I do not know if I make my meaning perfectly clear here. By conformity I

do not mean silent conformity. It is a man’s primary duty to convey his

individual difference to the minds of his fellow men. It is because I

want that difference to tell to the utmost that I suggest he should

not leave the assembly. But in particular instances he may find it more

striking and significant to stand out and speak as a man detached from

the general persuasion, just as obstructed and embarrassed ministers

of State can best serve their country at times by resigning office and

appealing to the public judgment by this striking and significant act.

3.15. A DILEMMA.

We are led by this discussion of secession straight between the horns of

a moral dilemma. We have come to two conclusions; to secede is a grave

sin, but to lie is also a grave sin.

But often the practical alternative is between futile secession or

implicit or actual falsehood. It has been the instinct of the aggressive

controversialist in all ages to seize upon collective organizations and

fence them about with oaths and declarations of such a nature as to bar

out anyone not of his own way of thinking. In a democracy, for example,

to take an extreme caricature of our case, a triumphant majority in

power, before allowing anyone to vote, might impose an oath whereby the

leader of the minority and all his aims were specifically renounced. And

if no country goes so far as that, nearly all countries and all churches

make some such restrictions upon opinion. The United States, that land

of abandoned and receding freedoms, imposes upon everyone who crosses

the Atlantic to its shores a childish ineffectual declaration against

anarchy and polygamy. None of these tests exclude the unhesitating liar,

but they do bar out many proud and honest minded people. They “fix” and

kill things that should be living and fluid; they are offences against

the mind of the race. How is a man then to behave towards these test

oaths and affirmations, towards repeating creeds, signing assent to

articles of religion and the like? Do not these unavoidable barriers to

public service, or religious work, stand on a special footing?

Personally I think they do.

I think that in most cases personal isolation and disuse is the greater

evil. I think if there is no other way to constructive service except

through test oaths and declarations, one must take then. This is a

particular case that stands apart from all other cases. The man who

preaches a sermon and pretends therein to any belief he does not truly

hold is an abominable scoundrel, but I do not think he need trouble

his soul very greatly about the barrier he stepped over to get into

the pulpit, if he felt the call to preach, so long as the preaching be

honest. A Republican who takes the oath of allegiance to the King and

wears his uniform is in a similar case. These things stand apart; they

are so formal as to be scarcely more reprehensible than the falsehood of

calling a correspondent “Dear,” or asking a tiresome lady to whom one is

being kind and civil, for the pleasure of dancing with her. We ought to

do what we can to abolish these absurd barriers and petty falsehoods,

but we ought not to commit a social suicide against them.

That is how I think and feel in this matter, but if a man sees the

matter more gravely, if his conscience tells him relentlessly and

uncompromisingly, “this is a lie,” then it is a lie and he must not

be guilty of it. But then I think it ill becomes him to be silently

excluded. His work is to clamour against the existence of the barrier

that wastes him.

I do not see that lying is a fundamental sin. In the first place some

lying, that is to say some unavoidable inaccuracy of statement, is

necessary to nearly everything we do, and the truest statement becomes

false if we forget or alter the angle at which it is made, the direction

in which it points. In the next the really fundamental and most

generalized sin is self-isolation. Lying is a sin only because

self-isolation is a sin, because it is an effectual way of cutting

oneself off from human co-operation. That is why there is no sin in

telling a fairy tale to a child. But telling the truth when it will be

misunderstood is no whit better than lying; silences are often blacker

than any lies. I class secrets with lies and cannot comprehend the moral

standards that exonerate secrecy in human affairs.

To all these things one must bring a personal conscience and be prepared

to examine particular cases. The excuses I have made, for example, for

a very broad churchman to stay in the Church might very well be twisted

into an excuse for taking an oath in something one did not to the

slightest extent believe, in order to enter and betray some organization

to which one was violently hostile. I admit that there may be every

gradation between these two things. The individual must examine his

special case and weigh the element of treachery against the possibility

of co-operation. I do not see how there can be a general rule. I have

already shown why in my own case I hesitate to profess a belief in

God, because, I think, the misleading element in that profession would

outweigh the advantage of sympathy and confidence gained.

3.16. A COMMENT.

The preceding section has been criticized by a friend who writes:--

“In religious matters apparent assent produces false unanimity. There is

no convention about these things; if there were they would not exist.

On the contrary, the only way to get perfunctory tests and so forth

abrogated, is for a sufficient number of people to refuse to take them.

It is in this case as in every other; secession is the beginning of a

new integration. The living elements leave the dead or dying form and

gradually create in virtue of their own combinations a new form more

suited to present things. There is a formative, a creative power in

sincerity and also in segregation itself. And the new form, the new

species produced by variation and segregation will measure itself and

its qualities with the old one. The old one will either go to the wall,

accept the new one and be renewed by it, or the new one will itself be

pushed out of existence if the old one has more vitality and is better

adapted to the circumstances. This process of variation, competition

and selection, also of intermarriage between equally vital and equally

adapted varieties, is after all the process by which not only races

exist but all human thoughts.”

So my friend, who I think is altogether too strongly swayed by

biological analogies. But I am thinking not of the assertion of opinions

primarily but of co-operation with an organization with which, save for

the matter of the test, one may agree. Secession may not involve the

development of a new and better moral organization; it may simply mean

the suicide of one’s public aspect. There may be no room or no need of a

rival organization. To secede from State employment, for example, is

not to create the beginnings of a new State, however many--short of a

revolution--may secede with you. It is to become a disconnected private

person, and throw up one’s social side.

3.17. WAR.

I do not think a discussion of man’s social relations can be considered

at all complete or satisfactory until we have gone into the question of

military service. To-day, in an increasing number of countries, military

service is an essential part of citizenship and the prospect of war lies

like a great shadow across the whole bright complex prospect of human

affairs. What should be the attitude of a right-living man towards his

State at war and to warlike preparations?

In no other connexion are the confusions and uncertainty of the

contemporary mind more manifest. It is an odd contradiction that in

Great Britain and Western Europe generally, just those parties that

stand most distinctly for personal devotion to the State in economic

matters, the Socialist and Socialistic parties, are most opposed to the

idea of military service, and just those parties that defend individual

self-seeking and social disloyalty in the sphere of property are most

urgent for conscription. No doubt some of this uncertainty is due to the

mixing in of private interests with public professions, but much more

is it, I think, the result of mere muddle-headedness and an insufficient

grasp of the implications of the propositions under discussion. The

ordinary political Socialist desires, as I desire, and as I suppose

every sane man desires as an ultimate ideal, universal peace, the merger

of national partitions in loyalty to the World State. But he does

not recognize that the way to reach that goal is not necessarily by

minimizing and specializing war and war responsibility at the present

time. There he falls short of his own constructive conceptions and

lapses into the secessionist methods of the earlier Radicals. We

have here another case strictly parallel to several we have already

considered. War is a collective concern; to turn one’s back upon it, to

refuse to consider it as a possibility, is to leave it entirely to those

who are least prepared to deal with it in a broad spirit.

In many ways war is the most socialistic of all forces. In many ways

military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When

the contemporary man steps from the street of clamorous insincere

advertisement, push, adulteration, under-selling and intermittent

employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane,

into an atmosphere of service and co-operation and of infinitely more

honourable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment

to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do. They

are fed and drilled and trained for better services. Here a man is

at least supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by

self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endowment of research

by commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at profit by

innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the steady

and rapid development of method and appliances in naval and military

affairs! Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil

conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the

progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house

appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty

years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly

heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house

of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory

places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle

or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to

those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a

use now for such superannuated things.

3.18. WAR AND COMPETITION.

What is the meaning of war in life?

War is manifestly not a thing in itself, it is something correlated with

the whole fabric of human life. That violence and killing which between

animals of the same species is private and individual becomes socialized

in war. It is a co-operation for killing that carries with it also

a co-operation for saving and a great development of mutual help and

development within the war-making group.

War, it seems to me, is really the elimination of violent competition as

between man and man, an excretion of violence from the developing

social group. Through war and military organization, and through war and

military organization only, has it become possible to conceive of peace.

This violence was a necessary phase in human and indeed in all animal

development. Among low types of men and animals it seems an inevitable

condition of the vigour of the species and the beauty of life. The more

vital and various individual must lead and prevail, leave progeny and

make the major contribution to the synthesis of the race; the weaker

individual must take a subservient place and leave no offspring. That

means in practice that the former must directly or indirectly kill the

latter until some mitigated but equally effectual substitute for that

killing is invented. That duel disappears from life, the fight of the

beasts for food and the fight of the bulls for the cows, only by virtue

of its replacement by new forms of competition. With the development

of primitive war we have such a replacement. The competition becomes

a competition to serve and rule in the group, the stronger take the

leadership and the larger share of life, and the weaker co-operate in

subordination, they waive and compromise the conflict and use their

conjoint strength against a common rival.

Competition is a necessary condition of progressive life. I do not

know if so far I have made that belief sufficiently clear in these

confessions. Perhaps in my anxiety to convey my idea of a human

synthesis I have not sufficiently insisted upon the part played by

competition in that synthesis. But the implications of the view that I

have set forth are fairly plain. Every individual, I have stated, is

an experiment for the synthesis of the species, and upon that idea my

system of conduct so far as it is a system is built. Manifestly

the individual’s function is either self-development, service and

reproduction, or failure and an end.

With moral and intellectual development the desire to serve and

participate in a collective purpose arises to control the blind and

passionate impulse to survival and reproduction that the struggle for

life has given us, but it does not abolish the fact of selection, of

competition. I contemplate no end of competition. But for competition

that is passionate, egoistic and limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful,

I desire to see competition that is controlled and fair-minded and

devoted, men and women doing their utmost with themselves and making

their utmost contribution to the specific accumulation, but in the end

content to abide by a verdict.

The whole development of civilization, it seems to me, consists in the

development of adequate tests of survival and of an intellectual and

moral atmosphere about those tests so that they shall be neither cruel

nor wasteful. If the test is not to be ‘are you strong enough to kill

everyone you do not like?’ that will only be because it will ask still

more comprehensively and with regard to a multitude of qualities other

than brute killing power, ‘are you adding worthily to the synthesis by

existence and survival?’

