I was set apart by Nature to live alone, and draw comfort from her breast, and hers only.
--Haggard She 8.
By thy name that in hell-fire was written, and burned at the point of thy sword, Thou art smitten, thou God, thou art smitten; thy death is upon thee, O Lord. And the love-song of earth as thou diest resounds through the wind of her wings - Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.
--Swinburne “Hymn of Man” 197-200.
It is hardly a secret that Victorian England suffered a crisis of faith. Thomas Huxley coined the term agnostic during this time, which was widely picked up and adopted as a term for someone who held the position that God was unknowable, even as Huxley protested that “it must be understood that I speak for myself alone; I am not aware that there is any sect of Agnostics; and if there be, I am not its acknowledged prophet or pope” (“Agnosticism” 5). Matthew Arnold lamented the withdrawing of the “sea of faith” in “Dover Beach.” Swinburne ran about enthusiastically proclaiming that man had created gods, and was in turn denounced, his book Poems and Ballads (1866) publicly burned and condemned from the pulpit. And Darwin published first The Origin of Species and then The Descent of Man. The theory of evolution struck a heavy blow to the theory of special creation, and became widely-established in about twenty years.
But what may be less noticed are the ways that such strains of freethought—not all articulated at the same time, not all having the same force, and not all focused on the same thing, especially because they had no “prophet or pope”—affected the image of the body. It might seem as if atheists had opened a door into despair. After all, if one began first to doubt the existence of a special creation of humankind, and then perhaps the existence of God Himself, what hope would one have? The body would decay. There might not be an afterlife. Perhaps, if “the only "soul" known is the brain of man” (Watts “Life” 2), there was no soul either. Immortality had died, and secularists were staring death in the face.
But in many forms of literature affected by freethought—such as Swinburne’s poetry, Haggard’s She, and Charles Watts’s essays—this despair, if present, is mingled with another strain of thought. Secularists had no positive evidence for the existence of immortality. This did not stop them from trying to invent replacements for immortality, vessels that would hold the human mind and personality as the decaying body could not. The replacements in themselves were secular, either devoid of or actively opposed to religious faith, atheist or anti-theist. They were also mortal, and each form of literature in turn had to confront their inferiority to the kind of immortality promised by Christian belief. However, this collapse in turn led to new strains of freethought. Secularists invented their immortality in order to pass beyond it, out of the nostalgia and longing for religion into an entirely new way of thinking about the body and the value of human life.
All these ways of thinking did share a common base, however widely they differed: the natural world bounded them. Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man in part caused this. The books themselves did not promote direct atheism, but in their encouragement of an alternative creation story, they for the first time presented a fully worked-out theory of “creation” in the natural world. If evolution were true, then humankind did not have special bodies different from any other species in the animal kingdom. Those who took evolution as truth must accept that and learn to work within its confines, rather than spending all their time wishing it were not true.
The secular ways of adaptation and learning to get past the despair that the collapse of a religious worldview might bring tended to focus on the human-given value of being human. Humankind might not have a destiny, but this did not empty life of meaning, much less empty the body of meaning. In fact, it is possible to view, through the lens of freethought, the human body as an end in itself, and knowledge about the body and nature as valuable, even vital. Perhaps such knowledge could help to better life, as lovers of science like Charles Watts hoped. Perhaps it could even provide a kind of immortality; knowledge was deeply entwined with many of the early secular attempts at replacing eternity. And perhaps the exaltation of the mind need not mean the denigration of the body, in the way that it would if freethinkers remained in the old mind/body dualism of Christianity. Negotiating new patterns of thought was not easy, nor did it offer certainty—to quote Darwin, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (Descent 2)—but the process of negotiation could adapt itself to new images of nature and new scientific knowledge in a way that the old creed of religion could not.
This uncertainty, double-edged sword though it could be, was vital to the way that secularists accepted and thought about evolution. Concurrent with the disappearance of easy answers was the power to discover new ones. And Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was such an answer, based on the natural world and trusting both in the human powers of observation and in the mind’s ability to draw correct conclusions from those observations. As offered in The Descent of Man (1871), evolution said that:
It is notorious that man is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals. All the bones in his skeleton can be compared with corresponding bones in a monkey, bat, or seal. So it is with his muscles, nerves, blood-vessels and internal viscera. The brain, the most important of all the organs, follows the same law, as shewn by Huxley and other anatomists (Darwin 4).
This view not only disrupted the theory of special creation, “the…doctrine [that] teaches that, during a limited period, God created the universe and man, and that the various phenomena are not the result simply of natural law, but the outcome of supernatural design” (Watts “Evolution” 2), but jumped on it and kicked it to death. In special creation, the “bones” and “brain” of man would have to follow a special pattern. If one accepted man as created in the “image of God,” as Genesis proclaimed, then humans should not show any relation to other animals. Here was science, producing such relations and the theory to support them, and relying on evidence in the natural world and the human mind. It is little wonder that some saw this as blasphemy, or that Watts claimed that “the great mass of those who accept the word [evolution] in its legitimate signification may be looked upon as of a skeptical turn of mind” (“Evolution” 2).
