The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lay Morals, by Robert Louis Stevenson (#10 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson) Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** Title: Lay Morals Author: Robert Louis Stevenson Release Date: December, 1995 [EBook #373] [This file was first posted on November 25, 1995] [Most recently updated: August 18, 2002] Edition: 10 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII
Transcribed from the Chatto and Windus 1911 edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
LAY MORALS AND OTHER PAPERS
Contents:
Lay Morals
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Father Damien
The Pentland Rising
Chapter I - The Causes of the Revolt
Chapter II - The Beginning
Chapter III - The March of the Rebels
Chapter IV - Rullion Green
Chapter V - A Record of Blood
The Day After To-morrow
College Papers
Chapter I - Edinburgh Students in
1824
Chapter II - The Modern Student
Chapter III - Debating Societies
Criticisms
Chapter I - Lord Lytton's “Fables
in Song”
Chapter II - Salvini’s Macbeth
Chapter III - Bagster’s “Pilgrim’s
Progress”
Sketches
The Satirist
Nuits Blanches
The Wreath of Immortelles
Nurses
A Character
The Great North Road
Chapter I - Nance at the “Green
Dragon”
Chapter II - In which Mr. Archer
is Installed
Chapter III - Jonathan Holdaway
Chapter IV - Mingling Threads
Chapter V - Life in the Castle
Chapter IV - The Bad Half-Crown
Chapter VII - The Bleaching-Green
Chapter VIII - The Mail Guard
The Young Chevalier
Prologue: The Wine-Seller’s
Wife
Chapter I - The Prince
Heathercat
Chapter I - Traqairs of Montroymont
Chapter II - Francie
Chapter III - The Hill-End of Drumlowe
LAY MORALS
CHAPTER I
The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter.
Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly
and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only
broken images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes
from one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between
two experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning;
it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or
spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared
hearer. Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we
condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend
on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous
hints. No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has
in him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally
incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom
comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation,
which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation
of events and circumstances.
A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt for
others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of this
inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the young,
must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been already
retailed to them in their own youth. Every generation has to educate
another which it has brought upon the stage. People who readily
accept the responsibility of parentship, having very different matters
in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when that responsibility falls
due. What are they to tell the child about life and conduct, subjects
on which they have themselves so few and such confused opinions?
Indeed, I do not know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended;
and yet the child keeps asking, and the parent must find some words
to say in his own defence. Where does he find them? and what are
they when found?
As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases
out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat three bad
things: the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from that as a fountain,
the desire of wealth and applause. Besides these, or what might
be deduced as corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of
any effective value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping,
and how to walk through a quadrille.
But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians.
It may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to perceive
it. As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good or evil,
it is not the doctrine of Christ. What he taught (and in this
he is like all other teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of
rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views,
but a view. What he showed us was an attitude of mind. Towards
the many considerations on which conduct is built, each man stands in
a certain relation. He takes life on a certain principle.
He has a compass in his spirit which points in a certain direction.
It is the attitude, the relation, the point of the compass, that is
the whole body and gist of what he has to teach us; in this, the details
are comprehended; out of this the specific precepts issue, and by this,
and this only, can they be explained and applied. And thus, to
learn aright from any teacher, we must first of all, like a historical
artist, think ourselves into sympathy with his position and, in the
technical phrase, create his character. A historian confronted
with some ambiguous politician, or an actor charged with a part, have
but one pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every side,
and grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify
the most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an
enigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment
and big words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human
nature appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from
point to point, from end to end. This is a degree of trouble which
will be gladly taken by a very humble artist; but not even the terror
of eternal fire can teach a business man to bend his imagination to
such athletic efforts. Yet without this, all is vain; until we
understand the whole, we shall understand none of the parts; and otherwise
we have no more than broken images and scattered words; the meaning
remains buried; and the language in which our prophet speaks to us is
a dead language in our ears.
Take a few of Christ’s sayings and compare them with our current
doctrines.
‘Ye cannot,’ he says, ‘serve God and Mammon.’
Cannot? And our whole system is to teach us how we can!
‘The children of this world are wiser in their generation than
the children of light.’ Are they? I had been led
to understand the reverse: that the Christian merchant, for example,
prospered exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty was the best policy;
that an author of repute had written a conclusive treatise ‘How
to make the best of both worlds.’ Of both worlds indeed!
Which am I to believe then - Christ or the author of repute?
‘Take no thought for the morrow.’ Ask the Successful
Merchant; interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that
this is not only a silly but an immoral position. All we believe,
all we hope, all we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands
condemned in this one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns
the sentence as unwise and inhumane. We are not then of the ‘same
mind that was in Christ.’ We disagree with Christ.
Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong.
Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament, and
finding a strange echo of another style which the reader may recognise:
‘Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit
in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house
upon another.’
It may be objected that these are what are called ‘hard sayings’;
and that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian
although it leave some of these sayings upon one side. But this
is a very gross delusion. Although truth is difficult to state,
it is both easy and agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet
it ere the phrase be done. The universe, in relation to what any
man can say of it, is plain, patent and staringly comprehensible.
In itself, it is a great and travailing ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable,
an eternal mystery to man; or, let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable
mountain, one side of which, and a few near slopes and foothills, we
can dimly study with these mortal eyes. But what any man can say
of it, even in his highest utterance, must have relation to this little
and plain corner, which is no less visible to us than to him.
We are looking on the same map; it will go hard if we cannot follow
the demonstration. The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher
becomes clear and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly
perceive the aspect and drift of his intention. The longest argument
is but a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel,
and we see what the man meant, whether it be a new star or an old street-lamp.
And briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is because we are
thinking of something else.
But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet,
and to think of different things in the same order. To be of the
same mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective;
it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not
much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the
force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision
that whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original,
that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept.
You do not belong to the school of any philosopher, because you agree
with him that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun
is overhead at noon. It is by the hard sayings that discipleship
is tested. We are all agreed about the middling and indifferent
parts of knowledge and morality; even the most soaring spirits too often
take them tamely upon trust. But the man, the philosopher or the
moralist, does not stand upon these chance adhesions; and the purpose
of any system looks towards those extreme points where it steps valiantly
beyond tradition and returns with some covert hint of things outside.
Then only can you be certain that the words are not words of course,
nor mere echoes of the past; then only are you sure that if he be indicating
anything at all, it is a star and not a street-lamp; then only do you
touch the heart of the mystery, since it was for these that the author
wrote his book.
Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds
a word that transcends all common-place morality; every now and then
he quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out
a pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry
of thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday conceptions
to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher principle
of conduct. To a man who is of the same mind that was in Christ,
who stands at some centre not too far from his, and looks at the world
and conduct from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude
- or, shortly, to a man who is of Christ’s philosophy - every
such saying should come home with a thrill of joy and corroboration;
he should feel each one below his feet as another sure foundation in
the flux of time and chance; each should be another proof that in the
torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and great armaments
and empires are swept away and swallowed, he stands immovable, holding
by the eternal stars. But alas! at this juncture of the ages it
is not so with us; on each and every such occasion our whole fellowship
of Christians falls back in disapproving wonder and implicitly denies
the saying. Christians! the farce is impudently broad. Let
us stand up in the sight of heaven and confess. The ethics that
we hold are those of Benjamin Franklin. Honesty is the best
policy, is perhaps a hard saying; it is certainly one by which
a wise man of these days will not too curiously direct his steps; but
I think it shows a glimmer of meaning to even our most dimmed intelligences;
I think we perceive a principle behind it; I think, without hyperbole,
we are of the same mind that was in Benjamin Franklin.
CHAPTER II
But, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of
morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and religion;
and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must follow
after profit with some conscience and Christianity of method.
A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his parents,
nor kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false witness;
for these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of duty.
Alas! what is a precept? It is at best an illustration; it is
case law at the best which can be learned by precept. The letter
is not only dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot
be uttered, alone is true and helpful. This is trite to sickness;
but familiarity has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can
steal all beauty from the mountain tops; and the most startling words
begin to fall dead upon the ear after several repetitions. If
you see a thing too often, you no longer see it; if you hear a thing
too often, you no longer hear it. Our attention requires to be
surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a thoughtful hearing
from the ruck of mankind, are feats of about an equal difficulty and
must be tried by not dissimilar means. The whole Bible has thus
lost its message for the common run of hearers; it has become mere words
of course; and the parson may bawl himself scarlet and beat the pulpit
like a thing possessed, but his hearers will continue to nod; they are
strangely at peace, they know all he has to say; ring the old bell as
you choose, it is still the old bell and it cannot startle their composure.
And so with this byword about the letter and the spirit. It is
quite true, no doubt; but it has no meaning in the world to any man
of us. Alas! it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less:
that while the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.
The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect,
clear, and stable like the earth. But let a man set himself to
mark out the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble
and never so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the
progression of the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long
ere he has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed.
Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated
forest; circumstance is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language
much more inexact than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the
trees fall and are renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look;
and the whole world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds
of time. Look now for your shadows. O man of formulae, is
this a place for you? Have you fitted the spirit to a single case?
Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such another be proposed for
the judgment of man? Now when the sun shines and the winds blow,
the wood is filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously
tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes
new. Can you or your heart say more?
Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life; and
although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every step
of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me what
definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from
both to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is
but the shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never truly was;
and you yourself are altered beyond recognition. Times and men
and circumstances change about your changing character, with a speed
of which no earthly hurricane affords an image. What was the best
yesterday, is it still the best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow?
Will your own Past truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected
Future? And if this be questionable, with what humble, with what
hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men driving beside us on their
unknown careers, seeing with unlike eyes, impelled by different gales,
doing and suffering in another sphere of things?
And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene, do
you offer me these two score words? these five bald prohibitions?
