Chapter V: Part 5

Vice is a monster of such frightful mien, _etc._

It never occurs to them to finish the sentence:

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

The fact is that Anglo-Saxon society has got beyond the enduring stage, and is largely occupied in pitying. There is a general sense that the people at large, in all moral matters, know better than the specialists. We will take our creed not from the theologians, but from Mr. Winston Churchill; and we will take our pathology not from medical treatises, but from Brieux. We will discuss the underworld at dinner because, between the fish and the entrée, the thin lady with the pearls may say something valuable about it. If we are made uncomfortable by the discussion, it only shows that we are selfish pigs.

Now I see no reason why decent-minded people should not discuss with their intimate friends anything they please. If you are really intimate with any one, you are not likely to discuss things unless you both please. But I do see, still, a beautiful result of the old order that the new order does not tend to produce. The conventional avoidance as a general subject of conversation of sex in all its phases was a safeguard to sensibilities. You cannot, in one sense, discuss sex quite impersonally, for every one is of one sex or the other. The people who cry out against the segregation of the negro in government offices have hardly realized that non-segregation is objected to, not because of itself, but because of miscegenation. There is a little logic left in the world; and there are some people who perceive that sequence, whether they phrase it or not. Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and whom you may not marry. You do not bring people together in society who are _tabu_ to each other. Not that you necessarily expect, out of a hundred dinner-parties, any one marriage to result; but you assume social equality in the people seated about your board. Is not, in the last analysis, the only sense in such a phrase as “social equality,” the sense of marriageability? Even conventions are not so superficial as they seem; and they have that perfectly good human basis. It is vitally important to the welfare and the continuance of the civilized race that sex-sensibilities should be preserved. Otherwise you will not get the romantic mating; and the unromantic mating, once well established in society, will give rise to a perfectly transmissible (whether by heredity or environment, O shade of Mendel!) brutality. It is brutalizing to talk promiscuously of things that are essentially private to the individual; just as it is brutalizing (I believe no one questions that) for a family and eight boarders to sleep in one room--even a large room. All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing. We do not take our tooth-brushes with us when we go out to dinner, and if we did, and did not mind (very soon we should not), the practice, I am sure, would have a brutalizing effect. A certain amount of plain speaking is, perhaps, a good thing; but there is no doubt that at present we have far too much of it to suit most of us, and I cannot see why we should be made to endure it just because a few people who are by way of calling themselves moralists cannot get on with society on its own terms.

It has long been a convention among people who are not cynical that bodily matters are not spoken of in mixed and unfamiliar gatherings. Of course, our great-grandmothers were prudes. The reason why they talked so much about their souls, I fancy, is that there was hardly a limb or a feature of the human body that they thought it proper to mention. They were driven back on religion because they held that the soul really had nothing to do with the body at all. The psychiatrists have done their best to take away from us that (on the whole) comforting belief. In America, at least, we are finding it harder and harder to get out of the laboratory. It is the serious and patriotic American in _The Madras House_ who asks the astonished Huxtable, “But are you the mean sensual man?” In _The Madras House_ the question is screamingly funny; but I cannot imagine any man’s liking, in his own house, to have the question put to him by a total stranger. The fact is that we have dragged our Ibsen and our Strindberg and our Sudermann lovingly across the footlights, and are hugging them to our hearts in the privacy of our boxes. We have decided that manners shall consist entirely of morals. It is just possible that, in the days when morals consisted largely of manners, fewer people were contaminated. You cannot shock a person practically whom you are totally unwilling to shock verbally; and if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically. Above all, when we become incapable of the shock verbal, there will be nothing left for the unconventional people but the shock practical. And that, I imagine, is what we are coming to--all in the interests of morality, be it understood. At no time in history, perhaps, have the people who are not fit for society had such a glorious opportunity to pretend that society is not fit for them. Knowledge of the slums is at present a passport to society--so much the parlor philanthropists have achieved--and all they have to do is to prove that they know their subject. It is an odd qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen and ladies are always credulous, especially if you tell them that they are not doing their duty.

Moreover, when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precocious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information? If we discuss the pathology of divorce with the first-comer, what is to prevent divorce from becoming, in the end, as natural as daily bread? And if nothing is to be _tabu_ in talk, how many things will remain _tabu_ in practice? The human race is, in the end, as relentlessly logical as that. Even the aborigines that we have occasionally mentioned turn scandals over to the medicine-man, and keep a few delicate silences themselves. Perhaps we are “returning to Nature,” as the Rousseauists wanted us to; with characteristic Anglo-Saxon thoroughness, going the savages one better. But it is a pity to forget how to blush; for though in the ideal society a blush would never be forced to a cheek, it would not be because nothing was considered (as a German might say) blushworthy. Each man’s private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess to people with a code. I do not contend that that is a high form of morality; but it has certainly saved society a good many practical unpleasantnesses. And we are clearly courting the danger of essentially undiscussable actions when we admit every action to discussion.

