He had a philosophy as yet untouched. His stars were the old stars, his
faith the old faith; nor would he recognise that there was any other,
for not to recognise any point of view except his own was no doubt
the very essence of his faith. Wisdom! There was surely none save the
flinging of the door to, standing with your back against the door,
and telling people what was behind it. For, though he also could not
know what was behind, he thought it low to say so. An “atheist,” as he
termed certain persons, was to him beneath contempt, an “agnostic,”
as he termed certain others, a poor and foolish creature. As for a
rationalist, positivist, pragmatist or any other “ist”--well, that was
just what they were. He made no secret of the fact that he simply
could not understand people like that. It was true. “What can they
do--save deny?” he would say. “What do they contribute to the morals
and the elevation of the world? What do they put in the place of what
they take away? What have they got, to make up for what is behind
that door? Where are their symbols? How shall they move and lead the
people? No,” he said, “a little child shall lead the people, and I am
the little child! For I can spin them a tale such as children love,
of what is behind the door.” Such was the temper of his mind that
he never flinched from believing true what he thought would benefit
himself and others. For example, he held a crown of ultimate advantage
to be necessary to induce pure and stable living. If one could not
say: “Listen, children! there it is, behind the door! Look at it,
shining, golden--yours! Not now, but when you die, if you are good.
Be good, therefore! For if you are not good--no crown!” If one could
not say that--what could one say? What inducement hold out? And warmly
he would describe the crown! There was nothing he detested more than
commercialism. And to any one who ventured to suggest that there was
something rather commercial about the idea of that crown, he would
retort with asperity. A mere creed that good must be done, so to speak,
just out of a present love of dignity and beauty--as a man, seeing
something he admired, might work to reproduce it, knowing that he
would never achieve it perfectly, but going on until he dropped, out
of sheer love of going on--he thought vague, futile, devoid of glamour
and contrary to human nature, for he always judged people by himself,
and felt that no one could like to go on unless they knew that they
would get something if they did. To promise victory, therefore, was
most important. Forlorn hopes, setting your teeth, back to the wall,
and such like, was bleak and wintry doctrine, without inspiration in
it, because it led to nothing--so far as he could see. Those others,
who, not presuming to believe in anything, went on, because--as they
said--to give up would be to lose their honour, seemed to him poor lost
creatures who had denied faith; and faith was, as has been said, the
mainspring of his philosophy.
Once, indeed, in the unguarded moment of a heated argument, he had
confessed that some day men might not require to use the symbols
of religion which they used now. It was at once pointed out to him
that, if he thought that, he could not believe these symbols to be
true for all time; and if they were not true for all time, why did he
say they were? He was dreadfully upset. Deferring answer, however,
for the moment, he was soon able to retort that the symbols were
true--er--mystically. If a man--and this was the point--did not stand
by _these_ symbols, by which could he stand? Tell him that! Symbols
were necessary. But what symbols were there in a mere good will; a mere
vague following of one’s own dignity and honour, out of a formless
love of life? How put up a religion of such amorphous and unrewarded
chivalry and devotion, how put up a blind love of mystery, in place of
a religion of definite crowns and punishments, how substitute a worship
of mere abstract goodness, or beauty, for worship of what could be
called by Christian names? Human nature being what it was--it would
not do, it absolutely would not do. Though he was fond of the words
“mystery,” “mystical,” he had emphatically no use for them when they
were vaguely used by people to express their perpetual (and quite
unmoral) reverence for the feeling that they would never find out
the secret of their own existence, never even understand the nature
of the universe or God. Fancy! Mystery of that kind seemed to him
pagan, almost nature-worship, having no finality. And if confronted
by some one who said that a Mystery, _if_ it could be understood,
would naturally not be a mystery, he would raise his eyebrows. It was
that kind of loose, specious, sentimental talk that did so much harm,
and drew people away from right understanding of that Great Mystery
which, if it was _not_ understood and properly explained, was, for
all practical purposes, not a great mystery at all. No, it had all
been gone into long ago, and he stood by the explanations and intended
that every one else should, for in that way alone men were saved;
and, though he well knew (for he was no Jesuit) that the end did not
justify the means, yet in a matter of such all-importance one stopped
to consider neither means nor ends--one just saved people. And as
for truth--the question of that did not arise, if one believed. What
one believed, what one was told to believe, _was_ the truth; and it
was no good telling him that the whole range of a man’s feeling and
reasoning powers must be exercised to ascertain truth, and that, when
ascertained, it would only be relative truth, and the best available to
that particular man. Nothing short of the absolute truth would _he_ put
up with, and that guaranteed fixed and immovable, or it was no good for
his purpose. To any one who threw out doubts here and doubts there, and
even worse than doubts, he had long formed the habit of saying simply,
with a smile that he tried hard to make indulgent: “Of course, if you
believe _that_!”
