Part 10

What, then, are we to conclude from all these variations (and the far greater number which I have not mentioned) of the respect or stigma attaching to the same actions, not only among different societies in different ages or parts of the world, but even at any one time among different classes of the same society? Must we conclude that there is no such thing as a permanent moral code valid for all time; or must we still suppose that there is such a thing--though society has hitherto sought for it in vain?

I think it is obvious that there is no such thing as a permanent moral code--at any rate as applying to actions. Probably the respect or stigma attaching to particular classes of actions arose from the fact that these classes of actions were--or were thought to be--beneficial or injurious to the society of the time; but it is also clear that this good or bad name once created clings to the action long after the action has ceased in the course of social progress to be beneficial in the one case, or injurious in the other; and indeed long after the thinkers of the race have discovered the discrepancy. And so in a short time arises a great confusion in the popular mind between what is really good or evil for the race and what is reputed to be so--the bolder spirits who try to separate the two having to atone for this confusion by their own martyrdom. It is also pretty clear that the actions which are beneficial or injurious to the race must by the nature of the case vary almost indefinitely with the changing conditions of the life of the race--what is beneficial in one age or under one set of conditions being injurious in another age or under other circumstances--so that a permanent or ever-valid code of moral action is not a thing to be expected, at any rate by those who regard morality as a result of social experience, and as a matter of fact is not a thing that we find existing. And, indeed, of those who regard morals as intuitive, there are few who have thought about the matter who would be inclined to say that any act in itself can be either right or wrong. Though there is a superficial judgment of this kind, yet when the matter comes to be looked into, the more general consent seems to be that the rightness or wrongness is in the motive. To kill (it is said) is not wrong, but to do so with murderous intent is; to take money out of another person's purse is in itself neither moral nor immoral--all depends upon whether permission has been given, or on what the relations between the two persons are; and so on. Obviously there is no mere act which under given conditions may not be justified, and equally obvious there is no mere act which under given conditions may not become unjustifiable. To talk, therefore, about virtues and vices as permanent and distinct classes of actions is illusory: there is no such distinction, except so far as a superficial and transient public opinion creates it. The theatre of morality is in the passions, and there are (it is said) virtuous and vicious passions--eternally distinct from each other.

Here, then, we have abandoned the search for a permanent moral code among the actions; on the understanding that we are more likely to find such a thing among the passions. And I think it would be generally admitted that this is a move in the right direction. There are difficulties however here, and the matter is not one which renders itself up at once. Though, vaguely speaking, some passions seem nobler and more dignified than others, we find it very difficult, in fact impossible, to draw any strict line which shall separate one class, the virtuous, from the other class, the vicious. On the whole we place Prudence, Generosity, Chastity, Reverence, Courage among the virtues--and their opposites, as Rashness, Miserliness, Incontinence, Arrogance, Timidity, among the vices; yet we do not seem able to say that Prudence is always better than Rashness, Chastity than Incontinence, or Reverence than Arrogance. There are situations in which the less honoured quality is the most in place; and if the extreme of this is undesirable, the extreme of its opposite is undesirable too. Courage, it is commonly said, must not be carried over into foolhardiness; Chastity must not go so far as the monks of the early Church took it; there is a limit to the indulgence of the instinct of Reverence. In fact the less dignified passions are necessary sometimes as a counterbalance and set-off to the more dignified, and a character devoid of them would be very insipid; just as among the members of the body, the less honoured have their place as well as the more honoured, and could not well be discarded.

Hence a number of writers, abandoning the attempt to draw a fixed line between virtuous and vicious passions, have boldly maintained that vices have their place as well as virtues, and that the true salvation lies in the golden mean. The [Greek: epieikeia] and [Greek: sôphrosunê] of the Greeks seem to have pointed to the idea of a blend or harmonious adjustment of all the powers as the perfection of character. Plutarch says (Essay on Moral Virtue), "This, then, is the function of practical reason following nature, to prevent our passions either going too far or too short.... Thus setting bound to the emotional currents, it creates in the unreasoning part of the soul moral habits which are the mean between excess and deficiency."

The English word "gentleman" seems to have once conveyed a similar idea. And Emerson, among others, maintains that each vice is only the "excess or acridity of a virtue," and says "the first lesson of history is the good of evil."

