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The Crisis of Belief in Modern Literature Author(s): Victor Strandberg Reviewed work(s): Source: The English Journal, Vol.

53, No. 7 (Oct., 1964), pp. 475-483+544 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/810590 . Accessed: 23/06/2012 16:22
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The
Vol. 53

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October 1964 No. 7

The
in

Crisis

Modern

of Belief Literature

Victor Strandberg
Strandbergstudies the images of modern man: a hairy ape, a bear, a dragon, a cockroach, a big blood blister. What inspired them? What are their literary antecedents? Do they indicate hopelessness and despair? Mr. Strandbergis a member of the English Department at the University of Vermont. monsters in Dante's Hell, is one so terrible to behold that only Dante is forbidden to look at it. That one is Medusa, the Gorgon of Despair, one glance at whom will turn a man to stone. Not even Satan himself is so much to be feared and avoided, as Virgil's warning to Dante indicates: "Turn your back and keep your eyes shut tight; For should the Gorgon come and you look at her, Never again would you return to the light." (Canto IX, 1. 52) Not satisfied with this warning, Virgil goes a step further to make it impossible for Dante to see this particular monster. As Dante records it: "He turned me about/himself, and would not trust my hands alone,/but, with his placed on mine, held my eyes shut." And finally, to culminate this sense of unparalleled danger, Dante steps out of the framework of his poem to give his readers this direct warning: Men of sound intellect and probity weigh with good understanding what lies hidden behind the veil of my strange allegory!

OF ALL the

Modern readers know only too well what lies hidden behind the veil of Dante's strange allegory. Unlike medieval man, whose religious belief served as a blindfold against despair, modem man has looked the Gorgon squarely in the face. He has known all forms of despair: despair of himself, of his value and destiny; despair of one another, of the meaning of civilization; and certainly, despair of God-of His goodness, or power, or existence. And as a consequence, modern man has had frequent recourse to ponder Dante's warning: "for should the Gorgon come and you look at her,/never again would you return to the light." Among those thus banished from the "light" have been such figures as James Thomson, who found himself in a "City of Dreadful Night" (atheism); Joseph Conrad, who saw civilization engulfed in a pitchblack "Heart of Darkness"; T. S. Eliot, who looked up from the Waste Land and saw his remnants of religious belief disappear like "the twinkle of a fading star;" and James Joyce, who quite frankly listed himself among "The Dead," in the story of that name. Unsettling as they are, these images of the human condition are not the only consequences of modern man's glimpse at the forbidden Medusa of despair. Man's

