After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  It is clear that Crippen had persuaded himself, as well as Ethel, that they were already in some senses man and wife. He refers to her in his letters as ‘wife’ and it would seem that they went through some form of ritual or ceremony together, perhaps standing beside an iron bedstead one afternoon in King’s Cross. Her respectability is a key ingredient in the murder story, and it is almost certainly true that, as Tom Cullen wrote in his excellent study of the case, ‘she was holding out for marriage lines and a home of her own, an “Acacia Villa” in that row of suburban “Chez Nous” and “Bide-a-Wee” and “Mon Repos” villas that stretches to infinity’.17

  I make this defence and this acknowledgement – that the love of Ethel LeNeve has been the best thing in my life – my only happiness – and that in return for that great gift I have been inspired with a greater kindness towards my fellow human-beings and a greater desire to do good.

  We were as man and wife together, with an absolute communion of spirit. Perhaps God will pardon us because we were like two children in the great unkind world, who clung to one another and gave each other courage.18

  We shall never know why Crippen made so many blunders – why for example, having in effect filleted his wife, removing not just the head but other bones, and effectively disposed of them, he did not simply dump the rest of her in a weighted bag in the nearby canal. If he had simply known the difference between slaked lime, which preserves human flesh, and quicklime which destroys it, Belle’s remains would have disappeared beneath the cellar floor.

  It is partly the inefficiency of Crippen which makes him a semi-endearing figure. The penultimate act of the drama, when he and Ethel thought to escape across the Atlantic in disguise, was, unknown to them, played out each day in the pages of the Daily Mail, thanks to the pioneering, by the Marchese Guglielmo Marconi, of wireless telegraph. Crippen and Ethel believed they had eluded the police, and at Antwerp they had boarded the 5,431-ton cargo vessel Montrose, bound for Canada, posing as John Philo Robinson, a merchant, and his sixteen-year-old son being taken abroad for his health. Captain Kendall noticed many strange things about the pair. One was that Mr Robinson, when his name was called, frequently forget that this was what he was supposedly called and did not turn. The boy, who spoke with an English accent quite unlike his father’s, had beautifully manicured hands, strange curves beneath his waistcoat, and the back of his trousers had been split, and was held together with safety pins. Thus it was that Kendall was able, as the boat steamed 130 miles west of the Lizard in Cornwall, to telegraph the ship’s owners in Liverpool: HAVE STRONG SUSPICIONS THAT CRIPPEN LONDON CELLAR MURDERER AND ACCOMPLICE ARE AMONG SALOON PASSENGERS. The dispatches he sent daily to the Montreal Star during the voyage were very dramatic.

  ‘They have been kept under strict observation all the voyage, as, if they smelt a rat, he might do something rash. I have noticed a revolver in his hip pocket,’ reported the captain. Ethel and Crippen had no idea that Kendall was in contact with the Montreal Star and that his words were being marconigrammed to the Daily Mail. Before they even reached Quebec, to be greeted by their nemesis Inspector Dew, their every move had been chronicled in the newspaper. Music hall artistes were singing, even before her arrest:

  Oh, Miss LeNeve, oh Miss LeNeve,

  Is it true that you are sittin’

  On the lap of Dr Crippen In your boy’s clothes

  On the Montrose

  Miss LeNeve?19

  Most modern readers would find more sadism in such jokes than in Crippen’s desperate decision to dispose of his wife.

  In his last letter from Pentonville Prison, written on 19 November 1910, Crippen said:

  As I face eternity, I say that Ethel LeNeve has loved me as few women love men, and that her innocence of any crime, save that of yielding to the dictates of the heart, is absolute.

  To her I pay this last tribute. It is of her that my last thoughts have been. My last prayer will be that God may protect her and keep her safe from harm and allow me to join her in eternity.20

  Of how many wives or husbands would their spouse truthfully write this on the eve of death?