I am very clear in my mind on this perpetual need of competition. I

admit that upon that turns the practicability of all the great series of

organizing schemes that are called Socialism. The Socialist scheme must

show a system in which predominance and reproduction are correlated with

the quality and amount of an individual’s social contribution, and so

far I acknowledge it is only in the most general terms that this can be

claimed as done. We Socialists have to work out all these questions far

more thoroughly than we have done hitherto. We owe that to our movement

and the world.

It is no adequate answer to our antagonists to say, indeed it is a

mere tu quoque to say, that the existing system does not present such

a correlation, that it puts a premium on secretiveness and self-seeking

and a discount on many most necessary forms of social service. That is a

mere temporary argument for a delay in judgment.

The whole history of humanity seems to me to present a spectacle of

this organizing specialization of competition, this replacement of the

indiscriminate and collectively blind struggle for life by an organized

and collectively intelligent development of life. We see a secular

replacement of brute conflict by the law, a secular replacement of

indiscriminate brute lust by marriage and sexual taboos, and now with

the development of Socialistic ideas and methods, the steady replacement

of blind industrial competition by public economic organization. And

moreover there is going on a great educational process bringing a

greater and greater proportion of the minds of the community into

relations of understanding and interchange.

Just as this process of organization proceeds, the violent and

chaotic conflict of individuals and presently of groups of individuals

disappears, personal violence, private war, cut-throat competition,

local war, each in turn is replaced by a more efficient and more

economical method of survival, a method of survival giving constantly

and selecting always more accurately a finer type of survivor.

I might compare the social synthesis to crystals growing out of a fluid

matrix. It is where the growing order of the crystals has as yet not

spread that the old resource to destruction and violent personal or

associated acts remains.

But this metaphor of crystals is a very inadequate one, because crystals

have no will in themselves; nor do crystals, having failed to grow in

some particular form, presently modify that form more or less and try

again. I see the organizing of forces, not simply law and police which

are indeed paid mercenaries from the region of violence, but legislation

and literature, teaching and tradition, organized religion, getting

themselves and the social structure together, year after year and age

after age, halting, failing, breaking up in order to try again. And

it seems to me that the amount of lawlessness and crime, the amount of

waste and futility, the amount of war and war possibility and war danger

in the world are just the measure of the present inadequacy of the

world’s system of collective organization to the purpose before them.

It follows from this very directly that only one thing can end war

on the earth and that is a subtle mental development, an idea, the

development of the idea of the world commonweal in the collective mind.

The only real method of abolishing war is to perceive it, to realize it,

to express it, to think it out and think about it, to make all the world

understand its significance, and to clear and preserve its significant

functions. In human affairs to understand an evil is to abolish it; it

is the only way to abolish any evil that arises out of the untutored

nature of man. Which brings me back here again to my already repeated

persuasion, that in expressing things, rendering things to each other,

discussing our differences, clearing up the metaphysical conceptions

upon which differences are discussed, and in a phrase evolving the

collective mind, lies not only the cures of war and poverty but the

general form of all a man’s duty and the essential work of mankind.

3.19. MODERN WAR.

In our contemporary world, in our particular phase, military and naval

organization loom up, colossal and unprecedent facts. They have the

effect of an overhanging disaster that grows every year more tremendous,

every year in more sinister contrast with the increasing securities and

tolerations of the everyday life. It is impossible to imagine now what a

great war in Europe would be like; the change in material and method has

been so profound since the last cycle of wars ended with the downfall

of the Third Napoleon. But there can be little or no doubt that it

would involve a destruction of property and industrial and social

disorganization of the most monstrous dimensions. No man, I think, can

mark the limits of the destruction of a great European conflict were it

to occur at the present time; and the near advent of practicable flying

machines opens a whole new world of frightful possibilities.

For my own part I can imagine that a collision between such powers as

Great Britain, Germany or America, might very well involve nearly every

other power in the world, might shatter the whole fabric of credit upon

which our present system of economics rests and put back the orderly

progress of social construction for a vast interval of time. One figures

great towns red with destruction while giant airships darken the sky,

one pictures the crash of mighty ironclads, the bursting of tremendous

shells fired from beyond the range of sight into unprotected cities. One

thinks of congested ways swarming with desperate fighters, of torrents

of fugitives and of battles gone out of the control of their generals

into unappeasable slaughter. There is a vision of interrupted

communications, of wrecked food trains and sunken food ships, of vast

masses of people thrown out of employment and darkly tumultuous in the

streets, of famine and famine-driven rioters. What modern population

will stand a famine? For the first time in the history of warfare the

rear of the victor, the rear of the fighting line becomes insecure,

assailable by flying machines and subject to unprecedented and

unimaginable panics. No man can tell what savagery of desperation these

new conditions may not release in the soul of man. A conspiracy of

adverse chances, I say, might contrive so great a cataclysm. There is no

effectual guarantee that it could not occur.

But in spite of that, I believe that on the whole there is far more good

than evil in the enormous military growths that have occurred in the

last half century. I cannot estimate how far the alternative to war is

lethargy. It is through military urgencies alone that many men can be

brought to consent to the collective endowment of research, to

public education and to a thousand interferences with their private

self-seeking. Just as the pestilence of cholera was necessary before men

could be brought to consent to public sanitation, so perhaps the

dread of foreign violence is an unavoidable spur in an age of chaotic

industrial production in order that men may be brought to subserve the

growth of a State whose purpose might otherwise be too high for them to

understand. Men must be forced to care for fleets and armies until they

have learnt to value cities and self development and a beautiful social

life.

The real danger of modern war lies not in the disciplined power of the

fighting machine but in the undisciplined forces in the collective mind

that may set that machine in motion. It is not that our guns and ships

are marvellously good, but that our press and political organizations

are haphazard growths entirely inferior to them. If this present phase

of civilization should end in a debacle, if presently humanity finds

itself beginning again at a lower level of organization, it will not

be because we have developed these enormous powers of destruction but

because we have failed to develop adequate powers of control for them

and collective determination. This panoply of war waits as the test of

our progress towards the realization of that collective mind which I

hold must ultimately direct the evolution of our specific being. It is

here to measure our incoherence and error, and in the measure of those

defects to refer us back to our studies.

Just as we understand does war become needless.

But I do not think that war and military organization will so much

disappear as change its nature as the years advance. I think that the

phase of universal military service we seem to be approaching is one

through which the mass of mankind may have to pass, learning something

that can be learnt in no other way, that the uniforms and flags, the

conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and

devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion and universal

responsibility, will remain a permanent acquisition, though the last

ammunition has been used ages since in the pyrotechnic display that

welcomed the coming of the ultimate Peace.

3.20. OF ABSTINENCES AND DISCIPLINES.

From these large issues of conduct, let me come now to more intimate

things, to one’s self control, the regulation of one’s personal life.

And first about abstinences and disciplines.

I have already confessed (Chapter 2.6) that my nature is one that

dislikes abstinences and is wearied by and wary of excess.

I do not feel that it is right to suppress altogether any part of one’s

being. In itself abstinence seems to me a refusal to experience, and

that, upon the lines of thought I follow, is to say that abstinence for

its own sake is evil. But for an end all abstinences are permissible,

and if the kinetic type of believer finds both his individual and his

associated efficiency enhanced by a systematic discipline, if he is

convinced that he must specialize because of the discursiveness of his

motives, because there is something he wants to do or be so good that

the rest of them may very well be suppressed for its sake, then he must

suppress. But the virtue is in what he gets done and not in what he does

not do. Reasonable fear is a sound reason for abstinence, as when a

man has a passion like a lightly sleeping maniac that the slightest

indulgence will arouse. Then he must needs adopt heroic abstinence, and

even more so must he take to preventive restraint if he sees any motive

becoming unruly and urgent and troublesome. Fear is a sound reason for

abstinence and so is love. Many who have sensitive imaginations nowadays

very properly abstain from meat because of butchery. And it is often

needful, out of love and brotherhood, to abstain from things harmless to

oneself because they are inconveniently alluring to others linked to us.

The moderate drinker who sits at table sipping his wine in the sight of

one he knows to be a potential dipsomaniac is at best an unloving fool.

But mere abstinence and the doing of barren toilsome unrewarding things

for the sake of the toil, is a perversion of one’s impulses. There is

neither honour nor virtue nor good in that.

I do not believe in negative virtues. I think the ideas of them arise

out of the system of metaphysical errors I have roughly analyzed in

my first Book, out of the inherent tendency of the mind to make

the relative absolute and to convert quantitative into qualitative

differences. Our minds fall very readily under the spell of such

unmitigated words as Purity and Chastity. Only death beyond decay,

absolute non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact

is impure. Everything has traces of alien matter; our very health is

dependent on parasitic bacteria; the purest blood in the world has

a tainted ancestor, and not a saint but has evil thoughts. It was

blindness to that which set men stoning the woman taken in adultery.

They forgot what they were made of. This stupidity, this unreasonable

idealism of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties and

exclusions, with partial suicides and secret shames. But we are born

impure, we die impure; it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang

from any saint’s decay, and the chastity of a monk or nun is but

introverted impurity. We have to take life valiantly on these conditions

and make such honour and beauty and sympathy out of our confusions,

gather such constructive experience, as we may.

There is a mass of real superstition upon these points, a belief in a

magic purity, in magic personalities who can say:--

My strength is as the strength of ten

Because my heart is pure,

and wonderful clairvoyant innocents like the young man in Mr. Kipling’s

“Finest Story in the World.”

There is a lurking disposition to believe, even among those who lead

the normal type of life, that the abstinent and chastely celibate are

exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune. The wildest claims are made.

But indeed it is true for all who can see the facts of life simply and

plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile, various creature and

can draw his strength from a hundred varieties of nourishment. He has

physiological idiosyncrasies too that are indifferent to biological

classifications and moral generalities. It is not true that his

absorbent vessels begin their task as children begin the guessing

game, by asking, “Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?” He responds to

stimulation and recuperates after the exhaustion of his response, and

his being is singularly careless whether the stimulation comes as a drug

or stimulant, or as anger or music or noble appeals.