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self-esteem, his image of his interior self, stage in twentieth century pessimism. has likewise taken a drastic tumble as his Selecting at random from the choicer new knowledge has come into conflict metaphors of modern literature, we thus with happier beliefs of the past. If the conceive man as: a "Hairy Ape" (Eugene Medusa of despair has not quite turned O'Neill); a "Heavy Bear" (Delmore men into stone, she has come very close Schwartz); a "Rhinoceros" (the recent to it in such imagcs as T. S. Eliot's "We Broadway play); a Brother to Dragons are the Hollow (Robert Penn Warren); a Lord of the NM7ene... Headpieces filled with straw," and Faulkner's parallel sug- Flies (William Golding); a cockroach gestion (presented through Quentin (Kafka's Metamorphosis); and finally, to Compson's mind) that "all men are just rest our case, . . dolls stuffed with sawdust." This "Old human man ain't much more than image of modern man as hollow, I might a big blood blister, add, represents modern man at his best: All red and proud-swole, but one good the aristocracy of modern prototypes. pinch and he's gone" Included here would be the fully aware (from one of Robert Penn Warren's and gentlemanly types, such as Faulkner's poems in Promises). Quentin Compson and his father, who commit suicide; Hemingway's Rinaldi A hairy ape, a bear, a dragon, a cockor Jake Barnes, who take refuge from roach, a big blood blister: what these Nada in alcohol; T. S. Eliot's narrator in unflattering images imply is that modern The Waste Land, whose fragmented man has imported Dante's Hell straight mind implies insanity; and of course up to the surface of our planet, while at J. Alfred Prufrock, who wants out of the same time banishing Dante's counterthe human race altogether: "I should balancing hope of Purgatory and Parahave been a pair of ragged claws/Scutdise. Thus, modern man at his best may tling across the floors of silent seas." aspire to a Limbo such as Hemingway's This lobster image, denoting Prufrock's "Clean, Well-Lighted Place," which, like desire to become sub-human, is typical Dante's Citadel of Reason, is a place deof a widespread despair of human stature cently livable, but devoid of hope. But, and dignity. Under the double impact of as in Dante's Hell, such hollow men of Darwin's contention that man is only an intelligence and dignity are far outnumanimal and Freud's contention that he is bered by the strictly subhuman among hardly a noble animal at that, modern the modern damned by T. S. Eliot's writers have indeed tended to scale man "Ape-neck Sweeneys," Faulkner's SnopH. L. Mencken's Homo Boobiens, sharply downward in the great chain of eses, and other modern Yahoos too numerous being. Whereas ancient drama treated to mention. conflict within or between heroes-and All this is the upshot, we may surmise, sometimes between men and gods, as in Prometheus Bound or Job-the conflict of the chief Greek ideal, the search for in modern drama has been likened by one truth, which went underground during critic to two snakes fighting over a dead the Dark and Middle Ages, but then came rat. (Ionesco or Tennessee Williams to embody itself in the scientific inquiry might fit this description.) And so we since the Renaissance and Age of Reason. arrive at the concept of modern man as Just as Oedipus' inquiring mind led him not only an animal, but a ridiculous ani- to know himself as a polluted wretch, so mal: Swift's Yahoo emerging from the the modern inquring mind, embodied in periphery of eighteenth century opti- the speculations of Darwin and Freud mism to take the front and center of the and Einstein, has led modern man to see

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himself as an insignificant, polluted, transitory animal-ape, cockroach, or blood blister.

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gained through science and history He has even come to erect a new superstructure of Purgatory and Paradise over his secular modern Hell-albeit they are Consigned thusly to a hell of darkness more to be natural rather than likely and anxiety and degradation, a hell that Dante's supernatural ones: the modern is the composite creation of our greatest the concept of history as modern writers, we, as the heirs apparent purgatory being a tortuous moral evolution of the human to this inferno, are solicitous of two quesand the modern paradise being tions: (1) How did we come into this race; afar off in Karl Marx's Isaiahic glimpsed condition? (2) How- aside from the visions and George Bernard Shaw's hypoforms of escapism already mentioned thetical Superman. (Faulkner's suicides, Hemingway's alcoWith this background in mind, I holics, T. S. Eliot's insanity or subhumanshould now like to trace, in its major outism)-might we get out? It is the object the crisis of belief arid some basic lines, of this paper to answer, by reference to to this crisis in both England responses selected masterworks of the past 100 and as evidenced in the literaAmerica, years, these two questions. ture of the past century. It was, in fact, The answer to question one, as to how in the generation coming to maturity just these Hells, like The Waste Land and a little over a hundred years ago that the The Heart of Darkness, came into being, modern crisis of belief first truly came is traceable, as I have suggested, to the to a head. (Both Tennyson's moral and scientific hypotheses of the nineteenth metaphysical hopes, we may note in passcentury- to Darwinism and Freudianism ing, seem ironic in view of later developand their variations-as well as to such ments. Concerning moral evolution, modhistorical social disasters as The Great ern man-likened to a cockroach or blood War and the Industrial Revolution. In blister, as I have cited-might well wish other words, the modern Inferno has he could only get back to the "ape and been created by a failure of belief-by a tiger" status of Tennyson's despair, and collapse of the old assumptions that man Tennyson's mystical hope that "Thou is a spiritual being, and that History is an wilt not leave us in the dust" is met by arrow pointing onward and upward to- T. S. Eliot's definition of man, at the wards Infinite Progress. This develop- beginning of The Waste Land, as conment is what I have termed, in the title sisting of "fear in a handful of dust.") of this discussion, "The Crisis of Belief." Several decades before Charles DarAs to question two, how to find the win "officially" proclaimed man's status thread leading out of the labyrinth, mod- as merely another evolving animal (Oriern literature has come up with an inter- gin of Species, 1859), Lord Tennyson esting variety of answers. For all his had contended mightily with the issue of old beliefs versus new knowledge. The initial despair at the crisis of belief-deresult was In Memoriam, published in which I have documented spair already -modern man has found that he cannot, 1850, the same year that Wordsworth's after all, live without hope. He has found death caused the laureate crown to pass that a world without belief is not finally to Tennyson's receptive brow. habitable by the human psyche. And so Written out of grief over the death of he has forged new beliefs to supplant the Tennyson's close friend, Arthur Hallam, old-beliefs not so high-minded as the In Memoriam is one of the most eloquent original perhaps, but beliefs that are more and comprehensive treatments of the compatible with his new self-knowledge crisis of belief in the Victorian Period.

