"No, I couldn't do that," said Lestrange to Barthrop, in one of those
unhappy little silences which so often seemed to lie in wait for
Lestrange's most platitudinal utterances. "It wouldn't be consistent with a
sense of honour."
Father Payne gave a chuckle, and Lestrange looked pained, "Oughtn't one to
have a code of honour?" he said.
"Why, certainly!" said Father Payne, "but you mustn't impose your code on
other people. You mustn't take for granted that your idea of honour means
the same thing to everyone. Suppose you lost money at cards, and called it
a debt of honour, and thought it dishonourable not to pay it; while at the
same time you didn't think it dishonourable not to pay a poor tradesman
whose goods you had ordered and consumed, am I bound to accept your code of
honour?"
"But there _is_ a difference there," said Rose, "because the man to
whom you owe a gambling debt can't recover it by law, while a tradesman
can. All that a debt of honour means is that you feel bound to pay it,
though you are not legally compelled to do so."
"Yes," said Father Payne, "that is so, in a sense, I admit. But still, one
mustn't shelter oneself behind big words unless one is certain that they
mean exactly the same to one's opponent. When I was at school there was a
master who used to be fond, as he said, of putting the boys on their
honour: but he never asked if we accepted the obligation. If I say, 'I give
you my honour not to do a thing,' then I can be called dishonourable if I
don't do it; but you can't put me on my honour unless I consent."
"But surely honour means something quite definite?" said Lestrange.
"Tell me what it is, then," said Father Payne. "Rose, you seem to have
ideas on the subject. What do you mean by honour?"
"Isn't it one of the ultimate things," said Rose, "which can't be defined,
but which everyone recognises--like blue and green, let me say, or sweet
and bitter?"
"No," said Father Payne; "at least I don't think so. It seems to me rather
an artificial thing, because it varies at different dates. It used, not so
long ago, to be considered an affair of honour to fight a duel with a man
if he threw a glass of wine in your face. And what do you make of the old
proverb, 'All is fair in love and war'? That seems to mean that honour is
not a universal obligation. Then there's the phrase, 'Honour among
thieves,' which isn't a very exalted one; or the curious thing, schoolboy
honour, which dictates that a boy may know that another boy is being
disgracefully and cruelly bullied, and yet is prevented by his sense of
honour from telling a master about it. I admit that honour is a fine idea;
but it seems to me to cover a lot of things in human nature which are very
bad indeed. It may mean only a sort of prudential arrangement which binds a
set of people together for a bad purpose, because they do not choose to be
interfered with, and yet call the thing honour for the sake of the
associations."
"Yes, I don't think it is necessarily a moral thing," said Rose, "but that
doesn't seem to me to matter. It is simply an obligation, pledged or
implied, that you will act in a certain way. It may conflict with a moral
obligation, and then you have to decide which is the greater obligation."
"Yes, that is perfectly true," said Father Payne, "and as long as you admit
that honour isn't in itself bound to be a good thing, that is all I want.
Lestrange seemed to use it as if you had only got to say that a motive was
honourable, to have it recognised by everyone as right. Take the case of
what are called 'national obligations.' A certain party in the State,
having secured a majority of votes, enters into some arrangement--a treaty,
let us say--without consulting the nation. Is that held to be for ever
binding on a nation till it is formally repealed? Is it dishonourable for a
citizen belonging, let us say, to the minority which is not represented by
the particular Government which makes the treaty, to repudiate it?"
"Yes, I think it may be fairly called dishonourable," said Rose; "there is
an obligation on a citizen to back up his Government."
"Then I should feel that honour is a very complicated thing," said Father
Payne. "If a citizen thinks a treaty dishonourable, and if it is also
dishonourable for him to repudiate it, it seems to me he is dishonourable
whatever he does. He is obliged to consent for the sake of honour to a
dishonourable thing being done. It seems to me perilously like a director
of a firm having to condone fraudulent practices, because it is
dishonourable to give his fellow-directors away. It is this conflict
between individual honour and public honour which puzzles me, and which
makes me feel that honour isn't a simple thing at all. A high conception of
private honour seems to me a very fine thing indeed. I mean by it a
profound hatred of anything false or cowardly or perfidious, and a loathing
of anything insincere or treacherous. That sort of proud and stainless
chivalry seems to me to be about the brightest thing we can discern, and
the furthest beauty we can recognise. But honour seems also, according to
you, to be a principle to which you can be committed by a majority of
votes, whether you approve of it or not; and then it seems to me a merely
detestable thing, if you can be bound by honour to acquiesce in something
which you honestly believe to be base. It seems to me a case of what
Tennyson describes:
"'His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.'"
"But surely social obligations must often conflict with private beliefs,"
said Rose. "A nation or a society has got to act collectively, and a
minority must be over-ridden."
"I quite agree," said Father Payne, "but why mix up honour with it at all?
I don't object to a man who conscientiously dissents to some national move
being told that he must lump it. But if he is called dishonourable for
dissenting, then honour does not seem to me to be a real word at all, but
only a term of abuse for a man who objects to some concerted plan. You
can't make a dishonest thing honest because a majority choose to do it--at
least I do not believe that morality is purely a matter of majorities, or
that the dishonour of one century can become the honour of the next. I am
inclined to believe just the opposite. I believe that the man who has so
sensitive a conscience about what is honourable or not, that he is called a
Quixotic fool by his contemporaries, is far more likely to be right than
the coarser majority who only see that a certain course is expedient. I
should believe that he saw some truth of morality clearly which the rougher
sort of minds did not see. The saint--call him what you like--is only the
man who stands higher up, and sees the sunrise before the people who stand
lower down."
"But everyone has a right to his own sense of honour," said Rose.
"Certainly," said Father Payne, "but you must be certain that a man's sense
of honour is lower than your own before you call him dishonourable for
differing from you. If a man is less scrupulous than myself, I may think
him dishonourable, if I also think that he knows better. But what I do not
think that any of us has a right to do is to call a man dishonourable if he
has more scruples than oneself. He may be over-scrupulous, but the chances
are that any man who sacrifices his convenience to a scruple has a higher
sense of honour than the man who throws over a scruple for the sake of his
convenience. That is why I think honour is a dangerous word to play with,
because it is so often used to frighten people who don't fall in with what
is for the convenience of a gang."
"But surely," said Rose, "morality is after all only a word for what
society agrees to consider moral."
"Yes, in a sense that is so," said Father Payne; "it is only a word to
express a phenomenon. But I believe that morality is a real thing, for all
that; and that our conceptions of it get clearer, as the world goes on. It
is something outside of us--a law of nature if you like--which we are
learning; not merely a thing which we invent for our convenience.
But that is too big a business to go into now."