Most people speak of drugs in the spirit of that admirable firm of

soap-boilers which assures its customers that the soap they make

“contains no chemicals.” Drugs are supposed to be a mystic diabolical

class of substance, remote from and contrasting in their nature with

all other things. So they banish a tonic from the house and stuff their

children with manufactured cereals and chocolate creams. The drunken

helot of this system of absurdities is the Christian Scientist who

denies healing only to those who have studied pathology, and declares

that anything whatever put into a bottle and labelled with directions

for its use by a doctor is thereby damnable and damned. But indeed all

drugs and all the things of life have their uses and dangers, and there

is no wholesale truth to excuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness

in these matters. Unless we except smoking as an unclean and needless

artificiality, all these matters of eating and drinking and habit are

matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish to make anything that is

stimulating and pleasurable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely

to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a need that it may become

painful to check or control. The moral rule of my standards is

irregularity. If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue

of sins by asking: “are you a man of regular life?” And I would charge

my penitent to go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving

irregularity; to fast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on

pork and beans or give up smoking or spend a month with publicans and

sinners. Right conduct for the common unspecialized man lies delicately

adjusted between defect and excess as a watch is adjusted and adjustable

between fast and slow. We none of us altogether and always keep the

balance or are altogether safe from losing it. We swing, balancing and

adjusting, along our path. Life is that, and abstinence is for the most

part a mere evasion of life.

3.21. ON FORGETTING, AND THE NEED OF PRAYER, READING, DISCUSSION AND

WORSHIP.

One aspect of life I had very much in mind when I planned those Samurai

disciplines of mine. It was forgetting.

We forget.

Even after we have found Salvation, we have to keep hold of Salvation;

believing, we must continue to believe. We cannot always be at a high

level of noble emotion. We have clambered on the ship of Faith and found

our place and work aboard, and even while we are busied upon it, behold

we are back and drowning in the sea of chaotic things.

Every religious body, every religious teacher, has appreciated this

difficulty and the need there is of reminders and renewals. Faith needs

restatement and revival as the body needs food. And since the Believer

is to seek much experience and be a judge of less or more in many

things, it is particularly necessary that he should keep hold upon a

living Faith.

How may he best do this?

I think we may state it as a general duty that he must do whatever he

can to keep his faith constantly alive. But beyond that, what a man must

do depends almost entirely upon his own intellectual character.

Many people of a regular type of mind can refresh themselves by some

recurrent duty, by repeating a daily prayer, by daily reading or

re-reading some devotional book. With others constant repetition leads

to a mental and spiritual deadening, until beautiful phrases become

unmeaning, eloquent statements inane and ridiculous,--matter for parody.

All who can, I think, should pray and should read and re-read what they

have found spiritually helpful, and if they know of others of kindred

dispositions and can organize these exercises, they should do so.

Collective worship again is a necessity for many Believers. For many,

the public religious services of this or that form of Christianity

supply an atmosphere rich in the essential quality of religion and

abounding in phrases about the religious life, mellow from the use of

centuries and almost immediately applicable. It seems to me that if one

can do so, one should participate in such public worship and habituate

oneself to read back into it that collective purpose and conscience it

once embodied.

Very much is to be said for the ceremony of Holy Communion or the Mass,

for those whom accident or scruples do not debar. I do not think your

modern liberal thinkers quite appreciate the finer aspects of this,

the one universal service of the Christian Church. Some of them are

set forth very finely by a man who has been something of a martyr for

conscience’ sake, and is for me a hero as well as a friend, in a world

not rich in heroes, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his book, “The Meaning

of the Mass.”

With others again, Faith can be most animated by writing, by confession,

by discussion, by talk with friends or antagonists.

One or other or all of these things the Believer must do, for the mind

is a living and moving process, and the thing that lies inert in it is

presently covered up by new interests and lost. If you make a sort of

King Log of your faith, presently something else will be sitting upon

it, pride or self-interest, or some rebel craving, King de facto of your

soul, directing it back to anarchy.

For many types that, however, is exactly what happens with public

worship. They DO get a King Log in ceremony. And if you deliberately

overcome and suppress your perception of and repugnance to the

perfunctoriness of religion in nine-tenths of the worshippers about you,

you may be destroying at the same time your own intellectual and moral

sensitiveness. But I am not suggesting that you should force yourself to

take part in public worship against your perceptions, but only that if

it helps you to worship you should not hesitate to do so.

We deal here with a real need that is not to be fettered by any general

prescription. I have one Cambridge friend who finds nothing so uplifting

in the world as the atmosphere of the afternoon service in the choir of

King’s College Chapel, and another, a very great and distinguished and

theologically sceptical woman, who accustomed herself for some time to

hear from a distant corner the evening service in St. Paul’s Cathedral

and who would go great distances to do that.

Many people find an exaltation and broadening of the mind in mountain

scenery and the starry heavens and the wide arc of the sea; and as I

have already said, it was part of the disciplines of these Samurai of

mine that yearly they should go apart for at least a week of solitary

wandering and meditation in lonely and desolate places. Music again is

a frequent means of release from the narrow life as it closes about us.

One man I know makes an anthology into which he copies to re-read any

passage that stirs and revives in him the sense of broad issues. Others

again seem able to refresh their nobility of outlook in the atmosphere

of an intense personal love.

Some of us seem to forget almost as if it were an essential part of

ourselves. Such a man as myself, irritable, easily fatigued and bored,

versatile, sensuous, curious, and a little greedy for experience, is

perpetually losing touch with his faith, so that indeed I sometimes turn

over these pages that I have written and come upon my declarations and

confessions with a sense of alien surprise.

It may be, I say, that for some of us forgetting is the normal process,

that one has to believe and forget and blunder and learn something and

regret and suffer and so come again to belief much as we have to eat and

grow hungry and eat again. What these others can get in their temples

we, after our own manner, must distil through sleepless and lonely

nights, from unavoidable humiliations, from the smarting of bruised

shins.

3.22. DEMOCRACY AND ARISTOCRACY.

And now having dealt with the general form of a man’s duty and with

his duty to himself, let me come to his attitude to his individual

fellow-men.

The broad principles determining that attitude are involved in things

already written in this book. The belief in a collective being gathering

experience and developing will, to which every life is subordinated,

renders the cruder conception of aristocracy, the idea of a select life

going on amidst a majority of trivial and contemptible persons who “do

not exist,” untenable. It abolishes contempt. Indeed to believe at all

in a comprehensive purpose in things is to abandon that attitude and

all the habits and acts that imply it. But a belief in universal

significance does not altogether preclude a belief in an aristocratic

method of progress, in the idea of the subordination of a number

of individuals to others who can utilize their lives and help and

contributory achievements in the general purpose. To a certain extent,

indeed, this last conception is almost inevitable. We must needs so

think of ourselves in relation to plants and animals, and I see no

reason why we should not think so of our relations to other men. There

are clearly great differences in the capacity and range of experience of

man and man and in their power of using and rendering their experiences

for the racial synthesis. Vigorous persons do look naturally for help

and service to persons of less initiative, and we are all more or less

capable of admiration and hero-worship and pleased to help and give

ourselves to those we feel to be finer or better or completer or more

forceful and leaderly than ourselves. This is natural and inevitable

aristocracy.

For that reason it is not to be organized. We organize things that are

not inevitable, but this is clearly a complex matter of accident and

personalities for which there can be no general rule. All organized

aristocracy is manifestly begotten by that fallacy of classification my

Metaphysical book set itself to expose. Its effect is, and has been in

all cases, to mask natural aristocracy, to draw the lines by wholesale

and wrong, to bolster up weak and ineffectual persons in false positions

and to fetter or hamper strong and vigorous people. The false aristocrat

is a figure of pride and claims, a consumer followed by dupes. He is

proudly secretive, pretending to aims beyond the common understanding.

The true aristocrat is known rather than knows; he makes and serves. He

exacts no deference. He is urgent to makes others share what he knows

and wants and achieves. He does not think of others as his but as the

End’s.

There is a base democracy just as there is a base aristocracy, the

swaggering, aggressive disposition of the vulgar soul that admits

neither of superiors nor leaders. Its true name is insubordination. It

resents rules and refinements, delicacies, differences and organization.

It dreams that its leaders are its delegates. It takes refuge from all

superiority, all special knowledge, in a phantom ideal, the People, the

sublime and wonderful People. “You can fool some of the people all the

time, and all the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the

people all the time,” expresses I think quite the quintessence of this

mystical faith, this faith in which men take refuge from the demand for

order, discipline and conscious light. In England it has never been

of any great account, but in America the vulgar individualist’s

self-protective exaltation of an idealized Common Man has worked and is

working infinite mischief.

In politics the crude democratic faith leads directly to the submission

of every question, however subtle and special its issues may be, to a

popular vote. The community is regarded as a consultative committee of

profoundly wise, alert and well-informed Common Men. Since the common

man is, as Gustave le Bon has pointed out, a gregarious animal,

collectively rather like a sheep, emotional, hasty and shallow, the

practical outcome of political democracy in all large communities under

modern conditions is to put power into the hands of rich newspaper

proprietors, advertising producers and the energetic wealthy generally

who are best able to flood the collective mind freely with the

suggestions on which it acts.

But democracy has acquired a better meaning than its first crude

intentions--there never was a theory started yet in the human mind that

did not beget a finer offspring than itself--and the secondary meaning

brings it at last into entire accordance with the subtler conception

of aristocracy. The test of this quintessential democracy is neither a

passionate insistence upon voting and the majority rule, nor an arrogant

bearing towards those who are one’s betters in this aspect or that, but

fellowship. The true democrat and the true aristocrat meet and are one

in feeling themselves parts of one synthesis under one purpose and one

scheme. Both realize that self-concealment is the last evil, both make

frankness and veracity the basis of their intercourse. The general

rightness of living for you and others and for others and you is to

understand them to the best of your ability and to make them all, to the

utmost limits of your capacity of expression and their understanding and

sympathy, participators in your act and thought.

