Part 3

In like fashion Intelligence’s passionate pleasure in dealing with Otherness and in looking out for Proteus, Intelligence’s frequent indifference to here and now, disrespect to self and refusal to regard means as ends――all this renders it unpopular with those practical-minded men who are bent on personal advantage and on outstripping competitors in the great race to Nowhere. These acute persons are quite aware that Intelligence might make an invaluable slave, only you cannot keep its nose, with any regularity, to the grindstone. In default of such practical usefulness it may be worth hiring, as one buys a yacht or an old master, for a mark of wealth and being in the know. But let us have none of your whys and wherefores! Besides, the Rulers of Men have by this time mostly recognized that Intelligence is harder to deal with than any number of High Principles, for you cannot hope to bamboozle it into serving you unawares.

But Intelligence, though thus in some quarters deservedly unpopular is adored by all who have it; and that is the reason why, once it has got a footing in the world, it is bound to increase and multiply and eventually conquer its promised land.

PROTEUS AND ETHICS

I have just come across a passage from Huxley’s famous Romanes Lecture, read thirty years ago and long since forgotten; and which has brought home to me all our elusive Proteus has been doing in the domain of ethics; moreover the share of Intelligence in confirming those changes. Huxley is pointing out a fact which he finds disconcerting, namely, “that ethical nature, while born of cosmic nature, is necessarily at enmity with its parent.” The allusion to the harmony reigning in Victorian families may make one smile, like some well-bred Du Maurier illustration. But how those words bring back what some of us are old enough to have suffered in days when Free Thought drew a terrifying line between religious dogmas and moral ones, clinging to these to steady itself after jettisoning the others! One’s youthful deistic anguish (as cruel, perhaps, as any believer’s sense of God’s forsaking him) at discarding God for insufficient morality, was merely transferred to one’s terms with Huxley’s ogre Cosmos, devouring the moral instincts itself had begotten. Occupied as my studies then were with art-history, I can remember wrestling with the horrid inconsistency of the art of Michael Angelo and Rafael having arisen in a civilization described by Taine as partaking of the brothel and the cut-throat’s den. And I remember the heavenly relief of hitting on the notion that, since such art is not born in a day, it must have been begotten and incubated during the Franciscan Age, immune from all Borgian infections. Of course, the generation immediately younger than mine was taught by Nietzsche that Michael Angelo’s greatness was, on the contrary, due to presiding Renaissance villainy; but that pseudo-Nietzschian generation is, in its turn, superannuated, and the cult of immoralism along with it. Not only because paradoxes do not bear repetition, but for another reason which that quotation from Huxley has made me realize. Namely, that we have left off thinking of art as either moral or immoral, simply because morality no longer holds the same place in our thoughts as, say, in those of Ruskin, George Eliot, or, as that quotation shows, even in those of Huxley. Not the same (if one may say so, ubiquitous) place; a place more clearly defined, but only the more important, ever since Intelligence, ferreting about among Golden Boughs, Religion of the Semites, and similar books, has quietly stripped from our moral valuations that half-supernatural, half-æsthetic halo which is but the shrunken religious involucrum wherein they came into the world. The “problem of evil” has already become the problem not of its toleration by God, but of its diminution by Man. That is the great change we are still witnessing; a change, I cannot but think, greater than any brought about by the material applications of science, and implying a deliverance from individual suffering not less than that we owe to Pasteur and to Lister.

Whether we notice it or not, Morality is already taking a new status, independent alike of an absentee (or absent) Deity, and of an indifferent Cosmos. But its new domain, narrow and self-governing, essentially sui generis, has sanctions and imperatives only the stronger for being man-made and man-regarding. And, one may add, only the more austerely binding on the present that we shall recognize them as different from those of the Past and different, no doubt, from those into which the Future will transform them.

Thus we are already conceiving of punishment only as a mechanism, successful or not, for social defence. And we scarcely ever hear more than the last echo of those incentives to virtue and deterrents from vice of the Sandford and Merton type of my own childhood’s copybooks. Still less of the Stoical, and (alas!) Platonic mendacities about remorse torturing evil-doers, and the unhappy life of Browning’s Instans Tyrannus with his “Then I was afraid.” Neither do we talk any longer of the virtuous glows which (failing the increase of flocks and herds!) used to reward the virtuous acts of the generation adorned by Butler’s Mr. Pontifex. We are getting to think of our own virtues, supposing we have any, as conducive not to our own advantage but to that of other folk.