For the moral precepts are no more than five; the first four deal rather
with matters of observance than of conduct; the tenth, Thou shalt
not covet, stands upon another basis, and shall be spoken of ere
long. The Jews, to whom they were first given, in the course of
years began to find these precepts insufficient; and made an addition
of no less than six hundred and fifty others! They hoped to make
a pocket-book of reference on morals, which should stand to life in
some such relation, say, as Hoyle stands in to the scientific game of
whist. The comparison is just, and condemns the design; for those
who play by rule will never be more than tolerable players; and you
and I would like to play our game in life to the noblest and the most
divine advantage. Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering
view of conduct, what view do we take ourselves, who callously leave
youth to go forth into the enchanted forest, full of spells and dire
chimeras, with no guidance more complete than is afforded by these five
precepts?
Honour thy father and thy mother. Yes, but does that mean
to obey? and if so, how long and how far? Thou shall not kill.
Yet the very intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled
by killing. Thou shall not commit adultery. But some
of the ugliest adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under
the sanction of religion and law. Thou shalt not bear false
witness. How? by speech or by silence also? or even by a smile?
Thou shalt not steal. Ah, that indeed! But
what is to steal?
To steal? It is another word to be construed; and who is to be
our guide? The police will give us one construction, leaving the
word only that least minimum of meaning without which society would
fall in pieces; but surely we must take some higher sense than this;
surely we hope more than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we wish
mankind to prosper and go on from strength to strength, and ourselves
to live rightly in the eye of some more exacting potentate than a policeman.
The approval or the disapproval of the police must be eternally indifferent
to a man who is both valorous and good. There is extreme discomfort,
but no shame, in the condemnation of the law. The law represents
that modicum of morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind;
but what is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent
judge? I observe with pleasure that no brave man has ever given
a rush for such considerations. The Japanese have a nobler and
more sentimental feeling for this social bond into which we all are
born when we come into the world, and whose comforts and protection
we all indifferently share throughout our lives:- but even to them,
no more than to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the state
supersede the higher law of duty. Without hesitation and without
remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments rather than abstain
from doing right. But the accidental superior duty being thus
fulfilled, they at once return in allegiance to the common duty of all
citizens; and hasten to denounce themselves; and value at an equal rate
their just crime and their equally just submission to its punishment.
The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active conscience
or a thoughtful head. But to show you how one or the other may
trouble a man, and what a vast extent of frontier is left unridden by
this invaluable eighth commandment, let me tell you a few pages out
of a young man’s life.
He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty,
as variable as youth itself, but always with some high motions and on
the search for higher thoughts of life. I should tell you at once
that he thoroughly agrees with the eighth commandment. But he
got hold of some unsettling works, the New Testament among others, and
this loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities.
As he was the son of a man in a certain position, and well off, my friend
had enjoyed from the first the advantages of education, nay, he had
been kept alive through a sickly childhood by constant watchfulness,
comforts, and change of air; for all of which he was indebted to his
father’s wealth.
At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed
the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in winter; and this
inequality struck him with some force. He was at that age of a
conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the aspects of life; and
he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of
man- and woman-kind. In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions,
and many intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this also
struck him. He began to perceive that life was a handicap upon
strange, wrong-sided principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair
and equal race. He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly
favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort
closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly
open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself.
There sat a youth beside him on the college benches, who had only one
shirt to his back, and, at intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay
at home to have it washed. It was my friend’s principle
to stay away as often as he dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning.
But there was something that came home to him sharply, in this fellow
who had to give over study till his shirt was washed, and the scores
of others who had never an opportunity at all. If one of these
could take his place, he thought; and the thought tore away a bandage
from his eyes. He was eaten by the shame of his discoveries, and
despised himself as an unworthy favourite and a creature of the back-stairs
of Fortune. He could no longer see without confusion one of these
brave young fellows battling up-hill against adversity. Had he
not filched that fellow’s birthright? At best was he not
coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and greedily devouring
stolen goods? The money, indeed, belonged to his father, who had
worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn it; but by what
justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done nothing
but help to squander it? A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more
even and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these considerations
a new force of industry, that this equivocal position might be brought
as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good services to mankind
justify the appropriation of expense. It was not so with my friend,
who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting
anger with which young men regard injustices in the first blush of youth;
although in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in their existence,
and knowingly profit by their complications. Yet all this while
he suffered many indignant pangs. And once, when he put on his
boots, like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his
best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free himself
from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his, and do battle
equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.
Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great
expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his perplexities
were thickest. When he thought of all the other young men of singular
promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who must remain at home
to die, and with all their possibilities be lost to life and mankind;
and how he, by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these
others to survive; he felt as if there were no life, no labour, no devotion
of soul and body, that could repay and justify these partialities.
A religious lady, to whom he communicated these reflections, could see
no force in them whatever. ‘It was God’s will,’
said she. But he knew it was by God’s will that Joan of
Arc was burnt at Rouen, which cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon;
and again, by God’s will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem,
which excused neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity of
Pilate. He knew, moreover, that although the possibility of this
favour he was now enjoying issued from his circumstances, its acceptance
was the act of his own will; and he had accepted it greedily, longing
for rest and sunshine. And hence this allegation of God’s
providence did little to relieve his scruples. I promise you he
had a very troubled mind. And I would not laugh if I were you,
though while he was thus making mountains out of what you think molehills,
he were still (as perhaps he was) contentedly practising many other
things that to you seem black as hell. Every man is his own judge
and mountain-guide through life. There is an old story of a mote
and a beam, apparently not true, but worthy perhaps of some consideration.
I should, if I were you, give some consideration to these scruples of
his, and if I were he, I should do the like by yours; for it is not
unlikely that there may be something under both. In the meantime
you must hear how my friend acted. Like many invalids, he supposed
that he would die. Now, should he die, he saw no means of repaying
this huge loan which, by the hands of his father, mankind had advanced
him for his sickness. In that case it would be lost money.
So he determined that the advance should be as small as possible; and,
so long as he continued to doubt his recovery, lived in an upper room,
and grudged himself all but necessaries. But so soon as he began
to perceive a change for the better, he felt justified in spending more
freely, to speed and brighten his return to health, and trusted in the
future to lend a help to mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had
lent a help to him.
I do not say but that my friend was a little too curious and partial
in his view; nor thought too much of himself and too little of his parents;
but I do say that here are some scruples which tormented my friend in
his youth, and still, perhaps, at odd times give him a prick in the
midst of his enjoyments, and which after all have some foundation in
justice, and point, in their confused way, to some more honourable honesty
within the reach of man. And at least, is not this an unusual
gloss upon the eighth commandment? And what sort of comfort, guidance,
or illumination did that precept afford my friend throughout these contentions?
‘Thou shalt not steal.’ With all my heart! But
am I stealing?
The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from pursuing
any transaction to an end. You can make no one understand that
his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact
it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil
to the world. We have a sort of blindness which prevents us from
seeing anything but sovereigns. If one man agrees to give another
so many shillings for so many hours’ work, and then wilfully gives
him a certain proportion of the price in bad money and only the remainder
in good, we can see with half an eye that this man is a thief.
But if the other spends a certain proportion of the hours in smoking
a pipe of tobacco, and a certain other proportion in looking at the
sky, or the clock, or trying to recall an air, or in meditation on his
own past adventures, and only the remainder in downright work such as
he is paid to do, is he, because the theft is one of time and not of
money, - is he any the less a thief? The one gave a bad shilling,
the other an imperfect hour; but both broke the bargain, and each is
a thief. In piecework, which is what most of us do, the case is
none the less plain for being even less material. If you forge
a bad knife, you have wasted some of mankind’s iron, and then,
with unrivalled cynicism, you pocket some of mankind’s money for
your trouble. Is there any man so blind who cannot see that this
is theft? Again, if you carelessly cultivate a farm, you have
been playing fast and loose with mankind’s resources against hunger;
there will be less bread in consequence, and for lack of that bread
somebody will die next winter: a grim consideration. And you must
not hope to shuffle out of blame because you got less money for your
less quantity of bread; for although a theft be partly punished, it
is none the less a theft for that. You took the farm against competitors;
there were others ready to shoulder the responsibility and be answerable
for the tale of loaves; but it was you who took it. By the act
you came under a tacit bargain with mankind to cultivate that farm with
your best endeavour; you were under no superintendence, you were on
parole; and you have broke your bargain, and to all who look closely,
and yourself among the rest if you have moral eyesight, you are a thief.
Or take the case of men of letters. Every piece of work which
is not as good as you can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect,
meagrely thought, niggardly in execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster
on parole and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue
performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own heart
and condemn you for a thief. Have you a salary? If you trifle
with your health, and so render yourself less capable for duty, and
still touch, and still greedily pocket the emolument - what are you
but a thief? Have you double accounts? do you by any time-honoured
juggle, deceit, or ambiguous process, gain more from those who deal
with you than it you were bargaining and dealing face to face in front
of God? - What are you but a thief? Lastly, if you fill an office,
or produce an article, which, in your heart of hearts, you think a delusion
and a fraud upon mankind, and still draw your salary and go through
the sham manoeuvres of this office, or still book your profits and keep
on flooding the world with these injurious goods? - though you were
old, and bald, and the first at church, and a baronet, what are you
but a thief? These may seem hard words and mere curiosities of
the intellect, in an age when the spirit of honesty is so sparingly
cultivated that all business is conducted upon lies and so-called customs
of the trade, that not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or
honourableness of his pursuit. I would say less if I thought less.
But looking to my own reason and the right of things, I can only avow
that I am a thief myself, and that I passionately suspect my neighbours
of the same guilt.
Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you find
that in your Bible? Easy! It is easy to be an ass and follow
the multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I
am well aware, is what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest.
But it will not bear the stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.
Even before the lowest of all tribunals, - before a court of law, whose
business it is, not to keep men right, or within a thousand miles of
right, but to withhold them from going so tragically wrong that they
will pull down the whole jointed fabric of society by their misdeeds
- even before a court of law, as we begin to see in these last days,
our easy view of following at each other’s tails, alike to good
and evil, is beginning to be reproved and punished, and declared no
honesty at all, but open theft and swindling; and simpletons who have
gone on through life with a quiet conscience may learn suddenly, from
the lips of a judge, that the custom of the trade may be a custom of
the devil. You thought it was easy to be honest. Did you
think it was easy to be just and kind and truthful? Did you think
the whole duty of aspiring man was as simple as a horn-pipe? and you
could walk through life like a gentleman and a hero, with no more concern
than it takes to go to church or to address a circular? And yet
all this time you had the eighth commandment! and, what makes it richer,
you would not have broken it for the world!
