Transcribed from the Chatto and Windus 1911 edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




LAY MORALS AND OTHER PAPERS




Contents:
   Lay Morals
      Chapter I
      Chapter II
      Chapter III
      Chapter IV
   Father Damien
   The Pentland Rising
      Chapter I--The Causes of the Revolt
      Chapter II--The Beginning
      Chapter III--The March of the Rebels
      Chapter IV--Rullion Green
      Chapter V--A Record of Blood
   The Day After To-morrow
   College Papers
      Chapter I--Edinburgh Students in 1824
      Chapter II--The Modern Student
      Chapter III--Debating Societies
   Criticisms
      Chapter I--Lord Lytton's "Fables in Song"
      Chapter II--Salvini's Macbeth
      Chapter III--Bagster's "Pilgrim's Progress"
   Sketches
      The Satirist
      Nuits Blanches
      The Wreath of Immortelles
      Nurses
      A Character
   The Great North Road
      Chapter I--Nance at the "Green Dragon"
      Chapter II--In which Mr. Archer is Installed
      Chapter III--Jonathan Holdaway
      Chapter IV--Mingling Threads
      Chapter V--Life in the Castle
      Chapter IV--The Bad Half-Crown
      Chapter VII--The Bleaching-Green
      Chapter VIII--The Mail Guard
   The Young Chevalier
      Prologue:  The Wine-Seller's Wife
      Chapter I--The Prince
   Heathercat
      Chapter I--Traqairs of Montroymont
      Chapter II--Francie
      Chapter III--The Hill-End of Drumlowe




LAY MORALS




CHAPTER I



The problem of education is twofold:  first to know, and then to
utter.  Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks
more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers
can impart only broken images of the truth which they perceive.
Speech which goes from one to another between two natures, and,
what is worse, between two experiences, is doubly relative.  The
speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up
again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language
until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.  Such, moreover, is
the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details in our
advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of
education is to throw out some magnanimous hints.  No man was ever
so poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or
actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is
a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no
process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps
varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of
events and circumstances.

A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt
for others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of
this inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the
young, must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been
already retailed to them in their own youth.  Every generation has
to educate another which it has brought upon the stage.  People who
readily accept the responsibility of parentship, having very
different matters in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when that
responsibility falls due.  What are they to tell the child about
life and conduct, subjects on which they have themselves so few and
such confused opinions?  Indeed, I do not know; the least said,
perhaps, the soonest mended; and yet the child keeps asking, and
the parent must find some words to say in his own defence.  Where
does he find them? and what are they when found?

As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine
cases out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat
three bad things:  the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from
that as a fountain, the desire of wealth and applause.  Besides
these, or what might be deduced as corollaries from these, he will
teach not much else of any effective value:  some dim notions of
divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping, and how to walk through a
quadrille.

But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians.
It may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to
perceive it.  As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good
or evil, it is not the doctrine of Christ.  What he taught (and in
this he is like all other teachers worthy of the name) was not a
code of rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of
truth; not views, but a view.  What he showed us was an attitude of
mind.  Towards the many considerations on which conduct is built,
each man stands in a certain relation.  He takes life on a certain
principle.  He has a compass in his spirit which points in a
certain direction.  It is the attitude, the relation, the point of
the compass, that is the whole body and gist of what he has to
teach us; in this, the details are comprehended; out of this the
specific precepts issue, and by this, and this only, can they be
explained and applied.  And thus, to learn aright from any teacher,
we must first of all, like a historical artist, think ourselves
into sympathy with his position and, in the technical phrase,
create his character.  A historian confronted with some ambiguous
politician, or an actor charged with a part, have but one pre-
occupation; they must search all round and upon every side, and
grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify
the most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an
enigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian
sentiment and big words; but once that is found, all enters into a
plan, a human nature appears, the politician or the stage-king is
understood from point to point, from end to end.  This is a degree
of trouble which will be gladly taken by a very humble artist; but
not even the terror of eternal fire can teach a business man to
bend his imagination to such athletic efforts.  Yet without this,
all is vain; until we understand the whole, we shall understand
none of the parts; and otherwise we have no more than broken images
and scattered words; the meaning remains buried; and the language
in which our prophet speaks to us is a dead language in our ears.

Take a few of Christ's sayings and compare them with our current
doctrines.

'Ye cannot,' he says, 'serve God and Mammon.'  Cannot?  And our
whole system is to teach us how we can!

