conventions of . . . logic and . . . grammar’ and responded to the ‘elemental truths and possibilities of apprehension long-buried under the frozen crust of habitual analytical credible saying’. This was a ‘peasant’ conception of thought and Steiner’s exposition the clarification of an opaque text rather than a statement of his own positions. We may impute to it, nevertheless, the idea that ‘the thinker and the poet’ embody supremely the relation of ‘responsibility . . . and . . . wonder’ involved in ‘listening . . . to the voice of Being’, that Heidegger had transformed the ‘scriptural and Kierkegaardian notion’ of the ‘foolishness’ of Christ into a notion of the heuristic foolishness of philosophy and that he had meant by philosophy something so radically different from Platonic, Cartesian and Kantian philosophy as to have conceptualized the kind of knowing which sets ‘the norms and values of the knowledge . . . through which a people fulfils itself historically and culturally’. Steiner associated Heidegger with that ‘contempt for the mercantile’ which he found in Yeats, Ortega Y Gassett and the ‘fugitive movement in the American South’, with the ‘pastoral nostalgia’ and ‘blood . . . mystery’ which he found in Barrès, Péguy, D. H. Lawrence and National Socialism, and with the ‘axiomatic intuition’ of a secular variant of the pre-Adamic ‘authenticity’ which he shared with Nietzsche, the young Marx, the Freud of Totem and Taboo and the ‘Lévi-Strauss of the Mythologiques’. He not only suggested a Marxist origin for Heidegger’s account of the ‘depersonalization of . . . urban man’ and the ‘exploitative . . . motivation in Western science and technology’, he also located Heidegger as successor to the ‘great lineage of pessimism and admonition’ which had descended from St Augustine. In Real Presences, aesthetic artefacts ‘changed men’s lives’ and pointed towards ‘unelected affinities’. They operated, music especially, through ‘ontological encounters between freedoms’ and they both neutralized the ‘demons of dogma’ and showed that the nihilism of Nietzsche, Freud and deconstruction ‘on the secular level’ was unanswerable. In treating the aesthetic in this way Steiner argued that the ‘great artificers’ had been ‘essentially men’ and that experience of childbirth was so ‘primordial to a woman’s being’ that it ruled out that ‘rivalry’ to God which was ‘crucial’ to its operation. The aesthetic’ contained the ‘lineaments of creation’, made its ‘ingress’ into man’s ‘being’, and, though it was secularized when ascribed to ‘unconsciousness’, was capable of restoring ‘the transcendent’ as the guarantor of ‘meaning’. The ‘transcendental postulate’ could not, of course, be ‘logically . . . or evidentially proved’ and was vulnerable to ‘ironic, absurdist or nihilist negation’ as well as to the ‘liberal . . . suspension of disbelief’. But so was ‘every essen-

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tial aspect of human existence’ including science. ‘No human discourse could make final sense of sense’, ‘everything . . . of compelling stature’ in literature, art and music was ‘of religious inspiration or reference’ and it was the ‘truthfunction’ of myth which in Christianity had produced ‘narratives of verity’ to effect an ‘epiphany’ which ‘quickened . . . the continuum between . . . matter and spirit . . . temporality and eternity . . . man and the other’. Steiner casts himself as the Cassandra of culture, associates the crisis of culture and the crisis of language with ‘the death of God’ and judges the twentieth century – ‘one of the cruellest . . . in human record’ – as having deserved what it got. He does not know whether a ‘scientific-secular world’ will follow, whether ‘the forgetting of . . . God’ will become ‘the nub of cultures now nascent’ and whether the ‘verticalities of reference to higher things’ will ‘drain’ entirely from speech. What he does know, or thinks he knows, is that, if ‘the mutations of consciousness and expression’ embodied in computer language and artificial intelligence became paramount, the ‘Logos . . . of love’ will have been disestablished and ‘art’ and ‘hope’ eliminated.

Steiner mistrusts liberal élitism but sees no hope for anything else; he is not interested in Christianity, and he uses the Christian centuries, as well as historic Judaism, rather as sticks with which to beat the modern world than as calls for religion’s revival. He takes more seriously than he should the connection between high culture and ordinary Western life, makes for this reason a narrow analysis of Western man and does not fully incorporate the idea that the obsessions of its intelligentsia, including his own obsessions about ‘consumerism’, ‘the post-culture’ and ‘the death of the Word’, do not represent this life. Many other criticisms could be made, especially of his silliness about the military-industrial complex, his hysteria about the Holocaust and the heavy insinuating quality of his self-righteousness which does more to provoke anti-Semitism than any of the provocations that he takes account of. The ultimate judgement must nevertheless be that Steiner embodies the minimum recognition of a God who, latitudinarian as he is, unrelated to any particular religion and surrounded by a jargon which renders religion unintelligible, may yet be as much as can be expected from a late-twentieth-century Jewish Arnoldian.

III Conclusion: religion and public doctrine in modern England

24 Complication and dilapidation

Most of the thinkers who have been examined in the last twenty-three chapters, like most of those who were examined in volumes I and II of Religion and Public Doctrine, have produced a public doctrine which has left its mark not only on many generations of the educated but also on many generations of epigoni who have reproduced, often crudely and bluntly, the assumptions which these thinkers had established in the public mind. In establishing assumptions, many of the latitudinarians who appear in chapters 1–15 of this volume had an insinuating conviction of superiority based on the belief that they had thought out their positions for themselves, had by-passed the stock responses which make sincerity impossible and had avoided the dependent status which distinguishes the epigoni we shall be examining in this chapter from the heroes of the mind we have been examining hitherto. The difference in quality and tone between epigoni and heroes of the mind is as fundamental among latitudinarians as among those whom they claim to replace, and it is painful to consider the mindless vacuity of Edna Lyall, the author of We Too, who subscribed to Bradlaugh’s election expenses in Northampton on the ‘Christian’ ground that ‘noble atheists’ were a witness to ‘something greater than themselves’; the eclectic crudeness of the fourth Earl Grey – an Anglican and Governor-General of Canada – who identified Christianity with both the religion of humanity and a ‘secular . . . national’ Church which would number Darwin, Rhodes, Mazzini and the elder Toynbee among its heroes; or the Reverend R. J. Campbell, ex-Methodist, Congregationalist minister of the Temple Church in London and future follower of Bishop Gore, whose famous course of sermons, The New Theology, designated ‘creed’ and ‘dogma’ as threats and ‘the divine immanence in the universe and . . . mankind’ as evidence of spiritual religion. These were manifest excesses, like the excesses for which Oestreicher and Bishop Jenkins were to be responsible later. But more distinguished thinkers were not less excessive. Thus Macan, Master of University College, Oxford and C. E. Raven, Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in their differing ways approved of the success with which ‘faith’ was being detached from dogma and miracle, and the apocalyptic and supernatural from orthodoxy’s 677

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‘selfish’ emphasis on ‘saving one’s own soul’. Bridges was not only poetlaureate, author of The Testament of Beauty and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s schoolfriend and publicity manager; as a disillusioned Puseyite, he also suffered the illusion that the ‘unworthy’ Reformation-idea of religion was being replaced by the Old Testament idea that poetry was religion’s ‘best expression’. To Sir Hamilton Gibb, the leading British historian of Islam in his generation, it seemed that twentieth-century Islam was being released from ‘anthropomorphic dogma’ just as it had seemed to Scawen Blunt fifty years earlier that nineteenth-century Islam was about to undergo a ‘spiritualizing’ Reformation after eleven centuries of theological dogmatism. It was the belief of Sir Thomas Arnold (who had adopted Muslim dress when lecturing at what was to become the University of Aligahr in 1880) that, in spite of the mixed motives which had accompanied conversion after conquest, Islam was a tolerant, flexible non-ecclesiastical religion whose historic weapons had been the unforced conversion of the heart and mind through which the preacher, the saint and the trader had spread the gospel, even when Islam’s political power was receding. L. P. Jacks was a Unitarian for whom ‘the Universe’ was ‘a great work of art’, the idea of God as a ‘supreme artist’ was at least as religious as the idea of God as ‘a judge’, and Christianity’s ‘lost radiance’ was most likely to be recovered (in the 1920s) if the ‘dry formulae’ of ‘church and chapel’ could be watered by a non-denominational education leading to a joyful release of the ‘vast potentialities of the human spirit’. Jacks wrote, among other things, a life of his father-in-law, Stopford Brooke, for whom Christ’s ‘human’ nature was vital and ‘poetry and theology’ were interchangeable, and who came to believe that these opinions, though compatible with a ‘spiritual’ interpretation of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Browning and Wordsworth, were incompatible with the formularies he had to recite as an Anglican clergyman in the 1860s. Jacks was not uncritical of Brooke. But he sympathized with Brooke’s rethinking of Christianity as a ‘religion of love unhampered by dogma’ and was himself the object of a campaign conducted by Lord Hugh Cecil to prevent Bishop David and the Liverpool Cathedral Chapter allowing Jacks to preach in Liverpool Cathedral on the ground that Unitarians ought not to preach in Anglican cathedrals. The 1914 War and the prospect of post-war reconstruction unloosed a secular patriotism, a stoical sadness and a yearning for immortality. They also unloosed a dissenting and academic righteousness which demonized Prussian arrogance and illiberality, contrasted German ‘crimes . . . filthiness and . . . cleverness’ with English freedom and toleration and, in celebrating the ‘unity’ the war had brought across barriers of ‘class, wealth and circumstance’, made the discovery, which would have surprised generations of English Kantians, Goetheans and Hegelians, that, except for Heine who was a Jew, German literature had done nothing which had not been done better by English literature.

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The conception of a non-credal, non-controversial, Christianity which could be believed in by all sincere and reasonable men had been present for three-quarters of a century before 1914 and is still present more than threequarters of a century later – often surrounded by smugness and sincerity. Sir Oliver Lodge’s non-denominational catechism based on the ‘Divine Immanence’ was a tactic calculated to head off a ‘compulsory’ system of secular education and Sir Richard Livingstone’s Future in Education and Education for A World Adrift, though continuations of his lifelong interpretation of Plato as a ‘Christian born out of due time’, were also tactical ways of persuading the democracy to support the war against Hitler and tactical rebuttals of the nasty prophets from Aldous Huxley downwards who had taken the young captive in the 1930s. But there have been many others, like W. R. Greg, whose Creed of Christendom was sustained by an untactical sincerity, Kathleen Raine, whose immersion in Blake has been sustained via a brief flirtation with Roman Catholicism by an eclectic sincerity, Basil Willey, who believed sincerely that ‘human needs’ rather than ‘received dogmas’ were at the heart of Christianity, and Edward Dowden, the celebrated literary historian, who sincerely admired Lamennais for freeing himself from historic orthodoxy, envisaged a Goethean rapprochement with Protestantism once the latter had ‘truly tended to edification’ and expressed sincere approval of the fourth-century Councils for declining, as he supposed, to command men to ‘learn’ their ‘catechisms’ and ‘echo’ their ‘formularies’. Samuel Butler was the son of an Anglican clergyman, and had been a sheep farmer and prospective ordinand before developing doubts about infant baptism, immortality and the resurrection. While writing his most famous novels after 1872, he ‘never ceased to profess himself a member of the advanced wing of the English Broad Church’ and looked forward to historic orthodoxy being replaced by the sceptical sincerity he pointed at science as well as theology. It was sincerity, too, which enabled Edward Clodd – banker and successively Baptist, Congregationalist and rationalist anthropologist – to claim in the 1880s that ‘reverence’ for Jesus was ‘unaffected’ by the ‘mythical . . . elements’ in the ‘narratives of his life’, Bethune-Baker – the distinguished Cambridge professor – to claim in the 1920s that neither miracle nor original sin were necessary to Christianity, and Percy Gardner, who was born a London Nonconformist in 1846 and became an Anglican apologist and Professor of Archaeology at Oxford, to share with John Robinson, who was born in 1919 and was a Cambridge theologian and author of Honest to God before he became a Bishop, the same sincere, or fashionable, demand to rescue God from ‘authoritarian creeds’, ‘supernaturalist’ premises and the ‘religious metaphysics of the first century’. In the writings of Cupitt – the latitudinarian-gadfly of the 1970s – there was not only the claim that a ‘unified church’ was being replaced by Christ’s idea of a ‘loose Hindu-type connection’ which would permit God to be believed in

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‘in as many ways as there were people’, there was also the claim that faith could no longer be identified with ‘doctrinal belief’ since the purification of Christianity required a deconstruction of the ‘nostalgic, other-worldly metaphysical’ style in theology. In contemporary English Christianity, alongside a ‘softer . . . sell’, Cupitt discerned a determination to ‘believe against experience’. In reaction he expressed an (obscure) preference for the ‘austere, hidden and subjective’ and for ‘a severity of inner discipline’ which would prevent Christianity becoming merely a religion of ‘consolation’. What was less obscure in Cupitt, following Bertrand Russell, was the claim that the universe was ‘without meaning or purpose’, that theology should stop fighting a ‘rear-guard action’ to establish otherwise and, though the human world was all men had, that human ideals and a ‘man-centred’ religion could be preserved notwithstanding. Man-centredness was traced ultimately to Luther, the Buddha and Barth (up to the point at which Barth adopted neo-orthodoxy), and to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Heidegger. Its destiny was to see off authority, immortality and the ‘snooping censorious . . . psychology of dogmatism’ and to replace the ‘timeless certainties of pre-critical theology’ by the inseparability of ‘being’ from ‘time’ and of ideologies, moralities and religions from the ‘biological will to power’. Faith was to be ‘internalised and moralised’, God to become a ‘personified religious ideal . . . indwelling in man’ and Christianity to be freed from the ‘fantasies of absolute knowledge’ and Plato’s ‘homesickness’ for a ‘higher world’. Cupitt admitted that he was rejecting ‘all the things that most people had traditionally lived by’. What he promised in return was the ‘liberation’ which would be achieved as the ‘Eternal’, descending incarnationally and ‘diffusing itself’ through ‘the contingent world’, invested ‘the most everyday things’ with the ‘radiance of Providence’ and the ‘deep peace and silence’ of ‘the ineffable’. Cupitt claimed to be picking up the pieces from the Church of England’s failure to preserve the ‘kind of confident, semi-official statement of realist doctrine that many people craved’ in the 1930s and 1940s. He had no sense of his own opinions as a fashion, of the insignificance of a clergy which proscribed ‘dogma’ and ‘objectivity’ or of the possibility of fashion licensing a reassertion of ‘dogma’ and ‘objectivity’ in the future. In short, he caricatured himself, sympathizing dogmatically with those who had converted ‘the old Christian way of . . . unknowing’ into the conceptions of the 1960s, and lining up behind them, in spite of the contradictions they were creating. Not all modernists, post-modernists and latitudinarians have been caricatures of themselves; A. B. Cook, Rashdall and F. C. Burkitt, for example, however advanced and contentious, were learned, cautious and reputable scholars. Moreover, vacuity, crudeness and stock responses are to be found among ‘normal’ defenders of Christianity, whether in a Roman-Catholic form in Bernard Holland or in an Anglican form in F. W. Bussell. But normal

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English Christianity, though it has produced few works of genius since 1800, has produced many competent defences. There have been literary and confessional defences, negative demolitions of obstacles to Christian understanding and essays in reconciling Christianity with philosophy and science. There has been extensive exegesis of Biblical, patristic and mediaeval thought; there have been attempts to show that theology has something to say to the modern world, and there has been the claim that ‘experience’ as a feature of contemporary theology needs to be stiffened by theological dogma. Literature, criticism, anthropology and sociology have been pressed into service, and there have been subtle accounts of the debts which modern secular thought owes to Christianity. There have been marriages between apologetic and historical scholarship, and criticisms or dismantlings of the Reformation as either a reversal or a continuation of mediaeval Christianity. There have been contrasts between mediaeval Christendom as a uniquely organized Christian society and both the classical culture which preceded it and the secular culture which has followed it, and there have been accounts of modern politics in which Christianity’s retreat has not obscured its continuing presence. In the midst of retreat, moreover, there has been heart-searching, like the heartsearchings of T. R. Glover – Baptist, Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and historian of Christianity and the ancient world, who argued, both before and during the First World War, that the modern knowledge and criticism which were being turned against Christianity, were being turned recklessly and mistakenly, and should be subjected to a ‘verification’ which would reverse contemporary Christianity’s ‘lack-lustre’ performance and parallel the missionary achievement in India by restoring a Christian civilization in England. These bodies of thought deserve the benefit of the doubt since their aims have been defensive, even when it has seemed important (as by H. A. Williams) to state that Beethoven, Freud and Marx were enliveners of dead souls. Modernists and latitudinarians who have aimed to supply a ‘new understanding of the essence of Christianity’ seldom deserve the benefit of the doubt since their unspoken aim has almost always been to liberate Christianity from the stock responses which they associate with orthodoxy (where in truth Christianity has been strongest where it has worked out from an orthodoxy of stock responses). There has, of course, been a long line of rationalist apologists, like J. M. Robertson – author, journalist and Asquithean junior minister – whose attacks on Christianity, like Bradlaugh’s attacks, were open and direct. But the attacks have also been oblique, like the famous essay1 H. A. Prichard, in which, pretending to dismantle Idealist moral philosophy, he did not mention religion, God or the Eternal Consciousness, all of which were central to it. 11

‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’

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In English public attitudes to sacred subjects, there have been many variations of tone – from the solemnity of Tennyson’s Ode on the Death of The Duke of Wellington through Lutyens’s Cenotaph, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius and the death-bed sequence in Brideshead Revisited, to the ambiguity which connected Byron’s Vision of Judgement and Byron’s Cain (so much admired by General Gordon) to the Byronic irony about post-Christian fashions which went as deep as Byron’s irony about Christian fashions. In the subversion of Christianity, poets and novelists have borne a heavy burden. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, though a pre-Raphaelite, was, like his father, in effect a pagan, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury – the most famous of Victorian poetic anthologies – a romantic landmark on the way to replacing religion by poetry. Whatever Keats, Swinburne or Fitzgerald demonstrated through their poetry, it was not Christianity. Yeats’s poetry, like Yeats’s Shelleyism, was numinous and mystical but was no more Christian than Motion’s poetry in the 1990s, Hughes’s poetry in the 1980s, Auden’s poetry in the 1930s, or Clough’s poetry in the 1850s when a carefully chosen postChristian language identified Christianity’s ‘true import’ with the secular values incapsulated in ‘life . . . action . . . submission . . . service . . . experience . . . patience . . . and . . . work’. In the course of a post-Christian odyssey, Gissing allowed Schopenhauerian celibacy and a ‘childless race’ to replace Comte and Christianity, and ‘sadness’ and ‘pathos’ to register the intuition that human existence was ‘something that should not be’. Ivy Compton-Burnett’s family had been Methodist, Congregationalist and Anglican, and her schooling a HighChurch schooling. According to her biographer, she not only avoided all reference to religion in her novels but also spoke with a ‘vehemence’ which suggested an ‘abiding grudge’ against it. In Arnold Bennett’s Middle England, no ‘young man of first-class intellect’ could accept ‘any form of dogma’, apart from the liberal dogma enshrined in Bennett’s judgement. In Snow’s Cambridge, the only clergyman was drunken and disappointed. In Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street, there were no clergymen, the hero was a drug-taking rationalist polymath, and Conan Doyle ended his life as a spiritualist. To Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, John Oliver Hobbes and Florence L. Barclay, among popular novelists of the early twentieth century, religion, including disengagement from Christianity, was important. In the flat fictional firmament of the last thirty years, religion, except negatively in Rushdie, blasély and negatively in Burgess, and uncertainly in Miss Spark, has been as irrelevant as it was to Miss Murdoch (apart from a few of her novels and a post-Christian essay in philosophy). From the elder Amis – the author among secular novels of a black comedy about Christianity – the jaunty judgements were that Jesus was a ‘good chap’ but that his ‘instinctive liberalism’, though better than God’s ‘prescriptive authoritarianism’, had been vitiated by inexperience of sex, family, war, disease, madness and starvation.

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Novelists and poets (to say nothing of composers and dramatists) are not alone in making such declarations. Blakemore is only the most obvious in a long line of scientists who have extracted a simple, secular message from science, Hobsbawm only the most obvious in a long line of historians who have inserted a simple secular message into history, and Lady Warnock – government’s guide through the moral maze – only the most obvious in a long line of philosophers for whom philosophy has been unsubtly secular. Lankester, Schiller and H. M. Chadwick, Waddington, the elder Bernal, Hoyle and Crick, Dobb, Carr, A. J. P. Taylor and Joan Robinson, Gellner, Giddens, Bernard Williams, R. J. Evans, and the younger Bernal have all been career secularists who, like Briggs and Lord Jenkins, have willed Christianity into the shadows. So too have the younger Amis’s belief in sex, T. E. Lawrence’s belief in freedom and action; the hideous, almost sacramental amoralism of St Aubyn’s Never Mind and the sexual perversity of Sher’s Changing Step. J. B. Bury, Acton’s successor as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, in the course of his life abandoned the Protestant simplicities of the Church of Ireland for the post-Christian simplicities of his History of Freedom of Thought. York Powell, Froude’s successor as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and a devotee of Kipling and the Scandinavian Sagas, dismissed Christianity as a ‘Jewish religion’ and affirmed that ‘all decent people’ had practically ‘the same religion’. J. A. Hobson, economist, social philosopher and pillar of Massingham’s Nation, argued for a ‘real western religion’, rooted in ‘pagan origins . . . spiritualized in accordance with the higher processes of civilization . . . and stripped of all theology and magic’ to apply the ‘principles and ideals of a rational ethic . . . to the support of our industrial and other institutions’. This, too, with variations, was the message of the young Fawcett – later Gladstone’s blind Post-Master General – for whom Mill On Liberty was filled with ‘noble . . . almost holy thoughts’; of Roger Fry – the art critic – for whom art, especially painting, had a ‘spiritual’ function; and of G. M. Trevelyan – Bury’s successor as Regius Professor of Modern History – for whom poetry was ‘a body of Scripture . . . almost a religion’ and ‘the common ground of all creeds and parties’, and for whom a history written for the average reader (rather than the professional historian) could cure ‘political prejudice’ and fertilize ‘the new democracy of intellect’ which was ‘athirst’ for ‘thought and knowledge’ in the twentieth century. In his fifties, sixties and seventies, Trevelyan moved from being an admirer of Bright, an anti-imperialist radical and in effect a non-combatant in World War I, to being an apologist for the Baldwinian and Churchillian consensuses. Having been a rancid agnostic and laureate of Meredith at the beginning of the century, he later began to describe himself as an Anglican agnostic. After the collapse of the Liberal Party in the 1920s, he became a spokesman for ‘the

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nation’, incorporating landscape, walking and Grey of Falloden (as naturalist and country gentleman) first into the war of liberation idealized in his Italian trilogy, then into the defensive, patriotic war of England Under Queen Anne, finally into the egalitarian, patriotic war celebrated in English Social History in 1942. And just as Trevelyan made high claims for history and poetry, so, in other hands, the space left by the death of Protestant England has been filled by the occult and the paranormal, by mysticism, apocalypticism, millenarianism and psychical research; by the National Trust, the Diana and Tolkien cults, the vegetarian and Green movements and sales talk in praise of popular music; by the Youth Hostel Association, (for which ‘a visit to the Lake District’ was ‘as good as a visit to Jerusalem’) and by the rural and suburban witchcraft and paganism which were given critical consideration by Professor Hutton in the four hundred or so pages of The Triumph of the Moon. During an adult life which began in Edinburgh in the 1930s, David Daiches moved from his father’s Rabbinical orthodoxy to a sociological rethinking of literary criticism, generalizing his own conflict into the conflicts exemplified by Auden’s and Eliot’s attempts to reconstruct a ‘disintegrating tradition’ but achieving in the end only the glossy, coffee-table Scottish secularity of some of his later works. Bronowski, also from Rabbinical beginnings, came to believe, in face of the student revolution of the 1960s, that the ‘confidence in human destiny’ which religion had once given could now be given by science, provided ‘protest’, tolerance’ and a ‘liberal ethic’ were allowed to integrate their implications ‘into our . . . culture’. Menuhin’s move towards ‘aesthetics’ and away from moral mores and didactic catechisms was matched by Ayer’s denial that there was a ‘teleology’ in the universe, by the claim Ayer had been repeating since his disengagement from Judaism that atheism was compatible with morality, and by the ‘philosophical’ conclusion he had reached that theology and mysticism, while having causal effects and possibly a ‘numinous’ quality, had no ‘cognitive’ content. An aggressive secularity and convenient amnesia about the intellectual Anglicanism of a couple of generations of educated women from Miss Dorothy Sayers through Miss Dorothy Emmett to Miss Helen Gardner are, moreover, necessary aspects of the aggressive feminism of the last three decades as it has appeared in Miss Lessing’s Socialist secularity and in the reproaches which the unspoilt sexuality of the Calabrian peasant women Miss Greer encountered when young have enabled her to direct at the wounds she believes women to have suffered in all male-dominated societies. And there has been the Marxist, psychoanalytical feminism which Miss Mitchell made her own in the 1960s. Miss Mitchell’s leading perceptions were that the bourgeois male-dominated family was a ‘cultural creation’ rather than a ‘natural phenomenon’, that it was a scene of ‘violence and despair’ and that the Suffragette movement,

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having achieved only a political emancipation, needed to be completed by a more thorough-going emancipation which would diversify sexual practices and institutions, induce a more willing acceptance of homosexuality and give women the right to ‘equal education’ and the ‘full entry . . . into . . . industry’ which had been made possible by automation and mechanization. This programme formed an important part of the new socialism of the 1960s, and has entered into both the New Labour and the public mind since. But it is not yet certain how the new feminism and the new homosexuality, will settle down, and whether they will be absorbed into the reticence of decency, respectability and conservative secularity. Conservative secularity may be seen to disadvantage in the party Conservatism propounded by F. J. C. Hearnshaw in the 1920s and 1930s, and in Curzon’s depiction of Wordsworth and Tennyson as preachers of a ‘political theory . . . identical with the creed held by the modern conservative’ (of 1885). It may be seen to greater advantage in the secularity of the fifteenth Earl of Derby who, though he ended his political life in Gladstone’s second Cabinet, had been a leading Conservative politician for the previous thirty years; in Lord Blake’s presentation of the history of the Conservative party,2 however lacking in subtlety and self-consciousness; and in Lord Hugh Cecil’s Conservatism (1912) which, in spite of its author’s Anglicanism, was the work of a Conservative Burkean whose arguments were predominantly secular. It may also be seen in Hinsley’s, Wilson’s and Ferguson’s presentations of economics, power-politics and the modern business corporation; in the secular homosexuality of Raven’s Alms for Oblivion; in the family values of popular and tabloid newspapers between Northcliffe and English; and in the secularity which, after entering Victorian imperialism in a Liberal form via Froude and Seeley, reached its peak in the secular Imperialism of Garvin’s Observer. There have been pockets of resistance to secularism – among soldiers from Wellington and Gordon to Montgomery and Glubb, in the minority journalism of Catholic, Anglican and Nonconformist newspapers, in the public schools (even when latitudinarian) and in Reith’s BBC which, though liberal and eclectic in effect, was Christian in tone and intention. Shots have been fired across the bows of the secular by two Halifaxes, two Selbornes and several Cecils. Shots have also been fired by intellectual Anglicans like J. B. Mozley, by demogogic dissenters like C. H. Spurgeon and intellectual dissenters like J. W. Oman; by intellectual Roman Catholics like Christopher Hollis and Michael de la Bedoyère; by professional protestant politicians like Sir William Joynson-Hicks and by professional Roman Catholic politicians like Lord St John of Fawsley. There has been exemplary resistance on the part of the parish clergy and Dissenting ministers through whatever agencies of public utterance they have had available. There has been Lord Soper’s 12

To correct a foolish remark in volume I of Religion and Public Doctrine.

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resistance (in the secularizing manner of the common man); and there has been the shadow cast by Sir Walter Scott over the Oxford Movement and the woolly degeneracy of Auden’s defences of Christianity in the 1960s and 1970s. And there has been the life work of S. H. Butcher – undergraduate friend of Maitland, the second Viscount Esher, the fourth Earl Grey and others of the ‘liberated’ at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1880s – who, as Regius Professor of Greek at Edinburgh and Conservative MP for Cambridge University until his premature death in 1910, propounded a cultured mixture of Hellenism, Ulster loyalism and critical Protestant bibliolatry and avoided the secularization involved in the identification of Israel with Greece. Some of the thinkers discussed in these volumes were aristocratic thinkers reflecting on the arrival of a non-aristocratic world, and to some of these, the fate of Christianity was a matter not just of religious but also of social and political importance. One of the assumptions in Religion and Public Doctrine is that academic impartiality is an illusion and that the bias against bias registers either a tired conventionality or an agenda which conceals its purpose; moreover, that English thought in the last century and a half has been distinguished less by argument than by assertion, sarcasm and irony, by emancipation from emancipation and by exposure of the uncertainties which surround relations between theory and practice. Trollope’s Barchester was a homely variant of Creighton’s Rome. Yet Creighton – the dispassionate registrar of a crucial ecclesiastical corruption – married orthodoxy to Oxford Idealism and, as Bishop of London, conveyed to those who knew him a satirical modern mentality which the reader does not extract from his writings. T. E. Hulme was a self-styled philosophical amateur who sneered at Nietzsche for passing ‘slimy . . . romantic . . . fingers’ over ‘classicism’, argued an intellectual case for ‘original sin’ and ‘dogmatic theology’ and almost certainly agreed with Wyndham Lewis that English religion in the 1930s was the scene of a confrontation between ‘sentimental pantheism’ and the ‘universal Catholic Church of Rome’. Yet Hulme confined his religious persuasions almost entirely to the printed page and, even within the limits of a short life, was neither a practising Roman Catholic nor a practising Anglo-Catholic for any substantial length of time. Galsworthy and Connolly – author of The Forsyte Saga and Enemies of Promise respectively – can scarcely be said to have been Christian, though the latter, when it suited him, stigmatized Communism and historic Christianity equally for their ‘perversion of the . . . humanity of the Sermon on the Mount’, while the former, in writing simultaneously as a young man both The Man of Property and The Island Pharisees,3 not only characterized the hedonistic acquisitiveness and ‘mass of unfraternity’ of the upper-middle-class late-Victorian family as 13

Originally entitled The Pagan.

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being inferior to ‘the artistic theory of life’, but also specified ‘love . . . sympathy and understanding’ as the ‘essence of Christianity’ once dogma had died, Christ’s divinity had been abandoned and both God and Christ had been rooted in ‘men’s daily conduct’. Buchan was brought up in the Scottish Free Church and became High Commissioner of the General Assembly of the Kirk after being a Conservative MP and writing three famous war novels whose heroes embodied secular resolve, moral decency and conservative respectability, but which, except in a Bunyanesque discussion of Peter Pienaar’s religion, introduced religion only in the form of Greenmantle’s Islam. Sir Edmund Gosse – for nearly forty years the most influential of literary critics – gave a respectful account in Father and Son of the effect of literature and geology on the ‘Calvinistic cloister’ in which he had been brought up, but did little to explain what he had come to believe in instead of Calvinism. A. C. Ewing – a naïve but prolific Kantian – combined church attendance with suspension of both belief and church membership during most of his forty years as a Cambridge philosopher, until eventually becoming a Unitarian church member in retirement in Manchester. A. N. Wilson, novelist and critic, was for a couple of decades a persuasive Anglican apologist but in 1991, while preserving a ‘silent’ Wordsworthian acknowledgement of ‘the mystery’, made an eccentric rejection of all institutional religion when an Iranian fatwa condemned Rushdie’s secular novel, The Satanic Verses, for ridiculing Islam. Even Muggeridge, a brilliant publicist, inventor of Mother Teresa as an English personality and eventually a convert to Rome, declared in the 1960s that historic Christian dogma could be taken seriously only as a ‘mystical experience’ for which the ‘identification of a church with a state’ was as ‘farcical’ as a ‘vegetarian joining the Butchers’ Union’. Complication, in other words, is a leading feature of the religion of the modern English intelligentsia. It is in twentieth-century universities, not only erstwhile Anglican universities, however, that the tension between dogma, academic study and institutional commitment has led most readily to sarcasm and irony, to the ‘melancholy’ which has surrounded as yet unruined choirs, to the sympathetic doubt urged by Vidler as the proper response to modern unbelief and to a perception of the ‘strain of tragedy’ which Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders – Anglican, ex-rationalist pupil of Sir Karl Pearson and director of the London School of Economics – intuited in the Godhead. Like a literature, a university is a ‘realization in concrete form . . . of . . . an ideal of life in one of its aspects’. Or, as it was put by Sir Walter Raleigh – the first Professor of English Literature at Oxford – a university is ‘the best type of a democracy’ which enables ‘the aristocracy of talent’ to escape from ‘the tyranny of the social order’. Though this might have been said of the mediaeval Church as well as of the mediaeval university, and of the university system since the 1940s, it could not have been said so readily of the late-Victorian

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university which did not match with social accessibility the ‘intellectual excellence’ and ‘bias against bias’ with which it detached itself from the Reformation-university. But it raises the question whether the bias against bias is a plausible conception in the more accessible university of the present, whether the modern secular university is more antagonistic to truth than the confessional university which it has replaced and whether impartiality and the academically level playing-field are not chimeras. If one asks how modern scholars have reconciled themselves to the universities’ role as relics of the confessional university, the answer is not just eructation, resignation, fogeyism and dandyism or the earnestness which Nonconformist thinkers brought to Oxford and Cambridge from the 1870s onwards. Rather it is the intellectual complication of gifted men who have been sympathetically attuned to their generations. Thus Graham Hough, Professor of English at Cambridge, while not thinking of himself as a Christian, despised the substitute religions which were displacing Christianity in the 1970s. Sir Maurice Bowra’s scepticism about dogma, his belief in poetry and his attachment to the gods of Greece and Rome sat oddly, but not untypically, on regular attendance at the Chapel of Wadham College, Oxford. S. A. Cook, who admired Sir James Frazer but had been brought up an Evangelical, having offended anthropologists by treating Greek religion in volume I of Zeus in 1914 as a ‘praeparatio evangelica’ for Christianity, then settled down in volumes II and III into what his obituarist rightly described as a ‘calm and considered deism’ (which offended no one). Cyril Bailey’s mother – an agnostic and a member of the Ethical Society – sent Bailey to a Froebel kindergarten before sending him to St Paul’s School. After losing interest in religion on arriving in Oxford, Bailey regained it as a Fellow of Exeter and Balliol, ‘loved to talk into the night’ to undergraduates about ‘the eternal verities’ and combined a conception of Christianity as a ‘way of life’ rather than a ‘creed’ with an unsentimental ‘rigour’ of ‘principle’ which made him ‘the ideal choice for hearing the pleas of conscientious objectors during the Second World War’. L. R. Farnell had religious experiences when young, performed the religious duties of his station as Rector of Exeter College and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and spoke and wrote in the 1920s about both the superiority of a personal God and the prospect of the ‘scientific study’ of religion ‘cooling’ the ‘heat . . . of dogmatic controversies’. As an anthropologist, by contrast, he discerned all the features of historic Christianity among the pre-Christian religions of the Mediterranean, built on Grimm’s discovery of a ‘crude and repulsive substratum of peasant ritual and belief’ and, in The Evolution of Religion (1905), developed a clinical ambivalence, less ambivalent only than the ambivalence of Sir Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, towards the claim that Catholicism looked stronger by reason of its roots in paganism. Robinson Ellis was one of Oxford’s best classical scholars in the second half

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of the nineteenth century; having ‘passed’ when young through a phase of ‘Newmanism’, he then abandoned religion except for a lifelong interest in Latin chant and Gore’s sermons. D. S. Margoliouth was Professor of Arabic at Oxford for nearly fifty years. As a scholar, he wrote of theology in general and of Islamic theology in particular as having a duty to ‘transfer its power of sanctification and endearment’ from ‘obsolete ethics’ to ‘such as were abreast of the times’; as a person, on the other hand, though he had a rabbinical Polish grandfather and a Protestant missionary father, he ‘alarmed strangers’ by an ‘ironical Christian orthodoxy’ which ‘came from the depths of his nature’. To J. W. Mackail – Fellow of Balliol, civil servant at the Board of Education, literary critic, biographer of William Morris, author of The Sayings of the Lord Jesus Christ and in later life a supporter of the Oxford Group – it was obvious that Christ was ‘the greatest of socialists’, that the ‘faith of the classics’ was an Erasmian ‘gospel’ to be preached ‘without distinction of class or calling’ and, at a time when the Christian vision was receding and civilization ‘bleeding at every pore’ during World War I, that poetry alone by its ‘living power’ could ‘prevent the loss of so many lives’ ending in the ‘blackening and poisoning of the national life’. Sir Llewellyn Woodward, Oxford historian and editor of Documents on British Foreign Policy, had an Evangelical childhood and a Puseyite puberty which, though followed by abandonment of Christianity, retained the belief that ‘the only hope for the . . . world lay . . . in the Christian virtues of compassion and humility’; A. E. Housman, recalling the High Anglicanism of a Worcestershire childhood as ‘the best religion he had ever known’, attributed its superiority to an absence of ‘Christian nonsense’, while the unusual combination of Whiggism, patriotism, Anglicanism and Hegelian atheism achieved by J. M. E. McTaggart, Housman’s older contemporary at Trinity, was accompanied by the belief that, since religion was as inseparable from dogma as dogma from metaphysics, those who had had no metaphysical training or capability had ‘no right to accept any religion as true’, even if they were unlikely to ‘give up traditional opinions’ for that reason. Irony was similarly apparent in Renford Bamborough, one of the cleverest critical minds of his Cambridge generation, who, in insisting in Reason, Truth and God in 1963 that the doctrine of the Incarnation, if it meant anything, implied an historical event, insisted also that Arnoldianism was for this reason incompatible with Christianity and, in so insisting, claimed for ‘philosophy’ the power to decide what was and was not Christian, even though ‘believing’ Arnoldians, in their latitudinarian confusion, believed that their Arnoldianism was Christian. The problem of Christianity became pressing among the thinking classes in the half-century after 1860 as very many thinkers had doubts and employed irony in evaluating them. There was a perception of the similarity between Christ, Socrates and the Buddha, an identification in all three of an ‘ethical’

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revolt against ‘ritual’, ‘set formulae’ and the ‘locust-army of . . . philosophers . . . priests and metaphysicians’, and a feeling that Nietzschean revaluation, eugenic and Schopenhauerian pessimism, and the low-minded hatred of humbug and uplift displayed in their differing ways by Benjamin Kidd, W. S. Gilbert, Orage and F. E. Smith had extended English religion beyond Hellenism and the ‘second-rate form of Christianity’ which Henry VIII had created by making himself head of the Church. More positively, there was a Comtean conviction that the ‘only blessed life’ was the life of ‘self-righteousness and sacrifice’ and a pragmatic conviction borrowed from John Dewey and William James that religion, so far from being a ‘specific experience’ which ‘marked it off’ from ‘comradeship . . . friendship . . . art, science, morals and politics’ was something which might be found in all of these, and in many other, experiences. In justifying a similarly secularizing paradox – that he and Christopher Hill, the Balliol Marxist, were the ‘leading ecclesiastical historians’ of their generation – Lord Dacre doubtless had in mind Hill’s treatment of the Church of England as an instrument of social control. He doubtless also had in mind his own attacks on the lower-class (Franciscan) bigotry of the Middle Ages, his comparison in The Last Days of Hitler between the faggots and dogmas of mediaeval bishops and the tortures and dogmas of modern commissars, and his Erasmian judgements that not only were Lutheranism and Calvinism not stages on the road to Enlightenment, but also that the historic function of patristic theology in the third and fourth centuries had been to ‘pump hot air into the sagging balloon of early Christianity’. At various points after 1860 there were anticipations of a ‘new creed’ to mark the end of the period of ‘scepticism’. A contradiction was noted between asceticism and the spontaneity of the ‘gentleman’s . . . natural passions’, and there was a belief that honour and chivalry – the ‘cardinal virtues’ of ‘the northern races’, with their refusal to deny either ‘the world’ or ‘the flesh’ and their Emersonian consecration of ‘the best kind of natural man’ – were what modern men acted upon, in spite of the lip-service they paid to Christian ideals of sainthood. In the twentieth century there has been a comparative withdrawal from both Anglicanism and Nonconformity, and a relocation of Roman Catholicism into becoming an informal alternative to the Church of England. There have been varying responses to Calvinistic sternness, and the development of a Catholic combination of strictness and accommodation at the same time as a natural, unforced, social Christianity has been overlaid by Kantian, liberal and puritan pieties which have merged readily into the higher secularism. Fabianism, imperialism, Nietzscheanism, Schopenhauerianism and philosophical Idealism took hold of the intelligentsia in the 1880s and 1890s just as Marxism and Freudianism were to do later. But, except after the immigrations of the 1960s (and then only on television and in the inner cities), there has been no suggestion of a multi-faith culture, institutional alternatives to

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Christianity or English acceptance of Pentecostalism or black Evangelicalism; while the Confucian, Taoist, Comtean, Hindu, mystical, Jungian, Buddhist, Muslim and Lawrentian religions have remained subordinate to newspapers, psychiatry, literature, history, science, sociology, the universities and the political parties in giving such emotional comfort and self-identification as the intelligentsia has been capable of. In the course of the twentieth century, English politics and government have ceased to have a significant Christian component and, when confronted with a sectarian version of such a component in Ulster, have willed it to go away. There have been moments of Anglican resistance, like the Butler Education Act of 1944, Tractarian revivals in the universities and evangelical revivals in some of the more prosperous suburbs, and there has been an inertia and inattention which have preserved the Anglican Establishment long after its defenders believed it could be defended. The more positive reality has been the establishment of ‘impartial’, ‘caring’, ‘feminist’ and ‘colour-blind’ criteria in government and politics and the subversion of national interests through military participation in the United Nations. Solemnity and elevation have attracted negative comments in the course of the twentieth century – from philosophers on the way from Idealist highmindedness to post-Idealist high-mindedness, from cynical historians between Namier and Elton, and from the lower-middle classes as they have taken over the academic profession and have bitten the high-liberal hands by which they had been fed. On the whole, however, in the last twenty years, deflation has retreated, and there have been concealed revivals of the almost religious earnestness invested in academic careers between 1880 and the democratization of the universities in the 1940s, when a lower-middle-class, partly Nonconformist, young man like George Unwin gazing, as Tawney’s ‘barbarians’ had gazed upon the ‘time-worn plains of an ancient civilization’, had conformed to the prevailing culture and passed through Green, Unitarianism and the philosophy of religion on the way to the study of economic history. Whether spirituality or religion can properly be attributed to, say, architecture raises even broader questions, to which Pugin gave one representative answer and Watkin another. Like Pugin, Watkin is a convert to Roman Catholicism. Unlike Pugin, he declines to recognize any but the most distant connections between Roman Catholicism and architectural style, and rejects almost all the details of Pugin’s architectural preferences. Pugin began with the assumption that ‘pointed architecture’ was the only ‘principled’ architecture, that it was a ‘Christian’ architecture as opposed to the ‘pagan’ architecture of St Paul’s Cathedral, and that its ‘principled’ character extended to the ‘smallest detail’, connecting Christianity to technique and ornament and leading, as it had led him, to the ‘course of study’ which had preceded his conversion.

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Pugin did not mean that he had been converted to Catholicism by the study of architecture. He did mean that the architecture of the Middle Ages had achieved a ‘high state of perfection both as regards design and execution’, that the ‘tyranny, apostasy and bloodshed’ by which Protestantism had been established had resulted in a ‘decay’ of architectural taste, and that the ‘riot’ of private judgement in the modern world had built cemeteries which were as deplorable as railway stations, ‘singing galleries’ which prevented ‘priest and people’ uniting in worship, and ‘government preaching-houses called churches’ which jostled in the modern towns of the 1840s with ‘Zion Chapels . . . New Connections and Socialist Halls’. This was both a cause and a reflection of England’s disunity and dilapidation, and a gothic revival, in face of the modern interest in ‘luxury’ and the modern church-builder’s interest in ‘profit’, would revive ‘ancient feelings and sentiments’ and reconsecrate art’s ‘highest efforts’ to ‘God’s . . . honour’. Pugin believed, more even than Newman, that England had to be rescued from ‘the vile spirit of modern innovation’. He sensed ‘insult’ when classical temples were built in memory of the ‘crucified Redeemer’, defended roodscreens and plainsong as inducements to decency and devotion and claimed that architecture was the central art a revolution in which was the precondition for a revolution in religion. In Pugin, there was the closest identity between architecture and Christianity. In Watkin’s Morality and Architecture (1977), by contrast, there was the strongest denial that gothic was Christian and a complicated mistrust of a ‘Christian architecture’ as an illegitimate mixture of modes which did nothing for either architecture or Christianity. In Morality and Architecture, Watkin attacked Pevsner’s historicist belief in the Zeitgeist as the proper determinant of architectural design, and the attribution of superior ‘honesty’ and a ‘moral imperative’ to Pevsner’s favoured style of architectural modernism – an ‘anonymous, instrumental, mechanical’ style dedicated, in Watkin’s view to ‘community need’ as defined by planners, civil servants and social scientists. Watkin’s Pevsner may have been touched up for dramatic purposes. But Watkin did not invent Pevsner’s silence about Lutyens, his aversion to ‘privacy’ as an architectural value or his insistence on ‘every feature of every building’ having a ‘tangible material use’. Nor did he invent Pevsner’s distaste for capitalism, his praise for ‘egalitarian uniformity’ or his belief in the importance of ‘continuous innovation’ in place of artistic tradition, individual genius, education, taste and imagination as guarantors of style and beauty. Whereas Scott’s Architecture of Humanism (1914), to which Morality and Architecture owed much, had uncovered an ethical and political conspiracy to adopt gothic as democracy’s antidote to aristocratic Palladian, so Watkin, in uncovering a collectivist and Socialist conspiracy in favour of ‘international modernism’ as the ‘universal truth’ of a ‘moral and social consensus’, replied

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not by claiming ‘universal truth’ for his preferred style of architecture but by affirming that the Roman Catholic Church was the ‘permanent exponent of revealed truth’, that architecture could not be ‘true’ in the sense in which Catholicism was ‘true’ and that the difference between fifteenth-century and twentieth-century Church architecture could not be explained in terms of ‘permanent and unchanging doctrine’. Watkin put the question with peculiar force. Is it legitimate, he asked, for a Roman Catholic to find Catholicism in a particular style of architecture? Is there really a connection between Christianity and any of the forms of cultural and academic endeavour? These are delicate questions. They echo through this work – not only in the forms in which its main thinkers have asked them but also in the arcane form touched on in a passage from E. R. Dodds’s autobiography (Missing Persons (1977)) in which, before Dodds’s arrival at Birmingham University, Latin and Greek had been taught by E. A. Sonnenschein, a ‘devoted and single-minded grammarian’ of whom Ernest de Selincourt, the Wordsworthian scholar, was a friend. ‘De Selincourt’, the passage went, liked to tell how one day he took Sonnenschein for a country walk. They had tramped for some time in unbroken silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts, when Sonnenschein suddenly asked in grave tones ‘De Selincourt, what do you think about God?’ There was a long pause while . . . de Selincourt tried to assemble his views on the Deity. At last Sonnenschein became impatient: ‘Well, what do you think? Would you classify it as a common or as a proper noun?’

