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 formulæ which were, in effect, denials of it. Among the writers thus referred to was Mr. Herbert Spencer, who in one passage described the Napoleonic wars as an incident in the process of evolution and in another passage 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 passages relating to himself, he was in entire agreement with my whole argument otherwise.

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 anticipated 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 multitude 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 circumstances—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

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 assumed 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 nobody 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 illustrated 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 illustrious 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 illustration 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 authoress 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 Œcumenical 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 illustrations. I found particular satisfaction in analyzing 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 space. 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 assured 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 Document. 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 Ambassador 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 analysis, 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 reassure her. "See," he says, "the depths above us, and the depths reflected under us, holding endless space 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 Document 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 principal 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 Document, turned on the nature of the affections and the pangs of unhappy matrimony, these last conducting the two principal 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 associated 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 bête noire is the fashionable or aristocratic classes, these being the true Antichrist; and she has founded a church whose main spiritual mission is to instigate an élite of the obscure and earnest to despise them. By and by she meets some members of this despicable class 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 substitute.

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, multitudes 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 scraps 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 chink in the mœnia 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 assume, and are bound to assume, 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. Space 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 assume 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 reassert 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 multitude 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 classical 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.

Of such other questions the most obvious is this: "How far do educated persons, who are nominally 'professing Christians,' really believe in doctrines of Christian orthodoxy, and more particularly in the authority and supernatural inspiration of the Bible?" Most of them are obliged to confess that at best they are in a state of doubt. On Sunday three Anglican clergymen are imported on a steam launch from a watering place some ten miles off, where they are attending a clerical Congress—an Evangelical, a Broad Churchman, and a Ritualist; and they administer to the company three competitive sermons.

These performances leave confusion worse confounded; and the guests during the following days set themselves to pick their own beliefs to pieces. At last they come back to the question of free will, especially as related to science and what is called scientific materialism. Then the question arises of "What do we mean by matter?" and then the question of the possible goodness of a God who, if he is really the power behind evolution, is constantly sacrificing the unit to the development of the race or species. This last difficulty is expressed by one of the disputants in a poem which had been written many years ago, and which, by request of the company, he recites. In this poem the man, who is vowed to abandon every belief for which science can make no room, is represented by a wanderer who finds himself at last conducted to a bare region where no living thing is discernible, but one shining apparition standing on the brink of a promontory which juts into a sailless sea. He approaches, and addresses it thus:

To this the apparition, who is the Spirit of Science, replies:

The suppliant replies that he knows from his own experience what such a counsel means, but has found it himself to be no longer practicable. There was a time, he says, when he found the perfect peace in kneeling before the Christian altar, but what is the Eucharist for him who can no longer believe in it? He still is prepared to follow the Spirit of Truth at all costs. "For me," he says:

"And yet," he says in conclusion, "Truth, to those who follow it, may at last bring its own reward."

The Veil of the Temple winds up, in short, with the indication that, if both are completely thought out, the gospel of Faith is no more irrational than the gospel of scientific negation, and that the former can be a guide to action, whereas, if thought out completely, this is precisely what the latter cannot be.

The Reconstruction of Belief is a synthesis of the main arguments urged or suggested in these two preceding volumes. The necessity of religious belief as a practical basis of civilization is restated. The absurdity of all current attempts on the part of clerical apologists to revindicate it by scientific reason is set forth in detail. The true vindication is shown to reside in the fact that religious belief works, and that scientific negation does not work, and that here we have the practical test by which the validity of the former is to be established, though the process by which this fact will be apprehended by the modern world may be slow.

CHAPTER XV

FROM THE HIGHLANDS TO NEW YORK

The first was indirectly connected with the Coronation of King Edward. On a certain evening, while the event was impending, I found myself sitting at dinner by a friend, Lady Amherst (of Montreal), who told me that she and Lord Amherst were shortly going to a shooting lodge which was close to the borders of Caithness, and which they rented from the Duke of Sutherland. For some months past Lady Amherst had been unwell, and her doctor had urged her to avoid the crowds of London, for which reason she and her husband had determined to find quiet in the north. I told her I thought she was a very enviable woman, all unusual crowds being to myself detestable. "If you think that," she said, "why don't you come with us? A few others will be there, so we shall not be quite alone." I accepted the invitation with delight. I said good-by to London on the earliest day possible. In a train which was almost empty I traveled much at my ease from King's Cross Station to Brora. Not a tourist was to be seen anywhere. Except for a few farmers, all the Highland platforms were empty. I felt like a disembodied spirit when I found myself at last in a land of short, transparent nights which hardly divided one day from another. Uppat, Lord Amherst's lodge, was one of the roomiest on the whole Sutherland property. Parts of it were old. It had once been a small laird's castle. Round it were woods from which came the noise of a salmon river. Among the woods were walled plots of pasture, and beyond the woods were the loneliest of all lonely mountains. In the kitchen was a French chef, and when on my arrival I found Lady Amherst in the porch, her homespun toilet showed that France produced artists other than French cooks. To elude the world without eluding its ornaments—what more could be prayed for by a mind desiring rest? Uppat, indeed, in June and July was like a land

