Another address—it took a more serious form—I delivered by special request to a more comprehensive audience, in which ladies likewise abounded. It was delivered in one of the theaters. The subject I was asked to discuss was a manifesto which had just been issued by a well-to-do cleric in favor of Christian Socialism. The argument of this divine was interesting and certain parts of it were sound. Its fault was that the end of it quite forgot the beginning. He began by admitting that the great fortunes of to-day were due for the most part to the few who possessed to an exceptional degree the talents by which wealth is produced; but talents of this special class were, he said, wholly unconnected with any moral desert. Indeed, the mere production of such goods as are estimable in terms of money was, of all forms of human activity, the lowest, and the men who made money were the last people in the world who ought to be allowed to keep it. The demand of Socialism was, he said, that this gross and despicable thing should be distributed among other people. The special demand of Christian Socialism was that the principal claimant on all growing wealth should be the Church. The fault, he said, of the existing situation was due to the fathers of the Constitution of the United States, who laid it down that one of the primary rights of the individual was freedom to produce as much as he could, and keep it; the true formula being, according to him, that every man who produced appreciably more than his neighbors should be either hampered in production or else deprived of his products. It was not difficult to show, without passing the bounds of good humor, that the arguments of this semienlightened reformer were, in the end, like a snake whose head was biting off its tail.

Except for Monsignor Vay di Vaya, the only cleric whom I met in New York society was one of distinguished aspect and exceedingly charming manners, who was certainly not an apostle of Christian or any other form of Socialism; but an anecdote was told me of another whose congregation, according to a reporter, was "the most exclusive in New York," and had the honor of comprising Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan. This clergyman was one morning surprised by receiving a visit from a negro, who expressed a desire to join his exclusive flock. The shepherd was somewhat embarrassed, but received his visitor kindly. "You are," he said, "contemplating a very serious step. My advice to you is that you seek counsel in prayer; that, if possible, you should see our Lord; that you make quite sure that this step is one of which our Lord would approve; and that in three weeks' time you come and talk again to me." The postulant thanked him, and in three weeks reappeared. "Well," said the clergyman, "have you prayed earnestly, as I advised you?" The negro said that he had. "And may I," said the clergyman, "ask you if you have seen our Lord?" "Yes, sah," said the negro, "I have." "And what," asked the clergyman, "was it that our Lord said to you? Could you manage to tell me?" "What our Lord said to me," the negro replied, "was this: 'I've been trying for eighteen years to get into that church, but I can't. I guess that your trying will come to no more than mine.'"

Meanwhile I had begun, in the intervals between social engagements, to recast my addresses, with a view, as I have said already, to transforming them into a connected book. The first stage in this process was the preparation of an intermediate version of them, which was to be issued as a series of articles in an important monthly journal, these serving as the foundation of the book in its complete form, which was by and by to be issued in America and England simultaneously.

I had arranged to return by the French steamer Provence—a magnificent vessel—the largest that the harbor of Havre could accommodate. The restaurant was decorated like a Salon of the time of Louis Quinze. The cooking was admirable, the tables were bright with flowers. I was asked to sit at a table reserved for a charming lady, who was bringing with her her own champagne and butter, with both of which she insisted on providing her friends also. My cabin, though small, was perfect in the way of decoration. An ormolu reading lamp stood by the silken curtains of the bed. The washing basin was of pink marble.

Before returning to England I had settled on spending some solitary months in Brittany, during which it was my object to bring my forthcoming work to completion. I spent a week in Paris, where my French servant rejoined me, whom I had left to enjoy during my absence a holiday, with his family near Grenoble. I never in my life met anyone with more satisfaction.

Paris is notoriously congenial to the upper classes of America; and yet between Paris and New York there is one subtle and pervading difference. Paris has behind it in its buildings and the ways of its people what New York has not—a thousand years of history. The influence of the past is even more apparent in Brittany; and New York became something hardly credible when I found myself in a little hotel—at which I had engaged rooms—an hotel girdled by the ramparts and medieval towers of Dinan. I remained there for six weeks, during which time my book, to which I gave the name A Critical Examination of Socialism, was very nearly completed. In spite, however, of my labor, I from time to time found leisure for pilgrimages to moated chateaux, which seemed still to be enjoying a siesta of social and religious peace, unbroken by revolutions and even undisturbed by republics. Of these chateaux one was the home of Chateaubriand. Another, which I traveled a hundred miles to see, was the Chateau de Kerjaen, its gray gates approached by three huge converging avenues, and the outer walls by which the chateau itself is sheltered measuring seven hundred by four hundred feet. Though parts of it are habitable and inhabited, Kerjaen is partly ruinous, but its ruin was not due to violence. It was due to an accidental fire which took place when Robespierre was still in his cradle and even in his dreams was "guiltless of his country's blood." Coming, as I did, fresh from the New World, there was for me in Brittany something of the magic of Hungary.

A Critical Examination of Socialism was published a few months after my return to England, where Socialist agitation meanwhile had become more active than ever, and I presently discovered that certain attempts were being made to establish some organized body for the purpose of systematically counteracting it. I put myself in connection with those who were taking, or willing to take, some leading part in this enterprise. The final result was the establishment of two bodies—the Anti-Socialist Union, under the presidency of Col. Claude Lowther, and a School of Anti-Socialist Economics, which, through the agency of Captain (now Sir Herbert) Jessel, was affiliated to the London Municipal Society—a body which, owing to him, was already proving itself influential. All the persons concerned had precisely the same objects, but there were certain disagreements as to the methods which at starting were most imperative. So far as principles were concerned, the Anti-Socialist Union were so completely in agreement with myself that they bought a large edition of my Critical Analysis of Socialism for distribution as a textbook among the speakers and writers whom it was part of their program to employ. There were, however, certain details of procedure in respect of which Captain Jessel's opinions were more in accordance with my own. He and I, therefore, settled on working together, taking the existing machinery of the London Municipal Society as our basis, while the Anti-Socialist Union proceeded on parallel, though on somewhat different, lines. Captain Jessel and I established, by way of a beginning, a school for speakers—mostly active young men—who would speak Sunday by Sunday in the parks and other public places, and attract audiences whose attention had been previously secured by Socialists. These speakers sent in weekly reports, describing the results of their work, which were for the most part of a singularly encouraging kind. But the number of these speakers was small, and, since all their expenses were paid, the funds at our immediate disposal would not enable us to increase it. It appeared to me, therefore, that our work would be best extended by a distribution of literature—leaflets or small pamphlets—simple in style, but coherent in their general import, and appealing not to the man in the street only, but to educated men, even Members of Parliament, also. A start in this direction was made by the publication of skeleton speeches, many of them written by myself, which any orator in the parks or in Parliament might fill in as he pleased, and which was supplemented by weekly pamphlets called "Facts Against Socialism." I found, however, that in preparing these my attention was more and more occupied by industrial and social statistics, and I was, in my colleague's opinion, concerning myself too much with matters which were over the heads of the people.

