Abstract
An outspoken critic of excessive emotionalism, whether its origin be religious or otherwise, Leslie Stephen nevertheless experienced during his crisis of faith the pain and anguish to which countless Victorians attest in their novels, poetry, memoirs, and letters.* Speaking through the protagonist of The Nemesis of Faith (1849), J.A. Froude told his readers that those who treat doubters like himself so coldly would be far more sympathetic could they see ‘the tears streaming down his cheeks’ when he recalled the peacefulness of his lost childhood faith.1 A.H. Clough, whose poetic ability seemed to be devoted to the elegant depiction of the agony of decision in a time of crisis, asked in 1851 if man’s purpose were ‘to spend uncounted years of pain/Again, again and yet again/In working out, in heart and brain/The problem of our being here’.2 Perhaps most vivid of all is Mrs Humphry Ward’s description in Robert Elsmere (1888) of the trials of an earnest Anglican minister in the process of losing his faith in conventional Christianity. Coming to terms with the idea of a purely human Christ ‘broke his heart’, and the ensuing three months, ‘marked by anguished mental struggle’, were ‘the bitterest months of Elsmere’s life’.3
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Notes
J.A. Froude, The Nemesis of Faith (1849) 2nd edn (London, 1849) 107.
Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘To Spend Uncounted Years of Pain’, in Victorian Poetry and Poetics, eds Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange (Boston, Mass., 1968) 365.
Mrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere (1888) 3 vols, Westmoreland Edition (Boston and New York, 1911) 2: 49. (Hereafter cited as RE.)
Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses (New York and London, 1977) 454; R.M. Schieder, ‘Loss and Gain? The Theme of Conversion in Late Victorian Fiction’, Victorian Studies, 9 (1965) 36; Enid Huws Jones, Mrs. Humphry Ward (London, 1973) 83. See also Margaret Maison, The Victorian Vision (New York, 1961), 255, 268; David Wee, The Forms of Apostasy: The Rejection of Orthodox Christianity in the British Novel, 1880–1900 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984) 80. Peterson is far more careful in his assessment of the significance of Robert Elsmere. Although he sees Robert as bearing ‘the heavy symbolic burden of being the representative modern doubter’, he is not willing to view Robert’s crisis of faith as a paradigm for the entire Victorian period. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus he regards as the more important spiritual autobiography of the early Victorian age, as therein is found an experience recognised by many readers as an expression of their own spiritual doubts and longings. For the same reason Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Newman’s Apologia are emblematic of the mid-Victorian age, and Robert Elsmere claims a similar position for the late Victorian period (William S. Peterson, Victorian Heretic [Leicester, 1976] 132, 14).
W.E. Gladstone, ‘“Robert Elsmere” and the Battle of Belief’, Nineteenth Century, 23 (1888) 767; [Henry Wace,] ‘Robert Elsmere and Christianity’, Quarterly Review, 167 (October 1888) 273.
Peterson, Victorian Heretic, 160; Basil Willey, ‘How “Robert Elsmere” Struck Some Contemporaries’, Essays and Studies, 10 (1957) 56; Peterson, Victorian Heretic, 159, 221–2. In 1909 Mrs Ward estimated that nearly one million copies of Robert Elsmere had circulated in English-speaking countries.
Janet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (New York, 1923) 75.
Mrs Humphry Ward, A Writer’s Recollections, 2 vols (New York and London, 1918) 2: 93.
Schieder, ‘Loss and Gain?’, 34. Considering Ward’s popularity with the Victorian reading public and her tendency to act as the mouthpiece of the spirit of the age, she has been relatively neglected by scholars until recently (see Esther Marian Greenwell Smith, Mrs. Humphry Ward [Boston, Mass., 1980] 142). One explanation for the decline in influence after her death stems from the very topicality of her work. By centring on a burning question of the day she assured her books immediate success, but in the process fated them to eventual obscurity. The fortunes of Mrs Ward’s reputation resemble those of Herbert Spencer, whose importance has also recently been recognised on the grounds that his influence was pervasive though he now makes dull reading.
Ward, Writer’s Recollections, 1: 141. Ironically, what was for Pattison his own method of coping with religious crisis, faith in learning and the critical intellect, touched off Mrs Ward’s crisis of faith (see Duncan Nimmo, ‘Learning against Religion, Learning as Religion: Mark Pattison and the “Victorian Crisis of Faith”’, in Religion and Humanism, ed. Keith Robbins [Oxford, 1981] 311–24).
Mrs Humphry Ward to Mandell Creighton, 13 March 1888 (Pusey House Library, as cited in Williams S. Peterson, ‘Mrs. Humphry Ward on “Robert Elsmere”: Six New Letters’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 [November 1970] 591).
Frederick Pollock, ‘Biographical’, in William Kingdon Clifford, Lectures and Essays, 2 vols, ed. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (London, 1879) 1: 32.
Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols (New York, 1904) 1: 173.
Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of T.H. Huxley (1900) 3 vols (London, 1913) 1: 10; Bruce Gordon Murphy, Thomas Huxley and His New Reformation (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977) 17.
T.H. Huxley’s Diary of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Rattlesnake, ed. Julian Huxley (Garden City, NY, 1936) 278.
T.H. Huxley, ‘Mr. Balfour’s Attack on Agnosticism II’, in Huxley: Prophet of Science, ed. Houston Peterson (London, New York, and Toronto, 1932) 315.
Tyndall Papers (Royal Institution of Great Britain, London), journals of John Tyndall, 220, 216; correspondence with Thomas Archer Hirst, 15 (R.I. MSS T., 31/B4, 12), 112 (R.I. MSS T., 31/B8, 38); Arthur Stewart Eve and C.H. Creasey, Life and Work of John Tyndall (London, 1945) 70.
Mrs Humphry Ward, New Forms of Christian Education (New York, 1898).
Leslie Stephen, Some Early Impressions (1924; London, 1952) 54.
The essays by James Moore and George Levine have already addressed facets of this issue. See also Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore, 1987). Here I shall concentrate on those points that pertain specifically to a comparison of the thought of Mrs Ward and the agnostics.
Ward, Writer’s Recollections, 2: 174; The Letters of John Fiske, ed. Ethel F. Fiske (New York, 1940) 479; Clifford, Lectures and Essays, 2: 253–85.
Leslie Stephen, Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking (London, 1873) 7; John Tyndall, New Fragments (New York, 1896) 29.
Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays (London, 1893) 302, 353–5.
Mary A. Ward, ‘The New Reformation: A Dialogue’, Nineteenth Century, 25 (1889) 479.
Mrs Humphry Ward, ‘Sin and Unbelief’, North American Review, 148 1889) 177.
ibid., 178.
Huxley, Life and Letters of T.H. Huxley, 3: 107. In his ‘Agnosticism: A Rejoinder’ (1889), a sequel to his ‘Agnosticism’, Huxley thanked Mrs Ward for saving him time by responding so powerfully to many of Wace’s points (see Thomas H. Huxley, Science and Christian Tradition [London, 1909] 263).
T.H. Huxley, The Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Henry Huxley, ed. Sir Michael Foster and E. Ray Lankester, 5 vols (London, 1898–1903) 2: 393.
L. Huxley, Life and Letters of T.H. Huxley, 2: 111; T.H. Huxley, Science and Education, 1893; New York and London, 1914) 191–2.
P.O.G. White, ‘Three Victorians and the New Reformation’, Theology, 69 (August 1966) 352–8.
Mary A. Ward, ‘The New Reformation: II. A Conscience Clause for the Laity’, Nineteenth Century, 46 (1899) 668.
Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978) 257.
Peter d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914: Religion, Class, and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England (Princeton, 1968) 177.
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© 1990 Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman
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Lightman, B. (1990). Robert Elsmere and the Agnostic Crises of Faith. In: Helmstadter, R.J., Lightman, B. (eds) Victorian Faith in Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10974-6_10
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