According to this view rightness or wrongness cannot be predicated of the passions themselves, but should rather be applied to the use of them, and to the way they are proportioned to each other and to circumstances. As, farther back, we left the region of actions to look for morality in the passions that lie behind action, so now we leave the region of the passions to look for it in the power that lies behind the passions and gives them their place. This is a farther move in the same direction as before, and possibly will bring us to a more satisfactory conclusion. There are still difficulties, however, the chief ones lying in the want of definiteness which necessarily attaches to our dealings with these remoter tracts of human nature; and in our own defective knowledge of these tracts.

For these reasons, and as the subject is a complex and difficult one, I would ask the reader to dwell for a few minutes longer on the considerations which show that it is really as impossible to draw a fixed line between moral and immoral passions as it is between moral and immoral actions, and which therefore force us, if we are to find any ground of morality at all, to look for it in some further region of our nature.

Plato in his allegory of the soul, in the Phædrus, though he apparently divides the passions which draw the human chariot into two classes, the heavenward and the earthward--figured by the white horse and the black horse respectively--does not recommend that the black horse should be destroyed or dismissed, but only that he (as well as the white horse) should be kept under due control by the charioteer. By which he seems to intend that there is a power in man which stands above and behind the passions, and under whose control alone the human being can safely move. In fact, if the fiercer and so-called more earthly passions were removed, half the driving force would be gone from the chariot of the human soul. Hatred may be devilish at times--but, after all, the true value of it depends on what you hate, on the use to which the passion is put. Anger, though inhuman at one time, is magnificent at another. Obstinacy may be out of place in a drawing-room, but it is the latest virtue on a battle-field, when an important position has to be held against the full brunt of the enemy. And Lust, though maniacal and monstrous in its aberrations, cannot in the last resort be separated from its divine companion, Love. To let the more amiable passions have entire sway notoriously does not do: to turn your cheek, too literally, to the smiter, is (pace Tolstoi) only to encourage smiting; and when society becomes so altruistic that everybody runs to fetch the coal-scuttle, we feel sure that something has gone wrong. The white-washed heroes of our biographies, with their many virtues and no faults, do not please us. We have an impression that the man without faults is, to say the least, a vague, uninteresting being--a picture without light and shade--and the conventional semi-pious classification of character into good and bad qualities (as if the good might be kept and the bad thrown away) seems both inadequate and false.

What the student of human nature rather has to do is not to divide the virtues (so-called) from the vices (so-called), not to separate the black horse and the white horse, but to find out what is the relation of the one to the other--to see the character as a whole, and the mutual interdependence of its different parts--to find out what that power is which constitutes it a unity, whose presence and control makes the man and all his actions "right," and in whose absence (if it is really possible for it to be entirely absent) the man and his actions must be "wrong."

What we call vices, faults, defects, appear often as a kind of limitation: cruelty, for instance, as a limitation of human sympathy, prejudice as a blindness, a want of discernment; but it is just these limitations--in one form or another--which are the necessary conditions of the appearance of a human being in the world. If we are to act or live at all we must act and live under limits. There must be channels along which the stream is forced to run, else it will spread and lose itself aimlessly in all directions--and turn no mill-wheels. One man is disagreeable and unconciliatory--the directions in which his sympathy goes out to others are few and limited--yet there are situations in life (and everyone must know them) when a man who is able and willing to make himself disagreeable is invaluable: when a Carlyle is worth any number of Balaams.

Sometimes again vices, etc., appear as a kind of raw material from which the other qualities have to be formed, and without which, in a sense, they could not exist. Sensuality, for instance, underlies all art and the higher emotions. Timidity is the defect of the sensitive imaginative temperament. Bluntness, stupid candor, and want of tact are indispensable in the formation of certain types of Reformers. But what would you have? Would you have a rabbit with the horns of a cow, or a donkey with the disposition of a spaniel? The reformer has not to extirpate his brusqueness and aggressiveness, but to see that he makes good use of these qualities; and the man has not to abolish his sensuality, but to humanise it.

