My visit to Cyprus one year, and my visit to Hungary the next, were both of them retreats from the life of political and even philosophical thought. They were frank acts of truancy in the regions of pure romance; where life, individual and social, is a spectacle to be enjoyed, not a problem of which thinkers compete in devising an explanation. But on returning from Hungary to England the practical affairs of the moment met me again halfway, at Vienna, where for a day or two I broke my journey. My acquaintances at Vienna were few, but they included Sir Augustus and Lady Paget at the Emba.s.sy, whom I had last seen at midnight on the deck of the Dover packet when I was bound for the sh.o.r.es of Cyprus more than a year before. Amba.s.sadors, if they know their business, are necessarily preoccupied with the present, and when lunching or dining with Sir Augustus it was not possible to forget it.
It was all the more impossible because on these occasions there was another diplomat present, also an old acquaintance--Sir Henry Drummond Wolf, who happened to be then on his way home from Persia, and who was voluble on questions of international, and especially of English, politics. So far, however, as my own mood was concerned, this dissipation of romance by realities was a more or less gradual process.
Even when I was again in England my inclinations to the life romantic--to what Virgil (I think) calls the "_amor ulterioris ripae_"--survived for many months the new recall of my mind to the philosophies of prosaic action.
As an ill.u.s.tration of this fact I remember a weekend visit which I paid that summer to Robert, the second Lord Lytton, at Knebworth. The occasion was marked by the coappearance of things romantic and practical in more ways than one. On the day of my arrival one of the first topics discussed was "Ouida," who at that time was in England, and had been staying at Knebworth only the week before. "Ouida"s" view of life was nothing if not romantic. Lytton, during the previous spring, had been spending some weeks in Florence. He was quite alone; and "Ouida," who, apart from her affectations, was a very remarkable woman, had had no difficulty in securing his frequent company at her villa, where she fed him at an incredible price with precociously ripe strawberries. On her memory of these tender proceedings she had built up a belief that his nature had been emptied of everything except one great pa.s.sion for herself, and she had actually come to Knebworth convinced that a single word from her would tear him from the bosom of his family and make him hers alone. The magic word was said. The expected results had, however, failed to follow--perhaps because the word, or words, had not been very happily chosen. They had been these: "Why don"t you leave this bourgeois man-and-wife _milieu_ behind you and prove in some Sicilian palace what life may really mean for people like you and I?"
On the occasion of the same visit another meeting between romance and reality was this: Knebworth was originally a dignified but plain structure, built (I should say at a guess) in the time of Charles II; but, as is well known, the first Lord Lytton (the novelist), inspired by the taste of his time, and aided by inexhaustible stucco, metamorphosed it into the semblance of a pinnacled castle or abbey, the old dining room reappearing in the form of a baronial hall. One evening after dinner I, my host, and a certain Admiral B---- happened to be in the hall alone. While the admiral was reading a letter, my host drew me aside and gave me an amusing description of the rise of the admiral"s family. His grandfather, having acc.u.mulated a substantial fortune as a solicitor, discovered a ruin--a small tower in France--the name of which was identical with his own. This ruin he bought, and declared that it was the cradle from which his own family sprang. He then, having bought an estate in an English county, proceeded to build a Norman castle in ruins, and adjoining this he built a turreted Tudor mansion. Here was a family pedigree translated into terms of stone. The builder crowned his work by the adoption of feudal manners, to which his domestics had so to adapt their own that when a neighbor, who called on him, asked if Mr.
B---- was at home, the reply of the footman was, "The right honorable gentleman is taking a walk on the barbican." My host, having finished his story, was for a moment called away. He had no sooner gone than the admiral, coming up to me, jerked his thumb in the direction of the surrounding panels, and said, confidentially, "The whole of this was put up by that man"s father."
