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PARTISAN REVIEW
whatever species of primate science might discover to be his next
of kin.
It
is little wonder that Stephen, and so many of his contem–
poraries, failed to recognize the revolutionary character of their time,
when the arch-rebel of the piece, Darwin himself, seemed to be un–
aware of or uninterested in the broader implications of his theory.
It
remained for Huxley, ten years after the appearance of
Origin of
Species,
to coin the word "agnosticism," and to discover how many
of the young intellectuals who enlisted in the ranks of the .agnostics
regarded it not as a new and startling revelation but as an old and
obvious truth. Stephen was one of those to whom agnosticism was
as old and obvious as common sense. And it was hard to get excited
about so commonplace a thing as common sense, in a country which
had made of common sense the national character, and among in–
tellectuals who had made of
it
a metaphysical principle.
A better name for Stephen's creed than agnosticism might be
"Muscular Christianity"-without the Christianity. His ideal phil–
osopher was identical with what he took to be Kingsley's ideal par–
son: "A married man with a taste for field-sports." Upon sports
Stephen, like his countrymen, lavished that passion and enthusiasm
which was denied to all other activities. And with the passion went a
sense of sport as the
ne plus ultra
of life. That politics, for example,
was a game was not the admission but the boast of nineteenth-century
politicians. (Gladstone was disliked, less because he was a hypocrite,
although some suspected him of that too, than because his constant
appeal to principle, his invariable tone of moral superiority and
righteousness, violated the rules of the game. This was the nineteenth–
century conception of the demagogue: a man who intruded con–
science into politics.)
Religion was a game in the same sense in which politics was a
game, because both were skirmishes played out on the fringes of so–
ciety, with society itself secure and invulnerable. Everyone, it could
be assumed, or at least everyone who counted, conformed to the
image of Tom Brown: "a brave, helpful, truthful Englishman, and
a gentleman, and a Christian."
If
men chose to argue about Arianism
or Erastianism, about the position of the altar or the cut of ecclesi–
astical vestments, it was their right as Englishmen to be idiosyncratic.
Indeed, it was fortunate that there were these religious idiosyncrasies,