And so on. Lecky, in his "History of Morals," shows how in society certain defects necessarily accompany certain excellences of character. "Had the Irish peasants been less chaste they would have been more prosperous," in his blunt assertion, which he supports by the contention that their early marriages (which render the said virtue possible) "are the most conspicuous proofs of the national improvidence, and one of the most fatal obstacles to industrial prosperity." Similarly he says that the gambling table fosters a moral nerve and calmness "scarcely exhibited in equal perfection in any other sphere"--a fact which Bret Harte has finely illustrated in his character of Mr. John Oakhurst in the "Outcasts of Poker Flat;" also that "the promotion of industrial veracity is probably the single form in which the growth of manufactures exercises a favorable influence upon morals;" while, on the other hand, "Trust in Providence, content and resignation in extreme poverty and suffering, the most genuine amiability, and the most sincere readiness to assist their brethren, an adherence to their religious opinions which no persecutions and no bribes can shake, a capacity for heroic, transcendent, and prolonged self-sacrifice, may be found in some nations, in men who are habitual liars and habitual cheats." Again he points out that thriftiness and forethought--which, in an industrial civilisation like ours, are looked upon as duties "of the very highest order"--have at other times (when the teaching was "take no thought for the morrow") been regarded as quite the reverse, and concludes with the general remark that as society advances there is some loss for every gain that is made, and with the special indictment against "civilisation" that it is not favorable to the production of "self-sacrifice, enthusiasm, reverence, or chastity."

The point of all which is that the so-called vices and defects--whether we regard them as limitations or whether we regard them as raw materials of character, whether we regard them in the individual solely or whether we regard them in their relation to society--are necessary elements of human life, elements without which the so-called virtues could not exist; and that therefore it is quite impossible to separate vices and virtues into distinct classes with the latent idea involved that one class may be retained and the other in course of time got rid of. Defects and bad qualities will not be treated so--they clamour for their rights and will not be denied; they effect a lodgment in us, and we have to put up with them. Like the grain of sand in the oyster, we are forced to make pearls of them.

These are the precipices and chasms which give form to the mountain. Who wants a mountain sprawling indifferently out on all sides, without angle or break, like the oceanic tide-wave of which one cannot say whether it is a hill or a plain? And if you want to grow a lily, chastely white and filling the air with its fragrance, will you not bury the bulb of it deep in the dirt to begin with?

Acknowledging, then, that it is impossible to hold permanently to any line of distinction between good and bad passions, there remains no course for us but to accept both, and to make use of them--redeeming them, both good and bad, from their narrowness and limitation by so doing--to make use of them in the service of humanity. For as dirt is only matter in the wrong place, so evil in man consists only in actions or passions which are uncontrolled by the human within him, and undedicated to its service. The evil consists not in the actions or passions themselves, but in the fact that they are inhumanly used. The most unblemished virtue erected into a barrier between one self and a suffering brother or sister--the whitest marble image, howsoever lovely, set up in the Holy Place of the temple of Man, where the spirit alone should dwell--becomes blasphemy and a pollution.

Wherein exactly this human service consists is another question. It may be, and, as the reader would gather, probably is, a matter which at the last eludes definition. But though it may elude exact statement, that is no reason why approximations should not be made to the statement of it; nor is its ultimate elusiveness of intellectual definition any proof that it may not become a real and vital force within the man, and underlying inspiration of his actions. To take the two considerations in order. In the first place, as we saw from the beginning, the experience of society is continually leading it to classify actions into beneficial and harmful, good and bad; and thus moral codes are formed which eat their way from the outside into the individual man and become part of him. These codes may be looked upon as approximations in each age to a statement of human service; but, as we have seen, they are by the nature of the case very imperfect; and since the very conditions of the problem are continually changing, it seems obvious that a final and absolute solution of it by this method is impossible. The second way in which man works towards a solution is by the expansion and growth of his own consciousness, and is ultimately by far the most important--though the two methods have doubtless continually to be corrected by each other. In fact, as man actually forms a part of society externally, so he comes to know and feel himself a part of society through his inner nature. Gradually, and in the lapse of ages, through the development of his sympathetic relation with his fellows, the individual man enters into a wider and wider circle of life; the joys and sorrows, the experiences, of his fellows become his own joys and sorrows, his own experiences; he passes into a life which is larger than his own individual life; forces flow in upon him which determine his actions, not for results which return to him directly, but for results which can only return to him indirectly and through others; at last the ground of humanity, as it were, reveals itself within him, the region of human equality--and his actions come to flow directly from the very same source which regulates and inspires the whole movement of society. At this point the problem is solved. The growth has taken place from within; it is not of the nature of an external compulsion, but of an inward compunction. By actual consciousness the man has taken on an ever-enlarging life, and at last the life of humanity, which has no fixed form, no ever-valid code; but is itself the true life, surpassing definition, yet inspiring all actions and passions, all codes and forms, and determining at last their place.

It is the gradual growth of this supreme life in each individual which is the great and indeed the only hope of Society--it is that for which Society exists: a life which so far from dwarfing individuality enhances immensely its power, causing the individual to move with the weight of the universe behind him--and exalting what were once his little peculiarities and defects into the splendid manifestations of his humanity.