I saw it seriously contended in some journal or other, not long ago, that, whether any other women were enfranchised or not, prostitutes ought undoubtedly to have the vote, because only thus could the social evil be effectively dealt with. Incredible enough; but there it was. Not many people, perhaps, would agree with that particular reformer; but undoubtedly there is a mania at present, in the classes that used to be conventional, for getting one’s information from the other camp. It is valuable to know the prostitute’s opinion--facts never come amiss; but why assume that we have only to know it to hold it? Is it not conceivable that other generations than our own have known her opinions, and that lines of demarcation have been drawn because a lot of people, as intelligent as we, did not agree with her? The present tendency, however, is to consider every one’s opinion important, in social and ethical matters, except that of respectable folk. My own pessimistic notion is, as I have hinted, that the philanthropic assault on the conventional code has come primarily from people who were too ignorant, or too lazy, or too undisciplined, to submit to the code; and that the success of the assault results from the sheer defenceless niceness--the mingled altruism and humility--of the people accused of conventionality. At all events, the fact is that our reticences have somehow become cases of cowardice, and our rejections forms of brutality. We are all a little pathetic in our credulity, and we are very like Moses Primrose at the fair. Well: let us buy green spectacles if we must; but let us, as long as we can, refuse to look through them!

It may seem a far cry from “temperament” to social service. I have known a great many people who went in for social service, and I do not think it is. The motives of the heterogeneous foes of convention may lie as far apart as the Poles (one Pole is very like the other, by the way, as far as we can make out from Peary and Amundsen) but the object is the same: to destroy the complicated fabric which the centuries have lovingly built up. (Even if you call it “restoration,” it is apt to amount to the same thing, as any good architect knows.) At the bar of Heaven, sober Roundheads and drunken rioters will probably be differently dealt with; but here on earth, both have been given to smashing stained-glass windows. Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give. The iconoclasts do the same thing; for civilization, whether it be perfect or not, is a fruit of time. Conventions are easy to come by, if you are willing to take conventions like those of the Central Australians. The difference between a perfected and a barbaric convention is a difference of refinement, in the old alchemical sense. A lot of the _tabu_ business is too stupid and meaningless for words. Civilization has been a weeding-out process, controlled and directed by increasing knowledge. We have infinitely more conventions than the aborigines: we simply have not such silly ones. The foes of modern convention are not suggesting anything wiser, or better, or more subtle: they are only attacking all convention blindly, as if the very notion of _tabu_ were wrong. The very notion of _tabu_ is one of the tightest notions in the world. Better any old _tabu_ than none, for a man cannot be said to be “on the side of the stars” at all, unless he makes refusals. What the foes of convention want is to have all _tabu_ overthrown. It is very dull of them, for even if a cataclysm came and helped them out--even if we were all turned, over night, into potential fossils for the delight of future scientists--the next beginnings of society would be founded on _tabu_. We shudder at the Central Australians; we should hate life on their terms. But I would rather live among the Warramunga than among the twentieth-century anarchists, for I cannot conceive a more odious society than one where nothing is considered indecent or impious. We may think, that the mental agility of the Warramunga could be better applied. Well: in time, it will be. But they are lifted above the brute just in so far as they develop mental agility in the framing of a moral law, however absurd a one. I said that their conventions were almost too complicated for us to master. That, I fancy, is because any mind they have, they give to their conventions. It is the natural consequence of giving your mind to science and history and philology and art, that you simplify where you can; also, that your conventions become purified by knowledge. Even the iconoclasts of the present day do not want us to throw away such text-book learning as we have achieved. They do ask us, though, to throw away the racial inhibitions that we have been so long acquiring. Is it possible that they do not realize what a slow and difficult business it is to get any particular opinion into the instincts of a race? Only the “evolution” they are so fond of talking about can do that. Perhaps we ought to take comfort from the reflection. But it is easier to destroy than to build up; and they are quite capable of wasting a few thousand years of our time.

No: the iconoclasts want to bring us, if possible, lower than the Warramunga. Some of them might be shocked at the allegation, for some of them, no doubt, are idealists--after the fashion of Jean-Jacques, be it understood. These are merely, one may say respectfully, mistaken: for they do not reckon with human nature any more than do the socialists. But the majority, I incline to believe, are merely the natural foes of dignity, of spiritual hierarchy, of wisdom perceived and followed. They object to guarded speech and action, because they themselves find self-control a nuisance. So, often, it is; but if the moral experience of man-kind has taught us anything, it has taught us that, without self-control, you get no decent society at all. When the mistress of Lowood School told Mr. Brocklehurst that the girls’ hair curled naturally, he retorted: “Yes, but we are not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to become children of grace.” We do not sympathize with Mr. Brocklehurst’s choice of what was to be objected to in nature; we do not, indeed, sympathize with him in any way, for he was a hypocrite. But none the less, it is better to be, in the right sense, a child of grace than a child of nature. Attila did not think so; and Attila sacked Rome. We may be sacked--the planet is used to these _débâcles_--but let us not, either as a matter of mistaken humility or by way of low strategy, pretend that the Huns were Crusaders!

THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH

It is pretty much taken for granted by decent folk that the truth should be told in all circumstances. “It is never permissible to lie” has been, ever since the Christian era came in, the common opinion, if not the common practice. And yet, which one of us has never lied, I will not say against his conscience, but for the very sake of his conscience? Conventional religion has been assumed to be our sole guide, while our actual conduct is usually based on the different, and more explicit, code of honor. Honor is not religion, though with real religion it has always been at peace; civilized manners are not religion, though, again, they have always been at peace with it. In the matter of lying, both honor and civilized manners have a great deal to say; and the fact that we realize this subconsciously is responsible for a great many minor perplexities.

Strictly speaking, in Candide’s “best of possible worlds” lies should not pass human lips. There are many people who stick to the literal interpretation of the precept: ladies, for example, who retire to the back porch before they permit their maids to tell the unwelcome caller that they are “out.” There, presumably, they gaze at the blue sky, and congratulate themselves on their unimpeachable veracity. Yet even scrupulous people allow their servants to say they are out when they are in, because “out” is conventionally understood to mean many things. On the other hand, Mr. Chesterton tells us that, under certain conditions, mere silence is the most damnable lie of all. The matter is not so simple as it seems: its intricacies may become a morass for the unwary, and an enchanted garden for the casuist.

Very few people, I fancy, would say, after deliberation, that no lie was ever justified. To be sure, I once heard a serious young man protest that Shakespeare had damned Desdemona by allowing her, at her last gasp, to exculpate Othello. I have also known people who objected vehemently to the late Mark Twain because he said so many things that were not so. But there are occasions when lies are taken for granted, even by the law. A man on trial for his life is supposed to tell the truth, but not if it will incriminate him. A wife is not dragged to the witness-stand against her will to testify against her husband--no one would legitimately expect anything but perjury from her. I do not see much difference between legally permitting a man to say “Not guilty” when he is guilty, and legally permitting him to lie. Is there any solitary maiden lady who would not willingly give the midnight marauder to understand that her husband was just coming down the stairs, armed to the teeth? A man is not supposed, except by an extinct type of Puritan, to “give away” the lady who has made sacrifices for him; and even the extinct type of Puritan would hardly expect you to tell your hostess that her dinner-party had been dull. From this heterogeneous group of examples, one may infer that there are lies and lies; and while it is never permissible to lie, it is sometimes quite unpermissible to do anything else.

Most lies of the decenter sort are social. “The admixture of a lie doth ever give pleasure,” said the moralist Bacon. There is certainly very little defence for the lie that does not give pleasure. It is to save other people’s feelings, not our own, that we tell lies. Let me put a case quite bluntly. How, without lying, is a man to thank his small niece properly for the necktie which she has selected for his Christmas present? No one wants merely to be thanked for one’s trouble; every one wants to be told that his taste has been perfect. Now that the late Phillips Brooks’s handsome evasion of fact has become historic, who ever dares _not_ to praise a baby explicitly? I confess that it goes against the grain with me to say that I have enjoyed something which I have detested; and I have frequently accepted invitations (especially over the telephone) because my tongue would not twist itself round the phrase “another engagement” when the other engagement was non-existent. But I have never had the slightest compunction about saying that I was sorry I had another engagement, when I did have another engagement and was not sorry.

I know only one person whom I could count on not to indulge herself in these conventional falsehoods, and she has never been able, so far as I know, to keep a friend. The habit of literal truth-telling, frankly, is self-indulgence of the worst. Nothing could be more delightful, in an evil sense, than telling certain people that their Christmas presents, their babies, and their hospitalities are all horrors which defy description; especially if one could count it a virtue to one’s self to say those things starkly. But one cannot keep that weapon only for one’s foes: the only excuse for saying inexcusable things is that one always says them. Roughly speaking, one’s friends are the people of whom one thinks, habitually, pleasant things. But even friends can be annoying, or unbeautiful, or dull. And it is of the essence of those manners which are morals not to tell them so if one can help it. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend”--and must sometimes be dealt. But no stabbing over non-essentials! And above all, no stabbing when it is a pleasure to stab. Sometimes these truth-tellers congratulate themselves that their praise is immensely enhanced by its rarity. There, I fancy, they are mistaken: for in the first place, praise that is too long on the way loses its savor; and in the second, they acquire, I have noticed, a censorious habit of mind that prevents them from praising at all.

