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Page 452
Victorian Religious Poetry
Cary H. Plotkin
What is not religious poetry? Representing the Platonic tradition, Shelley maintained in the
Defence of Poetry
that poetry is itself "something divine." Yet Helen Gardner is surely right to dismiss as meaninglessly broad the position that poetry in which "'man broods upon himself and his history . . . as a spiritual and self-conscious being'" deserves to be called "religious."
Fascinating for the contradictory movements and ideas it harbored, the Victorian era saw both the coining of the term
agnostic
and a proliferation of religious sects or associations, which by 1895 had grown to 293 in number according to
Whitaker's Almanack
(1896). Religious conformity, piety, and fervor were matched by religious doubt, pained questioning, and a sense of loss. Religious ideas and institutions were in turmoil; and those who could no longer believe often sought surrogates for the spiritual dimension they nevertheless could not live without. It is therefore not obvious where to close the circle around Victorian religious poetry. For practical purposes, however,
religious poetry
will here be construed narrowly to mean poetry whose object is a transcendent personal God who is the foundation and final cause of a recognized body of faith.
Even by this narrow definition, the field of Victorian religious poetry is unmanageably vast; for Victorians produced religious poetry in industrial quantifies. This was a fertile age for hymnody and other forms of liturgical verse not treated here, in which the quality of the verse mattered less than the quality of the piety. To exclude liturgical poetry from the present account does not however settle the deeper
 
Page 453
question of the relation between the aesthetic and the religious in religious poetry generally. In a world in which the sacred and the profane no longer overlap, does the secondary or subsidiary relation of religious poetry to its object inevitably work to the detriment of the poem? For religious poetry serves a purpose that is not identical with those of poetry in itself.
Intellectual History
Religious faith suffered a series of blows in the nineteenth century from which it arguably has never recovered. They were dealt mainly by natural science, then still widely referred to as natural history. The change in terminology is significant, marking a shift in emphasis from description to epistemology; but it also reflects a profounder change in the perception of nature itself. Here the names of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin may stand for the scientific figures whose work dislodged the Bible from its millennial position as a factual document of the creation of the world, thus putting the last nail into the coffin begun by Copernicus and altering the self-understanding of human beings within the sphere of nature. Lyell's
Principles of Geology
(18301832) offered persuasive proof against the biblical, cataclysmic view of the creation of the world and for a uniformitarian view that entailed unimaginable stretches of time. Darwin's
Origin of Species
(1859), popularly foreshadowed by Robert Chambers's
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(1844), extended the evolutionary model to animate nature, including implicitly
Homo sapiens
.
Darwin's theory did not merely sweep away everything before it, however. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was moved to attempt a refutation of uniformitarianism; and the biologist St. George Jackson Mivart, a convert to Roman Catholicism, tried in a series of works to salvage the human mind from the material processes of evolution, and hence to separate human beings from the rest of nature. (Significantly, Mivart could no longer reconcile his science and his religion towards the end of his life, and he died an excommunicate.)
Finally, the destructive effects of geology and biology were deepened by the results of a new science, philology. German philologists had led the way in applying the systematic methods of "textual criticism"originally trained on classical and historical textsto the Scriptures themselves, treating the Word of God as just another text, riddled with
 
Page 454
textual corruptions and inconsistencies. The appearance in 1860 of
Essays and Reviews
, some contributors to which put these methods into effect, unleashed a furor.
These developments, and others that have escaped this summary, affected not only the faith of the pious but their understanding of the natural world around them. Ruskin heard the clink of the geologist's hammer at the end of every verse of Scripture. Tennyson's
In Memoriam
contains the greatest and most moving poetic record of the spiritual and intellectual struggle that many believers faced, and much of it can be read as an agonized debate between the will to believe and the inability to suspend disbelief, a debate that ends inconclusively with the simple assertion of the former.
Social History
Great forces, then, were "making against Christianity," and against traditional religious belief and understanding generally. And yet both religion and religious poetry flourished. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 largely restored to English Roman Catholics participation in the life of the nation, from which they had been essentially barred since the reign of Elizabeth. The repeal one year earlier of the Test Act similarly relieved Protestant "Nonconformists"; and the University Tests Act in 1871 abolished subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England as a condition of activity at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, as well as lifted compulsory chapel attendance. In 18581860 legislation (which had been proposed forty years earlier) granted full parliamentary privileges to Jews, who had occupied several public offices since 1835. By the end of the century Jews sat in Commons and Lords. The spirit of tolerance that inhabits these historical changes favored diverse religious expression; and poetry remained the form perceived to be by nature suited to this purpose.
The Romantic Legacy
The poetic language and vision most directly available to Victorian religious poets were the legacy of English Romanticism; Wordsworth was clearly the spiritual (as Coleridge was the intellectual) godfather of much of the religious poetry of the nineteenth century. Spiritualized nature was a large part of their patrimony. Wordsworth was in turn the
 
