confess we haven't such a thing as a Little Moral left, except in the
copy-books. Big Morals are everywhere, writ large for all the world
to see; we don't trouble about them because they do not individually
concern us--they are merely the names and forms that help to keep
things going. But little morals are gone out of fashion entirely. It
is rather perplexing when we come to think of it. Because we ought
to be moral, strictly moral; and feeling that we ought to be, we
have to pretend that we are. Sometimes we find it difficult to keep
up the game, but as a rule we succeed fairly well. Only we know, you
know, that a "little moral" is a bore. That is why, in our heart of
hearts, we will have nothing to do with it. For example, it is not
on the lines of "little morality" that we should run up bills. But
we do run them up. Sometimes, too, without the smallest intention of
paying them. It is not in the path of unselfish virtue that we should
give our dear friends wine from the "stores" at "store" prices, while
we carefully reserve our old Chambertin and Chateau d'Yquem for our
own special drinking; but we do this sort of thing every day. And yet
we love our dear friends--oh! how we love them! we would do anything
for them, anything--except produce our Chambertin. And it is not, I
believe, a "little moral," _i.e._, a copy-book maxim, that we should
fall in love with our neighbour's wife. But that is just precisely
the most delightful among our modern fashionable amusements. Our
neighbour's wife is the most interesting woman in our social set.
Our neighbour's daughter is not half so interesting. Because our
neighbour's daughter is generally marriageable; our neighbour's wife
is only divorceable--hence her superior charm. The scandalous and
rude statement, "Whoso looketh on his neighbour's wife to lust after
her, hath already committed----" No, no! I will not defile delicate
ears polite with pure New Testament language. It is too strong; it is
painfully strong--quite unpleasant--a thunderous speech uttered by the
holiest lips that ever breathed man's breath, but it is shocking, and
gives our nerves an unpleasant thrill. Because we do look after our
neighbour's wife a good deal nowadays; "neigh" after her is the old
Scriptural term for our latter-day custom, which has been set in vogue
by the most distinguished examples of aristocracy among us. And our
neighbour's wife's husband is a capital butt for our "chaff"; we like
him, oh yes, we always like him: we go and stay with him for weeks, and
shoot game in his preserves, and ride his best horses; he is a capital
fellow, by Jove, but an awful fool. Yes, so he is. Our neighbour's
wife's husband is generally a fool. His dense noddle never discerns
any way out of his dishonour but the crooked path of the law. I haven't
got a wife--praise be to heaven!--but if I had, and I found any "noble"
personage disposed to "neigh" after her, I know what I should do with
him. I should trounce him with a tough cowhide thong till his "blue
blood" declared itself, till his "nobility" roared for mercy. Whether
he were prince, duke, lord, or plain "Mister," he would be black as
well as "blue" before I had done with him. Of course the law would have
to come in afterwards by way of a summons for assault, but who would
not pay liberally for the satisfaction of thrashing a low scoundrel?
Besides, viewed in the most practical light, it would cost less than
the business of divorce, besides having the immense advantage of giving
no satisfaction to the guilty parties concerned.
By Heaven, there are some men I know whom I would kick in the way
of pure friendship, if a kick would rouse them to a sense of their
position--men whose wives are openly shamed, the whole public knowing
of their flagrant, unblushing infidelity--men who stand by and look
on at their own disgrace, and yet presume to offer the "example" of a
public career to the "lower" classes. And how these "lower" despise
them; how they who still do call a spade a spade are filled with honest
scorn for such "distinguished" cowards! Well, well, I shall do no
good, I warrant, by heating my blood in the cause of the worthless and
degraded; fidelity in wives, manly principle in husbands, are "little
morals," and seem to have gone out with the jewelled snuff-boxes and
rapiers of old time.
Among other of these "little morals" it used to be tacitly understood
that "gentlemen" should preserve a certain delicacy of speech when
conversing before "ladies." This idea appears to be almost obsolete.
