Reasonable Doubts

Abstract

In Rose Macaulay’s novel, The Making of a Bigot (1914), a young man named Eddy is buffeted by various intellectual movements and beset by spiritual hesitations. He thinks he might become an Anglican clergyman, but he worries that ministers draw lines, object to people on no particular grounds, and dismiss points of view that are not their own. In one of his typical outbursts, Eddy advocates liberal tolerance: ‘It’s absurd to quarrel about the respective merits of different principles, when all are so excellent.’ In the end, his tolerance comes across as complacency or a failure to discriminate reasonable ideas from outrageous opinions. After knocking about the world for a while, Eddy decides to become a bigot who rallies behind a single cause: ‘the one way, it seemed, to be of use was to take a definite line and stick to it and reject all others.’ Yet hope is not entirely lost. Eddy considers becoming a novelist, because ‘in novels one may take as many points of view as one likes, all at the same time.’ For Macaulay, a self-described Anglo-agnostic, the novel is the perfect genre for figuring out one’s spiritual commitments or one’s reasons not to endorse any religion at all. The novel is a genre in which doubt has its place and irony tests the value of an idea. Macaulay shows up several times in Suzanne Hobson’s Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Modernisms, notably as an unbeliever who announces the demise of secularism circa 1879. Yet, as Hobson notes, secularism animated modernist literary production for decades after Macaulay’s announcement of its disappearance. Militant secularists appear throughout modernist fiction, now as Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, now as Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow, now as Richard Smythe in The End of the Affair. In Hobson’s delightful definition, secularism refers to ‘the dredging of religion from the public sphere’ (2), as if religion were muck at the bottom of a river. Secularists think that religion—specifically Christianity in interwar Britain—falsely claims to have a monopoly on truth and creates obstacles to human progress. Suzanne Hobson, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Modernisms, Oxford University Press, 2022, £60 hardback, 9780192846471.