No: in the course of mere conventional living, a certain amount of lying must be done. “How do you do?” “I am very well, thank you.” You may have indigestion, and in that case you have lied. Yet is it your business to make your acquaintance uncomfortable by telling him the facts in the case? Certain things are true of any man personally which have nothing to do with his social existence: personally, if he has a toothache, he has it; socially, he has not a toothache unless he mentions it. Then, there are lies which are not verbal at all--lies of implication. The early Puritans who objected to paint and powder, objected to them, I fancy, on perfectly Catholic grounds--it was immoral to make yourself attractive, and paint and powder were literally meretricious. On the same principle, to this day, a nun cuts off her hair. The modern feeling against paint and powder--for it does in some quarters survive--is rather, I imagine, on the score of dishonesty. You are not supposed to disguise a beautiful complexion if you really have it. But if you have not a good complexion, you are deceiving people--you are acting a lie--by making yourself look as if you had. The ground of the objection has shifted.

Some author--is it Mr. Kipling?--says of one of his heroines that she was as honest as her own front teeth. I know a great many people who are as honest as their own front teeth are false; and certainly no one expects them to go about calling attention to the skill of their dentist. Perhaps some sophist will say that between wearing false hair and declaring one’s false hair to be one’s own, there is all the difference in the world. I protest that it is tacit falsehood to wear it at all--unless one does it after the fashionless fashion of an ancient lady I knew in my childhood who, quite bald at the age of ninety-five, hung two wads of chestnut hair across her head, like saddle-bags, on a black velvet ribbon. And such tacit falsehoods are all in the spirit of the conventional politeness we use daily. To rouge a pale face may be vanity; but to thank a stupid hostess for the pleasure she has not given, is loving one’s neighbor as one’s self. I am inclined to think that even rouge is more often than not altruistic in intention. One does not wish, for the sake of society, to be either a fright or a brute. Certain things are demanded of every man who meets the world on its own ground. From the moment he has “accepted with pleasure,” he has agreed to play the game; and it is as unfair of him to give or take the wrong cues as it would be for the castle to insist on making the knight’s move. No: we need not go out of our way to lie; but we must not, even to be clever, tell the truth when an innocent lie is innocently demanded of us.

It occurs to me that my examples of conventional falsehood are largely feminine. So, I fancy, they should be. One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them. A man expects his wife to do this kind of thing for him. It is she who accepts or refuses their common invitations, directs their joint social manœuvres, encounters the world for them both on the purely social side. He is not expected to do it any more than he is expected to order the dinner. There is more straight-from-the-shoulder talk, I imagine, among men by themselves than among women by themselves; but that is partly because women slip out of the social harness less frequently and less easily. A man among men is perhaps (I speak under correction) more inveterately his personal self; a woman among women more inveterately her social self. It may be that it is easier to wear the harness constantly than to gall one’s shoulders afresh each day with putting it on. I am inclined to think that women are as honest with their intimate friends as are men; but--they have had an age-long training in the penalties of making one’s self unpleasant. So many low motives are imputed to women--and most of them, at the present day, quite unjustly--that they are driven to the lesser mendacities for the sake of getting some justice done them. When Mr. A. asks Mrs. B. if she does not think Mrs. C. beautiful, she is almost bound to say that she does, though she does not. Otherwise, she will be taken for a jealous fool. One lie is better than two; and it is better to be thought a fool when you are not, than jealous and a fool when you are neither.

Comparatively few people, however, will cavil at these mendacities, which are indeed ψευδῆ ἀψευδῆ--as mechanical and uncalculated as a gentleman’s “I beg your pardon” when a lady has insisted on colliding with him in the street. Truth is not so difficult to bound on that side; for most people recognize the social exigency, and if you are praising some one’s unskilful cook on one day, the chances are that she will be congratulating you on your amateur gardening the next. We simply have to be polite, as our race and clime understand politeness; and no one except a _naïf_ is really going to take this sort of thing seriously. It is perhaps regrettable that we do not carry courtesy even further; for nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as occasionally receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful--just as one is more angry for being told one is angry. Let us pass, however, to more debatable ground.

There is an old refrain which runs, “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” I am inclined to think that it is full of social philosophy. Most of us, probably, have put up our hardest fights for veracity on occasions when questions have been asked us that never should have been asked. “Refuse to answer,” says the ghost of that extinct Puritan whom we have evoked. An absurd counsel: for, as we all know, to most of these questions no answer is the most explicit answer of all. If the Devil has given you wit enough, you may contrive to keep the letter of the commandment. But usually that does not happen. I dare say many moralists will not agree with me; but I hold that a question put by some one who has no right, from any point of view, to the information demanded, deserves no truth. If a casual gossip should ask me whether my unmarried great-aunt lived beyond her means, I should feel justified in saying that she did not, although it might be the private family scandal that she did. There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary. The indiscreet questioner--and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man’s duty either to the community or to any individual to answer--is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such. I am sure that every reader remembers, in his own experience, such questions, and counts among his acquaintance at least one such questioner. Let him say whether, in these conditions, he has felt it his moral duty to hand over information, any more than he would consider it his moral duty to hand over his plate to a thief. I am not speaking of cases where the temptation to lie is merely the temptation to save one’s face: it is not permissible to lie merely to save one’s face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person’s face--as it was pardonable, surely, in Desdemona to declare that Othello had not murdered her.