  6

  God – and the Americans

  Our story occurs against the background of Europe’s collective suicide. Its self-destruction. Its insane political convulsions. Its violent, self-punishing revolutions and civil wars. Its repeated blood-letting. Britain and its Empire, which occupies our centre stage, cannot hold aloof. The dissolution of its Empire, the diminution of its world status, its financial ruin are played out against the background of a war in South Africa, two wholly destructive European wars, the rise of the European dictatorships, the wholesale slaughter of Armenians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Jews and Spaniards.

  With all this happening during the fifty years of our story, we are concerned with a period unlike any other in human history, or at any rate unlike anything which had happened since the nomadic barbarian tribes began their inroads into an imperial Italy whose very gods and religious life had been insidiously undermined by the spread of Christianity.

  That religion, which began as a cult within a cult, a sect of apocalyptically minded Jews eagerly awaiting the end of Time itself during the reign of the Emperor Nero, had, by the time of the nineteenth century, begun to stare at its own apocalypse. The biblical scholars of Tübingen had undermined the faith of the Protestant North in the infallibility of Scripture; while the painstaking lifetime of botanical and biological observations of Charles Darwin had shaken the faith of intellectuals in the Creator himself. By the end of the Victorian century, atheism had become the religion of the suburbs, as G. K. Chesterton observed.

  There is no doubt that, as the career and popularity of H. G. Wells demonstrates, unbelief was rife among the masses. As far as Britain was concerned, however, there was not the wholesale abandonment of religion which might have been expected, given the devastations visited on the Faith, not only by biblical scholars and the Darwinians, but also by the general prosperity of Western life, its easy materialism, which sat oddly beside a religion which professed to believe in the Incarnation of a God who chose to be a poor man, asserting the very unVictorian sentiment that it was fruitless to lay up treasure on Earth.

  In fact, as far as Britain was concerned, the half-century or so covered by the scope of this book was one in which religion prospered. In the Church of England alone, there were far more interesting scholars, administrators, bishops and priests than in the Victorian age. Whereas nearly all the great Victorian writers and intellectuals had an ambivalent or actively hostile attitude to religion or positively disbelieved it, the era we are now entering was that of – to name but a few names – G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, C. S. Lewis. Many of the most popular writers, such as crime writers, were Christian. Church music flourished, and Church architecture.

  Consider the career of Sir John Ninian Comper, an ecclesiastical obsessive, who had been articled to the architectural firm of Bodley and Garner, and who, from the 1890s onwards, and throughout a long career (he lived from 1864 to 1960), beautified and changed the interiors of countless churches and chapels, while creating an overpoweringly eclectic blend of Gothic and classical. Whether designing a church from scratch or beautifying an existing building, Comper creates the illusion that history itself has been transformed. Here is a Great Britain in which no Reformation happened. At St Mary’s, Wellingborough, an undoubted masterpiece, there is an English medieval perpendicular nave, with Gothic side chapels. The whole is a blaze of colour and gilding, with Spanish screens and a glorious classical baldachin. Another striking creation of Comper’s is the brick church of St Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate, just round the corner from the house where the fictitious Mr Sherlock Holmes was investigating his mysteries. Comper created glorious mysteries of his own. Push open the door of this dull-looking brick building, and you find yourself in a clear white interior, with no pews to clutter it. The vast Gothic screen is what the Catholics of
Southwold or Lavenham or Long Melford might have looked at in the fifteenth century – a blaze of gilding, with four-winged cherubim, and Christ on His Rood, attended by the gilded figures of Our Lady and St John. Beyond is the altar, above which can be seen Comper’s very distinctive coloured glass window, against whose yellows and blues flit the silhouettes of London pigeons.

