The Unrecognized Air
by Alfred Noyes
THERE IS ONE great influence in European literature, even in modern European literature, which is as vital and all-permeating as that of the air on the creatures that breathe it. Even where the makers of that literature are unconscious of it, or even unwilling to recognise it, they are dependent upon it for the very colour of the corpuscles in their veins. It need hardly be said that the word “modern” is used here in its proper sense to mark the latest of the three great divisions of history (the other two being the ancient and the medieval) and not, as it is so commonly used in the Press to-day, to signify merely the conventions of the last publishing season. If we include Dante as the supreme figure of medieval literature, the singer in whom, at once, the Middle Ages culminated and the modern period began; and if we survey those works of literature, from his day to our own, which seem to possess qualities of permanent value; it is impossible to dissociate them from certain elements that have been contributed to human thought and emotion by the Christian religion, even though these elements may be seized and transmuted as the oxygen of the atmosphere is transmuted by those who breathe it. It is not carrying the analogy too far to say that in many cases the distinctly anti-Christian literature in many respects corresponds only to what is breathed out again after the breather has extracted—consciously or unconsciously—what he needed for his own life; and that Voltaire himself was able to breathe out a destructive atmosphere only because he had unconsciously drawn in, and made use of, its more vital constituents. For the influence of Christianity is not limited to those who acknowledge it, or are aware of it.
If the Red Slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass-and turn again.
And so, to strike at once the very centre of the enemy’s shield, it may be pointed out that Voltaire (who may be regarded as the typical anti-Christian of modern world literature) has only one weapon of attack that still retains its weight and can still be respected in the higher regions of the intellect to-day. This is his contention that the God of the theologians is lacking in the higher attributes of his own “Supreme Being.” In other words, it was impossible for Voltaire to think as the pagan Lucretius. Confronted by the Lisbon earthquake, he could feel none of the pagan satisfaction of the man who from a secure shore watches the death-agonies of another; and the higher attributes which he insists are necessary to his own Supreme Being are precisely those upon which the spirit of Christianity, transcending all the theologies, had taught him to insist:—
Ignorer ton être suprême,
Grand Dieul! c’est un moindre blasphème,
Et moins digne de ton courroux
Que de te croire impitoyable,
De nos malheurs insatiable,
Jaloux, injuste comme nous.
So he wrote in his “Ode sur le Fanatisme”; what is this but an insistence on the very attributes of the Deity which it has been the glory and the power of the Christian religion to find in its own Founder, and to give as the central explanation of its own mystery, “God so loved the world.” Creeds and systems, theologies and theologians may have failed again and again and to the uttermost; but nothing can alter the fact that the strength of Christianity, the wisdom that was hidden from the wise and revealed to the simplicity and love of little children, the infinite justice at one with infinite mercy and divine compassion had so wrought upon the minds of men that Voltaire himself was intellectually compelled to judge its own priests by the standards which they had forgotten. Nor is this conclusion affected in the least by Voltaire’s own blindness and thrice-proven intellectual dishonesty, as when in his haste to condemn what he thought might be one of the evidences of the Old Testament legend of the Flood he attacked the real discoveries of the early geologists, and in the very irony of which he was so proud became himself a lasting subject for the irony of history.
This incorporation of the elements of Christianity in the works of writers who are professedly anti-Christian is one of the most striking characteristics revealed by a careful analysis of modern literature. It occurs in poets like Shelley and Swinburne, the first of whom attacked the lifeless creeds of his own day, and described himself as an “atheist” only to make one of the most burning confessions of faith that has ever been made in poetry; faith, not in any sectarian system, but in
That Light whose smile kindles the universe
That Beauty in which all things work and move.
Shelley’s vision of that Light and world-sustaining Love is at one with the vision of St. John; and the music in which it is expressed is a continuation of the music of Dante, in the opening and close of the “Paradiso”:—
La gloria di colui che tutto move
Per l’universo penetra, e risplende
In una parte pit, e meno altrove.