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these windows (the eyes). Yes, "this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and crannies, though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late to make any improvements now." The deathwind will sooner or later find its way into the house of the body. To his credit, the Melville of Moby Dick is an unusually open-minded fellow. Like Tennyson, Melville seems to encounter the crisis of belief-of not knowing what to believe-by keeping all the possible doors to truth ajar. Thus, although Ishmael declares in Chapter 23 ("The Lee Shore") that there is no absolute truth - no "land"- available ("In landlessness alone resides the highest truth"), Ishmael nonetheless seeks continually for a ground of belief. This search takes him through the whole range of possible outlooks, extending from Father Mapple's orthodoxy at one extreme to the contemplation of atheism at the other (see the last paragraph of Chapter 42, "On the Whiteness of the Whale," where Melville sees nature as a heartless and inhuman machine, beyond which nothing exists). Ishmael even subscribes for a time to Captain Ahab's Romantic belief in Man as the Supreme Being. But finally, unable to choose between these conflicting modes of belief, he embraces all the possibilities alike. Using a typically Melvillean epic simile, Ishmael compares his crisis of belief to the whale's spout at the end of the chapter, "The Fountain": "the mighty, misty monster ... his vast mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor ... and that vapor, as you will sometimes see it, glorified by a rainbow, as though Heaven itself had put its seal upon its thoughts. ... And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. All have doubts; many deny; but few along with them, have intuitions. . . . This combination makes

Unlike his Romantic predecessor, Wordsworth, Tennyson knew too much about geology to be able to accept Nature, "red in tooth and claw" as man's best friend. But on the other hand, he could hardly believe in a super-nature either, and so he travails through some agonizing rhetorical questions implying that man is only (as Darwin surmised) a physical being: Shall man "Be blown about the desert dust,/Or sealed within the iron hills?" (Stanza 56) To this suggestion that death (and Arthur Hallam's death in particular) is a permanent extinction of the self, Tennyson finally responds with a typical Victorian compromise. He agrees that man is an animal, but insists that this animal has a destiny spiralling upward through a moral as well as physical evolution. So he exhorts man to "Arise and fly/. . . the sensual feast;/Move upward, working out the beast,/And let the ape and tiger die." (Stanza 118) Having risked this chilling peep at the Gorgon of despair, moreover, Tennyson subsequently recoils, in his Prologue, towards a position of religious orthodoxy: "Strong Son of God .../Thou wilt not leave us in the dust." And so in Tennyson we cover the whole range in the crisis of belief, from despair to religious mysticism to something inbetween-the hope of a moral evolution in the human animal. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the crisis of belief was fermenting in the mind of a young writer who was later to be considered of great stature. Unlike Tennyson, Herman Melville was a robust, manly fellow who could contemplate even his own extinction with a certain cheerful humor. In Chapter Two of Moby Dick, as Ishmael warms his feet by the fire, he begins to compare this house standing against the storm to his body holding up against the death-wind outside. "Yes, these eyes are windows," he thinks, and there will come a time when the frost will lie on both sides of