For several reasons my view of the matter was not quite the same as his. It was, therefore, settled that this statistical work should be prosecuted by myself independently, and in something like two years I issued, at the rate of two or three a month, a series of pamphlets called "Statistical Monographs," addressed especially to Members of Parliament. Three of these pamphlets dealt with the land of the United Kingdom, the number of owners and the acreage and value of their holdings. Two of them dealt with the number and value of the houses which had been annually built during the past ten or fifteen years. Two of them dealt with coal-mining and the ratio in that industry of wages to net profits. Each was a digest of elaborate official figures, which an average speaker, if left to his own devices, could hardly have collected in a twelvemonth, but which when thus tabulated he could master in a couple of days.

Many of these monographs, as I know, were used in practical controversy; but the Conservative party, as a whole—this is my strong impression—was but partly awake to the importance of statistics as a basis of political argument. The use of systematic statistics was at that time left to Socialists, and wild misstatements as to figures formed at that time their principal and most effective weapon. The issue of these monographs was continued till the outbreak of the recent war, when conditions were so suddenly and so completely changed that the then continuance of the monographs would not have been appropriate, even if it had not been rendered impossible. Being, however, unfit for active service, I devoted myself to a volume applicable, so I hoped, to conditions which were bound to arise after the war was over. This volume was The Limits of Pure Democracy, to the composition of which I devoted the labor of four years. It has gone through four editions. A translation of it has been published in France. Increased costs of production have rendered a price necessary which would once have been thought prohibitive, but if conditions improve the intention is to reissue it in a cheaper form, when certain of its arguments will be illustrated by events which have taken place since its last page was completed.

* * * * *

Much of the matter contained in the "Statistical Monographs" was condensed by me in a volume called Social Reform. This was a study, more minute and extensive than any which I had attempted before, of the income of this country and its distribution among various classes of the population, not only as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also as they were in the earlier years of the nineteenth. My authorities with regard to the latter were certain elaborate but little known official papers showing the results of the income tax of the year 1801. These returns, by means of a minute classification, show the number of incomes from those between L60 and L70 up to those exceeding L5,000, the upshot being that the masses—manual and other wage-workers—were enjoying just before the war an average income per head more than double that which would have been possible a hundred years ago had the entire income of the country—the incomes of rich and poor alike—been then divided in equal shares among everybody. This same general fact had been broadly insisted on in Labor and the Popular Welfare. It was here demonstrated in detail by official records, to which I had not had access at the time when I wrote that volume, and of the very existence of which most politicians are probably unaware to-day. Social Reform was, however, published at an unlucky moment. It had not reached more than a small number of readers before the war, for a time, put a stop to economic thought, and left men to illustrate economic principles by action, thereby providing fresh data for economic theory of the future.



CHAPTER XVII

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.



CHAPTER XVIII

LITERATURE AND ACTION

Literature as Speech Made Permanent—All Written Speech Not Literature—The Essence of Literature for Its Own Sake—Prose as a Fine Art—Some Interesting Aspects of Literature as an End in Itself—Their Comparative Triviality—No Literature Great Which Is Not More Than Literature—Literature as a Vehicle of Religion—Lucretius—The Reconstruction of Belief.

If we go back to the beginning of things, literature, needless to say, is a development of ordinary speech. It is speech which has been made permanent, partly, indeed, by oral tradition, but mainly by the art of writing. Without speech no human co-operation, other than the rudest, would be possible. Some men at least must speak so as to organize the tasks of others, and the latter must understand speech so as to do what the former bid them. When the Deity determined to confound the builders of Babel, or, in other words, to render co-operative work impossible, he did not cut off their hands, but he virtually took speech away from them, by rendering the language of each unintelligible to all the rest. Moreover, in the case of tasks the nature of which is highly complex, it is necessary not only that the organizers should make use of speech, but also that what they speak should systematically be written down. The writing down, indeed, is often the most important part of the matter, as in the case of an Act of Parliament or of the delicate and elaborate formulae on which depends the production of chemicals or of great ships.

If written speech, then, of kinds such as these is literature, literature is obviously not antithetic to action, but is, on the contrary, action in one of its most important forms. To state the case thus, however, is stating no more than half of it. As a matter of fact, laws and chemical formulae, however carefully written, are not what is meant by literature in the common sense of the word. Though the writing down of speech may in such cases be a form of action, it does not follow that all such written speech is literature. Let us compare the compositions of a child, whether in prose or verse, with a page out of the Nautical Almanac or a manual of household medicine. The child's compositions may intrinsically have no literary value, but they nevertheless represent genuine attempts at literature. A page from the Nautical Almanac or the manual of household medicine may be, for certain purposes, of the highest value imaginable, but the test of literary beauty would be the last test we should apply to them.

What, then, is the primary difference between written words that are literature and written words that are not? The primary difference relates to the objects at which severally the writers aim or the motive by which they are impelled to write. The child writes solely because literary composition is a pleasure to him, as for the sake of a similar pleasure another child takes to a piano. The astronomer and the doctor write to help men in navigating ships or mothers in dosing babies. Between written language which is not literature and written language which is the initial difference is this: that for the writers written language is, in the first case, something which it is not in the second. In the first case, the writer's concern with language, and the sole interest which written language has for him, are things which have no dependence on the merits of written language as such, except in so far as it is a means of accomplishing ulterior objects, with which otherwise the mere merits of language have nothing at all to do. Sound injunctions to a nurse, provided that their meaning was clear, would have far greater value in a hospital than mistaken injunctions written with a grace or majesty worthy of Plato or Tacitus. In the second case, writing is a feat the successful achievement of which is, for the writer, an object and a pleasure in itself; and how far success is achieved by him depends not alone on the pleasure which he derives from his own performances personally, but also, and we may say mainly, on the quantity of kindred pleasure which his writing communicates to his readers.