To return then for a moment to the practical bearing of this on the question before us, we see that so soon as we have abandoned all codes of morals there remains nothing for us but to put all our qualities and defects to human use, and to redeem them by so doing. Our defects are our entrances into life, and the gateway of all our dealings with others. Think what it is to be plain and homely. The very word suggests an endearment, and a liberty of access denied to the faultlessly handsome. Our very evil passions, so called, are not things to be ashamed of, but things to look straight in the face and to see what they are good for--for a use can be found for them, that is certain. The man should see that he is worthy of his passion, as the mountain should rear its crest conformable to the height of the precipice which bounds it. Is it women? let him see that he is a magnanimous lover. Is it ambition? let him take care that it be a grand one. Is it laziness? let it redeem him from the folly of unrest, to become heaven-reflecting, like a lake among the hills. Is it closefistedness? let it become the nurse of a true economy.

The more complicated, pronounced, or awkward the defect is the finer will be the result when it has been thoroughly worked up. Love of approbation is difficult to deal with. Through sloughs of duplicity, of concealment, of vanity, it leads its victim. It sucks his sturdy self-life, and leaves him flattened and bloodless. Yet once mastered, once fairly torn out, cudgeled, and left bleeding on the road (for this probably has to be done with every vice or virtue some time or other), it will rise up and follow you, carrying a magic key round its neck, meek and serviceable now, instead of dangerous and demoniac as before.

Deceit is difficult to deal with. In some sense it is the worst fault that can be. It seems to disorganise and ultimately to destroy the character. Yet I am bold to say that this defect has its uses. Severely examined perhaps it will be found that no one can live a day free from it. And beyond that--is not "a noble dissimulation" part and parcel of the very greatest characters: like Socrates, "the white soul in a satyr form"? When the divine has descended among men has it not always, like Moses, worn a veil before its face? and what is Nature herself but one long and organised system of deception?

Veracity has an opposite effect. It knits all the elements of a man's character--rendering him solid rather than fluid; yet carried out too literally and pragmatically it condenses and solidifies the character overmuch, making the man woodeny and angular. And even of that essential Truth (truth to the inward and ideal perfection) which more than anything else perhaps constitutes a man--it is to be remembered that even here there must be a limitation. No man can in act or externally be quite true to the ideal--though in spirit he may be. If he is to live in this world and be mortal, it must be by virtue of some partiality, some defect.

And so again--since there is an analogy between the Individual and Society--may we not conclude that as the individual has ultimately to recognise his so-called evil passions and find a place and a use for them, society also has to recognise its so-called criminals and discern their place and use? The artist does not omit shadows from his canvas; and the wise statesman will not try to abolish the criminal from society--lest haply he be found to have abolished the driving force from his social machine.

From what has now been said it is quite clear that in general we call a man a criminal, not because he violates any eternal code of morality--for there exists no such thing--but because he violates the ruling code of his time, and this depends largely on the ideal of the time. The Spartans appear to have permitted theft because they thought that thieving habits in the community fostered military dexterity and discouraged the accumulation of private wealth. They looked upon the latter as a great evil. But to-day the accumulation of private wealth is our great good and the thief is looked upon as the evil. When however we find, as the historians of to-day teach us, that society is now probably passing through a parenthetical stage of private property from a stage of communism in the past to a stage of more highly developed communism in the future, it becomes clear that the thief (and the poacher before-mentioned) is that person who is protesting against the too-exclusive domination of a passing ideal. Whatever should we do without him? He is keeping open for us, as Hinton I think expresses it, the path to a regenerate society, and is more useful to that end than many a platform orator. He it is that makes Care to sit upon the Crupper of Wealth, and so, in course of time, causes the burden and bother of private property to become so intolerable that society gladly casts it down on common ground. Vast as is the machinery of Law, and multifarious the ways in which it seeks to crush the thief, it has signally failed, and fails ever more and more. The thief will win. He will get what he wants, but (as usual in human life!) in a way and in a form very different from what he expected.

And when we regard the thief in himself, we cannot say that we find him less human than other classes of society. The sentiment of large bodies of thieves is highly communistic among themselves; and if they thus represent a survival from an earlier age, they might also be looked upon as the precursors of a better age in the future. They have their pals in every town, with runs and refuges always open, and are lavish and generous to a degree to their own kind. And if they look upon the rich as their natural enemies and fair prey, a view which it might be difficult to gainsay, many of them at any rate are animated by a good deal of the Robin Hood spirit, and are really helpful to the poor.

