Faith, fiction, and the historical Jesus: theological revisionism and its influence on fictional representations of

THE AFTERLIFE OF WILDE’S ORAL TALES IN THE WRITINGS OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES
...the flowers of his talk bloom only in dead men’s memories, and have been buried with their skulls.⁴⁰⁸
So wrote the writer and journalist, Arthur Ransome, in his 1912 study of Oscar Wilde. The somewhat romantic notion that Wilde’s oral tales were preserved only in the graves of those who heard them is, however, far from the case: a good number of writers recorded a range of them in memoirs and biographical sketches, and a rather smaller number drew on them for their own imaginative writings. In a recent study of intellectual property and the literary world, Paul K. Saint-Amour gives this analysis of the creative borrowing in Wilde’s circle:

Wilde not only plagiarized, but created a community of plagiarists; by scattering his literary ideas and expressions around him for others to seize freely, he united writers in theft. In doing so, he endowed a private print culture with the dynamics of an idealized oral culture: stories received as gifts were passed on as gifts; narratives branched in abundant retellings, limning a community through circulation rather than reinforcing private ownership through accumulation.⁴⁰⁹

Saint-Amour’s description of Wilde ‘scattering his literary ideas’ echoes Richard Ellmann’s comment that the ‘ideas and themes he scattered were sometimes reaped by his young admirers’.⁴¹⁰ However, the anecdote which follows Ellmann’s statement suggests that not all of Wilde’s ideas were available for others to ‘seize freely’:

The novelist W. B. Maxwell…had heard many stories from Wilde, and wrote one of them down and published it. He confessed to Wilde, whose face clouded, then cleared as he mixed approval with reproach, ‘Stealing my story was the act of a gentleman, but not telling me you had stolen it was to ignore the claims of friendship.’ Then he suddenly became serious, ‘You mustn’t take a story that I told you of a man and a picture…I fully mean to write it, and I should be terribly upset if I were forestalled.⁴¹¹

Two of Wilde’s Biblical tales ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ and ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ could have proved significant contributions to the fifth Gospel Wilde talked so frequently of composing; but, unlike The Picture of Dorian Gray, they would never appear in written form under his name. They appeared instead in the writings of three of his contemporaries: Ranger Gull, Coulson Kernahan, and Frank Harris. This chapter focuses on how these authors adapted Wilde’s ideas for their own specific purposes, and considers how what Saint-Amour terms an ‘idealized oral culture’ operated at a time when publishing practices were becoming increasingly regulated and complex.⁴¹²

The triumph of faith over science: When It Was Dark (1903)
Two years after Wilde’s death, the journalist and fiction writer, Ranger Gull, writing under the pseudonym ‘Guy Thorne’, would develop the central idea of ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ into a novel entitled When It Was Dark.⁴¹³ In a polemic decrying aestheticism in literature and, in particular, religious literature, Albert Guérard singles out Gull’s novel as a prime example of ‘a thrilling and most edifying tale’, providing a succinct outline of its contents:

A wealthy Jew, hater of Christianity, plants a spurious inscription in Palestine, and sends an archaeological expedition to ‘discover’ it. The inscription is supposed to establish that the alleged Resurrection was a fraud. As soon as the news is made public, the whole fabric of Christian morality collapses with the theological edifice. The sole curb to men’s evil instincts is removed; lust, murder and all abominations reign unchallenged upon the earth. But the falsification is detected; truth is restored, and virtue prevails again.⁴¹⁴

Published a few years after the discovery of the ‘Sayings of Jesus’ (the Oxyrhynchus Papyri) and one year after the English translation of Paul Vignon’s influential study of the Turin shroud, Gull’s crude propagandist fiction was perfectly suited to the talking points of the day.⁴¹⁵ More than half-a-million copies of the novel were sold, a testament to Gull’s unwavering conviction that ‘Fiction will find those that can be reached by no other means’.⁴¹⁶ As was also the case with his contemporary, Marie Corelli - a writer he considered ‘a great modern force’ - Gull uses his fiction to comfort and sustain the faithful, smoothing over the ever-widening cracks on the surface of traditional Christianity.⁴¹⁷

Yet, if Gull’s fiction aspired to the popularity and orthodoxy of Corelli’s, so, too, did it bear the imprint of the decadent literature the likes of Corelli so abhorred. Gull’s close and abiding friendship with Lionel Smithers, one of the principal publishers of 1890s writing, ensured that he was very much in touch with the world of the British decadents.⁴¹⁸ His first attempt at rewriting the Scriptures was From the Book Beautiful: Being Some Old Lights Relit (1900), a collection of short stories recreating episodes from both the Old and New Testaments. While avowedly orthodox, the volume owes much to the decadent milieu in which its author spent much of his time. Gull insists in the Preface that his work is ‘an attempt to clothe…living facts with a picturesque dress’, so that his readers might appreciate the ‘aesthetic pleasure that can be found in the narratives of Holy Scripture’.⁴¹⁹ Yet he also warns that he has allowed ‘a certain modern note to creep into them here and there’ and, even at first glance, it is obvious that what the author defines as ‘modern’ in his writing could be more accurately defined as fin-de-siècle decadence. In ‘The Slave’s Love’, for example, the erotic allure of Potiphar’s wife is clearly modelled on that of the Salome figure which flourished in the literary imagination of the 1890s, her jewelled tortoise attached ‘by a tiny silver thread to one of the gold rings fastened in her breasts’, recalling Des Esseintes’s ill-fated turtle in the fourth chapter of Huysmans’s À Rebours.⁴²⁰