Men have no scruple nowadays in talking about their special ailments to
women (and not old women either), and they will allude to the various
parts of their bodies affected by those ailments in the most frankly
disgusting manner. At a supper-party given by one of the most exalted
of noble dames not long ago, I heard a brute detailing the ins and
outs of his "liver" trouble to an embarrassed looking young woman of
about eighteen. As for the ugly word "stomach," it is commonly used in
various circles of the _beau-monde_, and the most revolting details
of medicine and surgery are frequently dealt with in what used to be
termed "polite conversation." That ugly old women, and fat, greasy
matrons love to chatter about their own and their friends' illnesses,
is of course an accepted fact, but that men should do so before a
casual company of the married and unmarried "fair" is a new and highly
repulsive phase of "social intercourse." I remember hearing the editor
of a well-known magazine talk with a pretty young unmarried woman
concerning the possibilities of her sex in Art, and after the utterance
of many foolish platitudes, he brought his remarks to a brusque
conclusion with the following words: "Oh yes, I admire gifted women,
but, after all, their genius is bound to be interfered with and marred
by the _bearing of children_." Coarse ruffian as he was, I suppose the
surprised, hot blush that stained the poor girl's face was agreeable
to his low little soul, while I, for my part, yearned to knock him
down. His words, and above all, his manner, implied that he in his
fatuous mind considered every woman bound, willy-nilly, to submit
herself to the passions of man, be she saint or sinner. "The bearing
of children," as he put it, is, according to natural animal law, the
prime business of the average woman's life, average women being seldom
fit for anything else. But it has to be conceded that there are women
above the average, who, gifted with singular powers of ambition and
attainment, sweep on from one intellectual triumph to another, and do
so succeed in quelling the natural animalism that they do not consider
themselves bound to "bring forth and multiply" their kind. With
brilliant, fiery-souled Bashkirtseff, they exclaim: "Me marier et avoir
des enfants! Mais chaque blanchisseuse peut en faire autant!"
And in her next sentence the captive genius cries: "Mais qu'est ce que
je veux? Oh, vous le savez bien. Je veux la gloire!" And "la gloire,"
despite the opinions of the vulgar little editor aforementioned, does
not precisely consist in having babies, in hushing their frantic yells
hour after hour, and wiping their perpetually dribbling noses, what
time the fathers of these "blessings" sleep and snore in peace. "La
gloire" assumes an inviting aspect to many feminine souls to-day, and
the "joys of marriage" pale in comparison. It is rather a dangerous
seed to sow, this "la gloire," in the hitherto tame fields of woman's
life and labour, and the harvest promises to astonish the whole world.
That is, provided women will be original and not imitate men. At
present they imitate us too closely, and even in the question of coarse
freedom of speech they ape the masculine example. If a man insists
on talking about his "liver" a woman will bring her "leg" into the
conversation in order to be even with him. The vulgar word "ripping"
slips off the tongue of a well-bred young woman as easily as though she
were a rough schoolboy. And so on through the whole gamut of slang. As
a casually interested spectator of these things, I would respectfully
inform the "fair" that as long as they elect to "follow" instead of
"lead," so long will their efforts to attain eminence be laughed at and
contemptuously condemned. A painful flabby-mindedness distinguishes
many of the sex feminine, an inviting readiness to be "sat upon" which
is perhaps touching, but also ridiculous. If you take up an art,
dear ladies, you require to be strong if you ever wish to consummate
anything worth doing. Art accepts no half measures. You will need to
live solitary and eat the bread of bitterness, with tears for wine.
Consolations you will have doubtless, but they will come slowly, and
not from without, only from within. An ethereal ice-air will surround
and sever you from the common lot, you will be lifted higher and
higher into a cold, pure atmosphere that will require all your force
of lung to breathe without losing life in the effort. If you can stand
it--well! if not, better be Bashkirtseff's "blanchisseuse qui pent
faire autant."
Is it worth while, among "little morals," to mention gambling? I
trow not? Everybody gambles, from the men on the Stock Exchange to
the princes of the blood. We gamble on the turf, in the clubs, and
in our own homes, with the most admirable persistency. Any trifling
excuse serves, as, for example, a man asked me the other day to risk a
sovereign on the question as to whether a certain music-hall artiste's
Christian name began with a P. or a W. I declined the offer, not being
interested in music-hall artistes. And this brings me to a final point
in our "little morals," namely, the point of considering how utterly
and finally some of us have kicked over the traces with regard to
preserving the respectability and virtue of our women. We frequently
allow women to do things nowadays that may, or will, in the end
degrade them, while we put obstacles in all directions to retard their
elevation to distinction in the arts or sciences. We hate the idea of
their having a voice in the government of the country, but we do not at
all mind their appearing half naked to dance before us on the stage.
We are hardly civil to the young daughters of our aristocratic host,
but we will make a countess of the public dancer of "break-downs."
We will only arrive at an intimate friend's ball in time to eat his
supper, but we will hang about for hours to stare at an advertised
"beauty barmaid." Yet I should not say "we," since I am not guilty of
these things. I am not fond of music-halls, though I confess to finding
them more entertaining than Mr. Irving's hydraulic efforts at tragedy.
Still I daresay my good friend Gladstone patronises them more than I
do. Again, I am not devoted to barmaids. I may here remark a trifling
particular connected with "little morals" which has often struck me.
It is this. A "man about town" will kiss a pretty housemaid or any
other "low-class" woman he fancies without considering himself demeaned
by the act. Now, how is it that a lady of equal position never wishes
to kiss a footman or a waiter at a restaurant? One would think the
situation as tempting to one sex as another. But no. The "lady" would
consider herself insulted if kissed by a footman; the "gentleman"
chuckles with ecstasy if kissed by the housemaid. Why is this thus? I
am inclined to think that here the "fair sex" score the winning number
in the trifling matter of self-respect.
