Victorian Era: Faith As Seen
Through Poetry
Science and
Industrialism
January 10, 2016
Vince Tollers
University Presbyterian Church
January-February, 2016
Scheduled Topics
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January 3
January 10
January 17
January 24
January 31
February 7
February 14
Introduction and Change
Science and Industrialism
Education and religion
God and Christ
Nature
Sense of self
Romance/love (St. Valentine’s
Day)
The Victorian Challenge: Change
• Sense of self in the universe
• Science and industrialization
• Religion and education
• England’s place in the world: social justice
• War
Background
• Monarchs
• Leading characteristics
• Dateline of poets and
novelists
Monarch and Events
Victoria: 1937-1901
1830–48: stressful growth--first
railways and Reform Parliament
1848–70: prosperity, optimism, and
stability
1870–1901: breakdown of internal
and external compromises
Edward VII: 1901-10
1901-19 modernism meets
indolence and indifference
George V: 1910-36
WWI (1914-19) Old World ends
Victoria and Albert
Science and Industrialism
James Watts’ steam engine 1775
William Blake
1757
1827
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806
1861
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809
1892
Edward Fitzgerald
1809
1883
Charles Dickens
1812
1870
Robert Browning
1812
1889
George Eliot
1819
1880
Matthew Arnold
1822
1888
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
1828
1882
Christiana Rossetti
1830
1894
James Thomson
1834
1882
Edward Swinburne
1837
1909
Thomas Hardy
1840
1928
Gerard Manley Hopkins
1844
189
Henley
1849
1903
Robert Louis Stevenson
1850
1894
Oscar Wilde
1854
1900
Francis Thompson
1857
1907
A. E. Housman
1859
1936
William Butler Yeats
1865
1939
Rudyard Kipling
1865
1936
T. S. Eliot
1888
1965
Wilfred Owens
1893
1918
W. H. Auden
1907
1973
New Sense of Self in the World
• Scientific advances in biology and geography
– Changing sense of time and space
• Industrialization/technological shifts
• Population explosion and shifts
• Religious reforms
View of Time Shapes Our Response
– Cosmically
– Religiously
– Nationally
Turning to the Poets
Causes/Types of Change
• Great people (Carlyle)
• Progression of events/ scientific principles
(Tennyson and Buckle/Green)
• Cyclical (Arnold and Yeats)
• The gods (Hardy)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Wrote the songs the tribe learned to sing.
• “Locksley Hall” and “Ulysses” discussed last
week.
– See slides on CHUPC>Education website
Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
•Dover Beach (1851)
•Probably composed 1849
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Poet, novelist, short
fiction writer,
dramatist
The Darkling Thrush
The Oxen
The Dynasts
From
At once a voice arose among
The Darkling Thrush
The bleak twigs overhead
(1900)
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen.
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few believe
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve
"Come; see the oxen kneel
"In the lonely barton by yonder comb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
The Oxen
(1915)
Immanent Will in Hardy
• Central to several of his poems
– Most fully expressed in The Dynasts
• A cosmic force with an indiscernible purpose
working toward its own historical purpose
SHADE OF THE EARTH
What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
It works unconsciously, as heretofore,
Eternal artistries in Circumstance,
Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,
Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,
And not their consequence.
Forescene of
The Dynasts
(1904, 06, 08)
The Convergence of the Twain
Thomas Hardy (1912)
(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
The Second Coming (1919)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Cyclical Time and Human Development
in Yeats’ Poetry and A Vision
• Gyre—like a tornado
– History in 2000 year cycles
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Athenians: 500 BC
Romans/Christians: 0
Byzantines: 500
European High Renaissance: 1500
New Age after WWI:
• Humans constantly developing: incarnation
This Week:
Science and
Industrialism
“Science and religion are not at odds. Science is
simply too young to understand.”
Dan Brown, Angels and Demons
and DaVinci Code
“Science without religion is lame,
religion without science is blind.”
Albert Einstein
Denominations on Science and Industry
High
R Catholic
science is
temporal;
religion is
spiritual
Broad
Low
Church of England/Anglican
Methodist/
Presbyterian
fundamentalists
science not in
science conflicts
conflict with faith
with the Bible, the
source of knowing God
Psalm 8 (NIV)
3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
4 What is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
5
6
7
You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you
put everything under their feet:
all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild…
William Blake (1757–1827)
(Example of mysticism)
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Natural World Challenges Faith
• Victorian public first to grasp
– John Galsworthy in the Forsythe sage (1906-22)—
Nobody read Darwin, yet knew his theory
• Victorians > today: religious answers?
– Deep space: dark matter and the Big Bang
• Why are we important to God in this cosmic vastness
and infinite space?
– DNA—biochemistry
• Should we alter life at the molecular level?
Victorians Diminished in Space
• Copernicus said Earth revolves around the sun
(1543)
• Victorians saw 6-7 planets visible to human eye.
Telescope found 3 more
• Uranus (1781)
• Neptune (1846)
• Pluto (1930)
(Bob Dunham captured what space means to
Presbyterians in his recent sermon)
How the Victorians saw in Orion’s Belt
Today, as seen through the Hubbell telescope.