Though Gull was not one of Wilde’s immediate circle - he was barely twenty the year Wilde was tried and imprisoned - his friendship with Smithers, and his employment on the staff of the Saturday Review while under Frank Harris’s editorship in the second half of the 1890s, make it highly likely that he would have encountered, albeit second-hand, a range of Wilde’s apologues. Indeed, one of the stories included in From the Book Beautiful, ‘The Veil of the Temple’, has distinct echoes of Wilde’s spoken tale ‘Simon Le Cyrénéen’. The youthful Greek sculptor and aesthete who Gull employs to retell the Passion narratives asks Mary Magdalene ‘…who will remember you? Who will ever say your name tenderly when I am dead and gone?’⁴²¹ Here, Gull appears to be drawing on a similarly ironic moment in Wilde’s tale when Simon’s wife demands of him ‘…qui entendra parler de Simon de Cyrène?’ But it is in Gull’s most popular work, When It Was Dark that his debt to Wilde is most apparent. Echoes of ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’, can be detected thoughout: faith is replaced in Wilde’s version by ‘des explications rationellement scientifiques’, and in Gull’s by ‘the religion of common sense’; and just as the discovery of the tomb in the oral tale results in the Pope being chased from the Vatican, so in the novel the Catholic Church undergoes ‘a storm of persecution and popular hatred’.⁴²² And though by the close of the book the unsettling elements of ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ seem to have been overpowered by Christian fortitude, the main interest of the work resides in Gull’s lurid and sensationalist interpretation of Wilde’s vision of ‘l’apathie des jours sans croyance et sans joie’.⁴²³

Responses to Gull’s imposition of a traditional Christian resolution on an otherwise unsettling and unorthodox scenario were divided. Though When It Was Dark was given a ringing endorsement from the pulpit of the Bishop of London, some views outside the metropolis were rather more hostile.⁴²⁴ The poet and novelist Richard Aldington, who grew up in the same Cornish village in which Gull took up residence, recalled how the small community there were of the ‘general opinion …that it [the novel] was blasphemous and that one definitely should not call.’⁴²⁵ Such conflicting responses to When It Was Dark seem in line with its author’s Janus-like character. The son of a clergyman on a mission to save men from the ‘apathy of despair’ through his fiction,⁴²⁶ he was also, in Aldington’s words, the ‘tubby little bon vivant who never refused a double whiskey’.⁴²⁷ The second identity which came from taking on a nom de plume was, then, as much a means of masking his orthodox persona from the decadent circles in which he moved, as it was a means of hiding his fast-living lifestyle from the moral majority. Gull’s self-confliction is apparent in his non-fiction writings. In an essay published in 1907, he disassociates himself from a Wildean aesthetic:

The theory of modern criticism is that Art is a thing by itself and owes no duty to Ethics. The reason for Art, is art. Ten years ago I think I would almost have gone to the stake for this doctrine…I well remember the indignant anger with which I repudiated the suggestion of my father, a clergyman, that when I grew older…I should think very differently. He was perfectly right. Art is the essential part of fiction, but it is not destroyed because it is employed as the handmaid of an ethical standpoint.⁴²⁸
Notwithstanding such public disavowals, Gull continued to take a keen interest in decadent literature. 1915 saw the publication of his translation of Théophile Gautier’s Charles Baudelaire into English which included a lengthy essay on Baudelaire’s influence on British writers, demonstrating the author’s substantial knowledge of, and enduring interest in, the literary life of Wilde.⁴²⁹ When It Was Dark was perhaps Gull’s way of pursuing his interest in Wilde’s work, while at the same time keeping at a safe distance from it. In choosing to build on the donné of ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’, he paid homage to the contemporary appeal of Wilde’s creation; in stifling its heterodox energies with didactic pieties, he stripped it of all originality and aesthetic promise.
Bringing Wilde back to faith: Coulson Kernahan’s dream visions
One writer whose work can be confidently traced back to Wilde’s oral stories is Coulson Kernahan. As literary adviser to Messrs Ward, Lock, he liaised with Wilde in the early 1890s over the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray and came to be on friendly terms with the author. As he explains in his book of reminiscences, In Good Company:

My friendship with Wilde was literary in its beginnings. Flattered vanity on my part possibly contributed not a little to it, for I was young and - if that be possible - a more obscure man even than I am now, Wilde, already famous, was one of the very first to speak an encouraging word. ⁴³⁰

While the contrast here between the youthful Kernahan and the famous Wilde is somewhat misleading (Wilde was Kernahan’s senior by a mere four years), the master-disciple relationship it implies rings true: Kernahan was an aspiring writer and doubtless in awe of a literary author approaching the height of his celebrity.⁴³¹ Yet, it is clear from Kernahan’s mature reflections on his friendship with Wilde that, with respect to religious belief, and Christian morality in particular, the younger man considered himself superior. Though in his insistence that Wilde was ‘not an irreligious man’, Kernahan resists the image of the ‘pagan’ Wilde, propagated by the likes of Gide and Harris, it is evident that he is uncomfortable with what he clearly regards as his deceased friend’s immorality.⁴³² The more Kernahan extenuates, the more obvious this discomfort becomes; he conjectures that though Wilde ‘talked and wrote much nonsense…about there being no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’, such sentiments were mere ‘pose’, and he views his homosexuality as coming from ‘powers and forces of darkness outside himself’, which propel him into ‘a sort of Jekyll and Hyde life’.⁴³³ It was inevitable, then, that the treatments Wilde’s oral tales would receive at the pen of the devout Kernahan, would depart radically from the originals.

Though the relationship between Kernahan and Wilde lasted only a few years, what emerged from it endured in writings spanning three decades. In Good Company tells of how, during a discussion about religion, Wilde related the opening of a scenario featuring the ‘finding to-day of the body of Christ in the very rock-sepulchre where Joseph of Arimathea had laid it’.⁴³⁴ Though Kernahan claims not to have heard the story - presumably ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ - to its conclusion, it is clear from his later writings that he was acquainted with at least one complete version of it.⁴³⁵ Perhaps more than usually alert to issues of literary ownership owing to his experience in the world of publishing, Kernahan directly addresses the question of Wilde’s influence in his memoirs:

The idea appears to have occurred to both, but whereas, in Wilde’s mind, it was clear and defined, in mine it was then no more than an idea. I sometimes wonder whether his words did not make vivid to me what before was vague. Of one thing I am sure, that he was the first to speak of such an opening scene, which fact in itself constitutes some kind of previous claim.⁴³⁶
Given the public attention that Biblical archaeology was attracting at this time, Kernahan’s claim that the idea of the tale might have occurred to them both at the same time is not unreasonable; however, his religious fiction is more deeply interconnected with Wilde’s story than his memoirs suggest.