But in a much more memorable way romance conquered reality one night in the drawing-room. The ladies of the party had disappeared; and by way of doing something Lytton, two other men, and myself became somehow grouped round a card table with our minds made up for whist. At first we put down our cards with prompt.i.tude and a semblance of attention, but someone before long made some observation which, though interesting, was wholly irrelevant to the game. The three others put down their cards to listen, and had, when they took them up again, some difficulty in remembering who was to play next. Presently one of them quoted a line of poetry. It was from Coleridge"s "Kublai Khan." Somebody else suggested a mild doubt as to whether that poem had, as the author contended, really been composed in a dream. The game once more proceeded, but our host"s eyes had already begun to wander, and at last he frankly threw his own cards on the table. Everybody else followed him. Cards were things forgotten. Their place was taken by poetry. Single lines were cited which the authors had dreamed undoubtedly. The most remarkable was dreamed by a brother of Tennyson, after a day spent in examining a bundle of ancient ma.n.u.scripts. The line--it was Latin--was as follows:
"_Immemorabilium per fulva crepuscula palpans_"--that is to say, "fumbling among the tawny twilights of immemorables." Lord Lytton looked as if he were in a dream himself. Presently he spoke as though his mind were coming back from a distance. "I," he said, "dreamed a poem in India. It has never been written down, but I still can remember every line of it. Listen." The poem, which was full of vague Oriental imagery, was perfectly intelligible, and throbbed with a certain sonority like that of distant gongs; but no sane man would have written it in his waking moments. In that fact lay its charm. The author"s voice, naturally low and musical, acquired new tones as he recited it, giving to it the qualities of an incantation; and round us, as though fashioned out of shadows, was the large, dimly lighted drawing-room, which the old novelist had incrusted with impossible heraldries, culminating in escutcheons of pre-Christian Welsh kings.
The pseudo-Gothic revival, of which Knebworth is a late monument, but which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole in the stucco of Strawberry Hill, is, if judged by the strict canons of architectural taste, absurd, but as time goes on and the taste which produced it vanishes the houses in which it embodied itself cease to be mere absurdities. They acquire the rank and dignity of historical doc.u.ments. They are more than mere architecture. They represent attempts at a reconstruction of life--a new fusion of politics with poetry, romance, and mysticism. Their fault is that this fusion has failed to become actual. And yet these attempts, though largely recorded in stucco, still evoke visions and atmospheres from which many of us are loath to be driven into the wintry actualities of to-day.
For myself, on my return from Hungary, the influence of romance was further protracted by the fact that I for some time was occupied in completing my work on Cyprus; but when this at last had received its finishing touches there was nothing left that could keep other interests at bay. Radical and Socialist oratory was resounding on every side.
Doctrines with regard to Labor were again being promulgated in forms so extreme that they reached the verge of delirium, and were yet received with acclamations. Old statistical errors, for the complete refutation of which unimpeachable evidence abounded, were shouted afresh, as though they were not open to question. But in respect of all facts and principles which lie really at the basis of things, the Conservative party was, as a whole, dumb.
I began to say to myself daily, "_Semper ego auditor tantum? Nunquam ne reponam?_" "Will no one wake up this unhappily lethargic ma.s.s, and by forcing the weapons of knowledge and reason into their hands provoke them and enable them to meet the enemy at the gate?" Every other interest, philosophic, romantic, religious, fell away from me for the time. Wherever I was, whether in London or country houses--for in these respects my habits remained much what they had been--I had with me the works of economists, statistical reports, mult.i.tudes of current speeches, all bearing on industrial and social questions. At intervals I dealt with one or another of these in tentative articles contributed to reviews like the _Nineteenth Century_, till at length I redigested, rewrote and combined them, thus, after some three years of effort, producing a succinct book called _Labor and the Popular Welfare_.
This book, in carefully simplified language, dealt comprehensively with the fundamental causes to which the increased wealth of the modern world is due, and on which the maintenance, to say nothing of the enlargement, of this modern increment depends. The argument of the book, in its general outline, is as follows. Without manual labor there can be no wealth at all. Unless most of its members are laborers, no community can exist. But so long as wealth is produced by manual labor only the amount produced is small. In whatever way it may be distributed, the majority will be primitively poor. The only means by which the total product of a given population can be increased is not any new toil on the part of the laboring many, but an intellectual direction of the many by a super-capable few. Here is the true cause of all modern increments of wealth. Let these increments be produced, and it is possible for the many to share in them. It is on securing a share of them that their only hope of an ampler life depends, but it is from the efforts of the few that any increase of their shares must come. The fundamental facts of the case are, indeed, of a character the precise reverse of that which the theories of the Socialists impute to them. In proportion as the wages of labor rise above a given minimum the many are the pensioners of the few, the few are not the plunderers of the many, and those who maintain the opposite are mere intellectual gamins standing on their heads in a gutter.
