EXPERIENCES AT OXFORD
Early Youth at Oxford--Acquaintance with Browning, Swinburne,
and Ruskin--Dissipation of an Undergraduate--The Ferment of
Intellectual Revolution--_The New Republic_
My experiences at Oxford I may divide into two groups--namely, those
belonging to the social life of an undergraduate, and those consisting
of the effects--philosophical, moral, or religious--produced in an
undergraduate's mind by the influence of academic teaching.
As to my social experiences, my recollections are, on the whole,
pleasurable, but they are somewhat remote from anything that can
properly be called scholastic. They are associated with the charm of
certain cloistered buildings--with Magdalen especially, and the shades
of Addison's Walk; with country drives in dogcarts to places like Witney
and Abingdon; with dinners there in the summer evenings, and with a
sense of being happily outside the radius of caps and gowns; with supper
parties during the race weeks to various agreeable ladies; and with a
certain concert which, during one Commemoration, was given by myself and
a friend to a numerous company, and for which the mayor was good enough
to lend us the Town Hall.
From the incubus of mere collegiate discipline I was perhaps more free
than nine undergraduates out of ten. At the time when I matriculated
there were within the college precincts no quarters available; and I and
a fellow freshman who was in the same position as myself managed to
secure a suite of unusually commodious lodgings. That particular
partnership lasted only for a term, but subsequently I and two other
companions took the whole upper part of a large house between us. We
were never what is called "in college"; we rarely dined in Hall, having,
besides a good cook, a very good dining room of our own, where we gave
little dinners, much to our own contentment. We had, moreover, a spare
bedroom, in which on occasion we could put up a visitor. One visitor who
stayed with us for some weeks was Wentworth. Little things remain in the
mind when greater things are forgotten; and one little incident which I
remember of Wentworth's visit was this. Those were days when, for some
mysterious reason, men, when they smoked, were accustomed to wear
smoking caps. Wentworth had one of Oriental design, which he would
somehow attach to his head by means of a jeweled pin. One evening when
he was adjusting it the light caught his features at some peculiar
angle, and for a fugitive moment his face was an exact and living
reproduction of one of the best-known portraits of Byron.
Another incident belonging to this same order of memories occurred
during one of the race weeks. About half past ten one evening,
accompanied by three companions, I was making my way along a rather
ill-illuminated street. My three companions were feminine, and the
dresses of two of them--triumphs of the latest fashion--were calculated
to arrest attention as though they were so much undulating moonlight.
Suddenly I was aware that a strange voice was addressing me. It was the
voice of a proctor, who, attended by several "bulldogs," was asking me,
with a sinister though furtive glance at the ladies, what I was doing,
and why I was not in cap and gown. I could see in his eyes a sense of
having very neatly caught me in a full career of sin. I explained to him
that Mrs. L., wife of one of the greatest of the then university
magnates, and her two charming daughters had just been so kind as to
have had supper with me, and that I was seeing them back to All Souls'.
To return, however, to the first week or fortnight which saw me and my
original housemate established as full-blown freshmen; I cannot for the
life of me remember by what steps we entered on any course of formal
instruction, but he and I were told with very surprising promptitude
that we should, without loss of time, give a breakfast to the Balliol
Eight. We did so, and never before had I seen on any one matutinal
tablecloth provisions which weighed so much, or disappeared so rapidly.
Not many days later I found myself at another breakfast table of a very
different character, in the capacity not of host, but guest. The host
on this occasion was Jowett, who asked me to breakfast with him in order
that I might meet Browning. Browning by some one or other--I think it
was James Spedding--had been shown certain manuscript verses--precious
verses of my own. He had sent me a message of a flattering kind with
regard to them, and he now held out both his hands to me with an almost
boisterous cordiality. His eyes sparkled with laughter, his beard was
carefully trimmed, and an air of fashion was exhaled from his dazzling
white waistcoat. He did not embarrass me by any mention of my own
performances. He did not, so far as I remember, make any approach to the
subject of literature at all, but reduced both Jowett and myself to
something like complete silence by a constant flow of anecdotes and
social allusions, which, though not deficient in point, had more in them
of jocularity than wit. He was not, perhaps, my ideal of the author of
"Men and Women," or the singer of "Lyric Love" as "a wonder and a wild
desire"; but there the great man was, and when I quitted his presence
and found myself once more in undergraduate circles I felt myself
shining like Moses when he came down from the mount.