The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of little use
in private judgment. If compression is what you want, you have
their whole spirit compressed into the golden rule; and yet there expressed
with more significance, since the law is there spiritually and not materially
stated. And in truth, four out of these ten commands, from the
sixth to the ninth, are rather legal than ethical. The police-court
is their proper home. A magistrate cannot tell whether you love
your neighbour as yourself, but he can tell more or less whether you
have murdered, or stolen, or committed adultery, or held up your hand
and testified to that which was not; and these things, for rough practical
tests, are as good as can be found. And perhaps, therefore, the
best condensation of the Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the priests,
‘neminem laedere’ and ‘suum cuique tribuere.’
But all this granted, it becomes only the more plain that they are inadequate
in the sphere of personal morality; that while they tell the magistrate
roughly when to punish, they can never direct an anxious sinner what
to do.
Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a succinct
proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing in our faces.
We grant them one and all and for all that they are worth; it is something
above and beyond that we desire. Christ was in general a great
enemy to such a way of teaching; we rarely find him meddling with any
of these plump commands but it was to open them out, and lift his hearers
from the letter to the spirit. For morals are a personal affair;
in the war of righteousness every man fights for his own hand; all the
six hundred precepts of the Mishna cannot shake my private judgment;
my magistracy of myself is an indefeasible charge, and my decisions
absolute for the time and case. The moralist is not a judge of
appeal, but an advocate who pleads at my tribunal. He has to show
not the law, but that the law applies. Can he convince me? then
he gains the cause. And thus you find Christ giving various counsels
to varying people, and often jealously careful to avoid definite precept.
Is he asked, for example, to divide a heritage? He refuses: and
the best advice that he will offer is but a paraphrase of that tenth
commandment which figures so strangely among the rest. Take
heed, and beware of covetousness. If you complain that
this is vague, I have failed to carry you along with me in my argument.
For no definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its
truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven
by the voice of God. And life is so intricate and changing, that
perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we
find that nice consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply.
CHAPTER III
Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to our
experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment slumbers
within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings
to rekindle our astonishment. No length of habit can blunt our
first surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in this
connection; a few strokes shall suffice. We inhabit a dead ember
swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and
lighted up from several million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire
than was ever conceived by the theological imagination. Yet the
dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation
of this hell-fire ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer
eves upon the lawn. Far off on all hands other dead embers, other
flaming suns, wheel and race in the apparent void; the nearest is out
of call, the farthest so far that the heart sickens in the effort to
conceive the distance. Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though
they bestride but the truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home
compared with mankind on its bullet. Even to us who have known
no other, it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.
But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders
that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself.
He inhabits a body which he is continually outliving, discarding and
renewing. Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits
and the freshness of his countenance. Hair grows on him like grass;
his eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and
touch and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and intently
ponder on his astonishing attributes and situation, to rise up and run,
to perform the strange and revolting round of physical functions.
The sight of a flower, the note of a bird, will often move him deeply;
yet he looks unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous
bonfires of the universe. He comprehends, he designs, he tames
nature, rides the sea, ploughs, climbs the air in a balloon, makes vast
inquiries, begins interminable labours, joins himself into federations
and populous cities, spends his days to deliver the ends of the earth
or to benefit unborn posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of
unsurpassed fragility and the creature of a few days. His sight,
which conducts him, which takes notice of the farthest stars, which
is miraculous in every way and a thing defying explanation or belief,
is yet lodged in a piece of jelly, and can be extinguished with a touch.
His heart, which all through life so indomitably, so athletically labours,
is but a capsule, and may be stopped with a pin. His whole body,
for all its savage energies, its leaping and its winged desires, may
yet be tamed and conquered by a draught of air or a sprinkling of cold
dew. What he calls death, which is the seeming arrest of everything,
and the ruin and hateful transformation of the visible body, lies in
wait for him outwardly in a thousand accidents, and grows up in secret
diseases from within. He is still learning to be a man when his
faculties are already beginning to decline; he has not yet understood
himself or his position before he inevitably dies. And yet this
mad, chimerical creature can take no thought of his last end, lives
as though he were eternal, plunges with his vulnerable body into the
shock of war, and daily affronts death with unconcern. He cannot
take a step without pain or pleasure. His life is a tissue of
sensations, which he distinguishes as they seem to come more directly
from himself or his surroundings. He is conscious of himself as
a joyer or a sufferer, as that which craves, chooses, and is satisfied;
conscious of his surroundings as it were of an inexhaustible purveyor,
the source of aspects, inspirations, wonders, cruel knocks and transporting
caresses. Thus he goes on his way, stumbling among delights and
agonies.
Matter is a far-fetched theory, and materialism is without a root in
man. To him everything is important in the degree to which it
moves him. The telegraph wires and posts, the electricity speeding
from clerk to clerk, the clerks, the glad or sorrowful import of the
message, and the paper on which it is finally brought to him at home,
are all equally facts, all equally exist for man. A word or a
thought can wound him as acutely as a knife of steel. If he thinks
he is loved, he will rise up and glory to himself, although he be in
a distant land and short of necessary bread. Does he think he
is not loved? - he may have the woman at his beck, and there is not
a joy for him in all the world. Indeed, if we are to make any
account of this figment of reason, the distinction between material
and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each man as an individual
is immaterial, although the continuation and prospects of mankind as
a race turn upon material conditions. The physical business of
each man’s body is transacted for him; like a sybarite, he has
attentive valets in his own viscera; he breathes, he sweats, he digests
without an effort, or so much as a consenting volition; for the most
part he even eats, not with a wakeful consciousness, but as it were
between two thoughts. His life is centred among other and more
important considerations; touch him in his honour or his love, creatures
of the imagination which attach him to mankind or to an individual man
or woman; cross him in his piety which connects his soul with heaven;
and he turns from his food, he loathes his breath, and with a magnanimous
emotion cuts the knots of his existence and frees himself at a blow
from the web of pains and pleasures.
It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded and
autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there dwell other
powers tributary but independent. If I now behold one walking
in a garden, curiously coloured and illuminated by the sun, digesting
his food with elaborate chemistry, breathing, circulating blood, directing
himself by the sight of his eyes, accommodating his body by a thousand
delicate balancings to the wind and the uneven surface of the path,
and all the time, perhaps, with his mind engaged about America, or the
dog-star, or the attributes of God - what am I to say, or how am I to
describe the thing I see? Is that truly a man, in the rigorous
meaning of the word? or is it not a man and something else? What,
then, are we to count the centre-bit and axle of a being so variously
compounded? It is a question much debated. Some read his
history in a certain intricacy of nerve and the success of successive
digestions; others find him an exiled piece of heaven blown upon and
determined by the breath of God; and both schools of theorists will
scream like scalded children at a word of doubt. Yet either of
these views, however plausible, is beside the question; either may be
right; and I care not; I ask a more particular answer, and to a more
immediate point. What is the man? There is Something that
was before hunger and that remains behind after a meal. It may
or may not be engaged in any given act or passion, but when it is, it
changes, heightens, and sanctifies. Thus it is not engaged in
lust, where satisfaction ends the chapter; and it is engaged in love,
where no satisfaction can blunt the edge of the desire, and where age,
sickness, or alienation may deface what was desirable without diminishing
the sentiment. This something, which is the man, is a permanence
which abides through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and
now triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate distress
of appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all. So, to the
man, his own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult
of the senses, like a revolving Pharos in the night. It is forgotten;
it is hid, it seems, for ever; and yet in the next calm hour he shall
behold himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes and storm.
Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and eats, that
generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and lower sides
of man. This inner consciousness, this lantern alternately obscured
and shining, to and by which the individual exists and must order his
conduct, is something special to himself and not common to the race.
His joys delight, his sorrows wound him, according as this is
interested or indifferent in the affair; according as they arise in
an imperial war or in a broil conducted by the tributary chieftains
of the mind. He may lose all, and this not suffer; he may
lose what is materially a trifle, and this leap in his bosom
with a cruel pang. I do not speak of it to hardened theorists:
the living man knows keenly what it is I mean.
‘Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and
more divine than the things which cause the various effects, and, as
it were, pull thee by the strings. What is that now in thy mind?
is it fear, or suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?’
Thus far Marcus Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any
book. Here is a question worthy to be answered. What is
in thy mind? What is the utterance of your inmost self when, in
a quiet hour, it can be heard intelligibly? It is something beyond
the compass of your thinking, inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it
not of a higher spirit than you had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect
above all base considerations? This soul seems hardly touched
with our infirmities; we can find in it certainly no fear, suspicion,
or desire; we are only conscious - and that as though we read it in
the eyes of some one else - of a great and unqualified readiness.
A readiness to what? to pass over and look beyond the objects of desire
and fear, for something else. And this something else? this something
which is apart from desire and fear, to which all the kingdoms of the
world and the immediate death of the body are alike indifferent and
beside the point, and which yet regards conduct - by what name are we
to call it? It may be the love of God; or it may be an inherited
(and certainly well concealed) instinct to preserve self and propagate
the race; I am not, for the moment, averse to either theory; but it
will save time to call it righteousness. By so doing I intend
no subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed ready, and more than willing,
to accept the rigid consequence, and lay aside, as far as the treachery
of the reason will permit, all former meanings attached to the word
righteousness. What is right is that for which a man’s central
self is ever ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what
is wrong is what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible
with the fixed design of righteousness.
To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of definition.