This thesis I had outlined already in my earlier work, _Social Equality_, but in _Labor and the Popular Welfare_ it is urged with more precision, and the general argument is, as in the earlier work it was not, supported by a skeleton of more or less precise statistics. This book, by the advice of a friend, was offered to a celebrated publisher, a pillar of sound Conservatism; but in effect, if not in so many words, he said he would have nothing to do with it, its subject being, in his opinion, unlikely to interest, or its argument to benefit, anyone. It is, I think, not merely an author"s vanity which inclines me to regard his decision not so much as a mistaken literary judgment, but as the expression of a temperamental apathy with which many Conservatives are inflicted with regard to social problems. An entire edition of the work was bought soon after its publication by the Central Conservative Office as a textbook for the use of speakers. With a similar object in view, another a.s.sociation, six or seven years later, offered to purchase an entire edition likewise; but I was obliged to decline the proposal, because I had come to recognize that the statistical portions of the work had, in part, become obsolete, and were in part not sufficiently complete. Meanwhile successive editions of it had been sold to the English public. It had many readers in America, and a very large sum was offered me by a Melbourne newspaper for a series of short articles in which its main arguments should be condensed.
My personal concern, however, in these matters was diminished by the fact that the argument of this work, as a whole, soon seemed to me susceptible of a more comprehensive statement. I had already, as I have said before, attempted in my novel, _The Old Order Changes_, to unite the problems of industrial and social politics with those relating to religion and the higher forms of affection, whereas in _Labor and the Popular Welfare_ I had confined my attention to pure economics only. I had, indeed, thus confined it in _Social Equality_ also. But it now began to dawn on me that, quite apart from the sphere of religion, the philosophy of modern economics could be, and required to be, extended in what for me was a new direction.
A year or two after the publication of _Labor and the Popular Welfare_ a work made its appearance which, although it was couched in the driest terms of philosophy, sold as rapidly as any popular novel, and raised its author at once from absolute obscurity to fame. This was _Social Evolution_, by Mr. Benjamin Kidd. Mr. Kidd"s style, apart from certain tricks or mannerisms, was, for philosophic purposes, admirable. But no mere merits of style would account for the popularity of a work which consisted, in form at all events, of recondite discussions of evolution as conceived by the Darwinians on the one hand and the disciples of Weismann on the other. The popularity of Mr. Kidd"s book was due to the general drift of it. Just as Darwin"s theory of evolution, with its doctrine of the survival of the strongest, provided a scientific basis, unwelcome to many, for aristocracy, Mr. Kidd"s aim was to show that evolution in its higher forms was in reality a survival of the weakest, and thus provided a scientific basis for democracy--democracy by constant implications being identified with some form of Socialism. To me this book, which I examined with extreme care, seemed, in the practical bearing, a piece of monumental claptrap, though it was claptrap of the highest order, and was for that reason all the more pernicious. Mr. Kidd, in dealing with the facts of social life, seemed to me to be dealing not with facts, but clouds--clouds which suggested facts, as actual clouds may suggest a whale or weasel, but which yet, when scrutinized, had no definite content. To me this book rendered a very valuable service, I found in it an epitome of everything against which my own mind protested; and I soon set myself to prepare a series of tentative studies in which certain of Mr. Kidd"s positions were directly or indirectly criticized. If I remember rightly, these were published at intervals in the _Contemporary Review_; and their substance, expanded and digested, appeared by and by in a volume which I called _Aristocracy and Evolution_.
Of this volume, which was a criticism not only of Mr. Kidd, but of Mr.
Herbert Spencer also, the fundamental thesis was similar to that of _Social Equality_, and of _Labor and the Popular Welfare_--namely, that in proportion as societies progress in civilization and wealth all appreciable progress, and the sustentation of most of the results achieved by it, depend more and more on the directive ability of the few; and this thesis was affiliated to the main conclusions of evolutionary science generally. It was admitted that, within certain limits, results achieved by the few were absorbed and perpetuated by the many, though the activities of the originators might have ceased, and that a proper definition of evolution pure and simple would be: "The orderly sequence of the unintended." But, at the same time, it was shown that an "orderly sequence of the unintended," though it is a part of what we mean by progress, is a small part only, the major part still requiring the intentional activities of the few, not only for its initiation, but for its sustentation also.
This argument was set forth with great minuteness, and it was shown how many most distinguished thinkers, while admitting its general truth, were constantly obscuring it by formulae which were, in effect, denials of it. Among the writers thus referred to was Mr. Herbert Spencer, who in one pa.s.sage described the Napoleonic wars as an incident in the process of evolution and in another pa.s.sage cited them as examples of the results of the solitary wickedness of one super-capable man. With regard to these issues I received some interesting letters from Mr.
Spencer himself. His contention was that I had quite misrepresented his meaning. Economically, at all events, the functions of the super-capable man were in his opinion as important as they possibly could be in mine.
