I often think that when we go down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat we
shall all be greatly astonished at the credit and debit items we shall
find against our names in the ledger of our life. We shall discover
that many of the virtues which we thought would give us a thumping
credit balance have not been recorded at all, and that some of our
failings have by the magic of celestial book-keeping been entered on
the credit side. The fact is that our virtues are often no virtues at
all. They may even only be vices, seen in reverse.
Take Smithson Spinks--everyone knows the Smithson Spinks type. What a
reputation for generosity the fellow has! What a grandeur of giving he
exhales! How noble his scorn for mean fellows! How royal the flash of
his hand to his pocket if you are getting up a testimonial to this man,
or a fund for that object, or want a loan yourself! No one hesitates
to ask Smithson Spinks for anything. He likes to be asked. He would
be hurt if he were not asked. And yet if you track Smithson Spinks's
generosity to its source you find that it is only pride turned inside
out. The true motive of his giving is not love of his fellows, but
love of himself and the vanity of a mind that wants the admiration and
envy of others. You see the reverse of the shield at home, where the
real Smithson Spinks is discovered as a stingy fellow, who grumbles
when the boys want new boots and who leaves his wife to struggle
perpetually with a load of debt and an empty purse, while he plays the
part of the large-hearted gentleman abroad. He believes in his own
fiction, but when he looks in the ledger he will have a painful shock.
He will turn to the credit side, expecting to find GENEROSITY written
in large and golden letters, and he will probably find instead VANITY
in plain black on the debit side.
And I--let us say that I flatter myself on being a truthful person.
But am I? What will the ledger say? I have a dreadful suspicion that
it may put my truthfulness down to the compulsion of a tremulous nerve.
I may--who knows?--only be truthful because I haven't courage enough
for dissimulation. It may not be a positive moral virtue at all, but
only the moral reflection of a timorous spirit. It needs great courage
to tell a lie which you have got to face out. I could no more do it
than I could dance on the point of a needle.
Consider the courage of that monumental liar Arthur Orton--the sheer
unflinching audacity with which he challenged the truth, facing
Tichborne's own mother with his impudent tale of being her son, facing
judges and juries, going into witness-boxes with his web of outrageous
inventions, keeping a stiff lip before the devastating rain of
exposure. A ruffian, of course, a thick-skinned ruffian, but what
courage!
Now there may be a potential Arthur Orton in me, but he has never had a
chance. I have no gift of dissimulation. If I tried it I should
flounder like a boy on his first pair of skates. I could not bluff a
rabbit. No one would believe me if I told him a lie. My eye would
return a verdict of guilty against me on the spot, and my tongue would
refuse its office. And therein is the worm that eats at my
self-respect. May not my obedience to the ten commandments be only due
to my fear of the eleventh commandment--that cynical rescript which
runs, "Thou shalt not be found out"? I hope it is not so, but I must
prepare myself for the revelations of the ledger in the Valley of
Jehoshaphat. For they will be as candid about me and you as about
Smithson Spinks.
You can never be absolutely sure of a man's moral nature until you have
shipped him, figuratively,
... somewhere east of Suez
Where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no ten commandments,
And a man can raise a thirst--
until in fact you have got him away from his defences, liberated him
from the conventions and respectabilities that encompass him with
minatory fingers and vigilant eyes, and left him to the uncontrolled
governance of himself. Then it will be found whether the virtues are
diamonds or paste--whether they spring out of the ten commandments or
out of the eleventh. The lord Angelo in _Measure for Measure_ passed
for a strict and saintly person--and I have no doubt believed himself
to be a strict and saintly person--so long as he was under control, but
when the Duke's back was turned the libertine appeared. And note that
subtle touch of Shakespeare's. Angelo was not an ordinary libertine.
He passed for a saint because he could not be tempted by vice, but only
by virtue. Hear him communing with himself when Isabella has gone:
... What is't I dream on?
O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue; never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigour, art and nature
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite.
His saintliness revolted from vice, but his love of virtue opened the
floodgates of viciousness. What a paradox is man! I think I have
known more than one lord Angelo whose virtue rested on nothing better
than a fastidious taste, or an absence of appetite.
That is certainly the case with many people who have the quality of
sobriety. Abraham Lincoln, himself a total abstainer, once got into
great trouble for saying so. He was addressing a temperance meeting at
a Presbyterian church, and said: "In my judgment such of us as have
never fallen victims (to drink) have been spared more from the absence
of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who
have fallen." It seemed a reasonable thing to say, but it shocked the
stern teetotalers present. "It's a shame," said one, "that he should
be permitted to abuse us so in the house of the Lord." They did not
like to feel that they were not more virtuous than men who drank and
even got drunk. They expected to have a large credit entry for not
tippling. Like Malvolio, they mixed up virtue with "cakes and ale."
If you indulged in them you were vicious, and if you abstained from
them you were virtuous. It was a beautifully simple moral code, but
virtue is not so easily catalogued. It is not a negative thing, but a
positive thing. It is not measured by its antipathies but by its
sympathies. Its manifestations are many, but its root is one, and its
names are "truth and justice," which even the Prayer Book puts before
"religion and piety."
And to return to the Lincoln formula, if you have no taste for tippling
what virtue is there in not tippling? The virtue is often with the
tippler. I knew a man who died of drink, and whose life, nevertheless,
had been an heroic struggle with his enemy. He was always falling, but
he never ceased fighting. And it is the fighting, I think, he will
find recorded in the ledger--greatly to his surprise, for he had the
most modest opinion of his merits and a deep sense of his moral
infirmity.
It is no more virtuous for some men not to get drunk than it is for a
Rothschild not to put his hand in his neighbour's pocket in order to
steal half-a-crown. He doesn't need a half-crown, and there is no
virtue in not stealing what you don't want. That was what was wrong
with the "Northern Farmer's" philosophy that those who had money were
the best:
Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steaels,
Them as 'as coaets to their backs an' taaekes their regular meaels.
Noae, but it's them as niver knaws wheer a meael's to be 'ad--
Taaeke my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.
It was a creed of virtue which looked at the fact and not at the
temptation. He will have found a much more complex system of
book-keeping where he has gone. I imagine him standing painfully
puzzled at the sort of accounts which he will find made up in the
"valley of decision."