Perhaps skepticism and religion might not have warred with each other so fiercely if the battle were between only science and theological doctrine. However, many thinkers recognized that their very bases as well as their outward forms were opposed. Immortality in the theistic sense depended on faith, on being content to accept that there were some things “man was not meant to know” and trusting in God. Science exalted the human mind’s ability to find out the answers to questions, and brooked no chains on reason. One of the deepest divisions between knowledge and faith had begun, and other freethinkers were to accept the rift as natural and continue with it.
Swinburne, in his “Hymn of Man,” certainly does. “His soul to his soul is a law, and his mind is a light to his mind./ The seal of his knowledge is sure, the truth and his spirit are wed” (150-151). Truth, and trust in the mind to discover that truth, become the holy goals of freethought, and knowledge holds an irresistible fascination, not least as the possible cradle of a new immortality. The mind and the body together host life, which is taken from its sure hold on eternity. Life becomes circumscribed by nature, and the soul is discredited.
Charles Watts points out the dependence of what is usually called “soul” on physical matter, as well as the slipperiness of the term for someone of a skeptical turn of mind, in “Is There a Life Beyond the Grave?” an essay written in 1894:
For instance, I pointed out that the term "soul" has never been defined; that, if we possess one, it is not known in what part of the body it is to be found, or when it enters or when it leaves the human frame; that the only "soul" known is the brain of man, and if that brain does not properly exercise its functions, the manifestations of life will be proportionally impaired (2).
Here the scientific method appears and is rigorously applied, even to questions that before the nineteenth century seemed simply beyond the reach of science. There would be no sense in doing this did not thinkers like Watts accept the natural world as the whole of the world. The soul, if it existed, would have to have some manifestation in the natural world. Science should be able to approach the soul, and if observations it had made on other parts of the body—such as brain damage damaging the “manifestations of life”—did not accord with claims about the soul, then claims about the soul should be doubted.
In proof of this I referred to persons in lunatic asylums who had diseased brains, whose judgment was dethroned, and whose reason had deserted them. Had the soul, I asked, in their case lost its power of control? If so, what is its value? When a drunkard becomes intoxicated and loses all control over himself has his soul lost its power? Again, as regards the "soul" leaving the body, I enquired if it did so immediately at death, if it goes straight to heaven, or hell, without waiting for the judgment day? If it does not leave the body, till some time after death, how can a decaying body retain the soul? To any one of these questions the doctor did not even attempt to give an answer (2).
Questioning became of supreme importance, and knowledge a means out of the traps that some freethinkers saw theism as having laid (such as not being able to question the will of God). If “the doctor” (in this case the theologian Dr. A. B. Westbrook) could not give answers, then the freethinkers would become skeptical of his claims. The brain was the “most important of all the organs,” in Darwin’s words, the only one that could tie observations about the natural world together and offer up some idea of the connections that lay behind them. Seat of personality and whatever a human body had of the soul, it was one of the first sites to which a “freethinking immortality” tried to lay claim. And these ideas exercised a powerful and pervasive influence, creeping even into nominally theistic texts, such as Haggard’s She.
At first, there might seem to be little basis for this claim. After all, She is an openly theistic book which speaks often of the “Power who rules all things” (29), in Holly’s words. And since the narrator character Holly tells the whole book save for the introduction and some scattered footnotes by an “Editor,” he exercises great power over the narrative, even if he doesn’t stand in for Haggard himself. Thoughts similar to secular ones do arise in Ayesha’s speech on page 192:
I see—two new religions!…Mankind asks ever of the skies to vision out what lies behind them. It is terror for the end, and but a subtler form of selfishness—this it is that breeds religions…Naught endues but the world and human nature. Ah! if man would but see that that hope is from within and not from without—that he himself must work out his own salvation! He is there, and within him is the breath of life and a knowledge of good and evil as good and evil is to him. Thereon let him build and stand and erect, and not cast himself before the image of some unknown God, modelled like his poor self, but with a bigger brain to think the evil thing; and a longer arm to do it.
But Holly as narrative voice counters and rejects these. Ayesha, who espouses them, does die, apparently of age long deferred, and Holly chooses to interpret her death as a consequence of her having “opposed herself against the eternal Law, and, strong though she was, by it [she] was swept back to nothingness” (295). The book has its fascinations with death, but a cursory examination will reveal little reason to see death as the end of life. Whether dealing with reincarnation, or the Heaven that Holly tries so earnestly to describe to Ayesha, the narrative appears to prize traditional forms of spiritual immortality.