Lord Amherst, as a rule, spent most of the day fishing. Lady Amherst, I, and two other visitors very often bicycled. On other occasions we all made our way to purple fastnesses, and lunched where birches lifted their gleaming stems. The only movements discoverable between earth and sky were the sailing wings of eagles, and our own activities below, as we applied mayonnaise sauce, yellower than any primrose, to a sea trout or a lobster. We dined at nearly nine o'clock by a strange, white daylight; and in the outer quiet there was very often discernible a movement of stags' antlers above the wall of a near orchard. We read the newspapers till very nearly midnight without lamps or candles. We watched the blush of sunset, visible, like a dying bonfire, through a gap in the Caithness mountains, and this had not faded completely till it seemed as though someone had lighted beyond a neighboring ridge a bonfire of saffron—the faint beginning of sunrise. No retreat could have been a retreat more complete than this.

Another retreat in the north was vouchsafed to me some years later. I was lunching with my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Saxton Noble, in London, and they told me that, instead of taking, as had been their custom, a country house for the autumn, they had taken a yacht of about five hundred tons, and were going to spend their time in a leisurely cruise round the western coasts of Scotland. I mentioned to them that I had just been reading a very interesting description of Noltland, a curious castle in the remotest island of the Orkneys. We talked of this, which apparently was a very remarkable structure, containing the most magnificent newel staircase in Scotland. Suddenly Mrs. Noble said, "Why won't you join us?" My own plans for the autumn had been mapped out already, and I did not at first take her suggestion seriously. I laughed and said, "Yes, I'll come if you will go as far as Noltland." Both she and her husband at once answered: "Yes. We promise to go to Noltland. Let us take your coming as settled."

Accordingly, toward the end of July we left London by the night mail for Greenock, where the yacht would be found waiting for us. Next morning, in the freshness of a salt breeze, we were transferring ourselves from Greenock pier to a trim-looking motor boat, which was rising and falling on the swish of unquiet waters, while the yacht—a small streak of whiteness—was pointed out to us lying half a mile away. Besides Mr. and Mrs. Noble, our party consisted of their two children, Miss Helen Marhall, and myself. I had with me a Swiss servant; Mrs. Noble had a French maid, together with her London butler, transformed for the time into a mariner by gilt buttons and a nautical serge suit, and the cook was an accomplished chef who had once been in the service of the fastidious Madame de Falbe. We were all of us good sailors, so for our prospective comfort everything augured well. Our first few days were spent on the calm waters of Loch Fyne. We then went southward, and, doubling the Mull of Cantyre, had some taste of the turbulence of the open sea. We then turned north, and, protected by the outer islands, followed the mainland placidly until we approached Cape Wrath.

A large part of our time was spent in a succession of lochs. On our way to Oban, and in its harbor, we saw several large yachts; but, except for occasional fishing smacks, after Oban the sea became more and more deserted. Entering one loch after another in the summer evenings, and seeing no human habitations but crofters' cottages, which, except for their wreaths of smoke, were hardly distinguishable from the heather, and hearing no sound at nightfall, when our own engines were still, except the distant dipping of some solitary pair of oars, we felt as though we had reached the beginnings of civilization, or the ends of it. This was specially true of Loch Laxford—the last of such inland shelters lying south of Cape Wrath—Cape Wrath, the lightning of whose lanterns and the boom of whose great foghorns send out warnings to those on "seas full of wonder and peril," which Swinburne's verse commemorates.