and
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
In the later poet, Swinburne, there are even more striking illustrations of the debt of anti-Christian writers to Christianity, both in thought and feeling. Tennyson, while praising the splendour and strength of one of Swinburne’s early works once asked him the significant question whether it was fair to abuse the Deity in the language and imagery of the Hebrew prophets. But Swinburne goes farther than this. In ‘“Songs before Sunrise” he expresses his own highest thoughts and emotions in the language of the Bible; and, in poems like “Quia Multum Amavit,” the validity of those thoughts and emotions depends upon the validity of the figures and the imagery that he is using. His poem ‘“‘Before a Crucifix,” for instance, in the fury of its attack on the Christianity of the churches, seemed to many of the orthodox to be merely a piece of fanatical blasphemy. But its real content is something more than this; and, when he is confronted by the realities of suffering, and grief in the world around him, it is not to the Greek vision of Aphrodite or any pagan imagery that he turns, to express his highest thoughts about it. Step by dark step, this so-called anti-Christian is blindly led on, as a musician is led on by a surrounding orchestra, to postulate the very principles which he was supposed, possibly even by himself, to be denying.
O sacred head, O desecrate,
O labour-wounded feet and hands,
O blood poured forth in pledge to fate
Of nameless lives in divers lands,
O slain and spent and sacrificed
People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.
Though he is turning the imagery to a new purpose, its validity here depends upon the truth of the central idea of Christianity, the God who became man, and the ultimate object of the poet’s worship is indistinguishable from that of the saints of the Middle Ages.
And the blood blots his holy hair
And white brows over hungering eyes
That plead against us, . . .
There is indeed a sense in which some of the greatest of the anti-Christian writers may be said to be fulfilling rather than destroying the law which they seemed to others (and sometimes to themselves) to be attacking. Their spirit, though weakened by perversities or warped by intellectual pride, or reacting against its own environment in a way that has no meaning for others, has often, burning at its core, the anger of Christ in the temple against those who have made it into a den of thieves. The really valuable part of the modern literature of ‘‘rebellion,” whether it be in a Christian like Tolstoi or in professedly anti-Christian writers, has this, and this alone, as the foundation of whatever greatness it possesses. At the same time it must be remembered that seeing the motes in the eyes of others, and seeing them with anger, is an occupation that, in literature, as in life, may obscure many other matters of importance; and the literature of “rebellion” and destructive thought, as such, has never risen to the heights of the great creative world-poets. The two great epics that literature can oppose to those of antiquity during the last nineteen hundred years are both attempts to unfold the system of the universe, and in both cases the intellectual groundwork and the spiritual vision that gives them their permanent value were the direct result of the Christian religion. The world-ranging mind of Dante could never have achieved the great musical consummation of thought in the line
E la sua volontade e nostra pace,
if the seed had not been sown in his mind by the earlier simplicity of the prayer “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It was the Bible that enabled Milton to rise to the height of his great argument in “Paradise Lost”—a poem compared with which even the music of Homer seemed to Landor like that of a tinkling cymbal on the shores of the ocean—and it is never to be forgotten that the values of that music are not to be sought or discovered merely in the story he tells, or in what the logician can extract from the surface meaning of the words. Attempts to interpret the Bible allegorically have been regarded with a just suspicion, for they have sometimes been mere evasions of questions that deserve a direct answer, and they have been pressed into the service of intellectual dishonesty. But Milton affirmed directly that his own art is a ‘“‘process of speech” without which it would be impossible to tell of the acts of God. His meaning is to be sought in the symbolical values of great art and great poetry —as we seek it in the works of the great painters, or in a symphony of Beethoven. The very movement of the words has a meaning that transcends their literal meaning as far as a great cathedral transcends that of the separate stones of which it is built.
Hail, holy Light, off-spring of heaven first-born
Or of the Eternal, co-eternal beam
May I express thee unblamed, since God is light
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee…
Such passages as these in the great blind poet are transfigured by the spirit of holiness that he invoked. They are the mountain-peaks of the world’s literature, making the heaven of heavens their dwelling-place.
II
But the influence of Christianity upon literature is not limited to those writers who have either opposed it or, as in the two supreme masters of epic during the last nineteen hundred years, drawn their inspiration directly from its fountain-head. It is impossible here to cover the whole field, but one may indicate briefly that the literature of medieval chivalry, in ballad and romance, as well as in the statelier poems of the Crusades by Ariosto and Tasso, derived its nobility and beauty from ideas that had been sown and fostered by Christianity. The new compassion for the weak, the new reverence for womanhood, the truth and honour of Chaucer’s ‘‘perfect gentle knight”; and, everywhere, those gleams of the beauty of holiness, even though it were praised as a remote star in a heaven beyond the reach of our sin-stained earth; all these things were derived from the religion of which the wandering knight in the greatest of all the poems of chivalry —Spenser’s “Faerie Queene’’—bore the emblem upon his shield:
And on his breast a bloody cross he bore
The dear remembrance of his dying Lord.