That which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each
man by himself, but can never be rigorously set forth in language, and
never, above all, imposed upon another. The conscience has, then,
a vision like that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and for the
most part illuminates none but its possessor. When many people
perceive the same or any cognate facts, they agree upon a word as symbol;
and hence we have such words as tree, star, love, honour,
or death; hence also we have this word right, which, like
the others, we all understand, most of us understand differently, and
none can express succinctly otherwise. Yet even on the straitest
view, we can make some steps towards comprehension of our own superior
thoughts. For it is an incredible and most bewildering fact that
a man, through life, is on variable terms with himself; he is aware
of tiffs and reconciliations; the intimacy is at times almost suspended,
at times it is renewed again with joy. As we said before, his
inner self or soul appears to him by successive revelations, and is
frequently obscured. It is from a study of these alternations
that we can alone hope to discover, even dimly, what seems right and
what seems wrong to this veiled prophet of ourself.
All that is in the man in the larger sense, what we call impression
as well as what we call intuition, so far as my argument looks, we must
accept. It is not wrong to desire food, or exercise, or beautiful
surroundings, or the love of sex, or interest which is the food of the
mind. All these are craved; all these should be craved; to none
of these in itself does the soul demur; where there comes an undeniable
want, we recognise a demand of nature. Yet we know that these
natural demands may be superseded; for the demands which are common
to mankind make but a shadowy consideration in comparison to the demands
of the individual soul. Food is almost the first prerequisite;
and yet a high character will go without food to the ruin and death
of the body rather than gain it in a manner which the spirit disavows.
Pascal laid aside mathematics; Origen doctored his body with a knife;
every day some one is thus mortifying his dearest interests and desires,
and, in Christ’s words, entering maim into the Kingdom of Heaven.
This is to supersede the lesser and less harmonious affections by renunciation;
and though by this ascetic path we may get to heaven, we cannot get
thither a whole and perfect man. But there is another way, to
supersede them by reconciliation, in which the soul and all the faculties
and senses pursue a common route and share in one desire. Thus,
man is tormented by a very imperious physical desire; it spoils his
rest, it is not to be denied; the doctors will tell you, not I, how
it is a physical need, like the want of food or slumber. In the
satisfaction of this desire, as it first appears, the soul sparingly
takes part; nay, it oft unsparingly regrets and disapproves the satisfaction.
But let the man learn to love a woman as far as he is capable of love;
and for this random affection of the body there is substituted a steady
determination, a consent of all his powers and faculties, which supersedes,
adopts, and commands the other. The desire survives, strengthened,
perhaps, but taught obedience and changed in scope and character.
Life is no longer a tale of betrayals and regrets; for the man now lives
as a whole; his consciousness now moves on uninterrupted like a river;
through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he remains approvingly
conscious of himself.
Now to me, this seems a type of that rightness which the soul demands.
It demands that we shall not live alternately with our opposing tendencies
in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which
the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other to a common
end. It demands that we shall not pursue broken ends, but great
and comprehensive purposes, in which soul and body may unite like notes
in a harmonious chord. That were indeed a way of peace and pleasure,
that were indeed a heaven upon earth. It does not demand, however,
or, to speak in measure, it does not demand of me, that I should starve
my appetites for no purpose under heaven but as a purpose in itself;
or, in a weak despair, pluck out the eye that I have not yet learned
to guide and enjoy with wisdom. The soul demands unity of purpose,
not the dismemberment of man; it seeks to roll up all his strength and
sweetness, all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make of him a perfect
man exulting in perfection. To conclude ascetically is to give
up, and not to solve, the problem. The ascetic and the creeping
hog, although they are at different poles, have equally failed in life.
The one has sacrificed his crew; the other brings back his seamen in
a cock-boat, and has lost the ship. I believe there are not many
sea-captains who would plume themselves on either result as a success.
But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses
and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more
unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable
and draws on the rest. And this is to lose consciousness of oneself.
In the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is
clear, strong and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that
we enjoy communion with our soul. At the worst, we are so fallen
and passive that we may say shortly we have none. An arctic torpor
seizes upon men. Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a
stimulating world, they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness
becomes engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and
soon loses both the will and power to look higher considerations in
the face. This is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this
is temporal damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of
judgment. ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
world and lose himself?’
It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and its
fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and religious
education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but the sharp
ferule of calamity under which we are all God’s scholars till
we die. If, as teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose,
we must say what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak that
soul’s dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as his soul would
have him think of them. If, from some conformity between us and
the pupil, or perhaps among all men, we do in truth speak in such a
dialect and express such views, beyond question we shall touch in him
a spring; beyond question he will recognise the dialect as one that
he himself has spoken in his better hours; beyond question he will cry,
‘I had forgotten, but now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had
forgot to use them! I too have a soul of my own, arrogantly upright,
and to that I will listen and conform.’ In short, say to
him anything that he has once thought, or been upon the point of thinking,
or show him any view of life that he has once clearly seen, or been
upon the point of clearly seeing; and you have done your part and may
leave him to complete the education for himself.
Now, the view taught at the present time seems to me to want greatness;
and the dialect in which alone it can be intelligibly uttered is not
the dialect of my soul. It is a sort of postponement of life;
nothing quite is, but something different is to be; we are to keep our
eyes upon the indirect from the cradle to the grave. We are to
regulate our conduct not by desire, but by a politic eye upon the future;
and to value acts as they will bring us money or good opinion; as they
will bring us, in one word, profit. We must be what is
called respectable, and offend no one by our carriage; it will not do
to make oneself conspicuous - who knows? even in virtue? says the Christian
parent! And we must be what is called prudent and make money;
not only because it is pleasant to have money, but because that also
is a part of respectability, and we cannot hope to be received in society
without decent possessions. Received in society! as if that were
the kingdom of heaven! There is dear Mr. So-and-so; - look at
him! - so much respected - so much looked up to - quite the Christian
merchant! And we must cut our conduct as strictly as possible
after the pattern of Mr. So-and-so; and lay our whole lives to make
money and be strictly decent. Besides these holy injunctions,
which form by far the greater part of a youth’s training in our
Christian homes, there are at least two other doctrines. We are
to live just now as well as we can, but scrape at last into heaven,
where we shall be good. We are to worry through the week in a
lay, disreputable way, but, to make matters square, live a different
life on Sunday.
The train of thought we have been following gives us a key to all these
positions, without stepping aside to justify them on their own ground.
It is because we have been disgusted fifty times with physical squalls,
and fifty times torn between conflicting impulses, that we teach people
this indirect and tactical procedure in life, and to judge by remote
consequences instead of the immediate face of things. The very
desire to act as our own souls would have us, coupled with a pathetic
disbelief in ourselves, moves us to follow the example of others; perhaps,
who knows? they may be on the right track; and the more our patterns
are in number, the better seems the chance; until, if we be acting in
concert with a whole civilised nation, there are surely a majority of
chances that we must be acting right. And again, how true it is
that we can never behave as we wish in this tormented sphere, and can
only aspire to different and more favourable circumstances, in order
to stand out and be ourselves wholly and rightly! And yet once
more, if in the hurry and pressure of affairs and passions you tend
to nod and become drowsy, here are twenty-four hours of Sunday set apart
for you to hold counsel with your soul and look around you on the possibilities
of life.
This is not, of course, all that is to be, or even should be, said for
these doctrines. Only, in the course of this chapter, the reader
and I have agreed upon a few catchwords, and been looking at morals
on a certain system; it was a pity to lose an opportunity of testing
the catchwords, and seeing whether, by this system as well as by others,
current doctrines could show any probable justification. If the
doctrines had come too badly out of the trial, it would have condemned
the system. Our sight of the world is very narrow; the mind but
a pedestrian instrument; there’s nothing new under the sun, as
Solomon says, except the man himself; and though that changes the aspect
of everything else, yet he must see the same things as other people,
only from a different side.
And now, having admitted so much, let us turn to criticism.
If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him, unthinkingly
to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority of his contemporaries,
you must discredit in his eyes the one authoritative voice of his own
soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a man.
It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard this babble and chattering
of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk straight before
us by what light we have. They may be right; but so, before heaven,
are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that knowledge
we must stand or fall. There is such a thing as loyalty to a man’s
own better self; and from those who have not that, God help me, how
am I to look for loyalty to others? The most dull, the most imbecile,
at a certain moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further
argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational sense
of right. It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt
and blame, that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul.
Be glad if you are not tried by such extremities. But although
all the world ranged themselves in one line to tell you ‘This
is wrong,’ be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador
of God - throw down the glove and answer ‘This is right.’
Do you think you are only declaring yourself? Perhaps in some
dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully understood, you
are opening wider the straits of prejudice and preparing mankind for
some truer and more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand
forth for your own judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with
your body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the
guilt of false witness against humanity and the little ones unborn.
It is good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect
oneself and utter the voice of God. God, if there be any God,
speaks daily in a new language by the tongues of men; the thoughts and
habits of each fresh generation and each new-coined spirit throw another
light upon the universe and contain another commentary on the printed
Bibles; every scruple, every true dissent, every glimpse of something
new, is a letter of God’s alphabet; and though there is a grave
responsibility for all who speak, is there none for those who unrighteously
keep silence and conform? Is not that also to conceal and cloak
God’s counsel? And how should we regard the man of science
who suppressed all facts that would not tally with the orthodoxy of
the hour?
Wrong? You are as surely wrong as the sun rose this morning round
the revolving shoulder of the world. Not truth, but truthfulness,
is the good of your endeavour. For when will men receive that
first part and prerequisite of truth, that, by the order of things,
by the greatness of the universe, by the darkness and partiality of
man’s experience, by the inviolate secrecy of God, kept close
in His most open revelations, every man is, and to the end of the ages
must be, wrong? Wrong to the universe; wrong to mankind; wrong
to God. And yet in another sense, and that plainer and nearer,
every man of men, who wishes truly, must be right. He is right
to himself, and in the measure of his sagacity and candour. That
let him do in all sincerity and zeal, not sparing a thought for contrary
opinions; that, for what it is worth, let him proclaim. Be not
afraid; although he be wrong, so also is the dead, stuffed Dagon he
insults. For the voice of God, whatever it is, is not that stammering,
inept tradition which the people holds. These truths survive in
travesty, swamped in a world of spiritual darkness and confusion; and
what a few comprehend and faithfully hold, the many, in their dead jargon,
repeat, degrade, and misinterpret.
