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
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The ENGLISHJOURNAL
Vol. 53 October 1964 No. 7

The Crisis of Belief

in Modern 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.

OF ALL the monsters in Dante's Hell,
only one is so terrible to behold that
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 frame-
work 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!
475
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 des-
tiny; despair of one another, of the mean-
ing 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 Dread-
ful Night" (atheism); Joseph Conrad,
who saw civilization engulfed in a pitch-
black "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 frank-
ly 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
476 THE ENGLISH JOURNAL

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 HollowNM7ene... Headpieces filled (Robert Penn Warren); a Lord of the
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.
Included here would be the fully aware pinch and he's gone"
and gentlemanly types, such as Faulkner's (from one of Robert Penn Warren's
Quentin Compson and his father, who poems in Promises).
commit suicide; Hemingway's Rinaldi A hairy ape, a bear, a dragon, a cock-
or 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 counter-
the human race altogether: "I should balancing hope of Purgatory and Para-
have been a pair of ragged claws/Scut- dise. 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 de-
of 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 outnum-
animal 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 Snop-
H. L. Mencken's Homo Boobiens,
sharply downward in the great chain of eses,
being. Whereas ancient drama treated and other modern Yahoos too numerous
conflict within or between heroes-and to mention.
sometimes between men and gods, as in All this is the upshot, we may surmise,
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
 THE CRISIS OF BELIEF IN MODERN LITERATURE 477
himself as an insignificant, polluted, tran- gained through science and history He
sitory animal-ape, cockroach, or blood has even come to erect a new superstruc-
blister. ture 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
and anxiety and degradation, a hell that likely
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 ques-
and the modern paradise being
tions: (1) How did we come into this race;
glimpsed afar off in Karl Marx's Isaiahic
condition? (2) How- aside from the
visions and George Bernard Shaw's hypo-
forms of escapism already mentioned
thetical Superman.
(Faulkner's suicides, Hemingway's alco-
With this background in mind, I
holics, T. S. Eliot's insanity or subhuman-
should now like to trace, in its major out-
ism)-might we get out? It is the object the crisis of belief arid some basic
of this paper to answer, by reference to lines,
selected masterworks of the past 100 responses to this crisis in both England
and America, as evidenced in the litera-
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 pass-
century- to Darwinism and Freudianism ing, seem ironic in view of later develop-
and their variations-as well as to such ments. Concerning moral evolution, mod-
historical 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 con-
ment 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 Dar-
As 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 (Ori-
ern 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
initial despair at the crisis of belief-de- old beliefs versus new knowledge. The
spair which I have already documented result was In Memoriam, published in
-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.
478 THE ENGLISH
Unlike his Romantic predecessor, Words-
worth, 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 agoniz-
ing rhetorical questions implying that
man is only (as Darwin surmised) a phys-
ical being: Shall man "Be blown about
the desert dust,/Or sealed within the
iron hills?" (Stanza 56) To this sugges-
tion that death (and Arthur Hallam's
death in particular) is a permanent ex-
tinction of the self, Tennyson finally re-
sponds with a typical Victorian compro-
mise. 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, more-
over, Tennyson subsequently recoils, in
his Prologue, towards a position of reli-
gious 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 in-
between-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 ro-
bust, manly fellow who could contem-
plate 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
JOURNAL
these windows (the eyes). Yes, "this
body of mine is the house. What a pity
they didn't stop up the chinks and cran-
nies, though, and thrust in a little lint
here and there. But it's too late to make
any improvements now." The death-
wind 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 en-
counter the crisis of belief-of not know-
ing what to believe-by keeping all the
possible doors to truth ajar. Thus, al-
though Ishmael declares in Chapter 23
("The Lee Shore") that there is no abso-
lute truth - no "land"- available ("In
landlessness alone resides the highest
truth"), Ishmael nonetheless seeks con-
tinually for a ground of belief. This
search takes him through the whole range
of possible outlooks, extending from
Father Mapple's orthodoxy at one ex-
treme 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 sub-
scribes for a time to Captain Ahab's Ro-
mantic belief in Man as the Supreme
Being. But finally, unable to choose be-
tween 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 chap-
ter, "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
 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 crea-
tures 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, regardlessof his
ideological despair. Melville's answer to
the crisisof belief, then, would be to turn
one's back on the whole thing as an un-
solvable 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 pre-
sented in the poetry of Walt Whitman.
Whitman,whose lifespanwas almostco-
incident with Melville's (1819-1891;
1819-1892), gave us an image of the
Crisisof Belief which has probablynever
been bettered. Comparing himself to a
"noiselesspatientspider"which "launch'd
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, throw-
ing, 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 per-
spective, Whitman's little poem seems
LITERATURE 479
remarkably accurate and prophetic.
Whether peering back over the eons of
geologic time that have brought man
into being, or probing where great gal-
axies whirl through outer space, modem
man has had reasonto feel "detached,in
measurelessoceans of space," in a way
that Dante could hardly have under-
stood. 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 humaninsignificanceis typ-
ical of modern thinkers all down the
line: out of the despairoccasionedby the