These observations become more and more true and pungent in proportion as language becomes a more complex instrument, its progress resembling the evolution of an organ from a shepherd's pipe. As it thus progresses, its delicate possibilities of melody, metaphor, and subtle emphasis increase, and masters of the literary art enchant with ever new surprises multitudes who have no capacity for the literary art themselves. So far, then, as literature is in this sense literature for its own sake, the contrast between literature and action is, with certain exceptions, justified. Exceptions, however, to this rule exist, and these, briefly stated, are as follows. When a writer writes a book—let us say, for example, a novel—the object of which is to give pleasure, his primary object in writing it may be either to please himself or else to make money by ministering to the taste of others. The importance of this distinction has been clearly brought out by Tolstoy, who defines art, and literary art in particular, as a means by which the artist contrives to arouse in others emotions and interests which he has experienced in his own person. Such being the case, then, there are, says Tolstoy, many works which partake of the nature of literature, but which are not examples of true literary art. Such, according to him, are our modern detective novels, or any novels the interests of which depend on the solution of a mystery, the reason being that the writer is acquainted with the mystery at starting, and experiences himself no emotion whatever with regard to it. His sole object is to titillate an emotion in others which he does not himself share, and from which, indeed, he is, by the nature of the case, precluded. This is a criticism which might doubtless be pressed too far; but it is within limits fruitful, and, bearing it here in mind, we may say that literature, if we take it in its pure form and regard it as an end in itself, is language, as used to express the personal emotions or personal convictions of the writer, and is raised by him to such a pitch of beauty, of strength or of delicacy that it is a source of pleasure to large classes of mankind apart from all thoughts of relationship, if any, to ulterior objects.

Thus pure literature, as legitimately contrasted with action, is a matter of great interest for a large number of people whom nobody would describe as literary or as persons of letters otherwise; and I may, therefore, say something of pure literature as estimated more particularly by myself.

Let me begin with prose, which, merely as a pleasurable art, instinct has urged me, from my earliest days, to cultivate. Of what good prose is I have always had clear notions; and, whether I have been successful in my efforts to achieve it or not, my personal experience of the process may not be without some interest. My own experience is that the composition of good prose—prose that seems good to myself—is a process which requires a very great deal of leisure. True excellence in prose, so I have always felt, involves many subtle qualities which are appreciable by the reader through their final effects alone, which leave no trace of the efforts spent in producing them, but which without such effort could rarely be produced at all.

As examples of these qualities I may mention a melody not too often resonant, which captivates the reader's attention, and is always producing a mood in him conducive to a favorable reception of what the writer is anxious to convey. Next to such melody I should put a logical adaptation of stress, or of emphasis in the construction of sentences, which corresponds in detail to the movements of the reader's mind—a halt in the words occurring where the mind halts, a new rapidity in the words when the mind, satisfied thus far, is prepared to resume its progress. To these qualities, as essential to perfection in prose, I might easily add others; but these are so complex and comprehensive that they practically imply the rest.

With regard, then, to these essentials, the practice which I have had to adopt in my own efforts to produce them has been more or less as follows. The general substance of what I proposed to say I have written out first in the loosest language possible, without any regard to melody, to accuracy, or even to correct grammar. I have then rewritten this matter, with a view, not to any verbal improvement, but merely to the rearrangement of ideas, descriptions, or arguments, so that this may accord with the sequence of questions, expectations, or emotions which are likely, by a natural logic, to arise in the reader's mind—nothing being said too soon, nothing being said too late, and nothing (except for the sake of deliberate emphasis) being said twice over. The different paragraphs would now be like so many stone blocks which had been placed in their proper positions so as to form a polylithic frieze, but each of which still remained to be carved, as though by a sculptor or lapidary, so as to be part of a continuous pattern or a series of connected figures. My next task would be to work at them one by one, till each was sculptured into an image of my own minute intentions. The task of thus carving each and fitting it to its next-door neighbors has always been, merely for its own sake, exceedingly fascinating to myself, but it has generally been long and slow. Most of my own books, when their general substance had been roughly got into order by means of several tentative versions, were, paragraph by paragraph, written again five or six times more, the corrections each time growing more and more minute, and finally the clauses and wording of each individual sentence were transposed, or rebalanced or reworded, whenever such processes should be necessary, in order to capture some nuance of meaning which had previously eluded me as a bird eludes a fowler.

As an example of this process I may mention a single sentence which occurs in my little book on Cyprus. It is a sentence belonging to a description of certain morning scenes—of dewy plains, with peasants moving across them, and here and there a smoke wreath arising from burning weeds. The effect of these scenes in some poignant way was primitive, and I was able at once to reproduce it by saying that the peasants were moving like figures out of the Book of Genesis. I felt, however, that this effect was not produced by the groups of peasants only. I felt that somehow—I could not at first tell how—some part in producing it was played by the smoke wreaths also. At last I managed to capture the suggestion, at first subconscious only, which had so far been eluding me. I finished my original description by adding the following words, "The smoke-wreaths were going up like the smoke of the first sacrifice."

It may be objected that prose built up in this elaborate way loses as much as it gains, because it is bound to lose the charm and the convincing force of spontaneity. This may be so in some cases, but it is not so in all. I have found myself that, so far as my own works are concerned, the passages which are easiest to read are precisely those which it has been most laborious to write. And for this, it seems to me, there is a very intelligible reason. Half of the interests and emotions which make up the substance of life are more or less subconscious, and are, for most men, difficult to identify. One of the functions of pure literature is to make the subconscious reveal itself. It is to make men know what they are, in addition to what spontaneously they feel themselves to be, but feel only, without clear comprehension of it. As soon as a writer, at the cost of whatever labor, manages to make these spontaneities, otherwise subconscious, intelligible, the spontaneity of the processes described by him adds itself at last to his description.

A signal example of this fact may be found, not in prose, but in love poems. Most people can fall in love. It takes no trouble to do so, whatever trouble it may bring them. If any human processes are spontaneous, falling in love is one of them. Most lovers feel more than they know until great love poetry explains it to them what they are; but great love poems are great, not because they are composed spontaneously, but because they express spontaneities which are essentially external to themselves. In other words, the achievement of perfection, whether in prose or poetry, is comparable to the task of a piano tuner, who may spend a whole morning in tightening or relaxing the strings, but who knows at once, when he gets them, the minutely precise tones which the laws of music demand.

Whether every reader will agree with me as to these questions or not, they are, at all events, examples of questions purely literary, which are in themselves captivating for large numbers of people, without any reference to ulterior, or what are called practical, objects. To these questions I may add a few others, which have been specially captivating to myself.