So far of Respectability; what the Covenanters used to call ‘rank
conformity’: the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid
on men. And now of Profit. And this doctrine is perhaps
the more redoubtable, because it harms all sorts of men; not only the
heroic and self-reliant, but the obedient, cowlike squadrons.
A man, by this doctrine, looks to consequences at the second, or third,
or fiftieth turn. He chooses his end, and for that, with wily
turns and through a great sea of tedium, steers this mortal bark.
There may be political wisdom in such a view; but I am persuaded there
can spring no great moral zeal. To look thus obliquely upon life
is the very recipe for moral slumber. Our intention and endeavour
should be directed, not on some vague end of money or applause, which
shall come to us by a ricochet in a month or a year, or twenty years,
but on the act itself; not on the approval of others, but on the rightness
of that act. At every instant, at every step in life, the point
has to be decided, our soul has to be saved, heaven has to be gained
or lost. At every step our spirits must applaud, at every step
we must set down the foot and sound the trumpet. ‘This have
I done,’ we must say; ‘right or wrong, this have I done,
in unfeigned honour of intention, as to myself and God.’
The profit of every act should be this, that it was right for us to
do it. Any other profit than that, if it involved a kingdom or
the woman I love, ought, if I were God’s upright soldier, to leave
me untempted.
It is the mark of what we call a righteous decision, that it is made
directly and for its own sake. The whole man, mind and body, having
come to an agreement, tyrannically dictates conduct. There are
two dispositions eternally opposed: that in which we recognise that
one thing is wrong and another right, and that in which, not seeing
any clear distinction, we fall back on the consideration of consequences.
The truth is, by the scope of our present teaching, nothing is thought
very wrong and nothing very right, except a few actions which have the
disadvantage of being disrespectable when found out; the more serious
part of men inclining to think all things rather wrong,
the more jovial to suppose them right enough for practical
purposes. I will engage my head, they do not find that view
in their own hearts; they have taken it up in a dark despair; they are
but troubled sleepers talking in their sleep. The soul, or my
soul at least, thinks very distinctly upon many points of right and
wrong, and often differs flatly with what is held out as the thought
of corporate humanity in the code of society or the code of law.
Am I to suppose myself a monster? I have only to read books, the
Christian Gospels for example, to think myself a monster no longer;
and instead I think the mass of people are merely speaking in their
sleep.
It is a commonplace, enshrined, if I mistake not, even in school copy-books,
that honour is to be sought and not fame. I ask no other admission;
we are to seek honour, upright walking with our own conscience every
hour of the day, and not fame, the consequence, the far-off reverberation
of our footsteps. The walk, not the rumour of the walk, is what
concerns righteousness. Better disrespectable honour than dishonourable
fame. Better useless or seemingly hurtful honour, than dishonour
ruling empires and filling the mouths of thousands. For the man
must walk by what he sees, and leave the issue with God who made him
and taught him by the fortune of his life. You would not dishonour
yourself for money; which is at least tangible; would you do it, then,
for a doubtful forecast in politics, or another person’s theory
in morals?
So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can calculate
the bearing of his own behaviour even on those immediately around him,
how much less upon the world at large or on succeeding generations!
To walk by external prudence and the rule of consequences would require,
not a man, but God. All that we know to guide us in this changing
labyrinth is our soul with its fixed design of righteousness, and a
few old precepts which commend themselves to that. The precepts
are vague when we endeavour to apply them; consequences are more entangled
than a wisp of string, and their confusion is unrestingly in change;
we must hold to what we know and walk by it. We must walk by faith,
indeed, and not by knowledge.
You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently respectable:
you love him because you love him; that is love, and any other only
a derision and grimace. It should be the same with all our actions.
If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should be one who was never
torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on the absolute consent
of all his parts and faculties, submitted in every action of his life
to a self-dictation as absolute and unreasoned as that which bids him
love one woman and be true to her till death. But we should not
conceive him as sagacious, ascetical, playing off his appetites against
each other, turning the wing of public respectable immorality instead
of riding it directly down, or advancing toward his end through a thousand
sinister compromises and considerations. The one man might be
wily, might be adroit, might be wise, might be respectable, might be
gloriously useful; it is the other man who would be good.
The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be successful;
to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not outwardly, respectable.
Does your soul ask profit? Does it ask money? Does it ask
the approval of the indifferent herd? I believe not. For
my own part, I want but little money, I hope; and I do not want to be
decent at all, but to be good.
CHAPTER IV
We have spoken of that supreme self-dictation which keeps varying from
hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.
Now, for us, that is ultimate. It may be founded on some reasonable
process, but it is not a process which we can follow or comprehend.
And moreover the dictation is not continuous, or not continuous except
in very lively and well-living natures; and between-whiles we must brush
along without it. Practice is a more intricate and desperate business
than the toughest theorising; life is an affair of cavalry, where rapid
judgment and prompt action are alone possible and right. As a
matter of fact, there is no one so upright but he is influenced by the
world’s chatter; and no one so headlong but he requires to consider
consequences and to keep an eye on profit. For the soul adopts
all affections and appetites without exception, and cares only to combine
them for some common purpose which shall interest all. Now, respect
for the opinion of others, the study of consequences, and the desire
of power and comfort, are all undeniably factors in the nature of man;
and the more undeniably since we find that, in our current doctrines,
they have swallowed up the others and are thought to conclude in themselves
all the worthy parts of man. These, then, must also be suffered
to affect conduct in the practical domain, much or little according
as they are forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.
Now, a man’s view of the universe is mostly a view of the civilised
society in which he lives. Other men and women are so much more
grossly and so much more intimately palpable to his perceptions, that
they stand between him and all the rest; they are larger to his eye
than the sun, he hears them more plainly than thunder, with them, by
them, and for them, he must live and die. And hence the laws that
affect his intercourse with his fellow-men, although merely customary
and the creatures of a generation, are more clearly and continually
before his mind than those which bind him into the eternal system of
things, support him in his upright progress on this whirling ball, or
keep up the fire of his bodily life. And hence it is that money
stands in the first rank of considerations and so powerfully affects
the choice. For our society is built with money for mortar; money
is present in every joint of circumstance; it might be named the social
atmosphere, since, in society, it is by that alone that men continue
to live, and only through that or chance that they can reach or affect
one another. Money gives us food, shelter, and privacy; it permits
us to be clean in person, opens for us the doors of the theatre, gains
us books for study or pleasure, enables us to help the distresses of
others, and puts us above necessity so that we can choose the best in
life. If we love, it enables us to meet and live with the loved
one, or even to prolong her health and life; if we have scruples, it
gives us an opportunity to be honest; if we have any bright designs,
here is what will smooth the way to their accomplishment. Penury
is the worst slavery, and will soon lead to death.
But money is only a means; it presupposes a man to use it. The
rich can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere.
He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither
patience to read nor intelligence to see. The table may be loaded
and the appetite wanting; the purse may be full, and the heart empty.
He may have gained the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth
around him, in a great house and spacious and beautiful demesne, he
may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher. Without an appetite,
without an aspiration, void of appreciation, bankrupt of desire and
hope, there, in his great house, let him sit and look upon his fingers.
It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting
shells than to be born a millionaire. Although neither is to be
despised, it is always better policy to learn an interest than to make
a thousand pounds; for the money will soon be spent, or perhaps you
may feel no joy in spending it; but the interest remains imperishable
and ever new. To become a botanist, a geologist, a social philosopher,
an antiquary, or an artist, is to enlarge one’s possessions in
the universe by an incalculably higher degree, and by a far surer sort
of property, than to purchase a farm of many acres. You had perhaps
two thousand a year before the transaction; perhaps you have two thousand
five hundred after it. That represents your gain in the one case.
But in the other, you have thrown down a barrier which concealed significance
and beauty. The blind man has learned to see. The prisoner
has opened up a window in his cell and beholds enchanting prospects;
he will never again be a prisoner as he was; he can watch clouds and
changing seasons, ships on the river, travellers on the road, and the
stars at night; happy prisoner! his eyes have broken jail! And
again he who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up
riches against the day of riches; if prosperity come, he will not enter
poor into his inheritance; he will not slumber and forget himself in
the lap of money, or spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but
be up and briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which
is not that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into living delight
and satisfaction. Ecirctre et pas avoir - to be, not to
possess - that is the problem of life. To be wealthy, a rich nature
is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick
and healthy blood, to share in all honourable curiosities, to be rich
in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of
others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still
a dear possession in absence or unkindness - these are the gifts of
fortune which money cannot buy and without which money can buy nothing.
For what can a man possess, or what can he enjoy, except himself?
If he enlarge his nature, it is then that he enlarges his estates.
If his nature be happy and valiant, he will enjoy the universe as if
it were his park and orchard.
But money is not only to be spent; it has also to be earned. It
is not merely a convenience or a necessary in social life; but it is
the coin in which mankind pays his wages to the individual man.
And from this side, the question of money has a very different scope
and application. For no man can be honest who does not work.
Service for service. If the farmer buys corn, and the labourer
ploughs and reaps, and the baker sweats in his hot bakery, plainly you
who eat must do something in your turn. It is not enough to take
off your hat, or to thank God upon your knees for the admirable constitution
of society and your own convenient situation in its upper and more ornamental
stories. Neither is it enough to buy the loaf with a sixpence;
for then you are only changing the point of the inquiry; and you must
first have bought the sixpence. Service for service:
how have you bought your sixpences? A man of spirit desires certainty
in a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is some reciprocity
between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in service; that
he has not a lion’s share in profit and a drone’s in labour;
and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile
concern of mankind.
Services differ so widely with different gifts, and some are so inappreciable
to external tests, that this is not only a matter for the private conscience,
but one which even there must be leniently and trustfully considered.