Consonantly with the psychologist’s recognition that, of the two polar feelings determining human action, the (positive) attraction of pleasure is far less potent than the (negative) repulsion of pain, it seems as if our future ethics would emphasize not good actions but bad ones. That will be following up the rule-of-thumb wisdom of the Commandments, of which the surviving ones are all “thou shalt not”; the positive ones about loving God and honouring Father and Mother having become either difficult to enforce or optional. I am glad of that word optional, because it leads to the remark that Intelligence is surely abolishing that neutral territory whence “good actions” can issue at “good” people’s good pleasure and as an expression of their goodness, but which no one has a right to insist upon; indeed, which they have a perfect right to withhold, since they are patted on the back for doing them, or have their hands kissed, as children were taught to kiss those of the “revered author of their being.” I expect that before so very long Intelligence may bluntly suggest that if the action, whatever it happen to be, is really good, that must mean that it is really needed; and if it is really needed, your fellow men can claim it and oblige you to claim it from your unwilling self. And to dishonour that claim may become in their eyes (mirrored in your own), mean, disgraceful, dirty. In the language of contemporary youth, it will not be decent. That substitution of the word decency for the word virtue gives, methinks, the clue to the future revaluation of our moral standards. It implies, as I have suggested, a more intelligent and, in some ways, more indulgent, morality; but a morality on the whole more austere, a stark notion of duty armed with the relentless imperative which nowadays makes us abashed at the revelation in ourself of physical cowardice or bodily dirtiness. A morality, I venture to add, eventually able to do without the adornments coming under the head of “Moral Beauty.”

“No, we may not be as moral as they (i.e. the older generation) are, but we are fifty times decenter.”――G. B. Stern, Tents of Israel, 1924; p. 244.

And, speaking of a future standard of “decency,” there will necessarily come sundry revaluations quite intolerable to our present morality. I will not speak (since far too much is nowadays being spoken concerning what, after all, is but a small part of conduct) about such revaluations of sexual morals as Dædalus prognosticates from transplantation of ovaries. That, and coming facilitations for changing one’s sex, cannot, indeed, fail to modify family arrangements; although I have greater belief in the effects of future methods of producing and exchanging, not offspring, but other commodities, and the consequent alteration in our tenure and conception of property. Indissoluble marriage, which already strikes some of us as scarcely decent, will lose its practical utility once inheritance is more or less abolished, and the subsistence and education of children no longer a charge on parents. Nor is this all: a more restricted practice and therefore habitual notion of ownership may at some distant day educate men and women, parents and children, lovers and friends, nay, masters and disciples, to admit Proteus even into the impregnable stronghold and inviolable sanctuary of human selfishness called Love. The “marriage of true minds” may, like the other one, come to be supplemented by honourable divorce. Exclusive reciprocal attachment, surely of all spiritual essences the most delicate, if not most volatile, may cease to be regarded as an inalienable piece of property, guaranteed by honour more terrible than law; and which, while all else (and ourselves most!) alters and shifts, cannot be altered and shifted without guilt of theft. There may come an end to the ideal of such fidelity as implies the claim of him or her once preferred to be preferred for ever; the duty also of continuing to prefer once having begun. Like much of the morality of a more intelligent age, “decent” behaviour in matters of sentiment will be based less upon an ought than an is. And I can conceive that such a change may make love’s tenure less insecure and less routinish and perfunctory. It will, at least, save one of the finest kinds of happiness (and the multiplying factor of many other ones) not indeed from the passing misery of change, but from the ignominy of claimed or accepted sacrifice, and the cruel pollution of jealousy, not between lovers only, but between all who love. And when there shall be applied to love the solemn saying “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” we may learn to temper our loss by the intenser gratitude for whatever, even if only for a time, has been ours.

As with fidelity in love, so also with “loyalty” to persons, even to causes and ideas. But such, too often degrading, loyalty will, I imagine, be more than compensated for by the condemnation of a new sin against the Holy Ghost, and by insistence on a minimum (at least!) of consistency in one’s own ideas and a minimum of conformity between one’s judgment of others and one’s judgment of oneself: the mote in one’s brother’s eye awakening the suspicion of the beam in one’s own.