3.23. ON DEBTS OF HONOUR.

My ethical disposition is all against punctilio and I set no greater

value on unblemished honour than I do on purity. I never yet met a man

who talked proudly of his honour who did not end by cheating or

trying to cheat me, nor a code of honour that did not impress me as

a conspiracy against the common welfare and purpose in life. There

is honour among thieves, and I think it might well end there as an

obligation in conduct. The soldier who risks a life he owes to his army

in a duel upon some silly matter of personal pride is no better to me

than the clerk who gambles with the money in his master’s till. When I

was a boy I once paid a debt of honour, and it is one of the things I

am most ashamed of. I had played cards into debt and I still remember

burningly how I went flushed and shrill-voiced to my mother and got the

money she could so ill afford to give me. I would not pay such a debt of

honour now. If I were to wake up one morning owing big sums that I had

staked overnight I would set to work at once by every means in my power

to evade and repudiate that obligation. Such money as I have I owe under

our present system to wife and sons and my work and the world, and I see

no valid reason why I should hand it over to Smith because he and I have

played the fool and rascal and gambled. Better by far to accept that

fact and be for my own part published fool and rascal.

I have never been able to understand the sentimental spectacle of sons

toiling dreadfully and wasting themselves upon mere money-making to save

the secret of a father’s peculations and the “honour of the family,” or

men conspiring to weave a wide and mischievous net of lies to save the

“honour” of a woman. In the conventional drama the preservation of the

honour of a woman seems an adequate excuse for nearly any offence

short of murder; the preservation that is to say of the appearance of

something that is already gone. Here it is that I do definitely part

company with the false aristocrat who is by nature and intent a humbug

and fabricator of sham attitudes, and ally myself with democracy.

Fact, valiantly faced, is of more value than any reputation. The false

aristocrat is robed to the chin and unwashed beneath, the true goes

stark as Apollo. The false is ridiculous with undignified insistence

upon his dignity; the true says like God, “I am that I am.”

3.24. THE IDEA OF JUSTICE.

One word has so far played a very little part in this book, and that is

the word Justice.

Those who have read the opening book on Metaphysics will perhaps see

that this is a necessary corollary of the system of thought developed

therein. In my philosophy, with its insistence upon uniqueness and

marginal differences and the provisional nature of numbers and classes,

there is little scope for that blind-folded lady with the balances,

seeking always exact equivalents. Nowhere in my system of thought is

there work for the idea of Rights and the conception of conscientious

litigious-spirited people exactly observing nicely defined

relationships.

You will note, for example, that I base my Socialism on the idea of a

collective development and not on the “right” of every man to his own

labour, or his “right” to work, or his “right” to subsistence. All these

ideas of “rights” and of a social “contract” however implicit are merely

conventional ways of looking at things, conventions that have arisen in

the mercantile phase of human development.

Laws and rights, like common terms in speech, are provisional things,

conveniences for taking hold of a number of cases that would otherwise

be unmanageable. The appeal to Justice is a necessarily inadequate

attempt to de-individualize a case, to eliminate the self’s biassed

attitude. I have declared that it is my wilful belief that everything

that exists is significant and necessary. The idea of Justice seems to

me a defective, quantitative application of the spirit of that belief

to men and women. In every case you try and discover and act upon

a plausible equity that must necessarily be based on arbitrary

assumptions.

There is no equity in the universe, in the various spectacle outside our

minds, and the most terrible nightmare the human imagination has ever

engendered is a Just God, measuring, with himself as the Standard,

against finite men. Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all weighed

in the balance and found wanting.

So, as the recognition of this has grown, Justice has been tempered with

Mercy, which indeed is no more than an attempt to equalize things

by making the factors of the very defect that is condemned, its

condonation. The modern mind fluctuates uncertainly somewhere between

these extremes, now harsh and now ineffectual.

To me there seems no validity in these quasi-absolute standards.

A man seeks and obeys standards of equity simply to economize his moral

effort, not because there is anything true or sublime about justice, but

because he knows he is too egoistic and weak-minded and obsessed to do

any perfect thing at all, because he cannot trust himself with his own

transitory emotions unless he trains himself beforehand to observe

a predetermined rule. There is scarcely an eventuality in life that

without the help of these generalizations would not exceed the average

man’s intellectual power and moral energy, just as there is scarcely an

idea or an emotion that can be conveyed without the use of faulty and

defective common names. Justice and Mercy are indeed not ultimately

different in their nature from such other conventions as the rules of

a game, the rules of etiquette, forms of address, cab tariffs and

standards of all sorts. They are mere organizations of relationship

either to economize thought or else to facilitate mutual understanding

and codify common action. Modesty and self-submission, love and service

are, in the right system of my beliefs, far more fundamental rightnesses

and duties.

We are not mercantile and litigious units such as making Justice our

social basis would imply, we are not select responsible persons mixed

with and tending weak irresponsible wrong persons such as the notion

of Mercy suggests, we are parts of one being and body, each unique

yet sharing a common nature and a variety of imperfections and working

together (albeit more or less darkly and ignorantly) for a common end.

We are strong and weak together and in one brotherhood. The weak have

no essential rights against the strong, nor the strong against the weak.

The world does not exist for our weaknesses but our strength. And the

real justification of democracy lies in the fact that none of us are

altogether strong nor altogether weak; for everyone there is an aspect

wherein he is seen to be weak; for everyone there is a strength

though it may be only a little peculiar strength or an undeveloped

potentiality. The unconverted man uses his strength egotistically,

emphasizes himself harshly against the man who is weak where he is

strong, and hates and conceals his own weakness. The Believer, in the

measure of his belief, respects and seeks to understand the different

strength of others and to use his own distinctive power with and not

against his fellow men, in the common service of that synthesis to which

each one of them is ultimately as necessary as he.

3.25. OF LOVE AND JUSTICE.

Now here the friend who has read the first draft of this book falls

into something like a dispute with me. She does not, I think, like this

dismissal of Justice from a primary place in my scheme of conduct.

“Justice,” she asserts, “is an instinctive craving very nearly akin to

the physical craving for equilibrium. Its social importance corresponds.

It seeks to keep the individual’s claims in such a position as to

conflict as little as possible with those of others. Justice is the

root instinct of all social feeling, of all feeling which does not take

account of whether we like or dislike individuals, it is the feeling

of an orderly position of our Ego towards others, merely considered

AS others, and of all the Egos merely AS Egos towards each other. LOVE

cannot be felt towards others AS others. Love is the expression of

individual suitability and preference, its positive existence in some

cases implies its absolute negation in others. Hence Love can never be

the essential and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity for

the instinct of abstract justice which takes no account of preferences

or aversions. And here I may say that all application of the word LOVE

to unknown, distant creatures, to mere OTHERS, is a perversion and

a wasting of the word love, which, taking its origin in sexual and

parental preference, always implies a preference of one object to the

other. To love everybody is simply not to love at all. And it is

JUST BECAUSE of the passionate preference instinctively felt for

some individuals, that mankind requires the self-regarding and

self-respecting passion of justice.”

Now this is not altogether contradictory of what I hold. I disagree that

because love necessarily expresses itself in preference, selecting this

rather than that, that it follows necessarily that its absolute negation

is implied in the non-selected cases. A man may go into the world as a

child goes into a garden and gathers its hands full of the flowers that

please it best and then desists, but only because its hands are full and

not because it is at an end of the flowers that it can find delight in.

So the man finds at last his memory and apprehensions glutted. It is

not that he could not love those others. And I dispute that to love

everybody is not to love at all. To love two people is surely to love

more than to love just one person, and so by way of three and four to

a very large number. But if it is put that love must be a preference

because of the mental limitations that forbid us to apprehend and

understand more than a few of the multitudinous lovables of life, then

I agree. For all the individuals and things and cases for which we have

inadequate time and energy, we need a wholesale method--justice. That is

exactly what I have said in the previous section.

3.26. THE WEAKNESS OF IMMATURITY.

One is apt to write and talk of strong and weak as though some were

always strong, some always weak. But that is quite a misleading version

of life. Apart from the fact that everyone is fluctuatingly strong and

fluctuatingly weak, and weak and strong according to the quality we

judge them by, we have to remember that we are all developing and

learning and changing, gaining strength and at last losing it, from

the cradle to the grave. We are all, to borrow the old scholastic term,

pupil-teachers of Life; the term is none the less appropriate because

the pupil-teacher taught badly and learnt under difficulties.

It may seem to be a crowning feat of platitude to write that “we have

to remember” this, but it is overlooked in a whole mass of legal, social

and economic literature. Those extraordinary imaginary cases as between

a man A and a man B who start level, on a desert island or elsewhere,

and work or do not work, or save or do not save, become the basis

of immense schemes of just arrangement which soar up confidently and

serenely regardless of the fact that never did anything like that equal

start occur; that from the beginning there were family groups and old

heads and young heads, help, guidance and sacrifice, and those who had

learnt and those who had still to learn, jumbled together in confused

transactions. Deals, tradings and so forth are entirely secondary

aspects of these primaries, and the attempt to get an idea of abstract

relationship by beginning upon a secondary issue is the fatal pervading

fallacy in all these regions of thought. At the present moment the

average age of the world is I suppose about 21 or 22, the normal death

somewhen about 44 or 45, that is to say nearly half the world is “under

age,” green, inexperienced, demanding help, easily misled and put in

the wrong and betrayed. Yet the younger moiety, if we do indeed assume

life’s object is a collective synthesis, is more important than the

older, and every older person bound to be something of a guardian to the

younger. It follows directly from the fundamental beliefs I have assumed

that we are missing the most important aspects of life if we are not

directly or indirectly serving the young, helping them individually

or collectively. Just in the measure that one’s living falls away from

that, do we fall away from life into a mere futility of existence, and

approach the state, the extraordinary and wonderful middle state of (for

example) those extinct and entirely damned old gentlemen one sees and

hears eating and sleeping in every comfortable London club.