In The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil (1896), Kernahan’s choice of the dream-vision form immediately signals his desire to rein in Wilde’s heterodoxy. Such a form distances the work from the somewhat dubious genre of the religious novel, aligning its author more with ‘Bishop Bunyan’, than the populist Marie Corelli or Ranger Gull. In this Pilgrim’s Progress manqué, Kernahan conducts his narrative through the voices of allegorical figures, reacting to the discovery of Christ’s body in ‘the rock hewn sepulchre whither it was borne nineteen hundred years ago by Joseph of Arimathea.’⁴³⁷ The end of Christ’s dominance is marked by a great ceremony in which the long-established rituals of Christianity are destroyed and the ‘Reign of Sorrow’ is replaced with the ‘Reign of Joy’. However, the new order is short-lived as members of this post-Christian society begin to realise what they have lost: life without Christ is described by one despairing man as akin to being ‘held captive at the will of an Unknown Gaoler’, and the representative fallen woman laments that she can no longer live without the hope of forgiveness.⁴³⁸ In a sentimental final scene, Christ reappears to comfort the grief of a father at the death of his small child, and promises never to forsake the earth again. So Kernahan’s tale ends on a note of peace, hope and optimism brought about by the re-establishment of Christianity, counteracting the bleak and sombre conclusion of Wilde’s original. The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil is the response of an orthodox Christian to a somewhat open-ended agnostic parable; moreover, it is Kernahan’s way of showing the consequences of aestheticizing the figure of Christ. Wilde’s ‘culte de beauté’, represented here as the ‘Reign of Joy’ leads not to the utopia promised by its leader, but to a dystopia where ‘a mob, scrambling and fighting’, deprived of the moral restraints of Christianity, grows ever more vicious.⁴³⁹

Fifteen years later, Kernahan would return to the same theme in The Man of No Sorrows (1911), the Wildean inversion of its title suggesting a continuing connection between the author and his former friend. While this later work has the appearance of a novella, it retains the device of the dream vision, its various voices being better suited to a morality play than to the dialogue of realistic prose fiction. In this treatment of Wilde’s story, Kernahan focuses more emphatically on the idea of a New Age Messiah, inventing an entirely human leader in the ‘Man of No Sorrows’, whose tempting promise of a world without pain and suffering ensures his ready acceptance by the people. Claiming that Jesus misrepresented the will of God by ‘setting up the worship of Sorrow’, the new leader inaugurates his own ‘Reign of Joy’, much to the delight of the masses.⁴⁴⁰ As in Kernahan’s earlier work, the dream grows increasingly nightmarish, as the Christ-forsaken people fall into ‘feasting, lusting and debauch’.⁴⁴¹ In this evocation of degeneracy the author departs entirely from his source, looking instead to Gull’s apocalyptic vision in When It Was Dark for inspiration.⁴⁴² Like Gull, Kernahan extends the action world-wide, showing the spread of bestiality from London to Jerusalem where ‘the blackened corpses of men, women and little children lay roasting and smoking among the embers’.⁴⁴³ The prurient sensationalism of Gull’s chapter entitled ‘Mary, Pity Women!’ is also echoed in Kernahan’s reference to the horrible fate ‘of any young girl…who fell into the hands of that drink-maddened, lust-inflamed and bestial crew’ that roams the Sodom and Gomorrah that is now Jerusalem.⁴⁴⁴ Predictably, order is restored by the return of Jesus who, forgiving his usurper, reasserts his reign, as the ‘vast and colossal shadow of a Cross’ appears in a flame-like sky: a recapturing of Emperor Constantine’s fourth-century moment of conversion.

A World without the Christ (1934), Kernahan’s final adaptation of Wilde’s tale, is clearly the work of a man of declining years who has long exhausted his theme. Here, the fictional device of the dream vision is transformed into an autobiographical account of an actual dream Kernahan claims to have had in a church, shortly after recovering from a serious illness. Once more, he repeats the opening of Wilde’s tale, but departs from it entirely as the work develops into a struggle between the forces of good and evil. It is a work that never rises above the level of crude allegory, a fire-and-brimstone warning of the consequences of unbelief, where ‘tortured forms of men and women’ writhe in the mouth of hell, before being restored to the bosom of Christ.⁴⁴⁵ It becomes clear when examining Kernahan’s three religious fictions in sequence that his motivations for adapting Wilde’s original tale, had more to do with ethics than aesthetics. As if attempting to undo an evil spell, he seeks to restore to rights Wilde’s most unsettling ideas: the new Messiah, preaching his aesthetic creed is restored to the meek and gentle figure found in orthodox Lives of Jesus; and the promise of freedom and individuality implicit in ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ is exposed as an impossible ideal, the essential nature of humankind being irredeemably fallen, dependent on the external restraints of Christianity for its survival. The deeply conservative nature of Kernahan’s work reduces Wilde’s radical and thought-provoking vision of the Gospels to a series of dull, tract-like warnings of the consequences of atheism. In its appeal to fin-de-siècle fears of the degeneration which could result from the triumph of scientific rationalism and democratization, Kernahan’s work resembles that of Gull and Corelli, but his election of the dream vision form, rather than the popular novel, precluded it from ever attaining best-seller status.⁴⁴⁶
Second-hand tales: Unpath’d Waters by Frank Harris

Twelve years after the death of Wilde, a collection of short stories by Frank Harris entitled Unpath’d Waters was published to a mixed critical response. A brief review in The Times Literary Supplement praised all but one story for striking ‘an original note’ and, in what amounts to an encomium to Harris in the arts periodical, Rhythm, John Middleton Murry proclaimed ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ to be ‘among the supreme creations of art’, and its author to be ‘the greatest artist living among the English-speaking people’.⁴⁴⁷ Other reviewers were less convinced of Harris’s creative genius and, focusing mainly on the early Christian stories, treated them as unremarkable examples of an already well-established European genre of scripturally-based fiction.⁴⁴⁸ ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ was singled out by the Saturday Review as a work very much in the mode of Continental writers such as Anatole France and Maurice Maeterlinck, a mode which had ‘already been worked for all it is worth’; ⁴⁴⁹ and The Nation, though selecting it as the most impressive story of the volume, pointed out that it was ‘not so original in conception as Andreieff’s “Judas”’.⁴⁵⁰ Yet, however alert some critics were to Harris’s literary influences, his borrowings from Wilde’s oral tales seem to have escaped their notice.