At the same time (which is not our time!), and as Intelligence takes on a leading part in morals, there will come the indulgent recognition that such a “decency” as we may exact (or try to exact) from ourselves, cannot, any more than personal cleanliness in our own day, be exacted from all our neighbours. It may take a good many transformations of Proteus before the mote can always be removed from our brother’s eye, even supposing the beam to have been taken away from our own. It is no easy matter to be always clean inside and out, especially when, like the little boy in Stevenson’s rhyme, “your dear Papa is poor,” poor in spirit, perchance one of a long line of moral paupers. Neither is “decency” always attainable where there has been no past charwoman to prepare your easy tidiness at expense of previous dirty hands. Still less when, as nowadays, wallowing in excess or in cruelty is the only excitement many people can get out of life. Hence it may be a long while yet before the bare decencies of the spirit, even if recognized for such, can lose the value of rarity and the status of virtues. For, let us remember that, the fouler mankind’s surroundings and sores, the greater the need for incense and myrrh and even for the questionable odour of sanctity. Is not early Christianity’s, say St. Paul’s, insistence on chastity and mansuetude the expression of the otherwise inexpressible bestiality, cruelty, and vaingloriousness of decadent Rome? And what is the foolish Franciscan laudation of beggary save the measure of mediæval rapine and simony?

So, for the time being and the world as it may, alas! long continue, mankind will need something besides a taste for moral decency, to wit, an admiration for generous, nay, quixotic impulses and for tender sensibilities. These Intelligence, respectful towards the need for them, can neither create, nor, except by negative measures, even increase. But it can do something as necessary. Intelligence, and only Intelligence, can see to it that, even to-day, such rare and precious impulses and sensibilities be not diverted to evil results, wasted in barren self-sacrifice, or the fostering of hide-bound selfishness. Wasted, above all, in hecatombs to the Molochs of collective superstition, like the one which is only just over, and may begin again to-morrow.

III

PROTEUS AND ÆSTHETICS

“If there be any truth in these forecasts of what your fine Intelligence may bring about or justify in the domain of ethics, then” (it’s a certain kind of reader interrupting), “then may I never enter, nay, cast a glance into this detestable world of rationalized righteousness! Human do you call it, because you have made it godless? What is this Intelligence of yours worth if it fails to perceive that God exists because Man has need of Him; and that the true mission of virtue, of truth, of heroism, is not to make the world more endurable, but to satisfy our deepest human craving, that for greater harmony and loveliness, for deeper, steadier passion than otherwise life affords?”

My answer is that such a craving will become stronger, or at least wider-spread, in proportion as mankind grows more intelligent, therefore less exhausted by struggling against adverse circumstances, inbred defects and inherited superstitions. In proportion, likewise, as it will have learned to value its own virtues as they can minister to man’s prosperity and betterment. Nay, more: the time will come when we shall turn with disgust and wrath at their cultivation for any other purpose; and when pleasure in virtue and in heroism for its own sake may come to be accounted so much æsthetic dilettantism, questionable and well-nigh obsolete. For with the orientation of morals towards human usefulness, towards dutifulness conceived as decency, people will get to understand that what man craves for as consolation and enhancement, the passion deeper and steadier, the harmony more complete than real life furnishes, Man creates for himself in poetry and art, and in the things of reality seen as poetry and art. In all this he has made himself a realm where truth is never betrayed, because in its sheer existence true and false become words without a meaning; moreover, where the deepest and highest passions are satisfied without being misapplied or wasted, because satisfied by their mere expression. Art and whatever the poor word Art may stand for――is the man-made sanctuary of the legitimate, the innocent, the immaculately decent, because it is closed to the shifting needs, the partial truths, above all, the mine and thine, which trouble real life. This, in its way, is also a realm of otherness, inasmuch as it transcends the self with its here and its now. Yet an otherwise not merely recognized by Intelligence, but made by the heart’s desire out of the heart’s own substance and in desire’s own shape; for of such are the forms of the painter and sculptor, no less than the counterfeit presentments of the poet. Above all, in the twin arts of architecture and of music do we already meet the clarified embodiment of the longing and clinging, the solemn appeasement and victorious stress and fulfilment of human passion. Here, in art’s interludes of life, we can obtain what religious creeds lay open to the reproach of being false because they give it for true; and what love seeks to make unchanging, only to taste the bitterness of change. So that many as have been and will be the successive responses to our æsthetic cravings, the manifold satisfactions thereof, embodying as they do the purified essence of our feelings and activities, will, in the endless shifting of our valuations, perhaps constitute the one region where we need not be watching for Proteus.

