II. On the Negative Spirit
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 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 fullness 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 today, "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.
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