Out of the nine stories which make up Unpath’d Waters, at least five of them are adaptations of works by other authors. Harris acknowledges the provenance of two of these, suggesting a somewhat inconsistent attitude to the rights of the author: ‘The Irony of Chance’ bears the sub-title ‘After Oscar Wilde’ and ‘The Holy Man’, first published in Rhythm, is clearly denoted as ‘After Tolstoi’. No such attribution is attached to ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ nor to the short playscript ‘The King of the Jews’, though both bear a close resemblance to Wilde’s oral fables.⁴⁵¹ The longest story in the collection, ‘An English Saint’, also stands free of any mention of a literary forefather, though, as Middleton Murry recounts in his autobiography, it owed much to Stendhal:

Suddenly, in a volume of his [Stendhal’s] comparatively unknown stories I came upon the unmistakable original of ‘An English Saint’. I kept my discovery to myself, but my attitude to Harris was changed in a moment. I did not trust him any more; for the discovery came at a final moment. I had just written and published in Rhythm a tremendous dithyramb about him.⁴⁵²

And Middleton Murry was not the only critic of Harris’s short stories who had to rethink his opinions of the author. In a work of 1921, Hesketh Pearson praised Unpath’d Waters for containing ‘more real genius, a larger humanity, a deeper comprehension, a wider vision’ than any other collection he had read,⁴⁵³only to acknowledge in later years that: ‘Several of Wilde’s apologues have appeared in a volume of short stories called Unpath’d Waters’.⁴⁵⁴ One of Harris’s biographers, Hugh Kingsmill, also noted that the prose of the volume’s Biblical stories was ‘reminiscent of Wilde’s parables’.⁴⁵⁵ As time wore on, though, biographers and critics of Harris with no first-hand knowledge of their subject either omitted to mention, or failed to perceive, their subject’s debt to Wilde. E. Merrill Root, in his near hagiographical work on Harris, states how ‘“The Miracle of the Stigmata” develops a favourite idea of Harris’s: that Jesus did not die on the cross’.⁴⁵⁶ Writing a decade or so later, Vincent Brome describes the same story as ‘original, ironic and written with a spare beauty’, praise that might be more justly bestowed on Wilde’s original.⁴⁵⁷

Harris’s failure to credit Wilde for ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ in Unpath’d Waters could be put down to a regrettable oversight; after all, he acknowledges him as the originator of one of the stories in the volume. Guillot de Saix was of the opinion that Harris bought from Wilde the rights to both ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ and ‘The Irony of Chance’, presumably prior to his ill-fated purchase of the Mr and Mrs Daventry scenario.⁴⁵⁸ Certainly, the relative poverty endured by Wilde during his post-prison years makes it highly probable that he would have put some of his imaginative property on the literary market; but the sale of an entirely oral composition is clearly problematic. Considering that ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ is slight enough for Harris to have committed it to memory for later use, it is possible that he claimed the tale as a form of compensation for the Mr and Mrs Daventry fiasco but, ultimately, the question as to whether Harris bought or stole ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ is difficult to resolve with any certainty.⁴⁵⁹ However, his well-documented dispute over the tale’s donné with the Anglo-Irish author, George Moore, attests to the fact that he fully intended to pass the story off as his own invention.⁴⁶⁰ Moreover, Harris was an inveterate plagiarist, whose magpie tendencies are remarked upon in writings by both his friends and enemies. In his biography of Wilde, Hesketh Pearson includes William Rothenstein’s account of Harris’s prolix retelling of a tale by Anatole France and Wilde’s caustic response to the rendition: ‘What a charming story, Frank…Anatole France would have spoiled that story’, an anecdote which indicates that Harris’s plagiary was common knowledge.⁴⁶¹ Enid Bagnold, employed by Harris during his editorship of the periodical Modern Society, recalls in her autobiography: ‘I rewrote stories from Maupassant and signed them myself (needless to say, at my chief’s suggestion).’ ⁴⁶² And in Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde, Robert Sherard accuses Harris of translating André Gide’s transcriptions of Wilde’s oral tales into English and quoting them as his own in his biography of Wilde.⁴⁶³ Certainly, a parallel reading of the two writers’ versions of ‘The Master’ would, give or take a few minor variations, bear out Sherard’s claim, though his further allegation that Harris persuaded the translator of the French edition of the work, Henry-D. Davray, to put in ‘a few clumsy words of his own concoction’ to make the theft less obvious to French readers would seem unfounded.⁴⁶⁴ Indeed, Davray (the translator of numerous works by and about Wilde) appears to have opted for a direct translation of the published version of the prose poem.⁴⁶⁵

While the weight of evidence would seem to confirm Harris as a purloiner of Wilde’s ideas, there is room for recognizing that the transference of ideas was not exclusively one way. The genesis of Wilde’s spoken tale, ‘L’Ironie du Hasard’ is a relevant case in point. Harris’s reply to Hesketh Pearson’s enquiry as to whether the story ‘The Irony of Chance’ had originated with Wilde throws light on prevailing attitudes to the ownership of ideas:

Yes, the first idea of the story came from Wilde but the ending of it, that the boy was not in the ball, was my idea. Wilde told it one night very casually, saying he had a story. I said of course the boy must not be in the ball at the end, so that the man could have worsted his critics if he had only the self-confidence of virtue, but his cheating had weakened him and so he came to grief. The moment I said it, Oscar jumped at the idea and said: “Oh! Frank, what a splendid ending; but that makes the story yours; I have no more interest in it; you must write it.” He never wrote it, I believe, but I heard him telling it once afterwards with my addition, saying at the end laughing: “This is our story, Frank.” ⁴⁶⁶