For remember how many serve mankind who do no more than meditate; and
how many are precious to their friends for no more than a sweet and
joyous temper. To perform the function of a man of letters it
is not necessary to write; nay, it is perhaps better to be a living
book. So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by
others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is
useless while he has a friend. The true services of life are inestimable
in money, and are never paid. Kind words and caresses, high and
wise thoughts, humane designs, tender behaviour to the weak and suffering,
and all the charities of man’s existence, are neither bought nor
sold.
Yet the dearest and readiest, if not the most just, criterion of a man’s
services, is the wage that mankind pays him or, briefly, what he earns.
There at least there can be no ambiguity. St. Paul is fully and
freely entitled to his earnings as a tentmaker, and Socrates fully and
freely entitled to his earnings as a sculptor, although the true business
of each was not only something different, but something which remained
unpaid. A man cannot forget that he is not superintended, and
serves mankind on parole. He would like, when challenged by his
own conscience, to reply: ‘I have done so much work, and no less,
with my own hands and brain, and taken so much profit, and no more,
for my own personal delight.’ And though St. Paul, if he
had possessed a private fortune, would probably have scorned to waste
his time in making tents, yet of all sacrifices to public opinion none
can be more easily pardoned than that by which a man, already spiritually
useful to the world, should restrict the field of his chief usefulness
to perform services more apparent, and possess a livelihood that neither
stupidity nor malice could call in question. Like all sacrifices
to public opinion and mere external decency, this would certainly be
wrong; for the soul should rest contented with its own approval and
indissuadably pursue its own calling. Yet, so grave and delicate
is the question, that a man may well hesitate before he decides it for
himself; he may well fear that he sets too high a valuation on his own
endeavours after good; he may well condescend upon a humbler duty, where
others than himself shall judge the service and proportion the wage.
And yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born.
They can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own paymasters
on parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no more. For
I suppose that in the course of ages, and through reform and civil war
and invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and more general design
than to set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century beyond the
reach of needs and duties. Society was scarce put together, and
defended with so much eloquence and blood, for the convenience of two
or three millionaires and a few hundred other persons of wealth and
position. It is plain that if mankind thus acted and suffered
during all these generations, they hoped some benefit, some ease, some
wellbeing, for themselves and their descendants; that if they supported
law and order, it was to secure fair-play for all; that if they denied
themselves in the present, they must have had some designs upon the
future. Now, a great hereditary fortune is a miracle of man’s
wisdom and mankind’s forbearance; it has not only been amassed
and handed down, it has been suffered to be amassed and handed down;
and surely in such a consideration as this, its possessor should find
only a new spur to activity and honour, that with all this power of
service he should not prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure
should return in benefits upon the race. If he had twenty, or
thirty, or a hundred thousand at his banker’s, or if all Yorkshire
or all California were his to manage or to sell, he would still be morally
penniless, and have the world to begin like Whittington, until he had
found some way of serving mankind. His wage is physically in his
own hand; but, in honour, that wage must still be earned. He is
only steward on parole of what is called his fortune. He must
honourably perform his stewardship. He must estimate his own services
and allow himself a salary in proportion, for that will be one among
his functions. And while he will then be free to spend that salary,
great or little, on his own private pleasures, the rest of his fortune
he but holds and disposes under trust for mankind; it is not his, because
he has not earned it; it cannot be his, because his services have already
been paid; but year by year it is his to distribute, whether to help
individuals whose birthright and outfit have been swallowed up in his,
or to further public works and institutions.
At this rate, short of inspiration, it seems hardly possible to be both
rich and honest; and the millionaire is under a far more continuous
temptation to thieve than the labourer who gets his shilling daily for
despicable toils. Are you surprised? It is even so.
And you repeat it every Sunday in your churches. ‘It is
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich
man to enter the kingdom of God.’ I have heard this and
similar texts ingeniously explained away and brushed from the path of
the aspiring Christian by the tender Great-heart of the parish.
One excellent clergyman told us that the ‘eye of a needle’
meant a low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass till
they were unloaded - which is very likely just; and then went on, bravely
confounding the ‘kingdom of God’ with heaven, the future
paradise, to show that of course no rich person could expect to carry
his riches beyond the grave - which, of course, he could not and never
did. Various greedy sinners of the congregation drank in the comfortable
doctrine with relief. It was worth the while having come to church
that Sunday morning! All was plain. The Bible, as usual,
meant nothing in particular; it was merely an obscure and figurative
school-copybook; and if a man were only respectable, he was a man after
God’s own heart.
Alas! I fear not. And though this matter of a man’s services
is one for his own conscience, there are some cases in which it is difficult
to restrain the mind from judging. Thus I shall be very easily
persuaded that a man has earned his daily bread; and if he has but a
friend or two to whom his company is delightful at heart, I am more
than persuaded at once. But it will be very hard to persuade me
that any one has earned an income of a hundred thousand. What
he is to his friends, he still would be if he were made penniless to-morrow;
for as to the courtiers of luxury and power, I will neither consider
them friends, nor indeed consider them at all. What he does for
mankind there are most likely hundreds who would do the same, as effectually
for the race and as pleasurably to themselves, for the merest fraction
of this monstrous wage. Why it is paid, I am, therefore, unable
to conceive, and as the man pays it himself, out of funds in his detention,
I have a certain backwardness to think him honest.
At least, we have gained a very obvious point: that what a man spends
upon himself, he shall have earned by services to the race.
Thence flows a principle for the outset of life, which is a little different
from that taught in the present day. I am addressing the middle
and the upper classes; those who have already been fostered and prepared
for life at some expense; those who have some choice before them, and
can pick professions; and above all, those who are what is called independent,
and need do nothing unless pushed by honour or ambition. In this
particular the poor are happy; among them, when a lad comes to his strength,
he must take the work that offers, and can take it with an easy conscience.
But in the richer classes the question is complicated by the number
of opportunities and a variety of considerations. Here, then,
this principle of ours comes in helpfully. The young man has to
seek, not a road to wealth, but an opportunity of service; not money,
but honest work. If he has some strong propensity, some calling
of nature, some over-weening interest in any special field of industry,
inquiry, or art, he will do right to obey the impulse; and that for
two reasons: the first external, because there he will render the best
services; the second personal, because a demand of his own nature is
to him without appeal whenever it can be satisfied with the consent
of his other faculties and appetites. If he has no such elective
taste, by the very principle on which he chooses any pursuit at all
he must choose the most honest and serviceable, and not the most highly
remunerated. We have here an external problem, not from or to
ourself, but flowing from the constitution of society; and we have our
own soul with its fixed design of righteousness. All that can
be done is to present the problem in proper terms, and leave it to the
soul of the individual. Now, the problem to the poor is one of
necessity: to earn wherewithal to live, they must find remunerative
labour. But the problem to the rich is one of honour: having the
wherewithal, they must find serviceable labour. Each has to earn
his daily bread: the one, because he has not yet got it to eat; the
other, who has already eaten it, because he has not yet earned it.
Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and comforts, whether
for the body or the mind. But the consideration of luxuries leads
us to a new aspect of the whole question, and to a second proposition
no less true, and maybe no less startling, than the last.
At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of surfeit
and disgrace after meat. Plethora has filled us with indifference;
and we are covered from head to foot with the callosities of habitual
opulence. Born into what is called a certain rank, we live, as
the saying is, up to our station. We squander without enjoyment,
because our fathers squandered. We eat of the best, not from delicacy,
but from brazen habit. We do not keenly enjoy or eagerly desire
the presence of a luxury; we are unaccustomed to its absence.
And not only do we squander money from habit, but still more pitifully
waste it in ostentation. I can think of no more melancholy disgrace
for a creature who professes either reason or pleasure for his guide,
than to spend the smallest fraction of his income upon that which he
does not desire; and to keep a carriage in which you do not wish to
drive, or a butler of whom you are afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly.
Money, being a means of happiness, should make both parties happy when
it changes hands; rightly disposed, it should be twice blessed in its
employment; and buyer and seller should alike have their twenty shillings
worth of profit out of every pound. Benjamin Franklin went through
life an altered man, because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle.
My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having
bought a whistle when I did not want one. I find I regret this,
or would regret it if I gave myself the time, not only on personal but
on moral and philanthropical considerations. For, first, in a
world where money is wanting to buy books for eager students and food
and medicine for pining children, and where a large majority are starved
in their most immediate desires, it is surely base, stupid, and cruel
to squander money when I am pushed by no appetite and enjoy no return
of genuine satisfaction. My philanthropy is wide enough in scope
to include myself; and when I have made myself happy, I have at least
one good argument that I have acted rightly; but where that is not so,
and I have bought and not enjoyed, my mouth is closed, and I conceive
that I have robbed the poor. And, second, anything I buy or use
which I do not sincerely want or cannot vividly enjoy, disturbs the
balance of supply and demand, and contributes to remove industrious
hands from the production of what is useful or pleasurable and to keep
them busy upon ropes of sand and things that are a weariness to the
flesh. That extravagance is truly sinful, and a very silly sin
to boot, in which we impoverish mankind and ourselves. It is another
question for each man’s heart. He knows if he can enjoy
what he buys and uses; if he cannot, he is a dog in the manger; nay,
it he cannot, I contend he is a thief, for nothing really belongs to
a man which he cannot use. Proprietor is connected with propriety;
and that only is the man’s which is proper to his wants and faculties.
A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by poverty.
Want is a sore thing, but poverty does not imply want. It remains
to be seen whether with half his present income, or a third, he cannot,
in the most generous sense, live as fully as at present. He is
a fool who objects to luxuries; but he is also a fool who does not protest
against the waste of luxuries on those who do not desire and cannot
enjoy them. It remains to be seen, by each man who would live
a true life to himself and not a merely specious life to society, how
many luxuries he truly wants and to how many he merely submits as to
a social propriety; and all these last he will immediately forswear.