PROTEUS AND INTELLECTUAL MANNERS

Though many other causes will bring about such moral revaluations as I have mentioned, Intelligence will play its part in justifying them. But Intelligence will itself effectuate great changes, methinks, in the minor moral realm of intellectual manners. For instance, proscribing perfunctoriness; making us ashamed, which we are not, of offering in the guise of opinion much which we know to be stop-gap and shoddy. The condemnation of perfunctoriness will lead to discarding heckler’s tricks and dialectic pit-falls like that concerning the future status of the widow of seven successive husbands, wherewith the Sadducees, though disbelieving in any after-life at all, tried to trip up Jesus. His answer: that there would be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, may stand as the typical silencer to many queries with which debaters embarrass each other without advancing a step in the inquiry. For instance: “then, what do you propose to do?” Well! we may be intelligent enough to know that in nine cases out of ten there is nothing to propose. Since the more habitually we get to regard the Future as resulting from the Present and the Present from the Past, the more often we must admit that we know too little of the hidden Past, and less of the fleeting Present, to make sure what new combinations, including reciprocal neutralizations, are preparing to arise. The oftener we have watched the Old Man Proteus, the less, perhaps, our cocksureness about his next metamorphosis. Or, take another question which intellectual good breeding will refrain from because Intelligence foresees no answer: “In that case, what will you put in its place?” It being, let us say, indissoluble marriage, exclusive private ownership, war (you remember William James was, shortly before 1914, looking out for a surrogate!) or even what used to be called God, but may now be thankful when philosophers (like Mr. Lloyd Morgan) allow it merely adjectival rank as “Deity.” How do you know that it, whatever it is, will leave a place? Do we not daily see that, when things vanish, their place (place in the world, in our thoughts, and also, in our hearts!) are apt to vanish along with them and be forgotten? And among such things as may some day vanish and be forgotten there will, I trust, be the dialectic ju-jitsu which makes many pages even of Plato such dreary reading. Lacking, as the world then did, all discipline of experimental science, such acrobatics may have afforded an indispensable training to logical thought, and a preparation for that latest-comer of all intellectual habits: care for the exact sense in which a word is being employed. Apart, however, from this, controversy of this kind has but a personal value, adding nothing to knowledge, just as nothing is added to wealth when one gamester loses money to another: the personal value of downing an adversary and magnifying oneself by mere comparison, which may be reckoned in some distant Future an intellectual entertainment fit for cads.

Such are a few of the improvements one might foresee in our intellectual manners. Allied with these is one which appertains to our intellectual morals. In another book I have written at some length against the survival of the lawyer’s and politician’s arts of Persuasion, and of the priestly arts of Exhortation and Denunciation, both sets of them intended to influence men to think, feel and act differently from how they would otherwise do, but in compliance with the persuasive person’s wishes. Some day or other such attempts may be accounted impertinent where they fail, and dishonest where they succeed; they and the sway of words should constitute a chapter of intellectual morals.

The Handling of Words.

Returning to mere intellectual manners, I think intellectual prize fights, duels and vendettas, such as wasted half the life of the greatest intellects from Abélard to Samuel Butler, are a little going out of fashion, like the quarrels for precedence we read about in Herbert of Cherbury and such-like: they stop the traffic, make a noise and, after a minute, bore us! Moreover, I fancy I see a reason why, let alone mere spectators of such frays, even those who might have been principals in them will refrain and call them ill-mannered. I mean that, as people grow more intelligent, or more people grow intelligent at all, we shall discover other opportunities for exercising intellectual energy and for obtaining the thrill and uplift of intellectual prowess. There will appear other adversaries to wrestle with and circumvent: Things, Reasons why, the Universe’s riddles; not any longer mere other people trying to make us write ourselves down asses as we try to make them. The finest sport in all the world is hunting Proteus....

Nor will I let myself be heckled with the objection that joys like these are reserved for minds like yours and mine, dear reader, minds Creative.... As if books, pictures, policies, opinions, etc., etc., were created ex nihilo, obeying that august fiat which evolutional philosophy has filched from the old Creator of all things to bestow on every member of the Intelligentsia. No, no, the joys I speak of are unprofessional. And the chief creative joy is that of understanding and appreciating; say the joy of every deserving reader outrunning the straight path of the writer in circles like those of a dog pleased to be taken a walk.

Amateurishness! I can hear those of you pshah! and tosh! who believe in training the (involuntary) attention and who value work less by results than by efforts. Amateurish? Why, of course, that’s just the fun and the good of it. Also the unsought moral gain. For, are we not made more “decent” by these private, irresponsible dealings with the Unknown (at least to us); for instance, those secret inaccurate guesses at geological and historical riddles which make up half the pleasure of a journey? Since these amateurish stalkings of Proteus attain an attractiveness such that personal controversy seems insipid or odious by comparison.

I have had the good fortune once or twice, even in an old-fashioned lifetime, to witness the full flowering of such selfless intellectual happiness: to watch a mind so passionately interested in certain subjects as to care nothing whether the enchanting new ideas were its own or other folks’; nay, whether its own were by them confirmed or utterly demolished. I have seen that unusual spectacle, but once or twice only. For Intelligence has yet to establish its claim to such generous happiness. Once or twice only. But never more clearly have I seen it than in you, Mario Calderoni, dear dead young friend, who have embodied my hopes for the Intelligence of a distant Future, when you will not have received a posthumous recognition and I may be entirely forgotten.