In regard to the lie of exaggeration, a word should perhaps parenthetically be said. We all know the child who has seen two elephants in the garden eating the roses. We also know the delightful grown-up who “embroiders” his narratives. He will never tell the same adventure twice with the same details. The fact remains that he may each time leave you with precisely the same impression of the adventure in its entirety. It is quite possible that you trust him exceedingly. Of course it is also possible that his _ben trovato_ is never _vero_. You will have to determine after long experience of him whether he is fundamentally false, or merely has a sense of style. Personally, I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies. There is a subtle distinction between the two. At the risk of being at loggerheads with the rhetoricians, one must say that truth goes deeper than words, and that there is not much in a truthfulness which is only phrase-deep.

The old ladies who are shivering on the back porch will disapprove of me for saying these things, almost as much as I disapprove of them for being on the back porch. To speak frankly, I have not found that the people who cling to the letter are always the people who cling to the spirit of the law. Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth. The ladies I have referred to may be technically “out”; but they are really “out” only to the undesired visitor--exactly as much as if they had stopped in their own sitting-rooms. (Remember, please, that I am not speaking of the people who receive the unwelcome caller rather than permit a maid to fib--they are in a very different case.) I should not instinctively go to these people for an accurate account of a serious situation. Any one whose conscience is satisfied with that kind of loyalty to fact knows very little about the spirit of truth.

I do not jeer at literal accuracy: I think it an excellent safeguard for all of us. The person who has never indulged in a literal falsehood is the less likely to have indulged in a real one. Generally speaking, words follow facts with a certain closeness. Not always, however. I may truthfully say that my teeth are my own, if I have paid for them; but I shall none the less give a wrong impression to the engaging creature who has asked me if they are false. Substitute serious equivalents for that kind of veracious reply, and you will see what I mean. I am not at all sure that, where there is room for doubt, the people I have cited will not largely take the benefit of the doubt to themselves. I am not sure, for example, that the formula “I will not tell any one” stands to them for anything but a fallible human prophecy--something apt to be set at naught by the God who maketh diviners mad. I strongly suspect that mere loyalty will never make them hold their tongues. And I am quite sure that they will often be silent when silence is the most damnable lie of all. For, in their technical sense, silence can never be a lie.

In this short distance, we have come near to the heart of the matter. Remember that the only lie forbidden in the Decalogue is false witness against one’s neighbor. I may feel real respect for the lady on the porch--when I think that it may be hailing, I feel positive awe--but I should not like to make her the recipient of an intimate confidence. Such a person is wholly at the mercy of the unscrupulous. To be, for one’s self, at the mercy of the unscrupulous, suggests, I admit, the saint; to be, for one’s friends, at the mercy of the unscrupulous, suggests the cad. It is not, for the normal person, a pleasant thing to lie: it is much easier to record the truth quite automatically. There is in each of us who have been decently brought up a natural antipathy to saying “the thing which is not.” The basis of truth is so much the finest basis on which to meet one’s fellow-men! I have much sympathy with the unpopular people who cannot bring themselves, even in a ball-room, to “play the game.” Of all ugly things to be, perhaps a liar is the ugliest. And yet, and yet--We may not go into Victor Hugo’s rapture over the nun in _Les Misérables_ who gave the mendacious answer to Javert; but which of us wishes she had told the inspector that Jean Valjean was actually in the room? Fortunately, such crucial instances are rare; and usually we can benefit our friends most by telling the truth about them--if it were not so, they would not be beloved. It is a poor cause which has to be lied for regularly. But in the rare case like that of Sœur Simplice, let us hope that we, too, should lie, and be as sure as she of making our peace with Heaven.

For one’s self alone, it is a question whether any lie could bring such luxury as that of telling the simple truth. To lie to save one’s self is the mark of the beast; to lie to save another person may make one distrust the cosmos, but at least it is a purer fault. For it seems to be agreed on by all codes that the unselfish motive is a mightily purging element. On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.

Perhaps the greatest conflict for Puritan youth has always come when it faced for the first time the unfamiliar shape of Honor. Honor and John Calvin have fought on many a strange battlefield for the young soul, and the young soul must often have wondered which was friend and which was foe.

