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.