It never occurs to them to finish the sentence:
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
The fact is that Anglo-Saxon society has got beyond the enduring
stage, and is largely occupied in pitying. There is a general sense
that the people at large, in all moral matters, know better than the
specialists. We will take our creed not from the theologians, but from
Mr. Winston Churchill; and we will take our pathology not from medical
treatises, but from Brieux. We will discuss the underworld at dinner
because, between the fish and the entrée, the thin lady with the pearls
may say something valuable about it. If we are made uncomfortable by
the discussion, it only shows that we are selfish pigs.
Now I see no reason why decent-minded people should not discuss with
their intimate friends anything they please. If you are really intimate
with any one, you are not likely to discuss things unless you both
please. But I do see, still, a beautiful result of the old order that
the new order does not tend to produce. The conventional avoidance
as a general subject of conversation of sex in all its phases was a
safeguard to sensibilities. You cannot, in one sense, discuss sex quite
impersonally, for every one is of one sex or the other. The people who
cry out against the segregation of the negro in government offices
have hardly realized that non-segregation is objected to, not because
of itself, but because of miscegenation. There is a little logic left
in the world; and there are some people who perceive that sequence,
whether they phrase it or not. Social distinctions concern themselves
ultimately with whom you may and whom you may not marry. You do not
bring people together in society who are _tabu_ to each other.
Not that you necessarily expect, out of a hundred dinner-parties, any
one marriage to result; but you assume social equality in the people
seated about your board. Is not, in the last analysis, the only sense
in such a phrase as “social equality,” the sense of marriageability?
Even conventions are not so superficial as they seem; and they have
that perfectly good human basis. It is vitally important to the welfare
and the continuance of the civilized race that sex-sensibilities should
be preserved. Otherwise you will not get the romantic mating; and the
unromantic mating, once well established in society, will give rise
to a perfectly transmissible (whether by heredity or environment, O
shade of Mendel!) brutality. It is brutalizing to talk promiscuously of
things that are essentially private to the individual; just as it is
brutalizing (I believe no one questions that) for a family and eight
boarders to sleep in one room--even a large room. All violations of
essential privacy are brutalizing. We do not take our tooth-brushes
with us when we go out to dinner, and if we did, and did not mind (very
soon we should not), the practice, I am sure, would have a brutalizing
effect. A certain amount of plain speaking is, perhaps, a good thing;
but there is no doubt that at present we have far too much of it to
suit most of us, and I cannot see why we should be made to endure
it just because a few people who are by way of calling themselves
moralists cannot get on with society on its own terms.
It has long been a convention among people who are not cynical that
bodily matters are not spoken of in mixed and unfamiliar gatherings. Of
course, our great-grandmothers were prudes. The reason why they talked
so much about their souls, I fancy, is that there was hardly a limb or
a feature of the human body that they thought it proper to mention.
They were driven back on religion because they held that the soul
really had nothing to do with the body at all. The psychiatrists have
done their best to take away from us that (on the whole) comforting
belief. In America, at least, we are finding it harder and harder to
get out of the laboratory. It is the serious and patriotic American
in _The Madras House_ who asks the astonished Huxtable, “But are
you the mean sensual man?” In _The Madras House_ the question is
screamingly funny; but I cannot imagine any man’s liking, in his own
house, to have the question put to him by a total stranger. The fact
is that we have dragged our Ibsen and our Strindberg and our Sudermann
lovingly across the footlights, and are hugging them to our hearts in
the privacy of our boxes. We have decided that manners shall consist
entirely of morals. It is just possible that, in the days when morals
consisted largely of manners, fewer people were contaminated. You
cannot shock a person practically whom you are totally unwilling to
shock verbally; and if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual
verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.
Above all, when we become incapable of the shock verbal, there will be
nothing left for the unconventional people but the shock practical.
And that, I imagine, is what we are coming to--all in the interests of
morality, be it understood. At no time in history, perhaps, have the
people who are not fit for society had such a glorious opportunity to
pretend that society is not fit for them. Knowledge of the slums is
at present a passport to society--so much the parlor philanthropists
have achieved--and all they have to do is to prove that they know their
subject. It is an odd qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen
and ladies are always credulous, especially if you tell them that they
are not doing their duty.
Moreover, when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble
in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about,
you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precocious
curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about
life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly
advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and
who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by
their information? If we discuss the pathology of divorce with the
first-comer, what is to prevent divorce from becoming, in the end, as
natural as daily bread? And if nothing is to be _tabu_ in talk,
how many things will remain _tabu_ in practice? The human race is,
in the end, as relentlessly logical as that. Even the aborigines that
we have occasionally mentioned turn scandals over to the medicine-man,
and keep a few delicate silences themselves. Perhaps we are “returning
to Nature,” as the Rousseauists wanted us to; with characteristic
Anglo-Saxon thoroughness, going the savages one better. But it is a
pity to forget how to blush; for though in the ideal society a blush
would never be forced to a cheek, it would not be because nothing was
considered (as a German might say) blushworthy. Each man’s private
conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer:
he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within
himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings,
however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from
crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like
to confess to people with a code. I do not contend that that is a
high form of morality; but it has certainly saved society a good many
practical unpleasantnesses. And we are clearly courting the danger
of essentially undiscussable actions when we admit every action to
discussion.