But he very seldom had to argue on these matters, because people,
looking at his face with its upright bone-formation, rather bushy
eyebrows, and eyes with a good deal of light in them, felt that it
would be simpler not. He seemed to them to know his own mind almost
too well. Joined to this potent faculty of implanting in men a
childlike trustfulness in what he told them was behind the door, he
had a still more potent faculty of knowing exactly what was good for
them in everyday life. The secret of this power was simple. He did not
recognise the existence of what moderns and so-called “artists” dubbed
“temperament.” All talk of that sort was bosh, and generally immoral
bosh; for all moral purposes people really had but one temperament,
and that was, of course, just like his own. And no one knew better
than he what was good for it. He was perfectly willing to recognise
the principle of individual treatment for individual cases; but it
did not do, in practice, he was convinced, to vary. This instinctive
wisdom made him invaluable in all those departments of life where
discipline and the dispensation of an even justice were important. To
adapt men to the moral law was--he thought--perhaps the first duty of a
preceptor, especially in days when there was perceptible a distinct but
regrettable tendency to try and adapt the moral law to the needs--as
they were glibly called--of men. There was, perhaps, in him something
of the pedagogue, and when he met a person who disagreed with him his
eyes would shift a bit to the right and a bit to the left, then become
firmly fixed upon that person from under brows rather drawn down; and
his hand, large and strong, would move fingers, as if more and more
tightly grasping a cane, birch, or other wholesome instrument. He loved
his fellow-creatures so that he could not bear to see them going to
destruction for want of a timely flogging to salvation.
He was one of those who seldom felt the need for personal experience
of a phase of life, or line of conduct, before giving judgment on it;
indeed, he gravely distrusted personal experience. He had opposed, for
instance all relief for the unhappily married long before he left the
single state; and, when he did leave it, would not admit for a moment
that his own happiness was at all responsible for the petrifaction of
his view that no relief was necessary. Hard cases made bad law! But he
did not require to base his opinion upon that. He said simply that he
had been told there was to be no relief--it was enough.
The saying “To understand all is to forgive all!” left him cold. It
was, as he well knew, quite impossible to identify himself with such
conditions as produced poverty, disease and crime, even if he wished
to do so (which he sometimes doubted). He knew better, therefore, than
to waste his time attempting the impossible; and he pinned his faith
to an instinctive knowledge of how to deal with all such social ills:
A contented spirit for poverty; for disease isolation; and for crime
such punishment as would at once deter others, reform the criminal, and
convince every one that law must be avenged and the social conscience
appeased. On this point of revenge he was emphatic. No vulgar personal
feeling of vindictiveness, of course, but a strong state feeling
of “an eye for an eye.” It was the only taint of socialism that he
permitted himself. Loose thinkers, he knew, dared to say that a desire
for retribution or revenge was a purely human or individual feeling
like hate, love, and jealousy; and that to talk of satisfying such
a feeling in the collected bosom of the state was either to talk
nonsense--how could a state have a bosom?--or to cause the bosoms of
the human individuals who administered the justice of the state to feel
that each of them was itself that stately bosom, and entitled to be
revengeful. “Oh, no!” he would answer to such loose-thinking persons;
“judges, of course, give expression not to what they feel themselves
but to what they imagine the state feels.” He himself, for example, was
perfectly able to imagine which crimes were those that inspired in the
bosom of the state a particular abhorrence, a particular desire to be
avenged; now it was blackmail, now assaults upon children, or living on
the earnings of immoral women; he was certain that the state regarded
all these with peculiar detestation, for he had, and quite rightly,
a particular detestation of them himself; and if he were a judge, he
would never for a moment hesitate to visit on the perpetrators of such
vile crimes the utmost vengeance of the law. He was no loose thinker.
In these times, bedridden with loose thinking and sickly sentiment, he
often felt terribly the value of his own philosophy, and was afraid
that it was in danger. But not many other people held that view,
discerning his finger still very large in every pie--so much so that
there often seemed less pie than finger.
It would have shocked him much to realise that he could be considered
a fit subject for a study of extravagance; fortunately, he had not the
power of seeing himself as others saw him, nor was there any danger
that he ever would.