Watkin, Pugin and Pevsner resemble the major protagonists in this work in that their interactions have been dialectical, there have been no secure restingplaces, and all any of them have been able to do, in face of the diffusion of intellectual authority and the dilapidation of the religious instinct, has been to allow rhetoric to recommend assertion. In the concluding section, the author will make his own contribution to assertion.

25 The author and the argument

Scholarship . . . is the product of personal temperament and what it brings . . . is only temperament returned to temperament in the form of an embodied activity. (Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, 1952, p. 330) So soon as a thing can be demonstrated, the whole flavour of religion leaves it, and the mystery retires one step backward into the shadow of the incomprehensible. (Sir Alfred Lyall, Letters from Vamadeo Shastri, 1885, in Asiatic Studies, 1899, second series, pp. 38–9) A beautiful lady I once knew told me that when she was a girl at a convent, she was taken to an aged nun who was dying. The nun had given her entire long life to Catholic observances, and all she could think of saying on her death bed was ‘Goodness, I shall look a fool if it isn’t true.’ (Auberon Waugh, The Spectator, 4 December 1976)

An historical work rests, as F. H. Bradley pointed out in The Presuppositions of Critical History, on prejudications of what could have been the case. But Bradley’s idea may be extended; it may be argued that all writing rests on prejudications not only of what could have been, or can be, the case but also of what should have been, or should be, the case. To say this is to acknowledge that a book carries with it intuitions about what the world ought to be like, judgements about what the world is like and the assumption that the world deserves praise, or blame, for being what it is. Some of the prejudications involved in writing are obvious, and yield to straightforward analysis. Others are concealed by the silent persuasion insinuated by style and manner which conceals within the folds of every writer’s literary garments judgements, compliant, complacent, resentful or consecratory, implying an attitude to existence and demanding of criticism that it prods at the inviolability of an author’s defences. This work is both personal and impersonal. It could not have been written without the evidences of England’s religious dilapidation which the author found in himself at an early stage and has never really lost sight of. But equally it could not have been written if these evidences had not been transmuted (by embarrassment as much as by historical duty) into literary, historical impersonality. Religion and Public Doctrine transposes into critical history the tension between the prejudices, prejudications and experiences of its hundred-andtwenty or so subjects and the prejudices, prejudications and experiences of the 694

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numerous thinkers by whom the author’s mind has been formed. It is not intended to be, however, and is not, a definitive history of English thought between Burke and Eagleton. Rather it shows that schools of English thought since Burke and Gibbon have been distinguished from one another by unargued assumptions, that these have raised pyramids of belief which have glowered at each other across the suburbs, and that the glowering has been about culture in the broadest sense, with Christianity being both battleground and victim, and post-Christian assumptions and beliefs having for the moment subverted Christian assumptions and beliefs. In examining the religious opinions which have been held in England since the late eighteenth century, it might have seemed desirable to adopt a chronological method, to have given closer attention to the development of opinion in Scotland, Ireland and Wales and to have given greater weight to thinkers of power and authority in the State-Church system through which, since the Reformation, the primary English disclosure of Christianity has been made. Up to the Industrial Revolution, the Church of England was one of the chief centres of the nation’s intellectuality. Since the Industrial Revolution, its centrality has receded, and the problem for statesmen and churchmen has been to know what to do about its establishment. Some reactions have been described in these volumes. But the main argument in these volumes has been less about the Church of England than about the process by which the Christian intellect, including the dissenting intellect, has trickled away into mystical secularity, secular indifference or ‘the liberalism of all reasonable men’. The decision to avoid chronology is deliberate since, in populous modern societies, where printing and its successors are universal, opinions which have been enunciated severally over the decades jostle together so much without regard to the chronology of their provenance that one may properly speak of the historic English mind taking shape in the blur and fog of an undiscriminating contemporaneity. So far as Scotland, Ireland and Wales are concerned, comparison with England would be instructive, and a handful of Irish and Scottish thinkers has, indeed, been discussed at length for their contribution to English thought. These, however, have emerged from intellectual processes which began in Scotland in the sixteenth century and in Ireland in the seventeenth century, and differ as much from the intellectual processes through which modern thought has emerged in England as from the processes through which modern thought has emerged in Wales. Moreover, though it would have been instructive to exclude thinkers who have failed to marry practice to theory, to do so would have been to limit discussion to thinkers who have exercised power, where Religion and Public Doctrine has selected thinkers for discussion not because they have exercised power, but because, like Burke, Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury, Temple, Westcott, MacDonald, Joseph Chamberlain

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and others, even when they have exercised power they have also made it their business to lead the argument. The discontinuity between leading the argument and exercising power has been the occasion for much cynicism about politics, including ecclesiastical and ideological politics. But cynicism is inappropriate, discontinuity is unavoidable, the mentalities out of which theory emerges are inseparable from the mentalities out of which practice emerges and ‘the gods that fail’ fail because of the excessive expectations which theory calls on them to bear. As a work of critical exposition, Religion and Public Doctrine assumes that post- and anti-Christian opinions are neither obviously superior to, nor are obviously more coherent than, the opinions they have defeated. Critical exposition, when conducted with even a minimum of empathy, however, leaves the impression, that an author is hiding behind the thinkers whose thoughts he is expounding and requires explicitness in justifying the possibilities to which he is persuading – the possibility, in Religion and Public Doctrine, of a history of religion in which religion is not reduced to something else, of an account of contemporary culture in which religion is the central feature, and of a parallel to the success historians have had in bringing ecclesiastical history out of its ghetto by success in bringing both ‘progress’ and secular history out of their ghettos. To bring progress out of its ghetto implies that change may be regressive, that revivals and reactions, while ostensibly rooted in the past, in fact transform the past. To bring secular history out of its ghetto implies that it is in a ghetto, that the secular, while revealing unexpected visions of man’s future, has restored the sacred to centrality by permitting the secular to reproduce the claims which have long been made in the name of the sacred. Though there has in these volumes been a comparative absence of theology, this does not imply a diminution of theology’s significance. It is because theology ought to be, but is not, central that it has been necessary to proceed deviously, to give primary attention to literature, criticism, politics, philosophy, history, poetry and science, and to recognize in all of these evidence of the deliquescence of Christianity. All the thinkers discussed in these volumes have engaged with this deliquescence, but not all have been equally explicit about their engagement. Thinkers who have been been explicitly anti-Christian,1 have had the arbitrariness of their ‘truths’ displayed for inspection. Thinkers who have been post- or antiChristian mainly by implication2 have had their ostentatiously neutral but indubitable certainties dug out for inspection, while a number of thinkers who 11

12

E.g. Galton, Buckle, Harrison, Reade, Pearson, Ellis, Forster, Tyndall, Leslie Stephen, Morley, Shaw, Wells, Spencer, Hobhouse, Bosanquet, A. C. Bradley, Russell, Murray, Parry, Dawkins, D. H. Lawrence, Richards and Skinner. E.g. Maitland, F. J. Stephen, Leavis, Popper, Maugham, Keynes, Williams and Hayek, to whom Hampshire would have been added if he had been discussed at length.

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now look less friendly to Christianity than they once looked,3 have been shown assuming, or sliding insensibly into, a post-Christian mode. It is only in dealing with a couple of dozen thinkers4 that the reader will detect anything resembling sympathy, not so much because the author identifies himself with them, even less, in some cases, because he shares either their intensity or their political opinions but because they were enemies of the opinions of which he wishes to be the enemy. Against all these thinkers, apart from this couple of dozen, this work puts question marks: against some because they did not realize that they were subverting Christianity; against others because the religions with which they were subverting it were innocently humanistic, unsubtly positivistic or insensitively secular; against almost all of them because they were indifferent to the loss involved in the transition they were assisting at. The loss is the loss both of God’s and the Church’s psychological reassurance and an uncertainty in the historic English personality which has made coherent feeling difficult to maintain, has flooded the providential causeway which divides dignity and cosmic confidence from hopelessness, boredom and despair and has made it even more desirable to achieve a reconstruction of the soul than to achieve a reconstruction of thought. II It may seem odd, as the churches have emptied, to treat a history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English thought as the site of a religious conflict. Yet this is how it has to be treated if the contingent character of the conflict between Christianity and its enemies is to be understood and both Christianity and secularity are to be rescued from the naïve optimism which is Christianity’s temptation and was secularity’s natural posture until eugenics, intellectual pessimism and mass slaughter deprived optimism of its justification. Christianity, once liberated from the historical Jesus, has no simple message, preaches no simple gospel and discloses no simple God. It is subtle, pauline and casuistical, is a counsel of unattainable perfection and is so before it is morally ameliorative. It is neither dazzled by secular virtue and improvement, nor surprised by vanity, depravity or duplicity. It makes an Augustinian acknowledgement of sin and a quasi-Pelagian denial of sin’s irreversibility; it is capable of understanding the public world in real-political terms and the soul’s private 13 14

E.g. early Kipling, early Wordsworth, Ruskin, Toynbee, Whitehead, Oakeshott and Scruton. E.g. Burke, Bishop Wilberforce, Mansel, Newman, Gladstone, Stubbs, Salisbury, Church, Manning, Pusey, Liddon, W. G. Ward, Forsyth, Dawson, T. S. Eliot, Milbank, Mallock, Belloc, Chesterton, Waugh, Knowles, Powell, Norman, MacIntyre and some of the thinkers discussed in volume I, to whom should be added at their varying levels of articulation, J. B. Mozley, Haddan, Hoskyns, Douglas Jerrold and Muggeridge in his final phase.

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world in the terms of its psychological ambiguity; and it avoids the naïve pieties to which subtlety, casuistry and deviousness are obstacles. In an age when theology has been submerged and prayer is no longer a reality, it can best be approached through a Christian literature as the only plausible link between historic orthodoxy and any orthodoxy which is likely to command the future. A Christian literature is neither liturgy nor revelation. It transcends whimsy, Protestant aggression and fear of secularity. It takes existence as it finds it, denies that Christianity has to transform it and disposes of the idea that Christian faith is so much a matter of hunch or conversion that it can do without intellectuality. Christianity is a matter of hunch and can be a matter of conversion. But conversion involves a forcing of the will and the danger of insincerity where what is desirable is an habitual sensibility which operates without strain and tension, and, above all, avoids self-consciousness. How Christianity, or any evangelical religion, can avoid self-consciousness is a problem of the greatest difficulty. The habitual sensibility in contemporary England is post-Christian or anti-Christian, will require both intellectual effort and an effort of the will if it is to be modified and imposes on Christian converts and apologists a duty of persuasive contortion which is as alien as it is possible to be from the habitual catholicity which must be Christianity’s goal. Christianity in its ideal forms is both cautious and ambivalent and transcends mere moralism as much as it transcends evangelical conversion. It has at its core a sympathy which issues not only in a concern about poverty but also in a celebration of wealth. Psychological and sexual aberration may attract sympathy but so also may psychological and sexual normality. A criminal may be Christian, but so may the citizen who wishes to put him in prison. A Christian society may be imagined from which poverty and psychological and sexual abnormality have been eliminated, but Christianity has to operate in a world where aberrations, inequalities and abnormalities exist and Christian sympathy should neither subvert the duty to judge, allow judgement to be blunted by standing above the battle, nor attempt to deny the compatibility between Christianity and the pursuit of personal and national interests, the acquisition of personal and public power and the attempt to externalize prejudice and opinion in the laws, customs and institutions from which public power is derived. Bunsen once wrote of apostolic Christianity that it had ‘rolled uninterruptedly through eighteen centuries’. What in truth has rolled uninterruptedly through at least fifteen centuries has been Catholic, ecclesiastical Christianity. It is this which is Christianity, which gives Christianity such continuity as it has in the salvation of souls and the evaluation of civilizations, and which has had as its problem for the last two hundred years to know its own mind, to understand the difference between its own mind and the secular mind and to address the secular mind while yet anathematizing the heresies which have been conjured up by separating out and exaggerating the centrality of specified aspects of a fragmented orthodoxy.

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Orthodoxy implies the possibility of dignified public behaviour, social respectability as the upholder of morality and fluctuations in the content of morality as embodying fluctuating respectabilities. Defence of orthodoxy sometimes requires categorical directness, sometimes cynical disingenuousness, sometimes a decent, intellectual normality. At all times it requires a silent effort of the will, and acceptance of mysteries (or presuppositions) which, though they do not have to be explained, do have to be related to conduct, belief and understanding. It also requires the presence of dignified public institutions, including, where possible a Christian State as well as a visible literature and visible schools and universities carrying knowledge of Christian doctrine, practice and sensibility across the centuries. Whether the Church should or should not be established, whether the universities should or should not be ‘confessional’, whether the Church should aim primarily to identify itself with society, to influence society, or to preserve itself against society, are matters of mechanism, opportunity and organization. What is not a matter of mechanism, opportunity and organization is that the priesthood is a necessary institution which has in some sense to be based on belief in what it practises and that the Church not only stands in a complicated relationship to secular authorities but also embodies the conviction that civilization’s lay activities need an autonomy which does not diminish their Christian character. Christianity’s intellectual role, lay as much as ecclesiastical, is to differentiate itself from modern secularism as it differentiated itself from Jewish and Roman thought in the Roman Empire, Islamic thought in the Middle Ages, Renaissance paganism in the sixteenth century, and Enlightenment, and Romantic and post-Romantic, thought thereafter. It may be fertilized or infected by differentiation. But the reason why differentiation is a duty is that without it, immortality, judgement, heaven and hell will be lost, and the comfort, continuity and ambiguity of a non-fanatical religion will yield to a silent secularity if it does not yield to a militant secularity. In words which were to become famous in his generation, Sir Isaiah Berlin deduced from humanity’s ‘crooked’ character both the undesirability and the impossibility of straightening humanity’s ‘timber’. Yet Christianity aims to bring sympathetic understanding to man’s dissonances and to the unavoidable tensions in his character, even when it does so without very much expectation and in full awareness of the difficulties, whether within the looser discipline of Catholicism, the tighter discipline of Calvinism, or the bland decencies of unfanatical respectability.

Religion and Public Doctrine deals not with the silent majority, but with the intelligentsia whose literature the silent majority does not read. It tells a simple story of uncertainty and self-deception and has a simple message –

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that, though the ways in which Christianity may be justified once it has been arrived at may vary according to the circumstances, what cannot be varied is the prior engagement, without which no analysis, no judgement of past and present, no apologetic, no rationality, and no literature can be Christian. It may seem that the aim in this work is to condemn Christian thinkers who have capitulated to secular infidelity. Such is not the case. Religion and Public Doctrine is written in sadness rather than condemnation, in the shadow of a carelessness about a manifest vocation and with a wish to repay some part of the debt which carelessness has incurred. Literary sincerity is a problematical quality and authors who achieve it are very fortunate. Though the present author has not achieved it, the connections between his own development and the argument in Religion and Public Doctrine are very close, the latter being little more (to borrow Chaudhuri’s formulation) than an objective embodiment of that selection from the experience of the age to which he has been subject. In spite of being a Londoner during Hitler’s bombardment of London and an officer subsequently in two of the armies of the British Empire, the author’s experience has been unviolent, cushioned and uneventful. As an officer and officer cadet, he did not feel that he had been trained to kill or be killed; he would not have known what to do in a battle-situation; to him the army seemed like a meritocratic privilege or Galtonian bursary5 which hastened the complicated self-development in which he had been engaged from the time he went to Cambridge. There, though obviously a meritocrat but very young, he was so far from being self-consciously meritocratic that he acquired chiefly the negative complications which historical cynicism and ecclesiastical Christianity are both able to create for secular meritocracies and experienced the complications involved in entrenching in even the willing mind sufficient assent to Christianity, and sufficient conviction of its normality, without the anguish and agony of conversion. A religion ought to be habitual and ought not to involve the selfconsciousness inseparable from conversion. What Christianity requires is a second-generation sensibility in which the oddness and arbitrariness of Christianity’s doctrines are so much taken for granted that struggle has ceased to be of Christianity’s essence. This is not a situation which can easily be achieved in the contemporary world; indeed, the religions which can most easily avoid self-consciousness in the contemporary world are the secular religions which are absorbed at the mother’s knee or from the mother’s television set. It is difficult to see how this can be changed short of widespread crisis, extensive self-conversion or the slow influence which might be exerted by a Christian literature. Christianity is a matter of hunch or commitment. But it is as true in the 15

For Galtonian bursaries, see above p. 393.

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twenty-first century as it was in the twelfth that the connection between faith, intellectuality, knowledge and practice is complicated, that intellectuality is at Christianity’s heart as it is at the heart of any religion and that, without it, both high thought and low thought will be deprived of the fulfilment which what should be done finds in what should be thought and what should be thought in what should be done. This work does not explain what should be done. It hints at what should be thought by explaining what should not be thought. In addressing a world where reading, viewing and reflecting are more central than prayer or worship, it follows the most accessible route by which orthodoxy may be restored. Orthodoxy neither can be, nor should be, translated into ‘modern thought’. Its role is to feed on its own roots. In doing so, it may borrow some of the fashions of the world around it; and it may be stubborn or humble, commanding or contemptuous, according to the mind and manner of the society in which it appears. But the reason why it has had to become ecclesiastical, and the reason why the confessional university (as the remnant of a Christian state) is an important conception is that, without it, orthodoxy will run away into secularity, privacy or subjectivity. In its educated forms, orthodoxy implies social respectability as the upholder of morality, fluctuations in the content of morality as being determined by fluctuating respectabilities and the main Christian doctrines as being mysteries which are not subject to historical investigation and do not have to be demystified. It also involves the risk, taken by English Evangelicals and some English Tractarians, of making Christianity seem contentious and unreasonable and secularity reasonable and uncontentious. Religion and Public Doctrine makes no prediction, is sensible of its limitations, and recognizes that the Christian phase of European civilization may be over. What it also does, however, is observe analytically that secularization is a phase of intelligentsia life, that it would be absurd to assume its permanence and that the instinct for religion which lurks beneath the indifference of the public mind, may yet surprise by its willingness to be led astray by Christianity.

Notes

Where a work is mentioned in these endnotes without the name of its author, it is the work of the subject of the section in which the endnote occurs. Where a work has been used very extensively, page references have sometimes been omitted. Introduction, pp. xv–xxiv For F. M. Cornford see Thucydides Mythistoricus 1907, pp. vii and viii–xii; Religion in The University 1911, p. 2; Compulsory Chapel 1904, p. 4; and From Religion To Philosophy 1912, pp. v–xi. For T. K. Cheyne on the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ history see The Origins and Religious Content of The Psalter (1889) 1891, p. v. For Haeckel, see Ernst Haeckel The Riddle of The Universe 1898–9, Thinkers Library edition, p. 311. For Bishop Wilberforce, see esp. Essays Contributed to the Quarterly Review 1874 and D. Newsome, The Parting of the Ways 1966. For Bishop Headlam, see esp. History, Authority and Theology 1909; The Church of England 1924; and Christian Theology 1940. For A. E. Taylor see The Novels of Mark Rutherford in Essays and Studies V 1914, The Vindication of Religion in (Selwyn ed.), Essays Catholic and Critical 1926; The Faith of A Moralist 1930; and Does God Exist? 1945. For the 2nd Viscount Hailsham see The Door Wherein I Went 1975. For the 1st Earl of Selborne see Inaugural Address . . . at the University of St Andrews 1878; A Defence of The Church of England Against Disestablishment 1886; Memorials of Roundell Palmer 1896–8; and Letters to His Son on Religion 1898. For R. W. Dale see Nine Letters on Preaching 1877; The Living Christ and the Four Gospels 1890; and A. W. W. Dale, The Life of R. W. Dale of Birmingham (1899 edn). For the 8th Duke of Argyll see The Reign of Law 1867; Primaeval Man 1869; The Unity of Nature 1884; The Unseen Foundations of Society 1893; and Autobiography and Memoirs 1906. For A. M. Fairbairn see Studies in the Philosophy of Religion and History 1876; Christ in Modern Theology 1893; Catholicism Roman and Anglican 1899; the Philosophy of the Christian Religion 1902; and Studies in Religion and Theology 1910. For Dean Church see esp. R. W. Church, The Gifts of Civilization 1886. pp. 4–12 (Carlyle) For Carlyle on literature see The Life of Friedrich Schiller 1825 (1845), pp. 2, 54–5, 61, 67, 113, 126, 138, 141–3, 238, 246 and 250, The State of German Literature 1827, J. P. F. Richter 1827, Goethe 1828, Goethe’s Helena 1828, Life and Writings of Werner 1828, and Voltaire 1829, all in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays I 1899, pp. 8, 11, 14, 22, 34–6, 42–3, 54–68, 74, 78, 83, 137–8, 152–3, 159–62, 195, 200, 202–4, 207–8, 215, 218–22, 243, 398–401, 410, 414, 416, 418–23, 426, 435, 449–50, 458 and 462–3. See also (Sline, ed.) Carlyle’s Unfinished History of German Literature 1830 (1873); Novalis and Signs of the Times both 1829 in Critical and Miscellaneous

702

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703

Essays II, pp. 26ff., 52–5, 58–9 and 76–7; preface to first edn of Wilhelm Meister 1824 (Everyman edn), p. 7; and Lectures on the History of Literature 1838 (1892 edn), pp. 1, 48, 74, 95, 151, 168–79, 181–2, 192–3 and 205. For Emerson on Sartor Resartus see J. Slater, Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle 1964, p. 16. For Carlyle on modern politics and religion see The French Revolution 1837 (1885 edn) I, pp. 5, 7–21, 25, 27, 30–4, 48, 51, 53, 127, 140, 149, 168, 180–7, 206–7, 218, 288–9, 338–45, 369–72, 408–9, 513–14 and 526–7, and II pp. 1, 15, 32–3, 60, 66–7, 73, 94–5, 146–9, 176, 185, 200, 216, 218, 238–9 and 247; Chartism 1839 (1899 edn) pp. 118, 122, 124ff., 130–3, 145, 151–2, 154–5; 160–4, 189–90, 192–204 and ch. 4; Past and Present 1843 (1897 edn), pp. 7–10, 13–14, 18, 28, 32, 34, 43, 59–62, 66–7, 75–6, 82–3, 85–6, 88, 92, 115, 117, 136–7, 139, 142, 146–7, 151–3 155–64, 166–8, 175–6, 181, 184, 196–7, 200–1, 211ff., 219, 228–9, 240, 242, 246, 250, 271–8 and chs. 4 and 5; On Heroes and Hero Worship 1840 (1908 edn) pp. 239, 240, 242, 246, 249, 252, 278, 280–1, 289–91, 296–8, 307, 310–11, 314–17, 338–9, 343, 346–8, 350–1, 353, 355–8, 364, 367, 374, 383–92, 394–8, 403, 422–3, 425, 429–32, 435, 441, 444–7 and 452–3. See also The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell 1845 (1897 edn) I, pp. 4, 12–13, 51, 59, 80–1, 260 and 264–5, II, pp. 52–3 III, pp. 2 and 73 and IV, p. 184; see also J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, A History of The First Forty Years of His Life 1882 (1914 edn). pp. 12–15, 21–3 (Froude) For Froude’s later opinions see J. P. van Arx, Progress and Pessimism 1985, chapter 5. For Froude on the significance of the colonies, see Oceana 1886, pp. 8–10, 13 and 38, England and Her Colonies and The Colonies Once More in Short Studies on Great Subjects 1871, pp. 155, 158, 160–1, 169–71, 175, 288–90, 295–6, 304, 306 and 312. For Froude’s development up to 1856 see W. H. Dunn, James Anthony Froude, A Biography 1818–1856 I, pp. 62–7, 72–85, 93–101, 104–11 and chs. 15 and 16. See also The Nemesis of Faith 1849 (1904 edn), pp. 6–9, 12–14, 16, 18–19, 24–31, 36–7, 44–7, 50–1, 60–1, 68–80, 96, 113–16, 177 and 248, and preface to 2nd edn 1849, pp. xlv–xlix, lii–liii and lv; Representative Men 1850, England’s Forgotten Worthies 1852 and The Book of Job 1853, all in Short Studies on Great Subjects I 1867 (1905 edn), pp. 324–5, 330–1, 336, 338, 443–500, 583–95 and 601. For Froude as an historian, see especially The History of England From The Fall of Wolsey To The Defeat of The Spanish Armada (1870 edn) I 1856, preface and pp. 2, 13, 14, 18, 30, 57, 61, 89–90, 95, 99, 108, 164–5, 168–70, 310, 414, 418–19, 476, 481–91, 493–6, 502–6, 510–12 and 589, II 1856, pp. 122–3, 132–3, 206, 216–17, 236, 277, 297 and 348–9, VI 1860, pp. 114 and 150, VII 1863, pp. 5, 10 and 358ff., VIII 1863 pp. 58–9, 187–9, 263, 335ff., 476ff., 512ff., 520–6, IX 1866, pp. 4, 156 and 220–1, X 1866, pp. 72–4, 114–15, 120ff., 194, 316ff., 412–14, 462, 480–502 and XII 1870, pp. 476–82, 486, 497–502 and 508. pp. 15–21 (Kingsley) For Kingsley’s life see S. Chitty, The Beast and the Monk 1975, pp. 53, 59 and 104. For Kingsley and muscular Christianity see Owen Chadwick, Charles Kingsley at Cambridge in Historical Journal 1975, pp. 322–3. For Max Müller’s embarrasment see The Roman and The Teuton (Max Müller ed.), 1875, pp. x–xi. For Kingsley and Newman see Mr Kingsley and Dr Newman:A Correspondence 1864; and J. H. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua 1864. For Kingsley as an historian, see review of Froude’s History of England I and II in Miscellanies II 1860, pp. 25ff. and of VII and VIII in Macmillan’s Magazine January 1864, pp. 211ff.; Three Lectures on The Ancien Régime 1867, pp. v–ix, xv, xx, xxiv, 1–3, 5–6, 23–4, 26–32, 50–1, 70, 72–3, 95–107 and 126–7; and Alexandria and Her Schools 1854, pp. x–xiii, xix, 29, 32, 43, 56–65, 70ff.,

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82–5, 100–1, 103–4, 107–8, 112–14, 126–9, 131, 135, 137–40, 150–1, 155–6, 160 and 170–2. See also The Roman and the Teuton pp. 68 and 321–40. For Kingsley on poetry and literature see Tennyson 1850 in Miscellanies I 1860, pp. 215, 218–19, 221, 226 and 232–3; English Literature 1848 in Literary and General Lectures and Essays 1880 (1890 edn), pp. 248–9, 255–9 and 261–5; and Burns and His School 1833–48, Thoughts on Shelley and Byron 1853 and Alexander Smith and Alexander Pope 1853, all in Miscellanies I 1860, pp. 297ff., 305–11, 366, 369, 371 and 379. See also The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich and Tennyson’s Maud in Frazer’s Magazine January 1849, pp. 103–7 and September 1855, pp. 265–73. For Kingsley as ideological novelist, see Westward Ho! 1855 (Nelson edn), pp. 7, 10–11, 16, 143, 145, 159–61, 216, 264–5, 309–31, 364, 420–1, 446, 453–4, 483–5, 498–505, 510–12, 522–32, 541, 555, 608–9, 611, 647, 657, 668, 675, 679–83, 685, 690–1 and ch. ix; Hypatia 1853 (1881 edn) I, pp. 77, 103–5, 114, 127, 154–7 and 186–7 and II, pp. 44–5, 320–32 and 334; Yeast A Problem (1848–9) 1851, pp. 3–4, 22, 29, 31–2, 33–7, 47–9, 60, 64, 77–9, 94, 96ff., 100ff., 103, 110, 115ff., 124–5, 146, 158, 160–5, 183–4, 204, 210, 213ff., 216, 221, 227–9, 235–7, 240–3, 246, 253–5, 277, 281, 308–13, 319–40 and ch. xvi (also preface to 1st edn 1851, pp. xv–xvii and to 4th edn 1859, pp. iv–vii); Alton Locke Tailor and Poet 1850 I, pp. 44–56, 66–9, 71–2, 75, 116, 118–19, 122, 134–5, 145, 151, 163, 199–200, 205, 225–46, 251–5, 280–3, and 288 and II, pp. 4, 12, 24–5, 29, 45–7, 60–3, 65–9, 134, 140–1, 155–77, 204ff., 246–7, 249, 251–3, 255–6, 263–5, 273–7, 282, 284–5 and chs. vii and viii. See also The Water Supply of London 1850 in Miscellanies II 1860, p. 236; and The Sailors’ God 1843, in True Words For Brave Men (1890 edn), pp. 173–8. pp. 25–35 (Burke) For Burke on India, Ireland, Europe and England after 1789 see The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Cobban and Smith, eds.), VI 1967, pp. 24–5, 29–33, 36–7, 40–50, 78–84, 92–3, 101–9, 145–9, 170–3, 176–80, 192–3, 203–5, 210–19, 234–6, 240–3, 265–70, 289–94, 315–18, 330–4, 340–1, 353, 384–5, 415–22, 449–53 and 457–61; (Marshall and Woods, eds.), VII 1968, pp. 8–11, 42–3, 60–3, 143–4, 157–60, 189–93, 208–10, 219–21, 227–8, 232–3, 276–7, 304–19, 344, 388–93, 421–3, 428–38, 460, 485 and 517–22; and (McDowell ed.), VIII 1969, pp. 3–6, 24–5, 35–47, 78–81, 103–5, 113–14, 127–33, 144–7, 164–7, 188–91, 199–205, 213–15, 238–9, 242–50, 252–7, 299–305, 330–1, 337–51 and 425–35. Substance of the Speech on The Army Estimates 1790 in [The] Works [of The Rt Honourable Edmund Burke 1826] V, pp. 4–21; Thoughts on French Affairs 1791 and Letter to Hon. William Elliot 1795, both in Works VII, pp. 12–25, 46–7, 56–8, 72–80, 82–5 and 362–5; A Letter to A Member of The National Assembly 1791 in Works VI, pp. 4–5, 8–9, 14–15, 18–21, 28–31, 38–9 and 46–9; and Appeal From the New to the Old Whigs 1791 in Works VII, pp. 74–5, 82–5, 89–90, 97–8, 130–3, 148–9, 163–6, 200–3, 213–19 and 233–42. A Letter from the Rt Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord 1796 and Three Letters . . . on The Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France 1796–7, both in Works VIII, pp. 5–6, 13–16, 33–9, 49–64, 82–3, 92–101, 108–16, 138–45, 166–92, 213–65, 316–20, 348–52 and 417–20; and Letter IV To Earl Fitzwilliam in Works IX, pp. 9–12, 26–7, 31–3, 49–51, 56–7, 100–2 and 120–7. Speech of Mr Burke on The Impeachment of Warren Hastings Esq. 1788 in Works XIII, pp. 11–17, 68–72, 152–3, 164–80, 252–4, 319–23 and 402–5, Burke’s Speech on the Sixth Charge 1789 in Works XIV, pp. 4–8, 40–2, 90–4, 111–12, 174–6, 241–3 and 274–79; and Speech on The Impeachment of Warren Hastings Esq. 1794 in Works XV, pp. 29–34, 58–9, 70–91, 100–9, 124–6, 196–9, 281–5, 345–7 and 404–5. See also Reflections on The Revolution in France 1790 in Works V, pp. 29–38, 56–60, 86–95, 108–14, 124–31, 148–53,

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173–96, 224–7, 255–61, 270–84, 304–7, 399–405, 420–1 and 437–8. For Burke on religion, art and politics before 1789 see A Vindication of Natural Society 1756 and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful 1756–7, both in Works I, pp. 2–14, 29–34, 52–4, 59–60, 67–8, 78–9, 105, 130, 132–3, 140, 149, 152–77, 226–31 and 256; Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland (c.1765) in Works IX, pp. 325–43, 359–60 and 398, Speech on Mr Fox’s EastIndia Bill 1783 and Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Private Debts 1785, both in Works IV, pp. 11–21, 38–43 and 202–9; and Observations on A Late Publication Intituled The Present State of the Nation 1769 and Thoughts on The Cause of The Present Discontents 1770, both in Works II. pp. 35–44 (Disraeli) For Disraeli’s early life and opinions, see Robert Blake, Disraeli 1966, W. F. Monypenny, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli I and II 1910 and 1912; J. R. Vincent, Disraeli 1990; James Ogdon, Isaac Disraeli 1969, and (Robertson ed.), Tales and Introductions by Rt. Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield 1891. For Disraeli’s politics before 1850 see especially What is He? 1833 p.17; Peers and People 1835, pp. 42–3, 58, 60–3, 65, 72–5, 80, 85, 91–2, 94–5, 102–3 and 109–10, The Letters of Runnymede 1836, pp. 234–5, 238–9, 256, 264, 266, 271–2, 275, 277–9, 290, 298–9, 307, 311–15 and 324; The Spirit of Whiggism 1836, pp. 330–5, 344 and 346–51; Open Letters 1837–41, pp. 360, 363, 366, 371–2 and 374–6; and Vindication of The English Constitution 1835, pp. 112–14, 118–26, 128–30, 134, 136–7, 139–43, 145–6, 148–51, 154, 158, 160, 163–4, 169–71, 173, 176, 178–9, 181–4, 189, 191–3 and 200–3, all in W. Hutcheon, Whigs and Whiggism 1913; (Henderson and Matthews eds.), Cherry and Fair Straw (i.e. A Year at Hartlebury) 1983; The Voyage of Captain Popanilla 1828 (1891 edn), pp. 60ff.; (Kebbel ed.), Selected Speeches of The Late Right Honourable Earl of Beaconsfield 1882 I, pp. 29–30 and 38–57 and II, pp. 275ff. Coningsby or The New Generation 1844 (1881 edn) preface and pp. 5, 10, 24–5, 40, 52, 82–4, 87, 103, 105, 107, 123–5, 133–4, 146–7, 164–5, 170–1, 232–3, 257, 263–6, 271–85, 297, 323–4, 351–4, 356–9, 407–10, 442–63, 466–8 and 476–7; and Sybil or The Two Nations 1845 (1881 edn), Advertisement, pp. 50, 54–5, 58–9, 60–3, 69–74, 75–9, 90–3, 96, 114–15, 123–4, 125–7, 129–30, 133, 143–4, 152–3, 155–6, 159, 172–5, 186–9, 198–9, 207–8, 210, 214, 283–4, 319, 323, 327, 329, 332, 339, 350, 372, 387–8, 395, 421, 423, 428, 436, 439–40, 453, 460, 474–7, 481–5 and 487. For Disraeli’s religion up to 1850 see Tancred; or The New Crusade 1847 (1881 edn), pp. 48–9, 51, 53–5, 62, 69, 74, 109–10, 124–5, 131–2, 162, 166, 188–9, 201–2, 251, 253, 260–1, 264–6, 289–91, 295, 299–300, 309–10, 336, 342, 367, 389–90 and 428; and Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography 1852 (1872 edn), pp. 218–31, 345–6, 348, 350–4, 356–8, 360–1 and 363. pp. 46–7, 51–5 (Thomas Arnold) For Arnold’s life and historical writing see A. P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold 1844 (1852 edn), pp. 158, 323ff., 457 and 464; A Memoir of Baron Bunsen by Frances Baroness Bunsen 1868 I, chs. 5 and 6 and pp. 468–73; History of Rome I 1838, pp. vi and ix, II 1840, p. viii and III 1843, pp. x–xii, Early Roman History in Quarterly Review June 1825, pp. 67–92, Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War 1830 I, pp. 616–18 and 1835 III, pp. viii–ix; and Introductory Lectures on Modern History 1842 (1874 edn), pp. 10–11, 23 and 28. For Arnold’s politics see Stanley, Life and Correspondence, pp. 195, 280 and 323 and Englishman’s Register 1831, Letters on The Social Condition of The Operative Classes 1831–2 and The Labourers of England 1831, all in (Stanley ed.), Miscellaneous Works

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1845, pp. 11–12, 111–12, 118, 126–30, 134–5, 137–8, 145–6, 159, 176–8, 208 and 210. For Arnold on the Bible and the Church of England see esp. The Christian Duty of Granting The Claims of Roman Catholics 1829, pp. vi–vii, 3–4, 12–13, 17, 22, 42–3, 52, 55, 63–8, 83–6, 92, 95, 98, 107–8 and 110, Our Object (1831) in Miscellaneous Works, pp. 118–19, (Jackson and Rogan) Principles of Church Reform 1833 (1962 ed), pp. 87, 90–1, 93–5, 98, 101, 103–7, 109, 111–20, 123–5, 141ff., 145 and 147–8, Fragment on The Church 1844, pp. 4–7, 12–13, 15–20, 33, 41, 46–50, 56, 60–116 and 120, Fragment on The Church 1845, pp. 7–39, Stanley Life and Correspondence, pp. 321, 457 and 578, Additional Notes to Thucydides’s History of The Peloponnesian War 1845, pp. 37–8, The Oxford Malignants and Dr Hampden in Edinburgh Review April 1836, pp. 234–5. See also Sermons 1829, pp. iv–vii and Sermons II 1832, pp. 425, 427–8, 431–4, 436–8, 440, 457–9, 462–4, 478 and 480–1. pp. 47–51 (Bunsen) For Hare on Niebuhr see A Vindication of Niebuhr’s History of Rome 1829, pp. 18, 21–2, 55 and 59–60. For Bunsen’s life see A Memoir of Baron Bunsen by Frances Baroness Bunsen 1868 I, pp. 2–5, 22–3, 29ff., 85–90, 178–83, 184–5, 273–92, 388, 397–8, 411, 452–3, 463–4, 498–500, 503, 512, 544, 564–5 and 634–5 and II, pp. 178–9, 185, 198, 206–9, 218, 224, 287 and 355. For Bunsen as Protestant, philologist and Egyptologist, see Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History Applied to Language and Religion 1854 I, pp. 3–6, 154–5 and 166–92 and (1854 edn) II, pp. x–xv, 21–121, 134–51, 199–261 and 299–336; Egypt’s Place in Universal History 1845–57 esp. I, pp. xii–xli, 34 and 442–8, III (1859 edn), pp. xxvii–xxviii, IV 1855 (1860 edn), pp. 18, 27, 64–78, 84–5, 311, 636–41, 646–7, 649–52, 655–6, 663–4, 696–9 and V, pp. 100ff.; God in History I 1857–8 (1868 edn), pp. 5–8, 14–16, 27, 42–4, 46–7 and 59; The Five Letters to Archdeacon Hare (1851) in Hippolytus and his Age I, 1852 pp. ii–xxii, 3–29, 142–98 and 328–38, II 1852, pp. 3–78, 84–5, 88–90, 92, 98, 103–5 and 111–17 and III 1852, pp. 218–52. For The Apology of Hippolytus Addressed to the People of England see Christianity and Mankind II 1854, pp. 265–327. See also The Constitution of the Church of the Future 1845 (1847 edn). pp. 56–61 (Jowett) For Jowett’s opinions see (Abbott and Campbell eds.), Letters of Benjamin Jowett 1899, pp. 2, 6, 8–13, 19–23, 38, 41–2, 61 and 161; and Abbott and Campbell, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett 1897 I, pp. 45–51, 60–1, 69, 74, 89–91, 100–1, 113–14, 118–20, 124, 131–2, 136–7, 141–3, 149–50, 152, 156–60, 163–8, 179, 189–94, 212, 223, 250–1, 260–3, 275–6, 346–8, 350, 362, 368, 372, 384, 389, 392–3, 410–11, 429, 433 and 441–3 and II, pp. 89 and 311–12. See also The Unworldly Kingdom 1882 in (Fremantle ed.), Sermons on Faith and Doctrine 1901, pp. 231–5, 238–43 and 245–8. For Jowett on Biblical criticism see On The Interpretation of Scripture in Essays and Reviews 1860 (1869 edn), pp. 407, 422–3, 452–8, 466 and 495–9; The Epistles of St Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans 1855 I, pp. 2–5, 8–9, 13–23, 28–30, 34, 76–80, 82–94, 99, 101, 104, 135, 193, 222–5, 230–4, 291, 327, 330, 334–42, 344 and 347, and II, pp. 4–7, 30–3, 36, 64–71, 88–92, 94, 96–9, 197–8, 203, 211, 214–15, 382–7, 392–3, 395–401, 412–19, 424, 426–36, 439, 446–7, 450–2, 456, 459–63, 465, 467, 468–71, 479–82, 484–5, 490–3, 496–8, 500 and 502–3. For Jowett’s Hellenism see The Dialogues of Plato 1871 I, pp. viii–ix, 111, 115, 175, 180–1, 298–9, 328, 330, 332, 361, 381–4, 388–91, 479–83, 485–7, 552, 554–5, 557–8, 619–21, 623, 646 and 648; II, pp. 1, 10, 20, 137–51, 158–9, 163, 471, 507–9, 511, 513 and 529–31; III, pp. 4, 26, 28–9, 30, 33, 133, 225, 235–41, 254–5, 328, 445, 456, 545, 563 and 569; and IV, pp. 11–18, 165 and 168; and The Politics of Aristotle 1885 I, pp. ix, xii–xiii,

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xxxvi–xxxvii, lxix, lxxxix, cviii and cxiii. For Campbell’s summaries of Jowett’s Christianity see Scripture and Truth: Dissertations by the late Benjamin Jowett 1907; Select Passages from the Theological Writings of Benjamin Jowett 1902; and Theological Essays of the late Benjamin Jowett 1906. pp. 55, 61–4 (Stanley) For Stanley as historian and Biblical critic see Sermons and Essays on the Apostolical Age 1847, pp. v, 8ff., 14–22, 31–45, 164ff., 179, 268–9 and 357; Lectures on the History of the Church of Scotland 1872 (1879 edn), pp. v–vi, x–xi, 5–6, 9, 11–15, 58–63, 60, 64–5, 83, 85, 96, 98, 105–12, 116, 122–4, 129, 144–52, 162, 168–72, 170, 185–7, 189–90, 193–4 and 198–201, The Epistles of St Paul to the Corinthians 1855 I, pp. 3–8, 14–17, 35, 37–45, 58, 60, 69–70, 73, 76–7, 95, 117–19, 271–3, 287–9, 301–4, 308–11, 326–30, 339–40, 342–3, 350, 358, 360–1, 383–4 and 398–400; and II, pp. 3, 22, 42–3, 49, 77–9, 122–4, 143–7, 183, 197, 211–13, 268–9, 289 and 295; Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church 1863–79 (1885 edn) I, [pp. 23–6], 16–17, 24–30, 32, 34, 114, 140–3, 158–9, 193, 195–6, 213, 220–3, 225–9, 242, 270–1, 273–7, 275, 295, 345, 354, 359, 381–4, 388–90, 395, 396–400, 416–18 and 420, II, pp. 14ff., 28–9, 121–35, 157ff., 308, 315–55, 359–63 and 444; and III, pp. [27–8], 29, 31, 39, 42, 123, 148, 168, 292ff. and 381; Historical Memorials of Canterbury 1854 (1906 edn), pp. 9, 16–20, 26–7, 32–6, 49, 121–2, 153–5 and 235–47, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (1857) 1861 (1894 edn), pp. 18–21, 24–7, 32, 34–6, 40–50, 55–6, 111, 144, 147, 174, 253, and 277; and Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History 1856, pp. xiv and 423–7. For Stanley as theologian and churchman see Sermons Preached Mostly in Canterbury Cathedral 1859, pp. v, vii, 10–14, 22–9, 32–41, 48–9, 51, 54, 61, 63–4, 66–7, 71–2, 75–87, 108–12, 114–15 and 127–9; A Letter on the State of Subscription in the Church of England and in the University of Oxford 1863, pp. 12, 17, 19, 24, 26 and 51, Freedom and Labour 1860, pp. 11–12, Church and Chapel 1881, pp. xix and xxvii–xxix; The Encouragement of Ordination: A Sermon 1864, pp. 14 and 19; and Sermon in Norwich Cathedral October 1855, pp. 8–9; Essays Chiefly on Questions of Church and State 1870, pp. vii–viii, xxv–xxviii, xxx, 11–12, 17, 20, 59ff., 70–1, 76, 84, 86–8, 90–2, 94, 117, 131–2, 134, 224–5, 238, 244–5, 255–60, 274–5, 286, 342–3, 347–54, 356–8, 363–5, 370–3, 452–6, 461–3, 465–73, 476, 480, 482–3 and 486–7; and Christian Institutions 1881, pp. 1–2, 5–8, 17–29, 40–1, 67–8, 87–8, 127–8, 137, 146–9, 164–5, 172–5, 183–5, 193–7, 201–8, 214, 224–5, 266–84 and 347–53. pp. 64–6, 70–4 (Max Müller) For Max Müller on Madam Blavatsky in 1893 see Last Essays 2nd Series 1901, pp. 79–133 and 156–70; on Kant see Translator’s Preface to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 1881, pp. xiii, xvi, xviii–xix, xxiv and xxxi; and on Lotze and Schopenhauer see The Science of Thought 1887, pp. vii–viii. For Lang on Max Müller see Fortnightly Review May 1873. For Whitney and Max Müller see Lady Max Müller The Life and Letters of Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Müller 1902 II, pp. 20–2 and Whitney’s Müller’s Rigveda and Commentary October 1876, pp. 4–22. For Max Müller on politics see Letters on the War by T. Mommsen, D. F. Strauss, F. Max Müller and T. Carlyle (1870) 1871, pp. 59–72; and speech at the Peace Festival May 1871 in Life and Letters II, pp. 447–50. For the future of university education see Inaugural Lecture (1868) in Chips [from a German Workshop] III 1894, pp. 111–18; and for the need to encourage oriental studies in England see Languages of the Seat of War 1854, pp. xi–xii. For Max Müller on language and religion, see Edinburgh Review October 1851, pp. 298–301, 305, 307–15 and 327; Letter on the Classification of the Turanian Languages n.d., pp. 3, 8, 213–14, 216–18 and 224–6; Comparative