Though the reliability of Harris’s version of a long-past conversation cannot go unquestioned, the reported speech of Wilde carries a tinge of that arch irony frequently found in his comments to and about his friend, lending a degree of authenticity to the account. It would seem from this that co-ownership of the story was a perfectly tenable state of affairs, so long as it remained in its spoken form; it is only when Harris commits the story to the page that the sub-titular attribution ‘After O.W.’ is deemed necessary. This demarcation between oral and literate cultures is further underlined if, as Guillot de Saix claims, Harris purchased the rights to the story from Wilde before committing it to print.
Harris and the fifth Gospel

In the third volume of My Life and Loves, Harris writes: ‘I must confess that the chief influence in my life, in the first years of the nineties, was Oscar Wilde’.⁴⁶⁷ The first publication of ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ in 1910 serves as proof that Wilde’s ideas held sway over Harris’s literary endeavours for some considerable time after the close of the 1890s. There are several possible reasons why Harris was so keen to exploit Wilde’s Biblical revisions. On a purely personal level, his predilection for shocking the moral majority may well have been a driving force in the enterprise. Enid Bagnold remembered how he ‘talked loudly of his three companions, Christ, Shakespeare and Wilde…and heads were raised to listen.’⁴⁶⁸ And, recalling a similar occasion, Hesketh Pearson wrote how Harris ‘talked with amazing fluency…and when he caught sight of a dean or an archdeacon sitting near us, his terribly audible question “Did Jesus Christ wear gaiters?” horrified me.’ Writing Wilde’s stigmata story must have seemed to Harris an ideal way of gaining attention from a less immediate, but more extensive, public. In a postscript to a letter dated December 1908, Harris asks Arnold Bennett whether he knows of anyone interested in publishing his short story ‘The Magic Glasses’ and continues ‘Of course no one will look at “The Miracle of the Stigmata”, a strategically placed afterthought that suggests he was already anticipating future notoriety.⁴⁶⁹ Just one month later, negotiations over the publication of his stories were already in motion, and Harris reported to Bennett, with something akin to pride, that ‘Hueffer has lunched with me and told me that his partner, Marwood, regarded “The Miracle of the Stigmata” as a piece of blasphemous profanity which no right-thinking man would publish anywhere.’⁴⁷⁰ Notwithstanding such objections, the publication of his heterodox tale in Unpath’d Waters went ahead, launching Harris’s venture into Biblical fiction.

If Harris’s braggadocio is partly responsible for his prose treatment of Wilde’s stigmata tale, so was his wish to be taken seriously as a Biblical scholar. His account of an interview with Ernest Renan, first published in The English Review in 1911, is written in a style which proclaims the writer’s easy familiarity with his subject.⁴⁷¹ Harris presents himself as a knowledgeable theologian, undaunted by the fame and reputation of his interviewee; Renan is presented as both self-regarding and eager for his interviewer’s praise and admiration. All in all, the portrait reads like an exercise in wish-fulfilment: Harris is much more likely to have held this interview in his head than in Renan’s sitting room. Indeed, one of his biographers, Hugh Kingsmill writes that ‘Harris’s subjects may be arranged in three classes’, estimating that Renan fits into the second of these: ‘those whom there is either certainty or a reasonable presumption that he met between once and half a dozen times.’⁴⁷² Yet, however slight the friendship may have been, Harris purports to have taken Renan to task for his portrayal, in the Life of Jesus, of a sweet-natured and handsome Christ, and to have upbraided him for filling in the gaps of the Gospel stories with his own imagination. Harris continued to regard Renan’s chef-d’oeuvre as deeply flawed, having ‘missed Jesus at his highest’, and set himself the task of improving upon it.⁴⁷³ As early as 1910, he informed Arnold Bennett that his dealings with Renan had made him ‘eager to write about Jesus’ and to compose ‘a gospel according to Thomas’.⁴⁷⁴ Far from feeling awed and intimidated at the thought of following in Renan’s footsteps, he seems to have been spurred on by a certain competitive urge to compose better Scriptural fiction than his contemporaries. The novelist, Louis Marlow, who contributed to Pearson’s while it was under Harris’s editorship in New York, observed that Harris ‘rarely if ever wrote disinterestedly, but with an eye to the main chance and in the competitive spirit’.⁴⁷⁵ Such competitiveness is clearly demonstrated in Harris’s warning to Bennett not to tell anyone of his plans for a Scriptural fiction ‘or some clerical Shaw will probably exploit the idea’, and in his boast to the same correspondent that Anatole France, in composing the short story ‘The Procurateur of Judea’, had ‘spoiled a fine thing; but I wrote ‘The Stigmata’ to beat that thing of his.’⁴⁷⁶

Personality traits notwithstanding, Harris must also have realised that the climate remained favourable for Biblical fiction set in the era of the Primitive Church. Theological studies in the early years of the twentieth century were increasingly dominated by interest in early Christianity, spurred on by the discoveries of extra-canonical Gospels.⁴⁷⁷ And so, around 1910, Harris transferred his interests from the figure of Shakespeare to the figure of Christ, his critical study, The Women of Shakespeare, written in the same year, marking the point of transition. In this work, following in the tradition built up over decades in Lives of Jesus, he yokes together Christ and Shakespeare, drawing the reader’s attention to a number of verbal similarities between the sayings of Jesus and lines from Shakespeare’s plays, finally declaring his preference for the words of the Man of Sorrows who ‘gave himself a little more absolutely than Shakespeare to the divine inspiration.’⁴⁷⁸

‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’

Harris’s development of Wilde’s stigmata tale into short-story form is remarkable in its lack of literary ambition. While he may have moved in the same circles as writers such as Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, Harris does not seem to have shared their interest in creative innovation. Foregoing the opportunity of exploring the psychology of the resuscitated Jesus by means such as free indirect speech or interior monologue, he opts for an insistently omniscient narrator, staying well within the boundaries of classic Victorian realism. With the demands of realistic fiction in mind, Harris selects what best suits his purpose from more than one recorded version of Wilde’s story. Maurevert’s recollection of Wilde’s tale provides him with the Jewish-community setting, in line with what was by then the well-established custom of viewing Jesus in the context of first-century Judaism; this version also provides him with a married Jesus, enabling him to pursue ideas concerning the relationship between sexuality and character, and to explore, through the wife figure, the role played by women in the Early Church.⁴⁷⁹ But Harris casts aside this version’s foregrounding of the apostle Peter, preferring the other version’s emphasis on the apostle Paul, a figure who seems to have interested him more than Jesus himself.