I replied that if such were his opinion he very often obscured it, but that I hoped he would acquit me of any conscious unfairness to himself.
His first letters were not without a touch of acerbity, but he ended with amicably stating what his actual views were, and saying that if I only amended certain pa.s.sages relating to himself, he was in entire agreement with my whole argument otherwise.
[Ill.u.s.tration: HERBERT SPENCER]
I never met Mr. Spencer, and of what he may have been in conversation I have not the least conception; but a story is told of him which shows that he must have had a vein of humor in him which his writings do not suggest. His favorite relaxation was billiards. This game he played with more than average skill, but on one occasion, much to his own chagrin, he found himself hopelessly beaten by a very immature young man. "Skill in billiards, up to a certain point, is a sign," he said, "of sound self-training. Too much skill is a sign of a wasted life."
To go back to _Aristocracy and Evolution_, though its sale was equal to some of the works of Herbert Spencer himself, it was by no means comparable to that of the treatise of Mr. Kidd, to which it was designed as a counterblast. Of this the main reason was, I may venture to say, not that it was inferior in point of style or of pertinence, or of logical strength of argument, but that, while appealing, like Mr. Kidd"s work, to serious readers only, it appealed to the sentimentalism of a very much smaller number of them--if, indeed, it can be said to have appealed to sentimentalities at all; whereas Mr. Kidd had a semi-Socialist audience ready for him, who lived mainly by sentiment, whose sentimentalities had antic.i.p.ated his own, and who were only waiting for some one from whom they might learn to sing them to some definite intellectual tune. Moreover, unlike _Labor and the Popular Welfare_, which was equally remote from sentimentalism, _Aristocracy and Evolution_ did not supply the place of it by providing Conservative thinkers with arguments suitable for immediate use on the platform.
Here we have the old difficulty which has always beset Conservatives when face to face with revolutionaries. The revolutionaries, or, rather, the leading spirits among them--for revolutions are always the work of a small body of malcontents--require no rousing. They welcome any arguments, philosophic or otherwise, which may tend to invest them with the prestige of scientific thinkers; but the Conservatives require to be roused, and roused in two different ways--first, in respect of the principles on which their own position rests, and secondly, in respect of the methods by which those principles can be presented to the mult.i.tude in a manner which shall produce conviction. Looking back on _Aristocracy and Evolution_, I now think that, if I could have rewritten it in the light of the above considerations, I should modify, not its argument, but the manner in which this argument was presented. Much of its substance I have incorporated in what I have written since; but, as it stood when I finished it, I felt it so far satisfactory that it expressed all I had then to say as to the subjects of which it treated, and my house of political thought was for the time empty, swept, and garnished. After two years" labor spent on it, though this had been carried on in very agreeable circ.u.mstances--in Highland castles and shooting lodges, or at the Rodens" house in Ireland--I felt the need of rest--of forgetting in intercourse with agreeable men and women that anything like disagreeable men existed, who rendered the labors of political thought necessary. My mind, however, instead of resting, was presently driven, or driven back, into activities of other kinds.
CHAPTER XIV
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY AND FICTION
The So-called Anglican Crisis--_Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_--Three Novels: _A Human Doc.u.ment_, _The Heart of Life_, _The Individualist_--Three Works on the Philosophy of Religion: _Religion as a Creditable Doctrine_, _The Veil of the Temple_, _The Reconstruction of Belief_--Pa.s.sages from The _Veil of the Temple_.
A year or so after the publication of _Aristocracy and Evolution_ I found myself taking by accident quite a new departure. I was offered and accepted a place on the board of a small company, and was thus abruptly summoned from the world of economic philosophy to that of practical action. The object of the company was to perfect and introduce an invention which, had it been properly developed as a mechanism and skillfully dealt with otherwise, might well have become popular. The general idea was certainly sound enough. With regard to this all concerned were unanimous. But as soon as the project a.s.sumed a minutely practical form all sorts of difficulties arose. The mechanism was one which might be constructed in a number of alternative ways, and, according to the way chosen, the cost of manufacture would vary very considerably, and its use to the general public would vary to a degree still greater. Since the board comprised several engineers, a successful manufacturer of pianos, and a lawyer highly respected in the domain of local government, I imagined that these preliminary difficulties would very soon be solved. I was, however, much mistaken.