But the very vigor of that defense of immortality hints at cracks in the calm Christian complacency. Holly, a child of the late nineteenth century, has encountered evolution—“the monkey theory” mentioned on page 8—and materialism. He reflects that Ayesha’s arguments “sounded very like some I have heard in the nineteenth century, and in other places than the caves of Kor…It is weary work enough to argue with an ordinary materialist, who hurls statistics and whole strata of geological facts at your head, whilst you can only buffet him with deductions and instincts and the snowflakes of faith” (193). He has not gone unaffected, as the fragility of the image that he assigns to faith and the solidity of the image he assigns to “facts” show.
Holly does seem to occupy a less confident position in relation to these ideas, and most of all how they affect the conception of the body, than Swinburne’s speakers or Watts. He dances around them in long philosophical meanderings that come back at last into an assurance of Heaven and the existence of the soul. He even uses the observation of nature to assure himself that man’s part in the universe is not so great as all that:
So I lay and watched the stars come out by thousands, till all the immense arch of heaven was sewn with glittering points, and every point a world! Here was a glorious sight by which man might well measure his own insignificance! Soon I gave up thinking about it, for the mind wearies easily when it strives to grapple with the Infinite, and to trace the footsteps of the Almighty as he strides from sphere to sphere, or deduce His purpose from His works (117).
Holly does not seem to question the existence of an Infinite or an Almighty here. Faith and not knowledge rules; there are things man was not meant to know, and “the mind wearies” when it tries to understand them.
Besides, knowledge can have unfortunate consequences:
For what is the first result of man’s increased knowledge interpreted from Nature’s book by the persistent effort of his purblind observation? Is it not but too often to make him question the existence of his Maker, or indeed of any intelligent purpose beyond his own? The truth is veiled, because we can no more look upon her glory than we can upon the sun. It would destroy us. Full knowledge is not for man as man is here, for his capacities, which he is apt to think so great, are indeed but small (118).
Knowledge has become firmly linked to atheism, or at least to skepticism about the existence of “the Maker” and the afterlife. Holly deals with it by requiring knowledge to take a subordinate position to faith. Great knowledge does indeed exist, but man cannot possess it, and thus the goals of the freethinkers and those who love knowledge are forever impossible to achieve.
But, oddly enough, Holly cannot quite forsake the grip of these ideas. The importance of knowledge to him appears even in the letter that the “Editor” receives in the beginning of the novel. Though the tale has profoundly affected both his emotions and Leo’s, he offers the manuscript of their adventures with Ayesha as an example of “a phenomenon which we believe to be of unparalleled interest” (4). Holly has not forsaken knowledge, or the immortality that one might attain because of it. He hands the manuscript to the Editor in order that information about Ayesha—as filtered through his own consciousness—might still reach others, even though Holly does not feel capable of presenting it himself.
Nor has his curiosity about Ayesha ceased, for all his deep emotional involvement with her or the shock and horror of her passing. “What was her real religion?” (4) he wonders. The question appears to be of some importance to him, and indeed he approaches it during the course of the novel, when he curses his own silence: “I thought it best to leave the matter alone, and so sat silent. Many a time since then have I bitterly regretted that I did so, for thereby I lost the only opportunity I can remember having had of ascertaining what Ayesha really believed” (193, Haggard’s emphasis). Apparently Holly does not believe Ayesha really thinks that salvation lies within humanity, any more than some of Swinburne’s readers accepted “That no life lives forever;/ That dead men rise up never” (“The Garden of Proserpine,” 85-86). (“The Garden of Proserpine” appeared in Poems and Ballads in 1866, along with other poems such as “Anactoria” that fiercely questioned the necessity both of afterlife and submitting to a god).
But if he regrets not finding out what “Ayesha really believed,” Holly at least has access to a wonderful store of knowledge that she does share with him. Most of this knowledge deals with Kor, and the dead bodies that surround them. She tells Holly the story of Kor’s passing, reveals the pit containing the bodies of the last mass burial, and speaks often of death, revealing a very secular uncertainty about the “end of ends”:
Behold the lot of man—to the tomb, and to the forgetfulness that hides the tomb, must we all come at last! Even for me, oh Holly, thousands upon thousands of years hence; thousands of years after thou hast gone through the gates and been lost in the mists, a day will dawn whereon I shall die, and be even as thou art and these are. And then what will it avail that I have lived a little longer, holding off death by the knowledge I have wrung from Nature, since at last I too must die… But for us twain and these dead ones shall the end of ends be Life, or shall it be Death? (186-187).
The phrase “lot of man” echoes one of Holly’s own. When he and the others first arrive on the beach near the “head of the Ethiopian,” he watches the sunrise and thinks: “But one day a sunrise will come when we shall be among those who are lost, and then others will watch these glorious rays, and grow sad in the midst of beauty, and dream of Death in the full glow of arising Life! For such is the lot of man” (57). And the uncertainty Ayesha displays comes forth in the essay “Is There a Life Beyond the Grave?” by Charles Watts, written a few years later. “In the first place, what are the Secular views as to death? They are these. That there is not sufficient evidence to justify the assertion that there is, or that there is not, a life beyond the grave” (17).
Secular thought, therefore, does not always offer the absolute certainty of no afterlife. In fact, it rarely offers a certainty after all, despite earnest attempts to find one. Man may still have some special place in the animal kingdom—but the evidence does not point to a divinely created one. An afterlife may exist—but no positive evidence for it does, and therefore Watts can offer little more than an “I don’t know.” Immortality may be possible—but the means of achieving it no longer depend solely on faith.
Perhaps because immortality seemed still an attainable goal, various secular texts and texts influenced by secular thought, like She, made an attempt to retain it, though within the bounds of nature. The Editor comes up with a possible explanation of Holly’s strange story as “a bold attempt to portray the possible results of practical immortality, informing the substance of a mortal who yet drew her strength from Earth” (5). Among the words here, “practical” and “Earth” may draw the eye. Despite the seemingly fantastic aspects of Ayesha’s story, Haggard takes care to establish the general framework and her means of overcoming death in the natural, mundane, physical world. (This fits well with Ayesha’s insistence to Holly that “I deal not in magic—there is no such thing. ‘Tis only a force that thou dost not understand” [207]).
As the tale progresses, it becomes steadily more fantastic, and so the language of the narrator, confronted by terrifying uncertainty, slips steadily into the Providential. Where Holly once called himself “gifted by Nature with iron and abnormal strength and considerable intellectual powers” (8), by the end of the story he thinks of “all the strength that it has pleased Providence to give me in such abundance” (277). The answers offered by knowledge of the natural world are changeable and contingent on new discoveries tomorrow. It is perhaps no wonder that Ayesha’s existence, though she claims it rests on natural principles, induces a longing for the less changeable certainties of faith in Holly. But this does not change Ayesha’s answers to Holly’s questions, or even Holly’s representation of them.
And, ultimately, it does not change the power that Death (often so capitalized) exerts over Holly. When he beholds the dead of Kor, particularly a mother cradling her child, he invokes the Everlasting, but thinks of them as “flowers…[which] have only bloomed, to be gathered to the grave” (183). When Ayesha offers to show him her means of achieving immortality, he speaks of his “hope for an immortality to which the life span that perchance thou canst confer will be but as a finger’s length laid against the measure of the great world,” an immortality “free from the bonds that here must tie my spirit down” (252). Yet not even that is allowed to escape challenge. It meets Ayesha’s opposition when she sneers that “Thou dreamest that thou shalt pluck the star. I believe it not, and I think thee a fool, my Holly, to throw away the lamp” (253), the star being the unreachable or perhaps even nonexistent dream of a faith-based immortality, and the lamp the proven means she can offer. Holly not only fails to convert Ayesha to his position, but retreats into silence again. And, perhaps most tellingly, when he thinks of Ayesha and Job near the end of the story, he does not think of them as spirits, drifting free towards Heaven or Hell, but as “in the presence of the very well and spring of Life, but gathered to the cold company of Death” (299). He has felt the power of Death, and he cannot entirely ignore it or overcome it.
Nor can he resist trying to escape Death, though it be through exaltation of the mind and of human knowledge about the world. Holly sends the manuscript to the Editor in order to share and spread knowledge of Ayesha. He doubts the human mind, saying “the mind wearies easily when it strives to grapple with the Infinite, and to trace the footsteps of the Almighty…Knowledge is to the strong, and we are weak” (117-118). Yet when Billali asks him why he and his companions have come to the country of the Amahagger, Holly declares, “We came to find new things…We are tired of the old things; we have come up out of the sea to know that which is unknown. We are of a brave race that fear not death…that is, if we can get a little fresh information before we die” (78).
Here is a specific kind of “practical immortality,” of survival within the bonds of the natural world. Holly initially rejects immortality when Ayesha offers it to him because “A stony-hearted mother is our earth…Hard it is to die, because our delicate flesh doth shrink back from the worm it will not feel, and from that unknown which the winding-sheet doth curtain from our view” (250-251). However, the immortality of knowledge, and of words, and of creation, has none of these disadvantages. As the body as natural nexus reveals the limitations of mortality and whispers about the limitations of faith, the mind offers an escape. Instead of “the forgetfulness of the tomb,” someone who passes on ideas may endure in memory. He may even be, as Sappho is in Swinburne’s “Anactoria:”
“…one with all these things, With all high things for ever; and my face Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place, Cleave to men’s lives, and waste the days thereof With gladness and much sadness and long love… They shall know me as ye who have known me here, Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year When I love thee; and they shall praise me, and say “She hath all time as all we have our day, Shall she not live and have her will”—even I? Yea, though thou diest, I say I shall not die” (276-280, 285-291).
Like Sappho, Ayesha has the power to live past the ages and “have her will” over the men around her. And, like Sappho, who has the power to “brand [her lover’s lips] with immortality” (“Anactoria” 203) by mentioning Anactoria in song, Ayesha has the power to offer “life—not life eternal, for that none can give, but life and youth that shall endure for thousands upon thousands of years” (239). This seems like immortality after all, though not of the kind traditionally celebrated in religious faith, and so strenuously put forth by Holly in opposition to Ayesha.
Its differences, as well as allowing it to sideslip the bonds of religion, make it more fragile and bring it close to the cradle of physical life, the body, even as the mind makes shift to escape it. Like the body, a secular immortality is capable of disintegrating into nothingness. Sappho, after stressing her immortality, laments it: “Alas, that neither moon nor snow nor dew/ Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through,/ Assuage me nor allay me nor appease,/ Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease” (“Anactoria” 295-298). Life on Holly’s “stony-hearted earth” does not always offer solace; nor does a long life guarantee happiness. Ayesha, bound to one place by her sorrow for two millennia, and then dying at the very threshold of her triumph, makes this point very clear. Indeed, one can read Ayesha’s death scene as the triumph of mortality and thwarted nature as easily as the triumph of the “Providence” to which Holly chooses to attribute it.
Job’s reaction to Ayesha’s sudden collapse seems to lend itself to such a reading as well. “She’s shrivelling up! she’s turning into a monkey!” he cries, and then falls down in “a fit” (293). At the moment of death, Ayesha returns to an apparent ancestral form, changing appearance but not nature; Haggard takes care to emphasize through the narrative voice of Holly that “it was the same woman” (294, italics in original). Ayesha has not altered kind, only appearance, losing the dazzling beauty that has bound Leo and Holly both to her. She has not lost immortality, for she was never immortal in the first place. Before entering the Fire, she tells Holly and Leo that “This I know…that my life is but prolonged and made more bright. It cannot live for aye” (282). This is still a gift that Leo and, in the end, Holly are prepared to accept—but it is not complete deathlessness. It has the inherent fragility of all secular replacements for the afterlife. They can end; they themselves are mortal, lasting only as long as words or nature or the memories of other mortals.
What, then, is left, if not immortality, replacements for it, or the uncertainty that sometimes, as in Holly’s case, forces a retreat into faith? Perhaps the focus on mortal human life that Watts suggests and Swinburne, in some of his poems, actively promotes. Even Ayesha offers an answer that does not depend on the Spirit of Life itself, or God, or eternal physical life: “There is love—love which makes all things beautiful, and doth breathe divinity into the very dust we tread” (251).
Swinburne offers love up in much the same way. The creatures of nature know love in a way that death-focused humans cannot know, and he suggests that humans imitate them. In “To a Seamew,” speaking to a bird whom he intensely identified with, his speaker says:
We are fallen, even we, whose passion On earth is nearest thine; Who sing, and cease from flying; Who live, and dream of dying; Grey time, in time’s grey fashion, Bids wingless creatures pine: We are fallen, even we, whose passion On earth is nearest thine (73-80)
People who “live, and dream of dying” do no one any good, and are “fallen.” They need to focus on “earth,” Swinburne suggests, and live as mortals, even if that means giving up immortality. Sappho, too, recalls the very physical love she shared with Anactoria, and vows that she would give up the power of song that guarantees her continued life for it: “Ah, that my lips were tuneless lips, but pressed/ To the bruised blossom of thy scourged white breast! / Ah, that my mouth for Muses’ milk were fed/ On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled!” (“Anactoria” 105-108). Swinburne may link love with death and pain, but it is still an option, not devalued but made even more important and intense if life does not last forever.
Along with love, freedom matters in Swinburne; and here he often takes it to mean the freedom that he believes will come to man without the constraint of obeying the gods. In his poem “Hertha,” published in Songs before Sunrise (1871), he devotes a stanza to this concept, and makes it even more subversive by having the goddess Hertha speak it:
I bid you but be; I have need not of prayer; I have need of you free As your mouths of mine air; That my heart may be greater within me, beholding the fruits of me fair (156-610).
Without bowing to the gods, or with a god who has “need not of prayer,” mankind can begin to achieve true greatness, which Swinburne in another part of “Hertha” calls “God.” “But this thing is God,/To be man with thy might,/To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life as the light” (73-75). There will be no more bowing, but straight growth, and Swinburne promotes this as not only a consequence of the loss of God, but a most desirable one. The polytheistic context of his ideas in poems like “Hertha” becomes, in other poems, an openly atheistic one, as in “Hymn of Man” where his speaker claims that “Therefore the God that ye make you is grievous, and gives not aid, / Because it is but for your sake that the God of your making is made. / Thou and I and he are not gods made men for a span, / But God, if a God there be, is the substance of men which is man” (41-44). The existence of new ideas and men who will be new things matters far more than the loss of immortality.
Approaching the question from an agnostic position also seems to accord with reality as the secularists see it—that is, with natural reality, observed with the senses and coordinated in the brain. Charles Watts, writing twenty-three years after Songs before Sunrise, sees no reason to positively affirm or deny the existence of an afterlife; it is existence on earth that matters. “By making the best of this life, physically, morally, and intellectually, we are pursuing the wisest course, whatever the issues in reference to a future life may be” (“Life” 8). Losing immortality does not cheapen life, or should not, and does not turn secularists into those who long for suicide. Watts goes on to say, “If there should be another life, the Secularist must share it with his opponent. Our opinions do not affect the reality in the slightest degree. If we are to sleep forever, we shall so sleep despite the belief in immortality: and if we are to live for ever, we shall so live despite the belief that possibly, death ends all” (25). The question of the afterlife cannot be settled without positive evidence. Watts considers the evidence offered by one particular theistic thinker, Dr. A. B. Westbrook, and does not find it sufficient. Since he cannot find anything that satisfies him in this, he turns to what he feels is the best course: concentrating on life on earth. This is the true replacement for immortality, and it comes about by abandoning the focus on death and turning the gaze to life, which should be as free and moral as possible.
This was often Swinburne’s answer as well, and his sometimes outspoken anti-theism showed up here if nowhere else. "Freedom… expects no non-natural message from above or from without; but only that which comes from within -faith, born of man, in man, which passes in contagious revelation from spirit again to spirit; without authority and without sign" (cit. in Kuduk “Sword” 261). Using the words of religion—“faith,” “revelation,” and “spirit” among them—he asserts that the only faith worth having is faith in humanity, in a declaration remarkably similar to Ayesha’s ideas about faith in humanity.
Science, too, has its faith and its initiates. Watts sometimes declares an almost breathless confidence in the power of science to settle the conflict between religion and non-religion permanently, or at least rid humanity of harmful superstitions: “The flood of science will sweep all false beliefs away, as surely as the morning sun disperses the vapors of the night” (Watts “Life” 11). This returns to the idea of the exaltation of the mind. If humans cannot find immortality through thought, due to thought’s and memory’s inherent fragility, then they will find a better life through it. Science takes on the purifying and cleansing force that fire has had in some religious traditions, or that prayer and confession might have in the Christian religion. Science offers hope that the Victorian ideal of progress can continue, though not riding on the wings that it used to ride on. It becomes, to some extent, the teleology of freethought. Science will triumph over religion because that is its destiny, just as it was once Britain’s destiny to rule the world. And, at the same time, it will lend itself to the continual betterment of human life. The more idealistic strains of this thought even take on some of the idealism of religion. “In transforming society from what it was to what it is, the teachings of science have proved more efficacious than the preaching of sermons” (Watts “Christianity” 4). There is little thought given to the negative consequences that might arise, just as there was (presumably) little thought given to the possible consequences of religion when it was first preached.
Running alongside the blithe confidence that Watts shows here is an amused contempt for religion and religious thought perhaps most openly expressed in one of Ayesha’s many speeches to Holly. Here the division between “knowledge” and “faith” becomes clear again, and Holly’s distrust of knowledge is fully returned, this time from the other side of the fence.
Thou seest with the eye of Faith, gazing on the brightness that is to be, through the painted-glass of thy imagination. Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and this many-colored pigment of imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them doth agree with another. I could tell thee—but there, what is the use? Why rob a fool of his bauble? (Haggard She 252).
Ayesha here scorns the subjective, personalized world-view of faith. Her assessment of it does not change Holly’s assessment of it, nor his interpretation of She’s death at the end of the book as a punishment of Providence. Still, it is somewhat puzzling, if the story supposedly cleaves entirely to theism, to find the character with the most knowledge in the book speaking so. Just as secularism had to retreat from considering immortality as a viable option because there is no way to attain it without belief, so it seems that Holly, as narrative voice, has to retreat from obtaining knowledge because it would threaten his faith.