708

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Mythology in Oxford Essays 1856, pp. 4–7, 12–13, 26, 32–3, 44, 47, 55 and 69; Introduction to the Science of Religion (1870 edn), 1873 (1897 ed), pp. ix, 1–5, 7, 12–21, 24, 27–9, 41–4, 50–5, 63–85, 87, 89, 94–101, 106, 123–7, 130–5, 137–42 and 187–259; Lectures on the Science of Language I 1861, pp. 1–5, 10, 12–13, 16, 18–22, 27, 29–31, 36–8, 40, 47, 49, 54, 56–7, 59, 62, 64, 71, 118–21, 126, 150–1, 157, 201, 233–4, 260–79, 313–14, 318–25, 327, 334–44, 364–5, 368–9 and 371–2; and II 1864 (1871 edn), pp. 13, 44–5, 47–8, 65–8, 73–4, 86–7, 109, 370–86, 391–2, 421–3, 428, 440–7, 452, 455–67, 572–4, 607–8, 610, 612–13, 616–20 and 627–9. On the Philosophy of Mythology 1871 in Chips IV 1895, pp. 164–5, 168–9 and 172; The Sacred Books of the East 1879 I, pp. ix–x and xx–xxi; A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature 1859, pp. 6, 12–15, 18–19, 28–31, 36–7, 49–58, 71–2, 74–8, 81–2, 258, 311–12, 316–17, 322–3, 338–9, 342, 389, 427–8, 432–4, 460–1, 488–9, 525–6 and 528, India, What Can It Teach Us 1883, pp. 5–6, 15, 17, 29, 34–5, 42, 47–8, 89, 95–101, 104–5, 107–8, 122–3, 125–40, 143–50, 162, 168–9, 174–5, 197, 202–8, 215–17, 239–40, 244, 246–53 and 337–8; Introduction to the Upanishads 1879, pp. lvii–lxv; Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion 1878, pp. 30–4, 46–7, 55–6, 66–7, 78–9, 97, 102–5, 136–8, 144, 146–58, 168–72, 178–81, 221, 235–45, 302–13, 316–17, 342–3, 362–7, 371–2 and 377–8; and Ramakrishna, His Life and Saying 1898, pp. vi, 2–5, 8–9, 11–13, 24, 29–30, 51, 59–63 and 66–70. Rigveda Sanhita, The Sacred Hymns of the Brahmans Together with the Commentary of Sayana Acharya III 1856, pp. vi–ix and IV 1862, p. lxxx; and Rigveda Sanhita Translated and Explained 1869 I, pp. xi–xiii. Selected Essays in Language, Mythology and Religion II 1881, pp. 236–45 and 402–3. Why I Am Not Agnostic 1894, and The Parliament of Religions at Chicago 1894, both in Last Essays, 2nd Series, pp. 326, 334–5 and 345–56; and Theosophy or Psychological Religion 1893, pp. v–xii, lxii–lxiv, 2–3, 46–9, 361–2, 365–6, 371–80, 399–422, 467–8, 478, 486–7, 499, 505, 510, 516, 518–19, 521–2, 526, 532, 534–5 and 541–2. pp. 66–9 (Lyall) For Lyall’s life see H. M. Durand, The Life of Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall 1913, pp. 32, 45, 77, 87–9, 92, 94–5, 106, 123, 153, 159–61, 164–5, 173–4, 181, 184, 258–9, 273, 304–5, 313, 354, 362–3, 426 and 428–31. For Lyall on Indian Religion, see Asiatic Studies 1882 (1899 edn) I, pp. 1–3, 5–7, 10–11, 289, 318–23 and 326–7; Letters From Vamadeo Shastri in Asiatic Studies 2nd Series 1899, pp. 1–2, 4–5, 18, 24, 71–2, 74 and 95–6; and Life and Speeches of Sir Henry Maine in Quarterly Review 1893, pp. 288, 296–7 and 300–2. For Lyall on literature see Tennyson 1902, pp. 8, 10–14, 15, 37–9, 64–8, 147–9 and 184–5; and The Works of Lord Byron 1900, Characteristics of Mr Swinburne’s Poetry; and The English Utilitarians, all in Studies in Literature and History 1915, pp. 182, 184–5, 208, 238–9 and 266–73. pp. 75–87 (Matthew Arnold) For Arnold’s life see Parc Honan, Matthew Arnold, A Life 1981, pp. 72–101, 112–13, 121–31, 153–4, 164–7, 197–207, 226–43, 270–1 and 360–73. For Arnold on education see Essays in Criticism 1865 (1886 edn), p. 11; The Popular Education of France 1861, pp. xii–xxv and xlv; Schools and Universities on the Continent 1868, pp. 257–9, 264–6 and 272–4; Friendship’s Garland (1866–8) 1871, pp. 57ff.; and A French Eton 1864, pp. 57, 60, 65, 67 and 105–6. For Arnold on literature see Poems 1853 in (Quiller-Couch ed.), The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold 1909, pp. 2 and 14; Essays in Criticism, pp. 5–8, 19, 38–9, 46, 53–4, 66–7, 79, 81–2, 112, 142, 144, 159–61, 176–8, 193, 222 and chs. 3 and 4; The Study of Celtic Literature 1867 (1891 edn), pp. xix, 8–9, 16–18, 35, 46, 72, 85–8, 90–2, 97, 121, 126–7, 132, 136, 142–9 and 152; On

Notes

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the Modern Element in Literature 1857 and On Translating Homer 1861–2 both in R. H. Super, The Complete Prose of Matthew Arnold 1960–77 I, pp. 19, 23 and 144; and (Lowry ed.) The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough (1847–52) 1932, pp. 64–5, 97–9, 101 and 123–5. For Arnold on religion see Essays in Criticism, pp. 196–9, 210–12, 220, 308, 324–6 and 346–7, The Bishop and the Philosopher 1863, Stanley on the Jewish Church 1863 and Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 1862, all in Super III, pp. 43–4, 50, 57, 66–7 and 78–9; St Paul and Protestantism 1870 (1875 edn), pp. 13–14, 27, 30, 35–8, 42, 51, 57–62, 64–8, 81–7, 94–5, 138–40, 165, 178–82 and 194; Literature and Dogma 1873, pp. 14–15, 33, 40–5, 48–50, 77–8, 81, 84–9, 91, 93, 100–1, 104, 107, 153, 161–2, 177, 191, 194–5, 207, 209–11, 312, 350–2 and 364–5; God and The Bible 1875, pp. 10 and 110; Culture and Anarchy 1869, pp. 13, 29, 38, 40, 45–6, 51, 57 and 69, and Last Essays on Church and Religion 1877, pp. vi, xxxi, 139ff., 153–5, 163–4, 168–73 and 175. pp. 87–93 (Seeley) For Seeley’s life see Deborah Wormall, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History 1980, pp. 14, 16–18, 40–1, 110 and 164. For Seeley on impartiality see Inaugural Address to the Cardiff Society for the Impartial Discussion of Politics and Other Questions (1886) 1888, pp. 2–15. For Seeley on history and the British Empire see The Life and Times of Stein 1878 III, pp. 564–6; From the Cambridge Lecture Rooms: Bonaparte in Macmillan’s Magazine July 1881, p. 163, A Short History of Napoleon the First 1886; preface to The Life and Adventures of Ernst Moritz Arndt 1879, pp. xi–xii; The Expansion of England 1883, pp. 7–16, 18–19, 165–76, 178, 180, 184–6, 293–309, 344–5, 350–4 and 356, The Growth of British Policy 1895 (1897 edn) II, pp. 379–80; and A Paper Read Before the University College Student Christians’ Association on October 29 1867, pp. 3–4 and 6–9. For Seeley on education see Liberal Education in Universities 1867 and English in Schools n.d. both in Lectures and Essays 1870, pp. 184–6, 191–7, 207–15 and 218ff., A Letter Written by Professor J. R. Seeley on March 23 1868, pp. 14–15; (with Abbot) English Lessons for English People 1871, p. ix; and Classical Studies as an Introduction to the Moral Sciences 1863, p. 7. For the need to specialize see The Expansion of England 1883, p. 6. For the importance of the State as subject of historical investigation see The Expansion of England 1883, pp. 6–16, 165–75 and 299–309. For Seeley on religion, science and literature see Ecce Homo 1865 (1866 edn), pp. xvii–xx, 1, 7, 16–17, 23–6, 29, 36–40, 44–51, 55–7, 59–65, 78–84, 88, 89, 95–9, 108, 116–19, 124–7, 129–30, 131, 140–8, 158–60, 172–81, 193–202, 207–8, 211–19, 225–7, 242, 246–9, 257, 261, 264, 267, 272–3, 278 and 287–8; Goethe (1884) 1894, pp. 44–7, 55–7, 62–4, 70–3, 97, 108–9, 111–19, 121–8 and 134–46, The Life and Times of Stein III, pp. 544–6 and 556; Ethics and Religion 1900 in (The Society of Ethical Propagandists eds.), Ethics and Religion, pp. 14–15, 19–27 and 29; and Natural Religion 1882 (2nd edn), pp. x, 2, 6, 9–22, 25–6, 32, 34–43, 57–60, 62–4, 68–9, 73–8, 110–11, 119, 124–33, 136–43, 146–7, 154, 156–64, 167–9, 174–9, 182–5, 187–205, 208–12, 217–22, 225–8, 230–4, 249–50, 255–8 and 262. For Gladstone on Ecce Homo see [W. E. Gladstone], Ecce Homo 1868, pp. 199–201. pp. 93–8 (Sidgwick) For Sidgwick up to 1876, see Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir by AS and EMS 1906, pp. 33–294; Ecce Homo 1866, The Prophet of Culture 1867 and The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough 1869 all in Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses 1904, pp. 2, 4–21, 24–5, 28–9, 34–9, 41–2, 44–57, 60–1, 64–8 and 89–90. See also The Academy 1 April, 15 May and 1 August 1873 for Sidgwick on Spencer, J. S. Mill, Mansel and Fitzjames Stephen. For Sidgwick on education see Eton and Liberal

710

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Education, both in Macmillan’s Magazine February 1861, pp. 293–300 and April 1867, pp. 467–72; Idle Fellowships 1876 and The Theory of Classical Education 1867 both in Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses, pp. 273, 275, 293–5, 298, 303, 308–9, 315–19 and 320–39. See also the Diary of Archbishop Benson 5 May 1879 (Benson MSS, Trinity College, Cambridge; I owe this Reference to Professor Michael Bentley). For Sidgwick on religious subscription from 1870 onwards see The Ethics and Conformity of Subscription 1870, pp. 5–6, 9–15, 17–18, 20–6, 31–3 and 39–40; The Obligations of Doctrinal Subscription in Modern Review April 1881, pp. 267–72; and Practical Ethics (1895–6) 1898, pp. 114–16, 118–24, 128–33, 136–40, 168–70 and 175–8. For the role of ethical societies see Practical Ethics 1898, pp. 5, 7, 9–23, 30–1, 34–5, 38–40, 44, 52–84, 89–92, 94–5, 101–2, 104–9, 111–12 and 205–34. See also The Academy 15 April 1871, pp. 215–16. For Sidgwick on philosophy, theology, history, sociology, art and science, see Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations 1902, pp. 38–40, 95–7, 216–23, 226–7, 230–2 and 238–47; On the Nature of the Evidence for Theism 1898 and Authority, Scientific and Theological 1899, both in Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir, pp. 602–8 and 610–15; and review of S. B. Gould, Origin and Development of Religious Belief in Cambridge University Gazette 15 December 1869. pp. 98–103 (Wicksteed) For Wicksteed on politics and Christianity see What Does the Labour Church Stand For? 1892; C. H. Herford, Philip Henry Wicksteed 1931, pp. 48–9, 94 and 356–77; The Common Sense of Political Economy 1910, pp. viii, 1–2, 4–5, 9, 627–8, 633–7, 640, 652–9, 661–2, 666–83, 686–8, 694–8 and 700–2; Christianity and the Personal Life n.d., pp. 4–14, 20–31 and 36–7; and (with Carpenter ed.), Studies in Theology (1888 and 1893) 1903, pp. 285–7, 289, 292–9, 327, 330–3, 336–7 and 339. For Wicksteed’s theology and its relation to literature and science see Dante 1879, pp. v, 4–11, 23–7, 32–9, 48–51, 54, 61, 72–3, 80, 110–13, 121, 148–54 and 157, Four Lectures on Henrik Ibsen 1892, pp. 19–21, 24, 28–9, 43–5, 51, 54–5, 74–8, 81–3, 85–91, 97 and 109–12; Herford, Philip Henry Wicksteed, pp. 62–3 and 76, Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy Illustrated from the Works of S. Thomas Aquinas (1916) 1920, pp. 1–4, 6–7, 15–20, 23, 36–7, 39, 51–2, 56, 60–3, 65, 121–2, 125–6, 128–9, 132–43, 147, 157–8, 160–1, 163–9, 173–9, 182–8, 246–50, 254–5, 257, 276–8, 413–14, 549–55, 557–8, 560 and 562; The Ecclesiastical Institutions of Holland 1875, pp. 4–5, 10–17, 20, 28–31, 42–3, 45–50 and 55–60; John William Colenso in The Modern Review 1883, pp. 700–1, 706–7 and 718–25; (with Carpenter) Studies in Theology (1887–99) 1903, pp. 9–10, 18–26, 28–9, 34–7, 94–5, 98–9, 101–3, 154–5, 158–62, 276–7, 279–81 and 298–9, Recent Dutch Theology and Dutch Theology in Theological Review 1872, pp. 414–17 and 1874, pp. 266–70; Dante and Aquinas (1911) 1913. For Carpenter on the philosophia perennis see Comparative Religion 1913 (1937 ed.), pp. 70–1 and 249–51. pp. 105–8 (Dickens) For an unconvincing defence of Coleridge, see Milbank, Divine Logos and Human Communication in Neue Zeitschrift fur Systematische Religions philosophie 1987, pp. 56ff. For Dickens on politics, morality, society and religion see (Fielding ed.), The Speeches of Charles Dickens 1988, pp. 4–15, 19–24, 38–50, 54–5, 60–9, 74–5, 80–90, 95–7, 103–9, 124, 129–32, 142, 146, 149–53, 157–71, 173, 176–80, 182–5, 189–204, 206–16, 224–5, 230, 242–3, 247–51, 254, 258, 263–4, 270–4, 278–84, 289, 295–7, 303–5, 323, 330, 347, 395 and 404; (Paroissien ed.) Selected Letters of Charles Dickens 1985, pp. 43–4, 48–9, 90–1, 144–5, 166–9, 182–205 and 211–59; (Slater ed.), Dickens’ Journalism II 1966, pp. 17, 26–8, 44–51, 60–3, 65–7, 77, 90–5, 104–5, 124–5,

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139–42, 161–4, 212–27, 235ff., 264–82, 297–310, 321–2 and 350–1. For Dickens on Christ see The Life of Our Lord (1849) 1934 (1970 edn), pp. 26–39, 47, 56–7, 60–1, 67, 81–2, 91, 124 and 127–8. For English history see A Child’s History of England (1852–4), pp. 38–9, 42, 271–3 and 280. pp. 108–12 (Tennyson) For Tennyson’s life and opinions and for Jowett on Tennyson see esp. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by his Son 1897 (1898 edn), pp. 5–6, 11, 18, 30–1, 35, 44–6, 58, 62, 80, 83–4, 125–6, 138–9, 155, 188 and 206; and C. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson 1949 (1968), pp. 167 and 186–7. For Tennyson and Hallam and for Tennyson’s social and religious doctrine see In Memoriam 1850, The Poet’s Mind 1830, Sonnet to JMK 1830, Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind 1832, The Palace of Art 1832, Poland 1832, On a Mourner 1833, Locksley Hall (1837) 1842, Ulysses, St Simeon Stylites, The Two Voices, The Talking Oak, Morte d’Arthur, Love and Duty and The Vision of Sin, all 1842, Maud 1855 and Vivien 1859, all in (Ricks ed.) The Poems of Tennyson 1969. pp. 112–15 (Browning) For Browning as a Liberal see (Reid ed.) Why I Am A Liberal 1885. For Browning on poetry and religion see Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Letters of Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1889 (1946 ed.) I, pp. 38, 41, 44, 46, 200, 205, 220–3, 411, 415, 418 and 457, and II, pp. 49, 160, 429–30 and 436–7. For Pigou on Browning see Robert Browning as a Religious Teacher 1901, pp. 37, 45–6 and 120–3. For Browning on Darwin see Browning to F. J. Furnivall in (Peterson ed.), Browning’s Trumpeter 1979, pp. 34–5 and 51. For Browning on Shelley see (Brett-Smith ed.), An Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley 1851, pp. 72–5, 78–9 and 82–3. For Browning on God, see E. Le Roy Lawson, Very Sure of God 1974, esp. ch. v. pp. 115–22 (Pater) For Pater’s opinions up to 1873 see Diaphaneité 1864 in Miscellaneous Studies 1895 (1910 edn), pp. 248–51; Coleridge’s Writings, Winckelmann and Poems by William Morris, all in Westminster Review 1866–8, pp. 85, 91–6, 101–10, 115, 118, 122–3, 126–31, 300, 303 and 307–11; Studies in the History of the Renaissance 1873 preface and The Renaissance (1912 edn), pp. xii–xiv, 101–19 and 207–13. For Pater on literature (1886–7) see Essays from the Guardian 1910, pp. 6–15, 28 and 43, and (1874–88) Appreciations 1910, pp. 5–14, 17, 20–4, 61–3, 124–32, 135–8, 211–13 and 241ff. For Pater on religion see The Child in the House 1878, Emerald Uthwart 1892 and Apollo in Picardy 1893, all in Miscellaneous Studies 1895 (1910 edn), pp. 146–9, 168–9, 173, 180–6, 198–9, 204–11, 216–25 and 230–46; Gaston de la Tour (Shadwell ed., 1896; 1902 edn), pp. 6, 8, 10–11, 16–17, 21, 23, 28–31, 35–8, 42, 56–7, 67, 70–1, 82–3, 85, 88–93, 100, 103–4, 106, 109, 114, 122 and 137–61; Marius the Epicurean 1885 (1935 edn), pp. 1–18, 31, 68–9, 71–2, 76, 92–104, 106–7, 110–16, 134–9, 173, 177, 181–3, 189, 192–3, 199, 212–14, 216–17, 224–5, 232, 235–6, 266–70, 272–83, 300, 320–2 and 347–9; Plato and Platonism 1893, pp. 1–3, 32–5, 47–51, 64–5, 76–7, 122–3, 174–7, 232–6, 266–70, 272–83, 300, 320–2 and 347–9; Hippolytus Veiled 1870, A Study of Dionysus 1876 and The Myth of Demeter and Persephone 1876, all in Greek Studies 1895 (1901 edn), pp. 9–14, 32–7, 91–112, 120–41 and 156–9. See also Essays from the Guardian 1910, pp. 66–8 and 122–3 and introduction to C. L. Shadwell, Dante: The Purgatorio 1892, pp. xiv and xx–xxi.

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pp. 122–9 (Wilde) For Wilde’s work see [R.] Ross [The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde 1908]. For Wilde’s life see esp. (Hart-Davis ed.), Letters of Oscar Wilde 1962, pp. 11, 60 and 63; More Letters 1985, pp. 24–5, 36–8, 42–3, 60–1, 69 and 81 and R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde 1987 (1988). For Wilde’s failed prize essay in Oxford see The Rise of Historical Criticism 1879 in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Prose Pieces (Ross) 1908 and Miscellanies 1908 (Ross). For Wilde after his imprisonment see (Murray ed.), The Soul of Man and Prison Writings 1990, pp. 40, 42, 44, 61, 68, 70–6, 80, 82, 86, 89–91, 94–6, 98–9, 102, 105–10, 113–18, 121–4, 126–7, 129–30, 132–3, 139, 155, 159ff. and 190ff. For Wilde on politics up to 1895 see An Ideal Husband 1895 (Ross), pp. 59, 62, 64, 86, 96, 130–3 and 227; A Woman of No Importance 1893 (Ross), pp. 21–2; Vera 1881 (Ross), pp. 139–42, 147–55, 178–83; and Act IV, The Soul of Man Under Socialism 1891–5 (Ross), pp. 273, 275, 277–9, 281–6, 288, 290–1, 293–5, 297–8, 300–2, 304–8, 311–12, 315, 319, 321–2 and 328–9. For the politics of Wilde’s poetry see Poems 1881 (Ross), pp. 25–37. For Wilde’s doctrine as expressed through his fiction and theatre see The Portrait of Mr W. H. 1894 (Ross), pp. 160–1, 166–7, 169–70, 181–2, 186–7 and 190–8; A Woman of No Importance 1893 (Ross), pp. 30, 58, 112–15 and 190–1; Lady Windermere’s Fan 1892 (Ross), p. 64; Reviews (1885–9) (Ross) 1908, pp. 1, 10, 22, 43, 48–9, 77–8, 141–4, 149–51, 153–60, 173, 215–20, 399–401, 447–9, 519–23 and 540–5; Miscellanies (1877–90) 1908 (Ross), pp. 3–9, 18–19, 24, 27, 31–3, 43–8, 57–60, 66, 69–71, 136–7, 141–3, 145ff., 243–8, 250–1, 257–8, 262–3, 266–9, 271–7, 282–5, 289, 293–5, 299, 312–13 and 318–19; and The Picture of Dorian Gray 1890 (1891) (1992 edn), pp. 13, 19, 30–5, 55, 84, 104, 109–10, 124, 138, 140, 152, 167, 180, 182–7, 301–3 and 310–12. See also The Decay of Lying 1889 and The Critic as Artist 1891, both in Intentions 1891 (Ross), pp. 4, 8–10, 14–17, 21, 25–36, 40–2, 44, 47, 49–51, 100–1, 106–9, 118–21, 125–7, 132–3, 135, 141–5, 148–50, 160, 166, 174–5, 178, 182–3, 188–9, 194–7 and 213–16. pp. 132–7 (Stirling) For Stirling’s life and opinions see A. H. Stirling, James Hutchison Stirling 1912, esp. chs. xi and xii; and Jerrold, Tennyson and Macaulay 1868, pp. 25, 61–3, 70, 82–6, 92–100, 107, 111, 115–18, 120–3, 127, 129, 134, 138, 140, 157–9, 169–71 and 194–7. For Stirling on Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies, see The Secret of Hegel 1865 (1898 edn), pp. xii, xxii–xxxi, xxxv–xxxvi, xliii–xlv, xlviii–xlix, li–lvii, lx, 9, 11–12, 22, 52–4, 57–9, 64, 91, 93, 95, 97–8, 105, 112–13, 119–20, 122, 134–5, 138–42, 146–7, 158 and 693 and (A. Shwegler ed. and trans.), Handbook of the History of Philosophy 1867, pp. 420, 430, 437, 445 and 475–6. For Stirling on Hegel’s politics and religion see The Secret of Hegel, pp. lii–lv, lxi, 36–40, 55, 57, 64, 66, 74–5, 78, 86–7, 91–4, 99, 112, 116, 119, 122–3, 678, 686, 690–2, 694–8, 700, 708–13, 715–22, 733 and 750. pp. 139–40, 142–4 (Caird) For Caird’s early life, see Jones and Muirhead, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird 1921, pp. 7, 22–30, 36 and 40–1. For Caird’s early opinions, see Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates and The Roman Element in Civilisation both in North British Review December 1865 and June 1866, pp. 266–7, 270–1, 356, 366, 369, 372–3, 378, 381 and 383. For Caird’s sense of joint enterprise with Green, see (Seth and Haldane eds.) Essays in Philosophical Criticism 1883, pp. 1–7; introduction to A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant 1877; and R. L. Nettleship, Memoir in The Works of Thomas Hill Green III, pp. xxxix–xl. For Caird on religion and philosophy, see A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant 1877, pp. vi, 9, 31–3, 35–42, 49, 52, 57, 64–5, 71–2, 77, 84, 95, 108, 120–1 and 372–403; The

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Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant 1889 I, pp. ix–x, 3–16, 21, 26–8, 33–5, 41, 47 and 50 and II, pp. 48–52, 128, 577, 586–8, 590–1, 597, 604–6, 610, 614–15, 620, 623 and 631–4; and Hegel 1883 (1911 edn), pp. 110, 114–25, 128–30, 186–7, 194–5, 197, 201–3, 208–9, 211–15 and 218; The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte in Contemporary Review I (May 1879), p. 193, II (June 1879), pp. 521–3, 526–35 and 538–9, III (July 1879), pp. 648, 651, 656–8, 661 and 664, and IV (September 1879), pp. 85 and 92; The Problem of Philosophy at the Present Time 1881 in Essays on Literature and Philosophy, 1892, pp. 191–2, 194–5, 202, 207–9, 211–12 and 215; and Essays on Literature and Philosophy II 1892, pp. 276–7, 287–9, 291–2, 296–7, 301–2, 308–10, 382–3, 396–7, 404–5, 407–9, 416–17, 420–2, 427, 430–1, 436–42, 460–1, 465, 514–15, 521–2, 530–1 and 534–5. The Evolution of Religion (1890–92) (1899 edn), I, pp. viii, x, 4–5, 7–8, 12, 14–15, 20–1, 23–8, 30–1, 36–41, 43–5, 47, 54, 57, 64–5, 68–9, 77, 80–3, 85–7, 96–113, 118–21, 165–73, 190–1, 291–2, 296–8, 302–3, 308, 311–12, 314–22, 325, 328–9, 333, 340–1, 343 and 345, and II, pp. 5–7, 10, 12, 14–16, 20–1, 24–6, 44–5, 145–6, 297–303, 305–7 and 311–23. See also The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers (1900–2) (1923 edn) I, pp. 3–8, 16–21 and 23–25. pp. 140–2 (Wallace) For Wallace’s philosophy, see The Logic of Hegel with Prolegomena 1874, pp. x, xv, xviii–xxix, xxx–xl, xlvi–xlvii, li–lii, lv–lix, lxviii, lxxvi–vii, lxxx, cv, cxiii–cxvi, cxxxv, cliii, clviii, clxx, clxxii–iii and clxxv; and Kant 1882, pp. 46, 70–4, 95–6, 138–9, 147–8, 151–5, 159–60, 180–2, 185–6, 188–91, 205–8, 210–12 and 215–16. For Wallace on politics, morality, art, religion and the history of philosophy, see The Logic of Hegel with Prolegomena 1874, pp. clxiv–clxv; Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind 1894, pp. clxxvi–clxxix and cciv; Arthur Schopenhauer 1890, pp. 14–18, 20–1, 28, 56–7, 59, 90–1, 93–5, 96–7, 102–3, 105, 112, 117, 120, 122, 130–1, 149, 192–3, 200–4 and 210; and Epicurus 1880, pp. 6–8, 14–15 and 28. Hermann Lotze 1885, Our Natural Rights n.d., Nietzsche’s Criticism of Morality n.d., The Ethics of Socialism n.d., Relations of Fichte and Hegel to Socialism n.d., Thus Spake Zarathustra 1896, and Lectures on Natural Religion and the Relation of Religion to Morality 1894–5, all in (Edward Caird ed.), William Wallace: Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics 1898, pp. 6–7, 16–26, 28–31, 38–9, 42–3, 48–61, 63–6, 70–1, 84–91, 96–9, 104–5, 118–21, 142–3, 162–3, 166–7, 174–7, 183–9, 192, 197, 202, 208, 210, 215ff., 229–31, 234, 244, 253–8, 262–3, 397, 400–3, 413, 418–19, 422–9, 435, 482–3, 485, 519–29, 537 and 541. pp. 144–50 (Green) For Green’s early life see (Nettleship ed.), The Works of Thomas Hill Green (henceforth Works) 1888 (1891 edn) III, pp. xi–xxv, xxxiii–xlvii, lxx–lxxiv, cviii–cxiii and cxv–cxxv. For Green’s moral, political and religious philosophy, see Principles of Political Obligation (1879–80) in Works II (1924 edn), pp. 2–25 and Lectures A and F–P, and (1858–80) in Works III, pp. 4–5, 11–19, 22–7, 37, 41–4, 93–4, 112–13, 117, 119–37, 146, 159–64, 166–9, 172–3, 177–8, 184–5, 194–5, 199–201, 205–8, 211–12, 221–4, 226, 233–40, 244–6, 253–5, 257–65, 270–2, 275–6, 278–82, 288–9, 294–6, 347, 350–1 and 363–86; (Bradley ed.) Prolegomena to Ethics 1883 (1890 edn), pp. 1–3, 10–11, 22, 30–1, 35, 38–9, 58, 72–4, 86, 92–5, 100–2, 111–13, 120, 134–8, 156, 158, 163, 177–80, 182, 184, 186, 189, 192–3, 198, 201–2, 208, 210–12, 214, 218, 220, 222, 226, 229–31, 247–8, 250, 257–8, 261–3, 269–73, 275–6, 278–9, 284–5, 291–7, 299, 301, 306–7, 317, 319, 322–4, 326–30, 333, 337, 339, 341, 349, 351 and 354–5. See also Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant c. 1878 in Works II, pp. 83–5, 87, 104–6, 110–42

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and 154–5; and Introductions to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature in Works I, pp. 2–3, 5, 7–9, 16–17, 36–7, 67–9, 93–4, 132, 160–4, 297–300, 302–6, 331–2, 348 and 366–71. Cf. Arnold Toynbee, Eighteen Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England 1884, pp. xxii, xxv, 94, 235–6, 249–50 and 252–3, and 1908, pp. xvi and xx–xxi; and (G. Toynbee ed.), Reminiscences and Letters of Arnold Toynbee 1910, p. 123. For Mrs. Humphry Ward on Green, see The History of Robert Elsmere 1888, ch. V. pp. 152–64 (Macaulay) For Macaulay’s earliest political opinions see (Lady Trevelyan ed.), [The] Works [of Lord Macaulay] 1866 VII, pp. 641–59 and 683–703; The Slavery of the British West Indies and Thoughts on the Advancement of Academical Education in England, both in Edinburgh Review January 1825, pp. 468–87 and February 1826, pp. 315–41. For Macaulay’s earliest opinions about literature, see Works II, pp. 16–19, V, pp. 4–5, 7–8, 13–23, 49–61, 78, 82, 85–6, 95–104, 239ff., 374–5, 397–405, 408–9, 415–18, 441, 449–52, 519, 521 and 526–38 and VII, pp. 603–7, 609–11, 613, 621–9 and 663–5. For Macaulay’s earliest opinions about historical writing see esp. Essay on the Life and Character of King William III 1822, in A. N. L. Munby, Germ of a History in Times Literary Supplement 1 May 1969, pp. 468–9; and On History May 1828 in Works V, pp. 122–3, 129–31, 145–6, 150–2, 154, 156, 158 and 160. For Macaulay’s account of the relationship between politics, English history and political science especially between 1827 and 1835, see speeches of 2 March, 5 July, 10 October and 16 December 1831 and 25 February 1832 in Works VIII, pp. 18–20, 22–4, 31, 33, 53–4, 58–9, 61, 67, 71–6, and 84; (Hamburger ed.) Napoleon and the Restoration of the Bourbons 1977, pp. 44, 47, 49, 65–7 and 87–9; The Present Administration in Edinburgh Review June 1827, pp. 247, 249–50, 253–4 and 260–1; Major Moody’s Reports in Edinburgh Review March 1827, pp. 382–404; and The Slavery of the British West Indies, pp. 476–87; History of England I 1848 (1880 edn), pp. 17–19, 21–2, 25, 39, 65–72, 93–5, 111–13, 124–7, 134–5, 157–60, 188–91 and 253–4. For Macaulay’s account of French history see Works V, pp. 617, 621–5, 628–9 and 632–4, Works VI, pp. 87–105, 134, 140–1, 158, 244–5, 251–2, 264, 295–7 and 304–6, Works VII, pp. 687–9, 695 and 703 and (Hamburger ed.) Napoleon and the Restoration of the Bourbons, pp. 43–5, 47, 49–60, 65–7, 69–74, 71–3, 87–9 and 91. For Macaulay on religion see Works V, pp. 36–40, 593–4, and 608, and History of England, Works I, pp. 2, 22–4, 46–60, 72–85, 89–92, 96–8, 166–7, 171–4 and 181–6; Gladstone on Church and State April 1839 in Works VI, pp. 329–33, 344–5, 348, 355–6, 360–8 and 373–80; Ranke’s History of the Popes October 1840 in Works VI, pp. 454–79, 482–3 and 487, Civil Disabilities of the Jews (1829) in Works VIII, pp. 459–61; Criticisms on the Principal Italian Writers, Works VIII, pp. 608–9; Machiavelli, Works VIII, pp. 50–1; Thoughts on the Advancement of Academical Education in England, Works VIII, pp. 315, 317–78, 320, 322–4, 326–7 and 335–6, Utilitarian Theory of Government, Works VIII, pp. 327; Westminster Reviewer’s Defence of Mill, Works VIII, pp. 299–300; The Slavery of the British West Indies, Works VIII, pp. 472–3, Lord Nugent’s Memorials of Hampden, Works VIII, pp. 545–6; Milton, Works VIII, pp. 36–40; Southey’s Edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Works VIII, pp. 456–7; A Speech Delivered to a Committee of the Whole House of Commons 17 April 1833 in Works VII, pp. 100–7, Hallam’s Constitutional History, Works VIII, pp. 168, 171, 176–8, 204, 209, 223 and 227–8; Sadler’s Law of Population July 1830 and Sadler’s Refutation Refuted January 1831 both Works V, pp. 429–30 and 474–7. See also Speeches of 2 March and 16 December 1831 in Works V, pp. 23–4 and 87.

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pp. 164–9 (Lecky) For Lecky’s early life and opinions, see S. Walpole in Proceedings of the British Academy I 1903–4, p. 307; H. M. Hyde, A Victorian Historian 1947; A Memoir of the Right Honourable William Edward Hartpole Lecky by His Wife 1909, pp. 12–37, The Religious Tendencies of the Age (anonymous), 1860, pp. 1–16, 22–7, 32–3, 36–7, 42–61, 68–74, 76–7, 85–91, 94–101, 152–83, 193–201, 206–9, 214–20, 222–8, 232–3, 237–45, 247–51, 257–64, 273–82, 289–90, 296, 298–306 and 310–20; and Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland 1861, pp. 2–4. For the concluding chapter (present in the first edition but omitted from subsequent editions), see W. E. G. Lloyd and F. C. O’Brien Clerical Influences 1911, pp. 18–29, 31–43 and 48–53. For Lecky’s accounts of his method and of the history of Christianity and rationalism in Europe see esp. History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe 1865 I, pp. v, ix, xv–xx, 8–11, 20–3, 28–34, 41–4, 52–3, 94–9, 101–9, 113–14, 116–21, 128–35, 137–40, 147–9, 156–62, 171–3, 178–82, 186–7, 191–3, 196–205, 211–14, 251–88, 298–334, 336–54, 366–7, 374–9, 384–5, 387–94, 400–5, 412–13, 419–23, 428–31 and 436–47 and II, pp. 10–11, 22–4, 28–40, 42–9, 56–7, 60–105, 117–22, 130–42, 144–51, 159–61, 164–5, 178–94, 196–211, 223–5, 238–41, 247–9, 253–4, 263–8, 271–9, 286–98, 305–11, 316–19, 357–66 and 371–409. For History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne 1869 see I, pp. vi–vii, ix, 5–6, 12–15, 17–23, 29–33, 50–1, 54–7, 60–73, 88–90, 98–106, 113–16, 127–9, 142–3, 148, 152, 157, 169–71, 175–7, 179, 181–5, 191–3, 197–200, 202, 204–5, 211–12, 235, 238–9, 244, 255–72, 278–9, 287–8, 315, 338, 344–6 and 369–409 and II (2nd edn 1869), pp. 1–5, 8–10, 15–19, 20–4, 26–7, 36–7, 44, 65, 71–2, 92–7, 100–2, 105–6, 117–21, 140–1, 147–9, 153–4, 156, 189–91, 196–202, 205–7, 210–11, 213–14, 221, 224–5, 241–3, 253, 258, 260ff., 266–7, 274–5, 278–81, 291–2, 294–302, 309–12, 315–17, 332–3, 335–6, 340, 350–1, 354–5, 364–7, 372–4, 378–90 and 392–4. pp. 169–71 (Bryce) For Bryce on law, politics and religion, see The Holy Roman Empire 1864, esp. pp. 168–9. Inaugural and Valedictory Lectures and The Relationship of Law and Religion, both in Studies in History and Jurisprudence 1901 II, pp. 214–15, 218–19, 238–40, 244–6 and 475–536. Essays and Addresses in War Time 1918, pp. 16, 29, 36, 38, 40, 50–3, 58, 60, 67–8, 75–7, 113–16, 124–5 and 269. pp. 171–3 (Fisher) For Fisher on history, liberalism and religion see The Medieval Empire 1898, chapters I and X and pp. 275–9; The Republican Tradition in Europe 1911, pp. 1–5, 141, 148, 168, 170, 224 and 284–7; Napoleon 1912 (1945), pp. 59–79, 136–9, 141, 161 and 208; History of Europe 1936, pp. v–vi. See also British Universities at War 1917, pp. xii–xiv, Orthodoxy 1922, pp. 5–10, 12, 14–15, 17–19, 21–2, 35–6 and 38–42, The Common Weal 1924, esp. chapters 1 and 8; and Our New Religion 1929 (1933), pp. 1–3 and 97–143. pp. 174–82 (Fitzjames Stephen) For Stephen’s life, see Leslie Stephen The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen 1895, pp. 91–173 and 369–70. For Stephen on law, see A General View of The Criminal Law of England 1863, pp. v–vi, 2–5, 331 and 333–5; The Indian Evidence Act 1876, p. 1; A Digest of The Criminal Law 1877, pp. v–vii; The Characteristics of English Criminal Law in Cambridge Essays 1857, pp. 2–5, 9, 23 and 34–9; English Jurisprudence in Edinburgh Review October 1861, pp. 459–60 and 463–4, The Laws of England As To The Expression of Religious Opinions in Contemporary Review

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February 1875, pp. 447, 459–61, 464–5, 467–8 and 473–4; and The Ilbert Bill n.d. (1883–4), p. 13. For Stephen on the Rev. Rowland Williams see Defence of The Rev. Rowland Williams D. D. in The Arches Court of Canterbury 1862, pp. x, xli–xlvii, 2 and 30–1. For Stephens’s journalism in the 1850s and 1860s, see The Relation of Novels to Life in Cambridge Essays 1855, pp. 148–51 and 192; University Reform; – Cambridge in National Review April 1856, pp. 330–7, 346 and 354; Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Buckle’s History of Civilization in England both in Edinburgh Review January and April 1858, pp. 176–9, 183–5, 188–9, 191–2, 465, 470–3, 476, 481–2, 496, 499–500, 508–9 and 511; The Study of History, The Dissolution of The Union, Liberalism and Society, all in Cornhill Magazine June, July and August 1861, January 1862 and January 1863, pp. 29–32, 38–41, 71–9, 153, 156–9, 164, 670–3 and 675; Mister Matthew Arnold and His Countrymen in Saturday Review 3 December 1864, pp. 683–5. See also Saturday Review Essays 1858–61, reprinted in Essays By A Barrister 1862, pp. 18, 26, 36–8, 41–3, 45–6, 48–53, 55–7, 67–9, 90–1, 94–100, 107, 109–10, 113, 142–3, 146, 191–3, 199, 202–5, 208–9, 215–18, 222, 234–7, 240, 243, 246–53 and 278–9. For more Stephen essays mainly in the 1850s and 1860s, see also Horae Sabbaticae 1892 1st series, pp. 126, 136, 143, 153–7, 207, 228–9, 264–5, 276–9 and 310–11, 2nd series 1892, pp. 33, 50, 72, 85, 89–91, 104–5, 107–8, 206–8, 212–20, 278–79, 282–3, 286–7, 290–1, 299–302, 306–9, 316–17, 331, 335, 341–2, 384–7, 391–2 and 394–5, and 3rd series 1892, pp. 22–3, 57, 76–9, 110–11, 121–2, 125, 129–30, 132–3, 139–40, 142–5, 147–50, 154–5, 159–60, 166–72, 184–6, 196–201, 215, 234–5, 240, 246–7, 250–1, 254–5, 259, 262, 266–7, 271–2, 276–9, 285–7, 304–5, 308, 314–17, 352–3 and 372–6. For Stephen on religion see Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, 1857–61, pp. 484–91; and Essays of A Barrister, 1858–61,1862, pp. 3–4, 8–11, 91, 114–21, 123–5, 130–3, 136–9, 154–7, 236–9, 257, 260–4, 267–8, 270–1, 278–9, 293–6, 298–9, 305, 326 and 330–4. See also essays in Macmillan’s Magazine June 1863 and March 1864; Cornhill Magazine January 1862 and June 1864; Fraser’s Magazine December 1863, September 1864, June–July 1865, June–July 1866, November 1869 and April 1871; Caesarism and Ultramontanism in Contemporary Review March 1874, pp. 502–3 and May 1874, pp. 1012 and 1015–16; and Clarendon On The History of The Rebellion in Contemporary Review December 1874, p. 73. For Liberty, Equality, Fraternity 1873, see esp., pp. vi, 1–3, 8–13, 15–16, 20–3, 25–6, 35–46, 50–1, 54–5, 57–61, 63–7, 72–4, 76–7, 80–4, 87, 89, 94–5, 97–101, 112–14, 117–18, 120–2, 131–5, 142, 144, 148–9, 157–60, 165–8, 173, 178–9, 182–3, 196, 198, 208–9, 212–15, 219, 226, 232–3, 239–40, 242–3, 256, 263, 281, 284–5, 289–91, 299–303, 312, 314–15, 319–28 and 332–5. pp. 182–8 (Acton) For Acton on politics, history and religion between 1858 and 1870, see (Figgis and Laurence eds.), The History of Freedom and Other Essays 1907, pp. 111–12, 114–17, 121, 128, 132–3, 138–9, 142–3, 148–9, 151, 153, 165, 175–6, 187, 201–3, 206, 211, 234, 236, 240, 244, 255, 259, 261–2, 264–6, 271, 275–6, 280, 289, 291, 296–7, 301ff., 323–6, 328–9, 331, 368–73, 430, 448–9, 452–3, 460–72, 474–9, 483–9, 492–4, 515, 534 and 549–50; (Figgis and Laurence eds.) Historical Essays and Studies 1919, pp. 123, 125, 127ff., 133, 135–6, 142, 183–5, 193–4, 199–200 and 324–34, see also The Rambler January 1861, pp. 147–9, 156–7, 164–5 and 168–9; September 1861, pp. 292–3 and 298; July 1861, pp. 19, 36–55 and 58–61; March 1860, pp. 291ff.; February 1859, pp. 73–4, 78–80, 82–4 and 86; November 1859 and March 1860, pp. 68–71, 73–5 and 379–81; December 1858, p. 428 and September 1860, pp. 293–7; Home and Foreign Review 1863, pp. 167–71, 173–5, 177, 183, 187, 193, 197, 203–6, 526–8, 530, 610–11, 613–14, 616–17 and 636–7; and The Chronicle, 13 July and 5 October 1867.

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See also Human Sacrifice 1863, in (Fears ed.) Selected Writings of Lord Acton 1988 III, pp. 395–442. pp. 189–91 (Maine) For Maine on contemporary politics, India and jurisprudence see Popular Government 1885 (1909), pp. v, vii–x, 4–9, 11–16, 20–3, 32, 36–8, 41–3, 45–6, 50–2, 58, 64–7, 69–79, 81, 87–91, 93–5, 97, 110, 127, 133–7, 139–140, 148–9, 153–7, 164–7, 170, 175, 189–90, 198, 201–2, 207–8, 213 and 218–19; Village Communities in the East and West 1871, pp. 4–5, 10, 12–13, 20–7, 37–9, 41–5, 51–7, 65, 67–74, 103–5, 107–8, 110–11, 116–17, 122–5, 131–2, 146–7, 151, 168, 179–84, 189 and 196–7, and 1876, pp. 214–17, 241, 243, 253–4, 256–7, 265–6, 268–9, 273–4, 290 and 294; Roman Law and Legal Education in Cambridge Essays 1856, pp. 331–3, 336–9, 342, 344–5, 347, 349, 354–8, 361, 365, 380 and 382–3. Dissertations on Early Law and Custom 1883, pp. [5–6], 3–4, 6–8, 21–2, 59 and Chapter II; Lectures on the Early History of Institutions 1875, pp. 1–11, 13–17, 385–9 and 395–400; and Ancient Law 1861, pp. v–vi, 1–3, 6–8, 14–15, 18–20, 22–5, 48–9, 52–3, 55, 58–9, 69–73, 77–80, 88–94, 97, 99, 112, 115–16, 119–20, 122, 126–33, 152–3, 158–61, 169–70, 185, 194, 231–41, 259–60, 265–8, 270, 273, 277–80, 283, 305–7, 341–3, 346–7, 353–5, 374, 368–70 and 385. pp. 192–3, 195–202 (Inge) For Inge’s politics see Faith and Knowledge 1904, pp. 89–93, Outspoken Essays (1908) 1919, pp. 128–32, The Church and the Age 1912, pp. xii–xiii, 12, 15, 19, 70–2, 75 and 84; sermons V to IX in All Saints Sermons 1905–1907, 1907. Truth and Falsehood in Religion 1906 (1920 edn), pp. 171–2 and The Church and the Age 1912, pp. 42, 46, 60–3 and 77. See also Outspoken Essays 1919, pp. 1–4, 7–12, 15–17, 20, 48–52, 68–9, 77–8, 95–100, 102–3, 249–53, 258–9 and 265, and Outspoken Essays 2nd series 1922, pp. 60–1, 72, 79, 83–5, 117, 120–8, 156–7, 170, 185, 189, 202–3, 206–7, 232, 241 and 275, The Riddle of the Future 1920 in (Courtney ed.) Is It A New World? 1920 (1921–4), pp. 5–6; Lay Thoughts of A Dean 1926, pp. 90–1, 97, 108–11, 156–8, 160–1, 208, 247 and 250; Assessments and Anticipations 1929, pp. 185–8 and 190–2; The Training of the Reason 1917, in (Benson ed.), Cambridge Essays in Education 1917, pp. 13–14 and 19–27, Religion in (Livingstone ed.), The Legacy of Greece 1921, reprinted in The Church and the World 1927, p. 121; England 1926, pp. vii–xii, 26–30, 37–8, 40–3, 47, 49–63, 65–7, 71–87, 128–32, 135–7, 142–6, 148–51, 155–7, 159–61, 176, 179, 181, 183–6, 190, 194, 197–203, 208, 214, 219–21, 223, 234, 236, 252–9, 265–7, 270–3, 276–7, 279–82, 283 and 286, Our Present Discontents 1938, pp. 13, 15–20, 35, 76 and 79; and The End of An Age and Other Essays 1948, pp. 3–47, 74–7, 162–5, 172–3, 202–3, 244–5 and 270–1. See also Adam Fox Dean Inge 1990. For Inge on religion, science, mysticism and philosophy (1908–12), see Outspoken Essays 1919, pp. 107–9, 112–13, 115–16, 121–4, 127–8, 134–9, 141–2, 144–6, 154–5, 164–7, 170, 172–81, 186, 197 and 200–4; Confessio Fidei 1922 in Outspoken Essays second series 1922, pp. 1–19, 21–2, 24–7, 29, 32–5, 37 and 42–53, Faith 1909 (1911 edn), pp. viii, 2, 6–7, 38–41, 44–5, 48–53, 223–5, 229 and 234–41, The Person of Christ 1902 in Six Oxford Tutors, Contentalio Veritatis 1902, pp. 86–7; Christian Mysticism 1899, pp. vii–x, xii–xiii, 3–8, 9–22, 24–5, 28–33, 36, 39–40, 47, 50–1, 54–5, 57, 64–5, 70, 81–2, 100–2, 104, 110–22, 125–6, 138ff., 149–50, 162, 166–7, 181ff., 195–6, 213–16, 230, 242–309, 314, 316–17, 323, 328–9 and 332; Truth and Falsehood in Religion 1906 (1920 edn), pp. 4–11, 14–28, 20–4, 32–3, 35–8, 40–3, 46–8, 50, 52, 54–65, 68–71, 76–7, 80–1, 84–9, 111–13, 125–9, 133–4, 137–8, 140–3, and 145–8; Studies of Christian Mysticism 1906, pp. 1–37, The Awakening of the Soul 1912 (1950), esp. pp.

