Of my experiences in foreign countries, just as of those in Scotland, I shall have to speak again; but I will first return to those portions of my early life which, with the exception of an annual few months in London, I spent for the most part on the Riviera, in Italy, or in Devonshire, or in country visits at houses such as those which I have just mentioned, and I will record what, beneath the surface, my life and my mental purposes in these often-changed scenes were.
CHAPTER IX
FROM COUNTRY HOUSES TO POLITICS
First Treatise on Politics—Radical Propaganda—First Visit to the Highlands—The Author Asked to Stand for a Scotch Constituency
The sketches which I have just given of my purely social experiences may seem, so far as they go, to represent a life which, since the production of The New Republic, was mainly a life of idleness. I may, however, say, without immodesty, that, if taken as a whole, it was the very reverse of this. Whether the results of my industry may prove to have any value or not, nobody could in reality have been more industrious than myself, or have prosecuted his industry on more coherent lines.
I have already given some account of The New Republic, indicating its character, its construction, the mood which gave rise to it, and the moral it was intended to express. This moral—the fruit of my education at Oxford, and also of my experiences of society before I became familiar with the wider world of London—was, as I have said already, that without religion life is reduced to an absurdity, and that all philosophy which aims at eliminating religion and basing human values on some purely natural substitute is, if judged by the same standards, as absurd as those dogmas of orthodoxy which the naturalists are attempting to supersede. With the purpose of emphasizing this contention in a yet more trenchant way, I supplemented, as I have said already, The New Republic by a short satirical romance, Positivism on an Island, in the manner of Voltaire's Candide. My next work, Is Life Worth Living? in which I elaborated this argument by the methods of formal logic, was largely due to that wider knowledge of the world with which social life in London and elsewhere had infected me. The bitterest criticism which that work excited was based on the contention that the kind of life there analyzed was purely artificial, and unsatisfying for that very reason—that the book was addressed only to an idle class, and that from the conditions of this pampered minority no conclusions were deducible which had any meaning for the multitude of average men. Some such objection had been anticipated from the first by myself. I was already prepared to meet it, and my answer was in brief as follows, "If life without a God is unsatisfying, even to those for whom this world has done its utmost, how much more unsatisfying must it be to that vast majority for whom a large part of its pleasures are, from the nature of things, impossible." But a closer and wider acquaintance with the kind of life in question, and the sorrows and passions masked by it, prompted me to translate the argument of the three books just mentioned into yet another form—namely, that of a tragic novel—A Romance of the Nineteenth Century.
This book was attacked by the apostles of non-religious morality with a bitterness even greater than that which had been excited in them by Is Life Worth Living? And with these critics were associated many others, who, whether they agreed or disagreed with its purely religious tendencies, denounced it because it dealt plainly with certain corruptions of human nature, the very mention of which, according to them, was in itself corrupting, and was an outrage of the decorums of a respectable Christian home. Since those days the gravest reviews and newspapers have dealt with such matters in language far more plain and obtrusively crude than mine, and often displaying a much more restricted sense of the ultimate problems connected with them. Certain critics, indeed—among whom were many Catholic priests, with the experience of the confessional to guide them—took a very different line, and welcomed the book as a serious and valuable contribution to the psychology of spiritual aspiration as dependent on supernatural faith.
Put briefly, the story of the novel is this. The heroine, who is young, but not in her first girlhood, has in her aspect and her natural disposition everything that is akin to the mystical aspirations of the saint; but, more or less desolated by the diffused skepticism of the day, she has been robbed of innocence by a man, an old family friend, and has never been at peace with herself or wholly escaped from his sinister power since. The hero, who meets her by accident and with whom she is led into a half-reluctant friendship, has at first no suspicion of the actual facts of her history, but believes her troubles, at which she vaguely hints, to be due merely to the loss of religious beliefs which were once her guide and consolation. He accordingly does his best, though deprived of faith himself, to effect in her what Plato calls "a turning round of the soul," and hopes that he may achieve in the process his own conversion also. For aid in his perplexities he betakes himself to a Catholic priest, once a well-known man of the world, and calls her attention to the immortal passage in St. Augustine, beginning, "If to any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of earth and air and heaven." But he feels as though he were the blind endeavoring to lead the blind, and the end comes at last in the garden of a Mediterranean villa, behind whose lighted windows a fancy ball is in progress. The hero, whose dress for the occasion is that of a Spanish peddler, encounters the seducer in one of the shadowy walks and is shot dead by the latter, who believes that his life is being threatened by some genuine desperado; and the heroine, draped in white, like a Greek goddess of purity, witnesses this sudden event, is overcome by the shock, and dies of heart failure on a marble bench close by.
One of the stoutest defenders of this book was Lord Houghton, who, in writing to me with regard to it, mentioned a curious incident. The villain of the piece, Colonel Stapleton, was drawn by me from a certain Lord ——, as to whom I had said to myself the first moment I met him: "This man is the quintessence of selfishness. He is capable of anything that would minister to his own pleasures." "The novel," said Lord Houghton in his letter, "requires no apology. You have made only one mistake in it. The conduct of the colonel in one way would have differed from that which you ascribe to him. For instance," Lord Houghton continued, "I once met Lord X. in Paris, and to my own knowledge what Lord X. would have done on a similar occasion was so-and-so." Lord X. was the very man from whom my picture of the colonel had been drawn.
Some years later I published another novel, The Old Order Changes, of which the affection of a man for a woman is again one of the main subjects, but it is there regarded from a widely different standpoint. I shall speak of this book presently, but I may first mention that in the interval between the two a new class of questions, of which at Littlehampton and Oxford I had been but vaguely conscious, took complete possession of my mind, and pushed for a time the interests which had been previously engaging me into the background.