That constructive synthetic purpose which I have made the ruling idea in

my scheme of conduct may be indeed completely restated in another form,

a form I adopted for a book I wrote some years ago called “Mankind in

the Making.” In this I pointed out that “Life is a tissue of births”;

“and if the whole of life is an evolving succession of births, then

not only must a man in his individual capacity (physically as parent,

doctor, food dealer, food carrier, home builder, protector; or mentally

as teacher, news dealer, author, preacher) contribute to births and

growths and the fine future of mankind, but the collective aspects

of man, his social and political organizations must also be, in the

essence, organizations that more or less profitably and more or

less intentionally set themselves towards this end. They are finally

concerned with the birth, and with the sound development towards still

better births, of human lives, just as every implement in the toolshed

of a seedsman’s nursery, even the hoe and the roller, is concerned

finally with the seeding and with the sound development towards still

better seeding of plants. The private and personal motive of the

seedsman in procuring and using these tools may be avarice, ambition, a

religious belief in the saving efficacy of nursery keeping or a simple

passion for bettering flowers, that does not affect the definite final

purpose of his outfit of tools.

“And just as we might judge completely and criticize and improve that

outfit from an attentive study of the welfare of plants, and with an

entire disregard of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective

human enterprises from the standpoint of an attentive study of human

births and development. ANY COLLECTIVE HUMAN ENTERPRISE, INSTITUTION,

MOVEMENT, PARTY OR STATE, IS TO BE JUDGED AS A WHOLE AND COMPLETELY, AS

IT CONDUCES MORE OR LESS TO WHOLESOME AND HOPEFUL BIRTHS, AND ACCORDING

TO THE QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE ADVANCE DUE TO ITS INFLUENCE MADE

BY EACH GENERATION OF CITIZENS BORN UNDER ITS INFLUENCE TOWARDS A HIGHER

AND AMPLER STANDARD OF LIFE.”

And individual conduct, quite as much as collective affairs, comes under

the same test. We are guides and school builders, helpers and influences

every hour of our lives, and by that standard we can and must judge all

our ways of living.

3.27. POSSIBILITY OF A NEW ETIQUETTE.

These two ideas, firstly the pupil-teacher parental idea and secondly

the democratic idea (that is to say the idea of an equal ultimate

significance), the second correcting any tendency in the first to

pedagogic arrogance and tactful concealments, do I think give, when

taken together, the general attitude a right-living man will take to

his individual fellow creature. They play against each other, providing

elements of contradiction and determining a balanced course. It seems to

me to follow necessarily from my fundamental beliefs that the Believer

will tend to be and want to be and seek to be friendly to, and

interested in, all sorts of people, and truthful and helpful and hating

concealment. To be that with any approach to perfection demands an

intricate and difficult effort, introspection to the hilt of one’s

power, a saving natural gift; one has to avoid pedantry, aggression,

brutality, amiable tiresomeness--there are pitfalls on every side. The

more one thinks about other people the more interesting and pleasing

they are; I am all for kindly gossip and knowing things about them, and

all against the silly and limiting hardness of soul that will not look

into one’s fellows nor go out to them. The use and justification of most

literature, of fiction, verse, history, biography, is that it lets

us into understandings and the suggestion of human possibilities. The

general purpose of intercourse is to get as close as one can to the

realities of the people one meets, and to give oneself to them just so

far as possible.

From that I think there arises naturally a newer etiquette that would

set aside many of the rigidities of procedure that keep people apart

to-day. There is a fading prejudice against asking personal questions,

against talking about oneself or one’s immediate personal interests,

against discussing religion and politics and any such keenly felt

matter. No doubt it is necessary at times to protect oneself against

clumsy and stupid familiarities, against noisy and inattentive egotists,

against intriguers and liars, but only in the last resort do such

breaches of patience seem justifiable to me; for the most part our

traditions of speech and intercourse altogether overdo separations, the

preservation of distances and protective devices in general.

3.28. SEX.

So far I have ignored the immense importance of Sex in our lives and for

the most part kept the discussion so generalized as to apply impartially

to women and men. But now I have reached a point when this great

boundary line between two halves of the world and the intense and

intimate personal problems that play across it must be faced.

For not only must we bend our general activities and our intellectual

life to the conception of a human synthesis, but out of our bodies

and emotional possibilities we have to make the new world bodily and

emotionally. To the test of that we have to bring all sorts of questions

that agitate us to-day, the social and political equality and personal

freedom of women, the differing code of honour for the sexes, the

controls and limitations to set upon love and desire. If, for example,

it is for the good of the species that a whole half of its individuals

should be specialized and subordinated to the physical sexual life, as

in certain phases of human development women have tended to be, then

certainly we must do nothing to prevent that. We have set aside the

conception of Justice as in any sense a countervailing idea to that of

the synthetic process.

And it is well to remember that for the whole of sexual conduct there is

quite conceivably no general simple rule. It is quite possible that,

as Metchnikoff maintains in his extraordinarily illuminating “Nature

of Man,” we are dealing with an irresolvable tangle of disharmonies. We

have passions that do not insist upon their physiological end, desires

that may be prematurely vivid in childhood, a fantastic curiosity, old

needs of the ape but thinly overlaid by the acquisitions of the man,

emotions that jar with physical impulses, inexplicable pains and

diseases. And not only have we to remember that we are dealing with

disharmonies that may at the very best be only patched together, but

we are dealing with matters in which the element of idiosyncrasy is

essential, insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any rule

we make, unless we are to take types and indeed whole classes of

personality and write them down as absolutely bad and fit only for

suppression and restraint. And on the mental side we are further

perplexed by the extraordinary suggestibility of human beings. In sexual

matters there seems to me--and I think I share a general ignorance

here--to be no directing instinct at all, but only an instinct to do

something generally sexual; there are almost equally powerful desires to

do right and not to act under compulsion. The specific forms of conduct

imposed upon these instincts and desires depend upon a vast confusion of

suggestions, institutions, conventions, ways of putting things. We are

dealing therefore with problems ineradicably complex, varying endlessly

in their instances, and changing as we deal with them. I am inclined to

think that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is

in terms of individuality, through the novel, the lyric, the

play, autobiography or biography of the frankest sort. But such

generalizations as I can make I will.

To me it seems manifest that sexual matters may be discussed generally

in at least three permissible and valid ways, of which the consideration

of the world as a system of births and education is only the dominant

chief. There is next the question of the physical health and beauty

of the community and how far sexual rules and customs affect that, and

thirdly the question of the mental and moral atmosphere in which sexual

conventions and laws must necessarily be an important factor. It is

alleged that probably in the case of men, and certainly in the case of

women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary phase in existence; that

without it there is an incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a

real wilting and failure of energy and vitality and the development of

morbid states. And for most of us half the friendships and intimacies

from which we derive the daily interest and sustaining force in our

lives, draw mysterious elements from sexual attraction, and depend and

hesitate upon our conception of the liberties and limits we must give to

that force.

3.29. THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE.

The individual attitudes of men to women and of women to men are

necessarily determined to a large extent by certain general ideas of

relationship, by institutions and conventions. One of the most important

and debatable of these is whether we are to consider and treat women

as citizens and fellows, or as beings differing mentally from men and

grouped in positions of at least material dependence to individual men.

Our decision in that direction will affect all our conduct from the

larger matters down to the smallest points of deportment; it will affect

even our manner of address and determine whether when we speak to a

woman we shall be as frank and unaffected as with a man or touched with

a faint suggestion of the reserves of a cat which does not wish to be

suspected of wanting to steal the milk.

Now so far as that goes it follows almost necessarily from my views upon

aristocracy and democracy that I declare for the conventional equality

of women, that is to say for the determination to make neither sex nor

any sexual characteristic a standard of superiority or inferiority, for

the view that a woman is a person as important and necessary, as much

to be consulted, and entitled to as much freedom of action as a man. I

admit that this decision is a choice into which temperament enters,

that I cannot produce compelling reasons why anyone else should adopt my

view. I can produce considerations in support of my view, that is all.

But they are so implicit in all that has gone before that I will not

trouble to detail them here.

The conception of equality and fellowship between men and women is

an idea at least as old as Plato and one that has recurred wherever

civilization has reached a phase in which men and women were

sufficiently released from militant and economic urgency to talk and

read and think. But it has never yet been, at least in the historical

period and in any but isolated social groups, a working structural idea.

The working structural idea is the Patriarchal Family in which the woman

is inferior and submits herself and is subordinated to the man, the head

of the family.

We live in a constantly changing development and modification of that

tradition. It is well to bring that factor of constant change into mind

at the outset of this discussion and to keep it there. To forget it, and

it is commonly forgotten, is to falsify every issue. Marriage and the

Family are perennially fluctuating institutions, and probably scarcely

anything in modern life is changing so much; they are in their legal

constitution or their moral and emotional quality profoundly different

things from what they were a hundred years ago. A woman who marries

nowadays marries, if one may put it quantitatively, far less than she

did even half a century ago; the married woman’s property act, for

example, has revolutionized the economic relationship; her husband has

lost his right to assault her and he cannot even compel her to cohabit

with him if she refuses to do so. Legal separations and divorces have

come to modify the quality and logical consequences of the bond.

The rights of parent over the child have been even more completely

qualified. The State has come in as protector and educator of the

children, taking over personal powers and responsibilities that have

been essential to the family institution ever since the dawn of history.

It inserts itself more and more between child and parent. It invades

what were once the most sacred intimacies, and the Salvation Army is

now promoting legislation to invade those overcrowded homes in which

children (it is estimated to the number of thirty or forty thousand) are

living as I write, daily witnesses of their mother’s prostitution or in

constant danger of incestuous attack from drunken fathers and brothers.

And finally as another indication of profound differences, births were

almost universally accidental a hundred years ago; they are now in an

increasing number of families controlled and deliberate acts of will.

In every one of their relations do Marriage and the Family change and

continue to change.

But the inherent defectiveness of the human mind which my metaphysical

book sets itself to analyze, does lead it constantly to speak of

Marriage and the Family as things as fixed and unalterable as, let us

say, the characteristics of oxygen. One is asked, Do you believe in

Marriage and the Family? as if it was a case of either having or not

having some definite thing. Socialists are accused of being “against

the Family,” as if it were not the case that Socialists, Individualists,

high Anglicans and Roman Catholics are ALL against Marriage and the

Family as these institutions exist at the present time. But once we have

realized the absurdity of this absolute treatment, then it should become

clear that with it goes most of the fabric of right and wrong, and

nearly all those arbitrary standards by which we classify people into

moral and immoral. Those last words are used when as a matter of fact

we mean either conforming or failing to conform to changing laws and

developing institutional customs we may or may not consider right

or wrong. Their use imparts a flavour of essential wrong-doing and

obliquity into acts and relations that may be in many cases no more than

social indiscipline, which may be even conceivably a courageous act of

defiance to an obsolescent limitation. Such, until a little while ago,

was a man’s cohabitation with his deceased wife’s sister. This, which

was scandalous yesterday, is now a legally honourable relationship,

albeit I believe still regarded by the high Anglican as incestuous

wickedness.