There are, in fact, some strains of freethought that are not so much atheist as anti-theist, and impatient for the gods to die and humanity to start living its new and better life. Swinburne’s poem “Before a Crucifix” returns to the familiar images of bowing before gods: “Women with labour-loosened knees,/ With gaunt backs bowed by servitude,/ Stop, shift their loads, and pray, and fare/ Forth with souls easier for the prayer” (3-6). Here, Swinburne takes care to contrast the “backs bowed by servitude” and “souls [made] easier for the prayer.” The Christ image the women pray before helps the soul, but not the body, something Swinburne despises. He thinks that humanity has created gods in their own image, and thus, needlessly created another source of oppression:
God of this grievous people, wrought After the likeness of their race, By faces like thine own besought, Thine own blind helpless eyeless face, I too, that have nor tongue nor knee For prayer, I have a word to thee (13-18).
Here, the God of the women does not have a separate existence. His face is “helpless” and “eyeless,” and he cannot answer their prayers, help their bodies, or even prevent his own weathering. Swinburne chooses to treat his existence as a fact in this poem, but even then infects it with his own characteristic desire for freedom from theistic thought. “Hast thou brought freedom upon earth?” (40) he demands, and answers in the negative. Instead, Christ’s priests “scourge us with thy words for whips,/ They brand us with thy words for brands” (51-52), and hardly live like Christians should, or even as Christians supposedly do. The only choice is to forsake the theism that has not helped, and start living a different, mortal life.
To do that, Swinburne’s speaker feels, one must realize that “this dead God here against my face/ Hath help for no man” (157-158) and the god himself must “not look upon the sun;/ The sun grows haggard at thy name./ Come down, be done with, cease, give o'er;/ Hide thyself, strive not, be no more” (195-198). If Christ still exists, he shouldn’t. He should, in fact, accept his own non-existence (“cease, give o’er”) so that the human race can go on and grow towards a new future.
That future, proclaimed the freethinkers, will have morality, and a morality that relies on reason rather than a code of theistic morals. This they continued to proclaim, even though for centuries before the nineteenth century, theists had thought it was impossible for an atheist to be moral. “Swift argued that a known atheist should not be trusted with public office because "It is impossible for a Man who openly declares against Religion, to give any reasonable Security that he will not be false and cruel, and corrupt, whenever a Temptation offers, which he valueth more than he does the Power wherewith he was trusted” (Gardiner “Horse” 237). There existed an absolute standard of morality, at least apparently, in the Christian code. One lived in accordance with this code in order to please God and have eternal life. One who believed in neither would have no reason to comply with this code, and therefore no one could trust an atheist.
But by the nineteenth century, there were signs that this attitude was beginning to change. Holly in She, though convinced of immortality and the existence of God, acknowledges that “morality [is] a matter of latitude” (82). The absolute code still prevailed in many areas, but though accepted as absolute for British society, some thinkers had begun to play with the idea that it might not be absolute for other societies.
Haggard approaches the idea again with Ayesha, “To other eyes than ours the evil may be the good and the darkness more beautiful than the day, or all alike be fair” (203), she claims, and the puzzling ending of the book in some ways supports her. Ayesha the fair dies, but leaves Leo and Holly loving her. There is also a hint at the end of the book that Ayesha may return, conquering the death that was supposed to be her punishment.
With Leo it is different, and often and often I bitterly envy him his happy lot, for if She was right, and her wisdom and knowledge did not fail her at the last, which arguing from the precedent of her own case, I think most unlikely, he has some future to look forward to… I am content to give what I have given and must always give, and take in payment those crumbs that fall from my mistress’s table, the memory of a few kind words, the hope one day in the far undreamed future of a sweet smile or two of recognition, a little show of friendship, and a little show of thanks for my devotion to her—and Leo (300).
The uncertainty that results from a shattering of the sure supports for the Christian faith remains.
Dealing with the uncertainty is not the work of faith, but of logic, reason, and science. Here, too, the mind will prove important to the non-believer. Reason was hailed as the deciding factor of non-theist morality in Swift’s time—“For in temptation, the atheist relies on reason, while the one who has faith relies on something better, grace and hope” (Gardiner “Horse” 237)—and only became more important as the centuries went on. Reason allied itself with republicanism in such thinkers as Swinburne, who “in the wake of the American and French Revolutions…came to believe that what Blake called the "mind-forg'd manacles" of ideological oppression supported the brute force of the state” (Kuduk “Sword” 253). Theism had imprisoned the mind with its manacles, the thinking went, and so a morality free of it would need to rely on freeing the mind as well. A “dedication to equality” and “a truly egalitarian politics” (Kuduk “Sword” 253) completed the circle. Thrown back on himself, with no immortality, no absolute certainty, and a body that decayed when nature decreed it so, man should embrace equality and new principles that affirmed the mind.