This is a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth
regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula.
Origins of true faith
1. More than we deserve
2. Consciousness of sin
3. Awe and wonder:
Just try to watch a baby being born or gaze into a star-filled
night or stand at the ridge of a canyon—just try anything
that inescapably confronts you with the power and beauty
of the universe…. The move from what exists to what
caused that existence is another origin of all true faith.
Rabbi Marc Gellman
God Squad in the N&O, January 7, 2016
James Webb: Replaces Hubbell in 2018
[H]alf of the 200 billion stars just in our Milky Way
have planetary systems, so a basic question of
religion — Where did we come from? — leads to
another: Are we — carbon- and water-based,
oxygen-breathing creatures — alone?
George Will
October 4, 2015
Victorians Diminished in Time
• 5th-6th C BC
• 17th C
• 19th C
• Today
Jewish writers shape Genesis 1 & 2:
creation stories to tell their history
Life starts at evening on Saturday,
October 22, 4004 BC. (Bishop
Ussher of Armitage, Ireland)
Geology and biology push back
origin of time by eons
11-18 billion
• Began at the Big Bang
• Half of Americans believe world less
than 10,000 years old
Industrialization:
The New Order
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur (1869?), last poem
in Idylls of the King (1859-85)
Ages in Western Civilization
• Agrarian – to 1750s
• Industrial – 1750s to 1960s
• Information –1960s >
“Let the great world spin for ever down the
ringing grooves of change”
(Tennyson: Locksley Hall, 1842)
Inventions
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Textiles (1733-93)
Communication (Morse’s telegraph, 1837)
Railroads (1830s)
Steam ships (1850s)
Steel (Bessemer, 1856)
Industrial Revolution Led by Textiles
1733
1764
1769
1893
Flying shuttle
Spinning jenny
Factory system (Arkwright)
Cotton gin (US)
George and Robert Stephenson’s
Rocket. At 28 mph, the fastest machine
in the world in 1830. Railroads
transformed the world.
J.M.W. Turner
Rain, Steam and
Speed--The
Great Western
Railway (1844)
Isambard Brunel’s steamship The Great Eastern (1859
first voyage) was the largest ship in the world at 700
feet. Surviving many financial and mechanical
problems, its niche was laying seven transatlantic
cables (1867-74) and as a model design for 40 years.
An amateur
geologists, William
Smith maps the
physical history of
England. See Simon
Winchester’s The
Map That Changed
the World.
Nature as Teacher (1780s-1840s)
• To Wordsworth and many Romantics, source of
innocence, truth, gentleness, and morality
– Nature good vs. society bad, etc.
• William Blake wonders about evil/power as
seen through the tiger vs the lamb
The Tyger
By William Blake
….
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Later Views of Nature
• After 1830s, more doubt about Nature’s
goodness
– Victorians struggle with implications for faith in
“the survival of the fittest”
• At century’s end and especially after WWI,
lessons from Nature seen as irrelevant
– Agnosticism
– Humanism
– Social Darwinism: laissez faire applied to society
Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
• Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) – social
contract of self-interested actions
• Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850)
– This Victorian centerpiece is a lengthy poem about
understanding the death of his dearest friend
Arthur Hallam. Will return to this later.
– Two excerpts
In Memoriam
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law–
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–
…. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match’d with him.
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
bird of death?
primeval
tear
God
In Memoriam
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone
Quiet Work by Matthew Arnold (1852)
One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,
One lesson which in every wind is blown,
One lesson of two duties kept at one
Though the loud world proclaim their enmity-Of toil unsever'd from tranquility!
Of labor, that in lasting fruit outgrows
Far noisier schemes, accomplish'd in repose,
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.
Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring,
Man's fitful uproar mingling with his toil,
Still do thy sleepless ministers move on,
Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting;
Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil,
Laborers that shall not fail, when man is gone.
In Harmony with Nature by Matthew Arnold (1852)
"In harmony with Nature?" Restless fool,
Who with such heat dost preach what were to thee,
When true, the last impossibility—
To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool!
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;
Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore;
Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest;
Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave;
Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!
Darwin (1809-82)
• Born February 12– same day as Lincoln
• Evolution theory in Europe 50 years old—
Charles’ grandfather, Erasmus, among thinkers
• Wallace’s research forced Darwin to publish
The Origin of Species (1859)
• Descent of Man (1871): natural selection
amoral
Aboard the HMS Beagle in 1831-36, Darwin
studies nature. Back in England he eventually
publishes the Origin of Species (1859).
Huxley-Wilberforce debate (1860)
• Lord Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce (Soapy Sam)
– Was Huxley descended from an ape on his mother's side
or his father's side?
• Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog)
– he would rather be descended from an ape than a man
who misused his great talents to suppress debate
Drummer Hodge by Thomas Hardy (1899)
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Recessional by Rudyard Kipling (1897)
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Summary
• Although reduced in time and space, midcentury Victorians were hopeful that science
would guide them to a bright future
• Increasingly, science and industry led to
skepticism and doubt
Next Week: Religion and Education
• Religious reform
• Education of clergy
• Education of laity
– Rising middle class
– Sunday schools
• Post-secondary