Page 455
heir of an idea of nature advanced by eighteenth-century philosophes, of whom Carl Becker once wrote that by deifying nature, they denatured God. Already implicit in Romanticized nature, therefore, was a tension drawing religious poets away from devotion in the narrower sense; and by mid-century, as we have seen, scientific knowledge was undermining even Wordsworthian nature, now "red in tooth and claw."
Yet nature continued to figure centrally in Victorian religious poetry as it had not in the religious poetry of, say, the seventeenth century; and with Romanticism came either an intensely inward human experience of nature or the dialectic of experience advanced by Wordsworth and Coleridge. John Henry Newman lent weight to the latter in
A Grammar of Assent
, arguing that just such a dialectic described religious experience as well. The later Wordsworth, the conservative Wordsworth of the
Ecclesiastical Sonnets
(1822), cast a vague shadow of orthodoxy back over his earlier poems, creating a Victorian view of him that was more influential than any one of his poetic texts. It was to "their" Wordsworth that many Victorian religious poets turned for a voice and a vision adaptable to their ends.
With the exception of Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, and possibly Elizabeth Barrett (Browning) and Coventry Patmore, none of the Victorian religious poets are major poets by any serious standard, although some may be major figures in Victorian religious history. The following account of these secondary and tertiary poets arranges them according to the religious movements to which they adhered. The primary authorities in these sections are H. N. Fairchild's
Religious Trends in English Poetry
, vol. 4,
18301880
(for all its self-conscious tendentiousness and acid irony still an indispensable guide) and, for the Tractarians, G. B. Tennyson's
Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode
.
The Evangelicals
The Evangelical movement, with its roots in reaction against the unenthusiastic, and to many minds lifeless, orthodoxy of the English Church of the eighteenth century, naturally gave rise to a poetry of strong statement and undisguised emotion that was meant to inspire, even in the most obdurate, those passions of awe for Christian mystery and horror of final perdition found lacking in the established Church. The most direct application of these principles was in hymns whose
 
Page 456
"murky thunderlight," as Lord David Cecil writes, "makes them stirring out of all proportion to their strictly literary merits."
Martin Farquhar Tupper"the Shakespeare of the Church" according to some Evangelical connoisseurswas the author of the vastly popular
Proverbial Philosophy
, a collection of moral musings in unrhymed, occasionally rhythmic prose arranged in lines of irregular length. Tupper reflects on, explains, and enjoins his readers to accept humbly God's works, to improve what they have been given, and above all to shun that pride which leads one to imagine oneself autonomous. By the end of the century this work had become the butt of many an easy satire, yet it passed through sixty editions, and by 1881 a million copies had been sold in America alone. Like most of the poetry of the Evangelical movement, it was directed to a largely uncritical public little interested in belles lettres. They responded to the genuine moral and religious feeling in Tupper's poetry rather than to the aesthetics of the verbal artifact that conveyed it. Indeed, the doctrine of the movement clearly discouraged imagination, originality, or brilliance, based as these are on an assertion of individuality, which is the root of pride and hence of evil: "Fruitlessly thou strainest for humility, by darkly diving into self: / Rather look away from innate evil, and gaze upon extraneous good."
Somewhat grander in ambition if not in execution was Robert Pollock's
Course of Time
, a lengthy fulmination in ten books of stock eighteenth-century diction in blank verse upon eternal punishment for inveterate pride and hardened refusal to repent. As recognition of sinfulness was, for the Evangelicals, the precondition of acknowledging salvation in Christ, the drama of this poetry was, for its readers, in the subject rather than the treatment of it. The work became popular as soon as it was published, particularly in Pollock's native Scotland. Similar in tone, Robert Montgomery's
Satan, or Intellect without God
warns of the certain and terrible consequences of intellectual and imaginative independence. For five thousand lines, it was later observed, Satan delivers an unbroken monologue better suited to an Evangelical pastor than to the Archfiend. In Book One he comments sanely on early civilizations and censoriously on the Inquisition in Spain, the Revolution in France, and slavery in the United States; in Book Two he abominates vices and crimes; in Book Three he looks closely at the underside of English society in the age of the industrial revolution. Only in passing does he take in the Creation, the Fall, and the plan of redemption.
 
Page 457
Montgomery's
Omnipresence of the Deity
was so remarkably attuned to popular religious sentiment that it went into eight editions in as many months and into twenty more in the next thirty years, despite Macaulay's withering attack in the
Edinburgh Review
.
Less crabbed and grim than the poetry of Pollock or Montgomery, that of Jean Ingelow contains in addition hints of social reform. Whereas Pollock reminds his readers that all will be equal at the Last Judgment and Montgomery storms against slavery and Mammon, Ingelow counsels the poor "to be not humble overmuch," lest they think God to be of the party of the rich. But Ingelow was also, and atypically, troubled by evolution and higher criticism. In "Honours" she addresses those similarly shaken, advising them to "Wait, nor against the half-learned lesson fret, / Nor chide at old belief as if it erred, / Because thou canst not reconcile as yet / The Worker and the Work." Her verse, like Pollock's and Montgomery's, is vitiated by affectation and stiltedness, but unlike them she is able to temper censoriousness with delicacy, sympathy, and simple grace.
Anti-intellectualism, which marks much Evangelical poetry, may also be construed as prudential wariness of intellectual pride; and since for the Evangelicals salvation came by faith alone, there was good reason to set at naught the products of intellect. In addition to Tupper, Pollock, and Montgomery, Horatius Bonar and Charles Tennyson-Turner excoriate in particular intellectual agnostics, rationalists, and proponents of anthropocentric philosophy in any of its forms. To Bonar the Crystal Palace was the cult place of science, "diamond-blazing, / Shrine of her idolatry" (
Hymns of Faith and Hope
). Unappalled by evolutionism and, unlike Bonar, an enthusiast of the spirit of technological advances, Tennyson-Turner (coauthor with Alfred of
Poems by Two Brothers
) nevertheless takes to task those who apply scientific methods to textual analysis of the Bible; in all who burn to see "The Healer's face / . . . Faith shall be born! and, by her natural stress, / Push through these dark philosophies, and live!"
The Tractarians
"On Sunday July 14, 1833, Mr Keble preached the assize sermon in the [Oxford] University pulpit. It was published under the title of
National Apostasy
. I have ever considered and kept the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833." So Cardinal Newman on the act with which

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