Each director had some idea of his own, which clashed with the ideas of others, not indeed as to fundamentals, but purely as to incidental details. This rendered concerted action as impossible as it would have been had the differences related not to means, but to ends; and n.o.body united in himself sufficient technical knowledge with sufficient moral initiative to harmonize these conflicting elements, and thus to render concerted action practicable. The enterprise, in consequence, soon came to an end, certain of the directors bearing most of the loss. But I, at all events, got something for my money in the way of an instructive experience. It was an experience which ill.u.s.trated by fact what I had previously insisted on as a matter of general theory--namely, that no enterprise undertaken by a number of persons can possibly succeed unless it has some man of exceptional strength at the head of it, who will use the wits of others according to his own judgment; and, further, that this man"s strength must be of a very peculiar kind, which has nothing to do with the qualities, moral or intellectual, which make their possessors ill.u.s.trious in other domains of life.
This taste of business experience did not heighten my appreciation of the mental leisure which otherwise I now enjoyed. It was a leisure, however, which before very long took the form of activity in a new direction.
The more important questions which agitate the mind of an age, just like those which agitate the mind of an individual, engross and affect it, not simultaneously, but in alternation. One actor recedes for the moment and makes way for another, and the newcomer is an old actor returning.
About the time of which I am now speaking there was--on the surface, at all events--a lull in social controversy, and a new outbreak of religious. An ill.u.s.tration of this fact may be found in the extraordinary popularity achieved by a novel purely religious in interest, its name being _Robert Elsmere_, and its auth.o.r.ess Mrs.
Humphry Ward. Its religious interest is of a highly specialized kind. It is the story of an Anglican clergyman who starts as an earnest and absolutely untroubled believer in the traditional dogmas which the Church of England inculcates. He is thus at peace with himself till he gradually becomes intimate with a certain distinguished scholar. This scholar, who is the squire of his parish, is the possessor of an enormous library, rich in the writings of continental and especially of German skeptics. Having suggested to Robert Elsmere sundry disquieting arguments, he turns him loose in his library, begging him to use it as his own. The clergyman accepts the invitation. He soon is absorbed in the works of such writers as Strauss and Renan; and little by little their spirit becomes his own. Their eyes become his. Everything which orthodoxy demands in the way of the supernatural disappears. The sacraments become mummeries. Even Christ, in the ordinary sense, no longer lives. The clergyman is left in desolation. How, he asks, can the Church (by which he means the Anglican Church) help him? What evidence, what shred even of probability, have its ministers to support their teaching? They hardly, if closely pressed, know what they mean themselves, and the supernatural teaching of one section of Anglicans contradicts that of the others. The one moral which her hero draws from his studies resolves itself into the words, "Miracles do not happen."
Mrs. Ward"s novel was particularly appropriate to the time at which it was published. The question of what a man, as a minister of the English Church, might or might not teach without surrendering his office or without abjuring his honesty was being hotly debated in reviews, in Convocation, and at countless clerical Congresses; but these resulted in no unanimous answer. The English Church, indeed, as a teaching body, was held by many people to be on the very verge of disruption. The situation was precisely similar to that which in my book, _Is Life Worth Living?_ I had myself predicted ten years before as inevitable. If Christianity means anything definite--anything more than a mood of precarious sentiment--the only logical form of it is that represented by the Oec.u.menical Church of Rome. This had been my previous argument, and, stimulated by current events, I felt impelled to restate it in greater detail and with more pungent ill.u.s.trations. I found particular satisfaction in a.n.a.lyzing the utterances of dignitaries of the Broad-Church party, such as Farrar and Wilberforce, whose plan for rejuvenating the coherence of the Anglican Church was to reduce all its doctrine which savored of the supernatural to symbols. One of them proposed, for example, to salvage the doctrine of the Ascension by maintaining that its true meaning is, not that Christ rose from the earth vertically (which would indeed be absurd), but that he disappeared, as it were, laterally, by withdrawing himself somehow or other into the fourth dimension of s.p.a.ce. According to another, the statement that Christ on a specified day ascended was merely a symbolical way of saying that about the time in question his work on earth was finished, and that he had, like Sir Peter Teazle, taken leave of his disciples with the words, "Gentlemen, I leave my character in your hands." On the basis of such an exegesis they managed to raise a superstructure of sentiment which had, until it was touched, some likeness to the old fabric, but which a breath of air would dissipate, and unmask the ruins within. Canon Farrar"s _Life of Christ_ was a work of this description. The work had an enormous sale, and the author, at an Oxford dinner, confided somewhat ruefully to a neighbor that all he got for it himself was not more than three hundred pounds. Another neighbor, overhearing this remark, murmured to somebody else, "He forgets that in the good old days the same job was done for thirty pieces of silver."