718

Notes

10–29; Types of Christian Saintliness 1915; Personal Religion and The Life of Devotion 1924 (1925), pp. 17, 49, 51, 59, 64 and 81, God and The Astronomers 1933, pp. vii and 2, The Church and The Age 1912, pp. xiii–xiv, 7–8, 10–11, 38–42, 46, 48, 58–64, 66, 68, 80 and 82, Personal Idealism and Mysticism (1906) 1907, p. 67; The Philosophy of Plotinus (1917) 1923 I, pp. 1–7, 9–13, 22–3, 27–9, 35, 60, 66–9, 74, 78, 220–1 and 233 and II, pp. 219–30, 234–6, 239–40 and 248. See also (Needham ed.), Science, Religion and Reality, pp. 371–89. pp. 193–5 (Henson) For Henson’s public doctrine about religion, morality and politics see Retrospect of an Unimportant Life 1863–1939 I 1942, pp. 90 and 209 and III 1950, pp. 77, 115–20, 133, 172–3, 187, 204, 220, 226 and 249; Westminster Sermons 1910, pp. 32–3, 45–9, 54–5, 225–31, 241–2, 275–9 and 282–5; Last Words in Westminster Abbey 1941, pp. 17–19, The National Church 1908, pp. xvii–xviii, 76, 119–20, 170–2, 214–24 and 232–6; Bishoprick Papers (1932 and 1935) 1946, pp. 330 and 339; The Church and Socialism January 1920 and Religion and Economics October 1926, both in Edinburgh Review, 1920, pp. 2–5, 7–8, 11–13, 17–19, 21, 23; 1926, pp. 210–14, 216–17, 219–20 and 224–7. In (Henson ed.) Church Problems 1900, pp. v–vi, 12–13, 16–20, 22–7, 34–5, 42–3, 71 and 76–7. The Book and the Vote 1928, pp. xxv–xxix, 19–20, 113–15, 117–21, 124–7, 142–4, 167–8, 174 and 176–7; The Passing of National Churches 1927, pp. 1–14, The Value of Church Establishment for Religion, Disestablishment by Consent and Crossing the Rubicon, all in The Nineteenth Century and After 1929–30, pp. 44–58 and 289–91; The Church and The State in The Review of The Churches 1929, p. 372; and Ought the Establishment to be Maintained? in Political Quarterly 1930, p. 507. See also Notes on Popular Rationalism 1904, Christian Morality (1935–6) 1936, The Church of England 1939 and Owen Chadwick, Hensley Henson 1983. pp. 202–16 (Smuts) For Smuts’s early writings see (Hancock and van der Poel eds.), Selections from the Smuts Papers I 1966, pp. 36, 40–1, 44, 50, 76–7, 82–7, 90–1 and 105–6. For Smuts on Whitman see (McLeod ed.) J. C. Smuts, Walt Whitman (1894–5) 1973, pp. 23–7, 29–31, 33–5, 48–53, 56–7, 60–1, 63, 65–7, 72–4, 78–81, 84–6, 89, 101–9, 118–22, 127, 137, 139–44, 149–50, 152–4, 159–60, 167, 171, 180, 183 and 186. For Wolstenholme see O. W. Campbell, James Ward, Essays in Philosophy 1927, pp. 24ff. For Smuts’s career up to 1924, see East Africa (28 January 1918), pp. 131 and 138–9; and Wartime Speeches 1917, pp. v–viii, 5, 13–14, 17–19, 30–1, 33–4, 37, 42–3, 45, 55, 57, 59, 66–7, 81, 85–6, 88–9, 92, 97–9, 104–5, 109 and 114–17. See also Selections from the Smuts Papers I, 1966, pp. 3, 6–9, 18–19, 22, 52–6, 233–4, 242, 248–9, 256, 301–2, 322–3, 328–9, 394 and 461–8; II, pp. 4–5, 14–16, 25, 38, 64–72, 100–7, 130, 147–51, 158–61, 177, 218–21, 224–5, 228, 242–3, 246, 270–1, 276–7, 280–1, 284, 296, 298–9, 304–5, 309–10, 320–1, 349, 352, 355–6, 373–4, 404–8, 431, 438, 440–2, 552–62 and 596–7; III, pp. 59–60, 98, 160, 190, 198, 310–11, 313, 317, 365–8, 409, 437, 471–7, 480–3, 487, 501–3, 553, 634–5, 644–5, 646, 650, 654–8, 661–2, 668, 672 and 681; IV, pp. 9–13, 15–16, 34, 36, 41–2, 45–6, 48–51, 62–3, 66–7, 71, 79, 81, 83–7, 92–4, 108–9, 120–1, 123, 127, 132, 140–2, 145, 148–50, 157–8, 167, 177–89, 201, 208–9, 213, 216–19, 229–30, 247 and 252; V, pp. 35–9, 42, 51–4, 58, 63–4, 66–7, 106–10, 113–15, 117–35, 139–41, 147–9, 151–4, 165, 180–1, 183–4, 191, 196–7, 212–14, 224–5 and 227. For Smuts on religion, and on politics after 1924, see W. K. Hancock, Smuts I 1962, pp. 40, 44 and 89–90; and Hancock and van der Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers I, pp. 83, 100, 125, 134, 156–7, 167, 177, 345, 463, 475–9, 483–4, 530, 532,

Notes

719

554, 565, 572 and 579; II, pp. 15, 89, 105, 178, 180, 228, 276, 295, 299, 309–10, 394, 419–23, 432, 470–1, 552 and 569–71; III, pp. 67, 116–18, 146–7, 175, 181, 274, 325, 362, 368, 522, 553, 568, 573, 583, 596–7, 662, 664 and 687–8; IV, pp. 5–6, 40, 42, 46, 54, 57, 59–62, 118, 126, 132, 135, 141, 145–6, 152, 161, 171, 180, 212, 225, 265 and 276–7; V, pp. 29–30, 32, 50–9, 64, 99, 115, 160, 168, 172, 179, 204, 235, 238, 243, 251, 334, 338, 341, 380–1, 399–401, 411, 453–4, 503, 505, 511, 520, 555, 557–8 and 599; VI, pp. 4, 9, 11–12, 16, 18, 22–4, 28, 32–3, 35–6, 42, 46, 48–9, 51, 53–60, 62, 65–7, 69–75, 89–90, 95–6, 98, 105, 109, 117–18, 128, 130–2, 139–40, 145, 153–5, 157, 159, 162, 165–6, 169–70, 179, 190, 193, 195, 198, 206–7, 210, 213, 217, 222, 228, 231, 234–5, 247–8, 250, 275, 278, 288, 297–8, 301, 303, 305–6, 316–17, 321, 331, 333, 345–6, 352, 357, 360, 362–5, 367–8, 372, 379–80, 387–8, 398–400, 407–8, 415, 431, 445–7, 459, 486, 488, 493, 509–10, 517–18, 520, 522, 525, 546 and 550–1; VII, pp. 4, 12, 14, 17–19, 21, 24–5, 30, 43–4, 48, 60, 72, 101–2, 109–10, 116–17, 121, 124, 154–5, 159, 167, 176, 218–19, 228, 251, 253 and 259. For Smuts’s higher thought see WorldPeace 1929, Democracy 1929, Native Policy in South Africa 1929 and African Settlement 1929, all in Africa and Some World Problems 1930, pp. 39, 76–7, 87, 107–8 and 159–60; Wartime Speeches 1917, pp. 27, 42–3, 58 and 75; The Disarmed Peace 1931, pp. 1–3; A Vision of the New World Order 1941, The Spirit of the Mountain 1923 and Greater South Africa 1940, all in Plans for a Better World 1942, pp. 49–51, 243–8 and 275–8. For versions of Holism and Evolution, see An Enquiry into the Whole (1912) in Hancock and van der Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers 1966 III, pp. 68ff; The Theory of Holism (1927), in Plans for a Better World 1942, pp. 148–51. For the doctrine, see Holism and Evolution 1926, pp. vi–vii, 3, 5–21, 25–7, 38–9, 51–5, 65–7, 84, 94–5, 99–101, 105–7, 120–1, 127, 132, 138–40, 144, 148–9, 169, 188ff., 228–34, 240–1, 243–5, 247–50, 252, 256–60, 264–73, 278, 283, 294, 296, 298, 304, 312–14, 316, 318–19, 326–8 and 337–8; see also the 3rd edn 1936, pp. vii. pp. 217–27 (Whewell) For Whewell’s life see Mrs Stair Douglas, The Life and Selections from the Correspondence of William Whewell D. D. (1882 edn), pp. 24, 28–31, 39–41, 101, 137, 162–6, 190 and chapter 5. See also I. Todhunter, Whewell;An Account of His Writings with Selections from his Correspondence 1876, pp. 13ff. For Whewell on university education see The Principles of University Education 1837, pp. 5, 20–2, 26, 35, 37–8, 40–2, 44–5 and 48–52; and On the Principles of English University Education 1847, pp. 2–4, 81–3 and 128–40. For Whewell’s opinions after 1845, see Fraser’s Magazine March 1848, pp. 295ff., January and February 1850, pp. 33ff. and 151ff. and April 1866, pp. 411ff.; Macmillan’s Magazine March 1866, pp. 353ff.; Of Induction with Especial Reference to Mr J. Stewart Mill’s System of Logic 1849 and Criticism of Aristotle’s Account of Induction 1850, both in (Butts ed.) William Whewell’s Theory of Scientific Method 1968, pp. 265ff. and 311ff.; A Letter to the Author of Prolegomena Logica by the Author of the History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences 1852, pp. 3–18; and The General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science 1852, pp. 18–19. For Whewell on Pattison see Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy: A New Edition 1862, pp. i–xi. For Whewell on De Maistre see Edinburgh Review October 1857, pp. 299–300. See also On the Transformation of Hypotheses in the History of Science 1851, in Y. Elkana, Selected Writings on the History of Science (n.d.), pp. 385ff. For Whewell on the nature of scientific knowledge between 1831 and 1845 see The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences 1840 I, pp. iii–iv, x, xii–xv, xlvii–cxx, 4–11, 15–22, 30–6, 38–44, 49–53, 60–4, 67–8 and 75 and II, pp. 170–4, 178–84, 186–7, 189–92, 196–8, 203–9, 212–18, 220–3, 230–3, 240–2, 246–7, 250, 264–9,

720

Notes

272–7, 286–7, 352–481, 504–17, 520–1 and 525–6; The History of the Inductive Sciences I 1837, pp. vii–xii. For Whewell on Bacon see The History and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences and in Edinburgh Review October 1857, pp. 307–9. For Whewell on Lyell see British Critic Quarterly Theological Review January 1831, pp. 182–5, 192–4, 199–201 and 203–6 and Quarterly Review March 1832, pp. 117–18 and 132. For Whewell on Herschel see Quarterly Review July 1831, pp. 376–9, 381, 387–8, 391–8, 400 and 404. For Whewell on morality, politics, religion and the idea of a national Church see Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy 1835 (1837 edn), pp. v and 1–46; The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences I, pp. xii–xiii and II, pp. 280 and 579–81 and The Elements of Morality Including Polity 1845 I, pp. v–ix, 6–9, 13, 15–32, 33–7, 41–4, 48–53, 99–100, 131–42, 146–50, 152, 156–8, 165, 170–1, 176–8, 183, 226–8, 231–2, 235–6, 238–9, 284–5, 303–7, 309–26, 334–43, 350–2, 358–60 and 370–4 and II, pp. 3–13, 15–56, 62–4, 83–6, 89, 91–2, 96–8, 102–5, 109–45, 307–13, 315–27, 331–9, 342–3, 347–8 and 355–7. For Whewell on relations between nature, man and God see The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences II, pp. 579–81; Indications of the Creator 1845 (1846 edn), pp. 8–9, 13–15, 18–20, and 28–36; review of Lyell’s Geology II, 1845, pp. 116–26; and Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (Bridgewater Treatise) 1833, pp. vii, 2–14, 254–5, 257–60, 272–3, 278, 280–2, 286–9, 293–7, 306–7, 322–7, 330–1, 333–6, 344–7, 351, 355–65, 372–3, 380 and 397–9. pp. 227–37 (Stubbs) For Stubbs’s life, prejudices and opinions see esp. T. F. Tout, William Stubbs, in Dictionary of National Biography 1901–1910, pp. 444–51; (Hutton ed.), Letters of William Stubbs 1904, pp. 17–21, 42, 51–5, 67–8, 71–2, 75, 96–7, 126, 144–5, 150, 159, 168, 170–1, 196, 238, 254, 264, 307. G. L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore 1935, pp. 150–1; (Holmes ed.), Visitation Charges, Chester and Oxford, 1904, pp. 93–5 and 135; (Hassall ed.), Lectures on European History 1519–1648 1904, pp. 61–2; The Constitutional History of England I 1874, pp. 146, 290, 387 and 447; II 1875, pp. 3–5, 158–9, 306 and 440; and III 1878, pp. 612–13; The Early Plantagenets 1876, p. 229; Evil Days, A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford, 3 November 1867, p. 17; Ordination Addresses 1901, pp. 24, 44–9, 118–19, 127 and 210; Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History 1870, pp. vi and 10, Inaugural Lecture 1867, in Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History (1867–84) 1886, pp. 8–9, 15 and 23; The Origin and Position of the German, Roman, French, Celtic and English Churches (n.d.) and The Comparative Constitutional History of Medieval Europe (n.d.) both in (Hassall ed.), Lectures on Early English History 1906, pp. 196–7 and 238. For Bryce’s Inaugural of 1871 see J. Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence 1901, II, pp. 475–503. For Stubbs on medieval England and the English Constitution see Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum 1858, p. iii; The Foundation of Waltham Abbey 1861, pp. iii–vii; introductions to the Rolls Series 1864–71 in (Hassall ed.), Historical Introductions to the Rolls Series 1902, pp. 111–12, 314–17, 319, 322, 325, 327–8, 332, 335–6, 339–41, 343, 345, 353, 358–9, 366–81 and 432–8; Select Charters 1870, pp. vi, 1, 3, 7–8, 12–22, 31–2 and 51 and (Hassall ed.) Germany in the Early Middle Ages 1908, pp. 1–3. The Early Plantagenets 1876, p. 5 and The Constitutional History of England I 1874, pp. 2, 11, 46, 111, 166–9, 257, 267–8, 278, 312–15, 337–8, 356, 368–9, 435, 446, 492, 530–1, 543–6, 548–51, 578, 587, 609, 614, 620 and 637–8; II 1875, pp. 2, 5, 17, 99–100, 102–3, 105–8, 118, 163–6, 170–1, 176, 184–5, 188–9, 204–5, 224–5, 229–30, 243–5, 247, 254–5, 290–3, 295–6,

Notes

721

301–2, 304, 308, 374, 510, 512–15, 569, 586, 589, 599, 611, 621–2 and 624; and III 1878, pp. 2–3, 5, 234, 238–46, 269, 273–4, 286, 376ff., 498, 500–2, 504–6, 541–2, 548–57, 598–9, 606–10, 614, 616–17 and 620. For Stubbs on the English Church from 1874 onwards, see On the Present State and Prospects of Historical Study 1876, in Medieval and Modern History 1900, p. 35; The Early Plantagenets, pp. 56–9; Clericalism, A Sermon 1881, pp. 7 and 11–12; and in (Hutton ed.), William Stubbs on Convocation 1917, pp. 44–5; The Reign of Henry VIII and Parliament Under Henry VIII, both 1881 in Medieval and Modern History 1886, pp. 253–4, 259, 261, 276, 291 and 446–8; The Constitutional History of England I 1874, pp. 16, 121–2, 129, 163–4, 170, 178, 215, 217–19, 221, 227–8, 231–2, 234, 237–40, 242–3, 245, 280–1, 283, 285–6, 295, 316, 319, 375, 462, 465–6, 474, 531–2, 542–3 and 633–5; II 1875, pp. 196–7, 201, 299–301, 303 and 374; and III 1878, pp. 221, 280, 287–8, 290–1, 294–6, 305, 309–10, 314–15, 317–18, 329–36, 347–50, 352, 365–9, 371–4 and 618; The Laws and Legislation of the Norman Kings in (Hassall ed.), Lectures on Early Modern History 1906, p. 90. See also (Holmes ed.), The Ordination Questions 1901, pp. 38–9, 42–51, 118–19, 158–61 and 184–7. pp. 237–46 (Cunningham) For Cunningham after 1914 see The Common Weal 1917, pp. 88–96 and 107–14; The Secret of Progress 1918, p. 4; British Citizens and Their Responsibility to God 1916, pp. ii, 7–8, 10–11, 23–33 and 40–1; Christianity and Politics (1914) 1916, pp. 2–3, 18–20, 227 and 262–3; The Increase of Religion 1917, pp. 6–11, 18–19, 22–3, 26–7 and 30–2; and Personal Ideals and Social Principles 1919, pp. 5–6, 8–9 and 32–3. For Cunningham on Christianity, economic policy and economic history see Letter from India, in Cambridge Review 15 February, 8 March and 15 March 1882, pp. 172–3, 222–4 and 238–9; Politics and Economics 1885, pp. vii, 4–17, 22–33, 38–45, 48–9, 53, 74–5, 78–80, 82–7, 92–3, 98, 100, 104–5, 107, 111–12, 116–19, 121, 123 and 136–8; The Use and Abuse of Money 1891, pp. 39, 111–19, 122–4, 144–5 and 150–1. Political Economy and Practical Life (1892) 1893, pp. 4–7 and 13–16; The Alternative to Socialism in England 1885, pp. 1–9 and 18–25. Strikes 1895, pp. 5–8; Why Had Roscher So Little Influence in England? 1894, pp. 3–7, 11 and 16–18; Christianity and Social Questions 1910, pp. 4–5, 91, 107 and 129; Christianity and Economic Science (1913) 1914, pp. 16–30, 35, 41 and 56–7. The Progress of Socialism in England, in The Contemporary Review January 1879, pp. 245–54 and 257–9, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce 1882 (1885), pp. 2–7, 47–8, 51–3, 116–17, 120–1, 132, 137–59, 172–4, 178–9, 186, 222–3, 243, 248–50, 252–3, 262–6, 279, 310 and 391–2; and 1892 esp. II, pp. 1–5 and 678–86; The Wisdom of the Wise 1906, pp. 4–8, 22–3, 27–8, 39, 45–6, 49–51, 56–7, 60, 72–4, 78–9, 81–2, 85–6, 89–91, 94, 97–100 and 104–5; The Rise and Decline of The Free Trade Movement 1903 (1912), pp. 1–2, 4–8, 11, 37, 104–5, 111–12, 118–19, 124–5, 132–3, 138–9, 147–50, 153, 159 and 161–2; The Case Against Free Trade with a Preface by The Rt Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M. P. 1911, pp. 4, 7, 9–10, 15, 25–6, 87 and 116–17. The Real Richard Cobden 1904, p. 4 and Back to Adam Smith 1904, pp. 2–5. Christianity and Socialism 1909, pp. 1 and 11–14; The Cure of Souls 1909, pp. 169–70, 173, 175, 186–7 and 192–4, The Path to Knowledge 1891, pp. 41–3, 45, 48–9, 51, 136–7, 141–3, 151–5, 159–60, 213–15, 218–19, 225–8, 231 and 235–7; Christianity and Social Questions 1910 (1919), pp. 1–3, 6–13, 29, 36–9, 42–5, 48–51, 76–9, 101, 174–5, 179–84, 186–7, 192–3, 198–201, 203–4, 206–9, 216–19 and 223; The Use and Abuse of Money 1891, pp. vii, 14, 25, 32, 39–46, 92–3 and 100; The Christian Standpoint in (Swete ed.) Essays on Some Theological Questions of the Day 1906, pp. 5–6, True Womanhood 1896, pp. 20–3; The Epistle of St Barnabas 1877, pp. ii–iv, lxxxvi–lxxxvii and cxv–cxvii; The Churches

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of Asia 1880, pp. viii–ix, 3–7, 12 and 215–18; The Gospel of Work 1902, pp. 1, 7–10, 13, 16–19, 22, 25–6, 28–31, 33–4, 40–5, 53–4, 56–8, 70–1, 79–81, 91, 93–7, 113–14 and 117–19; Christian Civilization with Special Reference to India 1880, pp. 5–7, 9–10, 12–13, 17–19, 21, 23, 25–6, 29–31, 39–42, 53, 57, 63–4, 70, 77, 82–5, 108–11, 115–19, 123, 126–8, 134 and 137; Christian Opinion of Usury 1884, pp. 56–84; S. Austin and His Place in The History of Christian Thought 1886, pp. v–vi, 5–10, 12–13, 16–17, 20–5, 31–2, 36–42, 48, 55–6, 58–61, 63, 69–70, 81–7, 94–5, 99, 101, 103, 105, 114–15, 127 and 129–34; The Meaning of Religious Education (1906) 1907, pp. 3–4; Christianity and Economic Science (1913) 1914, pp. 2–5, 11, 63, 65–7, 83–4 and 87; and Toleration 1885, pp. 3–5 and 7–8. pp. 250–3 (Church) For Church as churchman, public commentator and Christian apologist see The Oxford Movement 1833–1845 1891, p. ix and 5–6; Occasional Papers 1897 I, pp. 4, 54–5, 64–73, 83–4, 148–9, 153–4, 156–7, 166–7, 210–11, 214, 232–3, 274–9, 289–91, 360–9, 374–5 and 401–2; II, pp. 2–3, 13–14, 16, 21–2, 24, 28, 30–3, 35–8, 41, 43, 48–9, 58–9, 61–2, 64, 69, 71, 74–7, 85–6, 90–1, 95–6, 101–2, 105–9, 114, 118–19, 127, 189–93, 199, 203–4, 208, 210–11, 249, 269, 306–8, 310–12, 318, 355–9, 362–3, 386 and 393; St Anselm 1870 (1888 edn), pp. v–vii, 3–7, 48–9, 148–51, 266–71, and 337–47; Pascal and Other Sermons 1875–80 (1895 edn), pp. 4–12, 14–16, 27–8, 32, 35, 38, 40–2, 52–96, 219–23, and 237–53; Spenser 1879 (1902 edn), pp. 3–4, 16, 29–35, 86–9, 119–21 and 150–6; Bacon 1884 (1909 edn), esp. chapters vii and ix; The Gifts of Civilization 1880 (1891 edn), pp. 7–19, 33, 40–1, 64–5, 97–105, 108–11, 152–7, 161, 164–5, 170–2, 188–93, 198–201, 212–13, 226–8, 231–2, 238–57, 261–2, 271, 273–5, 280–1, 320–4, 330–3, 338, 351–2, 365–7, 374–5 and 378–9; The Discipline of the Christian Character 1885, pp. 49 and 120; (R. Hooker ed.), Book I of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 1868, pp. xvii–xviii. See also (Mary Church ed.) Life and Letters of Dean Church 1894, pp. 35–6, 46, 60–3, 134–5, 145–6, 154, 168, 178 and 204; Miscellaneous Essays 1888, pp. 3–75 and 152–5; Dante and Other Essays 1850; Cathedral and University Sermons 1874–84, p. 11, 25, 88, 274–7 and 282; Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford . . . 1876–1878 (1886 edn), pp. 28–9, 40–3, 53–5, 64, 70–1, 75 and 84–5. For Church’s review of Sordello on first publication see Miscellaneous Essays II, pp. 494–570. pp. 253–9 (Shaftesbury) For Shaftesbury’s life and opinions see Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury KG 1886 I, pp. 44, 54, 59, 63, 67–9, 74–7, 84–9, 96–7, 102–6, 108–9, 111, 114–15, 154–5, 174, 199–200, 204–6, 238–40, 252–3, 295–6, 310–11, 314–15, 323, 334, 342–7, 376–7, 390, 395–6, 404–5, 408–9, 440–2, 472 and 490–4; II, pp. 11, 15, 23, 41, 43, 55, 58–9, 74–7, 80, 82–5, 98–101, 112–13, 115, 121, 140–1, 169, 222–3, 226, 238, 243, 244–5, 249, 262, 272, 279–81, 302, 329, 332–3, 338, 359, 362–3, 374–5, 387–92, 402–3, 406–7, 445–6, 450–3, 459, 474, 526–7 and 573; and III, pp. 5, 9–10, 15–16, 18, 20–7, 35–6, 57–60, 88–9, 94–8, 109, 132–6, 140–4, 146–9, 153, 160–72, 176–9, 185, 209–13, 226–9, 235–6, 240–3, 246–9, 254–61, 264–9, 282, 286, 295–6, 301, 303, 330–1, 357–8, 375–6, 387–8, 396–8 and chapter XXVIII. Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury (1837–67) 1868, pp. iii–iv, viii–xi, 10–11, 14–15, 22–3, 28–9, 44–5, 56–7, 59, 62–3, 79, 85–6, 114–15, 128–30, 148–51, 167–9, 195–6, 211–12, 214–17, 224–5, 254–5, 284, 296–302, 322, 332–3, 402–9, 424–5 and 428–31. See also G. B. M. Finlayson, The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury 1981. For Cobden see (Mallet ed.) Political Writings of Richard Cobden 1878, pp. 15, 23–7, 187, 190, 194 and 209.

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pp. 259–67 (Maurice) For Maurice’s early opinions see Metropolitan Quarterly Magazine 1826 I, pp. 9–24, 257–9 and 353–5, II, pp. 1–5, 30–6, 85–91 and 219–30, and 1827 III, pp. 303–15; Athenaeum 1828, pp. 49–50, 65–6, 97–8, 113–15, 129–30, 161–2, 193, 217–19, 249–50, 351–2, 528–9, 623–4, 641, 656, 751–2, 767–9, 969–70 and 977. See also Eustace Conway 1834 III, p. 279. For Maurice on literature, philosophy, theology and social doctrine, see On The Reformation of Society 1851, pp. 12–17 and 28–34; Lectures on The Ecclesiastical History of The First and Second Centuries 1854, p. 34; (Hughes ed.), The Friendship of Books and Other Lectures 1874 (1880 edn), esp. Lectures IV, V, VII, IX and XI, A Letter to The Ven. Samuel Wilberforce 1841, pp. 6–10, 14–15, 18 and 22; A Letter to Lord Ashley 1843, pp. 5–6, 10–11, 13–19 and 23; The Epistle to The Hebrews . . . [with] A Review of Mr Newman’s Theory of Development 1846, pp. xxv–xxvii, xxxi–xxxv, xxxvii–xxxix, xl–xli, xliii–iv, xlviii, lvii–lviii, lxv–lxvii, lxix, lxxx–lxxxiii, lxxxv, lxxxvii, xciii, xcvi, xcix, cxvii–cxix and cxxvii–cxxviii; Subscription No Bondage (by Rusticus) 1835, pp. 15–21, 23–4, 31, 56, 58, 68, 73, 75 and 78–9, The Kingdom of Christ or Hints on The Principal Ordinances and Constitution of The Catholic Church 1838 I, pp. vii–xxxvi, 162–4, 170, 186–7, 199, 202, 206–7, 211–17, 220–5, 227, 236, 240, 245–8, 251–2, 254–9, 262, 304–17 and 325, II, pp. iv–xviii and III, pp. 120–36 and 350–7. Introduction to Law, Remarks on The Fable of The Bees 1844, pp. i–lxxix; Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy 1850 (2nd edn), pp. 1–4, 28, 118, 136–8, 140, 144, 147, 165, 167 and 178; Mediaeval Philosophy 1857, Dedication, pp. v, 29–45, 80–2, 84–6, 112–16 and 163–73; and Modern Philosophy 1862, pp. vii–x, 100, 103, 124–5, 634–5 and 652–76. What is Revelation? 1859, pp. 132–40, 154–5, 165, 194–201, 226, 228–31, 242–3, 262–3, 285, 301, 326, 335, 372, 399, 445, 448 and 468–9; and Sequel to What is Relevation? 1860. The Religions of The World 1847, pp. 1–3, 5, 26–33, 35, 39–44, 46, 51–2, 54, 62–3, 85–91, 94, 144–9, 152, 155–7, 159, 192, 203–4, 209–14, 218, 226, 243, 251 and 254–6; Theological Essays 1853, pp. v–ix, 8–9, 20–1, 23–4, 26, 28, 38–40, 51, 60–2, 64–6, 68, 74, 87–9, 101–4, 127–8, 131–3, 141–7, 151, 188, 194, 196–8, 204–12, 231 and 237; and The Concluding Essay and Preface to The Second Edition of Mr Maurice’s Theological Essays 1854, pp. vii–63. For Tennyson on Maurice see To the Reverend F. D. Maurice 1854. For Maurice on the Indian Mutiny of 1857 see The Indian Crisis: Five Sermons 1857. See also Social Morality 1869, pp. vii–xii, 3, 7–8, 13, 16–17, 270–1, 278–9, 288–9, 295, 298, 309–10, 319–20, 327, 375–8, 432, 434–5, 438–40, 444, 446–8, 452–3, 458–9, 463, 468–72, 475, 478–9 and 481. pp. 267–71 (Westcott) For Westcott’s early experiences and opinions see A. Westcott, Life and Letters of B. F. Westcott Sometime Bishop of Durham 1903 I, pp. 7–8, 18–19, 206–8 and 214. For Westcott’s account of the Bible see The Bible in The Church 1864, pp. x–xi; An Introduction to the Study of The Gospels 1860, pp. 7–8, 11–16, 28–9, 31, 33–6, 150–5, 200ff., 229–30, 365–6, 369 and 373–5; Elements of The Gospel Harmony 1851, pp. 4, 8–10, 21–2, 30–2, 35–9, 44, 53ff., 58, 111ff., 132 and 134–7; Introduction to The New Testament 1881, p. 2; and A General Survey of the History of the Canon of The New Testament, pp. vii, 8 and 540. For Hort on the text of the New Testament see The New Testament in the Original Greek 1881, pp. 1–73. See also Westcott’s Gospel According to St John 1882 and Epistle to The Hebrews 1889, Some Lessons of The Revised Version of The New Testament (1887) 1897, pp. 1–18 and Life and Letters I, pp. 398–403. For Westcott on contemporary thought, culture and religion, see On Some Points in The Religious Office of The Universities 1873, pp. v–xii, 5, 11, 15, 25, 28–31, 33, 36, 39, 42, 56, 60, 64, 94, 96, 123 and 131; The Conservative Work of the

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Christian Ministry 1870, pp. 8–11 and 15–18. Essays in The History of Religious Thought in the West (1866–84) 1891, pp. 45–50, 52–3, 56, 58, 65, 78, 87, 93–4, 98, 100, 102, 118, 130, 139–40, 254–8, 272, 278–81, 287, 309–21, 323, 325–6 and 340–1. The Gospel of The Resurrection 1866, pp. 1–45, 48–57, 59–60, 81–6, 88, 90, 126, 135, 138, 141, 149, 151, 156, 158–63, 170–3, 178, 181–4, 187, 190–1, 194–5, 198–9, 201 and 207–15, and 3rd edn 1874, pp. vii–x; A Form of Confraternity Suited to The Present Condition of The English Church, in Contemporary Review 1872, pp. 102–24; Cathedral Foundations in Relation to Religious Thought, in (Howson ed.), Essays on Cathedrals 1872, pp. 111–15; and Cathedral Work in Macmillan’s Magazine January to February 1870, pp. 246 and 308–14. Elements of The Gospel Harmony 1851, p. 31; Comte on The Philosophy of The History of Christianity, in Contemporary Review September–December 1867, pp. 399–408 and 415–21; and Aspects of Positivism in Relation to Christianity, in Contemporary Review July 1868, pp. 372–4, 377–9 and 382–5. The Epistles of St John 1883, pp. 235–315, The Social Aspects of Christianity (1886–87) 1887 (1888 edn), p. xii, 4, 6, 15, 20–3, 27–30, 38–9, 42–3, 52–3, 62, 67–8, 70, 86, 89, 91, 96, 103, 110, 121, 123, 138–9, 144–5, 165 and 169–70; The Incarnation and Common Life (1890–1) 1893, pp. 8, 20–1, 23, 47, 60–5, 77, 86, 148, 152–3, 180, 189, 211, 225, 230–6, 243, 246 and 301; Christian Aspects of Life (1894–97) 1897 (1901 edn), pp. 36, 76–9, 90–1, 110–11, 144–5, 164–5, 228–9, 247, 249, 252, 260–1, 265–6, 284, 287–8 and 311–13; and Christian Social Union Addresses (1896–1900) 1903, pp. 1, 3–5, 8–9, 15, 31–2, 34–7, 40, 45, 49–50 and 73. In (Hocking ed.), The Church and New-Century Problems 1901, pp. 19–20 and 26–7 and in (no editor) Lombard Street in Lent 4th edn 1894, pp. ix and x. See also Our Attitude Towards The War 1870 and Death of Napoleon III 1873, both in Peterborough Sermons 1902; and A. Westcott, The Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott II 1903, pp. 286–7 and 311. pp. 271–5, 285–91 (Temple) For Temple on Edward Caird see Christus Veritas 1924, p. 41; Christianity in Thought and Practice 1936, p. 16; Nature, Man and God 1934, p. x; and Oliver Quick, The Gospel of the New World 1944, p. xii. For Temple’s social, political and educational doctrine see The Industrial Unrest and the Living Wage (1913–14); The Divinity of Christ, in (Streeter and others eds.), Foundations 1912, p. 244; The Kingdom of God 1912, pp. 74–80, 82–7, 92–4 and 96–9; Church and Nation 1916, pp. vii–xiii, 58–63, 80–7, 158–9 and 181–94; The Nature of Personality 1911, pp. 11–13, 20–1, 30–6, 52–3, 65–71 and 74–9; In Memoriam Ronald Poulton 1915, p. 12, Nature, Man and God 1934, pp. 404–5; The Hope of a New World 1940, pp. 11–12, 17–20, 25, 27–8, 35–44, 46–7, 49–55, 64–6, 77, 79, 91–8, 104, 107 and 109–11; and Thoughts in Wartime (1939–40) 1940, pp. 3–8, 15–19, 31–5 and 53–90. The Perils of a Purely Scientific Education 1932, Christ and the Way to Peace 1935, The Abdication 1937 and A Conditional Justification of War 1940, all in A. E. Baker, Religious Experience 1958, pp. 124–5, 132–4, 166–78 and 242; Life of Bishop Percival 1921, pp. 371–4; Prayer for Victory 1940, in What It Means 1940, pp. 4–5; The Christian and The World Situation (broadcast talk) 1935, pp. 4–13, Thanksgiving Service in Westminster Abbey 1927, pp. 9–12 and 14–16, Faith and Freedom (broadcast talk) 1935, pp. 7–14; Mens Creatrix 1917, pp. 213–52; The Death Penalty (reprinted from The Spectator) 1935, The Ethics of Penal Action 1934, pp. 14–17 and 21–31, Introduction to A. L. Woodard, The Teaching Church 1928, pp. 7 and 10–11; and The Distinctive Excellences of Greek and Latin 1930, pp. 16–18. The Conclusion of the Matter in (Dearmer ed.), Christianity and the Crisis 1933, pp. 599–608; A Sermon . . . on the Occasion of the Disarmament Conference 1932, pp. 2–9 and 11–18; The Preacher’s

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Theme Today 1936, pp. 64–75; and The Church’s Witness, in Thoughts on Some Problems of The Day 1931, pp. 32–68. Essays in Christian Politics and Kindred Subjects 1927, pp. 2, 5, 9, 12, 14–16, 22–4, 26–8, 30–1, 37–57, 70–6, 78–80, 111–20 and 126–30; Personal Religion and The Life of Fellowship 1925 (1926), pp. 50–68 and 82–7; Christ in His Church (1924) 1925, pp. 77–85; Christianity and Social Order (Penguin edn) 1942, pp. 9–14, 17–20, 22–3, 28, 34–5, 37, 39, 44–6, 52–3, 55ff.; Theology the Science of Religion: A Sermon Preached before The University of Oxford January 18 1914, pp. 2–3; Other Worldliness 1918, in Fellowship with God 1920, pp. 206–8; The Relations of Church and State 1930, pp. 12–19; Christianity and The State 1928 (1929 edn), pp. vii–x, 1–5, 8–9, 12–14, 25–32, 41, 91, 104–24, 127, 138–9, 150–1, 162–4, 171–5 and 184–5; Presidential Address (to the WEA) 1920, pp. 4–5; Nazi Massacres of the Jews 1943; The Challenge of The Christian Sex Standard 1944, pp. 4–7; The Crisis of The Western World 1944, pp. 15 and 18–19; Thoughts in Wartime (1939–40) 1940, pp. 2–3, 6–8, 26–31, 40–1, 50–3, 60–1, 69, 71–4 and 100–3; and The Church Looks Forward (1942–3) 1944, pp. 36–44, 105–9, 111–13, 117–18, 120–2, 127, 132, 138–9, 161–2 and 169–71. For Temple on the Church of England see The Church, in Foundations, pp. 346–7 and 353–6; The Place of The Layman in The National Mission 1916, pp. 4–7; A Challenge to The Church, Being an Account of The National Mission 1916, 1917, pp. 17–33; Life and Liberty 1917, pp. 3–7 and 14–17; The Fellowship of Service 1936, pp. 33–8; Is Christ Divided? 1943, pp. 7–10; Church and Nation 1916, pp. 30, 33, 37, 40–1, 92–4, 96–9, 101–2, 141–2 and 144–7; Christ in His Church (1924) 1925, pp. 93–4; The Church and The Education Bill 1906 up to p. 7; Christianity and The State 1929, pp. 194–5, in The Church Looks Forward 1944, pp. 28–30, Thoughts on Some Problems of The Day 1931, pp. 72–5, 90–1, 133–4, 136–7 and 153–6; The Genius of The Church of England 1928, in (Baker ed.) Religious Experience, pp. 87–93 and 96; The Prayer-Book: A Plea for the New Prayer-Book 1927, pp. 6–7 and 24; and The Prayer-book Crisis 1928, pp. 3, 7, 16–18, 25, 27–8 and 30–1. For Temple’s theological and philosophical vindication of Christianity see The Divinity of Christ, in Foundations, pp. 213–17, 219–22, 242–5, 254–5 and 258–63, The Universality of Christ 1921, pp. 22–9, 33, 35–6, 44–6, 53–6 and 72–5; The Kingdom of God, pp. 2–4 and 135–41; Essays in Christian Politics, pp. 218–19 and 228; The Nature of Personality 1911, pp. xiii–xiv, xx–xxvii, xxix–xxxii, 37–8, 48–9, 80–91, 96, 98 and 117–19; Christianity and The State, pp. 41–2; The Faith and Modern Thought 1912, pp. 3–4, 6–7, 9–12, 16–23, 25–8, 32, 45–56, 58, 62–75, 77, 84–8, 96–9, 105–7, 109, 116–23, 144–5, 147–55, 160–1, 163 and 170; Mens Creatrix, pp. 1, 4, 9, 20–3, 26–35, 37–8, 41–3, 64–8, 72, 93–9, 103, 105, 109–12, 118, 120–2, 125–7, 132–4, 144–6, 150–61, 169–70, 171–5, 184–90, 256–61, 264–9, 273–9, 282, 284–6, 289, 295–8, 311–15, 321, 339–42, 344, 346, 349–53 and chapter xxii; Christus Veritas, pp. ix, 3, 23, 105 and 119–20, Church and Nation, pp. 2–9, 14–15, 20–3 and 123–39; Basic Convictions 1937, pp. 3 and 15; Repton School Sermons 1913, p. 333, F. A. Iremonger, William Temple 1948, pp. 606–11; Theology Today, in Theology October 1939, and in Thoughts in Wartime 1940, pp. 93–6, 98–103 and 106–9; Christianity in Thought and Practice 1936, pp. 16–21, 31–5, 39–45 and 56; Plato and Christianity 1916 pp. 6, 31–2, 37, 39–40, 64, 66 and 73–102; Nature, Man and God, pp. ix–x and 28; Religious Experience, pp. 58–60; Christian Faith and Life 1931 (1957 edn), pp. 134–5; and Personal Religion and The Life of Fellowship 1926, pp. 2–5, 13, 16–17, 23–4, 69 and 78–82. pp. 275–85 (Tawney) For Gore’s Introductory Remarks to Tawney’s Inaugural Lecture as Director of the Ratan Tata Institute see R. H. Tawney, Poverty as an Industrial Problem 1913 (1924),

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pp. 5–8. For Gaitskell on Tawney see Address by The Rt Hon. Hugh Gaitskell, Leader of the Labour Party, at a Memorial Service for R. H. Tawney . . . February 8 1962, in R. Hinden, The Radical Tradition 1964, pp. 211–12. For Tawney’s biography, see Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and His Times and (Winter ed.), History and Society: Essays by R. H. Tawney 1978. For Tawney on the modern world, see (Winter and Joslin eds.), R. H. Tawney’s Commonplace Book 1912, 1972, pp. 6, 8–9, 12–14, 18–19, 22–3, 25, 30–1, 34–6, 38–9 and 45–7; 1913, pp. 49–50, 52–3, 61–7 and 70–1; and 1914 pp. 72, 74–6, 79 and 82–3; The Personnel of The New Armies, in The Nation 27 February 1915, p. 677, The Sword of the Spirit and The Philosophy of Power I and II, in The Athenaeum 1917, pp. 168–71, 213–15, 698–700, 702 and 704; Municipal Enterprise in Germany, in Economic Review October 1910, pp. 423–5 and 433–7; introduction to A. Greenwood et al., The Health and Physique of Schoolchildren 1913, pp. xi–xv; Recent Thought on The Government of Industry, in P. Alden and others, Labour and Industry 1920, pp. 191–3, 196–8, 201, 203–4 and 211; An Experiment in Democratic Education 1914, The Conditions of Economic Liberty 1918 and Keep the Workers’ Children in Their Place 1918, all in R. Hinden, The Radical Tradition, pp. 49–50, 72, 78–81, 97, 99, 110–13 and 116, and The Acquisitive Society 1921, pp. 1–4, 7–10, 13, 18–19, 23–5, 30–2, 36, 38, 45, 51–2, 54, 64, 66, 77, 80, 82–4, 87, 198–9, 202–4, 206–7, 223, 225–33 and 236–8. The University and The Nation, in The Westminster Gazette, 15, 16, 17, 23 and 24 February and 2, 3 and 10 March 1906; Canon Barnett, His Life, Work and Friends by His Wife 1918, II, pp. 105–14; An Educational Programme, in Manchester Guardian 10 March 1917; R. H. Tawney’s Commonplace Book 1912, pp. 7 and 42–3; and Education, the Socialist Policy 1924, pp. 2–5, 54–5 and 58. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century 1912, pp. vii, 2–3, 5–6, 8–11, 13–15, 28–9, 34–5, 38–40, 43–5, 55–61, 84, 86–7, 91, 96, 122–5, 134–5, 138–42, 146–51, 165, 177–9, 181–2, 185–7, 193–5, 231–2, 237, 264–5, 270, 274–5, 280, 310, 313–15, 317–18, 330–1, 333, 337–45, 347–8, 370, 382, 384–7, 389–97, 400 and 407–8; The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the Peace (1913) 1914, in (Minchinton ed.), Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England 1972. For Tawney on religion see review of The Daily News Religious Census of London, in The Toynbee Record March 1904, pp. 87–8; The Enabling Bill, in Manchester Guardian 7 June 1919; Religion and Business, in The Hibbert Journal October 1922, pp. 65–80; ed. Thomas Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury 1925, pp. 106–22; review of (Polanyi, Needham, Raven and MacMurray eds.), Christianity and The Social Revolution, in New Statesman and Nation 9 November 1935; introduction to Charles Gore, Christianity Applied to the Life of Men and Nations 1940, pp. 5–7; introduction to M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1930, pp. 1(d)–3, 5–6 and 8–9; A Note on Christianity and the Social Order 1937, in The Attack, pp. 167–8, 170–1, 174–8, 181–2, 184–5, 188–9 and 191; Religion and The Rise of Capitalism (1922) 1926 (1938 edn), pp. vi–xiii, 76–7, 84–7, 92, 97–114, 116–18, 120–2, 130–3, 139–41, 153–4, 169–73, 179–80, 183, 186, 190, 196, 198, 200–2, 208, 211, 218, 224–6, 228–9, 237–8, 241, 244, 247–8 and 270–5. pp. 293–8 (Forsyth) For Forsyth’s life see W. L. Bradley, P. T. Forsyth 1952, pp. 15ff. and Harry Escott, Peter Taylor Forsyth 1948, pp. 6–9, 12–15, 18–34 and 47–53. For Forsyth as defender of Dissent and assailant of Catholicism, see Rome, Reform and Reaction 1899, pp. 19–21, 23, 26–9, 39–46, 55–66, 68–9, 76, 88, 117–25, 177, 194, 198, 203–9 and 225; and The Charter of The Church 1896, pp. vi, 7–8, 10–12, 17–19, 22–7, 32–5, 39–41, 44, 48, 50–3, 57–8, 72–3, 80–1, 90 and 97. See also Congregationalism and Reunion 1919, pp. 2–21. For Forsyth’s politics see The Christian Ethic of War 1916, pp. 10–11,