THE CRISIS OF BELIEF IN MODERN neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regardsthem both with equal eye.") "Neither believer nor infidel,"Ishmael comes finally to live not by a belief but by a feeling-the "affectionate,friendly, loving feeling" towards all fellow creatures which Melville describesin Chapter 94 ("A Squeeze of the Hand") and which leads Ishmaelto repudiateAhab's questfor vengeance:"Iwashedmy hands and heart of it ... divinely free from all ill-will or malicewhatsoever." So long as a man has this human warmth inside, Melvilleseemsto imply, no Medusaneed ever turn a man to stone, regardless of his ideological despair. Melville's answer to the crisisof belief, then, would be to turn one's back on the whole thing as an unsolvable problem, and to concentrateon things, such as the humanbond between Ishmael and Queequeg, which do lie within the area of human control and understanding. Still a different response to the crisis of not knowing what to believe is presented in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Whitman,whose lifespanwas almostcoincident with Melville's (1819-1891; 1819-1892), gave us an image of the Crisisof Belief which has probablynever been bettered. Comparing himself to a "noiseless which "launch'd patientspider" forth filament,filament,filament,out of itself," Whitman addresses his soul as follows: And you O my soul where you stand Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselesslymusing, venturing, throwing, seeking... Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere,O my soul. (-"A Noiseless, Patient Spider")
As we look back from our present perspective, Whitman's little poem seems

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remarkably accurate and prophetic. Whether peering back over the eons of geologic time that have brought man into being, or probing where great galaxies whirl through outer space, modem man has had reasonto feel "detached,in measurelessoceans of space," in a way that Dante could hardly have understood. Whereas Dante assumed man's eternalsignificance,modem writers have had to questionwhether anythinghuman has lasting importance in a universe where suns expire and galaxies explode with regularity. Whitman's response to this sense of humaninsignificance is typical of modern thinkers all down the line: out of the despairoccasionedby the failure of the old certitudes, modern literature has "launch'd filament, filament, filamentout of itself" till some belief be found, "till the ductile anchor hold,/Till the gossamerthread you fling catch somewhere,O my soul." Walt Whitman's own ductile anchor would seem to be the Hindu Brahman, transcribedinto American literature in the person of Emerson'sOversoul, and celebratedas the universalSelf in Whitman'smasterpiece, Song of Myself. This concept of a universalself that permeates all things and all beings solves the crisis of belief by embracingall beliefs, however contradictory, in one vast unity. Thus Whitman's reverence ranges from the physically gross to the spiritually ideal; from "The bull and the bug never worshippedhalf enough,/Dung and dirt more admirablethan was dreamed"to such a spiritualcreed as follows: My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths, Enclosingworshipancientand modern and all between..., Making a fetish of the first rock or stump..., Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,
Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession. ..,

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to become weaker and weaker as far as the old beliefs were concerned, and more and more weighted towards the new knowledge. Thus, Matthew Arnold managed to hold the Victorian Compromise together only by watering Christianity down from the level of a metaphysical belief to the level of a cultural phenomenon. So Christian mysticism gives way to Christian ethics, which Arnold calls Hebraism and places on an even par with Hellenism, the Greek spirit of inquiry and right reason. Privately, Matthew Arnold responded to the crisis of belief with despair. In "Dover Beach," Arnold mourned the ebbing of the "Sea of Faith, . . . once at the full," and he described the resulting conflict of ideologies as "a darkling plain 0... . Where ignorant armies clash by night." Arnold even went so far as to give up writing poetry, presumably on the grounds that a poetry expressive only of despair was not worthy of being communicated. But publicly, Matthew Arnold did not despair. Instead, he wrote essays showing that the old religion still had considerable usefulness in a degenerate, Philistine society. Regardless of the failure of belief, one could still preach the creed of sweetness and light, could still affirm the sweet reasonableness of Jesus. John Ruskin likewise contrived a Victorian compromise by popularizing Christian aesthetics in his early writings on Gothic cathedrals and Christian ethics in his later call for social reform. In this fashion, some fragments of the old values might yet persevere against the new skepticism. Weakened and watered down in this way, the Victorian Compromise could not long endure. As the conflicting propositions of science and religion seemed to grow increasingly incompatible, the Victorian ethic finally went to pieces under the strain of internal conflict, and instead of one man (such as Tennyson, Melville, or Whitman) ex-

