You cannot control conduct by asserting that a man owes a debt to an abstraction which you vivify by printing it with a capital letter, and there remains always the question of the dying Lucretius —
“Thy duty? What is duty? Fare thee well.”
The problem, then, which we have to solve is – how to arrest the attention of the average man to those Christian principles, of which the acceptance or definite refusal will determine the course of civilization during the next twenty years.
The mere assertion of authority will not suffice, and men are not impressed in favour of Catholic doctrine simply by dignified ceremony and Ritual. We have only to look across the English Channel to be assured of this. Frenchmen have not been encouraged to study the evidences of Christianity. Bishops and priests have only advertised sceptical books by forbidding their perusal to the faithful; and as the devout have been instructed to live by faith, but not how to give a reason for the faith which is in them, in the result M. Viviani’s atheistic rhetoric has been placarded at the cost of the State in every commune throughout France.
We may consider, then, if there be any method by which the man who does not read theological or scientific or philosophical books, the man who has left off going to church, or gets no help from the average sermon, the man who has no reverence for mere authority, may be induced to consider the Christian Revelation as offering him a key to those riddles of life which his civic responsibilities are perpetually propounding.
Remember that his present condition may be roughly described as consisting of religious haziness and moral laziness. The moral laziness is being subjected to a series of rough shocks. He must make up his mind about some questions of morality. The relation of the sexes, the duties of property, the treatment of the subject savage, the survival of the unfit, the ethics of commerce, the control of the sale of alcohol, the education of children, these things he has to decide and he will ultimately decide. But he is at present perplexed, and his religious haziness is the reason of his perplexity. He perhaps has not reached the conclusion of his contemporary in France, but he is on the way to it. Those heavenly lights which M. Viviani declares that his Government has extinguished still shine faintly for men in England, though the mists obscure them.
Can we get men to look upwards for light, and instead of cursing the ancient creed in a confused commination, to take Arthur Clough’s advice —
“Ah! yet consider it again.”
I believe that there is a method, and as I mention it I am prepared for derision from all the “chorus of irresponsible reviewers, the irresponsible indolent reviewers.”
I believe that Fiction will find those that can be reached by no other means. Fiction sometimes sets a man seeking for Fact.
Very diffidently and very reverently I may remind my contemporaries that one, who has, at any rate, profoundly influenced the course of history, whatever view we may take of His person, did not disdain this method, “He taught them by parables.”
“Let me tell you a story.” Is there any age of mankind which does not respond to the invitation and give audience? A story stilled the tumult of the nursery in our earliest days, when heavy storms shook the windows and the tedium of a long, wet afternoon had turned play into fretfulness. A story beguiled us into interest when our History lesson had seemed an arid futility in Fourth Form days, and our magisterial enemies began to show themselves human after all when they bade us read The Last of the Barons as we were painfully plodding in the Plantagenet period, and found the War of the Roses a very thorny waste.
It is strange to turn over the pages of eminent evangelical sermons of the early Victorian days and to notice how “Novel reading” is denounced. Probably the worthy divines who fulminated against fiction were thinking of their own boyhood, and the mischief which came to them from Fielding and Richardson and Smollett surreptitiously perused. Sir Anthony Absolute’s detestation of the circulating library survived in some provincial circles even when Sir Walter Scott had come to his own. The last forty years have altered things considerably, and though some men may pretend to despise novels, now-a-days they must take them into account. Wise and learned persons began to prescribe them, not only as a vehicle for the exhibition of wholesome but unattractive information, but as having a remedial value of their own. “The intellectual anodyne of the nineteenth century,” I remember that somebody called them – perhaps it was Sir Arthur Helps. It came about that those who had a secret and timid predilection for the story-book, but blushed a little if at Mudie’s counter they ventured to ask for a novel, found that their ordinary reading of Biography and Memoirs revealed some unsuspected sympathies of the illustrious and wise. Who would have thought that Darwin devoured novels and Dean Church did not disdain them, and that Mr. Gladstone sat up all night to finish John Inglesant? The respectable pater-familias has long ceased to proscribe novel reading, and the most austere biographer no longer hides as a revelation of weakness his hero’s literary divertisements. Finally, in this year of Grace 1906 we are boldly told that Archbishop Temple could stand an examination in Miss Yonge’s novels, and on one occasion was heard keenly discussing with Lord Rosebery the careers of the May family in the Daisy Chain as though they were living acquaintances. From being recognized as a recreation the novel has developed into a power, and Charles Dickens was a pioneer in its progress. It is the custom amongst certain “superior persons” to sneer at the novel with a purpose, and to suggest that authors attained remunerative results by taking some subject which was already ripe for discussion and weaving round it a web of fiction.
Undoubtedly there is danger to-day of such artifice, but I maintain that the great reforms of the past century owed much to writers whose purpose was perfectly innocent. Cardinal Newman has told us of the literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, who turned men’s minds in the direction of the Middle Ages.
“The general need,” he said, “of something deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere, may be said to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which when once seen are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.”
If Cardinal Newman could thus maintain the value of Fiction in the great ecclesiastical movement which has regenerated the Church of England, I may claim without apology that the reform in Poor Law Administration gained the attention of the public when Dickens made “Bumbledom” ridiculous, and that the Court of Chancery was swept cleaner by the breezes which were blowing from Bleak House. Let any man run over in his mind the undoubted improvements in social matters during the last fifty years, and it will be seen how Fiction has assisted in their promotion. Did Charles Reade’s Hard Cash do nothing to arouse the attention of the public to the condition of the insane? Did Sir Walter Besant’s novels turn no light on the sins of the sweater, or Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke show no reason for legalizing the Trade Union and the reform of the Law of Conspiracy? Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe may to-day be forgotten, but the southern states of North America would not dispute the influence of Fiction upon the public mind.
The fact is that men, who generally read nothing else but newspapers, will read a good novel, and if the book brings before them principles which they have hitherto neglected, they will very often consider those principles again. It is necessary, however, that the novel shall appeal to them as being a fair record of the present or the past. They may as they read it be unable to pronounce on the thesis which is at the back of the book, but they will be led to consider and discuss it if the story, as a story, holds them. And it is here that the story which has a genuine religious motive often fails. Most of the great artists in fiction, when they have taken in hand a subject which is of religious interest, have written in a spirit of detachment. George Eliot’s Romola is an example, and the result is that men are more interested in Tito Melema than in Savonarola. Novels in which religion is necessarily much in evidence have been written either by literary artists who have studiously endeavoured to lay aside their own personal convictions, or if the books have been written with a distinctly religious purpose the hero and heroine have been unconvincing, the people in the story have