One of them is the use of metaphor as an immemorial literary device, especially in the case of poetry. What is the psychology of metaphor? Let us take an instance from Tennyson, who in one of his poems speaks, with very vivid effect, of Mediterranean bays as colored like "the peacock's neck." The color of the bay is at once made present to the reader's mind. But why? A discussion of this question occurs in a dialogue between two of the characters in my novel The Old Order Changes. The poet, urges one of them, might, if describing a peacock, have said with equal effect that the peacock's neck was colored like a Mediterranean bay. How is it that we gain anything by comparing one equally familiar thing to another? The secret of the use of metaphor in the poet's art is, says the speaker, this. When the mind is at rest its surface is alive with vivid images which have settled on it like sea birds on a rock, but the moment any one of these detects an approach on our part, in order that we may examine it carefully, its wings are spread, and in a flash it is gone. When, however, we use a simile in order to describe something which is obviously our main concern (say the color of a Mediterranean bay), the thing which we are anxious to describe acts as a kind of stalking-horse, which enables us to approach and capture the thing which we use as an illustration (say the neck of a peacock) before the peacock so much as suspects our neighborhood. We have it alive before us, with all its feathers glittering, and these throw a new light on objects which our direct touch might have frightened away beyond the confines of our field of vision. The more vivid of the two objects communicates its color to the less vivid.

Two other purely literary questions are discussed in The Veil of the Temple, the first of these being as follows. One of the speakers calls attention to a criticism which is often and justly made with reference to many, and even to the best of novels, that, while the minor characters are drawn with the utmost skill, the heroes (such as most of Scott's) have often no characters at all. The reason, he says, is that, in most cases, the hero is not so much an individual, with characteristics peculiar to himself, as a certain point of view, from which all the other characters and incidents of the story are drawn. Or else, if some of these are, as very often happens, not drawn from the point of view of the hero, they are drawn from the point of view of some other ideal spectator, on whose position, moral or local, the whole perspective of the story, mental or ocular, depends. Let us take, for example, a typical opening scene of a kind proverbially frequent in the novels of G. P. R. James. Such scenes were proverbially described very much as follows: "To the right lay a gray wall, which formed, to all appearance, the boundary of some great sheep tract. To the left was a wood of larches. Between these was a road, showing so few signs of use that it might have been a relic of some almost forgotten world. Proceeding along this road on a late October evening might have been seen three horsemen, of imperfectly distinguishable, yet vaguely sinister, aspect." In the absence of an ideal spectator, who is tacitly identified with the novelist, his hero, or his reader, such a description would mean very little more than nothing. There would be no left or right unless for a supposed spectator standing in a particular place and looking in a particular direction. The aspect of the horsemen could not be sinister or indistinguishable unless there were an assumed man whose eyes were unable to distinguish it.

The argument here in question will carry us on to certain kindred problems, connected likewise with the novelist's art, which are these: The necessary assumption of the author as ideal spectator being given, a question arises with regard to the range of vision which, in his capacity of spectator, the novelist professes to possess. Many novelists mar the effect of their work—and among these Thackeray is notable—by adopting an attitude which in this respect is constantly vacillating. Sometimes it is one of omniscience, sometimes of blind perplexity. At one time he describes the inmost thoughts of his characters which are suffered or pursued in secret, as though he could see through everything. At another time he will startle the reader with some such question as this: "Who shall dare to say—I certainly cannot—what at that solemn moment the lad's real reflections were?" A partial escape from the sense of unreality which alternations like these produce is to be found in the method which many novelists have adopted—namely, that of dividing the story into so many separate parts, these being told in succession by so many different characters, each recording events as wholly seen from the point of his own unchanged perspective. Such is the method adopted by Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White, for example. The danger of this artifice is that it tends to be too apparent. The most logically complete escape from the difficulties which we are here glancing at is to be found, no doubt, in the method of autobiography in a single and undivided form; unless indeed the assumption of absolute omniscience on the author's part can be used with a rigid consistency which it very rarely exhibits.

Another question of a purely literary kind, reflection on which is to me, at least, pleasurable (though many persons of literary taste may, perhaps, regard it as a bore), is the relation of modern prosody to ancient, and more particularly to Latin. It has always seemed to me that the lengthening and shortening of syllables according to their position, as happens in classical Latin, with regard to the syllables that follow them, must always have corresponded with the stresses or absence of stress which would naturally be made apparent by the voice of an ideal reciter; and to me, as to some other people, the question has proved amusing of how far in English verse Latin prosody could be reproduced. Many attempts have been made at deciding this question by experiments. The most remarkable of these are two which were made by Tennyson. One of them, called "Hendecasyllabics," is little more than a trick played with extreme skill, and in no serious sense does it merit the name of poetry. The other, "An Ode to Milton," is no less charming as a poem than as a conquest over technical difficulties. Let us take the first stanza:

Oh, mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, Oh, skilled to sing of time and eternity, God-gifted organ voice of England, Milton a name to resound for ages.

Here the stresses which the meaning of the English verse demands fall exclusively on syllables which would, according to Latin prosody, be long; but there are one or two syllables which in Latin verse would be long (such as "of" in the second line) which invite no stress in the English—which do not, indeed, admit of it—and must for that reason be treated by an English reader as short. Aiming at greater completeness, but otherwise in a manner very much less ambitious, I attempted an experiment of a similar kind myself, consisting of a few hexameters, in which not only do the natural stresses fall, and fall exclusively, on syllables which in Latin would be long, but in which also every syllable would be emphasized by an English reciter with a natural stress corresponding to it. These hexameters were a metrical amplification of an advertisement which figures prominently in the carriages of the Tube Railway, proclaiming the charms of a suburb called Sudbury Town, and remarkable for its surrounding pine woods. The moment I read the words "Sudbury Town" I recognized in them the beginning of a hexameter classically pure; and after many abortive attempts I worked out a sequel—a very short one—as follows:

Sudbury Town stands here. In an old-world region around it Tall, dark pines, like spires, with above them a murmur of umbrage, Guard for us all deep peace. Such peace may the weary suburbans Know not in even a dream. These, these will an omnibus always, Ev'n as they sink to a doze just earned by the toil of a daytime, Rouse, or a horse-drawn dray, too huge to be borne by an Atlas, Shakes all walls, all roofs, with a sound more loud than an earthquake.[5]

The moral of such experiments seems to me to be this: that even if ancient prosody, such as that of the Virgilian hexameter, could be naturalized completely in English, the emotional effect of the meter would in the two languages be different, and that Anglo-Latin hexameters would, with very rare exceptions, mean no more than successes in a graceful and very difficult game. It is indeed for that very reason that I mention this question here. It is a question of pure literature or of purely literary form. As such, it has proved fascinating to many highly cultivated persons; yet even by such persons themselves it will not be seriously regarded as much better than trivial. But this is not all. From this consideration we are led on to another. If the problems of Anglo-Classical prosody are trivial even for those who happen to find them entertaining, may not all literature, even the highest, when cultivated for its own sake only, be, from certain points of view, a triviality also?