Now I will not deal here with the institutional changes that are

involved in that general scheme of progress called Socialism. I have

discussed the relation of Socialism to Marriage and the Family quite

fully in my “New Worlds for Old” (“New Worlds for Old” (A. Constable and

Co., 1908).) and to that I must refer the reader. Therein he will see

how the economic freedom and independent citizenship of women, and

indeed also the welfare of the whole next generation, hang on the idea

of endowing motherhood, and he will find too how much of the nature

of the marriage contract is outside the scope of Socialist proposals

altogether.

Apart from the broad proposals of Socialism, as a matter of personal

conviction quite outside the scope of Socialism altogether, I am

persuaded of the need of much greater facilities of divorce than exist

at present, divorce on the score of mutual consent, of faithlessness, of

simple cruelty, of insanity, habitual vice or the prolonged imprisonment

of either party. And this being so I find it impossible to condemn on

any ground, except that it is “breaking ranks” and making a confusion,

those who by anticipating such wide facilities as I propose have sinned

by existing standards. How far and in what manner such breaking of ranks

is to be condoned I will presently discuss. But it is clear it is

an offence of a different nature from actions one believes to be in

themselves and apart from the law reprehensible things.

But my scepticisms about the current legal institutions and customary

code are not exhausted by these modifications I have suggested.

I believe firmly in some sort of marriage, that is to say an open

declaration of the existence of sexual relations between a man and a

woman, because I am averse to all unnecessary secrecies and because the

existence of these peculiarly intimate relationships affects everybody

about the persons concerned. It is ridiculous to say as some do that

sexual relations between two people affect no one but themselves unless

a child is born. They do, because they tend to break down barriers and

set up a peculiar emotional partnership. It is a partnership that kept

secret may work as anti-socially as a secret business partnership or

a secret preferential railway tariff. And I believe too in the general

social desirability of the family group, the normal group of father,

mother and children, and in the extreme efficacy in the normal human

being of the blood link and pride link between parent and child in

securing loving care and upbringing for the child. But this clear

adhesion to Marriage and to the Family grouping about mother and father

does not close the door to a large series of exceptional cases which our

existing institutions and customs ignore or crush.

For example, monogamy in general seems to me to be clearly indicated (as

doctors say) by the fact that there are not several women in the world

for every man, but quite as clearly does it seem necessary to recognize

that the fact that there are (or were in 1901) 21,436,107 females to

20,172,984 males in our British community seems to condemn our present

rigorous insistence upon monogamy, unless feminine celibacy has its

own delights. But, as I have said, it is now largely believed that the

sexual life of a woman is more important to her than his sexual life to

a man and less easily ignored.

It is true also on the former side that for the great majority of

people one knows personally, any sort of household but a monogamous one

conjures up painful and unpleasant visions. The ordinary civilized

woman and the ordinary civilized man are alike obsessed with the idea

of meeting and possessing one peculiar intimate person, one special

exclusive lover who is their very own, and a third person of either sex

cannot be associated with that couple without an intolerable sense of

privacy and confidence and possession destroyed. It is difficult to

imagine a second wife in a home who would not be and feel herself to

be a rather excluded and inferior person. But that does not abolish the

possibility that there are exceptional people somewhere capable of,

to coin a phrase, triangular mutuality, and I do not see why we should

either forbid or treat with bitterness or hostility a grouping we may

consider so inadvisable or so unworkable as never to be adopted, if

three people of their own free will desire it.

The peculiar defects of the human mind when they approach these

questions of sex are reinforced by passions peculiar to the topic, and

it is perhaps advisable to point out that to discuss these possibilities

is not the same thing as to urge the married reader to take unto himself

or herself a second partner or a series of additional partners. We

are trained from the nursery to become secretive, muddle-headed and

vehemently conclusive upon sexual matters, until at last the editors of

magazines blush at the very phrase and long to put a petticoat over

the page that bears it. Yet our rebellious natures insist on being

interested by it. It seems to me that to judge these large questions

from the personal point of view, to insist upon the whole world without

exception living exactly in the manner that suits oneself or accords

with one’s emotional imagination and the forms of delicacy in which one

has been trained, is not the proper way to deal with them. I want as

a sane social organizer to get just as many contented and law-abiding

citizens as possible; I do not want to force people who would otherwise

be useful citizens into rebellion, concealments and the dark and furtive

ways of vice, because they may not love and marry as their temperaments

command, and so I want to make the meshes of the law as wide as

possible. But the common man will not understand this yet, and seeks to

make the meshes just as small as his own private case demands.

Then marriage, to resume my main discussion, does not necessarily mean

cohabitation. All women who desire children do not want to be entrusted

with their upbringing. Some women are sexual and philoprogenitive

without being sedulously maternal, and some are maternal without much

or any sexual passion. There are men and women in the world now, great

allies, fond and passionate lovers who do not live nor want to live

constantly together. It is at least conceivable that there are women

who, while desiring offspring, do not want to abandon great careers for

the work of maternity, women again who would be happiest managing and

rearing children in manless households that they might even share with

other women friends, and men to correspond with these who do not wish to

live in a household with wife and children. I submit, these temperaments

exist and have a right to exist in their own way. But one must recognize

that the possibility of these departures from the normal type of

household opens up other possibilities. The polygamy that is degrading

or absurd under one roof assumes a different appearance when one

considers it from the point of view of people whose habits of life do

not centre upon an isolated home.

All the relations I have glanced at above do as a matter of fact exist

to-day, but shamefully and shabbily, tainted with what seems to me an

unmerited and unnecessary ignominy. The punishment for bigamy seems to

me insane in its severity, contrasted as it is with our leniency to the

common seducer. Better ruin a score of women, says the law, than marry

two. I do not see why in these matters there should not be much ampler

freedom than there is, and this being so I can hardly be expected to

condemn with any moral fervour or exclude from my society those who have

seen fit to behave by what I believe may be the standards of A.D. 2000

instead of by the standards of 1850. These are offences, so far as

they are offences, on an altogether different footing from murder, or

exacting usury, or the sweating of children, or cruelty, or transmitting

diseases, or unveracity, or commercial or intellectual or physical

prostitution, or any such essentially grave anti-social deeds. We must

distinguish between sins on the one hand and mere errors of judgment and

differences of taste from ourselves. To draw up harsh laws, to practise

exclusions against everyone who does not see fit to duplicate one’s own

blameless home life, is to waste a number of courageous and exceptional

persons in every generation, to drive many of them into a forced

alliance with real crime and embittered rebellion against custom and the

law.

3.30. CONDUCT IN RELATION TO THE THING THAT IS.

But the reader must keep clear in his mind the distinction between

conduct that is right or permissible in itself and conduct that becomes

either inadvisable or mischievous and wrong because of the circumstances

about it. There is no harm under ordinary conditions in asking a boy

with a pleasant voice to sing a song in the night, but the case is

altered altogether if you have reason to suppose that a Red Indian is

lying in wait a hundred yards off, holding a loaded rifle and ready to

fire at the voice. It is a valid objection to many actions that I do

not think objectionable in themselves, that to do them will discharge

a loaded prejudice into the heart of my friend--or even into my own. I

belong to the world and my work, and I must not lightly throw my time,

my power, my influence away. For a splendid thing any risk or any

defiance may be justifiable, but is it a sufficiently splendid thing?

So far as he possibly can a man must conform to common prejudices,

prevalent customs and all laws, whatever his estimate of them may be.

But he must at the same time to his utmost to change what he thinks to

be wrong.

And I think that conformity must be honest conformity. There is no more

anti-social act than secret breaches, and only some very urgent and

exceptional occasion justifies even the unveracity of silence about the

thing done. If your personal convictions bring you to a breach, let it

be an open breach, let there be no misrepresentation of attitudes, no

meanness, no deception of honourable friends. Of course an open breach

need not be an ostentatious breach; to do what is right to yourself

without fraud or concealment is one thing, to make a challenge and

aggression quite another. Your friends may understand and sympathize

and condone, but it does not lie upon you to force them to identify

themselves with your act and situation. But better too much openness

than too little. Squalid intrigue was the shadow of the old intolerably

narrow order; it is a shadow we want to illuminate out of existence.

Secrets will be contraband in the new time.

And if it chances to you to feel called upon to make a breach with the

institution or custom or prejudice that is, remember that doing so

is your own affair. You are going to take risks and specialize as an

experiment. You must not expect other people about you to share the

consequences of your dash forward. You must not drag in confidants and

secondaries. You must fight your little battle in front on your own

responsibility, unsupported--and take the consequences without repining.

3.31. CONDUCT TOWARDS TRANSGRESSORS.

So far as breaches of the prohibitions and laws of marriage go, to me it

seems they are to be tolerated by us in others just in the measure that,

within the limits set by discretion, they are frank and truthful and

animated by spontaneous passion and pervaded by the quality of beauty.

I hate the vulgar sexual intriguer, man or woman, and the smart and

shallow atmosphere of unloving lust and vanity about the type as I hate

few kinds of human life; I would as lief have a polecat in my home as

this sort of person; and every sort of prostitute except the victim of

utter necessity I despise, even though marriage be the fee. But honest

lovers should be I think a charge and pleasure for us. We must judge

each pair as we can.

One thing renders a sexual relationship incurably offensive to others

and altogether wrong, and that is cruelty. But who can define cruelty?

How far is the leaving of a third person to count as cruelty? There

again I hesitate to judge. To love and not be loved is a fate for which

it seems no one can be blamed; to lose love and to change one’s loving

belongs to a subtle interplay beyond analysis or control, but to be

deceived or mocked or deliberately robbed of love, that at any rate is

an abominable wrong.

