First Treatise on Politics--Radical Propaganda--First Visit to the Highlands--The Author Asked to Stand for a Scotch Constituency
The sketches which I have just given of my purely social experiences may seem, so far as they go, to represent a life which, since the production of _The New Republic_, was mainly a life of idleness. I may, however, say, without immodesty, that, if taken as a whole, it was the very reverse of this. Whether the results of my industry may prove to have any value or not, nobody could in reality have been more industrious than myself, or have prosecuted his industry on more coherent lines.
I have already given some account of _The New Republic_, indicating its character, its construction, the mood which gave rise to it, and the moral it was intended to express. This moral--the fruit of my education at Oxford, and also of my experiences of society before I became familiar with the wider world of London--was, as I have said already, that without religion life is reduced to an absurdity, and that all philosophy which aims at eliminating religion and basing human values on some purely natural substitute is, if judged by the same standards, as absurd as those dogmas of orthodoxy which the naturalists are attempting to supersede. With the purpose of emphasizing this contention in a yet more trenchant way, I supplemented, as I have said already, _The New Republic_ by a short satirical romance, _Positivism on an Island_, in the manner of Voltaire's _Candide_. My next work, _Is Life Worth Living?_ in which I elaborated this argument by the methods of formal logic, was largely due to that wider knowledge of the world with which social life in London and elsewhere had infected me. The bitterest criticism which that work excited was based on the contention that the kind of life there analyzed was purely artificial, and unsatisfying for that very reason--that the book was addressed only to an idle class, and that from the conditions of this pampered minority no conclusions were deducible which had any meaning for the multitude of average men. Some such objection had been anticipated from the first by myself. I was already prepared to meet it, and my answer was in brief as follows, "If life without a God is unsatisfying, even to those for whom this world has done its utmost, how much more unsatisfying must it be to that vast majority for whom a large part of its pleasures are, from the nature of things, impossible." But a closer and wider acquaintance with the kind of life in question, and the sorrows and passions masked by it, prompted me to translate the argument of the three books just mentioned into yet another form--namely, that of a tragic novel--_A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_.