THE SLEEP OF REASON
Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War
Derek Jarrett
New York: Harper & Row, 1989
249 pp., $22.50
Derek Jarrett has taught history at the University of London for many years. His latest book, The Sleep of Reason, concerns the profound change of attitudes about man and woman and God and the universe in the English-speaking world (focusing on Britain) between the 1840s and the 1920s, from the accession of Victoria to the publications of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. With great cogency and frequent humor Jarrett tells about a journey from certainty to loss of faith in a world where belief, both in progress and in God, had been crushed; and he convincingly recreates the Victorian, then Edwardian, cosmos of doubt, skepticism, superstition, and deep sense of loss.
The author begins by reminding us that in less than a century the scientific revolution had demonstrated--for the first time in history--that the invisible (or "spiritual") was no longer the necessary framework within which truths about the visible world could be discerned. The prescribed fantasies of religion were replaced by secret fantasies revealed on the psychoanalyst's couch or more respectable ones engendered by popular fiction. On the one hand, ever-increasing numbers of people refused to believe in God during this era; on the other hand, however, almost as many refused to believe that Sherlock Holmes was fictitious.
By the 1830s, says Jarrett, a world that had once known God naturally and instinctively lost touch with him--in art, in literature, and in society's view of itself. A widening gulf opened between scientific research and revealed religion. Nevertheless, it was not just the god of the Christians who was absenting himself, but the supposed goddess of reason as well. During the French Revolution, reason had slept while madness spawned monsters. If reason awoke later during the quieter secularization fostered by the scientific method, she also fell asleep again with the rise of new fantasies. For instance, in the 1840s, spiritualism (not to mention Mormonism) brought to a climax the long reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century. The greatest reason for not believing in God was the conviction that there was nothing outside material existence, something both spiritualism and Mormonism challenged among their growing clienteles. In fact, when Prince Albert died of typhoid in 1861 and Victoria became a deeply bereaved widow (the real beginning of the Victorian era), she received more comfort from spiritualism than from traditional Christianity.
Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, insisting that man and woman are descendants of apes (not created in the image of God) and that conflict and competition are the instruments of all evolution and progress (an assertion Marx liked especially well). As shocking as all this was to the world of religion, it was no bombshell in society at large, according to Jarrett, but merely a continuing cannonade. The study of anthropology and "comparative religion," inevitable concomitants of evolutionary theory, made the once-contemptuous dismissal of other cultures and religions impossible. Darwin had indeed shown the irrelevance of a few Jewish creation myths, but at another level he demonstrated the relevance of the myths of all humankind.
...
Read Full Article
|