'The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the
children of light.'  Are they?  I had been led to understand the
reverse:  that the Christian merchant, for example, prospered
exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty was the best policy; that
an author of repute had written a conclusive treatise 'How to make
the best of both worlds.'  Of both worlds indeed!  Which am I to
believe then--Christ or the author of repute?

'Take no thought for the morrow.'  Ask the Successful Merchant;
interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that this is
not only a silly but an immoral position.  All we believe, all we
hope, all we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands
condemned in this one sentence, or, if you take the other view,
condemns the sentence as unwise and inhumane.  We are not then of
the 'same mind that was in Christ.'  We disagree with Christ.
Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong.
Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament,
and finding a strange echo of another style which the reader may
recognise:  'Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from
any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of
that meeting-house upon another.'

It may be objected that these are what are called 'hard sayings';
and that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian
although it leave some of these sayings upon one side.  But this is
a very gross delusion.  Although truth is difficult to state, it is
both easy and agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet
it ere the phrase be done.  The universe, in relation to what any
man can say of it, is plain, patent and staringly comprehensible.
In itself, it is a great and travailing ocean, unsounded,
unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man; or, let us say, it is a
monstrous and impassable mountain, one side of which, and a few
near slopes and foothills, we can dimly study with these mortal
eyes.  But what any man can say of it, even in his highest
utterance, must have relation to this little and plain corner,
which is no less visible to us than to him.  We are looking on the
same map; it will go hard if we cannot follow the demonstration.
The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear
and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly perceive
the aspect and drift of his intention.  The longest argument is but
a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel, and
we see what the man meant, whether it be a new star or an old
street-lamp.  And briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is
because we are thinking of something else.

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our
prophet, and to think of different things in the same order.  To be
of the same mind with another is to see all things in the same
perspective; it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near
at hand and not much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest
flights, to see the force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in
the centre of his vision that whatever he may express, your eyes
will light at once on the original, that whatever he may see to
declare, your mind will at once accept.  You do not belong to the
school of any philosopher, because you agree with him that theft
is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is overhead at
noon.  It is by the hard sayings that discipleship is tested.  We
are all agreed about the middling and indifferent parts of
knowledge and morality; even the most soaring spirits too often
take them tamely upon trust.  But the man, the philosopher or the
moralist, does not stand upon these chance adhesions; and the
purpose of any system looks towards those extreme points where it
steps valiantly beyond tradition and returns with some covert hint
of things outside.  Then only can you be certain that the words are
not words of course, nor mere echoes of the past; then only are you
sure that if he be indicating anything at all, it is a star and not
a street-lamp; then only do you touch the heart of the mystery,
since it was for these that the author wrote his book.

Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ
finds a word that transcends all common-place morality; every now
and then he quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and
throws out a pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by
some bold poetry of thought that men can be strung up above the
level of everyday conceptions to take a broader look upon
experience or accept some higher principle of conduct.  To a man
who is of the same mind that was in Christ, who stands at some
centre not too far from his, and looks at the world and conduct
from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude--or,
shortly, to a man who is of Christ's philosophy--every such saying
should come home with a thrill of joy and corroboration; he should
feel each one below his feet as another sure foundation in the flux
of time and chance; each should be another proof that in the
torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and great
armaments and empires are swept away and swallowed, he stands
immovable, holding by the eternal stars.  But alas! at this
juncture of the ages it is not so with us; on each and every such
occasion our whole fellowship of Christians falls back in
disapproving wonder and implicitly denies the saying.  Christians!
the farce is impudently broad.  Let us stand up in the sight of
heaven and confess.  The ethics that we hold are those of Benjamin
Franklin.  HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY, is perhaps a hard saying; it
is certainly one by which a wise man of these days will not too
curiously direct his steps; but I think it shows a glimmer of
meaning to even our most dimmed intelligences; I think we perceive
a principle behind it; I think, without hyperbole, we are of the
same mind that was in Benjamin Franklin.



CHAPTER II



But, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of
morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and
religion; and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his
mind must follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity
of method.  A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours
his parents, nor kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears
false witness; for these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast
field of duty.

Alas! what is a precept?  It is at best an illustration; it is case
law at the best which can be learned by precept.  The letter is not
only dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot be
uttered, alone is true and helpful.  This is trite to sickness; but
familiarity has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can
steal all beauty from the mountain tops; and the most startling
words begin to fall dead upon the ear after several repetitions.
If you see a thing too often, you no longer see it; if you hear a
thing too often, you no longer hear it.  Our attention requires to
be surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a
thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are feats of about an
equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar means.  The
whole Bible has thus lost its message for the common run of
hearers; it has become mere words of course; and the parson may
bawl himself scarlet and beat the pulpit like a thing possessed,
but his hearers will continue to nod; they are strangely at peace,
they know all he has to say; ring the old bell as you choose, it is
still the old bell and it cannot startle their composure.  And so
with this byword about the letter and the spirit.  It is quite
true, no doubt; but it has no meaning in the world to any man of
us.  Alas! it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less:
that while the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.

The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon,
perfect, clear, and stable like the earth.  But let a man set
himself to mark out the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he
never so nimble and never so exact, what with the multiplicity of
the leaves and the progression of the shadow as it flees before the
travelling sun, long ere he has made the circuit the whole figure
will have changed.  Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but
to a great and complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly
changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than the tools
of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed; the
very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of
leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time.  Look
now for your shadows.  O man of formulae, is this a place for you?
Have you fitted the spirit to a single case?  Alas, in the cycle of
the ages when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of
man?  Now when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood is
filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously
tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole carpet leaps and
becomes new.  Can you or your heart say more?

Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life;
and although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had
every step of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory,
tell me what definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to
manhood, or from both to age?  The settled tenor which first
strikes the eye is but the shadow of a delusion.  This is gone;
that never truly was; and you yourself are altered beyond
recognition.  Times and men and circumstances change about your
changing character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane
affords an image.  What was the best yesterday, is it still the
best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow?  Will your own Past
truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future?  And if
this be questionable, with what humble, with what hopeless eyes,
should we not watch other men driving beside us on their unknown
careers, seeing with unlike eyes, impelled by different gales,
doing and suffering in another sphere of things?

And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene,
do you offer me these two score words? these five bald
prohibitions?  For the moral precepts are no more than five; the
first four deal rather with matters of observance than of conduct;
the tenth, THOU SHALT NOT COVET, stands upon another basis, and
shall be spoken of ere long.  The Jews, to whom they were first
given, in the course of years began to find these precepts
insufficient; and made an addition of no less than six hundred and
fifty others!  They hoped to make a pocket-book of reference on
morals, which should stand to life in some such relation, say, as
Hoyle stands in to the scientific game of whist.  The comparison is
just, and condemns the design; for those who play by rule will
never be more than tolerable players; and you and I would like to
play our game in life to the noblest and the most divine advantage.
Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering view of conduct, what
view do we take ourselves, who callously leave youth to go forth
into the enchanted forest, full of spells and dire chimeras, with
no guidance more complete than is afforded by these five precepts?

HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER.  Yes, but does that mean to obey?
and if so, how long and how far?  THOU SHALL NOT KILL.  Yet the
very intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled
by killing.  THOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY.  But some of the
ugliest adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under
the sanction of religion and law.  THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE
WITNESS.  How? by speech or by silence also? or even by a smile?
THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.  Ah, that indeed!  But what is TO STEAL?

To steal?  It is another word to be construed; and who is to be our
guide?  The police will give us one construction, leaving the word
only that least minimum of meaning without which society would fall
in pieces; but surely we must take some higher sense than this;
surely we hope more than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we
wish mankind to prosper and go on from strength to strength, and
ourselves to live rightly in the eye of some more exacting
potentate than a policeman.  The approval or the disapproval of the
police must be eternally indifferent to a man who is both valorous
and good.  There is extreme discomfort, but no shame, in the
condemnation of the law.  The law represents that modicum of
morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind; but what
is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent
judge?  I observe with pleasure that no brave man has ever given a
rush for such considerations.  The Japanese have a nobler and more
sentimental feeling for this social bond into which we all are born
when we come into the world, and whose comforts and protection we
all indifferently share throughout our lives:- but even to them, no
more than to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the
state supersede the higher law of duty.  Without hesitation and
without remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments rather
than abstain from doing right.  But the accidental superior duty
being thus fulfilled, they at once return in allegiance to the
common duty of all citizens; and hasten to denounce themselves; and
value at an equal rate their just crime and their equally just
submission to its punishment.

The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active
conscience or a thoughtful head.  But to show you how one or the
other may trouble a man, and what a vast extent of frontier is left
unridden by this invaluable eighth commandment, let me tell you a
few pages out of a young man's life.

He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous,
flighty, as variable as youth itself, but always with some high
motions and on the search for higher thoughts of life.  I should
tell you at once that he thoroughly agrees with the eighth
commandment.  But he got hold of some unsettling works, the New
Testament among others, and this loosened his views of life and led
him into many perplexities.  As he was the son of a man in a
certain position, and well off, my friend had enjoyed from the
first the advantages of education, nay, he had been kept alive
through a sickly childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and
change of air; for all of which he was indebted to his father's
wealth.

At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who
followed the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in
winter; and this inequality struck him with some force.  He was at
that age of a conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the
aspects of life; and he spent much of his time scraping
acquaintance with all classes of man- and woman-kind.  In this way
he came upon many depressed ambitions, and many intelligences
stunted for want of opportunity; and this also struck him.  He
began to perceive that life was a handicap upon strange, wrong-
sided principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair and equal
race.  He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly
favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and
comfort closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and
held unwearyingly open before so idle, so desultory, and so
dissolute a being as himself.  There sat a youth beside him on the
college benches, who had only one shirt to his back, and, at
intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have it
washed.  It was my friend's principle to stay away as often as he
dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning.  But there was
something that came home to him sharply, in this fellow who had to
give over study till his shirt was washed, and the scores of others
who had never an opportunity at all.  IF ONE OF THESE COULD TAKE
HIS PLACE, he thought; and the thought tore away a bandage from his
eyes.  He was eaten by the shame of his discoveries, and despised
himself as an unworthy favourite and a creature of the back-stairs
of Fortune.  He could no longer see without confusion one of these
brave young fellows battling up-hill against adversity.  Had he not
filched that fellow's birthright?  At best was he not coldly
profiting by the injustice of society, and greedily devouring
stolen goods?  The money, indeed, belonged to his father, who had
worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn it; but by
what justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet,
done nothing but help to squander it?  A more sturdy honesty,
joined to a more even and impartial temperament, would have drawn
from these considerations a new force of industry, that this
equivocal position might be brought as swiftly as possible to an
end, and some good services to mankind justify the appropriation of
expense.  It was not so with my friend, who was only unsettled and
discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting anger with which
young men regard injustices in the first blush of youth; although
in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in their existence, and
knowingly profit by their complications.  Yet all this while he
suffered many indignant pangs.  And once, when he put on his boots,
like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his
best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free
himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his,
and do battle equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.

Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great
expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his
perplexities were thickest.  When he thought of all the other young
men of singular promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who
must remain at home to die, and with all their possibilities be
lost to life and mankind; and how he, by one more unmerited favour,
was chosen out from all these others to survive; he felt as if
there were no life, no labour, no devotion of soul and body, that
could repay and justify these partialities.  A religious lady, to
whom he communicated these reflections, could see no force in them
whatever.  'It was God's will,' said she.  But he knew it was by
God's will that Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen, which cleared
neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by God's will that
Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which excused neither the
rancour of the priests nor the timidity of Pilate.  He knew,
moreover, that although the possibility of this favour he was now
enjoying issued from his circumstances, its acceptance was the act
of his own will; and he had accepted it greedily, longing for rest
and sunshine.  And hence this allegation of God's providence did
little to relieve his scruples.  I promise you he had a very
troubled mind.  And I would not laugh if I were you, though while
he was thus making mountains out of what you think molehills, he
were still (as perhaps he was) contentedly practising many other
things that to you seem black as hell.  Every man is his own judge
and mountain-guide through life.  There is an old story of a mote
and a beam, apparently not true, but worthy perhaps of some
consideration.  I should, if I were you, give some consideration to
these scruples of his, and if I were he, I should do the like by
yours; for it is not unlikely that there may be something under
both.  In the meantime you must hear how my friend acted.  Like
many invalids, he supposed that he would die.  Now, should he die,
he saw no means of repaying this huge loan which, by the hands of
his father, mankind had advanced him for his sickness.  In that
case it would be lost money.  So he determined that the advance
should be as small as possible; and, so long as he continued to
doubt his recovery, lived in an upper room, and grudged himself all
but necessaries.  But so soon as he began to perceive a change for
the better, he felt justified in spending more freely, to speed and
brighten his return to health, and trusted in the future to lend a
help to mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had lent a help
to him.

I do not say but that my friend was a little too curious and
partial in his view; nor thought too much of himself and too little
of his parents; but I do say that here are some scruples which
tormented my friend in his youth, and still, perhaps, at odd times
give him a prick in the midst of his enjoyments, and which after
all have some foundation in justice, and point, in their confused
way, to some more honourable honesty within the reach of man.  And
at least, is not this an unusual gloss upon the eighth commandment?
And what sort of comfort, guidance, or illumination did that
precept afford my friend throughout these contentions?  'Thou shalt
not steal.'  With all my heart!  But AM I stealing?

The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from
pursuing any transaction to an end.  You can make no one understand
that his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point
of fact it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or
an evil to the world.  We have a sort of blindness which prevents
us from seeing anything but sovereigns.  If one man agrees to give
another so many shillings for so many hours' work, and then
wilfully gives him a certain proportion of the price in bad money
and only the remainder in good, we can see with half an eye that
this man is a thief.  But if the other spends a certain proportion
of the hours in smoking a pipe of tobacco, and a certain other
proportion in looking at the sky, or the clock, or trying to recall
an air, or in meditation on his own past adventures, and only the
remainder in downright work such as he is paid to do, is he,
because the theft is one of time and not of money,--is he any the
less a thief?  The one gave a bad shilling, the other an imperfect
hour; but both broke the bargain, and each is a thief.  In
piecework, which is what most of us do, the case is none the less
plain for being even less material.  If you forge a bad knife, you
have wasted some of mankind's iron, and then, with unrivalled
cynicism, you pocket some of mankind's money for your trouble.  Is
there any man so blind who cannot see that this is theft?  Again,
if you carelessly cultivate a farm, you have been playing fast and
loose with mankind's resources against hunger; there will be less
bread in consequence, and for lack of that bread somebody will die
next winter:  a grim consideration.  And you must not hope to
shuffle out of blame because you got less money for your less
quantity of bread; for although a theft be partly punished, it is
none the less a theft for that.  You took the farm against
competitors; there were others ready to shoulder the responsibility
and be answerable for the tale of loaves; but it was you who took
it.  By the act you came under a tacit bargain with mankind to
cultivate that farm with your best endeavour; you were under no
superintendence, you were on parole; and you have broke your
bargain, and to all who look closely, and yourself among the rest
if you have moral eyesight, you are a thief.  Or take the case of
men of letters.  Every piece of work which is not as good as you
can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought,
niggardly in execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster on
parole and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue
performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own
heart and condemn you for a thief.  Have you a salary?  If you
trifle with your health, and so render yourself less capable for
duty, and still touch, and still greedily pocket the emolument--
what are you but a thief?  Have you double accounts? do you by any
time-honoured juggle, deceit, or ambiguous process, gain more from
those who deal with you than it you were bargaining and dealing
face to face in front of God?--What are you but a thief?  Lastly,
if you fill an office, or produce an article, which, in your heart
of hearts, you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and still
draw your salary and go through the sham manoeuvres of this office,
or still book your profits and keep on flooding the world with
these injurious goods?--though you were old, and bald, and the
first at church, and a baronet, what are you but a thief?  These
may seem hard words and mere curiosities of the intellect, in an
age when the spirit of honesty is so sparingly cultivated that all
business is conducted upon lies and so-called customs of the trade,
that not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or
honourableness of his pursuit.  I would say less if I thought less.
But looking to my own reason and the right of things, I can only
avow that I am a thief myself, and that I passionately suspect my
neighbours of the same guilt.

Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest?  Do you find that
in your Bible?  Easy!  It is easy to be an ass and follow the
multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am
well aware, is what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest.  But
it will not bear the stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.
Even before the lowest of all tribunals,--before a court of law,
whose business it is, not to keep men right, or within a thousand
miles of right, but to withhold them from going so tragically wrong
that they will pull down the whole jointed fabric of society by
their misdeeds--even before a court of law, as we begin to see in
these last days, our easy view of following at each other's tails,
alike to good and evil, is beginning to be reproved and punished,
and declared no honesty at all, but open theft and swindling; and
simpletons who have gone on through life with a quiet conscience
may learn suddenly, from the lips of a judge, that the custom of
the trade may be a custom of the devil.  You thought it was easy to
be honest.  Did you think it was easy to be just and kind and
truthful?  Did you think the whole duty of aspiring man was as
simple as a horn-pipe? and you could walk through life like a
gentleman and a hero, with no more concern than it takes to go to
church or to address a circular?  And yet all this time you had the
eighth commandment! and, what makes it richer, you would not have
broken it for the world!

The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of little
use in private judgment.  If compression is what you want, you have
their whole spirit compressed into the golden rule; and yet there
expressed with more significance, since the law is there
spiritually and not materially stated.  And in truth, four out of
these ten commands, from the sixth to the ninth, are rather legal
than ethical.  The police-court is their proper home.  A magistrate
cannot tell whether you love your neighbour as yourself, but he can
tell more or less whether you have murdered, or stolen, or
committed adultery, or held up your hand and testified to that
which was not; and these things, for rough practical tests, are as
good as can be found.  And perhaps, therefore, the best
condensation of the Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the
priests, 'neminem laedere' and 'suum cuique tribuere.'  But all
this granted, it becomes only the more plain that they are
inadequate in the sphere of personal morality; that while they tell
the magistrate roughly when to punish, they can never direct an
anxious sinner what to do.

Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a
succinct proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing in
our faces.  We grant them one and all and for all that they are
worth; it is something above and beyond that we desire.  Christ was
in general a great enemy to such a way of teaching; we rarely find
him meddling with any of these plump commands but it was to open
them out, and lift his hearers from the letter to the spirit.  For
morals are a personal affair; in the war of righteousness every man
fights for his own hand; all the six hundred precepts of the Mishna
cannot shake my private judgment; my magistracy of myself is an
indefeasible charge, and my decisions absolute for the time and
case.  The moralist is not a judge of appeal, but an advocate who
pleads at my tribunal.  He has to show not the law, but that the
law applies.  Can he convince me? then he gains the cause.  And
thus you find Christ giving various counsels to varying people, and
often jealously careful to avoid definite precept.  Is he asked,
for example, to divide a heritage?  He refuses:  and the best
advice that he will offer is but a paraphrase of that tenth
commandment which figures so strangely among the rest.  TAKE HEED,
AND BEWARE OF COVETOUSNESS.  If you complain that this is vague, I
have failed to carry you along with me in my argument.  For no
definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its truth
were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven by
the voice of God.  And life is so intricate and changing, that
perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall
we find that nice consent of circumstances to which alone it can
apply.



CHAPTER III



Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to
our experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment
slumbers within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our
surroundings to rekindle our astonishment.  No length of habit can
blunt our first surprise.  Of the world I have but little to say in
this connection; a few strokes shall suffice.  We inhabit a dead
ember swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it
swims, and lighted up from several million miles away by a more
horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived by the theological
imagination.  Yet the dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-
place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire ripens flower and
fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the lawn.  Far off on
all hands other dead embers, other flaming suns, wheel and race in
the apparent void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest so far
that the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance.
Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the
truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home compared with
mankind on its bullet.  Even to us who have known no other, it
seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.

But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of
wonders that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to
himself.  He inhabits a body which he is continually outliving,
discarding and renewing.  Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy,
restore his spirits and the freshness of his countenance.  Hair
grows on him like grass; his eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst
for action; he joys to see and touch and hear, to partake the sun
and wind, to sit down and intently ponder on his astonishing
attributes and situation, to rise up and run, to perform the
strange and revolting round of physical functions.  The sight of a
flower, the note of a bird, will often move him deeply; yet he
looks unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous
bonfires of the universe.  He comprehends, he designs, he tames
nature, rides the sea, ploughs, climbs the air in a balloon, makes
vast inquiries, begins interminable labours, joins himself into
federations and populous cities, spends his days to deliver the
ends of the earth or to benefit unborn posterity; and yet knows
himself for a piece of unsurpassed fragility and the creature of a
few days.  His sight, which conducts him, which takes notice of the
farthest stars, which is miraculous in every way and a thing
defying explanation or belief, is yet lodged in a piece of jelly,
and can be extinguished with a touch.  His heart, which all through
life so indomitably, so athletically labours, is but a capsule, and
may be stopped with a pin.  His whole body, for all its savage
energies, its leaping and its winged desires, may yet be tamed and
conquered by a draught of air or a sprinkling of cold dew.  What he
calls death, which is the seeming arrest of everything, and the
ruin and hateful transformation of the visible body, lies in wait
for him outwardly in a thousand accidents, and grows up in secret
diseases from within.  He is still learning to be a man when his
faculties are already beginning to decline; he has not yet
understood himself or his position before he inevitably dies.  And
yet this mad, chimerical creature can take no thought of his last
end, lives as though he were eternal, plunges with his vulnerable
body into the shock of war, and daily affronts death with
unconcern.  He cannot take a step without pain or pleasure.  His
life is a tissue of sensations, which he distinguishes as they seem
to come more directly from himself or his surroundings.  He is
conscious of himself as a joyer or a sufferer, as that which
craves, chooses, and is satisfied; conscious of his surroundings as
it were of an inexhaustible purveyor, the source of aspects,
inspirations, wonders, cruel knocks and transporting caresses.
Thus he goes on his way, stumbling among delights and agonies.

Matter is a far-fetched theory, and materialism is without a root
in man.  To him everything is important in the degree to which it
moves him.  The telegraph wires and posts, the electricity speeding
from clerk to clerk, the clerks, the glad or sorrowful import of
the message, and the paper on which it is finally brought to him at
home, are all equally facts, all equally exist for man.  A word or
a thought can wound him as acutely as a knife of steel.  If he
thinks he is loved, he will rise up and glory to himself, although
he be in a distant land and short of necessary bread.  Does he
think he is not loved?--he may have the woman at his beck, and
there is not a joy for him in all the world.  Indeed, if we are to
make any account of this figment of reason, the distinction between
material and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each
man as an individual is immaterial, although the continuation and
prospects of mankind as a race turn upon material conditions.  The
physical business of each man's body is transacted for him; like a
sybarite, he has attentive valets in his own viscera; he breathes,
he sweats, he digests without an effort, or so much as a consenting
volition; for the most part he even eats, not with a wakeful
consciousness, but as it were between two thoughts.  His life is
centred among other and more important considerations; touch him in
his honour or his love, creatures of the imagination which attach
him to mankind or to an individual man or woman; cross him in his
piety which connects his soul with heaven; and he turns from his
food, he loathes his breath, and with a magnanimous emotion cuts
the knots of his existence and frees himself at a blow from the web
of pains and pleasures.

It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded
and autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there
dwell other powers tributary but independent.  If I now behold one
walking in a garden, curiously coloured and illuminated by the sun,
digesting his food with elaborate chemistry, breathing, circulating
blood, directing himself by the sight of his eyes, accommodating
his body by a thousand delicate balancings to the wind and the
uneven surface of the path, and all the time, perhaps, with his
mind engaged about America, or the dog-star, or the attributes of
God--what am I to say, or how am I to describe the thing I see?  Is
that truly a man, in the rigorous meaning of the word? or is it not
a man and something else?  What, then, are we to count the centre-
bit and axle of a being so variously compounded?  It is a question
much debated.  Some read his history in a certain intricacy of
nerve and the success of successive digestions; others find him an
exiled piece of heaven blown upon and determined by the breath of
God; and both schools of theorists will scream like scalded
children at a word of doubt.  Yet either of these views, however
plausible, is beside the question; either may be right; and I care
not; I ask a more particular answer, and to a more immediate point.
What is the man?  There is Something that was before hunger and
that remains behind after a meal.  It may or may not be engaged in
any given act or passion, but when it is, it changes, heightens,
and sanctifies.  Thus it is not engaged in lust, where satisfaction
ends the chapter; and it is engaged in love, where no satisfaction
can blunt the edge of the desire, and where age, sickness, or
alienation may deface what was desirable without diminishing the
sentiment.  This something, which is the man, is a permanence which
abides through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and now
triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate distress of
appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all.  So, to the man,
his own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult of
the senses, like a revolving Pharos in the night.  It is forgotten;
it is hid, it seems, for ever; and yet in the next calm hour he
shall behold himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes
and storm.

Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and eats,
that generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and
lower sides of man.  This inner consciousness, this lantern
alternately obscured and shining, to and by which the individual
exists and must order his conduct, is something special to himself
and not common to the race.  His joys delight, his sorrows wound
him, according as THIS is interested or indifferent in the affair;
according as they arise in an imperial war or in a broil conducted
by the tributary chieftains of the mind.  He may lose all, and THIS
not suffer; he may lose what is materially a trifle, and THIS leap
in his bosom with a cruel pang.  I do not speak of it to hardened
theorists:  the living man knows keenly what it is I mean.

'Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and more
divine than the things which cause the various effects, and, as it
were, pull thee by the strings.  What is that now in thy mind? is
it fear, or suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?'  Thus
far Marcus Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any
book.  Here is a question worthy to be answered.  What is in thy
mind?  What is the utterance of your inmost self when, in a quiet
hour, it can be heard intelligibly?  It is something beyond the
compass of your thinking, inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it not
of a higher spirit than you had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect
above all base considerations?  This soul seems hardly touched with
our infirmities; we can find in it certainly no fear, suspicion, or
desire; we are only conscious--and that as though we read it in the
eyes of some one else--of a great and unqualified readiness.  A
readiness to what? to pass over and look beyond the objects of
desire and fear, for something else.  And this something else? this
something which is apart from desire and fear, to which all the
kingdoms of the world and the immediate death of the body are alike
indifferent and beside the point, and which yet regards conduct--by
what name are we to call it?  It may be the love of God; or it may
be an inherited (and certainly well concealed) instinct to preserve
self and propagate the race; I am not, for the moment, averse to
either theory; but it will save time to call it righteousness.  By
so doing I intend no subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed
ready, and more than willing, to accept the rigid consequence, and
lay aside, as far as the treachery of the reason will permit, all
former meanings attached to the word righteousness.  What is right
is that for which a man's central self is ever ready to sacrifice
immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is what the central
self discards or rejects as incompatible with the fixed design of
righteousness.

To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of definition.
That which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each
man by himself, but can never be rigorously set forth in language,
and never, above all, imposed upon another.  The conscience has,
then, a vision like that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and
for the most part illuminates none but its possessor.  When many
people perceive the same or any cognate facts, they agree upon a
word as symbol; and hence we have such words as TREE, STAR, LOVE,
HONOUR, or DEATH; hence also we have this word RIGHT, which, like
the others, we all understand, most of us understand differently,
and none can express succinctly otherwise.  Yet even on the
straitest view, we can make some steps towards comprehension of our
own superior thoughts.  For it is an incredible and most
bewildering fact that a man, through life, is on variable terms
with himself; he is aware of tiffs and reconciliations; the
intimacy is at times almost suspended, at times it is renewed again
with joy.  As we said before, his inner self or soul appears to him
by successive revelations, and is frequently obscured.  It is from
a study of these alternations that we can alone hope to discover,
even dimly, what seems right and what seems wrong to this veiled
prophet of ourself.

All that is in the man in the larger sense, what we call impression
as well as what we call intuition, so far as my argument looks, we
must accept.  It is not wrong to desire food, or exercise, or
beautiful surroundings, or the love of sex, or interest which is
the food of the mind.  All these are craved; all these should be
craved; to none of these in itself does the soul demur; where there
comes an undeniable want, we recognise a demand of nature.  Yet we
know that these natural demands may be superseded; for the demands
which are common to mankind make but a shadowy consideration in
comparison to the demands of the individual soul.  Food is almost
the first prerequisite; and yet a high character will go without
food to the ruin and death of the body rather than gain it in a
manner which the spirit disavows.  Pascal laid aside mathematics;
Origen doctored his body with a knife; every day some one is thus
mortifying his dearest interests and desires, and, in Christ's
words, entering maim into the Kingdom of Heaven.  This is to
supersede the lesser and less harmonious affections by
renunciation; and though by this ascetic path we may get to heaven,
we cannot get thither a whole and perfect man.  But there is
another way, to supersede them by reconciliation, in which the soul
and all the faculties and senses pursue a common route and share in
one desire.  Thus, man is tormented by a very imperious physical
desire; it spoils his rest, it is not to be denied; the doctors
will tell you, not I, how it is a physical need, like the want of
food or slumber.  In the satisfaction of this desire, as it first
appears, the soul sparingly takes part; nay, it oft unsparingly
regrets and disapproves the satisfaction.  But let the man learn to
love a woman as far as he is capable of love; and for this random
affection of the body there is substituted a steady determination,
a consent of all his powers and faculties, which supersedes,
adopts, and commands the other.  The desire survives, strengthened,
perhaps, but taught obedience and changed in scope and character.
Life is no longer a tale of betrayals and regrets; for the man now
lives as a whole; his consciousness now moves on uninterrupted like
a river; through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he
remains approvingly conscious of himself.

Now to me, this seems a type of that rightness which the soul
demands.  It demands that we shall not live alternately with our
opposing tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust,
but seek some path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose,
but serve each other to a common end.  It demands that we shall not
pursue broken ends, but great and comprehensive purposes, in which
soul and body may unite like notes in a harmonious chord.  That
were indeed a way of peace and pleasure, that were indeed a heaven
upon earth.  It does not demand, however, or, to speak in measure,
it does not demand of me, that I should starve my appetites for no
purpose under heaven but as a purpose in itself; or, in a weak
despair, pluck out the eye that I have not yet learned to guide and
enjoy with wisdom.  The soul demands unity of purpose, not the
dismemberment of man; it seeks to roll up all his strength and
sweetness, all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make of him a
perfect man exulting in perfection.  To conclude ascetically is to
give up, and not to solve, the problem.  The ascetic and the
creeping hog, although they are at different poles, have equally
failed in life.  The one has sacrificed his crew; the other brings
back his seamen in a cock-boat, and has lost the ship.  I believe
there are not many sea-captains who would plume themselves on
either result as a success.