be tolerable.

The only human being at that time who held and publicly expressed views
similar to my own, so far as I knew, was Ruskin. Of the riddle which I
found so importunate, he did not profess to have discovered any adequate
solution of his own. On the contrary, he confessed himself a victim of a
tragic and desolating doubt, but he did boldly proclaim that until some
solution was found the men of the modern world were of all men the most
miserable. Take, he said, the belief in immortality, which, according to
some men, is a matter of mild indifference. It is really a belief which
affects our whole conception of the human race. Consider, he said, the
carnage of war, with its pile of unnumbered corpses. It must make some
matter to us whether, according to our serious belief, each man has died
like a dog, and left nothing in the way of a personal existence behind
him, or "whether out of every Christian-named portion of that ruinous
heap there has gone forth into the air and the dead-fallen smoke of
battle some astonished condition of soul unwillingly released."

Here, it seemed to me, was the true voice of reason and challenging
passion combined--a voice which would not say "peace when there was no
peace," and which I missed altogether in Jowett and the Oxford liberals
generally. Jowett always regarded me as a mere dilettante and an idler,
who was bound to disgrace Balliol by coming to grief in the schools, and
he was, I think, mortified rather than pleased when I won, in my second
year, the Newdigate prize for poetry.

[Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN]

But mine was certainly no mere idler's mood; and whatever Jowett may
have thought of me when he heard of my giving parties to ladies, of my
driving them out to picnics, or of my concocting prize poems, my mental
life at Oxford was far from being a life of idleness. On the contrary,
from my second year of residence onward I was constantly engaged in
tentative sketches of a book in which I hoped some day to give a
comprehensive picture of the moral and intellectual condition to which
my Oxford experiences had by that time raised or reduced me. That book
was _The New Republic_, with regard to which in this place a few words
may be apposite.

The form of nearly every book is more or less fashioned on some model or
models. My own models in the case of _The New Republic_ were _The
Republic_ of Plato, the _Satyricon_ of Petronius Arbiter, and the
so-called novels of Peacock.