Harris’s Christ figure closely resembles that of Wilde’s tale: he is reclusive and withdrawn, tolerated by his companions because ‘his shrinking self-effacement flattered vanity and disposed them in his favour’.⁴⁸⁰ Building on Wilde’s brief but resonant description of Jesus as ‘le seul homme sur la terre à connaître la fausseté de la religion nouvelle’, Harris presents a disenchanted idealist, whose superior knowledge derives from surviving the agonies of the cross, and living to tell the tale that there is no tale to tell.⁴⁸¹ A leader and a charismatic preacher in his former life, his only labour now is to conceal his tortured past and to speak ‘very little, and never about himself’ (4). Harris’s decision to name him ‘Joshua’, the Jewish equivalent of ‘Jesus’, serves not only to insist on his Semitic roots, but also to underline his self-division: he has, in the reader’s mind at least, two names and two identities. Once Paul’s teachings take hold of the community, its discussions revolve almost entirely around the miracle of Christ’s resurrection, and Joshua is made even more acutely aware of the distance between his former and present self, fielding painfully rhetorical questions such as ‘what do you know of Jesus that you should contradict His apostle?’(17). As the story progresses, so the reader is made increasingly aware of the linguistic adjustments Joshua is obliged to make to conceal his true identity. This verbal estrangement from his earlier self is particularly pronounced when he disputes Paul’s interpretation of Christ’s teachings and puts forward what he knows to be the authentic version:

“Paul has made doctrines of belief and rules of conduct; but Jesus wanted nothing but love: love that is more than righteousness…He may have been mistaken,” he went on in a voice broken by extreme emotion; “He trusted God, cried to Him in his extremity, hoping for instant help - in vain….He was forsaken, cruelly forsaken, and all his life’s work undone. (19-20)

Here, Joshua’s emotional fragility when recounting his moment of anguish impedes his fluency; his halting speech rhythms threaten a lexical breakdown and the reader half-expects him to shift from the third-person to the first-person in a dramatic moment of revelation. Indeed, Harris relies heavily on Joshua’s potential to destroy the illusion of Christ’s resurrection, at any point in the story, to provide tension in an otherwise leaden narrative. Joshua’s most sustained dialogue in the story comes when he feels compelled to counter his wife’s unquestioning faith in Paul’s teaching. Harris fully exploits the situational irony of Joshua hearing his own supposed death and resurrection spoken about by Paul and his followers. A Christ-figure turned rationalist theologian, Joshua questions whether Jesus’s death on the cross was genuine:

“But sometimes,” Joshua went on, “men are thought to be dead who have only fainted. Jesus is said to have died on the cross in a few hours; and that, you know, is very strange; the crucified generally live for two or three days.”(10)

Similarly, he applies materialist arguments to explain away Paul’s Damascene vision, positing the theory: ‘It may have been the sun…the noonday sun; his blindness afterwards seems to show that it was sunstroke’ (11). In so frequently drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that the supernatural figure worshipped by Paul and his followers is one and the same as the sole rationalist and unbeliever in their community, Harris blunts the ironical edge of Wilde’s version of the tale and coarsens its tone.

In most respects Harris’s presentation of Christ is considerably more conventional than Wilde’s. He is careful to perpetuate the familiar image of a meek and gentle Jesus, so beloved of orthodox Christians, and while his appearance distinguishes him immediately as a Jew, his ‘silence…more stimulating than the speech of other men’ (4) sets him apart from his ‘loud, high-coloured, grasping compatriots’ (3).⁴⁸² For the women in the community, however, Joshua’s alterity is shown to derive from his lack of masculinity, Tabitha declaring him to be ‘soft and affectionate by nature, like a girl’ (5)⁴⁸³. The story suggests that Joshua’s ignoble defeat on the cross has led inexorably to sexual impotence and a childless marriage, a fictional playing out of Harris’s own conviction that ‘everything high and ennobling in our nature springs directly out of the sex instinct’.⁴⁸⁴ This is not the elective celibacy of a spiritual leader, but the inevitable sexual failure of a broken man who, as Tabitha remarks, ‘has a lot of the woman in him’ (6). However, it is not Joshua’s effeminacy, but his opposition to Paul and his teachings, which eventually ostracizes him from the entire community. The more Joshua hears reports of the missionary’s preaching, the more he realises that his own words have been distorted; as he insists to his wife, the apostle’s teaching ‘is not the teaching of love; and Jesus came into the world to teach love, and nothing else’ (19). Harris sentimentalizes Wilde’s desolate vision of a failed saviour by stressing Joshua’s boundless capacity for love and forgiveness, transforming a hauntingly agnostic tale into a story closer in tone to Unitarianism. Joshua’s capacity for love is seen to have expanded as a consequence of his suffering on the cross, helping him to realise the error of his former declaration that ‘no earthly ties should fetter us who are called to the service of the divine Master’ and that ‘the higher love ought to include the lower and not exclude it’ (21). When Judith abandons the marital home, it is with the conviction that she is obeying the exhortation of Christ, little suspecting its origin to lie in words spoken by the very husband she is deserting. And so, in yet another example of Harris’s unsophisticated handling of irony, Joshua is hoist with his own petard: the only aspect of his teaching accurately transmitted by Paul is the very one he would most like to reverse.

In fleshing out Wilde’s original story, Harris seems less interested in fictionalizing the character of Jesus than in exploring the historical figure of Paul. The apostle’s presence dominates the story, his overwhelming success throwing Joshua’s failings into sharp relief. The two men are contrasted throughout: where Joshua is reserved and laconic, Paul is bold and eloquent; where Joshua’s ‘great eyes made…flesh creep’ (5), Paul’s ‘eyes are wonderful’ (12). This interest in the relation between Jesus and Paul is very much of its time, the prevailing theological trend being to regard Paul as a unique thinker who had succeeded in breaking with an outmoded Judaic tradition and inaugurating a new and permanent spiritual order.⁴⁸⁵ Whereas in Wilde’s version Paul is but a shadowy presence, referred to only fleetingly as being ‘au cours de sa première tournée évangélique’, Harris’s story pays close attention to the Acts of the Apostles, detailing the missionary’s progress from unknown preacher to one recognized as the greatest of the apostles.⁴⁸⁶ By adding brief details of the evangelical ministries of the apostles Philip and Peter, and stressing the limits of their success, Harris presses home his own conviction that, without Paul, ‘Christianity…might have perished in obscurity.’⁴⁸⁷ The brief appearance of these two original disciples also makes the point that their first-hand knowledge of the Messiah does not render their preaching any more authoritative or compelling. Paul, on the other hand, whose Achilles’ heel is commonly held to be that he was not in the original band of disciples, seems to acquire spiritual authority through force of personality and strength of conviction. In the community, it is only Joshua who thinks to ask ‘Did he know Jesus…? He was not one of the disciples, was he?’ (11), a question answered with ironic force at the story’s conclusion, when Paul fails to recognize Joshua’s corpse as that of the crucified Jesus.

Following the general tendency to regard Paul as the figure who brought about a rupture with the Judaic law, Harris depicts him as a man with a seemingly boundless capacity for innovation; those who hear him are thrilled by the ‘new creed’ (9-10) and Joshua is dismayed by the manner in which Paul has reinvented his own words, shaping them into ‘doctrines of belief and rules of conduct’ (19-20). While the more devout Jews had rejected Peter’s teaching on account of the fact that Jesus was crucified, violating the statute laid down in Deuteronomy that ‘ a hanged man is accursed by God’(21:23), Paul manages to convince them that the crucifixion, far from being a disgrace, is ‘the crowning proof…that Jesus was indeed the Messiah’ (9). As fast as Judaic law is overturned, new Pauline laws are established. Judith’s quitting of the marital home in obedience to Paul’s decree: ‘Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers’(18), which Harris takes verbatim from II Corinthians (6:14), is a dramatic example of how quickly the apostle’s word becomes law.⁴⁸⁸ Paul also brings about a profound shift in the community’s eschatological beliefs and even one of its most sceptical members, Simon, is won over by ‘Paul’s idea that the kingdom promised to us Jews is to be a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom of righteousness, and not a material kingdom’ (13). Clearly regarding Paul’s declaration in II Corinthians (11:6) that he is ‘unskilled in speaking’ as no more than the device of a rhetorician, Harris reveals how his centrality to Christianity is thanks to his linguistic facility, rather than his privileged position as witness to a divine revelation. Paul’s ability to ‘talk of Jesus beautifully’ convinces his audience that he is ‘filled with the very Spirit of God’ (11) and, as a result, ‘Conversion followed conversion’ (13). Allied to Paul’s sophisticated skills of articulation is his gift for reinterpreting the words of others. Perhaps having in mind Paul’s admission in I Corinthians (15:3), that the good news he delivers of Christ’s resurrection comes only second-hand, Harris frequently reminds the reader that the original words of Christ are likely to have been distorted by those who carried them forward. And Harris has no compunction in wrenching quotations from their New Testament contexts to press home Paul’s shortcomings as a conduit of Christ’s word. In one instance, Harris presents Mark’s recording of Christ’s response to being accused of casting out demons in the name of Beelzebub, ‘He that is not against us is on our part’ (17), as the opposite of Matthew’s version ‘He that is not with me is against me’. ⁴⁸⁹ While the two accounts are, when read in their immediate Scriptural contexts, complementary, Harris chooses, for the purpose of his characterization, to present them as conflicting. The seemingly more moderate words from Mark are presented as the authentic words of Christ, whereas Matthew’s harsher version is delivered through the reported speech of Paul (15-16), underlining the apostle’s habit of misrepresenting Christ’s teaching to suit his own rather vengeful nature.⁴⁹⁰

As the narrative progresses, Harris explores current opinions that Paul was the falsifier of Jesus and his teaching. Most extreme amongst such views were those of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose vituperative assaults on the personality and ministry of Paul featured strongly in his late work, The Antichrist, the first English translation of which appeared in 1896.⁴⁹¹ By 1909, the year when Harris was formulating a picture of Paul for his stigmata story,⁴⁹² Nietzschean philosophy was very much in vogue with his contemporaries, most notably George Bernard Shaw, a close friend of Harris’s since the mid-1890s, and one of the earliest and most active popularizers of Nietzschean ideas.⁴⁹³ Harris’s portrayal of the Early Church in ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ accords with Nietzsche’s view that Christianity is a ‘purely fictitious world’ [translator’s italics].⁴⁹⁴ Paul is the consummate storyteller, constructing a new religion from the compelling narrative of a resurrection which has not actually taken place. His preaching begins with a crucifixion he has not witnessed, which is then proclaimed as the ‘chief doctrine of the new creed’ (9), consistent with Nietzsche’s opinion that the apostle ‘could not use the life of the Saviour at all, - he needed the death on the cross…’.⁴⁹⁵ Furthermore, Paul offers up his personal tale of Damascene conversion as one of the sacred texts of the new faith. His followers consider it ‘a wonderful story’ (11), appearing to value it more for its narrative qualities than as a testament to Christ. The Paul of ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ also bears a close resemblance to Nietzsche’s ‘genius of hatred’. An advocate of vengeance and punishment, he stirs up the crowds with his citation of vengeful Old Testament texts, twisting the teachings of Jesus to form a doctrine which prefers exclusion to inclusion, division to unity.⁴⁹⁶ Even the holy stigmata he perceives on the corpse of Joshua are interpreted as marks of punishment for unbelief, placed there as a sign of divine retribution.

The logic of the stigmata story leads inexorably to an absence at the centre of Christianity: there is no risen Messiah, there are no holy stigmata, and the Primitive Church is founded on a figment of the community’s imagination, most especially that of the female.⁴⁹⁷ While Harris characterises the story’s male Jewish community through scraps of dialogue spoken by a few unnamed men, the women of the story are given names, described in detail, and play crucial roles in the domestic life of Joshua and in the Pauline mission. Harris’s foregrounding of the apostle’s female followers is, in some respects, true to what we learn from certain of Paul’s Letters, where women are promoted to serve the Christian community on an equal footing with their male peers.⁴⁹⁸ Joshua’s wife, Judith, and her aunt, Tabitha, are amongst Paul’s first converts and ‘it was only natural that their zeal should grow when they found their example followed by the priests and Levites and other leaders of the people’ (14). Judith, in particular, is ‘treated by Paul with great tenderness, as one who had suffered much for the faith’ (24) and is constantly by his side at meetings. When Joshua’s death is discovered, Judith and Tabitha lay out his body, a travestying of the task that the female disciples set out to perform in all three Synoptic accounts of Jesus’s death and burial and, just as Mary Magdalene is one of the first witnesses of the resurrected Christ, so these two are the first to see the marks of the cross on Joshua’s corpse. On the surface, then, it might appear that Harris holds up the women of his story as faithful and loyal leaders of the new faith. Yet a closer inspection reveals Harris’s reservations regarding the religious temperament of women. For Judith, the initial attraction of Paul’s preaching is the relief it brings from the monotony of ‘the wretched loneliness of her life’ with Joshua (8). When she returns from a meeting with the apostle, we are told that she ‘seemed like a new creature; her cheeks were red and her eyes glowed, and she was excited, as one is excited with the new wine’ (9), from which we infer that her devotion to Paul stems more from displaced physical desire than religious fervour. Both the barrenness of Judith’s marriage and her feeling that she could have respected Joshua more if ‘he had turned on her and mastered her’ (6), hint at her husband’s impotence, the latter phrase reinforcing what was no doubt Harris’s own conviction: that women are naturally disposed to desire male domination. The unseemly haste with which Tabitha and Judith are received into the new faith is set against the more circumspect behaviour of Simon, the only male convert who is named. He looks on cautiously as Tabitha and her niece rush to be baptised, stating that ‘for his part, he meant to wait: he would hear more, and do nothing rashly’ (12). And while his conversion to Pauline ways is not long in coming, he retains a strong affection for Joshua throughout the story, being the only one to reprove Judith for deserting her husband, telling her: ‘He was too good for you’ (24). It is an accusation which again carries the author’s own criticism: women lack the discernment of men and cannot distinguish quiet truth from loud falsehood. In depicting the women of the story as led by bodily and social needs, rather than by the more noble pull of the spirit, Harris follows Renan’s view that the ‘female conscience, when under the influence of passionate love, is capable of the most extravagant illusions’, and perpetuates the tradition of centuries of male writing on the female religious temperament.⁴⁹⁹

In developing Wilde’s lapidary parable into a story of considerable length, Harris seems to have concentrated more on substance than style, prompted perhaps by his desire to be regarded as a Biblical savant.⁵⁰⁰ The text abounds with direct quotations from the Pauline Epistles and laboured attempts to dramatize what were, by this time, rather jaded theological issues. Harris’s involvement with Scriptural study and with the person of Jesus in particular, persisted for a few years following the publication of Unpath’d Waters. Several of his biographers put this continuation of interest down to his brief incarceration in Brixton prison in 1914 for contempt of court. Elmer Gertz and A. I. Tobin, in their 1931 study of Harris, wrote that:

He drew parallels between himself and the Divine One, who was crucified at

Calvary. ‘I am being punished that I may teach more efficaciously,’ he

said. It was then that the words of Jesus began to take on a personal note. They became his words, too, and constantly they flowed from his lips, infecting him with what were virtually messianic illusions.⁵⁰¹
Given that Harris was deeply involved in writing a life of Wilde during this period, it is highly likely that the author identified his own prison experiences with that of his subject’s, and that his increasing engagement with the Man of Sorrows was an instance of life imitating art. His vision of Christ came to resemble, more and more, that expounded in De Profundis and he increasingly took on Wildean phraseology, describing Christ as an ‘artist of the noblest’.⁵⁰² Furthermore, he followed Wilde in his disregard for the historical Jesus and his contempt for those who endeavour to ‘prove his existence by the testimony of Paul, or by the references to the crucifixion in Tacitus and Josephus.’⁵⁰³ Yet, though Harris admits in his portrait of Wilde that he and his friend shared a passion for the Gospels, and for the figure of Jesus in particular, he is also anxious to stress that they approached the subject ‘from opposite poles’; Harris presents himself as a believer in Jesus as a ‘divine spirit’, characterizing Wilde as a thoroughgoing pagan.⁵⁰⁴ That Harris lived out an image of himself as an ardent worshipper of Christ is evident from contemporary accounts of his behaviour. Recalling a visit from Harris, Augustus John writes how, on reading the manuscript of the Wilde biography, he discovered ‘the text interlarded with pious sentiments and references to our Saviour’, which were only toned down after considerable resistance from the author.⁵⁰⁵

As Harris aged, his vision of Jesus grew increasingly sentimental, more in line with the Christ of Renan’s Life of Jesus: a portrait he continued to dismiss as inadequate. His inclination as an older man was to look back to the liberal theology of the nineteenth century for his ideal image of Christ, refusing the challenge of writing a Jesus for the twentieth century through means of a more modern fiction. Unpath’d Waters, with its four Biblically-based stories, is the nearest Harris came to completing a fifth Gospel. His 1924 volume of short stories, Undream’d of Shores, included one fiction based directly on the New Testament entitled ‘St Peter’s Difficulty’, but this made little impact on the literary world and was heavily indebted to Shaw.⁵⁰⁶ Harris admitted defeat in the final volume of his memoirs: ‘If I had another life to live, I would learn Aramaic and Hebrew and try to do what Renan failed to do: give a real portrait of the greatest man who ever wore flesh.’ ⁵⁰⁷ In some ways his failure was already evident by the middle years of the First World War, when George Moore’s Biblical novel The Brook Kerith was published. Though regarded by some reviewers as profoundly blasphemous, it was amply praised by others, and became one of the most popular books of the war period. Harris’s accusations that Moore had plagiarized his stigmata story, coupled with his splenetic attacks on The Brook Kerith, suggest that he was well aware that he had already lost the race to compose the evangel for modern times.

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CHAPTER FIVE