  Here was an answer of a kind to Darwin and the materialists. When the church was opened in 1903, it is probably fair to say that no English congregation had ever seen anything quite like it. It has been cleverly observed by Peter Anson that ‘The overpowering richness of Comper’s ecclesiastical décor, even if late medieval in inspiration, was as opulent as the setting of Edwardian dinner-parties, where the masterpiece of decoration, usually of sweet peas, was saved for the centre of the dining-table, which would be dotted with olives, salted almonds, sugared green peppermints and chocolates in cut-glass bowls, or silver dishes.’ Pious ladies would be conveyed to St Cyprian’s on a Sunday morning in hansoms, or new motorized taxi-cabs or in their own electric broughams. They were ‘laced into corsets that gave them pouter-pigeon bosoms and protruding posteriors’. The evening before, after they had withdrawn from their dining-rooms, their husbands had created a silvery fume of cigars. And now in the morning light of St Cyprian’s, the incense wafted before the enchanted eyes of these women. ‘Perched on their heads, and elevated by a little roll just inside the crown, were hats which had grown as frivolous as the milliner’s trade could make them – enormous galleons of grey velvet with vast grey plumes of ostrich feathers sweeping upwards and outwards, or they would be trimmed with artificial flowers and fruit.’1

  A more elegiac form of Anglicanism is to be found in the imagination of that unlikely armaments manufacturer John Meade Falkner (1858–1932), who, after Oxford, went to be the tutor to the sons of Sir Andrew Noble, the principal figure in the Messrs Armstrong, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He eventually became Noble’s private secretary, travelling on the Continent to negotiate the contracts for the sales of ships and guns, while privately pursuing his scholarly researches into heraldry, Oxfordshire churches, and ecclesiastical architecture generally. In 1901 he joined the board of Armstrong, eventually rising to become its chairman, while still pursuing his cycling holidays in pursuit of unusual fonts, rood lofts and stained glass. He was honorary librarian to the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral and a reader in palaeography at Durham University.

  Alan Bennett has memorably said that to be a fervent Anglican is a contradiction in terms; but Falkner almost was this embodied oxymoron. He attended church whenever he could, but he never took Holy Communion. Was this because scruples forbade him to approach the altar of Peace, knowing he had made his money from battleships and heavy artillery? Or was he a Doubting Thomas, with a sense that for all its beauty, the Church itself had become a house built on shifting sands, its creeds untenable, its high moral demands unsustainable in the new century? Or was there some buried emotional guilt? His only known love-letter, which survives in a fragment, was addressed to a woman, but his three novels, especially the ghost story The Lost Stradivarius, seem to hint at a post-Wildean notion of the essentially destructive nature of same-sex emotional involvement. A decade which produced the late masterpieces of Henry James, Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), Wells’s Kipps and Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale could surely claim to be one of the greatest ten years in the history of English fiction. With such mighty rivals, John Meade Falkner’s The Nebuly Coat (1903) could strike the careless reader as no more than a curiosity, a bit of amateur work. This would be a mistake. What makes the story addictive is not its somewhat melodramatic plot, but its atmosphere, its whole perception of existence. It would be much too heavy to read it as an allegory of England, its ancient faith and its aristocracy on the verge, like the great Minister church at the heart of the story, of collapse. If not an allegory, however, it certainly is a mirror of such things. More an extended elegy than a novel, it is ‘poetry in stone’, as someone in the book defines architecture, an expression of the Anglican spirit, with the old seventeenth-century musical books still in use, the old clock bells chiming the hours to hymn tunes, and with nostalgia and suppressed emotion seeping through the very stones of the damp, precarious church. In an epilogue, a Royal Navy lieutenant sailing down the Channel in the corvette Solebay turns his spyglass towards the familiar landmark of Cullerne Tower, and finds it is not there any more. ‘He rubbed his glass, and called some other officers to verify the absence of the ancient seamark, but all they could make out was a white cloud, that might be smoke or dust or mist hanging over the town.’2

  The old order was fading, crumbling. Queen Victoria had predicted that the monarchy would not long outlast her demise. Her faithful laureate, Lord Tennyson, had made the same prediction about religion itself. Although in his greatest work, In Memoriamo he had appeared to hold on to some nebulous faith, ‘believing where we cannot prove’, he said before he died that within a century the forms of the old religion would have vanished from the Earth. It is just such a thought which must occur to any thoughtful reader of Falkner’s masterpiece when the great tower of Cullerne Minster descends in a cloud of dust and rubble.