Drinking mead from the skull-cap, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran, Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine, To the mass kneeling, or the puritan's prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew, Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me. ... (Section 43) Whitman's answer to the crisis of belief, then, is indeed a large-minded one: when perplexed by not knowing what to believe, one should respond by believing in everything-"I hear and behold God in every object." As a spider-artist, flinging out filaments of belief till the ductile anchor hold somewhere, Whitman has spun a resplendent cobweb indeed, holding within its circumference all that has ever existed in the womb of time, or the tomb of eternity. The hub of this cobweb, the irrefutable center of belief, is the self that Whitman celebrates: "and nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is." Lest anything slip or break through this cosmic web of belief, moreover, Whitman makes certain that its gossamer threads are not only very long but very flexible, so as not to be broken by mere contradiction or inconsistency: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. Tennyson, Melville, and Whitmanit may be said of all three that they are large and contain multitudes. As we have seen, they are comprehensive enough to maintain simultaneously both belief and skepticism, both hope and despair, in a kind of delicate equilibrium. This equilibrium we speak of as the Victorian Compromise-a way of synthesizing the old beliefs with the new knowledge. But as time went on, this compromise tended

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pressing a wide variety of attitudes, we see many men clinging to separate shards of the wreckage, each maintaining a single, narrow, consistent position. No longer do we have a Whitman who can contradict himself cheerfully because he contains multitudes; nor do we have an Ishmael who can both contemplate atheism and endorse Father Mapple's orthodoxy simultaneously; nor do we have a Tennyson who in the same poem embraces both belief and despair. Rather, in the later Victorian period this multiple point of view breaks into its smaller separate components, such as agnosticism (Huxley's essays), atheism (Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman), Christian orthodoxy (Francis Thompson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Cardinal Newman), transcendental idealism (Robert Browning), or a comic response to the whole situation (the nonsense literature of Edmund Lear and Lewis Carroll; the satires of Arthur Clough and Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde). Still other late Victorian responses to the crisis of belief include humanism, stoicism, and various kinds of escapism. Victorian humanism, which may be traced back into the hero worship of Carlyle and the ideal of Reason in John Stuart Mill as well as to the culture religion of Matthew Arnold, finds its apotheosis in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Humanism, which has been defined as calling man the Supreme Being, might be more properly called superhumanism in George Bernard Shaw's view of things, for Shaw goes along with Neitzsche's Superman concept as an answer to the crisis of belief: in one play after another, we find engagingly eloquent specimens of Shaw's superior being -a Saint Joan, a Henry Higgins, a Colonel Unterschaft, a Devil's Disciple-so that we may have some idea of what the stuff of the future, more perfect society will be made. Shaw and his ilk, then, would represent that part of Tennyson's

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vision which foresaw salvation in a moral evolution in the human animal, but with the refinement of the word moral (which Shaw would term obscene) into the word rational. Shaw's supermen represent the evolution of human reason into its highest forms. A significant variation of humanism is the utopian movement, represented most ecstatically by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who saw in the new science not a crisis of belief but an instrument from which to derive a secular Millennial Vision. Thus, although the City of God might be gone, there remained the City of Man as an object of belief and veneration. Given a large enough social and scientific revolution, men might still direct human civilization towards the best of all possible worlds. Or so, at least, it seemed, before the Fascists and Bolsheviks arrived on the scene to belie the hope of a secular millennial vision. Aside from Man, other substitutes for God as the Supreme Being would include the several variations of the Life Force principle. Charles Swinburne, for example, responded to the crisis of belief by venerating the sea as the creator and sustainer of life, while George Meredith similarly venerated the Earth as his ultimate progenitor. The Life Force principle also found human embodiment in a series of fictional females whose triumphant creative vitality differs sharply from the defeat and despair of their male counterparts. Thus, glimpses of the primal earth mother are seen in such figures as Joyce's Molly Bloom, Faulkner's Lena Grove and Dilsey, Hemingway's Pilar, O'Casey's "Juno," and others whose prototypes may extend back into the dominant female heroes of Shaw and Ibsen and Hardy and Sir James Barrie. As conceived in these character portraits, the Life Force principle functions through Woman's fertility so as to give her a spontaneous belief in the efficacy of the human project-a spontaneous belief at

