Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the
hysteria which as often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But
let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense,
necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It
is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of
success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal, in
what Stevenson called, with his usual startling felicity, “the lost
fight of virtue.” A modern morality, on the other hand, can only point
with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of law;
its only certainty is a certainty of ill. It can only point to
imperfection. It has no perfection to point to. But the monk
meditating upon Christ or Buddha has in his mind an image of perfect
health, a thing of clear colours and clean air. He may contemplate this
ideal wholeness and happiness far more than he ought; he may
contemplate it to the neglect of exclusion of essential THINGS; he may
contemplate it until he has become a dreamer or a driveller; but still
it is wholeness and happiness that he is contemplating. He may even go
mad; but he is going mad for the love of sanity. But the modern student
of ethics, even if he remains sane, remains sane from an insane dread
of insanity.
The anchorite rolling on the stones in a frenzy of submission is a
healthier person fundamentally than many a sober man in a silk hat who
is walking down Cheapside. For many such are good only through a
withering knowledge of evil. I am not at this moment claiming for the
devotee anything more than this primary advantage, that though he may
be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is still fixing his
thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness, on a strength that
has no limits, and a happiness that has no end. Doubtless there are
other objections which can be urged without unreason against the
influence of gods and visions in morality, whether in the cell or
street. But this advantage the mystic morality must always have—it is
always jollier. A young man may keep himself from vice by continually
thinking of disease. He may keep himself from it also by continually
thinking of the Virgin Mary. There may be question about which method
is the more reasonable, or even about which is the more efficient. But
surely there can be no question about which is the more wholesome.
I remember a pamphlet by that able and sincere secularist, Mr. G. W.
Foote, which contained a phrase sharply symbolizing and dividing these
two methods. The pamphlet was called BEER AND BIBLE, those two very
noble things, all the nobler for a conjunction which Mr. Foote, in his
stern old Puritan way, seemed to think sardonic, but which I confess to
thinking appropriate and charming. I have not the work by me, but I
remember that Mr. Foote dismissed very contemptuously any attempts to
deal with the problem of strong drink by religious offices or
intercessions, and said that a picture of a drunkard’s liver would be
more efficacious in the matter of temperance than any prayer or praise.
In that picturesque expression, it seems to me, is perfectly embodied
the incurable morbidity of modern ethics. In that temple the lights are
low, the crowds kneel, the solemn anthems are uplifted. But that upon
the altar to which all men kneel is no longer the perfect flesh, the
body and substance of the perfect man; it is still flesh, but it is
diseased. It is the drunkard’s liver of the New Testament that is
marred for us, which we take in remembrance of him.
Now, it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid
pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the
real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of
the nineteenth century. If any ordinary man ever said that he was
horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Maupassant, or by the
plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was
lying. The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of
modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never
dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a
new habit. On the contrary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence
which is new still, though it is already dying. The tradition of
calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes
down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary honest man,
whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not
either disgusted or even annoyed at the candour of the moderns. What
disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear
realism, but the absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine
religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the
contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing
that called names. This is the great difference between some recent
developments of Nonconformity and the great Puritanism of the
seventeenth century. It was the whole point of the Puritans that they
cared nothing for decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish
themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which
the founders of Nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at
kings and queens. But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke
plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly
about good. The thing which is resented, and, as I think, rightly
resented, in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is typical, is
that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things
increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what
things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it
goes almost blind with doubt. If we compare, let us say, the morality
of the DIVINE COMEDY with the morality of Ibsen’s GHOSTS, we shall see
all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse
the author of the INFERNO of an Early Victorian prudishness or a
Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral
instruments—Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the
vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only
one—Hell. It is often said, and with perfect truth, that no one could
read a play like GHOSTS and remain indifferent to the necessity of an
ethical self-command. That is quite true, and the same is to be said of
the most monstrous and material descriptions of the eternal fire. It is
quite certain the realists like Zola do in one sense promote
morality—they promote it in the sense in which the hangman promotes
it, in the sense in which the devil promotes it. But they only affect
that small minority which will accept any virtue of courage. Most
healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they dismiss the
possibility of bombs or microbes. Modern realists are indeed
Terrorists, like the dynamiters; and they fail just as much in their
effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dynamiters are
well-meaning people engaged in the task, so obviously ultimately
hopeless, of using science to promote morality.
I do not wish the reader to confuse me for a moment with those vague
persons who imagine that Ibsen is what they call a pessimist. There are
plenty of wholesome people in Ibsen, plenty of good people, plenty of
happy people, plenty of examples of men acting wisely and things ending
well. That is not my meaning. My meaning is that Ibsen has throughout,
and does not disguise, a certain vagueness and a changing attitude as
well as a doubting attitude towards what is really wisdom and virtue in
this life—a vagueness which contrasts very remarkably with the
decisiveness with which he pounces on something which he perceives to
be a root of evil, some convention, some deception, some ignorance. We
know that the hero of GHOSTS is mad, and we know why he is mad. We do
also know that Dr. Stockman is sane; but we do not know why he is sane.
