# Dr. Stiggins: His Views and Principles/Note

Introduction
In the year 1906 "The House of Souls" was issued by the firm of E. Grant Richards. The publisher, I know not why, thought the book ought to have a preface, and so I wrote one. This preface had nothing very much to do with the contents of the volume; it served me as a vehicle for the expression of my hatreds. I find that I disliked many things in 1906. I abhorred the notion that literature should be "practical," or utilitarian; the notion that made Macaulay condemn the Platonic philosophy because it had not led to the invention of anything useful to man, materially useful, that is. Then, I detested "big business" in all its ways. Big business meant to me a nest of horrible factories and appalling chimneys, rows of mean streets, staring or deplorable, the pleasant country laid waste, the rivers running black as ink. Again, Puritanism, ​with its successor modern Protestantism, to me was the abomination of desolation. It was not only that I regarded it as a theological blasphemy and an intellectual folly; it offended that part of the man which does not reason, but only feels. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has put the matter admirably in his notes on Dickens' violent dislike of Dissenters. He says that Dickens was in this exactly like his character Kit, in "The Old Curiosity Shop." Dickens knew no more of the intellectual, historical, or theological rights and wrongs of Dissent than did ignorant Kit; both took up Dissent as a man takes up a noisome fungus, smells it, makes an inarticulate noise of disgust, and throws it away. It offends; it is no sweet and natural growth of the good earth; it is foul in all its circumstances. And I was thoroughly with Kit and Dickens in this matter.
There were a few other hatreds: the serious novels of George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward; all wearisome, stodgy, careful, lifelike, untransfigured books, the books that are so long and lifelike that ​when you have finished reading one of them you almost feel that you have spent twenty years with these deplorable people, that you have, indeed, ridden with the Mudshire Pack, listened to interminable senseless gabble of the Mudshire drawing rooms, been solemnly cut by Lady Muddiman, or perhaps have entered into the heart of the spiritual storm that shook George Muddiman when he decided that he could no longer contest North Mudshire as a Conservative. Nay, you feel that you have listened to the last sermon preached by the Reverend Ezekiel Mudd at Ebenezer Chapel, Great Mudford, just before that estimable minister threw in his lot with Haeckel. That was the sort of book I detested; and all that was the subject of my Preface to "The House of Souls."
I liked saying all this so much that I went to a publisher and suggested a little book which should be, practically, this preface in an extended form. He assented, and forthwith I set about writing "Dr. Stiggins." It was published and ​attracted no attention whatever. I am inclined to think that by far the greater part of the edition was pulped.
This was eighteen years ago. I have glanced over the book again and find no single article that I would wish to recant. Everything that I hated in 1906 I hate now; if possible, with greater heartiness. But the old fighting spirit has gone from me. I realize definitely that I belong to the beaten cause; not so much theologically as materially. Popular Protestantism, it seems likely, will behave in every respect after the fashion of the toadstool to which Mr. Chesterton compared it. It will deliquesce and drip and cease to be. There may be an unpleasant mess for a while, but that will pass. But the dreadful wheel of material progress will not cease to revolve, and to that wheel all the world is bound, willy-nilly.
In America, as I suppose, the wheel has gone much faster than here in England. Still, we do what we can; we follow in your steps; as if the village idiot were to do his best to imitate the antics and ​contortions of the metropolitan maniac. I go down to my native town, Caerleon-on-Usk; in my day a little place of dreams and wonder and quiet. Now I find the white road from Newport scarred with villas, red and rancid; I find, instead of the green brake that hung over the river, a smear of red villas, as it were, a bleeding sore. The first object to greet the eye is a huge red lunatic asylum, the second object is a huge red factory: the madhouse and the factory are the two great marks of progress; the one feeds the other. Here, in London, every day sees a comely house destroyed, a green tree cut down, the foundation-stone laid of some monstrous affliction. The Strand, that street of delights, is gone; Regent street, all gaiety, is gone. Ugly stupid nonsense in steel and stone has taken their place. Day by day London reeks more foully of progress and vulgarity. Now and then American correspondents write to me of coming over to see London and England. I tell them to come quickly, lest they find that both, in their true life and spirit, have ​departed for ever; lest they find nothing but a shabby imitation of the worst features of their native country: skyscrapers that are not nearly high enough to be terrific, but high enough to be horrible.
Vicisti: thou hast conquered, O Industrial Pig.