According to differences of taste and temperament, different persons will answer this question differently. Since I am not entering here on any formal argument, but am merely recording my own individual views, I should, speaking for myself, answer this question in the affirmative. I may, indeed, confess that the mere artist in literature—the person for whom literature, as such, is the main interest in life—is a person for whom secretly I have always felt some contempt, even though, for myself personally, this magical triviality has been one of life's chief seductions.

The content and significance of such a feeling are presented in concrete form by such institutions as authors' or writers' clubs. In London and in other capitals so many of these have been established, and continue to flourish, that they obviously perform certain useful and welcome functions; but my own criticism would be that to call them clubs for "authors" or "writers" is a misnomer which fails to particularize the real basis of membership. In the modern world, no doubt, all writers, merely as writers, have certain interests in common. They have, in the first place, to get their works published, and the business of publication is a very complex process, which has necessarily a legal and financial side. Questions are inevitably involved of financial loss or gain, and even writers who are indifferent to profit, and are ready to bear a loss, will desire to be treated fairly. They may be ready to bear a loss, but not a loss which is inequitable, and if any gain should ensue, they will desire an equitable share of it. In connection with such matters, authors' clubs may perform many useful offices for their members. In so far, however, as their functions are limited to offices such as these the proper name for them would be not clubs, but agencies. On the other hand, in the modern world authorship to a great extent is a systematic writing for journals. It has to be performed, in respect both of time and other conditions, in accordance with strict arrangements between the writers themselves and the officials by whom, whether as editors or owners, these journals are managed. For this reason persons who practice journalism—daily journalism in particular—will probably be persons more or less similar in their habits, and clubs for admission to which the main qualification consists in the fact of authorship may provide them with special conveniences which they one and all desire. But for persons whose literary pursuits are carried on in isolation, and who aim at expressing by authorship no thoughts or no sentiments but their own, it seems to me that a club for authors or writers as such represents a conception as wrong as would that of a club for speakers as such or for politicians as such. What bond of union would there be between a Tory and a ferocious Democrat if they neither of them put pen to paper—if they were not authors at all? They would keep, so far as was possible, to different sides of the street. Why, then, should they wish to meet in a club coffee room and lunch at adjacent tables, simply because each, besides holding opinions absolutely odious to the other, should, instead of keeping them to himself, endeavor to disseminate them by writing among as many of his fellow creatures as was possible?

It may be said that two such men might very well wish to do so because, though what each expressed was odious to the other in itself, each was a consummate master of literary art in expressing it, and each admired, and was aware of, the presence of this technical mastery in the other. Now, so far as it goes, this, in numerous cases, may be true. Indeed, such an admission is the very point from which the present argument started. Pure literature, as such, is, no doubt, susceptible of consummate beauties, in their natural admiration of which men who are otherwise the bitterest adversaries may agree. What does this admission cover? It applies, in my own opinion, to minor literature only, though masterpieces of minor literature may be in their own way supreme, as Keats has shown us in such poems as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," but, as applied to literature in its higher and greater forms, the admission fails to be true, because it fails to be adequate. A poem by Keats may be admirable so far as it goes, but really great literature, such as Goethe's "Faust," for example, would possess but a minor value unless there were at the back of it something that is more than literature. In the case of a poem like "Endymion" the poem is greater than the man who writes it. In the case of a poem like "Faust" the man is greater than the poem. Behind the poet stands the man of profound reflection, the man of the world, the philosopher, the passionate or disillusioned lover. He is all of these before he is a literary artist. His writing is only the vehicle by which he communicates what he is in all these capacities to others, and so leaves a practical impression on the thoughts and emotions of the world.

And what is true of verse is more obviously true of prose. Of all prose works which have captured attention by their mere merits as literature, no better example can be given than the great masterpiece of Gibbon. But though Gibbon may be read by many for the sake of his mere literary charm, his place in the world as a great writer depends but in a secondary way on this charm in itself. He lives because this charm was used by him to convey the results of research so penetrating and comprehensive, and guided by a mind so sagacious and powerful, that for the most part these results have stood the test of criticism, however keen and hostile; and in accomplishing this feat Gibbon has rendered a service which is still indispensable to the historical students and historical thinkers of to-day, whereas otherwise his merely literary merits would have been merits displayed in vain or relegated to a literary museum which few men cared to enter.

This conception of pure literature as written language which is mainly appreciated for its own sake, and is for that reason in a relative sense trivial, no doubt widens out again when we come to consider the fact that emotion of some kind is, in the last resort, the one thing which gives value to life. But the fact remains that all the desirable emotions are determined by things which are not in themselves emotions, such as knowledge, intellectual beliefs, and the laws, economic and otherwise, which alone render a civilized society possible; and even the greatest of merely literary charms make great literature only in so far as they endow mankind with fundamental things like these.

Throughout these memoirs there has been constant allusion to the relation borne by literary expression to life in the case of the author himself. I have said already that for mere literature as such, and for its practitioners, I have from my youth onward had a certain feeling of contempt, and I now may explain once more what, at least in my own case, such a feeling really means. It means, not that mere literature at its best is not beautiful and delightful, but that it must, in order to be worthy of a serious man's devotion, be a mere part of some whole, the other part of which is incomparably the larger of the two. It means that literature, in order to be great literature, must at the same time be practically a form of action. I have no ambition to impose this opinion on others. I would merely record it as an opinion on which, since the ending of my early days at Oxford, I have myself by instinct acted. Whatever I have written I have written with one or other ulterior object, to which the mere pleasure of literary opposition as such has been altogether subordinate. Of the nature of these objects I have said enough already, but I may once again define them.

One of them relates to religion, to the quality of the lives and the loves of ordinary men and women as affected by it, and also to metaphysics and science, in so far as they leave, or do not leave, the doctrines of religion credible.

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 Rubaiyat 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 mooned 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.

And no omnipotent wearer of a crown Of righteousness, or fiend with branded frown Swart from the pit, shall break or reach thy rest, Or stir thy temples from the eternal down.