A criticism of the clerical rationalists, not dissimilar in its purport, was administered to Jowett by a certain Russian thinker, who knew little as to Jowett"s opinions, and had no intention of rebuking them. He was describing, as an interesting event, the development of a religion in Russia which claimed to be Christian and at the same time purely rational. "Was it a good religion?" asked Jowett, with a somewhat curt civility. "No," said the Russian, reflectively, "it was not a good religion. It was schlim-schlam. It was veesh-vash. It was vot you call "Broad Church.""
Mrs. Ward, who may fairly be described as the best educated woman novelist of her generation, endeavored, in the disguise of her hero, to found a rationalized Christianity on her own account, and her distinction as a scholar and a reasoner makes this experiment interesting. But the kind of Christianity in which Robert Elsmere takes refuge, and of which he officiates as the self-appointed primate, has no foundation but sentiment and certain _tours de force_ of the imagination. As soon as it resolves itself into any definite propositions with regard to objective fact it is evident that these have no authority at the back of them. Without some authority at the back of it, unified by a coherent logic, no religion can guide or curb mankind or provide them with any hopes that the enlightened intellect can accept. It is precisely this sort of authority which, for those who can accept its doctrines, the Church of Rome possesses, and is possessed by that Church alone. Here is the argument in which _Is Life Worth Living?_ culminated. The detailed processes by which the authority and the teaching of Rome have developed themselves I had cited in _Aristocracy and Evolution_ as an example of evolution in general. In a new volume, _Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_, I dealt with it once again, having before me the example of what was then being called "The Great Anglican Crisis." That this book was not written wholly in vain I have sufficient reason to know, for a variety of correspondents a.s.sured me that it put into clear form what had long been their unexpressed convictions--certain of these persons--serious Anglicans--having joined, since then, the Church of Rome in consequence.
But the thoughts of which this work was the result were not appeased by its publication. They began to germinate afresh in a kindred, but in a different form. _Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_ had for its immediate subject a position which was mainly insular--that is to say, the position, not of religion in general, but of the formal interpretations of Christianity which were at that time colliding with complete unbelief in England. But I had from the first--from the days when I was planning _The New Republic_ onward--urged that all doctrines pertaining to particular forms of Christianity were merely parts of a wider question--namely, that of the credibility of supernatural religion of any kind, and that this credibility must be tested, not by an examination of religious doctrines as such, or even of religious emotion in the purer and more direct manifestations of it, but in the indirect effects produced by it on the quality of life generally. Thus merely in the capacity of a thinker I felt myself presently impelled to a reconsideration of the contents of the life of the individual; and this impulsion was aggravated by certain domestic dramas which, in one way or another, came to my own knowledge.
In describing my visit to Hungary I mentioned a young and extremely engaging lady, who looked as though she were made for happiness, but whose life, though prematurely ended, had had time since then to become entangled in tragedy. I had often, since I left Hungary, wondered what had become of her; but not till some years later did I learn, quite accidentally, what her story and her end had been. I was told few details, but these sufficed to enable me, by a mere use of the imagination, to reconstruct it, and see in it certain general meanings.
Of this reconstructive process the result was my novel, _A Human Doc.u.ment_. It was not, indeed, due to the stimulus of this story alone, and of the philosophic meanings which I read either in or into it. It was partly due, I must confess, to the effects which Hungarian life had on my imagination generally--effects with which the affairs of this lady had nothing at all to do--and to an impulse to reproduce these in some sort of literary form. The castles, the armor, the shepherds playing to their flocks, the wild gypsy music, the obeisances of the peasants, the mysteries of the great forests--all these things, like an artist when he paints a landscape, I longed to reproduce for the mere pleasure of reproducing them. Such being the case, the heroine of my novel and her experiences became unified with the scenes among which I had actually known her.
For this work, as a picture of Hungary and Hungarian life, I am well supported in claiming one merit, at all events. Count Deym, who at that time was Austrian Amba.s.sador in London, told a friend of mine that my picture in these respects could not have been more accurate had I known Hungary for a lifetime. Of its merits as a study of human nature, and an essay on the philosophy of life, it is not my province to speak. I merely indicate the conclusion to which, as an attempt at philosophic a.n.a.lysis, it leads. It leads, although by a quite different route, to the same conclusion as that suggested in _The Old Order Changes_ and in _A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_--namely, that in all the higher forms of affection a religious belief is implicit, which connects the lovers with the All, and establishes between them and It some conscious and veritable communion.