I saw it seriously contended in some journal or other, not long ago,
that, whether any other women were enfranchised or not, prostitutes
ought undoubtedly to have the vote, because only thus could the social
evil be effectively dealt with. Incredible enough; but there it was.
Not many people, perhaps, would agree with that particular reformer;
but undoubtedly there is a mania at present, in the classes that used
to be conventional, for getting one’s information from the other camp.
It is valuable to know the prostitute’s opinion--facts never come
amiss; but why assume that we have only to know it to hold it? Is it
not conceivable that other generations than our own have known her
opinions, and that lines of demarcation have been drawn because a lot
of people, as intelligent as we, did not agree with her? The present
tendency, however, is to consider every one’s opinion important, in
social and ethical matters, except that of respectable folk. My own
pessimistic notion is, as I have hinted, that the philanthropic assault
on the conventional code has come primarily from people who were too
ignorant, or too lazy, or too undisciplined, to submit to the code;
and that the success of the assault results from the sheer defenceless
niceness--the mingled altruism and humility--of the people accused
of conventionality. At all events, the fact is that our reticences
have somehow become cases of cowardice, and our rejections forms of
brutality. We are all a little pathetic in our credulity, and we are
very like Moses Primrose at the fair. Well: let us buy green spectacles
if we must; but let us, as long as we can, refuse to look through them!
It may seem a far cry from “temperament” to social service. I have
known a great many people who went in for social service, and I do
not think it is. The motives of the heterogeneous foes of convention
may lie as far apart as the Poles (one Pole is very like the other,
by the way, as far as we can make out from Peary and Amundsen) but
the object is the same: to destroy the complicated fabric which the
centuries have lovingly built up. (Even if you call it “restoration,”
it is apt to amount to the same thing, as any good architect knows.) At
the bar of Heaven, sober Roundheads and drunken rioters will probably
be differently dealt with; but here on earth, both have been given to
smashing stained-glass windows. Many of us do not believe in capital
punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot
give. The iconoclasts do the same thing; for civilization, whether
it be perfect or not, is a fruit of time. Conventions are easy to
come by, if you are willing to take conventions like those of the
Central Australians. The difference between a perfected and a barbaric
convention is a difference of refinement, in the old alchemical sense.
A lot of the _tabu_ business is too stupid and meaningless for
words. Civilization has been a weeding-out process, controlled and
directed by increasing knowledge. We have infinitely more conventions
than the aborigines: we simply have not such silly ones. The foes of
modern convention are not suggesting anything wiser, or better, or more
subtle: they are only attacking all convention blindly, as if the very
notion of _tabu_ were wrong. The very notion of _tabu_ is
one of the tightest notions in the world. Better any old _tabu_
than none, for a man cannot be said to be “on the side of the stars” at
all, unless he makes refusals. What the foes of convention want is to
have all _tabu_ overthrown. It is very dull of them, for even if
a cataclysm came and helped them out--even if we were all turned, over
night, into potential fossils for the delight of future scientists--the
next beginnings of society would be founded on _tabu_. We shudder
at the Central Australians; we should hate life on their terms. But I
would rather live among the Warramunga than among the twentieth-century
anarchists, for I cannot conceive a more odious society than one
where nothing is considered indecent or impious. We may think, that
the mental agility of the Warramunga could be better applied. Well:
in time, it will be. But they are lifted above the brute just in so
far as they develop mental agility in the framing of a moral law,
however absurd a one. I said that their conventions were almost too
complicated for us to master. That, I fancy, is because any mind they
have, they give to their conventions. It is the natural consequence
of giving your mind to science and history and philology and art,
that you simplify where you can; also, that your conventions become
purified by knowledge. Even the iconoclasts of the present day do not
want us to throw away such text-book learning as we have achieved.
They do ask us, though, to throw away the racial inhibitions that we
have been so long acquiring. Is it possible that they do not realize
what a slow and difficult business it is to get any particular opinion
into the instincts of a race? Only the “evolution” they are so fond of
talking about can do that. Perhaps we ought to take comfort from the
reflection. But it is easier to destroy than to build up; and they are
quite capable of wasting a few thousand years of our time.
No: the iconoclasts want to bring us, if possible, lower than the
Warramunga. Some of them might be shocked at the allegation, for some
of them, no doubt, are idealists--after the fashion of Jean-Jacques,
be it understood. These are merely, one may say respectfully,
mistaken: for they do not reckon with human nature any more than do
the socialists. But the majority, I incline to believe, are merely the
natural foes of dignity, of spiritual hierarchy, of wisdom perceived
and followed. They object to guarded speech and action, because they
themselves find self-control a nuisance. So, often, it is; but if the
moral experience of man-kind has taught us anything, it has taught us
that, without self-control, you get no decent society at all. When
the mistress of Lowood School told Mr. Brocklehurst that the girls’
hair curled naturally, he retorted: “Yes, but we are not to conform
to nature; I wish these girls to become children of grace.” We do not
sympathize with Mr. Brocklehurst’s choice of what was to be objected
to in nature; we do not, indeed, sympathize with him in any way, for
he was a hypocrite. But none the less, it is better to be, in the
right sense, a child of grace than a child of nature. Attila did not
think so; and Attila sacked Rome. We may be sacked--the planet is
used to these _débâcles_--but let us not, either as a matter of
mistaken humility or by way of low strategy, pretend that the Huns were
Crusaders!