Strains of atheistic and scientific thought in the nineteenth century thus had a strange and doubled affect on the conceptions of the mind and the body. On the one hand, they seemed to lower the human body’s value. “It must never be forgotten, as Tyndall has very ably pointed out, that the matter of which the organic body is built up "is that of inorganic nature. There is no substance in the animal tissues that is not primarily derived from the rocks, the water, and the air"” (Watts “Evolution” 4). Humans could no longer claim a separate place or a separate destiny from animals, even after death. And the exaltation of the mind might cast a shade over the body as well. After all, could an atheist who valued reason and science as the foundations of truth and even the mainstays of morality really value the decaying, organic body?
Yes. When those freethinkers used their minds to acquire knowledge of the natural, physical, mundane, decaying world, they were doing more than accepting that this was the world they knew and the only one they knew at the moment, even if not the only one there was. Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, describes his reaction to the South American trees around him: “The trees were very lofty, and remarkable, compared with those of Europe, from the whiteness of their trunks. I see by my note-book, "wonderful and beautiful, flowering parasites," invariably struck me as the most novel object in these grand scenes” (14). Nature becomes a source of wonder and beauty, perhaps in spite of, perhaps because, it is no longer only a shadow of Heaven and the things to come, but because it is an end in itself.
Union with nature and the man-made, as opposed to the divine, becomes evident in some freethinker texts. The Sappho of Swinburne’s “Anactoria” describes the long list of things she will become part of, all of them either natural or man-made:
Blossom of branches, and on each high hill Clear air and wind, and under in clamorous vales Fierce noises of the fiery nightingales, Buds burning in the sudden spring like fire, The wan washed sand and the waves’ vain desire, Sails seen like blown white flowers at sea, and words That bring tears swiftest, and long notes of birds Violently singing till the whole world sings - I Sappho shall be one with all these things… (268-276).
By no longer separating themselves from the natural world in the way that the idea of special creation demanded, perhaps the freethinkers could attain a kind of natural unity. It would mean giving up the idea of immortality. It would mean exalting the mind, and no longer seeing the human body as made in the image of God. But it need not mean giving in to despair, or casting the body down into the dust.
Secular conviction of mortality, then, meant coming to terms with it, accepting the uncertainty and dealing with it, rather than trying to conquer it, retreating into faith, or inventing a substitute for immortality. In some ways, as with Watts’s acknowledgment that no positive evidence for the afterlife or against the afterlife exists, this might seem a mere accommodation of reality. On the other hand, some strains of thought, like Swinburne’s love of freedom and Watts’s linking of science to the sun, depict freethinkers as Ayeshas before their Leos. “The very excess and splendor of her mind led her by means of some strange physical reaction to worship at the shrine of matter” (Haggard She 6). Mind and body unite as the cradles of physical life, and the acceptance of their union and their eventual death turns to joy.
With joy more fierce and sweeter Than joys we deem divine Their lives, by time untarnished, Are girt about and garnished, Who match the wave’s full metre And drink the wind’s wild wine With joy more fierce and sweeter Than joys we deem divine (Swinburne “To a Seamew” 105-112).
_____________. The Voyage of the Beagle. Available at http://www.infidels.org/library/ historical/charles_darwin/voyage_of_beagle/index.shtml. 14.
Gardiner, Anne Barbeau. “’Be ye as the horse!': Swift, Spinoza, and the society of virtuous atheists.” Studies in Philology (97.2) (Spring 2000): p.229-253. .
Haggard, H. Rider. She. Ed. Karlin, David. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 332 pages.
Huxley, Thomas. “Agnosticism.” Part of Christianity and Agnosticism. Available at http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_huxley/ huxley_and_wace/index.shtml.
Kuduk, Stephanie. ‘"A Sword of a Song": Swinburne's Republican aesthetics in Songs before Sunrise.’” Victorian Studies: an interdisciplinary journal of social, political, and cultural studies (43:2) (Winter 2001): p.253-278.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “Anactoria.” In The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle. Ed. Lang, Cecil Y. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. 487-495.
________________________. “Before a Crucifix.” Available at http://library28.tripod.com/17-6.html.
_________________________. “The Garden of Proserpine.” In The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle. Ed. Lang, Cecil Y. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. 362.
__________________________. “Hertha.” In The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle. Ed. Lang, Cecil Y. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. 368-374.
__________________________. “Hymn of Man.” Available at http://library28.tripod.com/17-7.html
________________________. “To a Seamew.” In The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle. Ed. Lang, Cecil Y. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. 410-413.
Watts, Charles. “Christianity and Civilization.” Available at http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_watts/christianity_and_civilization.html. 16 pages.
___________. “Evolution and Special Creation.” Available at http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_watts/index.shtml. 13 pages.
___________. “Is There Life Beyond the Grave?” Available at http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_watts/index.shtml. 10 pages.