  When religious certainties are generally undermined, the diehard instinct takes over those in the bunker, or the last ditch. Unbelief had swept across Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century, in part as a result of German biblical scholarship, which made it difficult to believe the Bible to be set apart from other ancient literature, different, infallible. Study it in the same way you would study Homer or Hesiod and you come across a body of texts written at different periods, composed for different purposes, and fashioned late into the shapes and patterns we now read. If this approach undermined Protestantism more than Catholicism at first, the great Western Church was affected: by the biblical revolution, as by the advance in scientific knowledge. Geology demonstrated that the universe was infinitely older than the Bible had taught. Evolutionary theory culminating in Darwin removed the necessity of positing a Creator, or a purpose, behind the automatic self-adaptations of the species as they made life safer for themselves, a predatory, mindless environment.

  Yet the religious impulse is deep in humanity. No civilization has ever existed without temples, fanes, shrines or pilgrimages. Was there no chance for faithful and intelligent men and women to accept the March of Mind while holding on in some form or another to the rituals and stories which their ancestors had used to give shape to their deepest experiences of sin and loss? The great German Protestant scholar Adolf Harnack (1851–1930) in Das Wesen des Christentums and his huge Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte – History of Dogma – believed he had somehow unpicked the historical lock to Jesus’s original mission. He found the ‘kernel’, which was that Jesus, all those years ago, had been a German Liberal Protestant. The rest – the apocalyptic teachings of the Jews, the mystery cults favoured by St Paul, and so on – had been added to the original simple message about the Fatherhood of God. Christian tradition was thereby dismissed.

  The modernists, especially the French, believed this was approaching the problem from entirely the wrong way round. The Abbé Loisy was in his day the most famous modernist. In L’Évangile et L’Église, 1902, he reminded readers that it was only through tradition, through the Church, that we knew anything at all about Christ. His fellow modernist Marcel Hébert, in a book which knew some popularity in its English translation of 1899, described going to High Mass in the Duomo at Pisa.

  I listened, and I heard these words –

  Sub diversis speciebus,

  Signis tantum et non rebus,

  Latent res eximiae!

  [Wonderful things lie hidden under different species, which are not reality, merely signs].*

  I started. It was a complete expression of my own thoughts. Appearances, signs, symbols, which veil the mysterious reality, but which nevertheless adapt us to it, so that it penetrates us and makes us live – is not this one of the essential element
s of all faith and of all philosophy?3

  Such figures on the English scene as Father George Tyrrell S.J. and Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925) – born in Italy of an Austrian father and Scottish mother but long resident in Hampstead – certainly took this approach. The first twentieth-century pope, who was also the first holder of that office in modern times not to be educated beyond seminaries, nor to be of noble birth, took a very different line.

  On 8 September 1907, Pope Pius X released his encyclical condemning the modernists, Pascendi Dominici Gregis. He left no room for doubt: the attempt to reconcile modern or agnostic views of the tradition, while worshipping within it, was wholly unacceptable. This pope taught not merely that the existence of God could be proven but that it must be proven by every believer. He asserted that only a literal and fundamentalist reading of the Bible and Catholic doctrine could be accepted.

  There followed an extraordinary witch-hunt within the Church. Not only were modernists driven out, but would-be modernists were spied upon, bullied and cajoled. Loisy was excommunicated in 1908. Parishioners were encouraged to report any suspicion that their priest might be a modernist. (Hilaire Belloc absurdly believed that any priest who took longer than twenty minutes to say Mass was, or might be, a modernist.) ‘Pope Pius X approved, blessed and encouraged a secret espionage association outside and above the hierarchy itself, even on their Eminences the Cardinals.’4 The communists, when they seized power in Russia and other parts of Europe a decade after Pascendi, learnt much from the techniques of the Vatican bully-boys. ‘Rome is causing horrible suffering to the simple souls of my entourage,’ moaned one excommunicate modernist, a scholar, J. Turmel. Father Tyrrell in England was forbidden a Christian burial by his Church; sensibly, his friends merely buried him in the Anglican graveyard, with a stirring address by the great modernist scholar the Abbé Henri Bremond at Storrington, Sussex.