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which the sterile males of modernlitera- and symbolists,and such recent practiture, such as Prufrock,Jake Barnes,and tioners as America'sWallace Stevens. William Butler Yeats is of particular StephenDaedalus,can only marvel,addinterest with regard to the escapist reing envy to their sin of despair. The stoic responseto despairis repre- sponseto the crisisof belief. In his early sentedmost eloquentlyin such Victorian career, when Yeats wanted merely to writingsas WilliamErnestHenley's well- escape "the pavementsgray" of modem known "Invictus" and Robert Louis city life, he could escape either into the Stevenson'sbrilliant "Pulvis et Umbra," beautifulCeltic legends about Cuchulain as meaning"Dust and and the Land of Heart's Desire or into which is translated commentof the Lake Isle of Innesfree,where Nature Shadow"-a self-explanatory the human condition. Stoicism, indeed, is kind. But the vision of modem civilibeastin "The Sectends to form a bridge from the Vic- zation as a murderous torianto the modernperiod,for this is an ond Coming" went beyond ugliness to attitude frequently found as a modem horror:here the Christiandove and lamb credo-in Eliot's desireat the end of The and spiritussancti have been supplanted Waste Land to "at least set my lands in by predatory images-the dove by the order," in Hemingway's call for a stiff falcon, the lamb of God by the cannibal upper lip in the face of suffering, in Sphinx,and the Holy Spirit by the spirYeats' decision to continue work in the itus mundi-the spiritof this world. Thus, "foul rag and bone shop"of his heart,in the Second Coming is not the return of Faulkner'sstoic determinationthat man Christthe Lambto his earthly dominion, must "endure." Robert Frost would also but is rather a second coming of preas evidenced in the seem a stoic in saying that man "persists" Christianbarbarism, even without beliefs or self-knowledge, lunatic slaughter of World War I. So as Frost's Job does in A Masque of the hope for a moral evolution of man, a secularMillennial Reason. Vision, fadesout, and There remainsthe response of escap- with it also goes Yeats'plan for an island ism, the urge to flee the battlefieldwhere to retire to in the Lake of Innesfree. ignorant armies clash by night. Tenny- Instead,Yeats will escape not only modson once again gave us the main proto- ern civilization but Nature itself, now types: the lush sensuality of his "The revealed as an enemy that makes men Lotos-Eaters" prefigures the hedonism old-that shrivels a man's body, that of Fitzgerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar "dying animal," into a "tattered coat a Khayyamas well as Hemingway'sescape upon stick." Thus Yeats arrivesat the from nada through sex and drink; like- concept of the heavenly city of art, "the wise, Tennyson's Idylls of the King holy city of Byzantium," where the soundsa retreatinto a heroic pastlaterto artist-soulis freed from his treacherous is freed from time and Nature, so be emulatedby William Morris and in body, that in the form of a golden bird he may part by Faulkner; and finally, Tenny- perform the poet's calling forever: son's poem, "The Palace of Art," foreset upon a golden bough to sing shadows the idea of art as a beautiful To lords and ladiesof Byzantium world where one the magic may escape Of what is past,or passing,or to come. real world, now made intolerableby a ("Sailingto Byzantium") failure of belief. Among those finding in art a refuge from reality would be A finalresponseto the crisisof belief is Walter Pater, the refined "epicurean," belief itself, as observed in the return to Arthur Symons and his fellow decadents orthodoxy by initial unbelievers such as

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T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Aldous Huxley. I have already mentioned the extraordinary comprehensiveness of the chief spokesmen of 100 years ago and their ability to maintain a multiple point of view. While our modern spokesmen seldom bold contradictory points of view simultaneously-as did Whitman or Tennyson-they do show a capacity for mutation of outlook, and over the decades such mutations have been known to reanimate a man made stone by the Medusa of despair. Such mutation is possible because, although a crisis of belief results from a lack of certainty as to what is true, this same lack of certainty allows the numerous doors of possibility to remain open. And one such door may sometime open unexpectedly into the rose garden of religious belief. Thus the hollow man of T. S. Eliot's earlier years became the Anglican convert, the confidential clerk doing his Father's business. And at the same time, Eliot the snob of yesteryear, drawing consolation from his superiority to Jews and Irishmen, finally comes to assert that "Humility is the only wisdom." He who had scornfully dismissed man's plea for immortality as a "whimper" at the end of The Hollow Men now offers that plea himself at the end of Ash-Wednesday: "Let my cry come to Thee." Even Hemingway and Faulkner leave the church door conspicuously open in several of their works, though they themselves do not enter. Frederick Henry's desire to go to the priest's "high, cold country" in A Farewell to Arms, though futile, was apparently earnest enough so that the Catholic Church saw fit to officiate at Hemingway's funeralan acknowledgement of religious identity which the Church does not take lightly. And Faulkner tendered a similar respect to the Negro preacher at the end of The Sound and the Fury. Indeed, Faulkner would seem to refute Macbeth's assertion that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of