But in the wider fields of later literature, where the cross was no longer worn upon the breast, the influence is no less potent. The Elizabethan drama, dealing with all sorts and conditions of men and women, may be traced back by the curious to its origin in the old morality plays; but the debt is a wider and a deeper one than that. Hazlitt has pointed out how much the Elizabethan drama owes to a religion which had taught us the love of good for the sake of good, and, answering the question, “Who is our neighbour?”’ by the words “one whose wounds we can bind up,” has done more to humanise the thoughts and tame the unruly passions than all who have tried to reform or benefit mankind. The very idea of the desire to do good, or regarding the human race as one family, is hardly to be found in any other code. The Greeks and Romans never thought of considering others. . . . But in the Christian religion the heart of a nation becomes malleable, capable of pity, of forgiveness, of relaxing in its claims and remitting its power. And so, in Shakespeare, though his works are dramatic and can give no direct expression of his own personal creed, we can trace everywhere the prints of
. . . those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed
For our advantage on the bitter cross.
We trace it in his deep sense of the moral law, and still more in his humanity, which echoes the Sermon on the Mount, and adds a second benediction to it.
The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed.
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Just as Dante owed one of his most consummate passages of intellectual music to a sentence in the Lord’s Prayer, so Shakespeare owes this passage to the spirit that breathed upon a tortured world the divine sentence, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” To say that there is much in Shakespeare (as in Dante also) that conflicts with the teaching of Christ is merely to say that he was human, and that only a God could reveal the perfect harmony. The fact remains that the poetry of Shakespeare has a capacity of thought and emotion, a breadth of charity and humanity that were not possible to Greece and Rome. He owes these characteristics to the Christian religion and to that figure of whom another Elizabethan dramatist—Dekker—wrote
The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
A soft, meek, patient, humble tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.
These influences are so widely and so subtly spread that it is impossible to examine them in detail. It is only possible to say that they have coloured the whole fabric of European thought, even where it is least conscious of the fact, and even where it has apparently discarded the last shadow of a religious creed. But in later poets, like Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning in England; Victor Hugo in France; and Goethe in Germany, the debt is far clearer than in the Elizabethan period. It is not that these poets all definitely profess a Christian creed (Goethe certainly did not, even though in “Faust” he uses the Catholic symbolism), but their highest thought and emotion are of an order that belongs as definitely to Christendom, and to Christendom alone, as the use of fight and fire belongs to man alone among the creatures on this planet. When Wordsworth writes:
One lesson, shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals;
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels,
he is only expressing in set terms a spirit that is far more deeply interfused through all the literature of his period. For the subtler spiritual elements which literature derived from the Christian religion, we must turn to the mystics and the idealistic philosophers. But here again it should not be forgotten that it is not merely in the “mystics” or in the devotional poets like Herbert and Crashaw and Christina Rossetti that these elements are to be found. They leaven the whole of the higher literature of modern Europe, and exert a mysterious quickening power, not only upon philosophical critics like Carlyle and Tolstoi but on the “religion of beauty” of the poets of the romantic revival, with its aspirations into the unseen; and on the “religion of humanity” (with its desire to set the crooked straight), which, even where it was unavowed and unconscious, so strongly characterises the work of the greatest modern novelists. Of these last, in England, the best example is Dickens, who never writes as one making what are called religious professions, and yet perhaps has done more than any other writer in modern times to hasten the kingdom of heaven on earth. The sense of pity, the charity, the human kindness that suffuse the vast world of his creation continue the work of the Master whom he seldom directly invokes. One of these rare occasions when, like a long-suppressed cry, the direct appeal breaks from his lips, is in that marvellous scene—not surpassed by Shakespeare or any other —where a foolish and mean woman, far too commonplace to interest the modern exponents of intellectual pride, is brutally treated by the man to whom she was bearing a child.
He answered with an imprecation and a blow.
No angry cries; no loud reproaches. Even her weeping
and her sobs were stifled by her clinging round him…
O woman, God-beloved in old Jerusalem! . . .
It is the cry of the Master himself over the unremembering City of God.
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