failure of the old certitudes, modern
literature has "launch'd filament, fila-
ment, filamentout of itself" till some be-
lief 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 Whit-
man'smasterpiece,Song of Myself. This
concept of a universalself that perme-
ates 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. ..,
480 THE ENGLISH
Drinking mead from the skull-cap, to
Shastas and Vedas admirant, mind-
ing the Koran,
Accepting the Gospels, accepting him
that was crucified, knowing assured-
ly 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 cri-
sis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit
arouses me. ...
(Section 43)
Whitman's answer to the crisis of be-
lief, 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, fling-
ing out filaments of belief till the ductile
anchor hold somewhere, Whitman has
spun a resplendent cobweb indeed, hold-
ing within its circumference all that has
ever existed in the womb of time, or the
tomb of eternity. The hub of this cob-
web, 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, more-
over, 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 Whitman-
it 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 equi-
librium 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
JOURNAL
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 man-
aged to hold the Victorian Compromise
together only by watering Christianity
down from the level of a metaphysical
belief to the level of a cultural phenome-
non. 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 com-
municated. But publicly, Matthew Arn-
old did not despair. Instead, he wrote
essays showing that the old religion still
had considerable usefulness in a degen-
erate, 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 incompat-
ible, the Victorian ethic finally went to
pieces under the strain of internal con-
flict, and instead of one man (such as
Tennyson, Melville, or Whitman) ex-
 THE CRISIS OF BELIEF IN MODERN
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 athe-
ism and endorse Father Mapple's ortho-
doxy simultaneously; nor do we have a
Tennyson who in the same poem em-
braces 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 Brown-
ing), or a comic response to the whole
situation (the nonsense literature of Ed-
mund 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 re-
ligion of Matthew Arnold, finds its
apotheosis in the plays of George Bernard
Shaw. Humanism, which has been de-
fined as calling man the Supreme Being,
might be more properly called superhu-
manism in George Bernard Shaw's view
of things, for Shaw goes along with
Neitzsche's Superman concept as an an-
swer to the crisis of belief: in one play
after another, we find engagingly elo-
quent specimens of Shaw's superior being
-a Saint Joan, a Henry Higgins, a Colo-
nel 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
LITERATURE 481
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 high-
est forms.
A significant variation of humanism is
the utopian movement, represented
most ecstatically by Karl Marx and Fred-
erick 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 venera-
tion. Given a large enough social and sci-
entific 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 exam-
ple, responded to the crisis of belief by
venerating the sea as the creator and sus-
tainer of life, while George Meredith
similarly venerated the Earth as his ulti-
mate progenitor. The Life Force princi-
ple also found human embodiment in a
series of fictional females whose trium-
phant creative vitality differs sharply
from the defeat and despair of their male
counterparts. Thus, glimpses of the pri-
mal 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 pro-
totypes may extend back into the domi-
nant female heroes of Shaw and Ibsen
and Hardy and Sir James Barrie. As con-
ceived 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
482 THE ENGLISH JOURNAL
which the sterile males of modernlitera- and symbolists,and such recent practi-
ture, such as Prufrock,Jake Barnes,and tioners as America'sWallace Stevens.
StephenDaedalus,can only marvel,add- William Butler Yeats is of particular
ing envy to their sin of despair. interest with regard to the escapist re-
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
which is translatedas meaning"Dust and and the Land of Heart's Desire or into
Shadow"-a self-explanatorycommentof the Lake Isle of Innesfree,where Nature
the human condition. Stoicism, indeed, is kind. But the vision of modem civili-
tends to form a bridge from the Vic- zation as a murderousbeastin "The Sec-
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 spir-
Yeats' 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 pre-
seem a stoic in saying that man "persists" Christianbarbarism,as evidenced in the
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,
Reason. a secularMillennialVision, 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 mod-
son 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," fore-
shadows the idea of art as a beautiful set upon a golden bough to sing
magic world where one may escape the To lords and ladiesof Byzantium
real world, now made intolerableby a Of what is past,or passing,or to come.
failure of belief. Among those finding in ("Sailingto Byzantium")
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
 THE CRISIS OF BELIEF IN MODERN
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 Ten-
nyson-they do show a capacity for mu-
tation of outlook, and over the decades
such mutations have been known to re-
animate a man made stone by the Me-
dusa 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 re-
main 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 confi-
dential 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 funeral-
an 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
LITERATURE 483
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 ab-
surdity" 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 moti-
vated 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 de-
spairing 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 tem-
porary gift of life (like Thoreau, Whit-
man, and Henry Miller); or even to mini-
mize the larger human experiment as a
source of laughter (Wilde, Beerbohm,
Thurber, etc.).
5. An Open Door Policy-in the ab-
sence of absolute knowledge, to see be-
lief as a possibility. Hence, the neo-
orthodox movement.
Not only in substance but also in style,
(Continuedon page 544)
544 THE ENGLISH JOURNAL
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The Crisis of Belief in Modern Literature

(Continuedfrom page 483)

the crisis of belief has wrought some-
thing of an apocalypse in modern litera-
ture. 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 self-
knowledge might be. The crisis of belief
has given us teachers of English, more-
over, 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.