Lay Morals, Robert Louis Stevenson, Chatto and Windus 1911
Edition.
CHAPTER 1
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.
LAY MORALS
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 tomorrow? 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.
LAY MORALS
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.
LAY MORALS
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. ETRE 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