Honour and wit, foredamned they sit,

sings Kipling in an atavistic moment. Which of us has not at some time or other shudderingly understood him? And yet it is only the fortuitous trappings of Honor which can so disturb. For the truest thing about Honor is that, like Charity, it “seeks not itself”; and Honor in the mediæval sense was the darling child of the Church. Honor does not break its word; it protects the weak against itself, and against others; it keeps its engagements. It is more immediately concerned with its duty to humanity than with its duty to God; which is doubtless why the Puritan mystic saw it as a foe. The code of honor is the etiquette-book of the Christian; and the people who have attacked it are the people who have considered that Christians needed no etiquette. By our ancestors who were bred in the cold and windy times of the Reformation it was held to deal chiefly with duelling, gaming, and illicit affairs. “The debt of honor,” “the affair of honor”--what do even these corrupted phrases mean except that the gentleman has found more ways to bind himself than the laws of the land afford? I do not know that Honor ever compelled a man to gamble or to provoke a quarrel; but if he has gambled or if he has quarrelled--if he has undertaken to play the lamentable game--he must not skulk behind a policeman, like a cry-baby or a _sans-culotte_, because things have not gone his way. If he has broken, he must pay.

Part of the code of honor begins only when the Christian precept has been broken. Is it so bad a thing, in a fallible world, to be told what to do after you have once done something wrong? The Catechism, as a practical guide, is wofully incomplete without the code of the gentleman as an appendix. If you had sinned, the Puritan told you to repent; and he was quite right. But there is work left for the sinner after the repenting has been done. Both Honor and the Catechism will do their best to keep you out of a mess. The difference comes later: for after you have got into a mess, the Catechism leaves you to God, while Honor shows you how, if you have done ill to fellow beings, to repair that ill and not extend it.

Honor is a matter of practical politics--frightfully unpractical politics, in another sense, they often are. A cynical young woman once said to me that she found cads more interesting than gentlemen, because you could always tell what a gentleman would do in a given situation, whereas you could never tell, in any situation, what a cad would do. Cads may or may not be the proper sport of cynical young women; but to the average busy creature the gentleman is wholly delightful in that he is wholly predicable. The Christian is not predicable, for the simple reason that he has been given a counsel of perfection. You know that any given Christian will, by the day of his majority, have done some, at least, of the things which the Catechism has expressly warned him not to do. “The way that can be walked upon is not the perfect way,” said Laotse long ago. The Church does not believe that you have always done everything that your sponsors in baptism so cheerfully said you would do. The confessional is itself the greatest confession that the Church has ever made. One of the most convenient things about Honor is that its explicit code is limited; and you can say of some men when they die that they have never for a moment ceased to be gentlemen. Honor is of the world, worldly--and some people have distorted that magnificent fact into an accusation. That is what Mr. Kipling has done in “Tomlinson.”

All this about Honor is not so much a digression as an approach. For if few people will quarrel with the lies of implication and of convention, and most people pray to be delivered from the lie of self-defence, the lie “of obligation” cannot be juggled away; and it is the lie of obligation which Honor commands. Honor has never permitted, still less commanded, a lie for personal gain or satisfaction of any kind; but there are cases when the gentleman must lie if he is to be a gentleman. The gentleman does not betray the friend who has trusted him, even though he may bitterly object to having that friend’s secrets on his hands. From that supreme obligation lies sometimes of necessity result. I said just now that Honor and John Calvin must often have fought for the young soul; and it does not take an over-vivid imagination to conceive cases. Religion (in spite of the Decalogue) has tended to lump all lies together as the offspring of the Devil, while the code of the gentleman has always set aside a few lies as consecrated and _de rigueur_. But the gentleman, I venture to say, has always told those lies in the spirit in which a man lays down his life for his friend. For no gentleman lies, on any occasion, with unmixed pleasure. He feels, rather, as if he had put on rags.

It is easier--as some sociologists do--to plot the curves of a desire than to fix the boundaries of truth. The domain of truth is not world-wide: that, we know. They must be home-keepers indeed--perpetually cradled--who need never lie. Literal truth is imprisoned in a palace, like the Pope in the Vatican, affecting to be the ruler of the world. Even the faithful know that the claim is vain. The lies of obligation and convention are not, in the deepest sense, unveracious; for they are not pre-eminently intended to deceive. We expect them of other civilized beings and expect other civilized beings to expect them of us. Speaking such falsehoods, and such falsehoods only, we are still on truth’s own ground. The lie told for the liar’s own sake marks the moment when a man has passed from beneath her standard, across her shadowy sphere of influence, and is already hot-foot into the jungle.