In writing this poem I experienced the full sensation of having become a convert to the Lucretian gospel myself, against which throughout my life it had been my dominant impulse to protest.

There are, doubtless, many others who experience this disconcerting vicissitude—for whom the deductions of science as a moral message are ludicrous, but for whom its homicidal negations prove in the end ineluctable. If this is their permanent, if this is their final condition, they will perhaps deserve commiseration, but they will hardly deserve castigation, for their attitude is one which will bring its own castigation with it. I can only hope that I am entitled to the truly charitable satisfaction of regarding them as a class to which I do not myself belong, and that the literary industry of a life otherwise idle may prove to be a form of action, or rather a reaction, which, alike as to religion and politics, will have not been unserviceable to the world.

To sum the matter up, the Lucretian philosophy of life, appealing as it may to men when in certain moods, is one which, when submitted to what Kant calls the "practical reason," shrivels up into an absurdity, and I have shown at length, in my work The Reconstruction of Belief, that this becomes only the more apparent when we consider the attempts which have been made by modern thinkers to vivify it by an idea of which in Lucretius there is no trace. Put into language less imposing than his own, the gospel of Lucretius virtually comes to this, that men may eat and drink and propagate their kind in comfort if only they will hold fast to the belief that men, when they die, slip into their burrows like rabbits, and will, though they have done with pleasure, be out of the reach of pain—that whatever they may have done or not done, they will all, as individuals, be as though they never had been. The only enlargement of this gospel which modern thought can suggest is rooted in a transference of men's serious interests in life from the life of the individual to the life of the community or the race, and in the thought that, though the individual perishes, the race will continue and progress.

The answer given to this argument in The Reconstruction of Belief is that, even if we suppose such corporate progress to be a reality, it cannot be invested with any practical meaning unless we postulate the individual, and consider his fortunes first. We have here the Asses' Bridge of all philosophy whatsoever, and until the philosopher has crossed it the philosopher can do nothing but bray. The whole external universe, the race of men included, has for no man any perceptible existence except in so far as it is reflected in the thoughts and the sensations of the individual. The conception of the race is nothing, so far as we can know it, beyond what the individual conceives. Let us suppose it, then, to be in some relative sense true that the human race is undergoing some change always for the better in respect of its material or moral conditions, which change will continue so long as the race exists. In that case the course of Humanity will be comparable to an upward road which the race will be always ascending toward heights of welfare at present hardly imaginable. Such will be the course of the race, but the course of the individuals will be something totally different. It will for each be a progress not up such a road, but across it, no matter at what altitude this crossing is made. Humanity will always be nothing more than a procession passing from one turnstile to another, the one leading out of, and the other leading into, a something which always must be, for each individual, a nullity. Apart from the individual, nothing which the human race knows as desirable can exist; and, logically and practically alike, the only efficient connection between the individual and the race must first of all be a connection not with the race as such, and not with external nature, but with something which is beyond both, and is not comprehended in either.

The only conceivable human being who will, apart from religion, ever be able to describe himself as coextensive with the human race will, as Nietzsche puts it in one of his most memorable sentences, be the last man left alive when the rest of the human race is frozen. He, and he only, will be able to say truly: "Homo sum. Humani nihil a me alienum puto."

[5] In connection with the above questions, I may mention certain others, all bearing on the relation of prose to poetry. It was said of Plutarch that his sense of sound was so delicate that if it had been necessary for the sake of mere verbal melody, he would have made Caesar kill Brutus instead of Brutus killing Caesar. Closely bearing on this criticism is the fact that in old English tragedies from the days of Dryden onward a careful reader will note that, while parts of the dialogue are in blank verse and parts in prose, the writers themselves show, in many cases, a very defective appreciation of where verse ends and prose begins, many passages which are printed as prose being really unconscious verse. An interesting example of this may be found in a passage from Bacon's Essays, which Macaulay quotes as an example of the literary altitude to which Bacon's prose could rise. This passage is in reality blank verse pure and simple. It is as follows:

Virtue is like precious odors, Most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed. Prosperity doth best discover vice. Adversity doth best discover virtue.

This passage, with Macaulay's comments on it, may be commended to the notice of those who contend that Bacon could not have written Shakespeare, because Bacon's acknowledged verses are of a very inferior kind. If they look in Bacon's prose for verse which was unacknowledged, and which was unintended by himself, they may find reason for modifying this argument.



INDEX

Aberdeen, speech at, 192.

Acland, family of, 3.

—— Sir Henry at Oxford, 78.

Aide, Hamilton, 98, 130.

Alexandria, 228.

Alford, Lady Marian, on society, 119.

America, political visit to, 308.

American architecture, 322.

Amherst, Lord and Lady, 292.

Ardverikie, Sir John Ramsden's lodge, 145, 307.

Aristocracy and Evolution, 265.

Arnold, Matthew, as Mr. Luke in The New Republic, 88.

Ashburton, Louisa, Lady, 117.

—— Rawlin Mallock, Whig member for, 4.

Astor, Mr. John Jacob, in New York, 314.

Austin, Alfred, Poet Laureate, 120.

Baker, Sir Samuel, 226-227.

Baltimore, 309, 320.

Batthyany, Prince and Princess, 241-242.

Beaufort Castle (Lord Lovat's), 129.

Beaulieu, villa at, 203.

Beckett, Ernest, second Lord Grimthorpe, 195.

Benbecula, island of, 304.

Bevan, Mr. (the last of the "dandies"), 60.

Bismarck, Countesses Marie and Helen, 55.

Blatchford, Lord, 30.

Blayney, Lord, friend of Cromwell's, 4.

Blenheim, 132.

Blunt, Wilfrid, poet, and breeder of Arab horses, 53, 129.

Boroughs, rotten Cornish, 159.

Breakfast party at Lord Houghton's, 103.

Bright, John, as land agitator; his absurd statistics, 182.

Brittany, visit to, 329.

Broglio, castle of, 237.

Browning, Robert, 71.

Buller, Emma and Antony, 30.

Bulwer, Sir Henry, in Cyprus, 227.

Burdett-Coutts, Miss, at Torquay, 61.

Bute, Lord, original of Lord Beaconsfield's Lothair, 131; at Chiswick, 131; at Cardiff Castle, 151.

Butler, Dr. Nicholas Murray, 313.

Byram, Sir John Ramsden's, in Yorkshire, 161.

Cannes, first visit to, 167; miniature villa at, 167; subsequent visits, 241.

Cardiff Castle, 157.