The hero gives expression to this conclusion thus: On the evening after that on which the heroine had made herself wholly his the two are together in a boat on a forest lake. She does not regard her surrender as the subject of ordinary repentance. On the contrary, she regards it as justified by the cruelty and neglect of her husband, and yet she is beset by a sense that, nevertheless, she may have outraged something which for some reason or other she ought to have held sacred. Her companion divines this mood, and does what he can to rea.s.sure her.
"See," he says, "the depths above us, and the depths reflected under us, holding endless s.p.a.ce and all the endless ages, and ourselves like a ball of thistledown floating between two eternities. From some of these stars the arrows of light that reach us started on their vibrating way before Eve"s foot was in Eden. Where that milky light is new universes are forming themselves. The book of their genesis yet remains to be written. Think of the worlds forming themselves. Think of the worlds shining, and the darkened suns and systems mute in the night of time. To us--to us--what does it all say more than the sea says to the rainbow in one tossed bubble of foam? And yet to us it must say something, seeing that we are born of it, and how can we be out of tune with it, seeing that it speaks to us now?"
The moral of this mysticism is that no affection is complete unless it is in harmony with some cosmic will which takes cognizance of the doings of the individual, and gives to them individually something of its own eternity; but that, in so far as the two are at variance, the individual must pay the price. In _A Human Doc.u.ment_ this price is paid deliberately by the man, and ultimately the woman shares in it, like a character in a Greek tragedy.
This novel was followed by another, _The Heart of Life_, which was more or less constructed on the same lines, and also in response to a similar dual impulse. The scenery and the setting were those of my own early days in Devonshire. The home of the princ.i.p.al actors, as there depicted, is a compound of Glenthorne--I have mentioned its situation already, on the seaward borders of Exmoor--and of Denbury. Several of the characters are clergymen with whom I was once familiar. Mixed with these elements are certain scenes of fashionable life. All these accessories are almost photographically accurate; and the mere pleasure of reproducing them--or, as boys would say, the mere fun of reproducing them--was one of the motives which actuated me in writing this novel and rewriting it--for most of it was written over and over again. The main action, as in _A Human Doc.u.ment_, turned on the nature of the affections and the pangs of unhappy matrimony, these last conducting the two princ.i.p.al personages to a rest in which the heart of life, self-purified, is hardly distinguishable from the content of a Christian child"s prayer.
A third novel followed. This novel was _The Individualist_, of which the underlying subject was still the relation of religion to life, but the subject was handled in a spirit less of emotion than of pure social comedy. It was suggested by the movement, then beginning to effervesce, in favor of the rights of women, and by the semi-Socialist hysteria with which some of its leaders a.s.sociated it, and in which many of them thought that they had discovered the foundations of a new faith. The most prominent character, though she is not in the ordinary sense the heroine, is Mrs. Norham, an ornament of intellectual Bloomsbury. Having certain independent means, she is far from being an opponent of private property as such. Her _bete noire_ is the fashionable or aristocratic cla.s.ses, these being the true Antichrist; and she has founded a church whose main spiritual mission is to instigate an _elite_ of the obscure and earnest to despise them. By and by she meets some members of this despicable cla.s.s herself. Among them is a Tory Prime Minister, who joins with his sister, an exceedingly fine lady, in expressing a respectful and profound admiration of her intellect. Mrs. Norham"s philosophy of social religion hereupon undergoes such an appreciable change that she ultimately finds salvation in winding wool for a peeress, the only surviving thorns in her original crown of martyrdom being the loss of some money in a company formed for the production of a perpetual motion, and her discovery that a certain dinner party to which she has been asked is not sufficiently fashionable. This book, though in many respects a mere comedy of manners and characters--among the characters was a South African millionaire and his wife--was under the surface permeated by a serious meaning, being in effect an exhibition of the "fantastic tricks" which those who reject the supernatural are driven to play in their attempts to provide the world with a subst.i.tute.