Of the peril of these seas our captain had often spoken, and when, leaving the stillness of Loch Laxford, we renewed our northward journey, we soon perceived that his language was not exaggerated. From the mouth of Loch Laxford to Cape Wrath the whole coast might have represented to Dante the scowling ramparts of hell. Of anything in the nature of a beach no trace was discernible. The huge cliffs, rising sheer from the sea, leaned not inward, but outward, and ceaseless waves were breaking in spouts of foam against them. The yacht began to roll and pitch, so that though none of us were sick except Mrs. Noble's maid, we could very few of us stand. We managed, however, to identify the lighthouse and megaphone of Cape Wrath just peeping out of the cliffs, as though they were themselves afraid to meet the full violence of a storm. The skill of the cook, however, and the intrepidity of hunger enabled us to eat our luncheon. We then lay down in our several cabins and slept, till steps on deck and a number of voices woke us. We were soon rolling more disagreeably than ever. But this added annoyance did not last for long. Something or other happened. The motion of the vessel became easier, and at last, peeping into my cabin, Saxton Noble announced that we were back again in Loch Laxford. The megaphones of Cape Wrath had announced that a fog was coming. The captain had fled before it, and we dined that night at a table as stationary and steady as any in any hotel in Glasgow. Next day the weather was clear. We rounded the terrible headland, and were floating at ease that evening on the glassy surface of Loch Erribol. In this half-sylvan seclusion we rested for several days. Thence some eight hours of steaming brought us to the roadstead of Thurso. For several days we lay there while the yacht rocked uneasily, and most of our time was spent in expeditions on dry land. In some ways Thurso was curious. On the one hand, the shops were excellent. They might have been those of a country town near London. On the other hand, the older houses were, as a protection against storms, roofed with ponderous slabs hardly smaller than gravestones. At one end of the town was Thurso Castle, the seat of Sir Tollemache Sinclair, its walls rising out of the water. At the back of it was a small wood—the only wood in Caithness. I knew Sir Tollemache Sinclair well, but unfortunately he was not at home. He was what is called "a character." He had strong literary tastes, and firmly believed that he understood the art of French versification better than Victor Hugo. The last time I had seen him was at a hotel in Paris. He was on that occasion in a mood of great complacency, having just been spending an hour with Victor Hugo at luncheon. I asked him if, with regard to French versification, Victor Hugo agreed with him. "No," he replied, honestly, "I can't say that he did; but he asked me to lunch again with him whenever I should be next in Paris."

As soon as the weather was inviting enough we turned our bows toward the Orkneys, dimly visible on the horizon some forty miles away, and found ourselves, on a windless evening, entering Scapa Flow. We little thought that those then little visited waters would one day witness the making of British and German history. Scapa Flow is a miniature Mediterranean, with the mainland of the Orkneys on one side and the island of Hoy on the other. At the northeastern end of it, some ten miles away, a high, red building—a lonely tower—was visible. This was the tower of the great cathedral of Kirkwall. Approaching the Orkneys from Thurso the first things that struck us were certain great structures crowning the mounded hills. These, we discovered afterward were so many great farmsteadings, protected from the wind by cinctures of high walls, many of the Orcadian holdings being at once rich and extensive, and commanding very high rentals.

Kirkwall, in respect of its shops, surprised us even more than Thurso. There were chemists, grocers, booksellers, whose windows would hardly have been out of place at Brighton; but haunting suggestions of the old, the remote, the wild, were tingling in the air everywhere. The huge tentacles of the kraken might have lifted themselves beyond Kirkwall harbor. The beautiful palace of the old Earls of Orkney would have been still habitable if only some local body early in the nineteenth century had not stolen its slates for the purpose of roofing some schoolhouse. Tankerness House, entered by a fortified gate, and built round a small court, can have hardly changed since the days of Brenda and Minna Troyle. In the nave of the great cathedral, which took four centuries in building, one would not have been surprised at meeting Magnus Troyle or Norna. The nave is full of the records of old Orcadian notables. These are not, however, for the most part, attached to the walls as tablets. They are attached to the pillars by extended iron rods, from which they hang like the swaying signs of inns. A country without railways and without coal—how peaceful England might be if only it were not for these!