Carlyle, introduction to, 64.

Carriages, old traveling, 16.

Cary, Mr., of Tor Abbey, and R. Mallock as smugglers, 5.

—— Sir Henry, sells Cockington to R. Mallock, temp. Charles I, 4.

Castles, different classes of, 152.

Catholic society in London, 130.

Champernowne family related to Mallocks, 7.

Chelston Cross, built by Mr. W. Froude, 49.

Chillingham Castle, 155.

Civic Federation of New York, 308.

Clark, Mr. George, meeting at Cardiff, 158.

Cleveland, Duchess of, 149.

Cockington Church, 17.

—— Court, 13.

—— Estate, no building leases granted till 1860, 49.

Cockington village, 15.

Conservative party, besetting weakness of, 214, 268.

Conversation, the arts of, 101.

Country houses, description of various, 146-167.

Currie, Philip, afterward Lord Currie, 130.

Cyprus, winter visit to, 227, 235.

Dandies, 63.

Dartington Hall, 12.

—— Parsonage, 10.

Dartmouth as a rotten borough, 50.

De Vere, Aubrey, 54.

Dempster, Miss C., 241.

Denbury Manor, 7.

"Denzil Place," poem by "Violet Fane," 129.

Diagrams, statistical, used at public meetings, 191.

Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption, 276.

Dorlin, Lord Howard's lodge in the Highlands, 175.

Dreams, poems written in, 259.

Dunrobin, 146.

Eaglehurst, 241.

Eaton, Alfred Montgomery at, 152.

Elvaston Castle, 157.

Erskine, Lady, hostess at Torquay, 54.

Everingham Park, old Yorkshire Catholic house, 154.

Exeter, Henry Philpotts, Bishop of, 31-34.

—— R. Mattock's connection with, temp. Elizabeth and James I, 4.

Famaugusta, enormous ruins of, 233.

"Fane, Violet," 130.

Farmer, Devonshire, on free will, 24; on the fall of Jericho, 24.

Fielding, a child's imitation of his novels, 35.

Florence, interesting houses in and near, 236.

Froude, Antony, historian, and Carlyle, 64.

—— Archdeacon, equestrian, dilettante, artist, magistrate, 6.

Froude, Hurrell, leader of Tractarian movement, 6.

—— Mr. and Mrs. William, interesting society at their house, 50.

—— William, his discoveries in naval architecture, 51.

Fryston, 161.

Gaskell, C. Milnes; Lord Houghton's characteristic advice to him, 59.

George, Henry, limitations of his attack on private wealth, 173; his ignorance of statistics, 188.

Georges, Sir Ferdinando: his immense landed properties in Maine, 4; Mallock's partner temp. Charles I, 4.

Glasgow, the author speaks at, 192.

Glenthorne, its lonely and singular situation, 153.

Governesses, high Tory, 28.

Gratz, 246.

Greenock, Lord, 195.

Grimthorpe, Lord, 194.

Hare, Augustus, his indiscretions as a writer of memoirs, 136.

Harvard, 317-318.

Hatchments in Cockington Church, 17.

Heart of Life, The, 280.

Hebrides, the Outer, 304.

Heligan, the John Tremaynes' house in Cornwall, 159.

Herbert, Auberon, a devotee of "the simple life," 122-124.

—— of Lee, Lady, 177.

Hewel Grange, 160.

Hibbert, Mrs. Washington, 130.

Highlands, the, first visit to, 175.

Hoch-Osterwitz, extraordinary castle of, 245.

Hotels, old-fashioned, private, in London, 94; extravagant gilding of American, 316.

Houghton, Lord, at Torquay, 58; his enormous acquaintance, 59; his dry wit and humor, 60; his social advice to the author, 60; breakfast party given in London by, 103; his remarkable defense of one of the author's novels, 172; in the Highlands, 177.

Houghton, old Catholic house in Yorkshire, 155.

—— Sir Robert Walpole's, in Norfolk, 151.

Howard, Kenneth, 96.

Hoy, island of, its colossal cliffs, 300.

Hugel, Baron von, Austrian diplomat, 237.

Human Document, A, 255-278.

Huxley as Mr. Storks in The New Republic, 87-88.

In an Enchanted Island, 229.

Individualist, The, 281.

Ireland, visits in, 164.

Is Life Worth Living? 169.

James, William, at Harvard, 317.

Jerningham, C. E., 200.

Jerome, William Travers, 321.

Jersey, Julia, Lady, 126.

Jowett, as Doctor Jenkinson in The New Republic, 88.

Kidd, Benjamin, on Social Evolution, 264.

Kippax, Yorkshire, a product of architectural rivalry, 162.

Kirkwall and its cathedral, 299.

Knebworth, its pseudo-Gothic architecture, 257, 260; "Ouida's" visit to, 256; a night of conversation at, 288.

Koermend, castle of, in Hungary, 246.

Labor and the Popular Welfare, 261.

Land agitation in the Highlands, 180.

—— agitator on Fort William coach, 184.

—— the old basis of London society, 93; decline in rent of agricultural since 1880, 93.

Lane Fox, George, 211.

Larnaca in Cyprus, 229.

Laureateship, competitors for, 121.

Library, secret hours in a, 36.

Limits of Pure Democracy, 333.

Literature and action, 341-371.

Literature and utilitarianism, 343.

—— as speech made permanent, 342.

Littlehampton, private tutor at, 39.

Lloyd Bryce, 310.

Long Island, country house in, 310.

Lowther, Mrs. William, 117.

Lucretius on Life and Death, 366.

Lulworth Castle, 154.

Lyme, 163.

Lytton, as contrasted with Carlyle, 65; second Lord, early acquaintance with, 66; his poetry and his generous temper, 67; poem composed by him in a dream, 259.

—— first Lord, at Torquay, 54.

Mallock family, 3-5.

—— Richard, as member for Torquay division of Devonshire, 209; support given him by George Lane Fox and J. Sandars, 211.

Mallocks as members of Parliament for Lyme, Poole, Totnes, and Ashburton, 3.

—— of the eighteenth century: their ecclesiastical patronage, and their patronage of the turf, 5.

Manchester, speech at, on the land question, 192.

Manning, Cardinal, 131.

Marx, Karl, his influence in England about 1880, 173, 179.

Memoirs, difficulties of writing, 135.

Metaphors, the secret of their force in literature, 349.

Molesworth, Sir Louis, 159.

Monte Carlo, 194-208.

Montrose, Duchess of (Caroline), 99.