I was subsequently enveloped in a further reflected glory, due also to
Jowett's kindness--a kindness which survived many outbursts of what I
thought somewhat petulant disapproval. I received from him one day a
curt invitation to dinner, and presented myself, wondering mildly to
what this mark of favor could be due. But wonder turned to alarm when,
on entering the Master's drawing-room, I discovered in the dim twilight
no other figure than his own. His manner, however, though not effusive,
was civil, and was certainly fraught with no menace of any coming
judgment on my sins. We exchanged some ordinary observations on the
weather and kindred topics. Then, looking over his shoulder, he uttered
a half-audible word or two, which, being plainly not addressed to me,
must have been addressed to somebody else. Presently, out of the
shadows, a somebody else emerged. This was a person remarkable for the
large size of his head, his longish hair, his insignificant stature, and
his singularly sloping shoulders. I was introduced to him without
catching his name. Dinner was announced forthwith. It was evident that,
except for myself, this person was to be the sole guest. In the
candlelight of the dinner table I realized that this person was
Swinburne.
The dinner passed off pleasantly. Swinburne showed himself an
intelligent, though by no means a brilliant, talker; and as soon as we
had returned to the drawing room, where we drank a cup of coffee
standing, Jowett, who had some engagement, abruptly left us to finish
the evening by ourselves. On Swinburne the effect of the Master's
disappearance was magical. His manner and aspect began to exhibit a
change like that of the moon when a dim cloud drifts away from it. Of
what we discussed at starting I have not the least remembrance, but
before very long Swinburne was on the subject of poetry. His
observations at first consisted of general criticisms. Then he began to
indulge in quotations from various poems--none of them, I think, from
his own; but, however this may have been, the music seemed to intoxicate
him. The words began to thrill me with the spell of his own recitation
of them. Here at last I realized the veritable genius who had made the
English language a new instrument of passion. Here at last was the
singer for whose songs my ears were shells which still murmured with
such lines as I had first furtively read by the gaslight of the Brighton
theater. My own appreciation as a listener more and more encouraged him.
If he began a quotation sitting, he would start from his chair to finish
it. Finally he abandoned the restraints of a chair altogether. He began,
with gesticulating arms, to pace the room from one end to the other,
reciting passage after passage, and appealing to me, who managed to keep
pace with him, for applause. "The most beautiful lines that Tennyson
ever wrote," he exclaimed, "were these, from 'Maud':
"And like silent lightning under the stars
She seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest.
"Yes," he went on, "and what did the dream-Maud tell her lover when she
had got him? That the salvation of the world depended on the Crimean
War and the prosecution of Lord Palmerston's policy." Finally he strayed
into quotations from Sidney Dobell, a writer now hardly remembered, with
one of which, describing a girl bathing, he made the Master's academic
rafters ring:
"She, with her body bright sprinkles the waters white,
Which flee from her fair form, and flee in vain,
Dyed with the dear unutterable sight,
And circles out her beauties to the circling main."
He was almost shouting these words when another sound became
audible--that of an opening door, followed by Jowett's voice, which said
in high-pitched syllables, "You'd both of you better go to bed now."
My next meeting with Swinburne took place not many days later. He had
managed meanwhile to make acquaintance with a few other
undergraduates--all of them enthusiastic worshipers--one of whom
arranged to entertain him at luncheon. As I could not, being otherwise
engaged, be present at this feast myself, I was asked to join the party
as soon as possible afterward. I arrived at a fortunate moment. Most of
the guests were still sitting at a table covered with dessert dishes.