And now we have come soundly upon the cause of our open disregard of
"little morals." It is this: loss of self-respect. We do not respect
ourselves any longer, probably because we do not find ourselves worthy
of respect. We cannot respect a creature who is ready to sell soul,
body, sentiment, and opinion for hard cash, but that creature is
Ourself, in this blessed time of progress. Morals are nowhere weighed
against a fat balance at the banker's. Self-respect is ridiculous if
it opposes the gospel of Grab. What will self-respect do for us? Simply
isolate us from our fellow-men! Our fellow-men tell convenient lies,
cheat prettily, steal their neighbour's wives, and yet walk openly in
social daylight; why should not we all do the same? Where is the harm?
We only hurt ourselves if we try to do otherwise, and, what is far
worse, we are looked upon as fools. We cannot possibly be "in the swim"
unless we are good hypocrites. Herein is my sore point. I am unable
to hypocrise. Candour is part of my composition. It is unfortunate,
because it keeps me out of many delightful entertainments where Humbug
rules the roast. Socrates was not a "social" favourite, neither am
I. I am perfectly aware how unpleasantly tedious I have been all the
time I have talked about morals. They are not interesting subjects of
conversation at any time, and people would much rather not hear about
them at all. True! Only in church o' Sundays are we bound (by fashion's
decree) to listen to discourses on morality by a possibly immoral
cleric, but during the week we are, thank Heaven, free to forget that
morals, little or big, exist. This is as it should be in all civilised
communities. Of course we must keep up the _pretence_ of morality--this
is a necessity enforced by law and police. But we may piously assure
ourselves that our "feigning" is the most perfectly finished art in the
world. No nation can out-rival the English in Sunday-show morality.
It is the severest, grandest, dullest Sham ever evolved from social
history. From its magnitude it commands wondering admiration; from its
ludicrous inconsistency it provokes laughter. And I, strolling idler as
I am, stop an instant to stare and smile, and involuntarily I think of
the Ten Commandments. I believe that on one occasion Moses was so angry
that he broke the tablets on which they were graven. This was mere
temper on the part of Moses; he should have known better. He should
have spared the tablets, and broken the Commandments, every one of
them; as we do!
IV.
OF SAVAGES AND SKELETONS.
Pausing awhile to consider the question, I find that on the whole,
most of you, my dear friends, appear to get on excellently well
without either manners or morals. There you all are, taking your
several parts in the pageant before me, pushing, scrambling, and
making generally the most infernal din, the while you move heaven and
earth to serve your own personal interest and pleasure, regardless of
anybody else's convenience, and you manage to make a tolerably good
show of respectability. Your finished education in the great art of
counterfeiting does everything for you. The sum and substance of modern
culture is in the one line, "Assume a virtue though you have it not."
You all "assume" superbly. And yet the best actors tell us they find
their profession entails fatigue and exhaustion at times, and they are
glad when they can throw aside the mask and take to "rough-and-tumble"
in the secrecy of their own homes. For there is one great fact about
us which we all strive to hide, and yet which is for ever declaring
itself, and that is, that despite all our civilisation and progress, we
are savages still. Absolute barbarians are we, born so, made so, and
neither God nor Time shall alter us. Our education teaches us how to
cover Nature with a mask, even as our innocent Scriptural progenitors
covered themselves with fig-leaves; but Nature is not thereby
destroyed. The savage leaps out at all sorts of times and seasons, in
the tempers and habits of the most highly cultured men and women. "My
Lord," unbracing himself at night and unbuttoning his waistcoat to
give freedom to his ample paunch, hiccoughs himself into bed with as
much rude noise as the naked Zulu who has drunk himself nearly dead
on rum. "My Lady," unclasping her fashionable "corset" and allowing
her beauties to expand, sighs, yawns, shakes herself jelly-wise in
freedom, and plumps between the sheets as casually as any squaw in a
wigwam. And it is probable that both my lord and my lady asleep, snore
as loudly and look as open-mouthed and ugly in their slumbers as any
uncivilised brutes ever born. Old Carlyle's notion of the virtue of
clothes was the correct one. What should we do with a naked Parliament?
The clothes maintain order and respectability, but without artificial
covering the whole community would be as they truly are in their heart
of hearts--savages, and no more.
I think we are all pretty well conscious of this, some of us perhaps
painfully so. And what we are painfully aware of we always try to
conceal. Byron, despite his genius, was always thinking of his
club-foot. So are we always voluntarily or involuntarily, thinking
of our savagery. It will out, still, as I say, we do try to keep it
in. We do most faithfully pretend we are civilised, though we know we
never shall be; not in this planet. The thing is manifestly impossible.