Morgan, J. Pierpont, 323, 327.

Naval architecture, Mr. Froude's experiments in, 51.

Negro, spiritual ambitions of a, 327.

Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 101.

—— Miss Meresia, her lesson in oratory at Strathfieldsaye, 110.

New Domesday Book, studied by the author at Ardverikie, 187.

Newman, Cardinal, 50.

New Paul and Virginia, The, 90.

New Republic, The, 87.

New York: the opera there a social function, 312; dinner parties in, and other entertainments, 312; good taste in fashionable entertainments, 316; author's address at Columbia University, 313; Evelyn Nesbit and the Thaw trial, 321; ladies' club in, author's address at opening of, 324.

Nicosia, 230.

Noble, Mr. and Mrs. Saxton, 294.

Noltland Castle, in the Orkneys, 301.

Normans and Saxons, 28.

Oban, 175.

Old Order Changes, The, analysis of, 214-217.

Orford, Lord, his views of society, 97.

Osborne, Father B., son of a prominent Evangelical, 240.

"Ouida" in London, 126; at Florence, 256; at Knebworth, 256.

Oxford, undergraduate life at, 68; suppers and concerts at, 70-71; Robert Browning and Ruskin at, 71-79; rejection of dogmatic Christianity at, 82; suicide of Balliol undergraduate at, 80; orthodox apologists at, 83; The New Republic at, 87.

Paget, Sir Augustus and Lady, 228.

Pater, as Mr. Rose, in The New Republic, 88.

Pelham (Lord Lytton's novel), social advice to her son from the hero's mother, 97.

Philpot, Mr., private tutor at Littlehampton, 39; his taste for poetry, 39; the author's happy years under tuition of, 39-49; his professed Radicalism in polities and religion, 43; his fastidiousness in choice of pupils, 43.

Philpotts, Henry, Bishop of Exeter, examples of his polished wit, 32.

Poetry, author's early devotion to, 35-37.

Poor, the rural, of Devonshire, 20-29.

Pope as author's earliest model, 35.

Popoff, Admiral, his visit to Mr. W. Froude at Chelston Cross, 51.

Primrose League meeting at Cockington, humors of the occasion, 211.

Prose, methods of writing good, 347.

Prosody, attempts to write English verse according to Latin, 355.

Provence, the, French transatlantic steamer, 328.

Queen of Holland at Cockington, 17.

Raby Castle, 150.

Ramsden, Lady Guendolen: the author helps her in editing family memoirs, 100; has to reject the most amusing parts, 100.

—— Sir John, an ideal country gentleman, 161.

Reconstruction of Belief, The, 291.

Religion as a Credible Doctrine, 284.

Religion as an element of civilization, 291.

Riegersbourg, castle of, 252.

Roden, Lady, the charm of her conversation, 101.

—— Lord and Lady, in Ireland, 164.

Romance of the Nineteenth Century, A, 169; violent attacks on, 170; analysis of its philosophical purport, 170; defended by Catholic priest and Lord Houghton, 171-172.

Roosevelt, President, author's meeting with, at Harvard, 318.

Ruskin, meeting with, at Oxford, 78; his extreme charm of manner, 79; temperamentally opposed to Jowett, 79; his insistence on the need of definite religious belief, 86; as Mr. Herbert in The New Republic, 88.

St. Andrews Boroughs, invitation to stand for, 191.

St. Helier, Lady, and Duke of Wellington, 108.

St. Hilarion, castle of, 232.

St. Michael's Mount (Cornwall), 148.

St. Vincent, first Lord, 14.

Sartor Resartus, Carlyle's, 64.

Savile, Augustus, 96.

Season in London, 138.

Seaton, first Lord, 14.

Sermon, Jowett's, in The New Republic, 88; semisocialist, by priest in The Old Order Changes, 219.

Servants, Old World, 18.

Shelley, Sir Percy and Lady, 114.

Sherborne House, 163.

—— Susan, Lady, 163.

—— the late Lord, 163.

Shropshire, county ball in, 142.

Sloane, Mr. and Mrs., of New York, 315.

Smuggling by two country gentlemen in Devonshire, 5.

"Social Democratic Federation," 173.

Social Equality, 181.

Socialism, A Critical Examination of, 329.

—— elements of, in The Old Order Changes, 222.

Society in London, its traditional basis, 92.

Society in the country, 144.

Somers, Lady, 117.

Somerset, Duchess of, her conversational humor, 100.

Spencer, Herbert, letters from, about Aristocracy and Evolution, 266.

Stanway, picture of life at, in the eighteenth century, 162.

"Statistical Monographs," 333.

Stowe, 151.

Strafford, Cora, Lady, 151.

Suicide, her funeral at Monaco, 207.

Summer on the borders of Caithness, 292.

Sutherland, Duchess (Annie), at Torquay, 212.

Swinburne, admiration of his poetry at Littlehampton, 47; at Jowett's dinner table and afterward, 72; at an undergraduate's luncheon, 74; his humor, 75; recitation of his own verses, 77.

System played at Monte Carlo, 196-197.

Tchiacheff, Madame de, well-known Florentine hostess, 236.

Tennyson, quoted as illustrating the force of metaphor in poetry, 352.

Tiffany's, two queer customers at, 242.

Torquay, extension of, over Cockington and Chelston property, 13-14; winter society at, 54-55.

Torre a Cona, near Florence, 238.

Trevarthenick, Sir L. Molesworth's, 159.

Trevelyans of East Devon, 3.

Ugbrooke, the Cliffords, in Devonshire, 154.

Valentines, two living, 202.

Vay di Vaya, Monsignor, 314.

Veil of the Temple, passage on Darwin quoted in, 284; table talk on free will in, 287; verses from, quoted, 288-289; President Roosevelt's interest in, 319.

Verses, three volumes of the author's, 340.

Vicenza, 243.

Villa at Beaulieu, 205.

—— Maser, near Asolo, 244.

Vyner, Clair, 130.

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 272.

—— Wilfrid, 134.

Wellington, second Duke of, his conversational wit, 105-112; his last Waterloo banquet at Apseley House, 107; as a translator of Horace, 112.

Wemyss, Lord, 135.

Wentworth, Lord, 53, 69.

Westminster, Constance, Duchess of, 99.

White, Stanford, 321-322.

Whyte Melville, 124.

Will, freedom of, 284.

Wilton, Laura, Lady, 202.

Wordsworth, 35.

Wrath, Cape, 296.

Young, Rev. Julian, 54.

THE END