But every general event must have a general cause, for which individuals are not alone responsible; and the fantastic tricks of the people who try to make religions for themselves cannot be due merely to the idiosyncrasies of exceptionally foolish persons. There must be causes at the back of them of a deeper and a wider kind. The first of these causes is obviously the fact that, for some reason or other, mult.i.tudes who know nothing of one another are independently coming to the conclusion that supernaturalism, which was once accepted without question as the main content or substratum of human life, rests on postulates which to them are no longer credible. Why is this the case to-day, when it was not the case yesterday? Of these necessary postulates two are the same for all men--namely, an individual life which survives, the individual body, and the moral responsibility of the individual, or his possession of a free will. A third postulate, which is the same for all orthodox Christians, is the miraculous inspiration of the Bible, whatever the precise nature of this inspiration may be. Of these three postulates the last has been discredited all over the world by biblical criticism and scientific comparisons of one religion with another. The first and the second have been discredited by advances in the science of biological physics which has, with increasing precision, exhibited human life and thought as mere functions of the physical organism, the organism itself being, in turn, a part of the cosmic process. If this be the case, what religious significance can attach to the individual as such? His thoughts, his emotions, his actions, are no more his own than the action of a windmill"s sails or the antics of sc.r.a.ps of paper gyrating at a windy corner.[3] The first license to men to construct a religion is a license given them by reason to admit the proposition that the individual will is free. The primary obstacle to religious belief to-day is the difficulty of finding in this universe a rational place for freedom--a "_voluntas avolsa fatis_." How is this obstacle to be surmounted?
To this question I attempted an answer in a new philosophical book, _Religion as a Credible Doctrine_, of which the general contention is as follows. If we trust solely to science and objective evidence, the difficulty in question is insuperable. There is no place for individual freedom in the universe, and apologists who attempt to find one are no better than clowns tumbling in the dust of a circus. If they try to smuggle it in through some c.h.i.n.k in the _moenia mundi_, these ageless walls are impregnable, or if here and there some semblance of a gate presents itself, each gate is guarded, like Eden, by science with its flaming swords.
The argument of this book, then, is in the main negative. But in dealing with the problem thus it is not negative in its tendency, for it carries the reader to the verge of the only possible solution. For pure reason, as enlightened by modern knowledge, human freedom is unthinkable, and yet for any religion by which the pure reason and the practical reason can be satisfied the first necessity is that men should accept such freedom as a fact. But this argument does not apply to the belief in human freedom only. It applies to all the primary conceptions which men a.s.sume, and are bound to a.s.sume, in order to make life practicable. If we follow pure reason far enough--if we follow it as far as it will go--not only freedom is unthinkable, but so are other things as well.
s.p.a.ce is unthinkable, time is unthinkable, and so (as Herbert Spencer elaborately argued) is motion. In each of these is involved some self-contradiction, some gap which reason cannot span; and yet, as Kant said, unless we do a.s.sume them, rational action, and even thought itself, are impossible. If the difficulty, then, of conceiving human freedom is the only difficulty which religious belief encounters, we may trust that in time such belief will rea.s.sert itself, and a definite religion of some sort acquire new life along with it.
But religion does not logically depend on the postulate of freedom alone. Moral freedom, in a religious sense, requires, not the postulate of individual freedom only, but also of a Supreme or Cosmic Being, to whose will it is the duty of the individual will to attune itself, and it further requires the postulate that this Being is good in respect of its relations to all individuals equally--that it represents, in short, a mult.i.tude of individual benevolences. Nor does the matter end here.
Any definite religion postulates some recognized means by which the will of this Being may be made known. I had hardly completed _Religion as a Credible Doctrine_ before questions such as these, which there had been hardly touched, began to impress themselves with new emphasis on my mind. My desire was to take these questions in combination, and it seemed to me that this could best be done by adopting a method less formal than that which I had just pursued. I returned accordingly to the methods of _The New Republic_.
In this new work, called _The Veil of the Temple_, the action begins at a party in a great London house, where Rupert Glanville, a politician who has just returned from the East, invites some friends to cut their London dissipations short and pay him a visit at a curious marine residence which a Protestant bishop, his ancestor, had constructed in cla.s.sical taste on the remotest coast of Ireland. A party is got together, including a bishop of to-day and two ornaments of the Jockey Club, together with some fashionable ladies and a Hegelian philosopher educated at Glasgow and Oxford.
The intellectual argument of the book takes up the threads where _Religion as a Credible Doctrine_ dropped them. It begins at the dinner table, where a well-known case of cheating at cards is discussed, and the issue is raised of whether, or how far, a rich man who cheats at cards is the master of his own actions or the pathological victim of kleptomania. One of the lights of the Jockey Club is indignant at the idea that the matter can be open to doubt. "If a gentleman," he says, "is not free to abstain from cheating, what would become of the turf?
Eh, bishop--what would become of the Church? What would become of anything?" Thus the question of free will is once again in the air, and the more serious of the guests, as soon as the others depart, set themselves to discuss both this and other questions kindred to it.