Swinburne was much at his ease in an armchair near the fireplace, and
was just beginning, as a number of smiling faces showed, to be not only
interesting, but in some way entertaining also. He was, as I presently
gathered, about to begin an account of a historical drama by himself,
which existed in his memory only--a sort of parody of what Victor Hugo
might have written had he dramatized English events at the opening of
the reign of Queen Victoria. The first act, he said, showed England on
the verge of a revolution, which was due to the frightful orgies of the
Queen at "Buckingham's Palace." The Queen, with unblushing effrontery,
had taken to herself a lover, in the person of Lord John Russell, who
had for his rival "Sir Peel." Sir Peel was represented as pleading his
own cause in a passionate scene, which wound up as follows: "Why do you
love Lord John Russell, and why do you not love me? I know why you love
Lord John Russell. He is young, he is beautiful, he is profligate. I
cannot be young, I cannot be beautiful, but I will be profligate." Then
followed the stage direction, "Exit for ze Haysmarket." In a later act
it appeared that the Queen and Lord John Russell had between them given
the world a daughter, who, having been left to her own devices, or, in
other words, to the streets, reappears as "Miss Kitty," and is accorded
some respectable rank. Under these conditions she becomes the object of
much princely devotion; but the moral hypocrisy of England has branded
her as a public scandal. With regard to her so-called depravities nobody
entertains a doubt, but one princely admirer, of broader mind than the
rest, declares that in spite of these she is really the embodiment of
everything that is divine in woman. "She may," he says, "have done
everything which might have made a Messalina blush, but whenever she
looked at the sky she murmured 'God,' and whenever she looked at a
flower she murmured 'mother.'"
The vivacity and mischievous humor with which Swinburne gave his account
of this projected play exhibited a side of his character which I have
never even seen mentioned, and the appreciation and surprise of his
audience were obviously a great delight to him. He lay back in his
chair, tossed off a glass of port, and presently his mood changed.
Somehow or other he got to his own serious poems; and before we knew
where we were he was pouring out an account of _Poems and Ballads_, and
explaining their relation to the secrets of his own experiences. There
were three poems, he said, which beyond all the rest were biographical:
"The Triumph of Time," "Dolores," and "The Garden of Proserpine." "The
Triumph of Time" was a monument to the sole real love of his life--a
love which had been the tragic destruction of all his faith in woman.
"Dolores" expressed the passion with which he had sought relief, in the
madnesses of the fleshly Venus, from his ruined dreams of the heavenly.
"The Garden of Proserpine" expressed his revolt against the flesh and
its fevers, and his longing to find a refuge from them in a haven of
undisturbed rest. His audience, who knew these three poems by heart,
held their breaths as they listened to the poet's own voice, imparting
its living tones to passages such as the following--
This is from "The Triumph of Time":
"I will say no word that a man may say,
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been, and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be."
This is from "Dolores":
"Oh, garment not golden but gilded,
Oh, garden where all men may dwell,
Oh, tower not of ivory, but builded
By hands that reach heaven out of hell."
This is from "The Garden of Proserpine":
"From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free;
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."
Then, like a man waking up from a dream, Swinburne turned to our host
and said, nervously, "Can you give me another glass of port?" His glass
was filled, he emptied it at a single draught, and then lay back in his
chair like a child who had gone to sleep, the actual fact being, as his
host soon recognized, that, in homely language, he was drunk.
Drink, indeed, was Swinburne's great enemy. He had, when I met him at
Balliol, finished his own career there more than twelve years ago; but
he had since then been a frequent guest of the Master's, who treated
him, in respect of this weakness, with a watchful and paternal care.
When I dined with him at the Master's Lodge there was nothing to tempt
him but a little claret and water. The consequence was that afterward he
was brilliant as the burning bush till he finally went in his sober
senses to bed. He was not, I think, intemperate in the sense that he
drank much. His misfortune was that a very little intoxicated him.
