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
attacki