But the question is not really settled. It is merely settled for the
present, but not for the future. It is surely a sign of our weakness
and barbarism that we cannot imagine to-morrow as better than to-day,
and that, for all our vaunted temporal progress and hypocritical talk
of duty, we are yet unable to think and to feel in terms of
improvement and change; but let our habits, like the vilest vested
interests, oppose a veto to the hope and wish for better things.
To realise that _what is_ does not mean what _will be_, constitutes,
methinks, the real spirituality of us poor human creatures, allowing
our judgments and aspirations to pass beyond our short and hidebound
life, to live on in the future, and help to make that _yonside of our
mortality_, which some of us attempt to satisfy with theosophic
reincarnation and planchette messages!
But such spirituality, whose "it shall"--or "it shall not"--will
become an ever larger part of all _it is_, depends upon the courage of
recognising that much of what the past forces us to accept is not good
enough for the future; recognising that, odious as this may seem to
our self-conceit and sloth, many of the things we do and like and are,
will not bear even our own uncritical scrutiny. Above all, that the
lesser evil which we prefer to the greater is an evil for all that,
and requires riddance.
Much of the world's big mischief is due to the avoidance of a bigger
one. For instance, all this naïvely insisted on masculine inability to
obtain the poet's or naturalist's joys without shooting a bird or
hooking a fish, this inability to love wild life, early hours and
wholesome fatigue unless accompanied by a waste of life and of money;
in short, all this incapacity _for being manly without being
destructive_, is largely due among us Anglo-Saxons to the bringing up
of boys as mere playground dunces, for fear (as we are told by parents
and schoolmasters) that the future citizens of England should take to
evil communications and worse manners if they did not play and talk
cricket and football at every available moment. For what can you
expect but that manly innocence which has been preserved at the
expense of every higher taste should grow up into manly virtue unable
to maintain itself save by hunting and fishing, shooting and
horse-racing; expensive amusements requiring, in their turn, a further
sacrifice of all capacities for innocent, noble and inexpensive
interests, in the absorbing, sometimes stultifying, often debasing
processes of making money?
The same complacency towards waste and mischief for the sake of moral
advantages may be studied in the case also of our womankind. The
absorption in their _toilettes_ guards them from many dangers to
family sanctity. And from how much cruel gossip is not society saved
by the prevalent passion for bridge!
So at least moralists, who are usually the most complacently
demoralised of elderly cynics, are ready to assure us.