I associate my early days at Balliol with yet another memorable meeting.
One of the most prominent and dignified of the then residents at Oxford
was Sir Henry Acland, who, as a Devonshire man, knew many of my
relations, and had also heard something about myself. He was a friend
and entertainer of men of all sorts of eminence; and while I was still
more or less a freshman he invited me to join at his house a very small
company in the evening, the star of the occasion being a university
lecturer on art, who was just entering on his office, and whose name was
illustrious wherever the English language was spoken. He, too, knew
something about me, having been shown some of my verses, and to meet him
was one of my cherished dreams. Only half a dozen people were present,
and from a well-known portrait of him by Millais I recognized his form
at once. This was Ruskin. He had sent me, through Lord Houghton or
somebody, a verbal message of poetic appreciation already. I was now
meeting him in the flesh. The first thing in him which struck me was
the irresistible fascination of his manner. It was a manner absolutely
and almost plaintively simple, but that of no diplomat or courtier could
be more polished in what was at once its weighty and its winning
dignity. Such was his charm for the elect; but here again comes the
question of temperament. Between Ruskin and Jowett there was a
temperamental antipathy. An antipathy of this kind is a very different
thing from any reasoned dislike, and of this general fact Ruskin and
Jowett were types. I was myself another. Just as Jowett repelled so
Ruskin attracted me. During my later days at Oxford I grew to know
Ruskin intimately, and my sympathy with his genius never lost its
loyalty, though for a long time certain of his ideas--that is to say,
ideas relating to social politics--were to me barely intelligible, and
though, when they became intelligible, I regarded them as perversely
mischievous.
But beneath these social experiences, many of them sufficiently
frivolous, and all of them superficial in so far as their interest
related to individuals, Oxford provided me with others which went to the
very roots of life. Of these deeper experiences the first was due to
Jowett, though its results, so far as I was concerned, were neither
intended, understood, nor even suspected by him.
The most sensational event which occurred during my first term at
Balliol was the suicide of one of the undergraduates. He was a poor
Scotch student of a deeply religious character, who had found, so his
friends reported, that the faith of his childhood had been taken from
him by Jowett's skeptical teachings, and who had ended by cutting his
throat with a razor in Port Meadow. Jowett preached his funeral
sermon--the only sermon which I ever, so far as my recollection serves
me, heard preached in Balliol chapel by himself or by anybody else.
Jowett, who on the occasion was obviously much moved, chose for his text
the story of the woman taken in adultery, and of Christ's challenge to
her judges, "Which of you will dare to assault with the first stone?"
The course of his argument was curious. He began with examining the
passage from the standpoint of verbal scholarship, the gist of his
criticism being that its authenticity was at least doubtful. From this
argument he diverged into one of wider scope, insisting on how much is
doubtful in what the Gospels record as the sayings of our Lord
generally, from which illuminating reflection he advanced to one wider
still. It was as follows: Since we know so little of what Christ really
said about God, how much less can we really know of the nature of God
himself; of what he loves, condemns, or, in his infinite mercy,
pardons?--the moral being that we ought to cast stones at nobody, and
should in especial refrain from condemning our departed brother, who,
for anything which we knew to the contrary, might be just as acceptable
to God as any one of ourselves.
All my impressions of Jowett as a religious teacher were summed up in my
impressions of that one sermon. Though his tone in delivering it was one
of unusual tenderness, there lurked in it, nevertheless, a mordant and
petulant animus against the Christian religion as a whole, if regarded
as miraculously revealed or as postulating the occurrence of any
definite miracle. It was the voice of one who, while setting all belief
in the miraculous aside, on the ground that it had no evidence of a
scientific kind to support it, was proclaiming with confidence some
vague creed as unassailable, the evidence in support of which was very
much more nebulous, or what many would describe as _nil_. A story used
to be told about him by which his position in this respect is aptly and
amusingly illustrated. He was taking a walk with an undergraduate, who
confessed to him that his deepest trouble was his failure to find
anything which accurate reason could accept as a proof of God's
existence. Jowett did not utter a word till he and the young man parted.