In all these matters I perceive a general rule is in itself a possible

instrument of cruelty. I set down what I can in the way of general

principles, but it all leaves off far short of the point of application.

Every case among those we know I think we moderns must judge for

ourselves. Where there is doubt, there I hold must be charity. And with

regard to strangers, manifestly our duty is to avoid inquisitorial and

uncharitable acts.

This is as true of financial and economic misconduct as of sexual

misconduct, of ways of living that are socially harmful and of political

faith. We are dealing with people in a maladjusted world to whom

absolute right living is practically impossible, because there are no

absolutely right institutions and no simple choice of good or evil, and

we have to balance merits and defects in every case.

Some people are manifestly and essentially base and self-seeking and

regardless of the happiness and welfare of their fellows, some in

business affairs and politics as others in love. Some wrong-doers again

are evidently so through heedlessness, through weakness, timidity or

haste. We have to judge and deal with each sort upon no clear issue, but

upon impressions they have given us of their spirit and purpose. We owe

it to them and ourselves not to judge too rashly or too harshly, but for

all that we are obliged to judge and take sides, to avoid the malignant

and exclude them from further opportunity, to help and champion the

cheated and the betrayed, to forgive and aid the repentant blunderer

and by mercy to save the lesser sinner from desperate alliance with the

greater. That is the broad rule, and it is as much as we have to go upon

until the individual case comes before us.

BOOK THE FOURTH -- SOME PERSONAL THINGS.

4.1. PERSONAL LOVE AND LIFE.

It has been most convenient to discuss all that might be generalized

about conduct first, to put in the common background, the vistas and

atmosphere of the scene. But a man’s relations are of two orders, and

these questions of rule and principle are over and about and round

more vivid and immediate interests. A man is not simply a relationship

between his individual self and the race, society, the world and God’s

Purpose. Close about him are persons, friends and enemies and lovers

and beloved people. He desires them, lusts after them, craves their

affection, needs their presence, abhors them, hates and desires to limit

and suppress them. This is for most of us the flesh and blood of life.

We go through the noble scene of the world neither alone, nor alone with

God, nor serving an undistinguishable multitude, but in a company of

individualized people.

Here is a system of motives and passions, imperious and powerful, which

follows no broad general rule and in which each man must needs be a

light unto himself upon innumerable issues. I am satisfied that

these personal urgencies are neither to be suppressed nor crudely nor

ruthlessly subordinated to the general issues. Religious and moral

teachers are apt to make this part of life either too detached or too

insignificant. They teach it either as if it did not matter or as if

it ought not to matter. Indeed our individual friends and enemies stand

between us and hide or interpret for us all the larger things. Few of

us can even worship alone. We must feel others, and those not strangers,

kneeling beside us.

I have already spoken under the heading of Beliefs of the part that the

idea of a Mediator has played and can play in the religious life. I have

pointed out how the imagination of men has sought and found in certain

personalities, historical or fictitious, a bridge between the blood-warm

private life and the intolerable spaciousness of right and wrong. The

world is full of such figures and their images, Christ and Mary and the

Saints and all the lesser, dearer gods of heathendom. These things

and the human passion for living leaders and heroes and leagues and

brotherhoods all confess the mediatory role, the mediatory possibilities

of personal love between the individual and the great synthesis of which

he is a part and agent. The great synthesis may become incarnate in

personal love, and personal love lead us directly to universal service.

I write “may” and temper that sentence to the quality of a possibility

alone. This is only true for those who believe, for those who have

faith, whose lives have been unified, who have found Salvation. For

those whose lives are chaotic, personal loves must also be chaotic; this

or that passion, malice, a jesting humour, some physical lust, gratified

vanity, egotistical pride, will rule and limit the relationship and

colour its ultimate futility. But the Believer uses personal love and

sustains himself by personal love. It is his provender, the meat and

drink of his campaign.

4.2. THE NATURE OF LOVE.

It is well perhaps to look a little into the factors that make up Love.

Love does not seem to me to be a simple elemental thing. It is, as I

have already said, one of the vicious tendencies of the human mind to

think that whatever can be given a simple name can be abstracted as a

single something in a state of quintessential purity. I have pointed out

that this is not true of Harmony or Beauty, and that these are synthetic

things. You bring together this which is not beautiful and that which is

not beautiful, and behold! Beauty! So also Love is, I think, a synthetic

thing. One observes this and that, one is interested and stirred;

suddenly the metal fuses, the dry bones live! One loves.

Almost every interest in one’s being may be a factor in the love

synthesis. But apart from the overflowing of the parental instinct

that makes all that is fine and delicate and young dear to us and to be

cherished, there are two main factors that bring us into love with our

fellows. There is first the emotional elements in our nature that arise

out of the tribal necessity, out of a fellowship in battle and hunting,

drinking and feasting, out of the needs and excitements and delights of

those occupations; and there is next the intenser narrower desirings

and gratitudes, satisfactions and expectations that come from sexual

intercourse. Now both these factors originate in physical needs and

consummate in material acts, and it is well to remember that this great

growth of love in life roots there, and, it may be, dies when its roots

are altogether cut away.

At its lowest, love is the mere sharing of, or rather the desire to

share, pleasure and excitement, the excitements of conflict or lust or

what not. I think that the desire to partake, the desire to merge one’s

individual identity with another’s, remains a necessary element in all

personal loves. It is a way out of ourselves, a breaking down of our

individual separation, just as hate is an intensification of that.

Personal love is the narrow and intense form of that breaking down, just

as what I call Salvation is its widest, most extensive form. We cast

aside our reserves, our secrecies, our defences; we open ourselves;

touches that would be intolerable from common people become a mystery

of delight, acts of self-abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with

symbolical pleasure. We cannot tell which of us is me, which you. Our

imprisoned egoism looks out through this window, forgets its walls, and

is for those brief moments released and universal.

For most of us the strain of primordial sexual emotion in our loves is

very strong. Many men can love only women, many women only men, and

some can scarcely love at all without bodily desire. But the love of

fellowship is a strong one also, and for many, love is most possible and

easy when the thought of physical lovemaking has been banished. Then

the lovers will pursue interests together, will work together or journey

together. So we have the warm fellowships of men for men and women for

women. But even then it may happen that men friends together will talk

of women, and women friends of men. Nevertheless we have also the strong

and altogether sexless glow of those who have fought well together, or

drunk or jested together or hunted a common quarry.

Now it seems to me that the Believer must also be a Lover, that he will

love as much as he can and as many people as he can, and in many moods

and ways. As I have said already, many of those who have taught religion

and morality in the past have been neglectful or unduly jealous of the

intenser personal loves. They have been, to put it by a figure, urgent

upon the road to the ocean. To that they would lead us, though we come

to it shivering, fearful and unprepared, and they grudge it that we

should strip and plunge into the wayside stream. But all streams, all

rivers come from this ocean in the beginning, lead to it in the end.

It is the essential fact of love as I conceive it, that it breaks

down the boundaries of self. That love is most perfect which does most

completely merge its lovers. But no love is altogether perfect, and for

most men and women love is no more than a partial and temporary lowering

of the barriers that keep them apart. With many, the attraction of love

seems always to fall short of what I hold to be its end, it draws people

together in the most momentary of self-forgetfulnesses, and for the rest

seems rather to enhance their egotisms and their difference. They are

secret from one another even in their embraces. There is a sort of love

that is egotistical lust almost regardless of its partner, a sort of

love that is mere fleshless pride and vanity at a white heat. There is

the love-making that springs from sheer boredom, like a man reading a

story-book to fill an hour. These inferior loves seek to accomplish an

agreeable act, or they seek the pursuit or glory of a living possession,

they aim at gratification or excitement or conquest. True love seeks

to be mutual and easy-minded, free of doubts, but these egotistical

mockeries of love have always resentment in them and hatred in them and

a watchful distrust. Jealousy is the measure of self-love in love.

True love is a synthetic thing, an outcome of life, it is not a

universal thing. It is the individualized correlative of Salvation; like

that it is a synthetic consequence of conflicts and confusions. Many

people do not desire or need Salvation, they cannot understand it, much

less achieve it; for them chaotic life suffices. So too, many never,

save for some rare moment of illumination, desire or feel love. Its

happy abandonment, its careless self-giving, these things are mere

foolishness to them. But much has been said and sung of faith and love

alike, and in their confused greed these things also they desire and

parody. So they act worship and make a fine fuss of their devotions.

And also they must have a few half-furtive, half-flaunting fallen

love-triumphs prowling the secret backstreets of their lives, they know

not why.

(In setting this down be it remembered I am doing my best to tell what

is in me because I am trying to put my whole view of life before the

reader without any vital omissions. These are difficult matters to

explain because they have no clear outlines; one lets in a hard light

suddenly upon things that have lurked in warm intimate shadows, dim

inner things engendering motives. I am not only telling quasi-secret

things but exploring them for myself. They are none the less real and

important because they are elusive.)

True love I think is not simply felt but known. Just as Salvation as

I conceive it demands a fine intelligence and mental activity, so love

calls to brain and body alike and all one’s powers. There is always

elaborate thinking and dreaming in love. Love will stir imaginations

that have never stirred before.

Love may be, and is for the most part, one-sided. It is the going out

from oneself that is love, and not the accident of its return. It is the

expedition whether it fail or succeed.

But an expedition starves that comes to no port. Love always seeks

mutuality and grows by the sense of responses, or we should love

beautiful inanimate things more passionately than we do. Failing a full

return, it makes the most of an inadequate return. Failing a sustained

return it welcomes a temporary coincidence. Failing a return it finds

support in accepted sacrifices. But it seeks a full return, and the

fulness of life has come only to those who, loving, have met the lover.

I am trying to be as explicit as possible in thus writing about Love.

But the substance in which one works here is emotion that evades

definition, poetic flashes and figures of speech are truer than prosaic

statements. Body and the most sublimated ecstasy pass into one another,

exchange themselves and elude every net of words we cast.