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30–1, 34–5, 65–9, 73–4, 78–80, 86, 89–90 and 124; The Happy Warrior 1898, pp. 6–10, 12–13, 17 and 27; The Church, The Gospel and Society 1905 (1962 edn), pp. 32–46, 48–51 and 56–63; The Charter of The Church 1896, p. 37; and Socialism, The Churches and The Poor 1908, pp. 2, 5–25, 32–3, 47–9, 55–61, 68–9 and 72–3. For Forsyth on art see Religion in Recent Art 1889, pp. viii–ix and 1889 (1901 edn), pp. 3–10, 25, 32–8, 49, 52, 94–7, 100–2, 114–15, 117, 119, 130–3, 155, 165, 170–4, 193–4, 199, 209–12, 217, 220–2, 225–30, 232–5, 238–40, 253–9, 261, 263–4, 266–7, 271, 273 and 314–15; and Christ on Parnassus n.d. (1911), pp. 13–17, 19, 29–31, 35–6, 38–44, 47–51, 53, 60–8, 98–105, 106–7, 110, 117, 123, 137–9, 142–7, 173–4, 179–83, 189, 194–203, 205–7, 212–19, 229, 231–7, 240–4, 250–4, 256–9, 262–4, 267, 271–4, 276–80, 282–3, 285, 287–8 and 291–3. For Forsyth’s theology and the situation to which it was directed see The Christian Ethic of War, pp. 112, 125, 130–3 and 159; Revelation and The Person of Christ, in W. H. Bennett and others, Faith and Criticism 1893; The Cruciality of The Cross 1909, pp. 8–9, 112–15, 119–21, 143–5, 148, 151, 155–6, 159–63, 166–71 and 207–8; Religion in Recent Art, pp. 236–7, The Church, The Gospel and Society, pp. 6, 8, 13, 17, 20, 23, 67–73, 75–9, 80, 82–3, 86–90, 97–8, 107–9, 110–11, 113–15, 117–20, 122 and 126–7; Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind 1907, pp. 27–31, 42, 46–9, 51, 56, 60–1, 70–1, 75–7, 80, 88, 97, 100–1, 103, 110, 115–16, 122–7, 143–6, 150, 153, 156–7, 161, 168, 173, 178–9, 192–3, 202, 204–7, 210–11, 227, 235, 237–9, 247–9, 265, 314–16, 333–7 and 369; Rome, Reform and Reaction, pp. 107, 129, 143–4 and 233–4; Christian Perfection 1899, pp. 8–11, 16, 41, 55–63, 73 and 91; Faith, Freedom and The Future 1912, pp. x, xiv, 219, 235–8, 240–1 and 243–4. See also The Principle of Authority 1913 and The Justification of God 1917. pp. 298–300 (Masterman) For Masterman’s intellectual religion see esp. Tennyson as a Religious Teacher 1900 (1910), pp. 194–5, 197–8, 202, 204–7 and 210–13; and In Peril of Change 1905, pp. 114–20, 123, 127, 129, 132–3, 137, 139, 167–73, 285, 288, 291, 295–9 and 304–20. See also The Condition of England 1909. pp. 300–304 (Figgis) For L. S. Hodgson, see Towards A Christian Philosophy 1942, pp. 7–9. For Figgis on politics and religion see The Divine Right of Kings 1896 (1922 edn), pp. 1–10, 12–13, 252–9 and 262–5; Churches in The Modern State 1913, pp. 36, 39, 42, 57, 69–70, 76–7, 82–3, 85, 87, 91, 101, 108–11, 120, 163, 235–6 and 271; Gerson to Grotius (1900) 1907 (1916 edn); The Political Aspect of St Augustine’s City of God 1921, pp. 7, 29, 31 and 111–18; The Will to Freedom 1917, pp. 22–5, 27, 48–50, 61–3, 67, 72–5, 78–80, 82–3, 125–8, 130, 132, 134, 138–40, 142, 215, 232–6, 241, 269, 272, 290–1, 298, 305 and 309; The Gospel and Human Needs (1908) 1909, pp. vii–viii, x–xii, 1–4, 6, 8, 11–13, 15, 18–22, 25, 35, 54, 59 and 65–6; Hopes for English Religion 1919, pp. 16–21, 53–4, 57, 69, 84, 90–1, 106 and 113; and The Fellowship of the Mystery 1914, pp. 147, 149, 152–8, 168–9, 185–8 and 190–203. pp. 304–8 (Gore) For Gore’s life, the internal politics of the Church of England and the moral and political witness of the Church see Essays in Aid of the Reform of The Church 1898, pp. vii–viii, x, 1–2, 6–8 and 23–4; The Question of Divorce 1911, pp. 44–57; The Prevention of Conception 1927, pp. 26–32; Lambeth on Contraceptives 1930, pp. 3, 16–19 and 29–30; and (with G. H. Box) Divorce in The New Testament 1921. G. L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore 1935. For Gore’s social doctrine see St Paul’s

728

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Epistle to the Ephesians 1898, pp. 18–19, 222–8 and 264–5; Property Its Rights and Duties 1913, pp. xi and xvii–xix; The Social Doctrine of The Sermon on The Mount in Economic Review April 1892, pp. 4–9 and 16, The Sermon on The Mount 1896 (1938 edn), pp. 110–11; The War and The Church 1914, pp. 4–9, 12–17, 40–1 and 57–9; Christ and Society 1928, pp. 18, 26–7, 32, 46–7, 51, 61, 66 and 71; Crisis in Church and Nation 1915, pp. 38–9; Three Addresses 1 December 1896 in Christian Social Union 1896, pp. 29–32; Patriotism in The Bible: A Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge 7 March 1915, pp. 9–11. For Gore on The League of Nations see The League of Nations: The Opportunity of The Church 1918, pp. 4–6 and 23–4; The League of Nations 1919, pp. iv–v; and Christianity Applied to The Life of Men and Nations 1920, pp. 35–51. See also Leo The Great 1880, pp. 93–100, 115 and 127; St Paul’s Epistle to The Ephesians 1898, p. 153; Catholicism and Roman Catholicism (1922) 1923, pp. 19–21, 27–31, 34–5 and 52–3; The New Theology and The Old Religion 1907, p. 170 and chapter V; The Clergy and The Creeds 1887, pp. 7–8; and The Athanasian Creed 1897, pp. 6–9. See also The Social Obligations of a Christian 1912; Dr Headlam’s Bampton Lectures 1920 and The Anglo-Catholic Movement Today 1925. For Gore’s view of religion and theology see Objections to The Education Bill 1906, pp. 4–5 and 8–9; The New Theology and The Old Religion 1907, pp. vii, 5, 7, 10–11, 30–1, 34–5, 42–3, 54–5, 62, 66–7, 70–2, 80, 84–5, 88–9, 106, 110, 115–16, 121–3, 128–30, 135, 141–4, 148–51, 153, 155–7, 159, 185–6, 205–9, 233, 239–40 and 242–4. The Church and The Ministry 1882, pp. 2–4, 7–9, 22–3, 25–6, 50–1, 55 and 65–7; The Clergy and The Creeds 1887, pp. 7–8; The Incarnation of The Son of God 1891, pp. viii–ix, 1–5, 9, 16–18, 20–1, 24–5, 31–6, 38, 43–53, 55, 61–2, 64–6, 73, 76, 79–82, 85, 87, 89, 109, 126, 129–30, 136, 168, 182–3 and 185; The War and The Church, pp. 47–9, 116–23, 133–9, 182–3 and 185; Crisis in Church and Nation, pp. 25–6; Hints for the Study of Theology with a View to Holy Orders 1887, p. 3; The Ministry of The Church 1889, pp. v–vii, 5–9, 44, 49, 52–7, 60–1, 64, 73–4, 82–5, 92–3, 97–8, 106 and 337–45; Lux Mundi 1889 (1890 edn), pp. vii–ix, 327 and 332–8; The Mission of the Church 1892, pp. viii, 12–13, 22–3, 34–5, 74–7, 82–3, 99–101 and 132–7; The Epistles of St John 1920, pp. 8–13 and 18–19; The Deity of Christ 1922, pp. 2–3 and 6–7; The Epistle to The Ephesians, pp. 69, 85, 163, 174 and 271–4; The Religion of The Church 1916, pp. 1–15; The Epistle to The Romans I 1899, pp. 36–9, 77 and 81 and II 1900, pp. 6–7, 146 and 210–37. Dissertations on Subjects Connected with The Incarnation 1895 (1907 edn), pp. 63–5, 94–6, 202–3, 213–14, 222–3 and 269–78. Introduction to Renan’s Life of Jesus (Everyman edn 1928), pp. ix–xiv and xvi–xvii. The Reconstruction of Belief 1921–4 (1926 edn), pp. iv–ix, 1–2, 21–3, 33–4, 287–8, 290–2, 347, 624, 626, 639, 642, 938–40, 942–3, 948, 952, 956–7, 959–60, 965 and 969–70; and The Philosophy of The Good Life 1930, pp. v–vi, 192–3, 198–9, 208–11, 218, 220–1, 227, 232, 239, 242–3, 250, 257–9, 276–9, 296–7, 299 and 327. See also Dominant Ideas and Corrective Principles 1918. pp. 308–18 (Lewis) For Prebendary Wace see Henry Wace, Christianity and Agnosticism 1895, pp. xxiv–xxvi. For Lewis’s life see (Kilby ed.) Letters to an American Lady 1967 (1971 edn), p. 29 and W. H. Lewis; Letters of C. S. Lewis 1966, pp. 12–23, 37, 39–40, 42–3, 51, 73–4, 86–9, 167, 176–7 and 197. See also H. Carpenter, The Inklings 1979, and A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis 1990. For Lewis on literature up to 1944 see Rehabilitations 1939, pp. 3–5, 12, 21, 27, 29–33, 37–45, 47–54, 61–2, 64–8, 70–4, 81, 85, 92–3, 113–15, 152–3, 155–8 and 183–95, (Hooper ed.) Selected Literary Essays 1969, pp. 27–8, 104–5, 111–12, 116, 286–8 and 294–300; A Note on Comus 1932, in (Hooper ed.) Studies in Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature 1966, pp. 178–81. With E. M. W.

Notes

729

Tillyard, The Personal Heresy (1934–6) 1939, pp. 2–4, 8–9, 25–30, 51–2, 61–7, 103–4, 108–10, 112–14 and 116–21; A Preface to Paradise Lost (1941) 1942, pp. 10–11, 40–1, 51–2, 55–7, 60–1, 65, 68–75, 80–1, 83–93, 130, 132 and 134–5; The Allegory of Love 1936, pp. 1–4, 9–12, 13–14, 17, 21–3, 44–8, 58–60, 62–9, 77–8, 82–3, 88, 90–1, 112–13, 116–17, 160–1, 166, 173–4, 196–8, 296–7, 305–9, 312–13, 316–18, 320–3, 328 and 346–59. (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 1954, was a much extended version of Lewis’s Clark Lectures of 1944; it has not been used for his opinions in 1944; Father Walter Hooper has confirmed that the 1944 version seems not to have survived.) For Lewis on politics, culture, civilization and religion, between 1939 and 1944 see (W. H. Lewis ed.) Letters of C. S. Lewis, pp. 13, 165, 167, 176, 178–9, 181, 187 and 197; The Screwtape Letters 1942 (1975 edn), pp. 11–12, 27–8, 32, 35, 39–45, 49–52, 54–5, 60, 66–8, 71–4, 76–8, 81–4, 90–1, 118–19, 126–8, 134–5, 142 and 153; The Abolition of Man 1943 (1978 edn), pp. 9–11, 15–17, 19, 21–2, 24–6, 29–32, 34–6, 38–9 and 42–4; The Problem of Pain 1940 (1957 edn), pp. vii–viii and 4–13; Mere Christianity (1942–3) 1952, pp. 4, 14, 15–19, 20, 24–5, 27, 29–30, 32–4, 36–41, 44, 50–1, 53–4, 61, 64–9, 72–5, 79–80, 82, 84–5, 89–90, 92, 94, 98–101, 106–9, 115–16, 118, 121–2 and 126; Beyond Personality 1944, pp. 9–13, 15–19, 22–3, 26–7, 31, 39–43, 55 and 57–9; Undeceptions (1939–44), 1971, pp. 22, 31, 34, 36, 42–3, 46–7, 98, 161, 223–4, 230–2 and 271–3; and They Asked for a Paper (1944) 1962, pp. 148–9, 154, 158–9 and 162–4. See also A Preface to Paradise Lost, p. v. For Tolkien see On FairyStories, in (Lewis ed.) Essays Presented to Charles Williams 1947, pp. 39, 49–50, 72, 74, 77–81, 83–4 and 89. For ultimately unsuccessful attempts to make sense of Charles Williams see (Horne ed.) Charles Williams:A Celebration 1995 and G. Cavaliero, Charles Williams, Poet of Theology 1989, esp. chapter VI and Conclusion. pp. 319–28 (Balfour) For Balfour’s general intellectual reflections see esp. Essays Speculative and Political 1920, pp. 44–7, 74 and 89; The Pleasures of Reading 1887, in Essays and Addresses 1887 (1905 edn), pp. 6–10, 13–14, 18 and 28–31. Cf. B. F. Mackay, Balfour 1985, pp. 32–3. For Balfour on philosophy, morality and religion see A Defence of Philosophic Doubt 1879, pp. 5, 73–5, 243–4, 250, 256, 263–4, 269–70, 273, 287, 292–4, 300–3, 307, 311–12, 316–17, 319–20, 322–3 and 326; The Foundations of Belief 1895, pp. 1–3, 85–7, 137, 141–5, 166–74, 182, 194–205, 212–14, 216, 229, 233, 242–9, 251–3, 256–7, 260–8, 272–4, 276, 290–1, 296–8, 301–5, 309–13, 318, 321–3, 326–31, 333, 336–41, 343, 345–7, 349 and 354–6, and 8th edn 1901, pp. x–xi, xiii, xv–xvi, xviii–xxi, xxvii–xxx and xxxii–xxxiii; The Religion of Humanity 1888 and The Nineteenth Century 1900, both in Essays and Addresses (1905 edn), pp. 283–7, 290–1, 295–7, 300–1, 303, 305, 307, 311, 313 and 322–3. See also (Short ed.) Arthur James Balfour As Philosopher and Thinker 1879–1912, 1912. For Balfour on politics see (Cohen ed.) Speeches on Zionism (1920–7) 1928, pp. 24–5, 46–9, 60–3 and 71; introduction to W. Bagehot; The English Constitution 1928, pp. xxii–xxvi, (Amery ed.) The Empire in The New Era 1928, pp. xi–xii; S. A. Zebel, Balfour, A Political Biography 1973, pp. 1–2 and 11–13; Catherine J. Shannon, Arthur J. Balfour and Ireland 1874–1922 1988, pp. 282–6 and 289–91; Balfour to Salisbury in (Harcourt-Williams eds.) Salisbury– Balfour Correspondence 1988, pp. 221, 269–73; Speech at Manchester October 27 1892, Speech of 1893 in Aspects of Home Rule 1912, pp. 47–8, 51 and 59–60. Short in items Arthur James Balfour as Philosopher and Thinker, pp. 71, 79–80, 153, 155, 166–7, 185, 188, 191, 246, 248, 259, 275–6, 353, 360–2, 378–9, 382 and 497. For Economic Notes on Insular Free Trade 1903, see Fiscal Reform 1906, pp. 71–95. Balfour in Edinburgh October 5 1910, pp. 5–15, 17–19, 21 and 27–9; Cobden and the Manchester School 1882 and Politics and Political Economy 1885, both in Essays and

730

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Addresses 1892 (1905), pp. 194–7, 201, 203–4, 213–14 and 222–3, 229–30, 232–5 and 237; introduction to J. V. Bates, Sir Edward Carson 1921, pp. ix–xi; Opinions and Arguments 1910–1927, 1927, pp. 4–5. The Education Bill 1902 (Speech of 24 March), pp. 11 and 21–2 and The Education Bill 1902 (Speech at Manchester), pp. 6–10; and Dr Clifford on Religious Education 1902, in Essays and Addresses (1908 edn), pp. 427–9. See also (anon.) The Case Against Socialism 1908. pp. 329–33 (Chamberlain) For Chamberlain up to 1885 see (Boyd ed.) Mr Chamberlain’s Speeches 1914 I, pp. 6–10, 13–15, 17–22, 25–37, 41–5, 48–9, 54–5 and 62–65 and (Lucy ed.), Speeches of The Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain 1885, pp. 14, 16, 18, 20–1, 24–5, 27–8, 30–1, 37, 40–54, 56–7, 62–3, 65–73, 82–3, 85–6, 91, 94–5, 97, 100–1, 104–5, 108–9, 111–17, 120–1, 125–7, 130–1, 154, 157–9, 162–3, 170–2, 180–1, 183, 186–9, 193–5, 198–200, 204–7, 210–12, 230, 235–6 and 241. See also (Harcourt-Williams ed.), Salisbury–Balfour Correspondence 1988, pp. 168, 289–90 and 427–9. For Chamberlain between 1885 and 1905 see (Boyd ed.) Mr Chamberlain’s Speeches I, pp. 195–6, 244–5, 247–9, 253–4, 256–8, 261, 264–7, 270–1, 274, 276–9, 281–2, 284–5, 287–8, 298–302, 313, 334, 342–4, 352–7 and 361–2, and II, 3–4, 8–9, 13, 18–25, 28, 40, 49, 53–8, 60, 63, 66, 77–83, 88–90, 94–5, 109, 119, 125, 127–9, 132, 136–7, 139–42, 148–9, 157–9, 169–72, 202–3, 205–6, 218, 220–1, 226, 255–6, 258–62, 264–5 and 313–16. See also Foreign and Colonial Speeches by The Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain MP 1897, pp. 15–16, 18–19, 25–6, 34–6, 39, 43, 50–2, 68–9, 75–8, 88–90, 104–5, 133, 138, 140–1, 144–6, 148–9, 156–7, 165–7, 172–3, 194, 197–200, 206–7, 212–13 and 222–3. pp. 333–6 (Ashley) For Ashley’s combination of historical, Fabian and Christian thinking see James and Philip van Artevelde 1883, pp. 222–3; Address of 1907, pp. 2–4, The Economic Organization of England 1914, pp. 1 and 191; An Introduction to Economic History and Theory I, part ii, 1893 (1925 edn), pp. 379ff. Anne Ashley, William James Ashley 1932, pp. 92–3; The Christian Outlook 1925, pp. 16–17, 25, 28, 36–7, 44–5, 54–5, 66, 73, 81–3, 90–5, 126–9 and 154–6; and Citizenship 1917, p. 14. Freedom and Service 1922, pp. 54–5 and 57; In Troublous Times 1920, pp. 6–7; An Open Door 1922, p. 66; The War and Its Economic Aspects 1914, pp. 4–19; Surveys Historic and Economic 1897 (1900 edn), pp. 1–21, 31ff., 39–45, 92–4 and 269ff. Introduction to Fustel de Coulanges, The Origin of Property in Land 1891, pp. ix–xii; and The Progress of the German Working Class 1904, pp. v–vii. See also The Early History of the English Woollen Industry 1887; The Tariff Problem 1903; Commercial Education 1920; The Economic Situation 1922; Business Economics 1926; and The Bread of our Forefathers 1928. pp. 337–41 (Underhill) For Underhill on mysticism and psychology, see Mysticism 1911 (2nd edn), pp. x–xi, 4–5, 12–13, 15–16, 24–9, 35–7, 52–3, 58–61, 63–8, 70, 72–3, 75–6, 86–7, 90, 93–5, 101, 106, 108, 115, 122, 127–8, 141, 144, 148–9, 169–71, 203, 206 and 532–3; The Spiritual Life; Four Broadcast Talks 1937; The Mystic Way 1913, pp. vii–ix, 3, 7, 58, 127, 141 and 143; Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People 1914, p. vii, 7–13, 23, 31–3, 36, 38, 40–2, 146, 148 and 160; The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today 1922, pp. 58–60, 62–3, 64–72, 76–9, 81, 206–9 and 214–21; Mixed Pasture 1933, pp. viii, 2–3, 26, 38–9, 67, 70, 75, 81, 95–7, 105, 126–7, 210 and 212–13; and The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays 1920, pp. 1–3, 6–8, 12–15, 19 and

Notes

731

236–7. See also (Williams ed.) Letters of Evelyn Underhill 1943, pp. 10–17, 26–7, 142–5, 148, 178, 203, 206, 255 and 273; and (L. Menzies ed.) Collected Papers of Evelyn Underhill 1946. pp. 341–4 (Eddington) For Eddington’s use of the new physics to justify religion, see esp. New Pathways in Science (1934 edn) 1935, pp. 1–4 and 7–8; Space, Time and Gravitation (1920 edn) 1921, pp. v and 201; The Nature of the Physical World (Gifford Lectures 1927) 1928 (1929 edn), pp. 1–2, 16, 25–8, 35–7, 52–3, 87–90, 271–2, 274, 276–7, 280–2, 287–9, 294–5, 302–3, 317–21, 331–3, 335–6, 338–42, 344, 347, 353; and Science and the Unseen World (the Swarthmore Lectures (1928 edn)) 1929, pp. 10–12, 14–15, 18–21, 25, 28, 34–6, 42–5, 47–50 and 55–6. pp. 344–54 (Needham) For Needham on science, art, philosophy and religion in the 1920s, see Mechanistic Biology and the Religious Consciousness, in Science Religion and Reality 1925, pp. 221–5 and 235–57; Man A Machine 1927, pp. 16–19, 31–2, 36–40, 73, 74–5, 84–5, 87–93 and 98–111; Biochemistry and Mental Phenomena, in C. E. Raven, The Creator Spirit 1927, pp. 288–90 and 301; The Sceptical Biologist 1929, pp. 11–39, 46, 48–58, 60, 62–6, 74–85, 135–55; and 242–53; and The Great Amphibium 1931, pp. 26–7, 77–85, 90–1, 106–25, 129–31, 138–53, 159–60, 164 and 168. For Needham on politics, sociology, history and science in the 1930s and 1940s, see Integrative Levels 1937, pp. 3–7, 15–18, 26–7, 30–3, 37–9, 41, 43, 46–51, 55 and 58–9; Time: The Refreshing River (1935–41) 1943, pp. 9–10, 12–13, 16–19, 22–3, 30–3, 44–6, 48–9, 75–9, 92–4, 96–7, 108, 112, 121–2, 160, 172 and 174–6; and History is on our Side 1946, pp. 8–11, 38–43, 59–60, 114–20, 146, 150–5, 161–5, 171–2, 175–95, 199, 202–3, 207–11, 213 and 219. See also introduction to M. Prenant, Biology and Marxism 1938, pp. vi–x; (with W. Pagel) Background to Modern Science 1938, p. viii; Biological Science in the Soviet Union in ed. Science in the Soviet Union 1942, pp. 24–8, H. Holorenshaw (i.e. Needham), The Levellers and the English Revolution 1939, pp. 6, 17, 79–84, 86–7 and 90–1. For Needham on European and Chinese politics, thought, science and religion; see The Great Amphibium 1931, pp. 16–17, 30–1, 35–7, 41, 44–5, 52–68 and 73–4; History is on our Side, pp. 7, 10–11, 16–17, 20–1, 26–30, 39–43, 46–9, 52–6, 58–9, 97 and 106–10; Time: The Refreshing River, pp. 10, 21–7, 41, 118–19, 121–32 and 135; Integrative Levels, pp. 8–13. Falcuner; New China 1950; Within the Four Seas (1942–68) 1969, pp. 19–23, 26–8, 31–93, 95–7, 105–9, 112–16, 142–5, 147–52, 156–7, 163–6, 169, 171–2 and 190–4. History and Human Values 1975, pp. 6–8, 10–15 and 17–40; Man and His Situation 1970, An Eastern Perspective on Western Anti-Science 1974, both in (Werskey ed.); Moulds of Understanding 1976, pp. 275–6 and 298–302; Some Thoughts About China 1946 (no page numbers); The Grand Titration (1944–64) 1969, pp. 14–54, 55–122, 123–47, 154–76, 190–207, 218–20, 224–32, 242–5, 247–57, 264–8, 276–81 and 285–331; Clerks and Craftsmen in China and The West 1970, pp. 14–17, 28–33, 39 and 396–418; Thoughts on the Social Relations of Science and Technology in China, in (Lilley ed.) Essays on the Social History of Science 1953, pp. 40–7; Man and His Situation 1976; and An Eastern Perspective on Western Anti-Science 1974 in (Werskey ed.) Moulds of Understanding, pp. 270–3, 296–7 and 302–4; The Refiner’s Fire 1971, pp. 28–31; The Historian of Science as Ecumenical Man 1971, in (Nakayama and Sivrin eds.) Chinese Science 1973, pp. 2–7; and Science and Civilisation in China I 1954 esp. up to p. 9 and II 1956, pp. 1–13, 19–21, 26–7, 31–8, 46, 48–9, 55, 59–60, 62–3, 67–8, 71–2, 77–8, 88–98, 103, 106, 116–17, 119–20, 123–5,

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127–34, 139–40 and 151–63. See also foreword and postscript to Jolan Chang, The Tao of Love and Sex 1977. pp. 354–61, 367–70 (Zaehner) For S. Radhakrishnan see The Reign of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy 1920, pp. vii–viii, 1–2, 4–7, 10–11, 22–3, 31–3, 45–9, 410–11 and chapter XIII. For Zaehner on Zoroastrianism, see Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma 1955, pp. 51–2, 54, 58, 71–2, 221, 232–4, 243–4, 246, 261 and 266–8; and The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism 1961; on Hinduism, see Hindu Scriptures 1966, pp. v–xii; The Bhagavad-Gita 1969, pp. 1–41 and Hinduism 1962, pp. 197–223, chapter VIII. For Zaehner on mysticism, see Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe 1972, pp. 14–25, 28–9, 33–4, 36–9, 41, 66–70, 86–7, 106, 109, 114–15, 125–6, 133, 137–40, 142–62, 170–1, 195, 201 and 204–7; Mysticism, Sacred and Profane 1957 (1980 edn), pp. iv, ix, xii–xvi, 2, 8–13, 15, 17, 19, 21–3, 25, 30, 33, 36–48, 50–1, 54, 59–61, 67–8, 84, 91, 109–11, 113, 117–18, 122, 141, 144, 146–8, 150–2, 160–7, 176, 179, 181, 202, 206, 212 and 226; Our Savage God 1974, pp. 9–11, 35–51, 54–5, 66–8, 72, 76–7, 92–3, 97, 101–3, 106–9, 111, 133, 141, 143, 145–7, 151–2, 156–61, 163, 167, 170–1, 173–5, 178, 184, 186–7, 194, 198–200, 204–18, 231–3, 235–6, 239–40, 249, 252–3, 257–9, 264, 274–80, 283, 285–7, 289–91, 294, 296, 299–300, 305 and 307; Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (1959) 1960, preface and pp. 2–19. At Sundry Times (1957) 1958, pp. 9, 12–13, 15–20, 23–6, 113, 120, 166–9, 180 and 184; Evolution in Religion (1969) 1971, pp. 3, 6–11, 13–17 and 103; The Catholic Church and World Religions 1964, pp. 130–4 and 145; The Convergent Spirit 1963, pp. 102–5 and 121; Dialectical Christianity and Christian Materialism (1969) 1971, pp. 24–5. For Aldous Huxley see The Doors of Perception 1954, pp. 5, 32–3, 35–7, 53, 55–7 and 62–3. See also Moksha 1981 and The Perennial Philosophy 1945. For Zaehner on Marxism, see Evolution in Religion, p. 4; The Convergent Spirit, pp. 24–6, 29, 31, 33, 42, 160–1, 166–7, 170 and 186; and Dialectical Christianity and Christian Materialism, pp. 10–13, 21, 31–2, 34, 37, 42, 46–7, 50–5, 57 and 59. On Christianity see Evolution in Religion, pp. 2, 8–9, 11, 13, 24–6, 30–1, 74–5 and 80–3; Concordant Discord 1970, pp. 152–3, 208, 279–80, 370, 372–3, 375, 377–8, 405, 407, 415 and 423; The Convergent Spirit, pp. 15–18, 21–3, 33–4, 45–9, 60–1, 63–9, 74, 94–100, 110–13, 118–19, 129, 136–7, 141, 157–8, 160, 184–8, 193, 196, 199, 201, 205–6 and 209; Dialectical Christianity and Christian Materialism, pp. 28–33, 66–7, 74, 77 and 82; The Bhagavad-Gita 1969, pp. 2–3, 8–9 and 31; Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe, pp. 140–1, 172, 178–82 and 188; Our Savage God, pp. 164, 232, 245, 247, 249–50 and 260–2; The Catholic Church and World Religions, pp. 8–9, 11–14, 21–2, 129–31, 144 and 146–8; and Foolishness to the Greeks 1953, in Concordant Discord 1970, pp. 428–9, 432–4, 437 and 442–3. pp. 361–7 (Jung) For Jung and Freud on one another see S. Freud, On The History of The Psychoanalytic Movement 1914, in Penguin Freud Library 15, pp. 63, 86–8, 101–2, 120–4 and 127–8, C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of A Soul 1933 (1984 edn), pp. 134–5 and 137–42; Jung to S. E. Jelliffe 24 February 1936 in (Adler ed.) C. G. Jung Letters I 1973, p. 211; C. G. Jung, Sigmund Freud In His Historical Setting 1932 and In Memory of Sigmund Freud 1939, both in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature in Collected Works (henceforth CW) 15, 1984 edn, pp. 34–9 and 46–7, (McGuire ed.) The Freud–Jung Letters 1974 (1979 edn), pp. 223, 227 and 244–5; and Psychoanalysis and The Cure of Souls 1928, in Psychology and Religion, West and East, in Collected Works of C. G. Jung 1928–40, pp. 217–18. For Jung on analytical psychology and the connections between psychotherapy, art, alchemy, mysticism, the occult, theology,

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Eastern and Western religion, and on politics, culture and civilization generally see esp. The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature (1984 edn), pp. 71, 82, 115 and 135; Essays on Contemporary Events 1946 (1988 edn), pp. xvi, 5, 8, 10–13, 18–19, 23, 36–7, 58, 60–2, 66, 73, 84 and 88–90; Modern Man in Search of A Soul 1933 (1988 edn), pp. 5–7, 35–9, 42–6, 53–7, 63–5, 67, 69–70, 75–8, 82–3, 178, 194, 198–9, 201–3, 205–6 and 209–11. What Is Psychotherapy? 1935, in CW 16, pp. 21 and 26, Jung, Letters I, pp. 40, 82, 89–91, 96, 122–3, 125, 128, 133, 161, 164, 191, 194–5, 203, 216–17, 231, 348–9, 354, 361, 382, 469 and 558, and II, pp. 5, 80, 115, 139–41, 363, 370–3, 377, 500–1 and 557. Psychology and Religion (1937) 1938 in CW 11, pp. 5–6 and 44–5, Principles of Practical Psychotherapy 1935 and Realities of Practical Psychotherapy 1937, both in CW 16, pp. 3–5, 8, 10, 16–19 and 328–30. Psychology and Alchemy 1944 (1968 edn) in CW 12, pp. 4, 8–9, 12–14, 17, 22, 24–5, 28–31, 33–7, 475–6 and 480, Archetypes of The Collective Unconscious 1934 and The Concept of The Collective Unconscious 1936, both in CW 9, pp. 7–8 and 42–53; The Undiscovered Self (1957) 1958 (1974 edn), pp. 4–5, 14–16, 19, 22–4, 28–9, 38–9, 56–9, 65–6, 69–70, 72, 77, 80–4, 89, 95 and 107–11; Answer to Job 1951 (1952) (1984 edn), pp. xi, xiv–xviii, 10–11, 16–17, 21–2, 32–3, 35, 44–51, 54, 56–7, 68, 78–81, 150–3, 157, 159–60, 162–6 and 169–70, foreword to Victor White, God and The Unconscious 1952 in CW 2, pp. 299–300; (Jaffé ed.) Memories, Dreams, Reflections 1961 (1983 edn); A Psychological Approach to The Dogma of The Trinity 1940–1 and Transformation Symbolism In The Mass 1940–1, both in Psychology and Western Religion 1988, pp. 5–7, 25, 32, 44, 47, 49, 84, 88, 95, 99, 103, 118–19, 144, 148 and 189–91. Psychological Types 1921 (1923) (1971 edn), pp. 13–14, 140, 247, 336, 343–4, 374–5, 383, 404, 487–8 and 491–5. Psychology and Eastern Religion (1986 edn), pp. 3–6, 97–102, 139–41, 145, 148, 153–4, 157, 159–60, 168, 184–6, 190–1 and 207–8; Analytical Psychology 1935 (1986 edn), pp. 51, 68–9 and 140–3; and Civilization in Transition 1970 in CW 10, pp. 535–43 and 547–51. pp. 372–4, 384–8 (Milbank) For Milbank’s politics see Crucible October–December 1985, pp. 162 and 166. On Baseless Suspicion:Christianity and The Crisis of Socialism and Religion, Culture and Anarchy, both in New Blackfriars January and October 1988, pp. 4–5, 11–13, 16–17 and 439–43; Against the Resignations of The Age in (McHugh and Natale eds.) Things Old and New 1993, pp. 9 and 25. For Warburton see New Blackfriars July–August and September 1983, pp. 315–24 and 382–3. For Christianity and language, see Journal of Literature and Theology March 1988, pp. 1–2 and 9–17; for a ‘Christological Poetics’ see Downside Review January 1982, pp. 1–4 and 11–20. For Milbank as a poet, see The Mercurial Wood 1997, and as a social and political theologian see Post-Modern Critical Augustinianism in Modern Theology 1991, pp. 225–37; The End of Enlightenment in Concilium 1992, pp. 39–47; and Theology and Social Theory 1990 (1993 edn), pp. 4–6, 10, 17, 21–3, 37, 45, 51–2, 59, 75–7, 84, 87, 90–3, 97, 102, 104, 106, 110, 139, 147–8, 157–9, 162–4, 168–73, 177, 179, 182, 202, 207–8, 210–19, 259–63, 274–6, 279–80, 318–21, 326–33, 336–7, 339, 344–7, 350–1, 353, 359–60, 364, 380–2, 387–8, 400, 402–3, 407–11, 412, 416–17, 419, 423, 425, 427, 432 and 434. pp. 374–84 (MacIntyre) For MacIntyre up to 1964 see Marxism: An Interpretation 1953, pp. 3, 11–12, 14, 17–18, 20, 57, 60, 70–1, 84, 92–7, 102–9, 111 and 117–22; Breaking the Chains of Reason in (Thompson ed.) Out of Apathy 1960, pp. 195–6, 198, 200–12, 216–21, 224–8, 231, 236, and 239–40; Against Utilitarianism in (Hollins ed.) Aims in Education 1964, pp. 2–7 and 10–16; God and The Theologians 1963; Trotsky in Exile 1963 and The Socialism

734

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of R. H. Tawney 1964, all in Against the Self-Images of The Age 1971, pp. 13–25, 38–41 and 55–8; The Logical Status of Religious Belief in (Toulmin, Hepburn and MacIntyre eds.) Metaphysical Beliefs 1957, pp. 9, 168–72, 176–80, 184, 186–98, 201–4, 206 and 208–11; Difficulties in Christian Belief 1959, pp. 7–8, 11–13, 16, 74–9, 83–5, 88–101 and 116–19; The Unconscious 1958, pp. vii, 1–5, 15–16, 22, 26–37, 46, 60, 72–3, 76–80, 82–3, 86, 88–90, 92–3 and 98; A Society without a Metaphysics, in The Listener 13 September 1956, pp. 375–6; Notes from the Moral Wilderness, in The New Reasoner Winter 1958–9, pp. 89–100. For MacIntyre’s disengagement from Christianity, psychoanalysis and Marxism and for his development in the 1960s and 1970s, see Against the SelfImages of The Age, pp. viii–ix, 3–5, 8–11, 27–37, 43, 50–1, 60–9, 81–2, 85–7 and 93–279; Marcuse 1970, pp. 17–21, 31–8, 41–54, 74–8, 81 and 89; A Short History of Ethics 1967, pp. 113–16; Secularisation and Moral Change 1967, pp. 12–15, 24–8, 30, 34–7, 44–5, 52–4, 58–9, 61, 63, 65–72 and 74–5, Existentialism in (O’Connor ed.) A Critical History of Western Philosophy 1964, pp. 511–15; Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?, in (Hick ed.) Faith and The Philosophers 1964, pp. 128–32; (with Ricoeur edn) The Religious Significance of Atheism 1969, pp. 3, 11–13, 16–19, 23–9, 32–5, 43–4 and 51–2; Death and The English in (May ed.) Good Talk II, 1969, pp. 76–9, review of Owen Chadwick, The Secularisation of The European Mind in New Statesman 1976: and of Raymond Williams, Keywords, in New Statesman 1976, p. 160. Ed. and introduction (with D. Emmet) to Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis 1970, pp. ix–xxiv; Hume’s Ethical Writings 1965, pp. 11–16; Recent Political Thought in (Thomson ed.) Political Ideas 1966, pp. 189–94; ed. Hegel 1972, pp. 219–336; and Mr Wilson’s Pragmatism 1971, in A Second Listener Anthology 1973, pp. 295–7. For Gellner on MacIntyre and ‘Mother Church’ see The Spectator 28 August 1971, p. 307. For MacIntyre’s later positions and their connections with what had gone before, see A Short History of Ethics, pp. 1–4; Analogy in Metaphysics in Downside Review 1950–1, pp. 45–59; After Virtue 1981, pp. vii–viii, 2–3, 7–11, 22, 24–6, 32, 35, 37–8, 49–52, 56–62, 68–9, 72–5, 78–9, 101, 103–5, 107–13, 119, 121–2, 124–7, 133–4, 137–9, 140–1, 143, 145–7, 152–6, 159–64, 166, 168, 174–5, 177–8, 181–4, 188–91, 194, 199–206, 211–15, 218–19, 232, 236–41 and 245; Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1988) 1990, pp. 4–8, 17–18, 33–6, 39–40, 42–5, 48, 52–3, 55, 57–61, 63–7, 99–102, 117, 120–1, 123–5, 130, 133, 137, 140–1, 165, 216, 219–22, 228 and 230–1; Whose Justice, Which Rationality? 1988, pp. ix–x, 1–2, 4–5, 13, 183–4, 188–92, 194, 198–203, 335–45, 348, 350–7, 360–2, 365, 367 and 370–404; Relativism, Power and Philosophy in (Baynes, Bohman and McCarthy eds.) After Philosophy 1992, pp. 393–5, 397 and 408–9; and Is Patriotism a Virtue? 1984. pp. 392–3 (Galton) For Galton on his travels, see The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa 1853, pp. v–vii, 112–13, 190–1, 194 and 292–3; for his practical hints to travellers see The Art of Travel 1855. For Galton on the electric telegraph see Teleotype, A Printing Electric Telegraph 1850. For Galton on geography as a ‘liberal science’ see Notes on Modern Geography, in Cambridge Essays 1855, pp. 79–81, 88–90 and 97–100. For Galton on eugenics and religion, see esp. Hereditary Genius 1869, pp. 1, 14, 16–19, 23–4, 31–2, 35–9, 70, 130, 137, 140, 257, 262–74, 276–7, 280–1, 337–41, 343–8, 350, 352–3, 356–9, 362, 364ff. and 371; Essays in Eugenics 1909, pp. 11, 20, 36–8, 41–3, 56–7, 68–70 and 99; Natural Inheritance 1889, p. 192; Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer, in Fortnightly Review August 1872, pp. 125, 127–31 and 133–5; English Men of Science 1874, pp. 12–13, 22–6, 40–64, 126–9 and 135; and Inquiries into Human Faculty, 1883, pp. 22–3, 47, 68–9, 80–1, 208–10, 212, 216, 298–303, 307, 309, 317, 327–9, 331, 333–4 and 336.

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pp. 394–5 (Dawkins) For Sherrington see Man on his Nature 1940, pp. 364–5, 374–5 and 377–92. For Dawkins’s adaptation of Darwin see The Blind Watchmaker 1986 (1991), pp. xiii–xiv, 5–6, 11, 21, 39–41, 43, 86–7, 111–12, 114, 139, 141, 145–6 and 149–66; River Out of Eden 1995 (1996), pp. xiii–xv, 4–5, 10–14, 19–22, 25, 36–7, 95–100, 112–13, 122–3, 128–9, 134–5 and 142; The Selfish Gene 1976 (1989 edn), pp. ix–x, 1–4, 11–12, 14–16, 20–1, 200–1 and 268; and Facing Mount Rushmore 1996 (1997 edn), pp. 2–9, 63–9, 76, 178–9, 236–9, 257–9 and 270–2. For Dawkins on science as poetry, see Unweaving the Rainbow 1998. pp. 395–406 (Darwin) For Darwin’s early opinions see (Darwin ed.) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin 1888 I, pp. 305–7 and 313–7, (Barlow ed.) The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1958, pp. 57, 85–7, 89–91, 93 and 95; (Barrett et al., eds.), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin I 1985, pp. 220 and 460 and II 1986, pp. 123, 169 and 173; (Darwin and Seward eds.); More Letters of Charles Darwin I 1903, pp. 154, 194 and 321, (Stauffer ed.) Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection 1975, pp. 1–13; (Barrett et al. eds.) Charles Darwin’s Notebooks 1836–1844 1987, pp. 15, 182, 222–4, 228, 233, 264, 276, 286, 299–300, 305, 308, 316, 336, 342–3, 345, 349, 352–3, 358, 398, 410, 420, 432, 532, 535, 539, 550, 559, 564–8, 572–3, 605, 609–10, 625, 627–9 and 633–5; Charles Darwin’s Sketch of 1842 and Charles Darwin’s Essay of 1844, both in Darwin and Wallace Evolution by Natural Selection 1958, pp. 82–7 and 114–16; On The Origin of Species 1859 (1964 edn), pp. 167, 185–6, 292, 462–4, 481–4 and 490; The Descent of Man and Selection In Relation to Sex 1871 I, pp. 65–7 and 182, and II, pp. 394–5. For Darwin on plants and animals see On The Origin of Species, pp. 2–3, 6, 8, 10–13, 17, 19–20, 24, 29, 33–4, 36–7, 60–1, 64–5, 68–9, 71–7, 80–1, 83–4, 131, 142–3 and 148–9. For Darwin on man see On The Origin of Species, pp. 36, 87–8, 94–5, 108–9, 111–15, 127, 169–70, 187, 413–14, 420, 426–7, 432–5, 439, 449–50, 452–3, 462ff., 479 and 487; (Rachman ed.), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 1872 (1979), pp. 12–15, 18–19, 28–9, 35–9, 50–1, 67–9, 81–3, 310–51, 357, 361 and 365–7; and The Descent of Man and Selection In Relation to Sex I, pp. 10, 14–17, 31–8, 40–6, 51, 53, 61–3, 68–73, 76–80, 86, 91–6, 98–101, 106, 130–6, 156–7, 167–81, 185, 188–90, 194–5, 197, 199, 201, 203, 206–7, 212–13, 215, 228–9 and 249–50, and II, pp. 320, 337, 356, 368–72, 382–4, 396–7 and 402–4. See also More Letters of Charles Darwin I, p. 154 and II, pp. 30, 34, 43–4, 108 and 435–43. pp. 406–10 (Pearson) For Pearson on Socialism, philosophy and religion see Pollock’s Spinoza, Spinoza II and Martineau’s Spinoza, all in Cambridge Review 17 November 1880, 9 February 1881 and 22 November 1882, pp. 94–6, 114–16 and 150; The New Werther 1880 and The Trinity 1882. The Ethic Of Freethought (1883–8) 1888, pp. 5–6, 13, 17–24, 26–7, 31, 33–42, 78–94, 101–14, 122–3, 131–4, 154–5, 162, 165–7, 173–5, 188–91, 196–7, 210–16, 219–27, 229–31, 235, 240–6, 248–53, 257–9, 271, 290–1, 317–22, 324–5, 327, 329–48, 350–9, 361–8, 370–1, 373, 386–94, 399, 404–5, 410–11, 414–15, 422–3, 429–35, 440–1 and 443–4; The Positive Creed of Freethought 1888, pp. 7–8; Political Economy For The Proletariat in Cambridge Review 17 December 1881, pp. 124–5; Kuno Fisher’s . . . Kant, in Cambridge Review 28 November 1883, pp. 109–10, and Anarchy, in Cambridge Review 30 March 1881, pp. 269–70. The Chances of Death 1897 I, pp. 1–15, 73–4, 92–9, 103–7, 115–16, 121–4, 131–52, 162–72, 176–7, 180–1, 197–200, 202–3, 214–15, 217, 229–33, 242, 245–7 and 251, and II 1897, pp. 10ff.; National Life From The Standpoint of Science (1900 edn) 1901, pp. 9–10, 12, 14–15,

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17, 27–9, 31, 34–7, 40–1, 44–5 and 52; and Some Recent Misinterpretation of The Problem of Nurture and Nature 1914, in The Relative Strength of Nature and Nurture 1915, pp. 32–7 and 57–9. For Pearson’s definitive view of science see The Grammar of Science 1892, pp. vii–ix, 7–9, 13, 15–18, 20, 23, 25–33, 35–7, 42–4, 53–5, 57, 59, 63, 66–7, 74, 76–7, 83, 90, 93, 96–103, 106–7, 115–17, 119–21, 128–30, 133–4, 139–40, 145, 153, 189–90, 193, 196, 199–200, 205, 211–12, 220, 222, 228–9, 232, 250, 290, 300, 310–11, 329, 338, 340–1, 357, 385, 388–9, 391, 394, 400, 419, 428 and chapter X. Pearson also wrote innumerable statistical papers on engineering as well as eugenic and evolutionary subjects in the Biometric Laboratory Publications (Cambridge University Press) and in Biometrika itself. pp. 412–19 (Freud) For Freudian dreams, parapraxes and the unconscious, see esp. The Psychopathology of Hysteria in (with J. Breuer) Studies On Hysteria 1895, in Penguin Freud Library (henceforth PFL), 3, pp. 348–56, 363–4, 370–1 and 383–4; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life 1901 (1966 edn), pp. 231–44, 246–7, 253–4, 256–7 and 276–9; and The Interpretation of Dreams 1900, PFL 4, pp. 58, 71, 79–80, 96–7, 105, 133–5, 139, 170ff., 179–80, 198–9, 214, 227–8, 238, 241–2, 246–7, 249, 267–8, 311–12, 382–5, 418–19, 434, 453, 604, 609, 615, 628–30, 632–3, 636–7, 642, 680, 685, 689–92, 696, 698, 704–5, 713–14, 718, 725, 732–3, 735–7, 746–7, 751, 756–7, 763, 768–71, 771–4 and 783. For Freud on sexuality see Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality 1905, PFL 7, pp. 39–40, 42–3, 46–9, 51–2, 61–2, 72–4, 76, 86–7, 89–95, 100–3, 110, 128–30, 133–5, 142–4, 148–50, 153–4 and 156–63. For Freud on the function and content of psychoanalysis, see Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 1915–17, PFL 1, pp. 45–7, 105–6, 281–2, 294, 320–1, 323, 326–7, 331–2, 338, 340–54, 356–7, 360–9, 371–6, 388–9, 400–1, 414, 416–18, 420–1, 429–31, 467, 507 and 511–12; ‘Civilised’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness 1908, in Collected Papers II 1924 (1942 edn), pp. 76–7, 84 and 96–9; Beyond The Pleasure Principle 1920 (trans. 1922), PFL 2, pp. 309–16 and 331–4; and The Ego and The Id 1923 (trans. 1927) PFL 2, pp. 357, 364–5, 372, 380–1 and 390–2. For Freud on morality and religion, see The Psychopathology of Everyday Life 1901 (1966 edn), pp. 258–9; Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices 1907, in Collected Papers II 1924 (1942 edn), pp. 25–7 and 30–4; Totem and Taboo 1912–13 (trans. 1919) (1938 edn), pp. 6–7, 14–19, 32–4, 37–8, 43, 48, 50, 52–4, 75–8, 96, 100–1, 105–6, 123–6, 129–36, 142–7, 166–7, 187–90, 192–3, 195 and 205. Thoughts for the Times on War and Death 1915 (trans. 1918–25) PFL 12, p. 81; Civilization and its Discontents 1930 (trans. 1930) (1963 edn), pp. 15–22; The Future of an Illusion 1927 (trans. 1928) (1962), pp. 1, 7, 4–5, 26–7, 32–41, 44–6 and 50–1; A Philosophy of Life, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 1933 (trans. 1937), pp. 202–6, 208–10, 213–15, 218–19, 224 and 232; and The Ego and The Id, in New Introductory Lectures, pp. 375–7. p. 419 (Jeans) For Jeans on the new physics and astronomy see The New Background of Science 1933, pp. vii–viii, 1–6, 12–13, 41–2, 46–7, 50–1, 59–60, 63–70, 94–8, 100–1, 114, 118–19, 138–42, 140, 144–5, 149, 151–4, 163, 210–11, 212, 225, 227–30, 231, 233–4, 236, 254–7, 260–1 and 264–7; Eos or The Wider Aspects of Cosmogony 1928, pp. 10–12, 14–15, 18–19, 21, 22–3, 25, 35–6, 38, 41–2, 44–6, 52, 66, 71, 72–3, 77, 81, 86 and 88; Astronomy and Cosmogony 1928, pp. ix and 408–14; The Universe Around Us 1929, p. 343. The Mysterious Universe 1930, pp. 10, 16, 127, 132–3, 135, 140–1, 144 and 148; Man and the Universe in Scientific Progress 1936, pp. 11–13, 18–21 and 36–8; The Stars in Their Courses 1931, p. 99 and The Universe Around Us 1929, pp.

