In the aforementioned essay on his Greek master Mr. Rolfe, Edmund Wilson described the religious instruction he received at the Hill School, and his own alienation from that instruction, which culminated with a reverse conversion experience. He had taken up the works of George Bernard Shaw, and was reading Major Barbara on a train carrying him back to school after a holiday. In the Preface he came to a sentence in which Shaw asserted that currently "there is not a single credible established religion in the world." Wilson continued:
For a moment I was jolted a little; but I looked out the window at the landscape, rather muddy and sordid with winter, and had to recognize that this was true, that I knew perfectly well it was true, and that I ought to have admitted it before; and the flickering childish faith to which I had been giving artificial respiration expired then and there.
There follows, perhaps accompanied by too strong a whiff of self-satisfaction, an account of subsequent conversations with other Hill students who had not penetrated so deeply into the truth of these questions. But as a conversion story Wilson's is not to my way of thinking anywhere near as annoying as those that run in the other direction, which never involve the impression made by the late winter Pennsylvania countryside viewed out a train window. No, no, the devout require that their epiphanies be accompanied by bolts of light and the suspension of the everyday. It seems that the razzle-dazzle of these accoutrements is God's calling card.
Comments