I need not I think quote that famous passage from Lecky in which he shows how the prostitute, through centuries of suffering and ill-fame, has borne the curse and contempt of Society in order that her more fortunate sister might rejoice in the achievement of a pure marriage. The ideal of a monogamic union has been established in a sense directly by the slur cast upon the free woman. If, however, as many people think, a certain latitude in sexual relations is not only admissible but, in the long run, and within bounds, desirable, it becomes clear that the prostitute is that person who against heavy odds, and at the cost of a real degradation to herself, has clung to a tradition which, in itself good, might otherwise have perished in the face of our devotion to the splendid ideal of the exclusive marriage. There has been a time in history when the prostitute (if the word can properly be used in this connection) has been glorified, consecrated to the temple-service and honoured of men and gods (the hierodouloi of the Greeks, the kodeshoth and kodeshim of the Bible, etc.) There has also been a time when she has been scouted and reviled. In the future there will come a time when, as free companion, really free from the curse of modern commercialism, and sacred and respected once more, she will again be accepted by society and take her place with the rest.

And so with other cases. On looking back into history we find that almost every human impulse has at some age been held in esteem and allowed full play; thus man came to recognise its beauty and value. But then, lest it should come (as it surely would) to tyrannise over the rest, it has been dethroned, and so in a later age the same quality is scouted and banned. Last of all it has to find its perfect human use and to take its place with the rest. Up to the age of Civilisation (according to writers on primitive Society) the early tribes of mankind, though limited each in their habits, were essentially democratical in structure. In fact, nothing had occurred to make them otherwise. Each member stood on a footing of equality with the rest; individual men had not in their hands an arbitrary power over others; and the tribal life and standard ruled supreme. And when, in the future and on a much higher plane, the true Democracy comes, this equality which has so long been in abeyance will be restored, not only among men but also, in a sense, among all the passions and qualities of manhood: none will be allowed to tyrannise over others, but all will have to be subject to the supreme life of humanity. The chariot of Man instead of two horses will have a thousand; but they will all be under control of the charioteer. Meanwhile it may not be extravagant to suppose that all through the Civilisation-period the so-called criminals are keeping open the possibility of a return to this state of society. They are preserving, in a rough and unattractive husk it may be, the precious seed of a life which is to come in the future; and are as necessary and integral a part of society in the long run as the most respected and most honoured of its members at present.

The upshot then of it all is that "morals" as a permanent code of action have to be discarded. There exists no such permanent code. One age, one race, one class, one family, may have a code which the users of it consider valid, but only they consider it valid, and then only for a time. The Decalogue may have been a rough and useful ready-reckoner for the Israelites; but to us it admits of so many exceptions and interpretations that it is practically worthless. "Thou shalt not steal." Exactly; but who is to decide, as we saw at the outset, in what "stealing" consists? The question is too complicated to admit of an answer. And when we have caught our half-starved tramp "sneaking" a loaf, and are ready to condemn him, lo! Lycurgus pats him on the back, and the modern philosopher tells him that he is keeping open the path to a regenerate society! If the tramp had also been a philosopher, he would perhaps have done the same act not merely for his own benefit but for that of society, he would have committed a crime in order to save mankind.

There is nothing left but Humanity. Since there is no ever-valid code of morals we must sadly confess that there is no means of proving ourselves right and our neighbours wrong. In fact the very act of thinking whether we are right (which implies a sundering of ourselves, even in thought, from others) itself introduces the element of wrongness; and if we are ever to be "right" at all, it must be at some moment when we fail to notice it--when we have forgotten our apartness from others and have entered into the great region of human equality. Equality--in that region all human defects are redeemed; they all find their place. To love your neighbour as yourself is the whole law and the prophets; to feel that you are "equal" with others, that their lives are as your life, that your life is as theirs--even in what trifling degree we may experience such things--is to enter into another life which includes both sides; it is to pass beyond the sphere of moral distinctions, and to trouble oneself no more with them. Between lovers there are no duties and no rights; and in the life of humanity, there is only an instinctive mutual service expressing itself in whatever way may be best at the time. Nothing is forbidden, there is nothing which may not serve. The law of Equality is perfectly flexible, is adaptable to all times and places, finds a place for all the elements of character, justifies and redeems them all without exception; and to live by it is perfect freedom. Yet not a law: but rather as said, a new life, transcending the individual life, working through it from within, lifting the self into another sphere, beyond corruption, far over the world of Sorrow.