The Subversive in British Literary History

When, in a 1909 lecture, Jane Harrison asserted that “[t]o be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation,” she captured the new spirit of freethinking that stimulated a cultural rebellion in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. Heresy as subject, trope and method lies at the heart of Damon Franke’s exploration of modernist discourse, traceable in the writing of Pater, Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Shaw, in the ethics of G. E. Moore, in Keynesian economics, even in the New Criticism of I. A. Richards. Mining forty decades of intellectual and artistic innovation, Franke discovers a rich seam of artistic, philosophical and religious thought categorized as heretical: radical and subversive in its effects and consistently driven by a desire to synthesize competing, contradictory value systems—the scientific and the theological, the pagan and the Christian, for example. For Franke, “heresy” is more than a simple metaphor for controversial or unpopular beliefs. He argues that the “modernist sensibility” literally adopts heretical transgression as its foundation principle in the struggle to resist repressive orthodoxy and push forward social reform. Throughout this fascinating cultural and literary history of the 1880s to the mid-1920s, he sustains a strong case by the amassing of detailed evidence from many aspects of British cultural life.

Of course, most readers will associate heresy with the Christian Church and its outcasts. To be sure, religious heterodoxy is well represented in Franke’s narrative, from the 1883 blasphemy trial of G. W. Foote, the editor of the Freethinker, to the declaration by Pope Pius X in 1907 that the modernist movement within the Catholic Church was heretical in its attempt to reconcile dogma with evolutionary findings and historicist scholarship. But Franke’s work sheds valuable new light on the modernist project by showing how its preoccupation with the heretical slyly invades other kinds of institutions and literary products. Sometimes even masked by traditional forms, such discourse gradually saturates progressive intellectual circles, working consistently “within and against culture.”

Harrison made her comment in the inaugural public lecture of the Cambridge Heretics Society, founded by twelve undergraduates led by C. K. Ogden. Like the Cambridge Apostles, the Heretics intended to provide a forum for discussions about religion, philosophy and art. In time, the Society absorbed or eclipsed others concerned with controversial, radical thought. It became “an umbrella coalition of dissent and heterodoxy” at the university, attracting faculty as well as students, women as well as men, and eminent honorary members. The first half of Franke’s monograph is devoted to a detailed study of this organization and its influential connections with Bloomsbury, with new disciplines such as cultural anthropology, and with the humanist societies that emerged in the early twentieth century. The list of speakers who addressed the Society is impressive. Vernon Lee, Arthur Machen, Wittgenstein, Wyndham Lewis, Marie Stopes, Edith Sitwell, Lytton Strachey, and Rebecca West all spoke there. H. G. Wood and J. M. Robertson held forth on paganism, ritual and the historicity of the “Christ-myth.” Virginia Woolf gave her now famous talk on character in modern fiction to the Heretics, and George Santayana lectured on transcendentalism.

While the agenda was largely secularist, relativist and agnostic, the Heretics encouraged the airing of alternative viewpoints. Thus, when Shaw expanded on his theory of the “Life-Force,” he confidently dubbed heresy “the Religion of the Future” because only heretics could propagate new ideals appropriate to the fluidity of modern society and changing cultural values. Chesterton’s later lecture, entitled “the Future of Religion,” was a direct riposte that defended Christian orthodoxy and tradition. In this desire to confront contradictory conceptions of the world, human values, and the nature and function of society, the Heretics, Franke argues, typified and defined the modernist spirit. Not only did they seek to undermine establishment positions, but they aimed to do so through a model of freethinking that was pluralist and inclusive, that accommodated “competing visions of the world and social relations.” Their rallying cry was synthesis, for their objective...