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5, 10–11 and 331. See also The Growth of Physical Science 1947, pp. 71–3, 102–3, 105, 114, 130 and 160–1; and Physics and Philosophy 1942, pp. 18–19, 23–4 and 38. pp. 420–5 (J. B. S. Haldane) For Haldane on science, politics, Marxism and religion, see Daedalus or the Future of Science 1923, pp. 6–7, 11, 21–3, 28–9, 39, 54–5, 74–5, 84–5; Callinicus A Defence of Chemical Warfare 1925, pp. 2–5, 10, 14–17, 21, 27–8, 30, 46–7, 49, 51–2, 62, 71–4, 78–9 and 82; ARP 1938, pp. 57, 223–5, 230–2 and 240–3; Science in Peace and War 1940, pp. 9–10, and foreword to J. S. Lange, Crime as Destiny 1929 (1930), pp. 14–17. Heredity and Politics 1938, pp. 7–8, 14–15, 33–4, 42–3, 66–8, 80, 85–7, 102–3, 112–13, 118–19, 123–4, 129, 131, 133–4, 137, 139–40, 142, 148–9, 156–7, 161–2, 172–3 and 175; Biology and Statesmanship in (Baker and Haldane eds.) Biology in Everyday Life 1933, pp. 103, 105–9, 113, 116–17, 119 and 123; Science Advances 1947, pp. 176–7. The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences 1938, pp. 58, 83 and 96, The Haldane Memorial Lecture 1938, p. 3; Possible Worlds 1927 (1928), pp. vi, 28–9, 42–4, 126–8, 181–2, 186–91, 196, 205–7, 218–19, 225–6, 230, 238–9, 244–8, 280 and 289–91; The Inequality of Man 1932, pp. 2–3, 9–10, 13–17, 22–5, 42, 50–1, 78–9, 97–109, 118, 120–1, 125, 130–1, 134–9, 141, 146–51, 176–7, 181–3, 186–9, 191–2, 214, 220–1, 236–9, 253–4 and 262–7; Keeping Cool 1940, pp. 147–51, 154–7, 162–4, 174–9, 187, 189, 193–4, 198–9, 203–7, 216–23, 228–9, 241–3, 259–62 and 278; A Banned Broadcast 1946, pp. 16–17, 21–2, 24, 37, 45, 53–4, 62, 65–6 and 238–9; What is Life? 1949, pp. 3–6, 65–6, 68–71, 136–8, 255–7 and 260–1; Science and Everyday Life 1939, pp. 7–8, Science in Peace and War 1940, pp. 5–6; The Causes of Evolution 1932, pp. 2–3, 32–3, 111, 119–20, 129–31, 134–5, 158–9 and 168–9; and New Paths in Genetics 1941, pp. 7, 11, 14–15, 19, 24–6, 29–35, 41–3, 45–6, 115–16, 143–5 and 153–5. pp 425–31 (Julian Huxley) For Huxley on science, politics and religion, see esp. Essays of A Biologist 1923, pp. viii–xii, 6–7, 39–40, 61, 211–12, 222–4 and 226–9; The Uniqueness of Man 1940 (1942 edn), pp. vii–ix, 224–30, 239–40, 246–51, 260–1, 266–71, 274–5, 280–4, 286–8 and 290–1; Essays in Popular Science 1926, pp. 137–62; If I Were Dictator 1934, pp. 2–10, 12–13 and 22–32; The Humanist Frame 1961, pp. 5–11; Essays of A Humanist 1964, pp. 5–6, 34–5, 216–19, 222 and 225; Evolution: The Modern Synthesis 1942 (1945) esp. pp. 561–2 and 572–5; and Religion Without Revelation 1927, pp. 7–9, 10, 22, 28–30, 31–4, 35–6, 39–40, 41–3, 53–7, 82–5, 89–90, 96–8, 100–1, 103–5, 108, 118–22, 124–5, 127, 132–3, 136, 144, 249–51, 253, 255, 265–7, 269, 271, 274, 278–2, 286–9, 299–304, 306–9, 321, 324–5, 362, 367–8, 371–3 and 376–8. pp. 431–7 (Popper) For Popper’s life and intellectual development see Karl Popper Autobiography in (Schilpp ed.) The Philosophy of Karl Popper 1974, pp. 45–9, 54–5, 83–5, 133–6, 142–3 and 960–1180. For Popper on science and knowledge, see The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) 1959, pp. 16–19, 22–3, 27–41 and 288–91, The Myth of The Framework 1965, in The Abdication of Philosophy 1976, pp. 23–4, 28–9, 34, 36–7 and 43–4. Conjectures and Refutations (1937–63) 1963, pp. 4–7, 15–16, 28–30, 102–5, 114–19, 126–7, 137–8, 140–1, 146, 149–53, 173–4, 176–7, 180–7, 189–92, 195, 223–40, 254–5, 331–2 and 335. Objective Knowledge 1972 (1979 edn) preface and, pp. 191–3, 197, 202, 212, 257–63, 266–7, 272, 342–5, 348–9 and 360–1; and The Poverty of Historicism II, in Economica August 1944, p. 134. For Popper on politics and morality see The Open Society and Its Enemies 1945 (1957 edn) I, pp. vii–ix, 9–11,

738

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13–15, 17, 20, 22, 25, 28–30, 33, 37–8, 39–40, 48, 55, 64–6, 68–9, 71–6, 78–9, 82, 90, 94–6, 107, 111–15, 117, 120–4, 130–4, 144–5, 152–7, 161–3, and II, pp. 2–3, 8, 19–23, 25–6, 29–31, 33–5, 38, 42, 44, 46–7, 49, 58–61, 68–70, 80–1, 83–5, 92, 94–9, 102, 108–9, 112–13, 117, 120–3, 127, 129, 135–7, 154, 158, 163, 166–7, 170–1, 180–1, 185–6, 188–9, 201–11, 220–30, 233–41, 254–62 and 269. The Poverty of Historicism I, II and III, in Economica May 1944, pp. 86–7, 97, 99–100 and 103, August 1944, pp. 119–26 and 131, and May 1945 pp. 76–82. Conjectures and Refutations (1947–56) 1963, pp. 120–3, 126–7, 132–5, 345–6, 348–51, 354, 355–6, 364–5, 369–72 and 374–5. See also Reason or Revolution in (Notturno ed.) The Myth of The Framework (1960–72) 1994, pp. 65–71 and 78–9. pp. 439–44 (F. H. Bradley) For Bradley on religion, metaphysics and morality, see esp. The Presuppositions of Critical History 1874, in Collected Essays 1935 I, pp. 2, 8–9, 20–3, 31–2, 41–2 and 53; Ethical Studies 1876, pp. vi, 24, 26–7, 30, 38, 53, 57, 60, 63, 73, 80–1, 86, 94, 146–7, 150–1, 162–3, 172–83, 246–50, 279–87, 290–4 and 299–307; Appearance and Reality 1893 (1916 edn), pp. xii–xiv, 3–7, 121–9, 131–2, 136–7, 142–3, 144–7, 151, 158–61, 199, 295–6, 305–6, 310, 314–16, 324, 327, 333–41, 493, 500–11, 529, 532–3 and 550–2. pp. 444–50 (Bosanquet) For Bosanquet on aesthetic see Essays and Addresses 1889, pp. 78–9 and 106–7; History of Aesthetic 1892, pp. xi–xii, 2–4, 77–8, 117–24, 166–7, 186–7, 254, 264, 274–5, 282–5, 288, 321–3, 440–8, 452–6 and 462–8; Science and Philosophy (1889–1900) 1927, pp. 304, 373, 375–8, 381–3 and 388–91; and The Civilization of Christendom 1893, pp. 209–10, 221–3 and 352–3. For Bosanquet on philosophy see Science and Philosophy (1889), p. 381; History of Aesthetic, p. 323, Essays and Addresses, pp. 92–5, 99–103 and 122–3 (with Peake and Bonavia); Germany in The Nineteenth Century 1915, pp. 187–9, 192–3, 196–7 and 200–15; and A. E. Taylor; Bernard Bosanquet (Dictionary of National Biography 1922–30). For Bosanquet’s social and political doctrine see Essays and Addresses, pp. 2, 27–32, 39, 41–7 and 72–6; The Civilization of Christendom, pp. 241, 244, 247, 252–3, 255, 261, 265, 276, 302, 313–16, 318, 320, 322–3, 328–9, 333–4, 336–7, 339–43 and 358–83; The Philosophical Theory of The State 1899, pp. ix, 7, 55–66, 77–8, 80, 82–3, 94, 102, 125–7, 137–8, 148–9, 152–3, 167, 177, 191–6, 235–6, 247, 250, 253–4, 256, 294–5, 297–8, 300–1, 308–9, 312–13, 317–18, 321, 323, 328–9 and 331, and 2nd edn 1909 (1951 edn), pp. xxix, xlii–xliv and xlvii–xlix. Aspects of The Social Problem 1895, pp. 1–27, 103, 114–16 and 303–6. For Bosanquet’s later social and political doctrine see Social and International Ideals 1917, pp. 15, 127–30, 188, 190, 193–4, 220–3, 225–6, 236–7, 240–1, 244, 262–3, 267–71, 276–7, 308–9 and 315–16. For Bosanquet on religion see The Civilization of Christendom, pp. 10–13, 20–1, 44–7, 57–63, 66–72, 75, 78–80, 83–4, 89–92, 99–101, 111, 115, 118–25, 134–5, 137–8, 141–2 and 144–6, The Philosophical Theory of The State 1899, pp. 333–4 and 1909 (1951 edn), pp. xxxvii–xxxix; and The Value and Destiny of The Individual (1912) 1913, pp. 1–6, 8–12, 16–17, 20–2, 25–8, 32–224, 225–7, 230–8, 240–2, 246–7, 252–5 and 287–9. See also The Principle of Individuality and Value (1911) 1912, and for a particularly silly passage Are We Agnostics?, in The Civilization of Christendom, pp. 153–5. pp. 450–2 (R. B. Haldane) For Haldane on politics, education and religion, see Autobiography 1929, pp. 11, 20, 28 and 344–52; Life of Adam Smith 1887 esp. pp. 151–7. Selected Essays and

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Addresses (1907–13) 1928, pp. 68–73, 75, 81, 85–8, 93–100, 103–4, 106–8, 132, 134–5, 137–40, 163, 167–70, 176–8, 184–5, 194, 197, 200–1 and 207; ed. (with Seth) Essays in Philosophical Criticism 1883, pp. 56–62; and Education and Empire (1899–1901) 1902, pp. ix, 39, 45–6, 162–75, 178–81 and 192–5. pp. 452–8 (A. C. Bradley) For Bradley’s early opinions see Aristotle’s Conception of The State in (Abbott ed.), Hellenica 1880, pp. 187–9, 192, 203–9, 216–17 and 239, Old Mythology and Modern Poetry and Some Points in Natural Religion, both in Macmillan’s Magazine 1881, pp. 28–32 and 46–7, and 1882, pp. 144–7, 150–6 and 158; and K. Cooke, A. C. Bradley and His Influence in Twentieth Century Shakespeare Criticism 1972, pp. 37 and 158–9. For Bradley on poetry see Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1901–5) 1909 (1965 edn), pp. 3–31, 40–63, 100–2, 106–7, 117–20, 125–9, 165, 170–1, 173–4, 189, 191, 194–9, 202–3, 210, 212–13, 220–1, 230–2, 235–8 and 394; A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam 1901 (1902), pp. 38–9; and A Miscellany (1909–19) 1929, pp. ix–x, 3, 6–7, 19, 27, 34, 38–43, 45, 48, 50–1, 53–7, 107, 109–13, 115–17, 125, 128–9, 131, 137–8, 140, 144, 147, 150–3, 156–8 and 160. For Bradley on tragedy see Shakespearean Tragedy 1904 (1905 edn), pp. 3–7, 10–13, 15–21, 25–8, 30–1, 34–5, 37 and 39. For Bradley on religion, see Inspiration 1899, in A Miscellany 1929, pp. 229 and 235 and Ideals of Religion 1907 (published 1940), pp. 1–6, 17–18, 20–2, 24, 30–1, 34, 48–55, 57, 67, 70–4, 80–1, 87–8, 99–103, 105–6, 109–10, 112–13, 115–17, 120–1, 126–9, 131–3, 138–45, 166–7, 170–2 and 180–1. pp. 458–60 (Vaughan Williams) For Vaughan Williams’s life and opinions see Some Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony 1953, pp. 64–5, 68–71, 78–80, 86, 94, 99–101, 116–19, 122–3, 130–1, 135–6, and 146–7; Heirs and Rebels 1959, pp. 27–9, 32–3 and 94–101; National Music and Other Essays (1932) 1934, pp. 3–6, 12–13, 15, 17–19, 26–8, 42, 45–6, 53, 55, 69–70, 73, 81, 83–4, 95–7, 108–9, 117, 121–3, 128, 133–5, 138–9 and 146; A School of English Music, R. Strauss Ein Heldenleben and Palestrina and Beethoven, all in The Vocalist 1902. Introduction to W. H. Hadow, English Music 1931, p. ix–x; Henry Wood, in The London Mercury October 1938, p. 498. The Making of Music (1954) 1955, pp. 11, 24–5, 35–6, 50 and 55. Who Wants The English Composer?, in H. Foss, Vaughan Williams 1950, pp. 197–201; and English Folk Songs 1912, pp. 3–5, 7–8, 10 and 14–16. See also The Music in The English Hymnal 1906, pp. x–xii and xvi–xvii and Dearmer, Vaughan Williams and Shaw; The Oxford Book of English Carols 1928, pp. v–vii and ix–xi. pp. 460–4 (Hadow) For Hadow on the history and condition of music see Collected Essays (1906–28) 1928, pp. 18–20, 64, 144–6 and 338; Sonata-Form 1896, pp. 1 and 182–4; The Viennese Period 1904, pp. 2–5, 13–17; Introduction to W. H. G. Flood; Early Tudor Composers 1925, p. 8; The Place of Music Among The Arts 1933, pp. 8–11; and The Oxford History of Music I 1901, pp. v–vi. For Hadow on W. G. Grace see Collected Essays 1928, p. 334; on English literature see Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1907, pp. xx–xxiii; and (with Grace Hadow), The Oxford Treasury of English Literature I (1906), pp. 1, 25, 82, 86, and chapter V. On Parry see Collected Essays, pp. 155–6 and Studies in Modern Music 2nd series 1897, pp. 74–6. For Grace Hadow see H. C. Deneke, Grace Hadow 1946, pp. 17, 54, 56–7, 107, 168, 174, 176, 213–17 and chapter 10. For Hadow on music, politics, education and religion see Citizenship 1923, pp. 17–18, 42–3, 68–9, 90–1, 108–15, 130–1, 162–3, 182–3, 202–5 and 213–22; introduction to (Bain ed.), The Modern Teacher 1921, pp. xiv–xv and 7; English Music 1931,

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pp. 134–5 and 174; Studies in Modern Music 1893 (1898 edn), pp. 12–13, 18–19, 22, 24–7, 32, 38–40, 42–6, 49, 52–3 and 55–67; Studies in Modern Music 2nd series, pp. 3–8, 24–5, 30–3, 36–7, 40–1, 45–6, 50–1, 55, 58–9, 68, 74–6 and 110–11; The Needs of Popular Musical Education 1918, pp. 6–9 and 11–12; Collected Essays (1897–1927) 1928, pp. 27–30, 32–3, 35, 66–7, 70, 107, 109, 191–8, 206–15, 231 and 298–301; Lectures on Music (1926) 1927, pp. 12–13, 26–9 and 56–9. See also Introduction to E. J. Dalerozo, Rhythm, Music and Education, 1921, p. v; and The Philosophy of Lord Haldane 1931, pp. 5–6, 10 and 17; and Report of the Consultative Committee on the Education of the Adolescent 1938. pp. 464–7 (Parry) For Tippett on music see Towards the Condition of Music in (Huxley ed.), The Humanist Frame, pp. 211–14 and 216–20 and Moving into Aquarius 1959. For Elgar’s account of the significance of music see esp. (Young ed.) A Future for English Music and Other Lectures (1905) 1968, pp. 24–6, 31, 33, 37, 41, 49, 51, 55–7, 61, 129, 133, 165, 203, 205, 207, 213 and 223; (Young ed.) Letters to Nimrod 1965, pp. 67, 70 and 122; Letters of Edward Elgar 1956, pp. 20, 66 and 138; and (Moore ed.) Elgar and His Publishers II 1987, p. 865. For Parry’s life see Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert Parry: His Life and Music, 1992. For Parry’s politics and social doctrine generally see C. L. Graves; Hubert Parry: His Life and Works 1926 I, pp. 32–3, 62, 142, 148, 189 and 296; and Instinct and Character 1922 (Cambridge University Library MR816.b.90.1), pp. 178–9. For Parry’s daughter on Parry’s religion see Gwendolen Greene; Two Witnesses 1930, pp. 62–5 and 70–2. For Parry on music, art and religion, see C. L. Graves; Hubert Parry: His Life and Works I, pp. 28, 105–6, 112, 118, 121–2, 124–5, 127, 138–9, 205, 227–8, 274, 295 and II, pp. 131, 134–6, 149–53, 156, 222–3 and 270; The Art of Music 1893, pp. 12, 44ff., 51–3, 58–9, 66–7, 85–6, 88–9, 110, 112, 138, 140–1, 149ff., 170–3, 178, 181, 188, 197, 205, 213–18, 220, 225, 227–8, 237, 243, 255, 257ff., 263–4, 272–3, 280, 351–2, 355, 363–4 and 369; Music of The Seventeenth Century 1902, preface and pp. 1–7; and Instinct and Character, pp. i–ii, iv–v, 1–8, 146–254, 295–8, 314–19, 348–67, 369–83 and 405–15. For Parry’s partiality towards Instinct and Character, see Graves, Hubert Parry II, pp. 362ff. For Parry as Director of The Royal College of Music; see College Addresses (1897–1918) 1920, pp. 43–8, 56, 61, 83–5, 96, 106–7, 114, 136–7, 140, 152–3, 157, 216–22, 234–5, 257–9, 263 and 273–79. pp. 469–77 (Maitland) For Maitland’s early life see H. A. L. Fisher; Frederic William Maitland 1910, pp. 12–14, 16–19, 21, 27–8 and 63. For Maitland on Sidgwick, Stephen and Acton, see (Fisher ed.), The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland (henceforth Collected Papers) 1911 III, pp. 520–1, 525 and 532; and The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen 1906, esp. ch. viii and 406. For Maitland on law and history, see Collected Papers III, pp. 286–9, 291, 294–6, 303, 415–18 and 426. For Maitland as law reformer see The Law of Real Property 1879, in Collected Papers I, pp. 162–6, 170–1, 174–6 and 198. For Maitland on politics, law, economics and their history, see The Constitutional History of England (1887) 1908, pp. 1–4, 6, 8–9, 16, 19–20, 70–1, 75–6, 100–3, 105–6, 141–62, 164–5, 171, 179, 194, 206–9, 213, 229–31, 237–8, 251–2, 255–6, 263, 266, 270–2, 275, 297–8, 300–2, 319, 330–6, 339, 348, 361, 369–70, 379, 385, 396, 399, 404, 410, 413, 415, 437, 497, 515 and 537. For The Shallows and Silences of Real Life (1888) see Collected Papers I, pp. 468–73 and 476–9. For Materials for English Legal History (1889) see Collected Papers II, pp. 2–3, 7, 9–10 and 31–2. The History of English Law 1895 and 1898 (1952) I, pp. xxiii–xxviii,

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xxxiv–xxxvii, chapter 1 and pp. 23–4, 64–6, 73, 75, 77, 80–7, 120–36, 138–43, 146–8, 162, 167, 172, 174–5, 181–4, 190, 202, 208, 211, 217–20, 224–5, 227, 229–31, 408–9 and 526 and II, pp. 181, 542–51, 557 and 669–70. Domesday Book and Beyond 1897, pp. 2–3, 9, 151, 154, 160, 168, 171–2, 222–3, 318, 322, 326–7, 345, 347–8, 350–2, 354, 356 and 520. For Maitland’s disagreements with Pollock see C. H. S. Fifoot, Pollock and Maitland 1971, pp. 16–17. For Maitland’s Outlines of English Legal History 560–1600 (1893) see Collected Papers II, pp. 429–39. For Maitland’s Trinity dissertation see A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political Philosophy from The Time of Hobbes to The Time of Coleridge (1875) in Collected Papers I, pp. 12–13, 16–19, 22, 26, 34, 38, 41–4, 48–9, 57, 78–82, 84, 90–1, 96, 101–7, 111, 113, 125, 128–9, 132–3 and 135–7. For Spencer see Mr Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Society (1883), pp. 248–51, 255, 257–60, 262–3, 266–70, 274, 286–9 and 303 in Collected Papers I. For Maitland on Christianity see P. N. R. Zutshi, The Letters of Frederic William Maitland II 1995, p. 12. pp. 477–82 (Hobhouse) For Hobhouse’s political works and opinions, see The Labour Movement 1893, pp. 2–5, 10–11, 14–15, 20–1, 23–5, 28, 33, 39, 53–4, 57, 65, 74–5, 77–9 and 90; Democracy and Reaction 1904, pp. 57–9, 61–3, 65–9, 70–2, 80–1, 84–7, 90, 95, 119, 121, 125, 138–41, 149, 151, 156–7, 166, 170, 180–1, 184, 190–2, 196–7, 207–8 and 218; Liberalism 1911, pp. 7, 9, 13–15, 19–23, 224, 226 and 234; The World in Conflict 1915, p. 91; Questions of War and Peace 1916, pp. 91 and 94–5; and The Problem (late 1920s) in J. A. Hobson and M. Ginsberg L. T. Hobhouse: His Life and Work 1931, pp. 263–5, 267, 269, 272–3, 277, 279–80, 282–4, 287–8 and 290–1. For the connections between politics, sociology and religion, see esp. Morals in Evolution 1906 (1925 edn), pp. 6, 11–12, 354–6, 358, 366, 514–18, 521–5, 532–3, 538–9, 546–8, 555–6, 567, 570–1, 579–81, 574–5, 581–3, 596, 600, 603, 605–7 and 632–4; The Roots of Modern Sociology, in (with Westermarck) Lectures on Sociology 1908, pp. 8, 14–16, 18–20 and 22–3; and The Theory of Knowledge 1896, pp. vii–ix. See also Morals in Evolution, note to 4th edn 1923, in ed. 1925 edn, p. viii. pp. 482–92 (Keynes) For Keynes’s life and opinions see My Early Beliefs, in Two Memoirs 1949, pp. 81–6, R. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes I 1983, pp. 128–30. Essays in Biography 1933, pp. 20–6; Art and The State, in Beauty and The Beast 1937, pp. 22–35; The Economic Consequences of The Peace 1920, pp. 36–41, 43, 49, 60, 62, 72, 87–8, 91–4, 99, 105, 126–9, 138, 142–4, 148, 150–2, 158–60, 174, 181, 186–9 and chapter 3, and English text of the French preface to The Economic Consequences of The Peace, in (Johnson and Moggridge eds.) The Collected Writings of J. M. Keynes II, p. xix. See also The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 1936, pp. 372, 374, 376 and 378–82. For Keynes’s opinions generally see Collected Writings IX, pp. 2–5, 8–18, 21–2, 32–41, 46–50, 52–7, 61–2, 68–70, 73–5, 77–9, 84–5, 90, 92–4, 100–4, 107, 110–11, 117, 119, 122–9, 131–4, 136–9, 150–1, 153–7, 161–2, 170, 190, 193, 213–20, 231–2, 234–40, 243–6, 254–8, 260–5, 273–7, 280–1, 295–7, 300, 302–3, 307–11, 318, 321–3, 325–8, 337–46, 348–51, 354–5, 357 and 368–9. See also Collected Writings X, pp. 33, 66–7, 166–73, 222, 256–60 and 368–70. pp. 492–500 (Hayek) For Hayek’s early Socialism see The Road to Serfdom 1944, p. v. For his early interest in psychology see The Sensory Order 1952, pp. v–vi. For Hayek’s view of sociology, economics and public opinion up to 1944 see The Trend of Economic

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Thinking (Inaugural Lecture at The London School of Economics and Political Science on 1 March 1933), in Economica May 1933, pp. 121–37; Individualism and Economic Order (1933–42) 1949 (1976 edn), pp. 57–8, 60, 64, 66–73, 119–21, 123–7, 129, 131–5, 139, 141, 143–5, 152–9, 172–3, 179, 187, 190–2, 202, 204–8 and 268–72; Freedom and The Economic System, in Contemporary Review April 1938, pp. 434–41; Freedom and The Economic System (pamphlet expanding Contemporary Review article) 1939, p. 14, introduction to B. Brutzkus; Economic Planning in Soviet Russia 1935, pp. vii–xii; articles in Economica and elsewhere (1941–4), reprinted more or less verbatim with additional chapters in The CounterRevolution of Science 1955, pp. 13–14, 16–25, 31, 41–2, 46–8, 50–1, 53–5, 58–9, 62–3, 68–71, 73–9, 82–8, 90, 92, 98–102, 105–9, 111–15, 117–19, 121, 123, 126–8, 132–3, 137, 143, 150–1, 153–65, 168, 171–7, 179, 183, 188–9, 191, 195 and 198–202. Monetary Nationalism and International Stability 1937, pp. 1–5; and The Road to Serfdom pp. v, 2–12, 15–23, 26–8, 30–3, 40–3, 47–50, 52, 54–60, 63, 66–71, 78–81, 93–5, 101–3, 106–7, 112, 120–1, 124–33, 135–43, 148–9, 163–9 and 172–5. For Hayek’s intellectual and political campaigns between the 1940s and the 1960s, see Individualism and Economic Order, pp. 1–9, 12–24, 28–9, 77–85, 201–2 and 206–7, and Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics 1967, pp. 124–5, 138–46, 149–51, 155, 178–83, 188–9, 195–201, 206–7, 213, 217–22, 224, 229–36, 239–41, 300–1 and 305–11. For Hayek’s admiration of Toynbee see The Dilemma of Specialisation, pp. 122–3, 127 and 131. For Hayek on the Webbs (August 1948) see Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, pp. 341–2. For Hayek on Keynes (1952) see Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, pp. 344–8. For Hayek in 1960 see The Constitution of Liberty 1960, pp. 1–4, 8, 11–13, 15–21, 27–9, 36, 38–43, 47–52, 61–9, 76–82, 85–8, 91–4, 97–8, 103–10, 128–30, 134, 139–40, 142, 145, 148–9, 152–60, 162–75, 190–9, 205–7, 218–19, 253–60, 267–70, 274–8, 281–9, 297, 300–3, 306–11, 313–27, 330, 333–5, 342–6, 350–1, 360–4, 376–89, 391, 395, 397–402, 404–7 and 409. For Hayek on religion, see The Counter-Revolution of Science, 143ff.; Historians and The Future of Europe 1944, in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, pp. 142–4; Individualism True and False in Individualism and Economic Order, p. 2. For the absence of religious criticism of Mill’s Comteanism see John Stuart Mill at the Age of Twenty-Five 1942, and introduction to John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor 1951. pp. 504–7 (Morris) For the new Left of the 1960s, see the works of Hobsbawm, Thompson, Saville, Juliet Mitchell and Anderson esp. (Anderson and Blackburn eds.), Towards Socialism 1965, pp. 11–13 and 229–90. For William Morris’s Socialism, see The Socialist Ideal of Art 1891, p. 8; How Shall We Live Then? 1889, in (Meier ed.), An Unpublished Lecture of William Morris, 1971, pp. 10 and 14–15; foreword to Utopia Written by Sir Thomas More, 1893; Art and The Beauty of The Earth 1881 (1898), pp. 5–7, 9–11 and 26–7; The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris (1880–93) 1969, pp. 94–6, 100–3, 106–8, 113–18, 128–9, 180–1, 184–5, 189–90, 204–5, 209, 224–5 and 230–1; (with Bax), Notes on The Manifesto of The Socialist League 1883, pp. 10–14; and (with Hyndman), A Summary of The Principles of Socialism 1884, pp. 56–7 and 60–1; Communism 1889 (1903), p. 8; in (Cook and Wedderburn eds.) The Works of John Ruskin X 1892, p. 460; (with Magnusson), The Saga Library 1891 I, pp. v–xii (cf. E. Magnusson preface to Heimskringla IV 1905). Useful Work v. Useless Toil 1893, pp. 5–9; Signs of Change 1888, pp. vii–viii, 4–7, 22–7, 49–54, 110–11 and 200–1; Architecture, Industry and Wealth (1883–4) 1902, pp. 3–4, 20–1, 84–5, 92–3, 103–4, 107, 112–15, 164–6, 168–9 and 175–6.

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pp. 506–7, 511–18 (Sidney and Beatrice Webb) For Sidney Webb see Twentieth-Century Politics 1901, in The Basis and Policy of Socialism 1908, pp. 76–9 and 84–5; Labour in The Longest Reign 1897, Historic, in Fabian Essays 1889 (1962 edn), pp. 62–7, 69–71, 77–80, 84–5, 90–1 and 93. London Education 1904, pp. 196, 201–3 and 209–12; Socialism in England 1890, pp. 2–3, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 20–4, 64 and 133; Socialism True and False 1894, pp. 3–19; English Progress Towards Social Democracy (1888) 1890, pp. 3–6, 8–11, 12–13 and 15. The Future of Soviet Communism 1937 in (Cole and others), What is Ahead of Us?, pp. 104, 118, 121 and 125; The Arya Samaj 1915, pp. xi–xvii; The Difficulties of Individualism 1891 and The Regulation of The Hours of Labour 1889, both in Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Problems of Modern Industry, 1898, pp. 103–8, 111, 229–31, 233, 237, 240–3 and 248–9. For Beatrice Webb, see (N. and J. Mackenzie eds.) The Diary of Beatrice Webb I 1982, pp. 18–20, 22–3, 25–7, 31–2, 36–8, 41, 46, 50, 53–8, 60, 72–6, 85–7, 101–4, 110, 114–15, 120, 125–7, 132–5, 140, 156–63, 172–3, 182–5, 188–9, 194–5, 220–1, 224, 239, 250, 254–5, 259–60, 264, 298 and 325–9; II 1983, pp. 24–5, 32, 46–7, 66, 124, 155, 198–200, 207, 242, 245, 250, 255, 268–9, 295, 308–10, 322, 325, 334–5 and 339; III 1984, pp. 18, 56, 61, 86–7, 121, 128, 137–8, 214–16, 220, 242–3 and 252–3 and IV 1985, pp. 14–16, 20, 61–6, 70–3, 82, 93, 100–1, 106–7, 143, 152–3, 192–3, 208–9, 220–2, 224–5, 229–30, 233–7, 242, 246, 248–50, 254–5, 258, 263–4, 270–1, 278–9, 282, 291–3, 300, 315, 318, 333, 338, 346, 351, 353, 358, 360, 375, 377–8, 386, 392–5, 413–15, 425–6, 437–41, 444–5, 464 and 468. For Sidney and Beatrice Webb see Industrial Democracy 1897 (1920 edn) esp. Part III, A Constitution for The Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain 1920, pp. xi–xviii, 13–5, 27, 30, 49–50, 58, 78–9, 81–7, 90–1, 100–2, 104–5, 318, 321–2, 327–37 and 340, The Decay of Capitalist Civilization 1923, pp. 2–6, 9–10, 14, 18, 22–5, 28–31, 33, 36, 39–43, 45–84, 87, 115–20, 141, 144–6, 156–7 and 166–71. Soviet Communism 1935 (1936 edn) I, pp. v–x, and II, pp. 697–700, 702–3, 805–7, 810, 924–5, 946–8, 950–1, 953ff., 990–6, 999, 1004–6, 1009–10, 1012–41, 1043–63, 1066–75, 1078–9, 1083–8, 1116, 1122–9, 1131–4, 1136 and 1138. See also J. W. Mackail, Socialism and Politics 1902, p. 20. pp. 507–11 (MacDonald) For MacDonald on the professors see e.g. Socialism and Government I 1909, pp. 59–62. For the Webbs on MacDonald’s academic capability see (Mackenzie ed.) The Diary of Beatrice Webb II 1983, p. 94. For Mrs MacDonald’s progress from Christianity to Socialism see J. R. MacDonald, Margaret Ethel MacDonald 1912 (1913 edn), pp. 85–113. For MacDonald’s moral and intellectual politics see National Defence, A Study in Militarism 1917, pp. 9–10, 12, 15–17, 26–7, 34–6, 39–40, 42–3, 54–6, 58, 60–1, 63–9, 77, 79–84, 90, 92, 101–5, 108, 111, 129 and 131–2; Are We Liberating Europe? (reprinted in Labour Leader 1917, p. 58); The Zollverein and British Industry 1903, pp. 21, 89–97, 142–3 and 151; Labour and The Empire 1907, pp. xii, 13–46, 48, 62–3, 72–9, 92, 102 and 104–12; and What I Saw in South Africa 1903, pp. 118–31. Socialism and Society 1905, 2nd edn, pp. xii–xiv, xx, 1, 7–21, 34–8, 44–8, 54–8, 60–2, 70–2, 90–1, 99–108, 110, 122, 135–8, 144, 151–3, 156–61, 171–2, 176–80, 185 and chapter iv; Socialism 1907, pp. 3, 5, 49, 52–3, 56–8, 65, 86–7, 91–3, 96–9, 103, 107, 109, 113, 117 and 122–3; Socialism and Government 1909 I, pp. xvii–xviii, xxiv–xxvii, xxx, 3–4, 7–10, 12, 15, 17, 20, 24, 28, 33, 43, 46–7, 55, 67–74, 76–99, 108–9, 116, 124–5, 131–7 and 163–4, and II, pp. 2, 8–10, 47, 109–17, 133, 144–52 and 155–7; Syndicalism 1912, pp. 6–8, 26 and 47–72; Parliament and Democracy 1920, pp. 23–7, 35–6 and 41–2; Parliament and Revolution 1919, pp. 92–7 and 102–3, Marquand; Ramsay MacDonald 1977, p. 227ff.; The Socialist Movement 1912, pp. ix, xiii, 15–18, 22–3, 26–9, 36–7, 42, 55, 78, 83–92, 99–122, 129, 135–6, 139,

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148–50, 161, 175 and 195–243; The Social Unrest 1913, pp. 102–4, Introduction to W. Stewart; J. Keir Hardie 1921, p. xxii; A Policy for The Labour Party 1920, p. 38; and Socialism, Critical and Constructive, 1921, pp. 16, 29, 34–5, 38–74, 266 and 276–7. For MacDonald on religion and on India and Scotland, see Elton; The Life of James Ramsay MacDonald I 1939, pp. 19–20, 26–7, 37–9, 70–6 and 94–6; Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, pp. 28–9 and 53–5; The People in Power in (Coit ed.), Ethical Democracy 1900, pp. 60–6, 70, 72, 74, 76 and 80; The Socialist Movement, pp. 22–3, 38–9, 78–81, 94 and 245; Socialism, pp. 10, 42, 99–102 and 106, Socialism and Government I, pp. 28–9 and 37–9 and II, p. 138, Socialism and Society, pp. 7, 66–9, 148–52 and 166; Socialism, Critical and Constructive, pp. 9 and 20–1, Socialism During The War October 1914 and The Nation October 1922, both in Wanderings and Excursions 1925 (1932 edn), pp. 142 and 244–7; Character and Democracy 1908 in Social Tracts for the Times . . . Published by the Wesleyan Methodist Union for Social Service. The Awakening of India 1910, pp. 7, 13–14, 22–3, 33–8, 48–50, 52–5 59–60, 65, 70–4, 102, 105–7, 109–11, 114–19, 122, 148ff., 178–90, 194–5, 198–216, 218–30, 235–6, 239, 252–8, 260–3, 274–95, 297, 300–1, 306–8 and 311; The Government of India 1919, pp. 5–6, 8–13, 15, 20–2, 24, 162–7, 169, 224, 234–7, 241 and 247–62; and Introduction to R. Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India 1914, p. ix. For MacDonald’s wish to be Viceroy in 1935 see Cowling, The Impact of Hitler 1975, p. 60. pp. 518–27 (Laski) For Laski’s life and opinions and for accounts of The Chosen People see Kingsley Martin, Harold Laski 1953, pp. 2lff. and I. Kramnick and B. Sheerman; Harold Laski 1993, esp. pp. 552–9. For Laski on politics and religion up to 1944 see Studies in The Problem of Sovereignty 1917, pp. 1–5, 38, 41–2, 65, 69–74, 83–5, 88–90, 94, 102–5, 108–9, 142, 211–12, 216–25, 231–3, 236, 239–41, 244–5, 253 and 262–4, The Decline of Liberalism 1940, pp. 13–17 and 21; Liberty in The Modern State 1930 (1937 edn), pp. 11, 25–30, 32, 35, 49–50, 52, 58–61, 72, 75, 89, 94–161, 163–8, 170–6, 178, 181, 183–5, 188–93 and 207ff.; Introduction to Politics 1931, pp. 15, 19–21, 24, 26–7, 34–5, 37–8, 48–9 and 106; The Grammar of Politics 1925 (1934 edn) preface and pp. 142–4, 146–8, 156 and 182–3; The Danger of Being A Gentleman (1932–6) 1939, pp. 16, 57–69, 75, 88–108, 111–13, 116–23 and 189ff. Karl Marx, An Essay 1922, pp. 24–46; Communism 1927, pp. 45, 47–8, 50–4 and 236–51; The State in Theory and Practice 1935, pp. 4, 104, 116–19, 126–7, 130, 175–7, 193–4, 198, 259–60, 264–8, 270–80 and 284; Democracy in Crisis 1933, pp. 16–17, 23, 55–7, 61, 62, 66, 86–8, 113, 137, 146–9, 164–5, 174–6, 182–3, 188–9, 211, 214 and 216–18; Authority in The Modern State 1919 (1927 edn), pp. 26–35, 37–47, 54–7, 59–61, 64–5, 83–6, 94–5, 108–13, 120–8, 136–43, 150–7, 165, 167, 170–5, 182–4, 189, 192–3, 201–5, 217–18, 220, 222–3, 225, 228–30, 236–7, 240, 245, 247, 254–9, 261, 275, 284–5, 304–5, 310–11 and 384–7. For Laski in World War II see Reflections on The Revolution of Our Time 1943, pp. 9–13, 31–85 and 254–303; and Faith, Reason and Civilization 1944, pp. 9–11, 22–7, 35–61, 80–140 and 167–203. pp. 527–36 (Orwell) For Orwell’s political opinions see Down and Out in Paris and London 1934 (1940 edn), pp. 102–5 and 172–83; Burmese Days 1934 (1958 edn); The Road to Wigan Pier 1937 (1962 edn), pp. 21, 31, 104–5, 110–18, 122–5, 128–30, 133–5, 141–2, 149–51, 155, 164, 177–9, 189, 191 and 202–4; Keep The Aspidistra Flying 1936 (1963 edn), pp. 50, 99 and 211–12; Coming Up For Air 1939 (1962 edn), pp. 33–4, 67, 83, 102–8, 118–22, 128–34, 138–9, 148–60, 177–9 and 210–26; Homage to Catalonia 1938 (1966

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edn) pp. 7 and 15. Spilling The Spanish Beans 29 July and 2 September 1937, review of F. Borkenau; The Spanish Cockpit 31 July 1937; and Looking Back on The Spanish War (1942) 1943, all in S. Orwell and I. Angus The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (henceforth CE) 1968 (1970 ed.) I, pp. 301–11 and II, pp. 305–6; The Lion and The Unicorn 1941, in Orwell and Angus, CE II, pp. 74–80, 86–102, 104–5, 108–9, 112–13, 117, 119–27 and 132–3; Coming Up For Air, pp. 158 and 224–5 and Fascism and Democracy and Patriots and Revolutionaries in (Gollancz ed.); The Betrayal of The Left 1941, pp. 213–14, 234 and 245. See also Orwell and Angus, CE I, pp. 23, 445, and 587–90; II, pp. 42–4, 68–9, 73, 140, 146, 180, 240–4, 249–50, 265–6, 271–2, 317–18, 387–8, 398, 400, 402, 406, 414–16, 424–7, 431–2, 446, 452, 454, 462 and 485; III, pp. 75–6, 140, 180–1, 189–91 and 369–72; and IV, pp. 192–215 and 360–74, (Davison ed.) The Complete Works of George Orwell 1988 X, pp. 138–40, 146–7, 186–7, 477–9 and 534; XI, pp. 41–2, 61–2, 167–9, 184–5, 212–13, 340–1 and 406–7; XVI, pp. 23, 34–5, 63–7, 70–2, 129, 148–9, 158–9, 178, 180, 190–1 and 284–5; XVII, pp. 21–2, 32, 162–3, 175–6, 246–7, 255 and 342–75; XVIII, pp. 56–71, 150–1 and 263–84 and XX, pp. 35–6, 47, 240–58 and 318–26. For literature and the threats to literature from all sources, see Keep The Aspidistra Flying. See also Orwell and Angus, CE I, pp. 281–91, 373–5, 420–1, 454–534 and 540ff.; II, pp. 54–61, 104, 149–51, 153, 215–16, 231–40 and 311–16; III, pp. 149–64, 212–24, 244, 255–8, 272–9, 335–7 and 341–55; and IV, pp. 27–30, 38–48, 87–92, 117–21, 156–70, 236–8, 243, 253, 342, 463–70, 483–5 and 487. For Orwell on decency, respectability and religion, see A Clergyman’s Daughter 1935 (1964 edn), pp. 189–90 and 258–61; Orwell and Angus, CE I, pp. 43–4, 102–5, 109, 125–8, 145–6, 152, 174–5, 179, 423–4, 556, 558–9 and 564–5; II, pp. 30–3, 78, 174–6, 276–7 and 327; III, pp. 7–8, 97–8, 100–3, 140, 174–5, 243–4, 264 and 276–7; and IV, pp. 128–30, 144–8, 343–8, 393, 403–8, 418, 428, 480, 497, 514–17, 527–8, 539–40 and 575–6. See also The Complete Works of George Orwell XVIII, pp. 56–9. For Alfred Austin, see The Aristocracy of Letters, in National Review March 1884, pp. 65–77 and Autobiography 1911, p. 78.

pp. 536–43 (Crossman) For Crossman’s life see Alan Watkins, Brief Lives 1982, pp. 35–43 and Anthony Howard Crossman: The Pursuit of Power 1990. For Crossman’s anonymous pamphlet (with Kingsley Martin) see A Hundred Million Allies if We Chose, by ‘Scipio’ 1940. For the Crossman diaries see R. H. S. Crossman, The Diaries of A Cabinet Minister I–III 1975–7 and (Morgan ed.); The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman 1981. For Attlee on Crossman see (Pimlott ed.); The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton 1945–60 1986, p. 531. For Crossman in the first year of the war see Kingsley Martin; Editor 1968, p. 298. For Crossman’s opinions in the 1930s see (Selbie ed.) Oxford and The Groups 1934; Some Elementary Principles of Socialist Foreign Policy in (Catlin ed.); New Trends in Socialism 1935, pp. 21–31; The Theory and Practice of British Freedom (1938) in Planning For Freedom 1965, pp. 8–9, 15–19 and 25–31; Government and The Governed 1939, pp. 1–7, 12, 14–15, 26–7, 36, 40–2, 72–7, 133–5, 138, 141–2, 153–9, 165–70, 196, 203–8, 210, 229, 234, 251, 253, 258–9, 263–4, 278–80, 286 and 296–7; How Britain is Governed 1939, pp. 5, 7–9, 11, 22–7, 29, 45–8, 54, 56, 76–8, 83–4, 86 and 92, Plato Today 1937, pp. 20–2, 42–9, 60–3, 69, 74–5, 80, 85–93, 95–101, 105, 132–3, 137–54, 169–203, 214, 264–6, 268–9, 273–7, 280–8 and 295–300. There are essays on E. H. Carr, Collingwood, Eden, Mussolini and Coolidge in The Charm of Politics 1958, pp. 49–53, 84–8, 91–4 and 105–9. See also W. Bagehot; The English Constitution 1964, p. 51; for Beatrice Webb on Prime Ministerial government, see The Diary of Beatrice Webb IV 1985, p. 18.