Then he said, "Mr. Smith, if you can't find a satisfactory proof of
God's existence during the next three weeks, I shall have to send you
down for a term." Had I been in the young man's place I should have
retorted, "And pray, Mr. Jowett, what satisfactory proofs are you able
to adduce yourself?"
But, in speaking of Jowett thus, I am not wholly, or even mainly,
speaking of him as a single individual, I speak of him mainly as a type,
exceptional indeed on account of his signal intellect, but otherwise
representing a moral and mental attitude which was common not only to
the teaching body of Balliol, but also to the age in general, in so far
as its traditional temper had been influenced by scientific knowledge.
Nearly all the Balliol dons--even those who never spoke of
religion--seemed to start with the same foregone conclusion, that the
dogmatic theology of the churches was as dead as the geocentric
astronomy. They assumed this, just as Jowett did, on what purported to
be scientific grounds, and yet when they sought, as he did, to put in
the place of this some solemn system of quasi-scientific ethics, their
attempts seemed to me to exhibit the same absurdity with which Jowett's
constructive teaching had first made me familiar. Their denials of
everything which to me had been previously sacred appalled me like the
overture to some approaching tragedy. Their confident attempts at some
new scheme of affirmations affected me like a solemn farce.
Some foretastes of the new gospel had, as I have said already, been
vouchsafed to me at Littlehampton by Mr. Philpot. I now saw what
logically the new gospel implied. The sense of impending catastrophe
became more and more acute. I felt like a man on a ship, who, having
started his voyage in an estuary, and imagining that a deck is by nature
as stable as dry land, becomes gradually conscious of the sway of the
outer sea, until, when he nears the bar, showers of spray fall on him,
he perceives that the bows are plunging, and at last the percussion of
waves makes the whole vessel shudder.
Such, then, were the effects on me of the religious liberalism of
Oxford, and in this respect, as I now see, looking backward, my
condition was temperamentally the same as it had been when I was still
under the tuition of superorthodox governesses. In those days any
questioning of the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the miraculous
events recorded in it seemed to me, as it did later, to be at once
absurd and blasphemous. There was, however, even then, something which
to me seemed no less absurd than "the infidel's" attack on the dogmas of
Christian orthodoxy--for I knew that "the infidel" existed--and this was
the manner in which the Anglican clergy defended them. I was always,
when a child, looking forward each week to the Sunday sermon, in the
hope of finding some portions of it which I could either mimic or
parody. I remember one sermon in particular, which the preacher devoted
to a proof of God's existence. My own mental comment was, "If anything
could make me such a fool as to doubt this self-evident truth, your
arguments and the inflections of your voice would certainly make me do
so." I heard another preacher indulge in a long half-hour of sarcasm at
the expense of "the shallow infidel, who pointed to the sky and said,
'Where are the signs of His coming?'" In those days we were required by
a governess to write out the morning's sermon as a pious discipline in
the afternoon. This sermon I reproduced with a series of pictures in the
margin, one of which represented the "shallow infidel" exploring the sky
through a telescope, which he did his best to steady by holding it
against the stem of a palm tree. And yet so literally true did all
orthodox doctrines seem to me that I believed a member of my family to
have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost by kissing a New Testament
and swearing that one of the nursery maids had mispronounced some
word--an imputation which she had indignantly denied.