But our peace in a physical sense was very abruptly broken when we quitted Kirkwall en route for the Holy Grail of our pilgrimage, Noltland Castle, which secludes itself on the far-off island of Westray, and, leaving the quiet of Scapa Flow behind us, encountered once more the tumults of the Pentland Firth. But these were nothing in comparison with those that met us as soon as we had rounded the southwest corner of Hoy. The hills of Hoy, so far as we had yet seen them, were of no very great magnitude; but now, as we went northward, they showed themselves as a line of tremendous precipices, which rose from the booming waves to an altitude of twelve hundred feet. This monstrous wall ended where a narrow and mysterious fiord separates Hoy from a low-hilled island north of it. This island gave place to another, and at last, late in the day, our captain told us that we were passing the outer shore of Westray. Consulting our maps, and pointing to the mouth of some new fiord, we asked him if it would not afford us a short cut to our destination. He told us that it was full of hidden rocks and sandbanks, and called our attention to some enigmatic object which rose in midchannel like a deer's horns from the sea. "There," he said, "are the masts of an Icelandic steamer which attempted two years ago to make that passage, and was lost. To reach Westray in safety we must double its farthest promontory." An hour or two later this feat was accomplished. We were once more in smooth water, and found ourselves quietly floating toward something like a dwarf pier and one or two small white houses. By now it was time for dinner, and having dined in a saloon that was hung with jade-green silk, we leaned over the bulwarks and contemplated the remote scene before us. We could just discern by the pier some small tramp steamer reposing. In the little white houses one or two lights twinkled, and presently, not far off, we distinguished a mouse-colored something, the upper outlines of which resolved themselves into high gables. Like Childe Roland when he came to the dark tower, we realized that these were the gables of Noltland Castle. Next morning we explored this building. The main block consisted of a tower unusually large, in the middle of which was a great red-sandstone staircase winding round a newel which culminated in a heraldic monster. This staircase led to a great hall, roofless, but otherwise perfect. Above it had once been bedrooms. On the ground floor were vaulted offices, including a hearth as large as the kitchen of a well-built cottage. Attached to the tower was a court. Ruined chambers surrounded it, in which guests, their retinues, and the servants of the house once slept. Island chieftains once met and reveled here. Here also for a time the most beautiful woman in Europe—Mary Stuart, as a captive—looked out at the sea.

Of the little houses by the pier the largest was a combination of a public house and a store, where we bought a supply of soda water. The storekeeper was a man of slightly sinister aspect. He might have been a character in one of Stevenson's novels. His aspect suggested distant and enigmatic, and perhaps criminal, adventure. He had evidently some education, and spoke of the natives with a sort of detached condescension. I asked him if they were Catholics. He shrugged his shoulders and said: "Some are. In this little island there are four hundred inhabitants, and no fewer than five religions." With the exception of this man's store, the only shop in Westray was locomotive. We met it on a lonely road. It was a kind of glazed cart, the transparent sides of which showed visions of the goods within.

Before leaving Westray we paid a visit to a much smaller island opposite, Papa Westray, with an area of two thousand acres. It was occupied by two farmers, whose average rent was more than ten shillings an acre. On one of these farmers, thus separated from their kind, we called. His farmstead was like a fortified town. His house was larger than many a substantial manse. The sideboard in his spacious dining room was occupied by two expensive Bibles and a finely cut decanter of whisky, but his only neighbors from one year's end to another were apparently his rival, by whom the rest of the island was tenanted, and a female doctor lately imported from Edinburgh, whose business was more closely related to the births of the population than to their maladies.