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pp. 545–51 (Wordsworth) For Shelley, see The Defence of Poetry (1890 edn), pp. 38–9, 42 and 45. For Wordsworth on nature, man, himself and God, see Descriptive Sketches, in Poems of 1793 lines 192–8, 638–53 and 774–814; Lyrical Ballads 1798 in (Owen ed.) Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads 1798 1981, pp. 3, 36–7, 42–3, 50, 56, 65–6, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 76–9, 83–4, 88, 98–9, 102–5, 108–9, 114–15, 154–64 and 168. For cheerful Wordsworth; see Lyrical Ballads II 1800, pp. 131–2, 163–4, 172, 174, 184–6, 188, 190–4, 196–7, 203–5 and 207–8; for uncheerful Wordsworth see, pp. 128–31, 134–48, 149–52, 154–7, 159–60, 164–5, 168–70, 174–5, 180–4, 199, 220, 222 and 224–35. For the old manner in Poems 1807 in (Darbishire ed., 2nd edn 1952), see esp. I, pp. 57–8, 68–70, 72–3, 85–7 and 92–6; for the new manner see esp. I, pp. 11–16, 20–2, 26–7, 32–3, 37, 39, 44, 51–2, 64–5, 74–82, 90, 97–8, 104–5, 113, 116, 121, 124, 126–7, 130–1, 135–6, 138, 144–50, 153, 156 and 159–60; and II, pp. 183–4, 191, 194–5, 198, 201, 204, 207, 209, 214–15, 217–18, 222, 224, 226, 228, 232, 234, 239–40, 259, 261–3, 265–7, 270–1, 275–8, 281–2, 287–8, 291, 293–6, 298, 301, 312–14, 317–18 and 321–32. [Concerning The Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal to Each Other, and to The Common Enemy, At This Crisis; and specifically as affected by] The Convention of Cintra 1809, in (Owen and Smyser eds.); The Prose Works of William Wordsworth I 1974, pp. 226, 228–32, 235–7 and 242; Two Addresses to The Freeholders of Westmorland 1818, in (Owen and Smyser eds.), Prose Works III 1974, pp. 157–9, 162, 166, 169, 174 and 178–9. The Prelude 1805 in (Wordsworth, Abrams and Gill eds.); The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 1979, pp. 28–32, 36, 40–50, 54–6, 66, 70, 80–8, 96, 100, 106, 112, 134, 138–40, 152–4, 162, 172–4, 198–200, 224–6, 256, 266, 270, 296, 322–4, 328, 332–4, 360, 366–72, 382, 388–90, 392–6, 402, 408, 410–12, 418–20, 426–8, 436, 448–54 and 458–84. See also A Letter to The Bishop of Llandaff (unpublished) 1793, in (Owen and Smyser eds.) I, pp. 31–6, 40–1 and 45–8, and Wordsworth to Charles James Fox, 14 January 1801 in (Shaver ed.) The Early Letters of Dorothy and William Wordsworth 1967, pp. 312–15. pp. 551–3 (Hardy) For the background to Hardy’s novels see (Orel ed.) Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings (1882–1922) 1967, pp. 4, 26–7, 32, 34–5, 40–1, 48–9, 52–3, 56–7, 76, 118–20, 124–5, 128–9, 170–3, 183–4 and 188–9; (Pinion ed.) One Rare Fair Woman 1972, pp. 31, 92, 149 and 185; and Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy 1975, pp. 88–96. pp. 553–9 (Kipling) For Kipling’s poetry up to 1892 see esp. The Ballad of East and West, L‘Envoi, The Story of Uriah, Giffen’s Debt, Possibilities, A Ballad of Burial, The Grave of The Hundred Dead, Arithmetic on The Frontier, Christmas in India, A General Summary, Pagett MP, Delilah, Study of An Elevation in Indian Ink, Danny Deever, A Pilgrimage, The Conundrum of The Workshop, A Legend of The Foreign Office, Ford O-Kabul River, Tomlinson, Route Marchin’, The Undertaker’s Horse, What The People Said, The Fall of Jock Gillespie, The Hoof of The Wild Goat, The Gifts of The Sea, La Nuit Blanche, The Last Suttee, The Widow at Windsor, Mandalay, With Scindia to Delhi, The Dove of Dacca, The Ballad of Boh Dathone, Cells, Screw-drums, The Ballad of The King’s Jest, ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’, ‘Cleared’, The Rhyme of The Three Captains, Soldier, Soldier, The Ballad of The Red Earl, The Ballad of The ‘Bolivar’, The English Flag, Shillin’ A Day, Troopin’, Thomas Atkins, The Ballad of The ‘Clamperdown’, Loot and To Save Trouble, all in The Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse 1940. See also The Vindication of Grant Duff, At the Bar, On a Recent Appointment, The Faithful Soul, New Lamps for Old, The Compliments of The

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Season, A Job Lot, Parturiant Montes, O Baal Hear Us and The Quid Pro Quo, all in Rutherford, Early Verses by Kipling 1879–89, 1986. For Kipling’s prose see esp. The Tomb of His Ancestors . . . 1921, pp. 105–7, 120–3 and 128–30; The Mark of The Beast, in Life’s Handicap 1891 pp. 188–90 and 199–201; Black and White 1888 (1964 edn), pp. 200–9; Plain Tales From The Hills 1890 (1900 edn), pp. 1–8, 18–29 and 107–13. For Kipling’s opinions in general see T. Pinney, Kipling’s India 1986, pp. 26–31, 36–42, 65–7, 75–6, 104–8, 175–7, 184–92 and 235–42; H. Cortazzi and G. Webb, Kipling’s Japan 1988, pp. 62–5, 85–9, 170, 179, 202–3 and 225–8; Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling 1978, p. 112. For Kim and religion, see Kim 1901 (1987), pp. 1–25, 87–95, 192–8, 212–13 and 251–88. pp. 559–70 (Forster) For Forster on Egypt and India see Alexandria: A History and A Guide 1922, p. 81; Jehovah, Buddha and The Greeks, in The Atheneum 4 June 1920, p. 731; The Government of Egypt (Labour Party pamphlet) 1920, pp. 3–5 and 9–11; Two Cheers for Democracy 1951 (1965), pp. 324–6 and 331. See also essay on Syed Ross Masood in Abinger Harvest 1936 (1967), and essays on W. S. Blunt, Jodhpur and The Mind of The Indian Native State in (Heine ed.) The Hill of Devi and Other Indian Writings 1983, pp. 6, 10, 30, 38–9, 44, 76, 98–9, 110–13, 191, 193, 197, 229–30, 251–3 and 296–9. Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings 1971, pp. 203–4, 209, 211–12 and 240–1. The Nation and The Atheneum 21 January 1922, pp. 614–15, 28 January 1922, p. 645 and 30 September 1922, pp. 844–5. See also Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson 1934, pp. 141, 161–3, 174, 176, 184–5, 194 and 240–1; and A Passage to India 1924 (The Kingfisher Library 1932, 1945 edn), pp. 5–11, 13–17, 25–31, 37–8, 40–9, 52, 57–61, 64–5, 74–6, 81, 88–9, 102–3, 110, 116, 166, 162–3, 170–81, 183–4, 188–94, 197, 201, 204–7, 214–17, 221, 229–30, 251–2, 259, 274–5, 283–4, 293, 309–10, 314, 318 and 324–5. For Forster on sex, see Maurice (1914) 1971, pp. 8–9, 12–17, 20, 32–50, 54–7, 61–5, 70–5, 81–90, 94–5, 104–5, 108–9, 118–19, 124–6, 133–4, 138, 142–6, 151–2, 159, 167–9, 178, 181–5, 191–3, 196–7 and 200–3, and Terminal Note (1960s) 1971, pp. 235 and 240–1; (Heine ed.), The Hill of Devi and Other Indian Writings, pp. 306 and 310–26, Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings 1971, pp. 235–8, A Passage to India, pp. 53–5, 135 and 202; Liberty in England 1935, in Abinger Harvest 1936 (1967 edn), pp. 79–81, in (Beith ed.), Edward Carpenter, An Appreciation 1931, p. 80, New Statesman and Nation 31 October 1953, pp. 508–9; Abinger Harvest, p. 151, The New Censorship 1 September 1928, p. 696. For Forster’s correspondence, see M. Lago and P. N. Furbank, Selected Letters of E. M. Forster I 1983, pp. 15, 23–4, 37, 39, 41–2, 236–9, 243–4, 253–4, 258–9, 262–3, 270–1, 274–5, 280–2, 288–9, 291–2 and 296–8, and II 1985, pp. 2–3 and 242. For Lowes Dickinson see (Proctor ed.) The Autobiography of G. Lowes Dickinson 1973, pp. 8, 43–4 and 89–90. For Forster on religion see Two Cheers for Democracy (1944–6) 1951, pp. 75–84, 96–103, 192–205 and 266–7; Abinger Harvest (1905–23), pp. 21, 197–221, 290–2, 294–5, 327–31 and 365–6; Alexandria: A History and A Guide, pp. 42–3 and 68–9; Pharos and Pharillon, 1923, pp. 42, 44–5, 49 and 51; (Heine ed.), The Hill of Devi and Other Indian Writings, pp. 12–14, 63–8, 70–1, 73, 75, 81–2, 86, 138, 140–1, 144–6, 155–9, 176–8, 180, 197–8 and 268; The Nation and Athenaeum 30 September 1922, p. 844; The Listener 27 January 1937, p. 177; The Athenaeum 4 June 1920, pp. 730–1, 2 and 9 July 1920 pp. 8–9 and 43 and 19 November 1920, pp. 690–1; The Nation 4 December 1920, p. 344; Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings, pp. 197, 200–1, 213, 216–22, 224 and 227 (Lago and Furbank eds.), Selected Letters of E. M. Forster I 1983, pp. 62–3 and 109; Foreword to A. A. H. Douglas; The Faith of A Humanist, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, pp. 119–22; and A Passage to India, pp. 36,

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50, 54, 77, 147, 150, 193, 208–9, 287–92, 306–7 and 316. See also Tribute to Mahatma Gandhi 1948 in (S. Radhakrishnan ed.), Mahatma Gandhi:Reflections on His Life and Work 1949, and Call Me A Non-Believer 23 September 1968, both in (Das ed.), E. M. Forster’s India 1977, pp. 115–16. For Forster on literature (1907–50) see Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings, pp. 118–21, 130–4, 136–42, 175, 179–82 and 248; Abinger Harvest (on Ibsen, Eliot, Sinclair Lewis, Firbank, Proust and Jane Austen); and Two Cheers for Democracy. The Hill of Devi and Other Indian Writings, pp. 236 and 283–4; My Books and I in The Longest Journey (Abinger edn, 1984), p. 306; The Nation and Athenaeum 11 January and 29 March 1930, pp. 888 and 109; The Spectator 18 April 1931, p. 627; The Listener 13 January 1937, p. 87; and Aspects of The Novel 1927 (1974 edn), pp. 91, 93, 98–9, 105 and 118. For Forster as pontificator see Abinger Harvest 1936 (1967 edn), pp. 13, 15, 17–18, 22–5, 32–7, 42–5, 47–8, 76–9, 82, 90, 184, 296–7, 301 and 307; and Two Cheers For Democracy 1951 (1965 edn), pp. 31, 33–4, 35–8, 40, 43–4, 54–7, 62–7, 69, 75–7, 82–3, 175–6, 218–22 and 231–44; Albergo Empedocle, pp. 109 and 263–7; Tolstoy’s Birthday in (Orwell ed.), Talking to India, 1943, p. 121; Some Memories, in Edward Carpenter 1938, pp. 78–9; Preface to Dickinson; The Greek View of Life 1956 in Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Related Writings 1973, pp. 213ff. In (Toynbee ed.), The Fearful Choice 1956, pp. 82–3; Nordic Twilight 1940, pp. 10–11; Notes For A Reply 1938 in (Bell ed.), Julian Bell, p. 391; in Williams-Ellis, Britain and The Beast 1937, pp. 44–7, (Lago and Furbank eds.), Selected Letters of E. M. Forster I, pp. 103, 206, 213, 222–3 and 304–25, and II, pp. 46, 170 and 190–5. Foreword to A. Craig; The Banned Books of England 1937, pp. 10–11. For the National Council of Civil Liberties see Time and Tide 28 June and 5 July 1941, and for Forster’s resignation see The New Statesman and Nation 15 May and 5 June 1948. For Forster’s opinions generally see Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson 1934, pp. 11, 15, 17, 21, 25–8, 34, 37, 66, 87–8 and 103–4. See also contributions to New Statesman and Nation 4 April 1931, 23 January 1932, 15 October 1932, 6 July 1935, 22 February 1936, 24 April 1937, 27 August 1938, 10 December 1938 and 11 May 1957; The Spectator 27 June 1931, 19 December 1931, 17 March 1933, 5 July 1940, 19 July 1940, 12 November 1948, 17 January and 2 October 1959, Encounter 1962, p. 64; The Listener 12 May 1937, 9 March 1938, 29 December 1938, 28 March 1940, 15 August 1940, 24 June 1944, 4 October 1951 and 12 June 1952; The Athenaeum 27 February 1920 and 19 November 1920; The Nation and The Athenaeum 1 September 1928, 8 September 1928 and 11 January 1930; Time and Tide 2, 16, 23 and 30 June 1934, 2, 9, 16 and 23 November 1935; The Twentieth Century February 1955, pp. 100–1 and The New Leader 4 September 1925 and 2 October 1925. For Lowes Dickinson on religion see esp. Religion:A Forecast and Criticism 1905 and Religion and Immortality 1911. pp. 571–2 (Wittgenstein) For Wittgenstein on religion see esp. G. H. von Wright, Culture and Value (1977) 1980, pp. le, 6e, 13e, 18–19e, 21–2e, 28e, 30e, 33e, 35e, 45–6e, 53e, 64e, 72–3e, 80e, 83e and 85–6e. See also (Barrett ed.), Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief 1966. pp. 572–3, 584–93 (Richards) For Leavis attacking Richards, see Dr. Richards, Bentham and Coleridge 1935, in (Bentley ed.) The Importance of Scrutiny 1948, pp. 360–77. For Richards on basic English and its connection with meaning, see Basic Rules of Reason 1933, pp. 8, 12, 14, 23, 26 and 128–9, and Basic in Teaching: East and West 1935, pp. 7–11, 13, 20, 22–5, 30, 32, 34–40, 42–5, 56, 62–3, 68, 72, 87–8, 96–100 and 102–3. For Richards

Notes

749

on Chinese thought see Mencius on The Mind 1932, pp. x, xiii, xv, 5, 7–9, 12, 23–4, 33, 35, 39, 56–7, 59–64, 66, 69, 74–5, 78–80, 83–4, 86–7, 89–93, 98–9, 128 and 130–1. For Confucian ‘sincerity’ see Practical Criticism 1929, pp. 298–9. For Richards on criticism, meaning, science, literature and religion see Practical Criticism, pp. 3, 6, 13–17, 31, 190–1, 216–19, 224, 276–9, 298–9, 302–5, 309, 313, 336–40, 346–9 and 350–1; (with Ogden) The Meaning of Meaning 1923, pp. xxiii–xxiv, xxvi–xxxi, 1–3, 2–9, 22–5, 32–107, 133ff., 184, 186ff., 224–7, 244–5, 256–7, 261–2, 271–3, 276, 316–18 and 344–5; The Principles of Literary Criticism 1924 (1930 edn), pp. 3, 6, 8–9, 11–13, 16–17, 29, 32–7, 40–1, 44–8, 52, 55–62, 65–6, 69, 74, 81–8, 95–6, 98, 104–5, 110–11, 114–46, 176–81, 184–5, 190–1, 195–7, 202–12, 216–27, 234, 262, 265, 274, 282–7; Science and Poetry 1926, pp. 45, 48–55, 58, 60 and 82, and Coleridge on Imagination 1934, pp. 144–63, 173–4, 178 and 226–33. For Richards’s later opinions see Nations and Peace 1947; The Wrath of Achilles 1951, Why So Socrates? 1964; Design for Escape: World Education Through Modern Media 1968; Introduction to reprint of C. K. Ogden, Opposition 1968; So Much Nearer 1968; Poetries and Sciences: How Does a Poem Know 1970; and Complementarities 1972. pp. 573–84 (Leavis) For Leavis’s life see W. H. Walsh, F. R. Leavis 1980, pp. 1–40. For Leavis on the Cambridge English Faculty and metropolitan culture see Towards Standards of Criticism 1933 (1976 edn), pp. xxiii, in (Tasker ed.), F. R. Leavis, Letters in Criticism 1974, pp. 86–9 and 136–8; and Two Cultures: The Significance of C. P. Snow 1962, pp. 5–30; For Continuity 1933, pp. 192–203; (Leavis ed.), A Selection From Scrutiny 1968 I, pp. 99–101 and 114; The Common Pursuit 1952, pp. 33–43, 276–7 and 293–8; New Bearings in English Poetry 1932 (1950 edn), pp. 169–70; and Preface to M. Shapira, Henry James: Selected Literary Criticism 1963, p. xxiii. For self-congratulation in the 1950s see New Bearings in English Poetry 1950, pp. 158–74 and Approaches to T. S. Eliot in The Common Pursuit 1952, pp. 278–92. For Leavis on poetry see New Bearings (1932), pp. 12–15, 75–95, 99–106, 112–15 and 138–41; Revaluation 1936 (1964 edn) and The Common Pursuit 1952, pp. 48–72. For Leavis on Eliot’s poetry and religion, see Education and The University 1943, pp. 103–4; D. H. Lawrence, Novelist 1955, pp. 10–12 and 308, For Continuity, pp. 149–59, (Bentley ed.), The Importance of Scrutiny 1948, pp. 276–82, 286–7 and 338–43 and T. S. Eliot – A Reply to The Condescending, in The Cambridge Review 8 February 1929, pp. 254 and 256. For Leavis on the novel, see For Continuity, pp. 91–110, in The Importance of Scrutiny, pp. 295 and 316ff. and The Great Tradition 1948 (1950 edn), pp. 1–3, 6–9, 13, 16, 18–23, 29, 31–2, 35–6, 40–5, 47, 49–50, 56–9, 61, 66, 91–103, 107–9, 111, 118, 121–2, 125, 127–9, 134, 141, 146, 153, 155–6, 177, 182–3, 185–91, 196, 200–10, 225, 227–30 and 236; A Selection From Scrutiny 1968 II, pp. 119–21; and Anna Karenina and Other Essays 1967, pp. 59–74, 92–5 and 108–10. For Leavis on Lawrence, see For Continuity, pp. 111, 113–15, 117–18, 122, 125, 127, 131, 133, 138, 146–7, 151–3 and 156–8; D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, pp. 9, 11, 16–19, 26–7, 61, 66–97, 99–103, 105–6, 110–12, 121, 123, 127–8, 131, 142, 144–50, 156, 161–4, 167–70, 174, 179, 182, 191–2, 303, 309 and 311; The Great Tradition, p. 24; The Importance of Scrutiny, pp. 340–1 and The Common Pursuit, pp. 257–8. For Leavis on criticism, literacy, minority culture, education, history, religion and mass civilization, see Education and The University 1943, pp. 8, 10–11, 16–18, 22, 25–31, 35, 38–9, 43, 47–8, 53–60, 70, 106–7, 119–20 and 130; Mass Civilization and Minority Culture 1930 (1943), pp. 145–64; Culture and Environment 1933, pp. 1–3, 75, 80–2, 87, 89–96, 98 and 106–7; Towards Standards of Criticism 1976, pp. 4–13; Determinations 1934, pp. 2–5; The Common Pursuit, pp. 211–22 and 248–54; A Selection From Scrutiny I, pp. 175–7, 180–3, 188,

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190–2, 196, 261 and 288–9, and II, pp. 280–303 and 308–15. Scrutiny, A Manifesto, in Scrutiny May 1932, pp. 3–5; The Importance of Scrutiny, pp. 9–10, 278, 286–7 and 321; This Age in Literary Criticism, in The Bookman October 1932, pp. 8–9; Under Which King Bezonian?, in Scrutiny December 1932, pp. 205–8, 210 and 213; Restatement for Critics in Scrutiny March 1933, pp. 319 and 321; Why Universities?, in Scrutiny September 1934, pp. 118–19, 124–6 and 132; For Continuity, pp. 3–4 and 6–12; New Bearings in English Poetry, pp. 169–73; The Common Pursuit, pp. 200–1; and Mill on Bentham and Coleridge 1950 (1962 edn), pp. 2–9 and 14–39. For Lord David Cecil see esp. The Stricken Deer 1929, pp. 50–1. pp. 594–602 (Williams) For the treatment of Williams after his death, see (Eagleton ed.), Raymond Williams, Critical Perspectives 1989; (Gable ed.) Resources of Hope 1989; (O’Connor ed.), Raymond Williams, Writing, Culture, Politics 1989; C. Baldick in Times Literary Supplement November 1989; and T. Pinkney, Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism 1989. For Eagleton on Williams in 1976, see T. Eagleton; Criticism and Ideology 1976, pp. 23–40. For Williams on drama and tragedy, see Drama from Ibsen to Eliot 1952, pp. 12–13, 16, 18, 20–33 and 274–7; Drama in Performance 1954 (1972 edn), pp. 2 and 183–4, Preface to Film 1954, pp. vii–viii, 21 and 34–5; and Reading and Criticism 1950, p. 9. For Williams on English politics and culture, see esp. May Day Manifesto 1968, pp. 9–13, 16–18 and 189; The Long Revolution 1961, pp. 293–355; and Television 1974, pp. 7–15. For Williams’s first systematic statements, see Culture and Society 1958 (1962 edn), pp. 11, 17–18, 23–4, 26, 35–47, 49–55, 58–9, 76–83, 91–8, 119, 136, 146, 149–51, 165, 187, 191–5, 258, 285, 292–5, 300–5, 308–10 and 314–24; and The Long Revolution, pp. 3–124. For Williams’s attempt to relate tragedy to revolution see Modern Tragedy 1966, pp. 14–17, 34–9, 45–51, 60–84, 87–9, 92, 94–104, 106–7, 114–15, 135–47, 150–1, 156–60, 162–6 and 174–204. For Williams as a Marxist critic see Marxism and Literature 1977, pp. 1–4, 80–91, 94–118, 122, 125, 129–30, 132–3, 138, 145, 149, 151, 157, 162, 164, 189–92, 194, 196–7, 200, 203–4 and 206. For Williams’s Afterword to Modern Tragedy see The Politics of Modernism, pp. 95–106. For this author on Williams see Cambridge Review 27 May 1961, pp. 546–51 and (Kramer and Kimball eds.) Against the Grain (1990) 1995, pp. 222–32. See also The Meaning of Work, in R. Fraser Work 1968–9, pp. 280–98. Orwell 1971 and Cobbett 1983 have further statements. So do A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy 1970 in Problems in Materialism and Culture 1980, pp. 3–8 and 170–95; Advertising: The Magic System 1960; and Communications and Community 1962, pp. 14–15. For Williams’s secular complication see Politics and Letters 1979, p. 309. For later Hobsbawm, see esp. Hobsbawm, The New Century: Conversation with Antonio Polito 2000. pp. 602–14 (Eagleton) For Eagleton’s account of relations between Marxism, literature and Christianity between 1966 and 1970, see The New Left Church 1966, pp. vii–x, 5, 7–8, 11–12, 14–17, 21–4, 28–9, 31, 38, 41, 43–6, 57, 59, 63–6, 69–74, 80, 83–9, 91–3, 102–3, 106–9, 112–14, 118, 122–3, 126–36, 142–7, 156–61 and 163–9; The Body as Language 1970, pp. 3–12, 18–24, 28–31, 33, 40, 44–8, 51–5, 57, 60, 66–8, 70–1, 76, 85, 91–2 and 96–8; ed. Directions 1968, pp. 169 and 171; (with Adrian Cunningham and others), Catholics and the Left 1966, pp. 4–5, 10–13, 16–19, 26–7, 32–5, 39–46, 48, 50, 62–3, 69, 77 and 79–82; and From Culture to Revolution 1968, pp. 35–7, 43–4 and 56. For Eagleton’s early literary criticism see Shakespeare and Society 1967 (1970 edn), pp. 9–11, 29–30, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 92–3, 112–13, 122–4, 139–41, 171 and 177–206; and Exiles and Emigrés 1970, pp. 9–19, 36–40, 52, 61–73, 89–90, 108–37, 156–78 and

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221–2. For Eagleton’s discussions of specific literary works see Myths of Power 1975, pp. 4, 8–11, 13, 100–3 and 108–21; William Shakespeare 1986, pp. ix–x, 1–2, 4–14, 16–21, 24, 32, 35, 37–41, 65–8, 70–5, 80, 84–9 and 95–9; and The Rape of Clarissa 1982, pp. vii–ix, 2, 4–5, 12–17, 20–1, 38–9, 44–9, 50–61, 63, 71–3, 75–80, 84, 88–90, 93, 95 and 101. For Eagleton as a Marxist theorist, see Criticism and Ideology 1976 (1978 edn), pp. 7–8, 13–17, 22–3, 44–9, 64–75, 77–8, 84–5, 89–93, 96–107, 110–11, 125–33, 137, 145, 149, 165–9, 177–8 and 185; Against The Grain 1986, pp. 10–11, 18–21, 36, 49, 53, 66–7, 70–4, 144, 150–8 and 184; The Spectator 30 January 1971, pp. 159–60; Walter Benjamin: Towards A Revolutionary Criticism 1981, pp. 82–93, 96–7, 101, 112–15, 118, 126, 139, 144–5, 152–7, 161–70 and 175–9; and Literary Theory 1984; The Significance of Theory 1990, pp. 28–9; The Ideology of the Aesthetic 1990, pp. 1–5, 8–9, 13–14, 17–20, 28, 41–2, 60–5, 70–5, 83, 88, 92–3, 97, 100, 102, 113, 119–23, 134, 136, 145, 157, 159, 169, 172, 182–3, 190–2, 196, 202–3, 208, 214–15, 230, 234, 240, 253, 257, 358–9, 372–3, 382–3 and 394–6 and Ideology 1991, pp. 1–33 and 193–224. See also St Oscar 1989, pp. vii–xii and Where Will It All End?, in Sunday Times 13 November 1994 sect. 7, p. 8. pp. 614–19 (Kenny) For political correctness, see The Ivory Tower 1985, pp. 65–9, 72–4 and 131–4, The Road to Hillsborough 1986, pp. 129–36; A Path From Rome 1985, pp. 153–4, God and Two Poets 1988, pp. 135ff.; Thomas More 1983, pp. 19 and 61; and The Logic of Deterrence 1985, pp. 6–10, 18–9, 22–3, 28–31, 34–41 and 65–6. For Kenny on abortion, see Abortion and The Taking of Human Life 1986, in Reason and Religion 1987, pp. 153–66. For Kenny on philosophy and the history of philosophy, see Aquinas and Wittgenstein, in Downside Review Spring 1959, pp. 217–19, 222, 224, and 228–35; Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man 1959–60, in The Legacy of Wittgenstein 1984, pp. 113–17; and The Use of Logical Analysis in Theology 1964, in Reason and Religion 1987, pp. 5–9. Cartesian Privacy 1966, in The Anatomy of The Soul 1973, pp. 114, 119–21 and 127–8, Descartes 1968, pp. 21–4, 28–9, 31–5, 38–9, 54–5, 59–62, 72–5, 93–5, 98–101, 109–10, 125 and 219–23; The Legacy of Wittgenstein 1984, pp. vii–viii, 8–13, 18–49, 51–5, 58–60 and 77; Wittgenstein 1973, pp. 227–32; The Anatomy of The Soul 1973, p. vii; ed. (with Geach), A. N. Prior, The Doctrine of Propositions and Terms 1976, pp. 7–11; ed. Rationalism, Empiricism and Idealism 1986, pp. 1 and 5, The Metaphysics of Mind 1989, pp. v–vii; The Heritage of Wisdom 1987, pp. vii; 17–19, 22–3, 32–3, 52–5 and 119–120, ed Aquinas 1969, pp. 1–5 and 273–6; Aquinas 1980, pp. 3, 32–3, 46, 53–9 and 69–77; The Aristotelian Ethics 1978, pp. 3–5 and 161–214; Aristotle’s Theory of the Will 1979, pp. vii and viii. See also Action, Emotion and Will 1963; Will, Freedom and Power 1975 and Free Will and Responsibility 1980. For Kenny on stylometrics in general see The Computation of Style 1982. See also A Stylometric Study of The New Testament 1986, pp. 1–4 and 116–22. For Kenny on religion and the philosophy of religion see A Path From Rome 1985, pp. 72–6, 79, 102–12, 124–9, 136–40, 146–8, 172–93, 196–201 and 208–9; Faith and Reason 1983, p. 4; The God of The Philosophers 1979, esp., pp. 122–9; The Oxford Diaries of Arthur Hugh Clough 1990, pp. xli–xlii; Thomas More 1983, pp. 3, 91, 94, 96–7 and 102–4; Wyclif 1985, pp. v–vi, 5, 13, 86, 100–5 and 108–9; The Heritage of Wisdom, pp. 70–1, 81, 91–2 and 110; and God and Two Poets, pp. xii, 2–14, 29–30, 38, 58–61, 69–73, 89–90, 93, 97–102, 106–7, 113–22, 128–31, 133–7 and 186–192. pp. 619–21 (Skinner) For Skinner’s intellectual politics, see Hobbes’s Leviathan in Historical Journal 7 1964, pp. 321–33; History and Ideology in the English Revolution, in Historical

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Journal 8 1965, p. 151; The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought in Historical Journal 9 1966, pp. 286 and 315; and Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, in History and Theory vol. VIII 1969, pp. 3–39. Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the Constitution of Morality 1991, pp. 54–6; ‘Social Meaning’ and the Explanation of Social Action in (Laslett et al. eds.) Philosophy, Politics and Society 4th series 1972, pp. 155–7; Motives, Intentions and The Interpretation of Texts, in New Literary History 1972, pp. 407–8; Hermeneutics and The Role of History, in New Literary History 1975–6, pp. 209–28; The Foundations of Modern Political Thought 1978, esp. II, Machiavelli 1981, pp. 59–88; ed. The Return of Grand Theory in the Social Sciences 1985, pp. 15–20, in (Tully ed.); Meaning and Context 1988, pp. 279–88; The Idea of Negative Liberty, in (Rorty et al. eds.) Philosophy in History 1984, pp. 193–216; The Paradoxes of Political Liberty 1984 (1986), pp. 237–46; in (Tully ed.) Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism 1994, pp. 37–48; and Liberty Before Liberalism 1988. pp. 621–33 (Scruton) For Scruton’s opinions up to Art and Imagination, see The Politics of Culture 1981, pp. 50–1, 55, 57, 94, 149–50 and 191–3, and in (Devlin and Williams eds.) Old School Ties 1992, p. 115. For his father’s hatred of the English class system, see Socialists Answer The New Right, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty pamphlet n.d., pp. 29–30. For Scruton’s attack between 1975 and 1990 see The Politics of Culture 1981, pp. 11–12, 31–2, 36–7, 44–7, 58–9, 72–5, 78–9, 152–7, 167, 174–9, 184–5, 194–5, 197–9 and 224–5; (with Cox) Peace Studies: A Critical Survey 1984, pp. 12–26 and 38–41; The Aesthetic Understanding 1983, pp. 7, 179–81 and 186–8; Thinkers of The New Left 1985, Preface, pp. 2–10, 20–3, 32–5, 42, 76–81, 85, 88, 95–8, 102–3, 110–11, 115–16, 119–20, 122, 126–7, 131–4, 144–9, 154–6, 159–60, 162–4, 176–9, 181–3, 185, 189 and 191; and The Philosopher on Dover Beach 1990, pp. 146–7, 151, 157, 162–3, 171, 179–81, 193–214, 218, 222–3, 234–5, 238–9, 247, 273–7, 286–92 and 297–8. For Scruton’s contributions to The Times see Untimely Tracts 1987, pp. 1–2, 10–11, 14, 21–2, 25–9, 31–7, 45–6, 51–3, 56–7, 67–8, 73–8, 80–1, 89–94, 103–4, 113–14, 118, 121–2, 124–9, 137–43, 146–9, 152–3, 159–60, 162–9, 174–5, 178, 184–5, 194–5, 236, 239–41, 244–6, 248–50, 253–4, 258–9 and 262. For Scruton’s politics see The Meaning of Conservatism 1980, Preface, and pp. 11–12, 15–16, 40–3, 50, 52–3, 60–3, 72–3, 124, 126–33, 135–9, 145, 160–1, 164–5, 167–71, 175 and 188–9; The Philosopher on Dover Beach 1990, pp. 38, 146–7 and 222–3; and Modern Philosophy 1994, pp. 416–24, 426–7 and 436–8; Reflections on The Revolution in Eastern Europe 1991, pp. 1–4 and 8–9 and in (Paul ed.) Totalitarianism At The Crossroads 1990, pp. 171–3. For Scruton’s view of philosophy and the history of philosophy see Modern Philosophy 1994, pp. ix, 4–6, 119–20, 123, 226–7, 232, 234–6, 242–3, 246, 272–3, 281, 285–7, 289–90, 293–4, 297–8, 460, 470, 475 and 482; A Short History of Modern Philosophy 1981, pp. 2–3, 11–13, 29–30, 36–9, 61–5, 87, 104–5, 118–19, 137, 146–7, 151–3, 159–60, 164, 168–73, 176, 241–2, 248–9, 254–6, 259–64, 268–9, 272, 277–80 and 283–4; The Philosopher on Dover Beach, pp. 36–7; and Kant 1982, Preface and, pp. 10–13, 18–20, 22–4, 27–8, 30–1, 35, 41–2, 46–62, 64, 68–72, 80 and 84–91. For Scruton on sexuality see Untimely Tracts, pp. 10–11 and 204–5; Modern Philosophy, p. 470; The Philosopher on Dover Beach, pp. 261–4 and 267–8, and Sexual Desire 1986. For Scruton on music, architecture and aesthetics see Art and Imagination 1974, pp. 1–4, 8–12, 14–23, 58–9, 70–9, 82–3, 90–1, 96–8, 132–3, 139, 142–3, 157, 162–3, 188–9, 198–201, 236–49, 252, 256 and 259–63; The Aesthetics of Architecture 1979, pp. 1–38 and 84–5; The New Criterion November 1996, pp. 5–13 and March 1999, p. 38; An Intelligent Person’s Guide to

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Philosophy 1996, pp. 7–8, 12–13, 28–9, 36–9, 42–3, 46–7, 50, 60–1, 65–8, 85–8, 90–4, 96–7, 106, 108–9, 144, 148 and 150; and The Aesthetics of Music 1997, esp., pp. vii–ix, 80–170, 369–70, 395 and 458–9. For Scruton on religion see The Philosopher on Dover Beach, pp. 3, 32–3, 37, 42, 200, 202–3, 222, 224–6 and 261–4; Thinkers of the New Left 1985, pp. 5, 31, 97, 153 and 181; Spinoza 1986, pp. 4–5, 9, 11–13, 21, 26–8, 33–4, 52, 63, 91–2, 106 and 109–12; Untimely Tracts 1987, pp. 74–5 and 133ff.; A Short History of Modern Philosophy, pp. 5–7, 14–17, 20–1, 46, 64–6, 74–5, 146–8 and 186–91; Kant 1982, pp. 52–7, 78–9 and 90–1; The Meaning of Conservatism, pp. 22, 43, 138 and 167–70; Choosing The Wrong Enemy, in Sunday Telegraph 2 April 1989; Modern Philosophy 1994, pp. 120–2, 124–5, 271, 283, 290, 439, 441–2, 449–50, 452–7, 463–5, 480–1 and 494–5; and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture 1998, pp. vii, 28, 31, 36–8, 45–51, 55–68, 71–2, 79–80 129–30 and 136–8. See also Conservative Thinkers 1988, p. 9; Times Literary Supplement 19–25 May 1989, pp. 533; Towards A Natural Philosophy of Religion 1993, in (Bentley ed.) Public and Private Doctrine, pp. 251–8, 260–2 and 263–9; Sexual Desire, p. 353; Upon Nothing 1993, pp. 8–11, 13, 16, 29 and 35 and On Humane Education 1993, Preface and, pp. 3–7 and 21–3. pp. 635–46 (Namier) For Namier on the history of Europe see 1848: Revolution of The Intellectuals (1944) 1946, pp. 4–8, 16–19, 23–6, 31–7, 42–7, 53, 57, 62, 66–71, 78–92 and 115–23; In The Margin of History 1939, pp. 3–8, 13–19, 21–35 and 37–47; and Conflicts 1942, pp. 17–18, 27–30, 32–42, 52, 56–68, 74–6, 80–5 and 88–90. For Namier’s earliest writings and opinions see Julia Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography 1971, pp. 40–5, 60–1, 63–72, 74–7, 81–101, 104–7, 120, 138–46, 151 and 170–1; Skyscrapers 1931, pp. 74–5, 81–2, 84–5, 88–94, 96–101, 105–6, 120–1, 146–8, 150–5, 157–65 and 170–2; Conflicts 1942, pp. 94–6, 1848: Revolution of The Intellectuals, pp. 10–11 and 24; The Downfall of The Habsburg Monarchy, in (Temperley ed.); A History of The Peace Conference of Paris 1921, pp. 69, 75–7, 80, 89–90, 105–8 and Rose, Lewis Namier and Zionism 1980, pp. 13–7, 20–2, 136–7 and 215. For Namier on the politics and diplomacy of the First World War see In The Margin of History, pp. 213–29, 235–43, 247–50 and 263–4. For Namier on English history see Skyscrapers 1931, pp. 34–48 and 173–83; In The Margin of History, pp. 105–13, 115–51 and 158–76; Crossroads of Power 1962, pp. 46–72, 74, 78, 80, 82–3, 88–9 and 104–6; The Structure of Politics at The Accession of George III 1929 I, pp. vii, 3–4, 9, 11–12, 15–16, 21–2, 24–5, 31–2, 37, 41–2, 44, 47–50, 53–60, 88, 128, 164–5, 170–1, 187–90, 195, 207, 209, 261, 263–5 and 276–9; and England in The Age of The American Revolution 1930, esp. pp. 3–10, 15–25, 33–7, 51–5, 59–70, 75–8, 81–4, 90–105, 147, 150–1, 178–84, 200–39 and Book V. For Namier’s religion and his Zionism see Julia Namier; Lewis Namier, A Biography, pp. 3–7, 21, 33–6, 52, 90, 93, 95–7, 163–4, 201–7, 210–19, 230–3, 237–8, 246–7, 262–4, 268–73 and chapter 2 Rose, Lewis Namier and Zionism, pp. 5–6, 10–13, 18–25, 32–3, 36–40, 43–5, 56–7, 65–72, 74–6, 84–93, 98, 100–1, 114–39, 148–9 and chapter 4, Skyscrapers, pp. 57–61, 116, 129–36 and 138–41, I. Berlin, L. B. Namier, in Personal Impressions 1966, p. 78, England in The Age of The American Revolution, pp. 20 and 42–5; In The Margin of History, pp. 65, 76–7, 82–93, 152–7 and 279–81; and Conflicts, pp. 102–3, 108–20, 144–5, 147–8, 156, 165–6 and 189. See also C. Babington-Smith, Julia de Beausobre 1983, p. 81. pp. 646–50 (Berlin) For Berlin on the history of Russian thought and politics see Russia and 1848 1948, pp. 2–5, 7, 9, 11, 13–15 and 18–21; Russian Thinkers 1978, pp. 83, 85–9, 96–7, 99,

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102, 115–17, 124, 126–7, 129, 131, 150ff., 187, 199–200 and 208–9; Against The Current 1981, pp. 188 and 211; Generalissimo Stalin and The Art of Government (by O. Utis) 1952; The Soviet Intelligentsia 1957 and The Silence in Russian Culture 1957, all in Foreign Affairs January 1952, pp. 200, 202–4, 206–7, 210 and 212, and 1957, pp. 2–3, 5, 9, 14, 16–19, 21–3, 124 and 128–9. For Berlin on politics and the historical process see Political Ideas in The Twentieth Century 1949, in Four Essays on Liberty 1969, pp. 6–10, 18–19, 23, 27–40 and 123. See also Four Essays on Liberty, pp. xiii–xv, xlv–xlix and lii–lviii; The Two Concepts of Liberty 1958, pp. 3–10, 14–19, 25–30, 32–5, 43–5 and 50–4; Historical Inevitability (1953) 1954, pp. 5–6, 10, 13, 20–3, 30–7, 40–3, 50, 53, 65–9, 73 and 77; Obscurum per Obscurus, in The Spectator 15 May 1936, p. 888; Concepts and Categories 1978, pp. 82–3, 100–3, 110, 113, 118, 126, 129–33, 139, 146–53 and 166–8; Karl Marx 1939, pp. 9–17, 27–8 and 248–9, and J. L. Austin and The Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy 1973, in Personal Impressions 1981, p. 115. For Berlin on Christianity, Judaism and Zionism see Against The Current 1981, pp. 217–18, 222, 225–7, 231–2, 237–8, 241, 244–5, 249–51, 253–6, 263, 268, 276–8, 280 and 284; Personal Impressions 1981, pp. 32–5, 39–43, 45–8, 50–3, 55–62, 66–9 and 148–52; The Hedgehog and The Fox 1951, in Russian Thinkers, pp. 51–5, 64–5 and 77–9; Russian Thinkers, pp. 13–15, 106, 120, 123–4, 126, 141, 157–8, 172–3, 200, 217–18, 223–4, 238–43, 246, 253–4, 259–60 and 265; Four Essays on Liberty, pp. xliii–xliv, 5 and 33–7; Jewish Slavery and Emancipation 1951, in (Bentwich ed.), Hebrew University Garland 1952, pp. 19–27, 30–1, 34–7 and 39–42; The Silence in Russian Culture, pp. 4–5; Historical Inevitability, pp. 38–43; Concepts and Categories 1978, p. 153, in ed., Chaim Weizmann As Leader, pp. 13–14 and 16, and The Origins of Israel 1953, in (Laqueur ed.), The Middle East in Transition 1958, pp. 205, 207, 212–15, 217–18 and 220–1. For John Gray, on Berlin see John Gray Isaiah Berlin 1995, pp. 140 and 168. Introduction to (Yudkin ed.) General Education 1975, pp. ix–xi and xviii–xix. See also Ramin Jahanbegloo, Philosophy and Life: An Interview in New York Review of Books 28 May 1992, pp. 46–54 and M. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin 1998. pp. 650–61 (Koestler) For Koestler’s life, see D. Cesarani, Arthur Koestler 1998, pp. 75–9, 108–11, 148, 171–2, 180–1, 202–6, 213–18, 221–2, 264–5 and 365–8. For Koestler’s and Cynthia Koestler’s suicides, see H. Harris, Stranger on The Square 1984, pp. 9–11. For Koestler on politics, intellectuals, Marxism and the Communist party see esp. Scum of The Earth 1941, pp. 64–5, 78, 85–6, 110, 112, 114–15, 252 and 254; The Trail of The Dinosaur 1955, pp. 15–16, 22–3, 29–31, 37, 45–6, 52, 179–82, 189, 193–5, 199–204 and 210–12; in (Crossman ed.) The God That Failed 1950, pp. 25–7, 30, 55–8 and 61; Arrow in The Blue 1952, pp. 225–8, 237–42 and 246–51; The Invisible Writing 1954, pp. 15–27, 31–3, 38, 83, 313–15 and 332–5; The Yogi and The Commissar 1945, pp. 9–21, 69, 74, 76–81, 100–1, 106–11, 122–31, 170–1, 188–200, 215–16, 219–26, 236 and 238–41; Spanish Testament 1937, pp. 4–5, 18–19, 22–3, 25, 30–1, 36–7, 42, 44–7, 55–63, 70–4, 78–81, 87–97, 100–3, 106, 111, 128, 133, 148–54, 167–73, 258, 295, 332–9, 343–4 and 366, and Darkness at Noon 1940, pp. 36, 40, 42, 56–7, 64–71, 78–9, 86–7, 94–5, 98–101, 130–4, 140–4, 146–50, 158–61, 204, 212–13 and 241–2. For Koestler on Jewishness, and post-Jewish humanism, see esp. The Thirteenth Tribe 1976, pp. 58–82, 141–2, 159ff., 168, 180, 182–3, 188–9, 192–200 and 223–6; Judah at The Crossroads 1955, and The Trail of The Dinosaur 1955, both in The Trail of the Dinosaur 1955, pp. 107–9, 112–15, 118–23, 133–5, 139, 234, 244–7 and 250–1; Thieves in The Night 1946, pp. 6–7, 10–12, 37–43, 132–3, 152–6, 193, 199–200, 219, 222, 241–3, 245, 253, 268, 272, 284–97, 301, 318, 327 and 330; Arrow in The Blue, pp.

