The second of these objects relates to the existing conditions of social and industrial life, more especially to those suggested by the loosely used word "Labor," and the frantic fallacies with regard to these by which the ideas of extreme reformers are vitiated, and from which, instead of meeting them, too many Conservatives shrink in ignominious terror.
With regard to religion, philosophy, science, and the widespread ideas underlying what is vaguely described as Socialism, I have endeavored to discredit, or else to modify, the views which, for something like fifty years, leaders who are called "advanced" have been making more and more widely popular. I have resorted for this purpose to the methods of fiction and of formal argument. The implication of all the writings by which I have attempted to do this is that the mischief, religious, social, and political, which "advanced" thought has done may in time, by a rational development of conservative thought, be undone, and the true faiths be revived on which the sanctities, the stabilities, and the civilization of the social order depend.
I have nevertheless always myself recognized, ever since early enthusiasm felt the chill of experience, that such a counter-revolution must be slow, nor have I ever underrated the obstacles which certain false idealisms now at work in the world may oppose to it. On the contrary, I have always felt that no man is fit to encounter an adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for the moment his own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it for himself, and takes account, not only of what the adversary says, but also of the best that he might say, if only he had chanced to think of it.
On this principle I have endeavored myself to act. The process, however, may in some cases be not without the seeming danger that the converter, in thus arming himself for his task, may perform it somewhat too thoroughly, and end by being himself perverted. He must, at all events, go near to experiencing a sense of such perversion dramatically. Of this fact I have myself provided an example in one of my writings, to which I just now alluded, and which herein differs from the rest. Having elsewhere argued in defense of religious faith, as though feeling that, through argument and knowledge, mankind will some day recover it, I wrote the work here in question as a man might write who had himself made a final—even a complacent—surrender to the forces which he had dreamed of dissipating.
This work is a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let us kiss and drink while it lasts. The doctrine of Lucretius is to a certain extent similar, but is sterner and more intellectual in its form. I accordingly selected from his great scientific poem, which contains in embryo all the substance of the modern doctrine of evolution, those passages which bear on the meaning of man's existence. I arranged these in logical order, and translated or paraphrased them in the meter with which Fitzgerald has familiarized and fascinated the English ear, so that the philosophy of the Persian and the Roman might be reduced to something like a common denominator. Lucretius is so far a pessimist that, under existing conditions, human life is for him no more than a hideous nightmare; but he is so far an optimist that he looks upon all this misery as due to one removable cause, this cause being the prevalence of one mistaken belief, which a true scientific philosophy will altogether eradicate. The belief in question is a belief in a personal God, who is offended by the very nature of man, and who watches with a wrathful eye by the deathbed of each human creature, in order to begin a torture of him which will last for all eternity. Man's true savior, Lucretius argues, is science, which makes this belief ridiculous by showing clearly that all individual things—human beings included—are nothing but atomic aggregations, which, having been formed for a moment, dissolve and disappear for ever. How, then, can any avenging God be anything more than the distempered dream of children? How could such a God torture men when they die, since as soon as they are dead there is nothing left to torture? Let them cast this incubus of irrational fear behind them, and the mere process of life may then be tolerable enough. It may even, in a sober way, be happy. It certainly need not be, as it now is, miserable; and at all events it will be pleasing as a prelude to the luxury of an endless sleep. Of my own rendering of the great Lucretian message, I may here give a few stanzas as specimens:
Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze
Go off. Those moonèd sands forsake their place;
And where they are shall other seas in turn
Mow with their sands of whiteness other bays.
How, then, the poet asks, shall the individual man be more enduring than these?
What, shall the dateless worlds in dust be blown
Back to the unremembered and unknown,
And this frail Thou—this flame of yesterday—
Burn on forlorn, immortal and alone?
What though there lurks behind yon veil of sky
Some fabled Maker, some immortal Spy,
Ready to torture each poor thing he made?
Thou canst do more than God can. Thou canst die.
Will not the thunders of thy God be dumb
When thou art deaf for ever? Can the sum
Of all things bruise what is not? Nay, take heart,
For where thou go'st thither no God can come.