USES AND ABUSES

Considering the great pleasantness, let alone the various uses, of the mental habits I have summed up as Intelligence, it is surprising there should not yet be more of it forthcoming. It has, at present, a way of giving out suddenly in individuals and nations, just when its mixture of light-hearted scepticism and steady hopefulness would seem most needed. By which inadequacy of its supply I am confirmed in the suspicion that Intelligence is a much more recent human accomplishment than the Past’s other achievements in art and poetry and wit and humour would lead us to expect. Indeed, the deserved prestige of that Past, and the consequent survival of its educational and religious traditions and institutions, is very likely what has so strangely delayed the advent of modern Intelligence. And it is their dwindling, itself partly attributable to nascent Intelligence, which has delivered our intellectual activities from sundry blind alleys and sloughs of despond, like those presided over by the terrible, and most unintelligent, word Salvation. For Intelligence, one of whose virtues is abolishing Fear, is itself stifled by the obsession of danger in this world or the next: are we not seeing the most naturally intelligent of all countries fallen into incredible self-defeating stupidity through its present mania for “Security”? It is, of course, evident that, apart from the decay of religious and classical superstition, the growth of Intelligence in our own days has been enormously fostered by increase both of scientific knowledge and of civic liberty, and also, as far as it goes, of well-being; also of opportunities for variety of impression at least for the well-to-do classes. And one hopes there may be other kinds of yet unforeseen novelties coming to Intelligence’s assistance in the Future. Yet, the chief obstacles once removed, my hope is chiefly in what one might call Intelligence’s own natural proliferation. One intelligent mode of thought inevitably leads to another, and puts out of action an unintelligent one. Every intelligent book adds, let us hope, to the intelligence of at least one reader; so that we could almost do without the tremendous launchings-forth of the great challengers, Ruskin, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Nietzsche; even of the more purely beneficent (because lighter-hearted) stirrers-up of thought like Bernard Shaw.

Believing, therefore, in such spontaneous multiplication of Intelligence, I do not find much use for the methods, whereof that one is but an extreme example which is attributed to the late Dr. Metchnikoff, proposing (it is said) to increase the output of genius by judicious doses of syphilitic virus. Surely, the supply of raw genius would be fairly adequate if only we could put it to the best use? And the best use of genius is not, in my opinion, the practical application of science to methods of reciprocal slaughter and devastation. Nor even its application to easier locomotion, intercourse and the cheapening of food, heat and light, except to the extent which would secure more health, more leisure and more opportunity all round; certainly at present not the case. And, speaking for myself, the best use of genius and the most necessary application of science, seems to be teaching people what Descartes called (whatever his precise meaning) the méthode de bien conduire son esprit; at least to the slight degree of not letting obsolete shibboleths and new-fangled catchwords carry us, as they did ten years ago, headlong into the disasters we were trying to avoid.

The next best thing to be done with our existing supply of genius might be to train it to check, by application of common sense and a little modesty, certain ailments inherent in its own constitution, namely: exaggeration, contrariness and, of course, megalomania. Such self-purification, on the part of persons of genius or what passes for such, would save the rest of us the disheartening task of throwing half of their sayings onto the scrap-heap, and of picking out of the scrap-heap some of the sayings of rival persons of genius consigned thereunto at their bidding. There is quite enough to be done in the way of selection, assimilation and elimination (since all understanding means that) without setting such Intelligence as we have to play scavenger to wasteful or slatternly genius.... And yet, and yet.... May not those trashinesses of genius, and the scavengering entailed thereby, be that which secures to Intelligence its highest activities, and in so far fulfils one of Genius’s chief missions? For, after all, Intelligence is the living, changing mass of unprofessional thought, the averaged, habitual thought of the majority of us. And is not the chief use of all such genius as is not set aside in science or in art, rather to make the rest of us think, than to furnish us with ready-made thoughts, however true or sublime? Nay, I would hazard the supposition that it was because the men of the Past were presented with such a mass of ready-made thoughts, creeds, philosophies, and moral formulæ (think of Deuteronomy!) all given for perfect and definitively valid, that there did not appear till so late in the day just what I have called Intelligence, which alone could give that without which the greatest genius is solitary and barren: an audience, a reader, a mind able to carry on the thinking and, in so far, able to eliminate the deciduous, the rubbishy elements of the thought already offered to it.