The New Religious Novel
By MARC HAN ITA LASK I
MOST of the new fashions of fiction-writing appearing during the past fifty years have had gradually to build up their own standards of comparison inside their own genre. With the religious novels that we have lately seen flood- ing from the presses, a standard of comparison already exists in the religious novels of the latter part of the last century. From these earlier novels it is possible to disinter some common factors. In all of them it was taken for granted that the establishment of a moral basis for the personal life was the prime preoccupation of the good man. This premise granted, it was then possible for a specific novel to concern itself with the presence or absence of a specific doctrinal sanction for this moral basis, to discuss whether Tractarianism, Methodism or even scepticism afforded the best foundation. Or the novelist may have implicitly accepted a dogma and then concerned himself with the interpretation of that dogma in terms of the spiritual and worldly problems confronting his hero. With whichever aspect of the religious problem the writer dealt, he assumed a hero and a reading-public well versed in theological doctrine, capable of following prolonged and complicated argument, and ready to balk at no practical or spiritual hurdle. Compare with this prototype the new religious novel. (From my recent reading, I could readily adduce innumerable actual examples.) Its hero—who is often a " parson " or "padre "- enters upon his fictional life unaware in any positive sense that the need for a personal morality exists. We may suppose that, if questioned, he would not deny such a need ; but he would assume, in his early unawakeaed state, that the generally-accepted codes to which he unquestionably subscribed constituted a full meed of necessary morality. The purpose of the book is to show the hero's awakening to the realisation that this is not sufficient. Under stimulus, not of the commonplace everyday order that forms the background of the Victorian book, but of the most dramatic and unusual kind, our hero undergoes a variety of religious experience so simple that I doubt whether James ever drew attention to it. From this he emerges with the conviction that only similar experience can save, not just himself, but all mankind, and may, if unusually articulate, express this in terms of a discovery that all men should love one another. The conversion undergone is at about the spiritual level of Jessica's First Prayer, and the intellectual content is apparently geared, like all today's vulgarised digests masquerading as knowledge, to people to whom the absence of intellectual effort seems a positive virtue.
It is easy to see the reason for the present growing popularity of this theme. It is perceived that Communism—accepted as the enemy—has faith. It is believed that only by faith can Com- munism be overcome. What is not realised is that the Communist faith has a more than coincidental similarity to the religion we meet in the Victorian novels, that it is as firmly founded on a closely argued intellectual dogma, as constantly related back to the dogma in every material or spiritual problem that confronts its adherents throughout their lives. Just as Communism can produce an intellectually justified "party line" for every demanded action or belief, so the Victorian religious novelist was prepared to examine the necessary moral attitude of his hero when confronted with situations as various as the justification of the crinoline and doubts about the divinity of Christ. To their minds, as to the Communists, morality must be all-embracing, and the modern reader will still find in their books arguments, cogent and relevant in any dispute about the interpretation of morality. It is impossible to doubt that in the hero of the Victorian religious novel was to be found a positive and well- founded faith capable of standing stalwart against any other that might be matched with it.
But to the new religious hero intellectual justification of his faith is regarded almost as a desecration of it. We may see his faith in action, sustaining him against exceptionally dramatic odds—a homicidal deserter, an inveigling prostitute, a Japanese torture are typical examples. But it is an integral feature of this faith that its most fundamental aspects must be rooted in incom- municable experience. In some of these books it even happens that a deliberate mystery enshrouds it with the introduction of an imperfectly explained character of supernatural Spiritual power, in whom we would seem to be supposed to recognise something approximating to, but not quite the same as, a reincarnation of Jesus. The figure itself may not be introduced, but the mysticism that it symbolises is an unvarying feature. It is the modern religious novelist's substitute for an interpretation of faith in terms of the real moral problems confronting people in the ordinary conditions of their lives. The discovery that we should love our fellow-men is not of immediately perceivable relevance to, for instance, arguments about decency on bathing-, beaches or the validity of universal suffrage. The Communist is equipped to adjudicate on the moral aspects of either ; so was the Victorian religious hero. To both, faith is no more than the starting-point from which determination of the nature. and value of wOrks may proceed.
To all men, even to the atheist, the need for a personal morality is a matter of faith. If we accept the individual and not society as the unit, then the form that this morality shall take must be for each individual a matter of unremitting and ruthlessly logical contemplation. Unquestioningly to accept morality from authority, whether spiritual or temporal, is the ultimate abdication of what we have painfully come to believe is our true nature and the true nature of our cause. The new religious novel, with its underlying plea to accept unquestion- ingly an authority that is by deliberate intent only imperfectly understood, is a terrifying symptom of such an abdication. It represents an ominous widening of the gap between those who believe that logical thought should be applied to problems pro- perly susceptible to it, and those who believe, to quote Leonard Woolf, "that a belief you have no reason for believing is more spiritual than and ethically superior to one for which you can, give a reason."
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