I returned, as I said, with a sense of serene pleasure and security to
my work; but that serenity did not last long. What I had seen with
Amroth, on that day of wandering, filled me with a strange restlessness,
and a yearning for I knew not what. I plunged into my studies with
determination rather than ardour, and I set myself to study what is the
most difficult problem of all--the exact limits of individual
responsibility. I had many conversations on the point with one of my
teachers, a young man of very wide experience, who combined in an
unusual way a close scientific knowledge of the subject with a peculiar
emotional sympathy. He told me once that it was the best outfit for the
scientific study of these problems, when the heart anticipated the
slower judgment of the mind, and set the mind a goal, so to speak, to
work up to; though he warned me that the danger was that the mind was
often reluctant to abandon the more indulgent claims of the heart; and
he advised me to mistrust alike scientific conclusions and emotional
inferences.
I had a very memorable conversation with him on the particular question
of responsibility, which I will here give.
"The mistake," I said to him, "of human moralists seems to me to be,
that they treat all men as more or less equal in the matter of moral
responsibility. How often," I added, "have I heard a school preacher
tell boys that they could not all be athletic or clever or popular, but
that high principle and moral courage were things within the reach of
all. Whereas the more that I studied human nature, the more did the
power of surveying and judging one's own moral progress, and the power
of enforcing and executing the dictates of the conscience, seem to me
faculties, like other faculties. Indeed, it appears to me," I said,
"that on the one hand there are people who have a power of moral
discrimination, when dealing with the retrospect of their actions, but
no power of obeying the claims of principle, when confronted with a
situation involving moral strain; while on the other hand there seem to
me to be some few men with a great and resolute power of will, capable
of swift decision and firm action, but without any instinct for morality
at all."
"Yes," he said, "you are quite right. The moral sense is in reality a
high artistic sense. It is a power of discerning and being attracted by
the beauty of moral action, just as the artist is attracted by form and
colour, and the musician by delicate combinations of harmonies and the
exquisite balance of sound. You know," he said, "what a suspension is in
music--it is a chord which in itself is a discord, but which depends for
its beauty on some impending resolution. It is just so with moral
choice. The imagination plays a great part in it. The man whose
morality is high and profound sees instinctively the approaching
contingency, and his act of self-denial or self-forgetfulness depends
for its force upon the way in which it will ultimately combine with
other issues involved, even though at the moment that act may seem to be
unnecessary and even perverse."
"But," I said, "there are a good many people who attain to a sensible,
well-balanced kind of temperance, after perhaps a few failures, from a
purely prudential motive. What is the worth of that?"
"Very small indeed," said my teacher. "In fact, the prudential morality,
based on motives of health and reputation and success, is a thing that
has often to be deliberately unlearnt at a later stage. The strange
catastrophes which one sees so often in human life, where a man by one
act of rashness, or moral folly, upsets the tranquil tenor of his
life--a desperate love-affair, a passion of unreasonable anger, a piece
of quixotic generosity--are often a symptom of a great effort of the
soul to free itself from prudential considerations. A good thing done
for a low motive has often a singularly degrading and deforming
influence on the soul. One has to remember how terribly the heavenly
values are obscured upon earth by the body, its needs and its desires;
and current morality of a cautious and sensible kind is often worse than
worthless, because it produces a kind of self-satisfaction, which is the
hardest thing to overcome."
"But," I said, "in the lives of some of the greatest moralists, one so
often sees, or at all events hears it said, that their morality is
useless because it is unpractical, too much out of the reach of the
ordinary man, too contemptuous of simple human faculties. What is one to
make of that?"
"It is a difficult matter," he replied; "one does indeed, in the lives
of great moralists, see sometimes that their work is vitiated by
perverse and fantastic preferences, which they exalt out of all
proportion to their real value. But for all that, it is better to be on
the side of the saints; for they are gifted with the sort of instinctive
appreciation of the beauty of high morality of which I spoke.
Unselfishness, purity, peacefulness seem to them so beautiful and
desirable that they are constrained to practise them. While controversy,
bitterness, cruelty, meanness, vice, seem so utterly ugly and repulsive
that they cannot for an instant entertain even so much as a thought of
them."
"But if a man sees that he is wanting in this kind of perception," I
said, "what can he do? How is he to learn to love what he does not
admire and to abhor what he does not hate? It all seems so fatalistic,
so irresistible."
"If he discerns his lack," said my teacher with a smile, "he is probably
not so very far from the truth. The germ of the sense of moral beauty is
there, and it only wants patience and endeavour to make it grow. But it
cannot be all done in any single life, of course; that is where the
human faith fails, in its limitations of a man's possibilities to a
single life."
"But what is the reason," I said, "why the morality, the high austerity
of some persons, who are indubitably high-minded and pure-hearted, is so
utterly discouraging and even repellent?"
"Ah," he said, "there you touch on a great truth. The reason of that is
that these have but a sterile sort of connoisseur-ship in virtue. Virtue
cannot be attained in solitude, nor can it be made a matter of private
enjoyment. The point is, of course, that it is not enough for a man to
be himself; he must also give himself; and if a man is moral because of
the delicate pleasure it brings him--and the artistic pleasure of
asceticism is a very high one--he is apt to find himself here in very
strange and distasteful company. In this, as in everything, the only
safe motive is the motive of love. The man who takes pleasure in using
influence, or setting a lofty example, is just as arid a dilettante as
the musician who plays, or the artist who paints, for the sake of the
applause and the admiration he wins; he is only regarding others as so
many instruments for registering his own level of complacency. Every
one, even the least complicated of mankind, must know the exquisite
pleasure that comes from doing the simplest and humblest service to one
whom he loves; how such love converts the most menial office into a
luxurious joy; and the higher that a man goes, the more does he discern
in every single human being with whom he is brought into contact a soul
whom he can love and serve. Of course it is but an elementary pleasure
to enjoy pleasing those whom we regard with some passion of affection,
wife or child or friend, because, after all, one gains something oneself
by that. But the purest morality of all discerns the infinitely lovable
quality which is in the depth of every human soul, and lavishes its
tenderness and its grace upon it, with a compassion that grows and
increases, the more unthankful and clumsy and brutish is the soul which
it sets out to serve."
"But," I said, "beautiful as that thought is--and I see and recognise
its beauty--it does limit the individual responsibility very greatly.
Surely a prudential morality, the morality which is just because it
fears reprisal, and is kind because it anticipates kindness, is better
than none at all? The morality of which you speak can only belong to the
noblest human creatures."
"Only to the noblest," he said; "and I must repeat what I said before,
that the prudential morality is useless, because it begins at the wrong
end, and is set upon self throughout. I must say deliberately that the
soul which loves unreasonably and unwisely, which even yields itself to
the passion of others for the pleasure it gives rather than for the
pleasure it receives--the thriftless, lavish, good-natured,
affectionate people, who are said to make such a mess of their
lives--are far higher in the scale of hope than the cautiously
respectable, the prudently kind, the selfishly pure. There must be no
mistake about this. One must somehow or other give one's heart away, and
it is better to do it in error and disaster than to treasure it for
oneself. Of course there are many lives on earth--and an increasing
number as the world develops--which are generous and noble and
unselfish, without any sacrifice of purity or self-respect. But the
essence of morality is giving, and not receiving, or even practising;
the point is free choice, and not compulsion; and if one cannot give
_because_ one loves, one must give _until_ one loves."