This dual mood, as renewed in me by Oxford influences, differed from its
earlier and childish form in the fact that my sense of the absurdities
distinctive of modern religious thought acquired a wider range and went
deeper than I had at first anticipated. The absurdities of which I was
conscious as a child were those of the arguments by which the orthodox
clergy endeavored to defend doctrines which were then for myself
indubitable. At Oxford I became conscious of an absurdity to which as a
child I had been a stranger--namely, the absurdity of the arguments by
which men who repudiated orthodoxy altogether endeavored to establish in
its place some purely natural substitute, such as the "enthusiasm of
humanity," a passion for the welfare of posterity, or a godless
deification of domestic puritanism for its own sake. In addition to this
second absurdity a third gradually dawned on me. This was the
absurdity, common to all parties alike, of supposing that, if the
cardinal doctrines of religious orthodoxy were discredited--namely, that
the human soul is immortal, that the human will is free, and that a God
exists who is interested in the fortunes of each soul
individually--these doctrines, in disappearing, would take away with
them nothing but themselves alone; the actual fact being that they are
known to mankind generally not so much in themselves as in their
indirect effects on that plexus of moral, emotional, and intellectual
values on which all our higher interests in the drama of life depend.
Thus, in whatever direction I turned, I felt that, if I listened to the
reasoning of liberal Oxford, I was confronted with an absurdity of one
kind or another. Of the only liberal answers attempted to the riddle of
life, not one, it seemed to me, would bear a moment's serious criticism;
and yet, unless the orthodox doctrines could be defended in such a way
that in all their traditional strictness they could once more compel
assent, life, in the higher sense of the word, would--such was my
conviction--soon cease to be tolerable.
The only human being at that time who held and publicly expressed views
similar to my own, so far as I knew, was Ruskin. Of the riddle which I
found so importunate, he did not profess to have discovered any adequate
solution of his own. On the contrary, he confessed himself a victim of a
tragic and desolating doubt, but he did boldly proclaim that until some
solution was found the men of the modern world were of all men the most
miserable. Take, he said, the belief in immortality, which, according to
some men, is a matter of mild indifference. It is really a belief which
affects our whole conception of the human race. Consider, he said, the
carnage of war, with its pile of unnumbered corpses. It must make some
matter to us whether, according to our serious belief, each man has died
like a dog, and left nothing in the way of a personal existence behind
him, or "whether out of every Christian-named portion of that ruinous
heap there has gone forth into the air and the dead-fallen smoke of
battle some astonished condition of soul unwillingly released."
Here, it seemed to me, was the true voice of reason and challenging
passion combined--a voice which would not say "peace when there was no
peace," and which I missed altogether in Jowett and the Oxford liberals
generally. Jowett always regarded me as a mere dilettante and an idler,
who was bound to disgrace Balliol by coming to grief in the schools, and
he was, I think, mortified rather than pleased when I won, in my second
year, the Newdigate prize for poetry.
[Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN]
But mine was certainly no mere idler's mood; and whatever Jowett may
have thought of me when he heard of my giving parties to ladies, of my
driving them out to picnics, or of my concocting prize poems, my mental
life at Oxford was far from being a life of idleness. On the contrary,
from my second year of residence onward I was constantly engaged in
tentative sketches of a book in which I hoped some day to give a
comprehensive picture of the moral and intellectual condition to which
my Oxford experiences had by that time raised or reduced me. That book
was _The New Republic_, with regard to which in this place a few words
may be apposite.
The form of nearly every book is more or less fashioned on some model or
models. My own models in the case of _The New Republic_ were _The
Republic_ of Plato, the _Satyricon_ of Petronius Arbiter, and the
so-called novels of Peacock. All these books introduce us to circles of
friends who discuss questions of philosophy, religion, art, or the
problems of social life, each character representing some prevalent
view, and their arguments being so arranged as to have, when taken
together, some general and coherent meaning. Many of Peacock's
characters are taken direct from life, and in this respect I made myself
a disciple of Peacock. My characters in _The New Republic_ were all
portraits, though each was meant to be typical; but the originals of
some--such as Lady Ambrose, the conventional woman of the world--were of
no public celebrity, and to mention them here would be meaningless. The
principal speakers, however, were drawn without any disguise from
persons so eminent and influential that a definite fidelity of
portraiture was in their case essential to my plan. Mr. Storks and Mr.
