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.