We had hoped, on leaving the Orkneys, to have gone as far north as the Shetlands, but while we were lying off Westray the weather turned wet and chilly, so we settled on going south again, visiting on our way the islands of the outer Hebrides. The first stage of our journey was rougher and more disagreeable than anything we had yet experienced. Once again we were foiled in our efforts to get round Cape Wrath; and, having spent an afternoon lying down in our cabins, we woke up to find ourselves back again in the quiet of Scapa Flow. Next day we made a successful crossing over sixty miles of sea to Tarbet, a little town crouching on the neck of land which connects the Lewes with Harris. From every cottage door there issued a sound of hand looms. The town or village of Tarbet is in itself neat enough. One of its features is an inn which would, with its trim garden, do honor to the banks of the Thames; but a five minutes' stroll into the country brought us face to face with a world of colossal desolations, compared with which the scenery of Scapa Flow is suburban. The little houses of Westray were, at all events, unmistakably houses. The crofters' huts, almost within a stone's throw of Tarbet, many of them oval in shape, are like exhalations of rounded stones and heather. We felt, as we gravely looked at them, that we were back again in the Stone Age. In the island of North Ouist we were visited by the same illusion. The landing stage was, indeed, a scene of crowded life; but the life was the life of sea birds, which were hardly disturbed by our approach. Leaving North Ouist, we passed the mounded shores of Benbecula, the island where Prince Charlie once lived as a fugitive, and where the islanders, all of them Catholics (as they still are to-day), sang songs in his honor which, without betraying his name, called him "the fair-haired herdsman." Far off on an eminence we could just distinguish the glimmerings of a Catholic church, in which, with strange ceremonies, St. Michael is still worshiped. South Ouist, dominated by the great mountain of Hecla, likewise holds a population whose Catholicism has never been broken. Facing the landing stage is an inn obtrusively modern in aspect, and a little colony of slate-roofed villas to match; but here, as at Tarbet, a few steps brought us into realms of mystery. Having strayed along an inland road which wavered among heaths and peat hags and gray boulders, we saw at a distance some building of hewn sandstone, and presently there emerged from its interior a solitary human being. For a moment he scrutinized our approach, and then, like a timid animal, before we could make him out, he was gone. When we reached the building we found that it was a little Catholic schoolhouse, and that the door was hermetically closed. I tried the effect of a few very gentle knocks, and these proved so ingratiating that the inmate at last showed himself. He was the schoolmaster—a youngish man, perhaps rather more than thirty. Finding us not formidable, he had no objection to talking, though he still was oddly shy. He told us what he could, in answer to some questions which we put to him. I cannot remember what he said, but I remember his eyes and the gentle modulations of his voice. They were those of a man living in a world of dreams, for whom the outer world was as remote, and the inner world as pure, as the silver of the shining clouds that were streaking the peaks of Hecla. His face was my last memento of the mystery of the Outer Isles.

The rest of our journeyings lay among scenes better known to tourists. We visited Skye and Rum, the latter of which islands was once occupied as a deer forest by the present Lord Salisbury's grandfather. Rum is infested by mosquitoes, which almost stung us to death. Lord Salisbury told a friend that he protected himself from their assaults by varnishing his person completely with castor oil. The friend asked him if this was not very expensive. "Ah," he replied, "but I never use the best." The present owner has built there a great, inappropriate castle. We wondered whether its walls were proof against these winged enemies. Pursuing our southward course, we watched the Paps of Jura as they rose into the sky like sugar loaves. Plunging through drifts of spray we doubled the Mall of Cantyre, and got into waters familiar to half the population of Glasgow. We lay for a night off Arran. The following day we had returned to our original starting point. We were hardly more than a cable's length from Greenock, and once again we heard the whistling of locomotive engines. At Greenock we separated.

The Nobles were bound for England. I was myself going north to stay once more with Sir John and Lady Guendolen Ramsden. By the West Highland railway I reached the diminutive station of Tulloch, and a drive of twenty miles brought me to the woods, the waters, and the granite turrets of Ardverikie. After two months' acquaintance with the narrow quarters of a yacht there was something odd and agreeable in spacious halls and staircases. Especially agreeable was my bedroom, equipped with a great, hospitable writing table, on which a pile of letters and postal packets was awaiting me. Of these I opened a few which alone promised to be interesting, allowing the others to keep for a more convenient season. By the following morning, which I spent with Lady Guendolen, sketching, I had, indeed, almost forgotten them, and not till the evening did I give them any attention. One of them I had recognized at once as the proofs of an article which I had just finished, before I joined the yacht, on "The Intellectual Position of the Labor Party in Parliament." The number of this party had been doubled at the last election, and my mind, in consequence, had again begun to busy itself with the question of mere manual labor as a factor in life and politics. I had, indeed, on the yacht been making a rough sketch of a second article on this subject, which would develop the argument of the first.

That night I glanced at the proofs before going to bed, reflecting on the best methods by which the political intelligence of the masses could be roused, reached, and guided. The unopened letters, none of which looked inviting, I put by my bedside, to be examined when I woke next morning. All except one were circulars. One, bearing a business monogram and evidently directed by a clerk, differed from the rest in having a foreign stamp on it. I indolently tore this open, and discovered that it was an invitation from a great political body in New York to visit the United States next winter and deliver a series of addresses on the fundamental fallacies of Socialism.

It was at Ardverikie, many years before, that I had first embarked on a serious study of statistics as essential to any clear comprehension of social principles and problems. By an odd coincidence, it was at Ardverikie likewise that, after years of laborious thought as to political questions which must soon, as I then foresaw, become for politicians the most vital questions of all, I received an invitation to address, with regard to these very questions, a public far wider than that of all Great Britain put together.

CHAPTER XVI

POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN AMERICA