The attraction of sex, the love of fighting, the thirst of conquest,
the greed of power: these things are savage elements, like wind and
fire and lightning; they make up life, and so long as life is ours, so
long shall we be savages at heart--savages in our grandest passions
as well as in our meanest. That is why I am disposed to think the
doctrines of Christianity unsuited to the world, because they are so
directly opposed to natural instinct. However, this is a point I am
quite unfitted to argue upon, being of no creed myself, and very much
of a savage to boot. Personally, I would not give a fig for a man who
had nothing of the savage about him. I have met the kind of fellow
often, especially among the literary set. "Not that I intend to imply,"
as the G. O. M. sayeth, "that under certain circumstances, and given
certain conditions," the literary set cannot be savage--they can be,
and are, but it is a savagery that is mere palaver, and never comes to
honest fisticuffs. The "literary set" are physically timorous, and not
fond of firearms or manly sports; effeminacy and dyspepsia mark these
gifted creatures for their own. They have "nerves," have the bookish
folk, like fine ladies, and with the "nerves" spite and petulance go as
a matter of course. Real, _bonâ-fide_, fierce savagery is infinitely
preferable to the puling whine or the cynical snarl of little poets
and "society" philosophers; and the company of a bluff soldier who has
"faced fire" is preferable to that of a dozen magazine editors.
Gathering my domino closer about me, I gaze steadily over the circling
noisy throng that whirls before me, and I think of wild tribes and
famished hordes scurrying fiercely along through clouds of sand
over miles of desert, and I see very little difference between the
"cultured" crowd and the hungry "barbarians." Desert, or the road
called Custom; sand or dust in the eyes of moral perception--they come
to very much the same thing in the end. Can it be possible that the
present century is "helping on" civilisation? I don't believe it any
more than I believe that the wretches who flung themselves under the
car of Juggernaut went straight to heaven. The most curious and awful
part of the whole spectacle to me is to realise that all this movement,
clamour, and confusion, should be doomed to end in sudden silence by
and by; such silence, that not a sound from any one of these now living
noisy tongues will stir it by so much as a curse or a groan.
Yes, my friends; deny it if you will that we are all savages (I expect
you to deny it because I assert it, and you would not be human if you
did not contradict me), you will hardly refuse to admit that we are all
skeletons. Our flesh makes our savagery. Our clothes make our morality.
But reduced to our primal selves, we are plain Bones. And in honest,
unadorned Bones, to be positive to the utmost degree of positivism, we
invariably discover ourselves grinning. At what? Ah, who shall say!
Unless it be at our own exquisite fooling with fate, which, truth to
tell, is very exquisite indeed. And, however serious we may look in the
flesh, we must remember our own death's-head is always laughing at us.
Death's-heads are jolly companions. Some of my friends are fond of
wearing imitation ones to remind them of the wide perpetual smile they
carry behind their own fleshly covering. One or two charming ladies
I know carry jewelled death's-heads on their watch-chains, and play
with them in a sufficiently gruesome manner. Lady Dorothy Nevill,
she of shrewd Walpole wit and keen intelligence, wears a conspicuous
ornament given her by our own amiable Prince of Wales--a red coral or
cornelian death's-head, with a couple of diamonds in the eye-sockets.
I wonder what Albert Edward was thinking about when he made the lady
this valuable present, and whether the line, "To this complexion must
we come at last," occurred at all to his memory. Lady Dorothy herself
is particularly fond of the suggestive bauble; she perceives and
appreciates as much as I do the delicate irony of a skull's smile.
And it really needs a good deal of intelligence to understand
death's-heads. A duke I know, of the best possible ducal brand, annoys
me exceedingly by his lack of perception in this regard. The handle
of his walking-stick is an ivory skull, and he is always sucking it.
The effect of this act is indescribable. He seems to be mouthing the
dried and polished cranium of an ancestor. I meet him frequently in the
"row," or Snobs' Parade, where gilded youth goes to stare at gilded
age, by which phrase I mean that the foot-passengers are mostly young
and lissom of limb, while the fine carriages frequently contain naught
but the dried and desolate fragments of old age, or the painted and
bedizened wrecks of youth. It is really quite curious to note how few
pretty or even genial-looking persons are seen in the vehicles that
crowd the Row during a "season." Max O'Rell declares that the entire
show is like Tussaud's wax-work taken out for an airing, but I have
never seen any one so good-looking or so clear-complexioned as wax-work
in a carriage. On foot, yes; there are any number of pretty women and
tolerably well set-up men to be met with strolling about under the
trees, and it is precisely for this reason that whenever I go to the
Park I walk instead of driving, as I prefer pretty women to ugly ones.