MISS ALCOTT’S NEW ENGLAND

I remember being very much impressed--and not a little shocked--when a friend of mine told me that she had never, in her childhood, been able to get any real pleasure out of Louisa Alcott’s stories. It had never occurred to me that being brought up in New York instead of in New England, or even being of Southern instead of Pilgrim stock, could make all that difference. Miss Alcott seemed the safe inheritance, the absolutely inevitable delight, of childhood. _Little Women_ was as universal as _Hamlet_. I remembered perfectly that French playmates of mine in Paris had loved _Les Quatre Filles du Docteur March_ (though the French version was probably somewhat expurgated). If children of a Latin--moreover, of a Royalist and Catholic--tradition could find no flaw in Miss Alcott’s presentment of young life, I could not see why any free-born American child should fail to find it sympathetic.

I questioned my friend more closely. Her answer set me thinking; and it is probably to her that I owe my later appreciation of Miss Alcott’s special quality and special documentary value. For what my friend said was simply that the people in the books were too underbred for her to get any pleasure out of reading about them. My friend was not, when I knew her, a snob; and I took it that she had made the criticism originally at a much earlier age. All children are as snobbish as they know how to be; and I fancy that the child’s perennial delight in fairy-tales is not due solely to the epic instinct. One is interested in princes and princesses, when one is eight, simply because they are princes and princesses. Of royalty, one is perfectly sure. I have never known a child who did not prefer the goose-girl to be a princess in disguise, or who felt any real sympathy with the princess who was only a disguised goose-girl. You do not have to expound the Divine Right to any one under twelve. Peasants are an acquired taste; and socialism is an illusion of age.

Out of such axioms as these, I made my explanation of my friend’s heterodoxy. I remembered my own reaction, when very young, on a story that centred in a masked ball to which all the inhabitants of the kingdom were bidden. All the milkmaids went as court ladies, and all the court ladies went as milkmaids--a mere rounding out of the Petit Trianon episode. The moral was obvious; and I recall being frightfully disturbed by my own absolute certainty that, if I had been going to a masked ball, I should, without hesitation, have gone as grandly as I possibly could. I should never have gone as a milkmaid, so long as the costumer had a court train left. Did it perhaps mean that I was, on the whole, nearer to the milkmaid than to the court lady? I did not like the story, but I have never, to this day, forgotten it. Perhaps my friend had been of the same age when she discriminated against Miss Alcott. But then, I and my contemporaries had made no such discrimination. As I say, it set me to thinking. Since then, I have read Miss Alcott over, not once, but many times, and I think I understand.

The astounding result of re-reading Miss Alcott at a mature age is a conviction that she probably gives a better impression of mid-century New England than any of the more laborious reconstructions, either in fiction or in essay. The youth of her characters does not hinder her in this; for childhood, supremely, takes life ready-made. Mr. Howells’s range is wider, and he is at once more serious and more detached. Technically, he and Miss Alcott can be compared as little as _Madame Bovary_ and the _Bibliothèque Rose_. Yet, although their testimonies often agree, his world does not “compose” as hers does. It may be his very realism--his wealth of differentiating detail, his fidelity to the passing moment--that makes his early descriptions of New England so out of date, so unrecognizable. Miss Alcott is content to be typical. All her people have the same background, live in the same atmosphere, profess the same ideals. Moreover, they were ideals and an atmosphere that imposed themselves widely during their period. Mr. Howells gives us modern instances in plenty, but nowhere does he give us clearly the quintessential New England village. It is precisely the familiar experiences of life in that quintessential village that Miss Alcott gives us, with careless accuracy, without _arrière-pensée_. And it must be remembered that, in spite of Dr. Holmes’s brave and appropriating definitions of aristocracy, and the urbanity which the descendants of our great New Englanders would fain persuade us their ancestors possessed, our great New Englanders were essentially villagers, and that the very best thing to be said of them is that they wrought out village life to an almost Platonic perfection of type. “Town” will not do to express the Boston, the Cambridge, the Salem, the Concord, of an earlier time: it smacks too much of London--and freedom. The Puritans founded villages; and, spiritually speaking, the villages that they founded are villages still. The village that Miss Alcott knew best was Concord; and if, for our present purpose, we find it convenient to call Concord typical of New England, we shall certainly not be doing New England any injustice.

As I say, what strikes one on first re-reading her, is the extraordinary success with which she has given us our typical New England. Some of her books, obviously, are less successful in this way than others--_Under the Lilacs_, for example, or _Jack and Jill_, where (one cannot but agree with her severer critics) there is an inexcusable amount of love-making. There is an equally inexcusable amount of love-making, it is interesting to remember, in much of the earlier Howells. But for contemporary record of manners and morals, you will go far before you match her masterpiece, _Little Women_. What Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Laurie do not teach us about life in New England at a certain time, we shall never learn from any collected edition of the letters of Emerson, Thoreau, or Hawthorne.

The next--and equally astounding--result of re-reading Miss Alcott was, for me, the unexpected and not wholly pleasant corroboration of what my friend had said about her characters. They were, in some ways, underbred. Bronson Alcott (or shall we say Mr. March?) quotes Plato in his family circle; but his family uses inveterately bad grammar. “Don’t talk about ‘labelling’ Pa, as if he was a pickle-bottle!”--thus Jo chides her little sister for a malapropism. Bad grammar we might expect from Jo, as a wilful freak; but should we expect the exquisite Amy (any little girl will tell you how exquisite Amy is supposed to be) to write to her father from Europe, about buying gloves in Paris, “Don’t that sound sort of elegant and rich?”

The bad grammar, in all the books, is constant. And yet, I know of no other young people’s stories, anywhere, wherein the background is so unbrokenly and sincerely “literary.” Cheap literature is unsparingly satirized; Plato and Goethe are quoted quite as every-day matters; and “a metaphysical streak had unconsciously got into” Jo’s first novel. In _The Rose in Bloom_, Miss Alcott misquotes Swinburne, to be sure, but she does it in the interest of morality; and elsewhere Mac quotes other lines from the same poet correctly. Of course, we all remember that Emerson’s _Essays_ helped on, largely, Mac’s wooing--if, indeed, they did not do the whole trick. And has there ever been an “abode of learning”--to slip, for a moment, into the very style of _Jo’s Boys_--like unto Plumfield, crowned by “Parnassus”? After all, too, we must remember how familiarly even those madcaps, Ted and Josie, bandied about the names of Greek gods. The boys and girls who scoff at the simple amusements of Miss Alcott’s young heroes and heroines are, alack! not so much at home with classical mythology as the young people they despise. Yet, as I say, the bad grammar is everywhere--even in the mouths of the educators.

Breeding is, of course, not merely a matter of speech; and I fancy that my friend referred even more specifically to their manners--their morals being unimpeachable. Miss Alcott’s people are, as the author herself says of them, unworldly. They are even magnificently so; and they score the worldly at every turn. You remember Mrs. March’s strictures on the Moffats? and Polly’s justifiable criticisms of Fanny Shaw’s friends? and Rose’s utter lack of snobbishness about Phœbe, the little scullery-maid, who eventually was brought up with her? Of course, Archie’s mother objects, at first, to his marrying Phœbe, but she is soon reconciled--and apologetic.

Granted their unworldliness, their high scale of moral values, where, then, is the trace of vulgarity that is needed to make breeding bad? They pride themselves on their separation from all vulgarity. “My mother is a lady,” Polly reflects, “even if”--even if she is not rich, like the Shaws. The March girls are always consoling themselves for their vicissitudes by the fact that their parents are gentle-folk. Well, they are underbred in precisely the way in which, one fancies, the contemporaries of Emerson in Concord may well have been underbred. It is the “plain living” side of the “high thinking.” They despised externals, and, in the end, externals had their revenge. Breeding, as such, is simply not a product of the independent village. (Some one may mention Cranford; but you cannot call Cranford independent, with its slavish adherence to the etiquette of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson, its constant awed reference to Sir Peter Arley and the “county families.”) The villagers have not--and who supposes that Bronson Alcott and Thoreau had it?--the gift of civilized contacts. A contact, be it remembered, is not quite the same thing as a relation. Manners are a natural growth of courts. Recall any mediæval dwelling of royalty; then imagine life lived in those cramped chambers, in the perpetual presence of superiors and inferiors alike--and lived informally!

In Miss Alcott’s world, all that is changed. According to the older tradition, a totally unchaperoned youth would mean lack of breeding. Here, on the contrary, all the heroines are unchaperoned, while the match-making mamma is anathema. We did not cut off King Charles’s head for nothing. The reward of the unchaperoned daughter is to make a good match. In that rigid school, conventions are judged--and nobly enough, Heaven knows!--from the point of view of morals alone (of absolute, not of historic or evolutionary morals) and many conventions are thereby damned. The result is a little like what one has heard of contemporary Norway. “Underbred” is very likely too strong a word; yet one does see how the social state described in _Little Women_ might easily shock any one brought up in a less provincial tradition. There is too much love-making, for example. Though sweethearting between five-year-olds is frowned on, sweethearting between fifteen-year-olds is quite the thing. In real life, it would not always be safe to marry, very young, your first playmate. Any one who has lived in the more modern New England village knows perfectly well that people still marry, very young, their first playmates, and that disaster often results. Nor can Una always depend on the protection of a lion that is necessarily invisible. Granted that Jo’s precocious sense was right, and that it would have been a mistake for her to marry Laurie; which of us believes that, in real life, she would not have made the mistake? You cannot depend on young things in their teens to foresee the future of their temperaments accurately. One cannot but feel that if Mrs. March really saw the complete unfitness of those two for each other, it was her duty to put a few conventional obstacles in their path.