Ibsen does not profess to know how virtue and happiness are brought
about, in the sense that he professes to know how our modern sexual
tragedies are brought about. Falsehood works ruin in THE PILLARS OF
SOCIETY, but truth works equal ruin in THE WILD DUCK. There are no
cardinal virtues of Ibsenism. There is no ideal man of Ibsen. All this
is not only admitted, but vaunted in the most valuable and thoughtful
of all the eulogies upon Ibsen, Mr. Bernard Shaw’s QUINTESSENCE OF
IBSENISM. Mr. Shaw sums up Ibsen’s teaching in the phrase, “The golden
rule is that there is no golden rule.” In his eyes this absence of an
enduring and positive ideal, this absence of a permanent key to virtue,
is the one great Ibsen merit. I am not discussing now with any fulness
whether this is so or not. All I venture to point out, with an
increased firmness, is that this omission, good or bad, does leave us
face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very
definite images of evil, and with no definite image of good. To us
light must be henceforward the dark thing—the thing of which we cannot
speak. To us, as to Milton’s devils in Pandemonium, it is darkness
that is visible. The human race, according to religion, fell once, and
in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil. Now we have fallen a
second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us.
A great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken disappointment, has in
our time fallen on our Northern civilization. All previous ages have
sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the
right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern
world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no
answer to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a
few notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for
instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mere
existence of their neighbours. Ibsen is the first to return from the
baffled hunt to bring us the tidings of great failure.
Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order
to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about
“liberty”; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what
is good. We are fond of talking about “progress”; that is a dodge to
avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about
“education”; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The
modern man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and
embrace liberty.” This is, logically rendered, “Let us not decide what
is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.” He says,
“Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.” This, logically
stated, means, “Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle
whether we are getting more of it.” He says, “Neither in religion nor
morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.”
This, clearly expressed, means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let
us give it to our children.”
Mr. H.G. Wells, that exceedingly clear-sighted man, has pointed out in
a recent work that this has happened in connection with economic
questions. The old economists, he says, made generalizations, and they
were (in Mr. Wells’s view) mostly wrong. But the new economists, he
says, seem to have lost the power of making any generalizations at all.
And they cover this incapacity with a general claim to be, in specific
cases, regarded as “experts”, a claim “proper enough in a hairdresser
or a fashionable physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of
science.” But in spite of the refreshing rationality with which Mr.
Wells has indicated this, it must also be said that he himself has
fallen into the same enormous modern error. In the opening pages of
that excellent book MANKIND IN THE MAKING, he dismisses the ideals of
art, religion, abstract morality, and the rest, and says that he is
going to consider men in their chief function, the function of
parenthood. He is going to discuss life as a “tissue of births.” He is
not going to ask what will produce satisfactory saints or satisfactory
heroes, but what will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers. The
whole is set forward so sensibly that it is a few moments at least
before the reader realises that it is another example of unconscious
shirking. What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled
what is the good of being a man? You are merely handing on to him a
problem you dare not settle yourself. It is as if a man were asked,
“What is the use of a hammer?” and answered, “To make hammers”; and
when asked, “And of those hammers, what is the use?” answered, “To make
hammers again”. Just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the
question of the ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all the
rest of us are by these phrases successfully putting off the question
of the ultimate value of the human life.
The case of the general talk of “progress” is, indeed, an extreme one.
As enunciated to-day, “progress” is simply a comparative of which we
have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion,
patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of
progress—that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something
that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great
deal more of nobody knows what. Progress, properly understood, has,
indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in
opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. So far from it
being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of
ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. Nobody has any
business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and
a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being
doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without
being infallible—at any rate, without believing in some infallibility.
For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we
are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same
degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the beginning
of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word
“progress” than we. In the Catholic twelfth century, in the philosophic
eighteenth century, the direction may have been a good or a bad one,
men may have differed more or less about how far they went, and in what
direction, but about the direction they did in the main agree, and
consequently they had the genuine sensation of progress. But it is
precisely about the direction that we disagree. Whether the future
excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less
liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut
up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin
intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love
everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with Nietzsche;—these are the
things about which we are actually fighting most. It is not merely
true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this
“progressive” age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have
settled least what is progress are the most “progressive” people in it.
The ordinary mass, the men who have never troubled about progress,
might be trusted perhaps to progress. The particular individuals who
talk about progress would certainly fly to the four winds of heaven
when the pistol-shot started the race. I do not, therefore, say that
the word “progress” is unmeaning; I say it is unmeaning without the
previous definition of a moral doctrine, and that it can only be
applied to groups of persons who hold that doctrine in common.
Progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that
it is illegitimate for us. It is a sacred word, a word which could only
rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith.