Chapter 35

THE AUTHOR'S WORKS SUMMARIZED

A Boy's Conservatism--Poetic Ambitions--The Philosophy of Religious Belief--The Philosophy of Industrial Conservatism--Intellectual Torpor of Conservatives--Final Treatises and Fiction.

I began these memoirs with observing that they are in part a mere series of sketches and social anecdotes strung on the thread of the writer's own experiences, and as such illustrating the tenor of his social and mental life, but that in part they are illustrative in a wider sense than this. His literary activities may be looked on as exemplifying the moral and social reactions of a large number of persons, to the great changes and movements in thought and in social politics by which the aspect of the world has been affected, both for them and him, from the middle years of the reign of Queen Victoria onward. Regarding myself, then, as more or less of a type, and reviewing my own activities as circumstances have called them into play and as these memoirs record them, I may briefly redescribe them, and indicate their sequence thus.

Having been born and brought up in an atmosphere of strict Conservative tradition--conservative in a religious and social sense alike--I had unconsciously assumed in effect, if not in so many words, that any revolt or protest against the established order was indeed an impertinence, but was otherwise of no great import. Accordingly, my temperament being that of an instinctive poet, the object of my earliest ambitions was to effect within a very limited circle (for the idea of popular literature never entered my head) a radical change in the poetic taste of England, and restore it to what it had been in the classical age of Pope. But, as I left childhood behind me and approached maturer youth I gradually came to realize that the whole order of things--literary, religious, and social--which the classical poetry assumed, and which I had previously taken as impregnable, was being assailed by forces which it was impossible any longer to ignore. Threats of social change, indeed, in any radical sense continued for a long time to affect me merely as vague noises in the street, which would now and again interrupt polite conversation, and presently die away, having seriously altered nothing; but the attack on orthodox religion seemed to me much more menacing, and was rarely absent from the sphere of my adolescent thought. The attacking parties I still looked on as ludicrous, but I began to fear them as formidable; and they were for me rendered more formidable still by the very unfortunate fact that the defenders of orthodoxy seemed to me, in respect of their tactics, to be hardly less ludicrous than their opponents. The only way in which the former could successfully make good their defense was--such was my conclusion--by appeal to common experience: by showing how supernatural religion was implicit in all civilized life, and how grotesque and tragic would be the ruin in which such life would collapse if supernatural faith were eliminated.

Such, as I have explained already, was the moral of my four early books, _The New Republic_, _The New Paul and Virginia_, _Is Life Worth Living?_ and _A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_. All these attempts at attacking modern atheistic philosophy were based on a demonstration of its results, and appealed not so much to pure religious emotion as to the intellect, a sense of humor, and what is called a knowledge of the world.

The writing of these works, the first of which I had begun while I was still an undergraduate, occupied about six or seven years. Meanwhile, side by side with the preaching of atheism in religion and morals, a growth had become apparent in the preaching of extreme democracy or Socialist Radicalism in politics, a preaching of which Bright was in this country the precursor, and which first came to a head between the years 1880 and 1900, in the writings of Henry George and the English followers of Marx. What I looked on as the fallacies of these new political gospels seemed to me no less dangerous, and also no less absurd, than those which I had previously attacked in the gospel of atheistic philosophy, and my attention being forcibly diverted from religious problems to social, I devoted myself to the writing of my first political work, _Social Equality_ (published 1882), in which all questions of religion were for the moment set aside. In my novel _The Old Order Changes_, published four or five years later, the religious problem and the social problem are united, and an attempt is made to suggest the general terms on which the ideals of a true Conservatism may be harmonized with those of an enlightened Socialism. As a result of my political writings, I was asked, and with certain reservations I consented, to become a candidate for a Scotch constituency.

Between the years 1890 and 1895 I turned again to social politics pure and simple in two books, the first of which was _Labor and the Popular Welfare_, the second being _Aristocracy and Evolution_.

My dealings with social politics being for the time exhausted, I devoted about five years--1895 to 1900--to the composition of three novels, _A Human Document_, _The Heart of Life_, and _The Individualist_, which were studies of the relation of religion to the passions, feelings, and foibles of which for most men the experiences of life consist.

Between the years 1900 and 1907 I published four works on the relation of religious dogmas to philosophy and scientific knowledge--namely, _Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_--this volume relating to the Anglican controversies of the time--_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_, _The Veil of the Temple_, and _The Reconstruction of Belief_, to which may be added a novel called _An Immortal Soul_.[4]

As a result of the attention excited by these or by certain of these books, I was in the year 1907 invited to visit America and deliver a series of addresses on the Socialist propaganda of the day. These addresses were presently rewritten and published in a volume called _A Critical Examination of Socialism_.

Between that time and the outbreak of the recent war I played an active part, together with other persons, in devising and setting on foot certain schemes of anti-Socialist propaganda in this country. Most of my own efforts I devoted to the collection and promulgation of sound social statistics, especially those relating to the current distribution of wealth, and I may here mention, without even suggesting a name, that I discussed the importance of such statistics with a leading Conservative statesman, who, expressing his sympathy with my views, added at the same time that, so far as the constitution of his own mind was concerned, they were not temperamentally his own. "To me," he said, "columns of figures are merely so many clouds." I answered, "That may be; but they are clouds which, when taken together, make not clouds, but lightning."

Anyhow, by the outbreak of war these schemes were suspended, and changed conditions may now make methods other than those which seemed then appropriate necessary. But, as for myself, the first four years of war-time I devoted entirely to the production of a new volume, _The Limits of Pure Democracy_, of which a French translation is being issued, and which may, I hope, prove useful to sober conservatives of more than one school and country, as it aims at establishing a formula acceptable, so far as it goes, to persons who are at present adversaries.

In addition to the works here mentioned, two volumes have been published of _Collected Essays_, on which certain of the works just mentioned are based. I have further published, besides my little book on Cyprus, two short volumes of verse, and a poem of which I shall speak presently, called _Lucretius on Life and Death_. All these works indicate, if taken together, the nature of the fallacies--intellectual, religious, and social--which have in succession provoked them, which have not yet exhausted themselves, and which it has been the ambition of the writer to discredit or modify.

Such have been the activities which, devoted to a continuous and developing purpose, have thus far occupied a writer whose life has been spent in alternations of solitude and the life of society. The latter, so far as he is concerned, resembles that of many other persons to whom society is naturally agreeable and have had the opportunity of enjoying it. It is a life which for him has remained substantially the same from his early youth onward, except for the fact that with time his social experiences have widened, that they have been varied by travels more or less extensive, and that they might have been varied also by the vicissitudes of political publicity had not his disposition inclined him, having had some taste of both, to the methods of literature rather than to those of the party platform.

Which method is the best for one who, inspired by tenacious and interconnected convictions, desires to make these prevail is a question which different people will answer in different ways. But let us make one supposition. Let us suppose that a person, such, for instance, as myself, who has dealt with ideas and principles in his opinion fallacious (notably those connected with the current claims of Labor), should have so succeeded in influencing the thoughts and the temper of his contemporaries that the modern strife between employers and employed should be pacified, and arrangements by sober discussion should render all strikes needless. Nobody would deny that a person who had brought about this result had performed what would be, in the strictest sense, an action--an action of the most practical and signally important kind, and it would be no less practical if accomplished by means of literature than it would be if accomplished by the ingenuity of cabinets or select committees. Such being the case, then, the reflection will here suggest itself that literature and action are by many critics of life constantly spoken of as though they were contrasted or antithetic things. It will not be inappropriate here, as a conclusion to these memoirs, to consider how far, or in what sense, this contrast is valid.

[4] This work, later in date than the preceding, deals with the religious difficulties arising from the phenomena of multiple personality, a subject which was then being widely discussed in England, on the Continent, and in America.