Schnitzler's Century by Peter Gay

Author:Peter Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE CAMP OF THE UNORTHODOX WAS JUST AS crowded and just as quarrelsome. With the spread of skepticism and with mounting opportunities to construct one’s own faith, the Victorian age became a paradise for imaginative individualists. In May 1868, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, France’s most eminent literary critic, speaking in the Senate, issued a shrewd reminder that there was “another great diocese” in addition to the Christian one, “with no fixed boundaries, extending over the whole of France and over the whole world.” It was steadily enlarging its numbers and solidifying its power. Its members were “in various stages of emancipation, but all in agreement on one point—that above all else they must be freed from an absolute authority and a blind submission—which counts in their thousands deists and adherents of spiritual philosophies, disciples of natural religion, pantheists, positivists, realists, skeptics and seekers of every kind, the devotees of common sense and the followers of pure science.” Like its religious counterpart, it was irreparably split into mutually distrustful camps, and made common cause only if its very existence seemed to be in danger.

Sainte-Beuve’s other great diocese was, as he noted, a gather-all of the most diverse thoughts and fantasies, notable for its controversies and instability. But it deserves a special place in a study of bourgeois religiosity in the Victorian years because middle-class sectarians were at home, and in leading positions, in virtually every creed. Not that bourgeois deserted the dominant denominations in droves—they did not. On the other hand, outright atheists had numerous middle-class supporters, though many unbelievers, much like Schnitzler, apparently preferred the less doctrinaire, more modest stance of agnosticism. T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s most dependable, most effective partisan and a distinguished zoologist in his own right, coined the term, with its felicitous mixture of devotion to experience and experiment on the one hand and respect for unsolved and unsolvable mysteries on the other. It proved to be a welcome refuge for savants and intellectuals. “Understand that all the younger men of science whom I know intimately are essentially of my way of thinking,” Huxley wrote in 1869 in a much-quoted letter to Charles Kingsley, who had attempted to convert him to the Christian doctrine of immortality, as Huxley was grieving over the death of his young son—in vain. “Sit down before fact as a little child,” he replied. He could not accept Christian consolation, but he was not an atheist.

Among the prominent sects in Sainte-Beuve’s other great diocese, the Saint-Simonians were, for all their unconventional, often eccentric views on love, women, and religious leadership, the most bourgeois and, in the end, the most influential. They were also the most paradoxical. Their founder and principal inspiration was the comte de Saint-Simon, who died in 1825 after an adventurous life including years in support of the French Revolution. His doctrine, expounded in a series of publications and constantly revised by his successors after his death, gratified diverse tastes with its agenda of bringing religion up to date, its radical feminism, above all its affinity for Carlyle’s captains of industry.

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