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sound and fury and signifying nothing, largely by virtue of Dilsey's mystic vision of the Biblical redemption. And even James Joyce, who took the crisis of belief as a life-long theme, was able to defend Catholicism as "a logical consistent absurdity" in contrast to Protestantism (in "Portrait of the Artist."). Some conclusions concerning the crisis of belief are now in order. Literature being in essence a vision of reality, men have always of course written out their beliefs as to what reality is. But seldom in the history of literature has there been such a total and crucial breakdown of belief as in the last century-and seldom, in consequence, has literature been motivated by so varied and energetic a search for a vision that men might live by. To sum up, the responses to the crisis of belief take on the following five-fold configuration: 1. Despair-a part time motive in all these writers. 2. Escapism-into a death-wish, into subhumanism, into pleasure, or to the ivory tower (or holy city) of art. 3. Substitute religions: (a) humanism, or supermanism-from the secular march to Zion to the simple ideal of culture; and (b) the worship of the Life Force, whether in Earth, Sea, or Woman. 4. The Retreat into the Self: Less despairing than simple escapism, the retreat into the self means giving up the larger questions as unanswerable, thereby to invoke the stoic response, making the most of oneself, grateful for even a temporary gift of life (like Thoreau, Whitman, and Henry Miller); or even to minimize the larger human experiment as a source of laughter (Wilde, Beerbohm, Thurber, etc.). 5. An Open Door Policy-in the absence of absolute knowledge, to see belief as a possibility. Hence, the neoorthodox movement. Not only in substance but also in style,
(Continuedon page 544)

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tion. By William Vaughn Moody and Robert MorssLovett; revisedby Fred B. Millett. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964. 576 pp. (paperback).
Discourse of Reason: A Brief Handbook

of Semantics and Logic. 2nd edition. By John C. Sherwood. New York: Harper and Row, Inc. 1964. 132 pp. (paperback). $1.50. AlexanderButman,Donald Reis, and David Sohn. New York: BantamBooks, Inc., 1963. 152 pp. (paperback).
Reading in High School: A Quarterly Paperbacks in the Schools. Edited by

Journal for the Improvement of Reading By Edward R. Fagan. Philadelphia: The Teaching. Edited and published by Hugo Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964. Hartig. Subscription rate: $3.50 a year. 212 pp. $5.50. Editorial and businessaddress:P. O. Box 75, Dimensions in Drama: 6 Plays of Crime College Station, Pullman, Washington. and Punishment.Edited by Henry D. Piper There, feels better already. and J. Kent Clark. New York: Charles E.J.F.

The Crisis

of Belief

in Modern

Literature

(Continuedfrom page 483)

the crisis of belief has wrought something of an apocalypse in modern literature. Working under the conviction that honesty is modern man's highest virtue, writers like Conrad and Hemingway have sought a style free of all pretense and falsity. And this same passion for honesty led James Joyce (in prose) and T. S. Eliot (in poetry) to develop the stream of consciousness technique so as to probe with absolute truthfulness the inner labyrinth of the human mind. As with the Greek Oedipus, the modern search for self-knowledge may become

a source of despair-leading man to see himself as a hairy ape, a cockroach, or a big blood blister (one good pinch and he's gone)-but paradoxically, it is also man's chief glory to thus demand to know who and what he is, as Oedipus did, regardless of how frightful such selfknowledge might be. The crisis of belief has given us teachers of English, moreover, a rich legacy: for while Dante's Medusa of despair does not permit a comfortable life, it has produced, in the last hundred years, a great literature.

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