Let him do this, and he will be surprised to find how little money it
requires to keep him in complete contentment and activity of mind and
senses. Life at any level among the easy classes is conceived
upon a principle of rivalry, where each man and each household must
ape the tastes and emulate the display of others. One is delicate
in eating, another in wine, a third in furniture or works of art or
dress; and I, who care nothing for any of these refinements, who am
perhaps a plain athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer, flannel
shirts and a camp bed, am yet called upon to assimilate all these other
tastes and make these foreign occasions of expenditure my own.
It may be cynical: I am sure I shall be told it is selfish; but I will
spend my money as I please and for my own intimate personal gratification,
and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay out the colour of
a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty. I shall not
wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless I am born with a delight
in them. Dress is my own affair, and that of one other in the
world; that, in fact and for an obvious reason, of any woman who shall
chance to be in love with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind.
If I do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent; and even
if I do, they have no further right but to refuse the invitation!
There is a kind of idea abroad that a man must live up to his station,
that his house, his table, and his toilette, shall be in a ratio of
equivalence, and equally imposing to the world. If this is in
the Bible, the passage has eluded my inquiries. If it is not in
the Bible, it is nowhere but in the heart of the fool. Throw aside
this fancy. See what you want, and spend upon that; distinguish
what you do not care about, and spend nothing upon that. There
are not many people who can differentiate wines above a certain and
that not at all a high price. Are you sure you are one of these?
Are you sure you prefer cigars at sixpence each to pipes at some fraction
of a farthing? Are you sure you wish to keep a gig? Do you
care about where you sleep, or are you not as much at your ease in a
cheap lodging as in an Elizabethan manor-house? Do you enjoy fine
clothes? It is not possible to answer these questions without
a trial; and there is nothing more obvious to my mind, than that a man
who has not experienced some ups and downs, and been forced to live
more cheaply than in his father’s house, has still his education
to begin. Let the experiment be made, and he will find to his
surprise that he has been eating beyond his appetite up to that hour;
that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes,
the plain table, have not only no power to damp his spirits, but perhaps
give him as keen pleasure in the using as the dainties that he took,
betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous and somnambulous submission
to wealth.
The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians
of literature, is exactly described by such a principle of life.
The Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good for him and
prefers anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is for the most
part a respectable Bohemian, respectable in disrespectability, living
for the outside, and an adventurer. But the man I mean lives wholly
to himself, does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper, buys
what he wants for himself, and not what is thought proper, works at
what he believes he can do well and not what will bring him in money
or favour. You may be the most respectable of men, and yet a true
Bohemian. And the test is this: a Bohemian, for as poor as he
may be, is always open-handed to his friends; he knows what he can do
with money and how he can do without it, a far rarer and more useful
knowledge; he has had less, and continued to live in some contentment;
and hence he cares not to keep more, and shares his sovereign or his
shilling with a friend. The poor, if they are generous, are Bohemian
in virtue of their birth. Do you know where beggars go?
Not to the great houses where people sit dazed among their thousands,
but to the doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it was the
widow who had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into the treasury.
But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or who in
any way falls out of the level of expenditure which is common to his
level in society, falls out of society altogether. I suppose the
young man to have chosen his career on honourable principles; he finds
his talents and instincts can be best contented in a certain pursuit;
in a certain industry, he is sure that he is serving mankind with a
healthy and becoming service; and he is not sure that he would be doing
so, or doing so equally well, in any other industry within his reach.
Then that is his true sphere in life; not the one in which he was born
to his father, but the one which is proper to his talents and instincts.
And suppose he does fall out of society, is that a cause of sorrow?
Is your heart so dead that you prefer the recognition of many to the
love of a few? Do you think society loves you? Put it to
the proof. Decline in material expenditure, and you will find
they care no more for you than for the Khan of Tartary. You will
lose no friends. If you had any, you will keep them. Only
those who were friends to your coat and equipage will disappear; the
smiling faces will disappear as by enchantment; but the kind hearts
will remain steadfastly kind. Are you so lost, are you so dead,
are you so little sure of your own soul and your own footing upon solid
fact, that you prefer before goodness and happiness the countenance
of sundry diners-out, who will flee from you at a report of ruin, who
will drop you with insult at a shadow of disgrace, who do not know you
and do not care to know you but by sight, and whom you in your turn
neither know nor care to know in a more human manner? Is it not
the principle of society, openly avowed, that friendship must not interfere
with business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a consideration
of money goes before any consideration of affection known to this cold-blooded
gang, that they have not even the honour of thieves, and will rook their
nearest and dearest as readily as a stranger? I hope I would go
as far as most to serve a friend; but I declare openly I would not put
on my hat to do a pleasure to society. I may starve my appetites
and control my temper for the sake of those I love; but society shall
take me as I choose to be, or go without me. Neither they nor
I will lose; for where there is no love, it is both laborious and unprofitable
to associate.
But it is obvious that if it is only right for a man to spend money
on that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the doctrine applies
with equal force to the rich and to the poor, to the man who has amassed
many thousands as well as to the youth precariously beginning life.
And it may be asked, Is not this merely preparing misers, who are not
the best of company? But the principle was this: that which a
man has not fairly earned, and, further, that which he cannot fully
enjoy, does not belong to him, but is a part of mankind’s treasure
which he holds as steward on parole. To mankind, then, it must
be made profitable; and how this should be done is, once more, a problem
which each man must solve for himself, and about which none has a right
to judge him. Yet there are a few considerations which are very
obvious and may here be stated. Mankind is not only the whole
in general, but every one in particular. Every man or woman is
one of mankind’s dear possessions; to his or her just brain, and
kind heart, and active hands, mankind intrusts some of its hopes for
the future; he or she is a possible well-spring of good acts and source
of blessings to the race. This money which you do not need, which,
in a rigid sense, you do not want, may therefore be returned not only
in public benefactions to the race, but in private kindnesses.
Your wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and should
be helped the first. There at least there can be little imposture,
for you know their necessities of your own knowledge. And consider,
if all the world did as you did, and according to their means extended
help in the circle of their affections, there would be no more crying
want in times of plenty and no more cold, mechanical charity given with
a doubt and received with confusion. Would not this simple rule
make a new world out of the old and cruel one which we inhabit?
[After two more sentences the fragment breaks off.]
FATHER DAMIEN
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND
DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU
SYDNEY,
February 25, 1890.
Sir, - It may probably occur to you that we have met, and visited, and
conversed; on my side, with interest. You may remember that you
have done me several courtesies, for which I was prepared to be grateful.
But there are duties which come before gratitude, and offences which
justly divide friends, far more acquaintances. Your letter to
the Reverend H. B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had
filled me with bread when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse
my father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me from the bonds of
gratitude. You know enough, doubtless, of the process of canonisation
to be aware that, a hundred years after the death of Damien, there will
appear a man charged with the painful office of the devil’s
advocate. After that noble brother of mine, and of all frail
clay, shall have lain a century at rest, one shall accuse, one defend
him. The circumstance is unusual that the devil’s advocate
should be a volunteer, should be a member of a sect immediately rival,
and should make haste to take upon himself his ugly office ere the bones
are cold; unusual, and of a taste which I shall leave my readers free
to qualify; unusual, and to me inspiring. If I have at all learned
the trade of using words to convey truth and to arouse emotion, you
have at last furnished me with a subject. For it is in the interest
of all mankind, and the cause of public decency in every quarter of
the world, not only that Damien should be righted, but that you and
your letter should be displayed at length, in their true colours, to
the public eye.
To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large: I shall then
proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of view, divine
and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to draw again, and
with more specification, the character of the dead saint whom it has
pleased you to vilify: so much being done, I shall say farewell to you
for ever.
‘HONOLULU,
‘August 2, 1889.
‘Rev. H. B. GAGE.
‘Dear Brother, - In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien,
I can only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the extravagant
newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly philanthropist.
The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, head-strong and bigoted.
He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders; did not stay
at the leper settlement (before he became one himself), but circulated
freely over the whole island (less than half the island is devoted to
the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu. He had no hand in
the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were the work of our
Board of Health, as occasion required and means were provided.
He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of
which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.
Others have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government
physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of meriting
eternal life. - Yours, etc.,
‘C. M. HYDE.’ {1}
To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at the outset
on my private knowledge of the signatory and his sect. It may
offend others; scarcely you, who have been so busy to collect, so bold
to publish, gossip on your rivals. And this is perhaps the moment
when I may best explain to you the character of what you are to read:
I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility:
with what measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again;
with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to
plunge home. And if in aught that I shall say I should offend
others, your colleagues, whom I respect and remember with affection,
I can but offer them my regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the
consideration of interests far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted
by anything from me must be indeed trifling when compared with the pain
with which they read your letter. It is not the hangman, but the
criminal, that brings dishonour on the house.
You belong, sir, to a sect - I believe my sect, and that in which my
ancestors laboured - which has enjoyed, and partly failed to utilise,
an exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii. The first missionaries
came; they found the land already self-purged of its old and bloody
faith; they were embraced, almost on their arrival, with enthusiasm;
what troubles they supported came far more from whites than from Hawaiians;
and to these last they stood (in a rough figure) in the shoes of God.
This is not the place to enter into the degree or causes of their failure,
such as it is. One element alone is pertinent, and must here be
plainly dealt with. In the course of their evangelical calling,
they - or too many of them - grew rich. It may be news to you
that the houses of missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets
of Honolulu. It will at least be news to you, that when I returned
your civil visit, the driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste,
and the comfort of your home. It would have been news certainly
to myself, had any one told me that afternoon that I should live to
drag such matter into print. But you see, sir, how you degrade
better men to your own level; and it is needful that those who are to
judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien and the devil’s advocate,
should understand your letter to have been penned in a house which could
raise, and that very justly, the envy and the comments of the passers-by.
I think (to employ a phrase of yours which I admire) it ‘should
be attributed’ to you that you have never visited the scene of
Damien’s life and death. If you had, and had recalled it,
and looked about your pleasant rooms, even your pen perhaps would have
been stayed.
Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine) has
not done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom. When
calamity befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended
and took root in the Eight Islands, a quid pro quo was to be
looked for. To that prosperous mission, and to you, as one of
its adornments, God had sent at last an opportunity. I know I
am touching here upon a nerve acutely sensitive. I know that others
of your colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the
intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to be
called remorse. I am sure it is so with yourself; I am persuaded
your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not essentially ignoble,
and the one human trait to be espied in that performance. You
were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that which should
have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not rendered.
Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room, as you
sat raging and writing; and if the words written were base beyond parallel,
the rage, I am happy to repeat - it is the only compliment I shall pay
you - the rage was almost virtuous. But, sir, when we have failed,
and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped
in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain,
uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succours
the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his
turn, and dies upon the field of honour - the battle cannot be retrieved
as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle,
and lost for ever. One thing remained to you in your defeat -
some rags of common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.
Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right, but the
honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour of the
inert: that was what remained to you. We are not all expected
to be Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love
his comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that.
But will a gentleman of your reverend profession allow me an example
from the fields of gallantry? When two gentlemen compete for the
favour of a lady, and the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and
(as will sometimes happen) matter damaging to the successful rival’s
credit reaches the ear of the defeated, it is held by plain men of no
pretensions that his mouth is, in the circumstance, almost necessarily
closed. Your Church and Damien’s were in Hawaii upon a rivalry
to do well: to help, to edify, to set divine examples. You having
(in one huge instance) failed, and Damien succeeded, I marvel it should
not have occurred to you that you were doomed to silence; that when
you had been outstripped in that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in
the midst of your wellbeing, in your pleasant room - and Damien, crowned
with glories and horrors, toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under
the cliffs of Kalawao - you, the elect who would not, were the last
man on earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would
and did.
I think I see you - for I try to see you in the flesh as I write these
sentences - I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a hyperbolical
expression at the best. ‘He had no hand in the reforms,’
he was ‘a coarse, dirty man’; these were your own words;
and you may think it possible that I am come to support you with fresh
evidence. In a sense, it is even so. Damien has been too
much depicted with a conventional halo and conventional features; so
drawn by men who perhaps had not the eye to remark or the pen to express
the individual; or who perhaps were only blinded and silenced by generous
admiration, such as I partly envy for myself - such as you, if your
soul were enlightened, would envy on your bended knees. It is
the least defect of such a method of portraiture that it makes the path
easy for the devil’s advocate, and leaves for the misuse of the
slanderer a considerable field of truth. For the truth that is
suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy. The
world, in your despite, may perhaps owe you something, if your letter
be the means of substituting once for all a credible likeness for a
wax abstraction. For, if that world at all remember you, on the
day when Damien of Molokai shall be named Saint, it will be in virtue
of one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.
You may ask on what authority I speak. It was my inclement destiny
to become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde. When
I visited the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave.
But such information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation
with those who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory;
but others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with
no halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose
unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features
of the man shone on me convincingly. These gave me what knowledge
I possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely
and sensitively understood - Kalawao, which you have never visited,
about which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself;
for, brief as your letter is, you have found the means to stumble into
that confession. ‘Less than one-half of the island,’
you say, ‘is devoted to the lepers.’ Molokai - ‘Molokai
ahina,’ the ‘grey,’ lofty, and most desolate island
- along all its northern side plunges a front of precipice into a sea
of unusual profundity. This range of cliff is, from east to west,
the true end and frontier of the island. Only in one spot there
projects into the ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy,
stony, windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater:
the whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation
as a bracket to a wall. With this hint you will now be able to
pick out the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how much
of Molokai is thus cut off between the surf and precipice, whether less
than a half, or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a tenth - or, say,
a twentieth; and the next time you burst into print you will be in a
position to share with us the issue of your calculations.
I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness
of that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to behold.
You, who do not even know its situation on the map, probably denounce
sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your pleasant
parlour on Beretania Street. When I was pulled ashore there one
early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters, bidding farewell
(in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human life.
One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself from joining
her. Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have
triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and
you beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common
manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population
as only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare - what
a haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards
the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found
every fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital
and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable,
but still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have
understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves
of a man’s spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness
of the sun; you would have felt it was (even to-day) a pitiful place
to visit and a hell to dwell in. It is not the fear of possible
infection. That seems a little thing when compared with the pain,
the pity, and the disgust of the visitor’s surroundings, and the
atmosphere of affliction, disease, and physical disgrace in which he
breathes. I do not think I am a man more than usually timid; but
I never recall the days and nights I spent upon that island promontory
(eight days and seven nights), without heartfelt thankfulness that I
am somewhere else. I find in my diary that I speak of my stay
as a ‘grinding experience’: I have once jotted in the margin,
‘Harrowing is the word’; and when the Mokolii
bore me at last towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself,
with a new conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the
song -
‘’Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.’
And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged,
bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the Bishop-Home
excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the missionaries,
all indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different place
when Damien came there and made his great renunciation, and slept that
first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with pestilence;
and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of
dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.
You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful abound
in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and nurses.
I have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the nurses.
But there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and
Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of
length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression;
for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering
by which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called
upon to enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say
farewell, they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but
go for a time to their high calling, and can look forward as they go
to relief, to recreation, and to rest. But Damien shut-to with
his own hand the doors of his own sepulchre.
I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.
A. ‘Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully
remembered in the field of his labours and sufferings. “He
was a good man, but very officious,” says one. Another tells
me he had fallen (as other priests so easily do) into something of the
ways and habits of thought of a Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise
the fact, and the good sense to laugh at’ [over] ‘it.
A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was a popular.’
B. ‘After Ragsdale’s death’ [Ragsdale
was a famous Luna, or overseer, of the unruly settlement] ‘there
followed a brief term of office by Father Damien which served only to
publish the weakness of that noble man. He was rough in his ways,
and he had no control. Authority was relaxed; Damien’s life
was threatened, and he was soon eager to resign.’
C. ‘Of Damien I begin to have an idea. He seems
to have been a man of the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type:
shrewd, ignorant and bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of
receiving and digesting a reproof if it were bluntly administered; superbly
generous in the least thing as well as in the greatest, and as ready
to give his last shirt (although not without human grumbling) as he
had been to sacrifice his life; essentially indiscreet and officious,
which made him a troublesome colleague; domineering in all his ways,
which made him incurably unpopular with the Kanakas, but yet destitute
of real authority, so that his boys laughed at him and he must carry
out his wishes by the means of bribes. He learned to have a mania
for doctoring; and set up the Kanakas against the remedies of his regular
rivals: perhaps (if anything matter at all in the treatment of such
a disease) the worst thing that he did, and certainly the easiest.
The best and worst of the man appear very plainly in his dealings with
Mr. Chapman’s money; he had originally laid it out’ [intended
to lay it out] ‘entirely for the benefit of Catholics, and even
so not wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his error fully
and revised the list. The sad state of the boys’ home is
in part the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own slovenly
ways and false ideas of hygiene. Brother officials used to call
it “Damien’s Chinatown.” “Well,”
they would say, “your China-town keeps growing.” And
he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and adhere to his errors with
perfect obstinacy. So much I have gathered of truth about this
plain, noble human brother and father of ours; his imperfections are
the traits of his face, by which we know him for our fellow; his martyrdom
and his example nothing can lessen or annul; and only a person here
on the spot can properly appreciate their greatness.’
I have set down these private passages, as you perceive, without correction;
thanks to you, the public has them in their bluntness. They are
almost a list of the man’s faults, for it is rather these that
I was seeking: with his virtues, with the heroic profile of his life,
I and the world were already sufficiently acquainted. I was besides
a little suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill sense, but merely
because Damien’s admirers and disciples were the least likely
to be critical. I know you will be more suspicious still; and
the facts set down above were one and all collected from the lips of
Protestants who had opposed the father in his life. Yet I am strangely
deceived, or they build up the image of a man, with all his weaknesses,
essentially heroic, and alive with rugged honesty, generosity, and mirth.
Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides of
Damien’s character, collected from the lips of those who had laboured
with and (in your own phrase) ‘knew the man’; - though I
question whether Damien would have said that he knew you. Take
it, and observe with wonder how well you were served by your gossips,
how ill by your intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of fact
we are at one, and how widely our appreciations vary. There is
something wrong here; either with you or me. It is possible, for
instance, that you, who seem to have so many ears in Kalawao, had heard
of the affair of Mr. Chapman’s money, and were singly struck by
Damien’s intended wrong-doing. I was struck with that also,
and set it fairly down; but I was struck much more by the fact that
he had the honesty of mind to be convinced. I may here tell you
that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues sat with him
late into the night, multiplying arguments and accusations; that the
father listened as usual with ‘perfect good-nature and perfect
obstinacy’; but at the last, when he was persuaded - ‘Yes,’
said he, ‘I am very much obliged to you; you have done me a service;
it would have been a theft.’ There are many (not Catholics
merely) who require their heroes and saints to be infallible; to these
the story will be painful; not to the true lovers, patrons, and servants
of mankind.
And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of those
who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to
find and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to
forget the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone
introduced them to your knowledge. It is a dangerous frame of
mind. That you may understand how dangerous, and into what a situation
it has already brought you, we will (if you please) go hand-in-hand
through the different phrases of your letter, and candidly examine each
from the point of view of its truth, its appositeness, and its charity.
Damien was coarse.
It is very possible. You make us sorry for the lepers, who
had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father. But
you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with
the lights of culture? Or may I remind you that we have some reason
to doubt if John the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter,
on whose career you doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no doubt
at all he was a ‘coarse, headstrong’ fisherman! Yet
even in our Protestant Bibles Peter is called Saint.
Damien was dirty.
He was. Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade!
But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.
Damien was headstrong.
I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head
and heart.
Damien was bigoted.
I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me.
But what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish
in a priest? Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity
of a peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do.
For this, I wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only character,
should have avoided him in life. But the point of interest in
Damien, which has caused him to be so much talked about and made him
at last the subject of your pen and mine, was that, in him, his bigotry,
his intense and narrow faith, wrought potently for good, and strengthened
him to be one of the world’s heroes and exemplars.
Damien was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders.
Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for blam