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82–92, 102–21, 125–32, 142–3, 146, 227 and 230–3; The Invisible Writing, pp. 351–4, 357 and 376–81; and Promise and Fulfilment 1949, pp. vii, 7–9, 18–19, 22–9, 36–9, 45–7, 50–7, 73–7, 82–5, 88–93, 107, 112, 118–19, 122–9, 132–3, 137–9, 148–9, 156–60, 162–3, 168, 173–4, 176–82, 194, 207–8, 245–54, 265–6, 271, 278–9, 289–93, 295, 302–5, 308–15, 322–3 and 331–5. For the substance of Koestler’s post-Jewish humanism see The Act of Creation 1964. For Koestler on hanging see Reflections on Hanging 1956, pp. 7–8, 19, 34, 51–2, 102–4 and 170. pp. 661–73 (Steiner) For Steiner on language see In A Post Culture 1970, in Extraterritorial 1973, pp. 156–62; Antigones 1984 (1986), pp. 203–5; and After Babel 1975, pp. 17–18, 27, 33–5, 37–9, 46–7, 50, 55–7, 81–4, 91, 95, 106–7, 115, 124–5, 127, 129, 134–9, 141–2, 153–5, 159, 170, 173–5, 200, 203, 215–18, 229, 231–3, 235–40, 245–6, 269, 272, 274–5, 279–80, 282–5, 294–5, 298, 300–1, 303, 308–9, 321, 333–4, 346–7, 355–7, 361–3, 406–8, 414–15, 471 and 473. For Steiner on literature, tragedy and culture see After Babel, pp. 245–7, 429, 443, 461–2 and 464; and The Death of Tragedy 1961 (1963 edn), pp. 3–10, 24–5, 31–2, 108, 112–13, 115–18, 121–2, 124–5, 135, 140–1, 143–4, 174, 188–9, 195–7, 228, 238–45, 256–7, 270–3, 275–6, 288, 292–4, 304, 309, 313–16, 321–5 and 332–46. For ‘the crisis of the twentieth century’ see In Bluebeard’s Castle 1971, pp. 14–15, 17–18, 21, 24, 26–7, 31, 35–6, 41–3, 44–6, 48, 51–4, 57, 61, 63, 66–7, 69–74, 77–8, 82–5, 89–91, 95–7, 99, 104 and 106–7. See also Language and Silence (1959–61) 1967, pp. 32–5, 42–4 and 117, Britain and Europe, Comparison and Contrast, in Report of The Annual Meeting of The Headmasters’ Conference 1991, pp. 23, 25 and 28; and in (Kearney ed.) Vision of Europe 1992, pp. 43–53. For Steiner on Judaism and religion see Language and Silence (1959–67) 1967, pp. 13–16, 121–3, 164–5, 167–74, 176–9, 182–3, 186–8, 190 and 193; The Portage to San Cristobal of AH 1979, pp. 120–3 and 125–6; Language and Silence, p. 49; In Bluebeard’s Castle, pp. 34–9, 46–8, 71 and 88; The Death of Tragedy, pp. 55–76, 81, 87, 196–7, 319–23 and 331; Tolstoy or Dostoevsky 1959, pp. 3–8, 20, 28, 35, 42, 75, 80–1, 115–17, 140–1, 151–2, 210, 228–9, 240, 244, 246–9, 251–5, 258–63, 265–7, 286–7, 290–3, 295–6, 300, 305, 316, 319–22, 336–8 and 340; Heidegger 1978, pp. 13, 17–18, 36, 38–40, 42, 60–4 and 138–41; and Real Presences 1989, pp. 11–12, 23–6, 28–39, 43–5, 49–50, 53, 55, 57–9, 73, 79, 83–7, 93–5, 105–6, 112–20, 128, 139–43, 148–54, 165–9, 174, 179, 183–5, 198–206, 209–12, 214–19, 224–30 and 232. pp. 677–93 (Complication and dilapidation) For Edna Lyall (Ada Ellen Bayly) see J. M. Escott The Life of Edna Lyall 1904, pp. 44 and 49. For the 4th Earl Grey see H. Begbie, Albert, Fourth Earl Grey 1918, esp. chapter 3 and pp. 42–9, 90–1, 106, 116, 121 and 132. For Rev. R. J. Campbell see The New Theology 1907, pp. 1–4, 8, 11, 14–15, 107–8, 166, 175, 217 and 256. For R. W. Macan see The Resurrection of Jesus Christ 1877, pp. vii and 165, and Religious Changes in Oxford During the Last Fifty Years 1918, pp. 31 and 35–9. For C. E. Raven see The Creator Spirit 1927, pp. vii and 283 and Religion and Science 1946, pp. 6–7. For Robert Bridges see The Necessity of Poetry, Address to Tredegar District Co-operative Society 22 November 1917, pp. 42–5. For Sir Thomas Arnold see esp. The Preaching of Islam 1896, pp. 3–8, 37–40, 208–9, 346 and 371. For Wilfred Scawen Blunt see The Future of Islam 1882, pp. v–vii, 134–7, 141–2, 153–61 and chapter V. For Gibb see Whither Islam 1932, pp. 66–74 and 372–6; Modern Trends in Islam 1947, pp. x–xiii. For L. P. Jacks see Sir Arthur Eddington (1948) 1949, pp. 30–1; The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion 1921, pp. 8–16, 22–3, 32 and 36–7; and The Confessions of An Octogenarian 1942, p. 116. For Brooke see L. P. Jacks,

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Life and Letters of Stopford Brooke 1917 I, pp. 310–23 and II, pp. 352–4. For Sir Walter Raleigh see esp. England and The War 1916–18, pp. 8–10, 32, 41, 57, 71–3, 79–80, 83, 96, 119 and 123; The War in The Air 1922, p. 2, Laughter From a Cloud (n.d.) 1923, pp. 127, 129, 132–4 and 144–5, The Meaning of A University 1911, pp. 8–9 and 18–19; Shakespeare 1907, pp. 195–6 and The Origins of Romance (1915) 1916, pp. 18–24. For Sir Oliver Lodge see The Substance of Faith 1907, pp. iii–x and 1–5. For Sir Richard Livingstone, see The Greek Genius and its Meaning to Us 1912, p. 195; The Future in Education 1942, p. 112; and Education for a World Adrift 1942, pp. 20, 25, 54, 73, 88, 97, 125, 152 and 188. For Greg see The Creed of Christendom 1851 and Enigmas of Life 1872. For Willey see esp. John Beer in Proceedings of the British Academy 66 1980, pp. 485–7. For Dowden see Studies in Literature 1878 (1887 edn), pp. 350–3 and True Conservatism – What It Is, in Contemporary Review 1869, pp. 276–8. For Samuel Butler see esp. Erewhon 1872; The Fair Haven 1873; Life and Habit 1878; Erewhon Revisited 1901; The Way of All Flesh 1903; and Essays on Life, Art and Science 1904. For Clodd see The Childhood of The World 1873; Jesus of Nazareth 1880; Pioneers of Evolution 1897; Thomas Henry Huxley 1902; and Animism 1906. For Bethune-Baker see The Way of Modernism and Other Essays 1924 and 1927, pp. 54–5, 60–1, 73–4, 128–9, 138–9 and 146–7. For Percy Gardner see Faith and Conduct 1887, pp. x–xi and 241–55; Oxford at The Crossroads 1903, pp. 1–3, 6–10, 70, 129–31 and 508–21; Evolution in Christian Ethics 1918, pp. vi–viii; Modernism in the English Church 1926, pp. xi–xiii; and Practical Basis of Christian Belief 1933, pp. 9–11 and 23–4. (See also Exploratio Evangelica 1899.) For J. A. T. Robinson see esp. Honest to God 1963, pp. 116, 123, 127 and 137. For Cupitt see in (Sykes ed.) Christ, Faith and History 1971, pp. 142–4; The Leap of Reason 1976, pp. 132–7; The World To Come 1982, pp. ix–xvi and 139–44; Only Human 1985, pp. ix–xi, 199–201, 205–8, 210–11 and 213–15; and The Long-Legged Fly 1987, pp. 1–12. For A. B. Cook see C. Seltman; Proceedings of the British Academy 38 1952, pp. 301–2. For Rev. Hastings Rashdall see Doctrine and Development 1898, pp. vii–xiii and 13–15, and The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology 1919 (1920), pp. 411–16 and 438–9. For F. C. Burkitt see The Gospel History and its Transmission 1906; Jewish and Christian Apocalypses 1914; The Religion of the Manichees 1925; Jesus Christ, An Historical Outline 1932; and Church and Gnosis 1932. For Rev. F. W. Bussell, composer, parish priest and Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford (1886–1913) see Doctrine of Office and Person of Christ 1892; School of Plato 1896; Christian Theology and Social Progress 1907; Marcus Aurelius and The Later Stoicism 1909; A Survey of Monarchical Institutions 1909; The Principle of Monarchy 1918; and Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages 1918. For Bernard Holland, see Onyx; A Reported Change in Religion 1899, pp. 145 and 170–5; Kenelm Digby 1919, Belief and Freedom 1923; and Baron F. von Hugel, Selected Letters 1896–1924 1926. For T. R. Glover see esp. The Christian Tradition and its Verification 1912, pp. 8–35, and The Jesus of History 1917, pp. 22–4. For H. A. Williams on Beethoven, Freud and Marx see The True Wilderness 1965, p. 138. For the ‘pluriform’ character of theology, see S. W. Sykes Christian Theology 1971, pp. 8–9. For J. M. Robertson see H. J. Laski in Dictionary of National Biography 1931–1940. For H. A. Pritchard see Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake? in Moral Obligation 1949. For D. G. Rossetti, see (W. M. Rossetti ed.) Works 1911 and (Doughty and Wahl eds.) Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1965. For George Gissing, see (Coustillas ed.), George Gissing Essays and Fiction 1970, pp. 20–4 and 96–7. For Arnold Bennett; see How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day 1906, pp. 29 and 37; The Truth About an Author 1903, pp. 99–100; How to Become an Author 1903, pp. 36–7; Books and Persons 1917, p. 152; The Religious Interregnum 1929, pp. 23–9; My

Notes

757

Religious Experience, in Books That Have Influenced Me 1926, pp. 255–6; and Reginald Pound, Arnold Bennett 1952, p. 18. For Kingsley Amis, see On Drink (1970) 1972, pp. 11–12; On Christ’s Nature (1962), in What Happened to Jane Austen 1970, pp. 212–14, 216 and 219–23; and The Alteration 1978. For St Aubyn see The Patrick Melrose Trilogy (1992–94) 1998. For J. B. Bury, see A History of Freedom of Thought 1912, and The Idea of Progress 1920. For York Powell: see Oliver Elton; Frederick York Powell: A Life 1906 I, pp. 166, 332 and 396, and II, p. 314. For Hobson, see The Social Problem 1901, pp. 126–7, 284–6 and 288; The Church for the People, in A Modern Outlook 1910, pp. 65–8 and 223. See also Character and Society in (Parker ed.) Character and Life 1912, p. 62 and God and Mammon 1931, pp. 10–21, 44–5 and 52–6. For G. M. Trevelyan, see Poetry and Rebellion and The Muse of History in Recreations of an Historian 1905 (1919 edn), pp. 28–9, 32, 58 and 128–9; England under Queen Anne 1930–4 esp. I, pp. 103–13 and 423; II, pp. vii–ix, 101 and 406; and III, pp. vii–ix and 307; and D. Cannadine, G. M. Treveylan 1993. For Roger Fry; see Art and Socialism 1912 and 1920 in Vision and Design (1937 edn), pp. 61–70. For the Lake District and Jerusalem, see H. Butterfield in (Sykes-Davies and Watson eds.) The English Mind 1964, p. 3. For Daiches, see Poetry and the Modern World 1940, p. 153 and Two Worlds 1957, pp. 28–9, 53–4, 82, 137, 139–40, 142–7 and 152. See also The Place of Meaning in Poetry 1935, New Literary Values 1936 and The Novel and the Modern World 1939. For Menuhin, see R. Daniels, Conversations with Menuhin 1979 (1991), pp. 19–24. For Bronowski, see esp. Lessons of Science 1951, pp. 7–9, in (Littleton ed.) Science and Human Values 1961, pp. 70–1; The Identity of Man 1965 (1967), pp. 78–9 and 103; and (Littleton ed.) Protest and Prospect, in The Shape of Likelihood; Relevance and the University 1971, pp. 42–51. For Ayer, see Language, Truth and Logic 1936 (1946), pp. 115–19, in (Magee ed.) Modern British Philosophy 1971, pp. 58–9; The Vienna Circle 1956 in (Ryle ed.) The Revolution in Philosophy 1956, pp. 86–7; On Making Philosophy Intelligible 1963 and Metaphysics and Commonsense 1966, both in G. E. Moore on Propositions and Facts (n.d.), pp. 4–8, 65–71 and 202, in (Unwin ed.) What I Believe 1966, pp. 13–15, The Philosophy of Politics 1967, pp. 2–3 and 22–3, The Origins of Pragmatism 1968, pp. 219–21; The Humanist Outlook 1968, pp. 4–5 and 7–9; Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage 1971, p. 7 and The Central Questions of Philosophy 1973, pp. 4–7 and 222–7. For Curzon, see Poetry, Politics and Conservatism in National Review November 1885, p. 510. For Wilson see History of Unilever 1954 and The Dutch Republic 1968. For Blake see The Unknown Prime Minister 1955 and History of the Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill 1970. For Ferguson see The Pity of War 1998 and The World’s Banker 1998. For Hinsley see Power and the Pursuit of Peace 1963. For Cecil see Conservatism 1912. For Hearnshaw see esp. Democracy at the Crossroads 1918 and Conservatism 1933. For ‘intellectual excellence’ as the object of Victorian reformers in Cambridge, see L. Stephen, Life of Henry Fawcett 1885 (1886), pp. 105–6. For Telegraph newspapers see Conrad Black, Ridiculous, Febrile, Lurid, Ludicrous, in The Spectator 26 February 1994. For Wyndham Lewis, see (Henslowe ed.) Things Have Changed 1930, p. 145. For T. E. Hulme, see A. R. Jones Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme 1960, esp. pp. 21–3, 190–3 and 195–6; (Read ed.) Speculations 1924, (Hynes ed.), Further Speculations 1955, pp. 50–1, 179–82 and 186; and Michael Roberts, T. E. Hulme 1938, p. 33 (see also Hulme’s Introduction to Sorel, Reflections on Violence 1914). For Juliet Mitchell see esp. Women: The Longest Revolution 1966, in Women:The Longest Revolution 1984, pp. 17–54. For Germaine Greer see esp. The Female Eunuch 1971; Sex and Destiny 1986; The Mad Woman’s Underclothes 1986; and The Change 1991. For Galsworthy, see H. V. Marrot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy 1935, pp. 152, 675, 688 and 719; R. Barker A Man of

758

Notes

Principle 1963, pp. 91–3 and 110; and M. E. Reynolds, Memoirs of John Galsworthy by his Sister 1936, pp. 78–80 and 86. See also The Island Pharisees 1904, pp. 9–10, 13, 31, 127, 139, 173 and 193. For Connolly, see Horizon 1948, in Ideas and Places 1953, pp. 196–7; Introduction to A. Camus, The Outsider 1946, pp. 6–7; and Writers and Society 1940–3, in The Condemned Playground 1945, p. 261. For Buchan, see The Thirty-Nine Steps 1915; Greenmantle 1916; Mr Standfast 1918; and The Kirk in Scotland 1931. For Muggeridge, see esp. Muggeridge Through the Microphone 1967 (1969), pp. 25, 36–9, 42, 81, 151 and 180–1. For Orage, see in (Mairet ed.) Orage 1936, pp. vi and 16–17. For Carr-Saunders, see H. Phelps Brown in Proceedings of the British Academy 58, 1967, p. 389. For Rashdall on universities, see The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages I 1895, pp. 4–5, 7 and 12–13. For Bowra see Annan, A Man I Love in (Lloyd-Jones ed.) Maurice Bowra:A Celebration 1974, pp. 83–4. For Farnell, see An Oxonian Looks Back 1934, pp. 25–7, 42–7, 57–8 and 335–40, The Attributes of God 1925 esp. pp. 247–80; The Evolution of Religion 1905, esp. Lectures 1 and 2. See also The Cults of the Greek States 1896 and The Higher Aspect of Greek Religion 1912. For Margoliouth see Gilbert Murray in Proceedings of the British Academy 26, 1940, pp. 395–6. For Mackail, see Biblia Innocentium 1892, The Sayings of the Lord Jesus Christ 1894, p. 8; introduction to The Holy Bible 1897 I, pp. xx–xxi; The Report of the Prime Minister’s Committee on the Classics 1921, in Classical Studies 1925, pp. 20–1 and 28–31;The Case for Latin in Secondary Schools 1922, pp. 8–9 and 30–1; Patriotism 1925, in Classical Studies 1925, p. 233; The Poetry of Virgil and his Meaning to the World of Today 1923, pp. 85, 99 and 141. See also Studies in Humanism (1907–24) 1938, pp. 16–21, 25–31, 47–8, 187 and 210. For Woodward, see R. Butler, Proceedings of the British Academy 1940, p. 504. For Housman, see H. W. Garrod in James Jones, The Study of Good Letters 1963, pp. 55–6. For McTaggart see (Broad ed.) Some Dogmas of Religion (1895) (1906) 1930, pp. xlviii–xlix, 1–30, 290–2 and 295–7. For H. W. Garrod see The Religion of All Good Men 1906, pp. vii–ix, 60–71, 74–5, 78–9, 82–3, 130 and 153. For J. H. Bridges see Comte The Successor of Aristotle and St Paul 1883, p. 24; and The Day of all the Dead 1905, in Essays and Addresses 1907, pp. 296–7. For W. L. Courtney on Christ, Socrates and the Buddha, see Socrates, Buddha and Christ, in Studies in Leisure 1892 (1894), pp. 182 and 186; see also The Service of Man in Courtney, Studies New and Old 1888, pp. 225–7. For Unwin see R. H. Tawney, Studies in Economic History 1927, pp. xvi–xvii and xxiv–xxvi. For Pugin, see Contrasts 1836, pp. iv, 5, 18–19 and 26; A Reply to Observations 1837, pp. 4–5, and 33; The True Vision of Pointed or Christian Architecture 1841, pp. 1, 3, 18 and 56; An Appeal for The Revival of Christian Architecture in England 1843, pp. 1 and 10–19; The Present Status of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England 1843, p. 114; An Earnest Appeal for the Revival of Ancient Plain-Song 1850, pp. 3–6; A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Screens 1851, pp. 1–2, and An Earnest Address on the Establishment of the Hierarchy 1851, pp. 2, 16 and 24–5. For Watkin see Morality and Architecture 1977, pp. 4–5, 13–14, 18, 32, 42–6, 51–3, 65–8, 72, 77, 81–4, 86, 97–100, 102–4 and 109. For Scott, see The Architecture of Humanism 1914, pp. 138–9. For Ewing see Grice in Proceedings of the British Academy 59, 1973, p. 509. For Owen see J. Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen: A Biography 1975, pp. 13–93. For S. A. Cook see D. W. Thomas in Proceedings of the British Academy 36, 1950; The Truth of The Bible 1938; and The Rebirth of Christianity 1942. For Illingworth, see Personality, Divine Immanence and The Gospel Miracles (1915) 1916, pp. iv–v and 163–77. For Coulton see St Francis and Dante 1906; Chaucer and His World 1908; Art and the Reformation 1928; and Four Centuries of Mediaeval Religion 1923–50. For L. S. Hodgson see Towards a Christian Philosophy 1942, pp. 7–9. For Rev. J. Polkinghorne see The Particle Play 1979; Models of High Energy

Notes

759

Process 1980; The Quantum World 1984; One World 1986; Science and Creation 1988; Science and Providence 1989; Process and Reality 1991; Science and Christian Belief 1994; Quarks, Chaos and Christianity 1994; Scientists as Theologians 1996; Beyond Science 1996; Belief in God in an Age of Science 1998 and Science and Theology 1998. For Sir Alister Hardy, see Science and The Quest for God 1951; The Living Stream 1961, and The Divine Flame 1966. For Bishop Jenkins on Beckett’s ‘despair and melancholy’, see (Coulson ed.) Theology and the University 1964, pp. 218–19. For I. Compton-Burnett see H. Spurling, Ivy When Young 1974, pp. 77–9. For Perry Anderson on feminism see P. Anderson and R. Blackburn, Towards Socialism 1965, pp. 276–8. For later Auden see The Dyer’s Hand 1963 (1975), pp. 436–61; Forewords and Afterwords 1973 (1979), pp. 40–78 and 168–81; and Secondary Worlds 1968, pp. 119–44. For S. H. Butcher see What We Owe to Greece 1882, pp. 5 and 28–30. For Gooch see H. Butterfield, George Peabody Gooch, in Proceedings of the British Academy 55, 1969, p. 337. For A. N. Wilson see The Observer 29 May 1991, pp. 49–50. For ‘radical unbelief’ of the ‘modern world’, see A. R. Vidler Objections to Christian Belief 1963, pp. 7–9. For Robinson Ellis see A. C. Clarke, in Proceedings of the British Academy 1913, p. 524. For Cyril Bailey, see W. Oakeshott in Proceedings of the British Academy 46, 1960, pp. 302–4.

Index of proper names

Acton, Sir John, 1st Baron xviii, 64, 88, 166, 175, 182–5, 189, 203, 237, 301–2, 432, 469, 521, 561, 619 Amis, Kingsley 574, 597, 682 Amis, Martin 683 Anderson, Perry 503 Andrewes, Rev. Lancelot 252, 253 Annan, Noel, Lord 559, 574 Anselm, St 265 Aquinas, Thomas, St 99–101, 381–2, 387, 587, 615–16 Aristole 57, 369–70, 380, 435, 446, 539, 590, 615–16, 626 Argyll, George, 8th Duke of xvii, 153 Arnold, Matthew xviii, xix, 36, 64, 75–87, 93, 99, 126, 154–75, 278, 283, 296, 311, 399, 425, 427, 440–1, 456, 463, 474, 503, 516–17, 520, 525, 533, 580–1, 590, 593, 598–9, 633, 670 Arnold, Rev. Thomas xvii, xviii, xix, 45, 55, 75, 86, 175, 177, 251, 252, 254, 258, 267, 334, 565 Ashley, Sir W. J. 319, 329, 333–6 Asquith, Rt Hon. H. H. 152, 320, 451 Athanasius, St 167 Attlee, Rt Hon. Clement, 1st Earl 285, 502, 526, 537 Augustine, St 11, 167, 233, 243, 249, 302, 387, 500, 629, 672 Ayer, A. J. 368, 378, 503, 635, 647, 684 Bach, J. S. 434, 465 Bacon, Rt Hon. Francis, 1st Viscount St Albans xvii, xviii, 25, 26, 64, 103, 136, 154, 160–1, 177, 203, 347 Bagehot, Walter 95 Baldwin, Rt Hon. Stanley, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley 152, 246, 320, 324, 486–7 Balfour, Rt Hon. A. J., 1st Earl xvii, 94, 95, 140, 163, 319, 320, 322–3 Bamborough, J. Renford 609 Barker, Sir Ernest 329, 521 Barnes, William 552 Barth, Karl 289, 349, 358, 379, 436, 680

Baur, F. C. 145, 242, 439 Beethoven, Ludwig van 338, 349, 434, 462, 463, 465, 683 Belle, Clive 590 Bell, Daniel 377 Bell, Rt Rev. George 195 Belloc, Hilaire xv, 298 Benjamin, Walter 606, 655 Benn, Rt Hon. Anthony, Wedgwood 538, 563–4 Bennett, Arnold 576, 682 Bentham, Jeremy 140, 156, 177, 180, 189, 447, 488, 520, 541 Bentinck, Lord George 36 Bergson, Henri 198, 272, 323, 339, 355, 578 Bevin, Rt Hon. Ernest 652 Blair, Rt Hon. Anthony 502–3 Blake, Robert, Lord 685 Blake William 339, 591, 632, 679 Blavatsky, Helena 68, 70 Bloch, Ernst 668 Blondel, Maurice 386 Boehme, Jacob 137, 200, 339, 591 Bohr, Niels 219, 341, 431 Bonhoeffer, Rev. D 356, 359, 379, 386 Boniface VII, Pope 302 Booths, the 515–16 Bosanquet, Bernard xix, 124, 131–2, 199, 219, 272, 437–9, 444–50, 453, 464, 522, 541, 570, 590 Bossuet, J. B., Bishop 80, 166, 180 Bowra, Sir Maurice 688 Bradbrook, Muriel 309 Bradlaugh, C. 677, 681 Bradley, A. C. xix, 131, 132, 437–40, 452–8, 464, 549, 570, 590 Bradley, F. H. xix, 119, 131, 132, 294, 324, 437–44, 500, 522, 541, 570, 620, 694 Brecht, Bertolt 503, 600, 664 Bridges, Robert 575, 678 Briggs, Asa, Lord 159, 167, 503, 683 Bright, Rt Hon. John 144, 254, 255, 294, 295, 329, 332, 683 Britten, Benjamin 458

760

Index Bronowski, Jacob 635, 684 Brooke, Rev. Stopford 678 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 112–15 Browning, Robert xxii, 81, 105, 112–15, 124, 125, 148, 149, 183, 259, 273, 290, 302, 477, 555, 678 Brunner, E. 359 Bryce, James, 1st Viscount 169–76, 229 Buchan, John, 1st Viscount Tweedsmuir 687 Buckle, T. H. 134, 177, 186, 229, 252 Buddha 71, 72, 515, 529, 600, 669, 680 Bunsen, Joachim, Baron xvii, xviii, 64–5, 66, 67, 70, 75, 130, 133, 191, 242, 252, 257 Burgess, Anthony 682 Burgess, Guy 647 Burke, Rt Hon. Edmund 24–35, 44, 151, 152, 183, 400, 432, 488, 499, 524, 549, 600, 641, 649 Bury, J. B. 619, 683 Bussell, Rev. F. W. 680 Butcher, S. H. 686 Butler, Rt Rev. Joseph 68, 96, 176, 203 Butler, Samuel 464, 533, 679 Butterfield, Sir Herbert xv, 172, 176, 221, 234, 286, 329, 348, 352, 495, 619, 640, 646 Byron, George, Lord 19, 67, 77, 80, 92, 105, 124, 143, 144, 154, 177, 456, 521, 608, 682 Caird, Edward xvii, 139–40, 142–4, 323, 438, 445, 452 Calvin, John 527 Campbell, Rev. McCleod 303 Campbell, Rev. R. J. 677 Campbell-Bannerman, Rt Hon. Sir Henry 170, 205, 460 Canning, Rt Hon. George 156, 160, 255, 256 Carlyle, Thomas xvii, xxi, 451, 495, 502, 504, 555, 579, 598, 608, 638, 699–70 Carr-Saunders, Sir Alexander 687 Casey, John 622 Cecil, Lord Robert, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood 206, 207, 216 Cecil, Robert, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury xv, xxi, 85, 86, 166, 181, 256, 267, 320–3, 328, 331–2, 409–10, 509, 554 Chadwick, Rev. Henry xvi Chadwick, Rev. Owen 379, 619 Chalmers-Mitchell, Sir Peter 651, 660 Chamberlain, Rt Hon. Sir Austen 329, 520 Chamberlain, Rt Hon. Joseph 204, 270, 319–22, 328–33, 336, 515–16, 541 Chamberlain, Rt Hon. Neville 209, 422, 656 Chauduri, N. C. 694

761

Chesterton, G. K. xv, 310 Cheyne, T. K. xxiv Christ, Jesus xviii, 303, 311, 313, 335, 339, 369–71, 429, 436, 450, 511, 515, 543, 632, 660, 670 Church, Very Rev. R. W. 230, 250–3 Churchill, Rt Hon. Winston Spencer xv, 486–8, 495, 531, 645, 649, 657 Clement of Alexandria, St 567 Clifford, W. K. 409, 440 Clodd, Edward 679 Clough, A. H. 615, 684 Cobbett, William 281 Cobden, Richard 322, 333, 478, 491 Cole, G. D. H. and Margaret, 503, 541, 637 Colenso, Rt Rev. J. W. 306 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor xvii, 334, 502, 546 Collingwood, R. G. xv, xviii, 495, 570, 620 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 682 Comte, Auguste 385, 400, 422, 472, 477, 479, 495 Confucius 632 Conrad, Joseph 533, 555, 561, 576-7 Constantine, Emperor 425 Cook, A. B. 688 Cook, S. A. 688 Coulton, G. G. 309 Cowper, William 555, 582 Cranmer, Rt Rev. Thomas 255 Creighton, Rt Rev. Mandell 300–1 Cromwell, Oliver 509, 533 Crossman, Rt Hon. R.H.S. 486, 501, 503–4, 527, 537, 647, 654–5 Cunningham, Archdeacon William 143, 195, 211, 227, 237–46, 301, 329, 472, 474, 504 Cupitt, Rev. D. 679–80 Cyril of Alexandria 167 Daiches, David 635, 684 Dante, Alighieri 9, 11, 100, 107, 125, 143, 154, 171, 309, 450, 454 Darwin, Charles Robert xix, xx, 99, 116, 126, 143, 203, 226, 231, 248–9, 306, 323, 353, 391–3, 395, 412, 420, 442, 578, 677 Davidson, Rt Rev. Randall 272, 329 Dawkins, Richard xix, xx, 392–5 Dawson, Christopher 192, 526 Derby, Rt Hon. Lord Stanley, 14th Earl of 36, 37, 228, 256, 323 De Gaulle, Charles 356 Derrida, Jacques 372, 386, 606, 612, 623, 632, 680 Descartes, R. 136, 142, 238 Dewas Senior, Ruler of 562–3, 568 Dickens, Charles 67, 104–5, 108, 124, 127, 533, 535, 576

762

Index

Dickenson, Goldsworthy Lowes 560–1, 563, 565, 569 Disraeli, Rt Hon. Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield xvii, xxi, 35–44, 108, 148, 175, 228, 253, 320–1, 323, 355, 576 Dodds, E. R. 693 Dostoevsky, F. 127, 173, 357, 578, 670 Durkheim, Emile 374, 385 Eagleton, Terence xviii, xix, 358, 373, 375, 504, 593–7, 602–4, 622 Eddington, Sir Arthur xviii, 198, 307, 337, 341–4, 392, 410–11, 419, 422, 469, 580 Eliot, T. S. xv, xxii, 104, 105, 113, 318, 379, 503, 526, 533, 570, 574–6, 578, 580–1, 584–5, 590, 605, 622, 632, 666 Elgar, Sir Edward 459, 464, 682 Ellis, Henry Havelock 345, 414, 504, 507 Emerson, R. W. 451 Empson, William 573 Engels, F. 256, 349, 422, 598, 665 Fairbairn, A. M. xvii, 329 Farnell, L. R. 688 Figgis, Rev. J. N. 299–304, 308, 329, 373, 470, 521, 619 Fisher, Rt Hon. H.A.L. 169, 171–3, 470, 472, 521, 537 Forster, E. M. 533, 544, 554, 559–70, 576, 578 Forsyth, Rev. Peter Taylor xviiim 12–15, 292–8, 308 Francis, St 82, 270, 423, 429, 516, 523, 525, 542 Frazer, Sir James xv, 71, 345, 412, 416, 664 Frederick William IV, King of Prussia 47 Freud, Sigmund 312, 348, 362, 375–6, 378–9, 392, 404, 411–19, 437, 503, 578, 664, 666, 672 Froude, James Anthony xvii, 13–26, 21–3, 36, 47, 62, 64, 65, 75, 86, 116, 161, 168, 177, 219, 255, 267, 357, 685 Galsworthy, John 303, 533, 686 Galton, Sir Francis 391, 392–3, 398-9, 405, 409, 521 Gellner, Ernest 379, 603, 635, 683 George III, King of England 641 George V, King of England 521 George, Henry 322 Gibbs, Sir Hamilton 678 Gibbon, Edward xxiii, 62, 133, 161, 168, 179, 535, 570 Gilbert, W. S. 459, 690 Gilbert and Sullivan 123 Gladstone, Rt Hon. William Ewart xv, xxi, 36, 61, 65, 85, 86, 87, 90, 123, 162,

170, 184, 188, 228, 229, 251, 253–8, 294–5, 300, 305, 320–1, 331–2, 409–10, 444, 464, 478, 511 Glover, T. R. 64, 329, 681 Goethe, J. W. von 64, 91, 92, 116, 118, 172, 300, 453, 637, 652, 664, 668 Gordon, General Charles 67, 340, 460, 685 Gore, Rt Rev. Charles 103, 104, 195, 197, 227, 228, 272, 274, 282, 286, 302–8, 318, 335 Gosse, Sir Edmund 303, 687 Green, Rev. John Richard 229 Green, Thomas Hill xv, xvii, xviii, 73, 94, 131, 138, 140, 141, 271, 283, 144–50, 305–6, 308, 334–5, 438–9, 445–7, 453–5, 461, 477, 525 Greene, Graham xv, 504, 511 Gregory I, Pope 11, 266 Gregory XVI, Pope 523 Hadow, Sir W. H. 130, 438, 459–64 Haldane, J. B. S. 347, 419, 420–5 Haldane, Rt Hon. R. B., 1st Viscount Haldane of Cloan xix, 131, 241, 329, 438–9, 450–2, 512 Hallam, Henry 111, 151, 157, 158, 236 Hamilton, Sir William 133–4, 136 Hampshire, Sir Stuart 359, 368, 503, 543, 594, 647 Hardy, Thomas 459, 544, 576, 580, 582 Harrison, Frederic 440 Hayek, F. von 133, 431–2, 437, 468–9, 492–3, 533 Hegel, G. W. F. xvii, 58, 95, 114, 116, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 143, 199, 203, 209, 243, 266, 375, 377, 385–6, 434–5, 439, 442, 445, 446–8, 456, 461, 522, 607, 615, 622, 628–9, 666 Heidegger, Martin 386, 604, 628, 672, 680 Henderson, Rt Hon. Arthur 504, 515–16 Henry I, King of England 236 Henry VIII, King of England 107, 236, 690 Henson, Rt Rev. Hensley xvi, 193–6, 319 Herzen, Aleksandr 649 Herzl, Theodore 644 Hildebrand, Gregory VII, Pope 11 Hill, Christopher 647 Hobbes, Thomas 140, 146, 177, 380, 385, 473, 621 Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawney xix, 172, 201, 206, 469, 477, 479–82, 495 Hooker, Rev. Richard 176, 253, 395, 473 Hopkins, G. M. 575, 615, 678 Hort, Rev. F. J. A. 335 Housman, A. E. 689 von Hugel, Baron F. 337–8, 464

Index Hughes, Thomas 108 Hulme, T. E. 533, 686 Hume, David xvii, 130, 133, 135–6, 140, 229, 265, 380, 382, 400, 487–8, 493, 621 Hutton, Ronald 684 Huxley, Aldous 314, 337, 425, 527, 533, 545, 628 Huxley, Sir Julian xix, 323, 395, 402, 409–11, 419, 420–1, 423–31, 437, 440, 448–9, 512 Huxley, T. H. 425 Ibsen, Henrik 100, 503, 601, 664, 668 Inge, Very Rev. W. R xviii, 66, 191, 192–202, 205, 337, 350, 613 Innocent III, Pope 475 Jacks, L. P. 425, 678 James II, King of England 160 James, William 143, 339, 355, 360, 427, 690 Jeans, Sir James 198, 341, 411, 419, 422, 580 John XXIII, Pope xviii, 356, 359, 373 John-Paul II, Pope 373 Jowett, Rev. Benjamin xvii, xviii, 52, 55–61, 64, 65–75, 76, 96, 105, 131, 140, 143, 201, 258, 278, 305, 308, 333, 447, 453, 632 Jung, C. G. 337, 361–7, 369, 412, 416 Jupiter 258 Kant, Immanuel xvii, 58, 66, 95, 114, 130, 135, 137, 138, 142, 171, 241, 269, 323, 338, 403–4, 405, 407, 417, 445, 448, 662, 631, 637, 659 Keats, John 80–1, 105, 124, 125, 311, 456, 575, 682 Keble, Rev. John xv, 117, 552 Kedourie, Elie xv Kenny, Anthony xix, 614–19 Keynes, John Maynard, 1st Baron xix, 206, 329, 377, 468, 482–2, 561 Kierkegaard, S. 379, 436, 570, 607, 666, 680 Kingsley, Rev. Charles xvii, xviii, 3–4, 15–23, 48, 64, 65–8, 75, 87, 116, 126, 146, 175, 176, 223, 227, 249, 267, 295, 337, 502, 642 Kipling, Rudyard 299, 460, 544, 550–1, 553–9 Knowles, Rev. David xv, 329, 337, 619 Koestler, Arthur xix, 432, 530, 628, 634–5, 648, 650–1 Kuenen, Abraham 101–8 Lansbury, Rt Hon. George 521, 559 Lang, Andrew 66

193, 239, 504,

763

Lang, Rt Rev. C. G. 272 Laski, Harold Joseph xix, 288, 503, 518–27, 541, 635, 651 Laud, Rt Rev. William 107, 283 Law, Bonar, Rt Hon. Andrew 486 Law, William 200, 240, 262, 339 Lawrence, D. H. xv, 349, 414, 529, 537, 570, 576–7, 578–9, 584, 626, 672 Lawrence, T. E. 26–7, 34, 157, 680 Leavis, F. R. xix, 459, 573-84, 591, 593, 601–4, 621, 662, 671 Lecky, Rt Hon. William Edward Hartpole xvii, 64, 86, 138, 151, 160, 164–9, 173, 243, 252, 254, 464, 555, 670 Leibniz, Gottfried 50, 136, 352 Lenin, V. I. 288, 349, 377, 422, 517, 526 Leo XIII, Pope 302, 380 Lewes, G. H. xv, 398, 464 Lewis, C. S. xviii, 195, 298, 308–18, 354 Lewis, Wyndham 534, 686 Liddon, Rev. Henry Parry xv, 228, 305 Lloyd George, Rt Hon. David, 1st Earl 171, 172, 206, 207, 278–9, 320, 329, 336, 424, 484, 487, 521, 562, 636, 641 Locke, John xviii, 130, 136, 140, 176, 177, 252, 254, 264, 283, 326, 401, 470, 487–8, 541, 589 Lodge, Sir Oliver 679 Lotze, R. H. 140, 452, 461 Luther, Martin 9, 50, 83, 142, 146, 161, 282, 294, 406, 429, 526, 680 Lyall, Sir Alfred 66–70, 175, 562, 694 Macaulay, Rt Hon. Thomas Babbington, Lord xvii, xxiii, 36, 62, 96, 133, 151–64, 173, 175, 183, 228, 262, 271, 469, 512, 550 Machiavelli, N. 219 Macdonald, Rt Hon. James Ramsay xix, 501, 504, 507–11, 515–16, 518, 527 MacIntyre, Alasdair xviii, 371–2, 374–84, 504, 603 Mackail, J. W. 503, 590, 689 Mackintosh, Sir James 151 Maine, Sir Henry 66, 99, 171, 175, 186, 189–91, 205, 266, 412, 471–2 de Maistre, Joseph 143, 179, 186, 385, 522, 649 Maitland, F. W. xix, 228, 237–8, 469–77 Mallock, W. H. xv, 120, 348, 545 Manning, Henry Edward, Cardinal xv, 24, 82, 85, 86, 179, 188, 249, 256, 300, 521–3 Mansel, Rev. Henry Longueville xv, 68, 96, 134, 143, 218 Manson, Charles 359, 368, 370 Mao Tse-Tung 346, 358, 598 Marcion 368 Marcuse, Herbert 623

764

Index

Margoliouth, D. S. 688 Marx, Karl xviii, 84, 88, 238, 239, 244, 256, 313, 322, 346, 349, 350, 353, 373, 377, 379, 386, 398, 399, 407, 412, 426, 434–6, 502, 514, 598, 601, 603–7, 610, 672 Masood, Syed Ross 562, 567 Masterman, C. F. G. 298–300 Maurice, Rev. F. D. xvii, 46, 47, 58, 64–5, 94, 110, 116, 144, 239, 255–67, 271, 293, 295, 329, 373 Max Muller, Rt Hon. F. xvii, xviii, 13, 45, 64–5, 73, 143, 191, 228, 267, 296, 327, 333, 647 McTaggart, J. M. E. 689 Mencius 586 Millbank, John 370, 372–4, 384, 388 Millman, Very Rev. H. H. 54, 64, 153, 177, 252 Mill, James 33, 156, 470 Mill, John Stuart 5, 33, 67, 77, 84, 86, 94, 133, 172, 175, 179, 181–2, 185, 218, 240, 295, 306, 324, 330, 398, 437, 440–1, 447, 464, 470, 477–8, 517, 525, 533, 604, 643, 651 Milton, John 64, 79, 80, 81, 104, 153, 154, 264, 311, 319, 473, 509, 546, 665 Montaigne, M. de 121, 176 Moore, G. E. 380, 483–4, 571, 573, 576, 590 More, Sir Thomas 236, 510, 617 Morley, Rt Hon. John Viscount Morley of Blackburn xv, 67, 94, 398, 426, 464 Morris, William 117, 309, 317, 408, 445, 503–6, 533 Mozart, W. A. 462–3, 466 Muggeridge, Malcolm 534, 687 Murray, Gilbert xv, 206, 521, 527, 553 Myers, F. W. H 91, 94 Namier, Sir Lewis 620, 634, 635–41, 691 Napoleon I, Emperor 6, 8, 9, 37, 67, 77, 87, 138, 171, 546, 637 Napoleon III, Emperor 77, 109, 184, 185, 229 Needham, Joseph xviii, 337, 344–54, 392, 395, 504, 633 Nettleship, R. L. 131, 147, 439, 453 Newman, J. H. Cardinal xv, xix, xxi, xxiii, 36, 55, 56, 81, 86, 96, 116, 125, 127, 143, 146, 166, 173, 176, 177, 179, 197, 219, 221, 248–9, 250, 253, 259, 263 Newton, Sir Isaac 218, 423, 431, 483, 495, 664, 672 Nietzsche, F. 16, 140, 302, 306, 339, 362, 367, 381, 386, 590, 607, 672, 680, 686 Nightingale, Florence 340, 541

Oakeshott, Michael xv, 275, 276, 348 Orwell, George (Eric Blair) xix, 432, 504, 527–36, 554, 584, 600, 654–5 Paley, Rev. William 49, 68, 176, 178, 221, 400, 488 Paine, Thomas 28 Palmerston, Rt Hon. Henry Temple, 1st Viscount 78, 80, 250, 254 Parry, Sir Charles Hubert xix, 460, 464–7, 553 Pascal, Blaise 64, 120, 143, 253, 379 Pater, Walter Horatio xviii, 105, 114–22, 127, 341, 576 Pattison, Rev. Mark 195, 218, 252 Paul, St 11, 58–9, 60–1, 83, 102, 199, 298, 336, 339, 425 Pearson, Sir Karl xix, 125, 329, 391–2, 395, 405–10, 419, 421, 504 Peel, Rt Hon. Sir Robert 36, 37, 42, 57, 109, 218, 253, 255 Pelagius 298 Pilate, Pontius 172, 181 Pius X, Pope 35, 53, 63, 116 Pius XII, Pope 356 Plato xxiv, 57, 116, 143, 339, 368, 380, 434–5, 450, 515, 521, 541–2, 589, 679 Plontinus 199, 339, 445 Popper, Sir Karl xix, 221, 392, 410–11, 431–7, 495, 655 Powell, Rt Hon. J. Enoch 26, 595, 622 Powell, F. York 683 Pugin, A. W. 691, 693 Pusey, Rev. E. B. xv, 65, 72, 96, 228, 256 Quickswood, Lord Hugh Cecil, 1st Viscount 678, 685 Raleigh, Sir Walter 687 Ranke, Leopold von 163, 252 Raven, Rev. Canon C. E. 677 Raven, Simon 685 Reade, Winwoode 430, 533 Reith, Sir John, 1st Baron 602 Renan, Ernest 61, 64, 94, 121, 124, 229, 258, 508 Rhodes, Cecil 204, 205, 208, 677 Richard I, King of England 235 Richards, I. A. xix, 312, 571–5, 581, 584–93 Robespierre, M. 37, 127 Robinson, Rt Rev. John 359, 428 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 682 Rothschild, Lional de 42 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 9, 27, 142, 146, 267, 287, 306, 447, 460, 488 Roy, Ram Mohan 72, 73 Rushdie, Salman 682–3

765

Index Ruskin, John xv, xxi, 125, 129, 205, 317, 334, 408, 445, 502, 504, 665 Russel, Bertrand, Earl Russell 414, 445, 502, 504, 665, 680 Russell, Rt Hon. Lord John, 1st Earl Russel 55, 151, 153, 255, 258 Ryle, Gilbert 615, 647 Salisbury, 3rd Marquis of; see Cecil, Robert Santayana, George 197 Schleiermacher, F. 46, 47, 58, 264 Schopenhauer, A. 68, 140, 141, 326, 451, 456, 571, 606 Scott, Sir Walter 80, 445, 576, 686 Scruton, Roger xix, 594, 621–33 Seeley, Sir John Robert xvii, xviii, 64, 75, 87–93, 95, 96, 132, 200, 237, 238, 291, 454, 576, 685 Selborne, Roundell Palmer, 1st Earl of xvi, 685 Sen, Keshub Chunder 50, 71, 72, 73, 74 Shaftbury, Anthony, 6th Earl of xvi, 4, 108, 247, 253, 255, 258, 259, 298, 541 Shakespeare, William xviii, 9, 11, 64, 79, 81, 104, 113, 127, 135, 143, 154, 252, 311, 368, 455–6, 575, 579, 580–2, 665, 668, 678 Shaw, George Bernard xv, 122, 300, 414, 458, 460, 467, 487, 503–4, 507, 512, 521, 527, 555 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 19, 80, 112, 124, 199, 290, 453, 456, 545, 550 Sherrington, Sir Charles 394 Shorthouse, J. H. 329, 337 Sidgwick, Henry 75, 91, 93–8, 130, 275, 321, 324, 328, 402, 469, 472, 504 Skinner, Q. R. D. 619–21, 663 Smith, Adam 98, 133, 152, 155, 241, 282, 332, 335, 479, 488, 493, 495, 626 Smith, Robertson 132, 293 Smith, Southwood 108 Smuts, Rt Hon. J. C., Fieldmarshal 151, 202–16 Socrates 381, 542, 543 Sombart, W 282 Sophocles 663 Southey, Robert 155, 162, 254 Spengler, Oswald 192 Spencer, Herbert xv, 67, 113, 138, 203, 323, 350, 398, 416, 440, 447–9, 464, 473, 477, 479, 512, 514–15 Spenser, Edmund 252, 311 Spinoza, Benedict de 50, 82, 136, 142, 170, 252, 267, 272, 329, 385, 407, 450, 629 Spurgeon, C. H. 258, 335, 685 St John Stevas, Norman, Lord St John of Fawsley 685

Stalin, Josef 358, 371, 434, 487, 527, 539, 652, 654 Stanley, Very Rev. A. P. xviii, 52, 56–64, 65, 71, 75, 93, 116, 178 Stead, W. T. 204 Stephen, Leslie 68, 175 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames 66, 166, 174–82, 189, 191, 205, 243 Stirling, J. Hutchison xvii, 132–7, 430, 433, 448, 606 Strachey, Lytton 115, 561 Strauss, D. F. 61, 264 Stubbs, Rt Rev. William xvi, xix, 217, 227–37, 473, 640 Tait, Rt Rev. A. C. 55, 300, 373 Taylor, A. E. xvi, 329, 439 Tawney, R. H. 64, 76, 193, 238, 247, 254, 271–3, 275–6, 373, 429, 459, 504, 525, 580, 584, 640 Temple, Rt Rev. Frederick 64, 76, 94, 229, 272, 300, 307 Temple, Rt Rev. William xviii, 193, 271–4, 285–91, 504, 512 Tennyson, Alfred Lord xvii, 64, 67, 96, 104, 105, 108–12, 113, 114, 124, 133–4, 148, 199, 259, 266–7, 295, 299, 456, 502, 546, 550, 618, 678, 682 Thackeray, W. M. 134 Thomas, Sir Keith 536, 688 Tocqueville, Alexis de 67, 177, 189, 494 Tolkien, J. R. R. 309–10, 318–19, 684 Tolstoy, Leo, Count 535, 556, 570, 653, 670 Tout, T. F. 228 Toynbee, Arnold, the elder xv, xviii, 130–1, 138, 144, 238, 334, 378, 435, 497, 521, 677 Toynbee, Arnold, the younger 192, 216, 282, 345, 353, 567, 637, 645, 658 Trevelyan, G. M. 561, 565, 567, 580, 619, 683 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, Lord Dacre 188, 216, 484, 521, 690 Trollope, Anthony 686 Tylor, Sir E. B. 65, 398, 416 Underhill, Evelyn

336–41

Vane, Sir Harry 147, 264 Vaughan Williams, Ralph 459–69, 464 Vico, G 143, 373 Victoria, Queen of England 65, 109, 160, 228 Vishnu 258 Voltaire (F. M. Arouet) 47, 161, 176, 229, 260, 362, 402, 495, 664–5 Wagner, Richard 664, 668

295, 463, 465, 466, 632,

766

Index

Wallace, W. xvii, 131, 137, 138, 140–2, 395–6, 438 Ward, Mrs Humphrey 144, 252, 425, 567 Ward, Rev. James 98, 211 Ward, Rev. W. G. 55, 56, 76, 273 Watkin, David 622, 691–3 Waugh, Auberon 273, 694 Waugh, Evelyn xv, 529, 534, 536 Webb, Beatrice, Lady Passfied xix, 196, 274, 501, 506–7, 511–18, 541, 565 Webb, Sidney, 1st Baron Passfield xix, 196, 274, 506–7, 510, 511–18, 520, 541, 565 Weber, Max 282, 385 Weizmann, Chaim 603–4, 648, 655 Wellington, Arthur, 1st Duke of 109, 229, 253, 254, 685, 547 Wells, H. G. x, xv, 312, 347, 427, 429, 503, 504, 507, 581 Wesley, Rev. John 50, 56, 64, 104, 165, 198, 265, 305, 617 Westcott, Rt Rev. B. F. 52, 119, 230, 247, 259, 267–71, 290 Whewell, Rev. William xvi, 132, 217, 227, 266, 289, 392, 581

Whitehead, A. N. xv, xviii, 307, 349, 379, 435 Whitman, Walt 203–4, 307, 339, 570 Wicksteed, Rev. Philip 75, 98–103 Wilde, Oscar xviii, 105, 114–15, 122–9, 297, 308, 414, 463, 551, 555, 605 William III, King of England 29, 159–60, 162 Williams, Charles 316–17 Williams, Raymond xix, 594–602 Williams, Rev. Rowland 96, 174 Wilson, C. H. 685 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 349, 375, 492, 503, 571–2, 604, 615–16, 618, 627, 647, 680 Wordsworth, William xvii, xviii, 64, 80, 105, 110, 111, 113, 143, 148, 199, 200, 223, 334, 456, 460, 544, 545–51, 553, 575, 678 Wyclif, John 229, 262, 617 Yeats, W. B.

672

Zaehner, R. C.

xviii, 337, 367–70, 545