Stockton, the prosaic and the sentimental materialists, were meant for
Professors Huxley and Tyndall. Mr. Luke was Matthew Arnold. Mr. Rose was
Pater. Mr. Saunders, so far as his atheism was concerned, was suggested
by Professor Clifford. Mrs. Sinclair was the beautiful "Violet Fane";
and finally--more important than any others--Doctor Jenkinson was
Jowett, and Mr. Herbert was Ruskin. All these people I set talking in
polite antagonism to one another, their one underlying subject being the
rational aim of life, and the manner in which a definite supernatural
faith was essential, extraneous, or positively prejudicial to this.
To all the arguments advanced I endeavored to do strict justice, my own
criticisms merely taking the form of pushing most of them to some
consequence more extreme, but more strictly logical, than any which
those who proclaimed them either realized or had the courage to avow.
Thus when Doctor Jenkinson descanted in his sermon on the all-embracing
character of Christianity, I made him go on to say that "true
Christianity embraces all opinions--even any honest denial of itself."
By this passage Browning told me that Jowett was specially exasperated,
and Browning had urged on him that such a temper was quite unreasonable.
I think myself, on the contrary, that Jowett had an excellent reason for
it, this reason being that Jowett's position was false, and that my
method of criticism had brought out its absurdity. Here indeed was the
method employed by me throughout the whole book, except in the case of
Ruskin, and there the method was inverted. Just as I sought to show that
Jowett's principles, if carried far enough, ended in absurdity, so did I
seek to show that Ruskin's principles, despite their superficial
absurdities, ended, if carried far enough, in the nearest approach to
truth which under modern conditions of thought and knowledge is
possible. In my effort to give point to what were really my own
underlying convictions, I wrote _The New Republic_ six or seven times
over, and in doing so it became clearer and clearer to me what my own
convictions were. They ended in an application of the method of a
_reductio ad absurdum_ to everything; and this fact I finally indicated
in the words of a Greek epigram which I placed as a motto on the
title-page: "All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for all
the things that are arise out of the unreasonable."
Such seemed to me the upshot of all the intellectual and moral teaching
of Oxford, of the faintly hinted liberalism of Mr. Philpot's teachings
which had preceded them, and of my own enlarging experiences of male and
female society. That such a conclusion was satisfactory I did not for a
moment feel, but here was the very reason which urged me on to elaborate
it. The mood which expresses itself in a sense that life is merely
ridiculous was, so my consciousness protested, nothing more and nothing
better than a disease, and my hope was that I should get rid of it by
expressing it once for all as pungently and as completely as I could,
after which I would address myself to the project of finding a
foundation for some positive philosophy of life which should indeed be
fortified by reason, but against which reason should not prevail. When,
however, _The New Republic_ had been completed and given to the world, I
felt that my sense of the absurdities of current liberal philosophy had
not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by
another--_The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island_, a
short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's _Candide_. This is a
story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a
demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked
on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading
superstitions of theism and to make her a partner with him in the
sublime service of Humanity--of that "Grand Etre," so he says to her,
"which, so far as we are concerned, has come in the course of progress
to consist of you and me." _The New Paul and Virginia_ was followed some
two years later by _Is Life Worth Living?_ a formal philosophical
treatise, in which the values of life and their connection with
religious belief, the methods of fiction being abandoned, were submitted
to scientific analysis. These three books represent the compound results
produced by the liberalism of Oxford on a mind such as my own, which had
been cradled in the conservatisms of the past. But meanwhile I had left
Oxford behind me, and the death of my father and other family events
which occurred about that time left me free to determine my own
movements, the consequence being that thenceforward the months of what
is called "the season" found me year by year in London from Easter till
the approach of August. Of my early experiences of London, and of the
kind of life I lived there, I will now give some brief account, not
disdaining the humble aid of gossip.