I have put out two ideas of unification and self-devotion, extremes upon

a scale one from another; one of these ideas is that devotion to the

Purpose in things I have called Salvation; the other that devotion to

some other most fitting and satisfying individual which is passionate

love, the former extensive as the universe, the latter the intensest

thing in life. These, it seems to me, are the boundary and the living

capital of the empire of life we rule.

All empires need a comprehending boundary, but many have not one capital

but many chief cities, and all have cities and towns and villages beyond

the capital. It is an impoverished capital that has no dependent towns,

and it is a poor love that will not overflow in affection and eager

kindly curiosity and sympathy and the search for fresh mutuality. To

love is to go living radiantly through the world. To love and be loved

is to be fearless of experience and rich in the power to give.

4.3. THE WILL TO LOVE.

Love is a thing to a large extent in its beginnings voluntary and

controllable, and at last quite involuntary. It is so hedged about by

obligations and consequences, real and artificial, that for the most

part I think people are overmuch afraid of it. And also the tradition of

sentiment that suggests its forms and guides it in the world about us,

is far too strongly exclusive. It is not so much when love is glowing as

when it is becoming habitual that it is jealous for itself and others.

Lovers a little exhausting their mutual interest find a fillip in an

alliance against the world. They bury their talent of understanding and

sympathy to return it duly in a clean napkin. They narrow their interest

in life lest the other lover should misunderstand their amplitude as

disloyalty.

Our institutions and social customs seem all to assume a definiteness

of preference, a singleness and a limitation of love, which is not

psychologically justifiable. People do not, I think, fall naturally into

agreement with these assumptions; they train themselves to agreement.

They take refuge from experiences that seem to carry with them the risk

at least of perplexing situations, in a theory of barred possibilities

and locked doors. How far this shy and cultivated irresponsive

lovelessness towards the world at large may not carry with it the

possibility of compensating intensities, I do not know. Quite equally

probable is a starvation of one’s emotional nature.

The same reasons that make me decide against mere wanton abstinences

make me hostile to the common convention of emotional indifference to

most of the charming and interesting people one encounters. In pleasing

and being pleased, in the mutual interest, the mutual opening out of

people to one another, is the key of the door to all sweet and mellow

living.

4.4. LOVE AND DEATH.

For he who has faith, death, so far as it is his own death, ceases to

possess any quality of terror. The experiment will be over, the rinsed

beaker returned to its shelf, the crystals gone dissolving down the

waste-pipe; the duster sweeps the bench. But the deaths of those we love

are harder to understand or bear.

It happens that of those very intimate with me I have lost only one, and

that came slowly and elaborately, a long gradual separation wrought by

the accumulation of years and mental decay, but many close friends and

many whom I have counted upon for sympathy and fellowship have passed

out of my world. I miss such a one as Bob Stevenson, that luminous,

extravagant talker, that eager fantastic mind. I miss him whenever I

write. It is less pleasure now to write a story since he will never read

it, much less give me a word of praise for it. And I miss York Powell’s

friendly laughter and Henley’s exuberant welcome. They made a warmth

that has gone, those men. I can understand why I, with my fumbling

lucidities and explanations, have to finish up presently and go,

expressing as I do the mood of a type and of a time; but not those

radiant presences.

And the gap these men have left, these men with whom after all I only

sat now and again, or wrote to in a cheerful mood or got a letter from

at odd times, gives me some measure of the thing that happens, that may

happen, when the mind that is always near one’s thoughts, the person who

moves to one’s movement and lights nearly all the common flow of events

about one with the reminder of fellowship and meaning--ceases.

Faith which feeds on personal love must at last prevail over it. If

Faith has any virtue it must have it here when we find ourselves bereft

and isolated, facing a world from which the light has fled leaving it

bleak and strange. We live for experience and the race; these individual

interludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in which we lovers met

and refreshed was but a halt on a journey. When we have loved to the

intensest point we have done our best with each other. To keep to that

image of the inn, we must not sit overlong at our wine beside the fire.

We must go on to new experiences and new adventures. Death comes to part

us and turn us out and set us on the road again.

But the dead stay where we leave them.

I suppose that is the real good in death, that they do stay; that it

makes them immortal for us. Living they were mortal. But now they

can never spoil themselves or be spoilt by change again. They have

finished--for us indeed just as much as themselves. There they sit for

ever, rounded off and bright and done. Beside these clear and certain

memories I have of my dead, my impressions of the living are vague

provisional things.

And since they are gone out of the world and become immortal memories

in me, I feel no need to think of them as in some disembodied and

incomprehensible elsewhere, changed and yet not done. I want actual

immortality for those I love as little as I desire it for myself.

Indeed I dislike the idea that those I have loved are immortal in any

real sense; it conjures up dim uncomfortable drifting phantoms, that

have no kindred with the flesh and blood I knew. I would as soon think

of them trailing after the tides up and down the Channel outside my

window. Bob Stevenson for me is a presence utterly concrete, slouching,

eager, quick-eyed, intimate and profound, carelessly dressed (at

Sandgate he commonly wore a little felt hat that belonged to his son)

and himself, himself, indissoluble matter and spirit, down to the

heels of his boots. I cannot conceive of his as any but a concrete

immortality. If he lives, he lives as I knew him and clothed as I knew

him and with his unalterable voice, in a heaven of daedal flowers or

a hell of ineffectual flame; he lives, dreaming and talking and

explaining, explaining it all very earnestly and preposterously, so I

picture him, into the ear of the amused, incredulous, principal person

in the place.

I have a real hatred for those dreary fools and knaves who would have me

suppose that Henley, that crippled Titan, may conceivably be tapping at

the underside of a mahogany table or scratching stifled incoherence

into a locked slate! Henley tapping!--for the professional purposes of

Sludge! If he found himself among the circumstances of a spiritualist

seance he would, I know, instantly smash the table with that big fist of

his. And as the splinters flew, surely York Powell, out of the dead past

from which he shines on me, would laugh that hearty laugh of his back

into the world again.

Henley is nowhere now except that, red-faced and jolly like an October

sunset, he leans over a gate at Worthing after a long day of picnicking

at Chanctonbury Ring, or sits at his Woking table praising and quoting

“The Admiral Bashville,” or blue-shirted and wearing that hat that

Nicholson has painted, is thrust and lugged, laughing and talking aside

in his bath-chair, along the Worthing esplanade...

And Bob Stevenson walks for ever about a garden in Chiswick, talking in

the dusk.

4.5. THE CONSOLATION OF FAILURE.

That parable of the talents I have made such free use of in this book

has one significant defect. It gives but two cases, and three are

possible. There was first the man who buried his talent, and of his

condemnation we are assured. But those others all took their talents

and used them courageously and came back with gain. Was that gain

inevitable? Does courage always ensure us victory? because if that is so

we can all be heroes and valour is the better part of discretion. Alas!

the faith in such magic dies. What of the possible case of the man who

took his two or three talents and invested them as best he could and was

deceived or heedless and lost them, interest and principal together?

There is something harder to face than death, and that is the

realization of failure and misdirected effort and wrong-doing. Faith is

no Open Sesame to right-doing, much less is it the secret of success.

The service of God on earth is no processional triumph. What if one does

wrong so extremely as to condemn one’s life, to make oneself part of the

refuse and not of the building? Or what if one is misjudged, or it may

be too pitilessly judged, and one’s co-operation despised and the help

one brought becomes a source of weakness? Or suppose that the fine

scheme one made lies shattered or wrecked by one’s own act, or through

some hidden blemish one’s offering is rejected and flung back and one is

thrust out?

So in the end it may be you or I will find we have been anvil and not

hammer in the Purpose of God.

Then indeed will come the time for Faith, for the last word of Faith, to

say still steadfastly, disgraced or dying, defeated or discredited, that

all is well:--

“This and not that was my appointed work, and this I had to be.”

4.6. THE LAST CONFESSION.

So these broken confessions and statements of mood and attitude come to

an end.

But at this end, since I have, I perceive, run a little into a pietistic

strain, I must repeat again how provisional and personal I know all

these things to be. I began by disavowing ultimates. My beliefs, my

dogmas, my rules, they are made for my campaigning needs, like the

knapsack and water-bottle of a Cockney soldier invading some stupendous

mountain gorge. About him are fastnesses and splendours, torrents and

cataracts, glaciers and untrodden snows. He comes tramping on heel-worn

boots and ragged socks. Beauties and blue mysteries shine upon him and

appeal to him, the enigma of beauty smiling the faint strange smile of

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. He sees a light on the grass like music; and

the blossom on the trees against the sky brings him near weeping. Such

things come to him, give themselves to him. I do not know why he should

not in response fling his shabby gear aside and behave like a god; I

only know that he does not do so. His grunt of appreciation is absurd,

his speech goes like a crippled thing--and withal, and partly by virtue

of the knapsack and water-bottle, he is conqueror of the valley. The

valley is his for the taking.

There is a duality in life that I cannot express except by such images

as this, a duality so that we are at once absurd and full of sublimity,

and most absurd when we are most anxious to render the real splendours

that pervade us. This duplicity in life seems to me at times

ineradicable, at times like the confusing of something essentially

simple, like the duplication when one looks through a doubly refracting

medium. You think in this latter mood that you have only to turn the

crystal of Iceland spar about in order to have the whole thing plain.

But you never get it plain. I have been doing my halting utmost to get

down sincerely and simply my vision of life and duty. I have permitted

myself no defensive restraints; I have shamelessly written my starkest,

and it is plain to me that a smile that is not mine plays over my most

urgent passages. There is a rebellious rippling of the grotesque under

our utmost tragedy and gravity. One’s martialled phrases grimace as one

turns, and wink at the reader. None the less they signify. Do you note

how in this that I have written, such a word as Believer will begin to

wear a capital letter and give itself solemn ridiculous airs? It does

not matter. It carries its message for all that necessary superficial

absurdity.

Thought has made me shameless. It does not matter at last at all if one

is a little harsh or indelicate or ridiculous if that also is in the

mystery of things.

Behind everything I perceive the smile that makes all effort and

discipline temporary, all the stress and pain of life endurable. In the

last resort I do not care whether I am seated on a throne or drunk or

dying in a gutter. I follow my leading. In the ultimate I know, though I

cannot prove my knowledge in any way whatever, that everything is right

and all things mine.

THE END.