Studies in conduct

Front matter

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Contents

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i. The Capacity toe Pleasure 1

ii. The Pains ot Association 11

II. The Pains Of Association

ERO used to curse and shun the scenes of his crimes, " because they could not change their faces, like the courtiers, to flatter him.-" Even people, who have not to torment them the recollection of such enormities as haunted Nero, may begin, after a certain time, to find that places have a stubborn unchangeableness about them which they would fain avoid. Considering that all of us who are not utterly dull and inanimate are constantly undergoing change, and that, even if our own stock of ideas and sentiments should, to our discredit, remain unaltered, yet the mere lapse of time outside of ourselves changes our point of view, it is plain that the comparative constancy of places is a something which jars on the unphilosophic mind. Of all the agreeable fancies that have gained room among the stock sentiments of the world, that of there being some pleasure in renewing old associations with places is the most delusive. The constant breakdown in the fulfilment of anticipations of this sort is as much a commonplace as the anticipations themselves are. Men who have made a mark in the world are often pictured, by novelists and the modern fancy biographer, as revisiting the scenes of their youth, and moralizing over them with a gushing and hateful complacency. The truth is that most men who achieve any great success have by that time outgrown the inclination " to shed a tear of joy and thankfulness/' as the phrase is, over the haunts of the past. During the thirty years or so which in most cases, even of success, elapse between youthful aspirations and their more or less perfect fulfilment, a man's mind is better engaged than in sentimental moralizings over the vicissitudes of mortal fortune; and when he has got time to recognize these vicissitudes and ponder over them, he has probably lost the inclination. It is mostly, we believe, sentimental young gentlemen and unmarried ladies under twenty who expatiate so beautifully upon the touching loveliness of early association. Perhaps one ought to be very much obliged to them for their sedulous efforts to keep us from being hardened by the world, and to recall to grown-up people the purity and simple-mindedness of their

The Pains of Association. 13

earlier days. But contrasts between present and past, be they never so touching, are seldom very effective. When they are most violent — and, to have any effect at all, they must have a certain violence — they are simply acutely painful, and it may be questioned whether mere acute pain is ever good for much in morals. Supposing a man has the fortitude to run probes and lances deep into himself, merely for the sake of the pain they inflict, the reaction is sure to be too strong for him, and the pain and humiliation will most likely leave him worse, not better, than he was before. Clergymen who preach on behalf of Female Penitentiaries nearly always introduce a picture of the fallen woman reflecting with softened heart upon the old days when she clung about her mother's knees. It would be more true to nature and fact to represent the woman as hardened, not softened, by such reflections. A good many fallen women do not indulge in these retrospects at all, and those who do are often irresistibly driven by them to the solace of gin. It is a wholesome thing that men and women should smart for their backslidings, but smartin gs which result in a too profound depression of the moral system are the most dangerous discipline to which anybody can subject himself or others. The sting which is left by a revival of the old hopeful associations in the breast of a man whose life has been, or appears to himself to be, a failure, more often makes him reckless than stimulates him to fresh endeavours. Hence the sight of the old school-house, or of the place where he was born, or of the church in which he was married, is not so much pathetic, as simply horrible to him, because it recalls in a vivid way a contrast which is pregnant with unalloyed pain. In the case of successful men with a warm emotional temperament, the places w 7 hich revive old associations — that is to say, old hopes and ideas and exploits — are not downright odious, as they are to the little social Neros. But even here they are not so lovely as the young poetesses would have us think. A Lord Chancellor or an Archbishop, unless he has a very unusual amount of the unctuous affectation of dignitaries, is not at all moved to shed a joyful tear as he revisits the spot where he remembers that he thrashed an ill-conditioned schoolmate, or won his first prize, or even preached his first sermon. The philosopher who is supposed to have discovered the doctrine of the universal flux of things was himself usually to be found dissolved in tears. And one can scarcely wonder at him, though perhaps the habitual contemplation of so surpassingly dismal a truth might have been expected to breed that indifference which comes of familiarity with truths as with other things. The custodian of a ruin has not a tithe of the sensibility which affects the casual tourist; and so a phi-

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losopher who is for ever pointing out the crumbling ruins of human hopes might naturally come to look on his doctrine as a matter of business, and be no more moved by it than an undertaker or a mute is moved by the thought of mortality. Agreeable sentimentalists are to be met with who get quite hearty and cheerful over the contrasts of life, just as a mute does over a lively season. But the heartiness, in one case as in the other, is in a manner professional. Contrasts and vicissitudes constitute the regular stock in trade of a certain sort of moralists in poetry and prose.

Any hint that, after all, this use of violent contrast between a man's positions at different times is rather a clever trick than a broad and profitable reflection on life, is resented or despised as an intrusion of a hard matter-of-fact worldliness. People who are more sincerely sensible of the sorrowfulness of the contrasts which association brings out find the old proverbial thought that times change, while we are changed with them, by no means so pleasant as to be worth making much of. A pair of lovers in the honeymoon may find a certain luxury in being reminded, by the ruins of the Coliseum, or by hearing that some acquaintance has come to ruin, that man's life is but a span, that he is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, and that the vicissitudes of the world are numberless and full of mystery. But, if they honestly realized all this, it would

J 6 Studies in Conduct.

strike them as something very different from a luxury. And people who talk of the pleasures of memory, and the delights of renewing associations with the past, are often just as far from a real appreciation of what they are discoursing about.

Sufficient notice has not been taken of the mischief which is wrought in the world by the fear of the pain which the rude severance of associations is wont to inflict ; in other words, of the harm which men receive from suffering old associations to gain too tight a hold upon them. In a hundred ways, alike in thought and in conduct, the force of association restrains and paralyses. Courage to obey the dictates of truth or prudence, when the memory of former friends or beliefs or habits interposes, is one of the rarest virtues. If it is true that respect for some past is constantly found to be strong enough to keep people back from decline and retrogression, is it any less true that a mistaken tenderness for this same past as often keeps back even the better spirits from the vigorous advance which they would otherwise have made ? Nobody could pretend that such an influence is anything but natural. The undeniable fact that it is natural makes it all the more dangerous. As much civilization is due to the steady repression of nature as to its development. Ferocity is very natural, but it is no virtue for all that. A reve-

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rence for old associations is nearly always a sign of an affectionate and loveable disposition. It is not so quite always, because men who are harsh in the present, and irritable to persons before them^ are often ready to think of past events, and of those at ho figured in them, with a vehement sentimental kindness. A sentimental man of this- sort will glow with warm soft feeling as he thinks of the fine and sympathetic behaviour of his wife in their young days, and within half an hour, straightway forgetting all this, he may rate her savagely for some slight or even imaginary neglect at the passing moment. But if a keen feeling about old associations were a more trustworthy sign than it is of a kindly and amiable temper, that would be no proof that a systematic concession to such feeling is much of a merit. Just as amiability itself may run to seed in a criminal weakness, so the particular kind of amiability which consists in a sedulous regard for old associations, as for things sacred, very frequently leads to maudlin indecision or wrongheadedness. Just as it is often wrong not to be angry, so it is often wrong not to throw old associations to the winds. The author of the ' Idyls of the King' has furnished a delicately worded illustration of a position of this sort, where to yield to the impulses of tender reminiscence would be a fatal sacrifice of dignity and self-respect : —

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" I hold that man the worst of public foes Who for his own or for his children's sake, To Save his name from scandal, lets his wife Whom he knows false abide and rule the house."

Of course reminiscence is not the only motive in the minds of men who take back dishonoured wives. Dislike to exposure, habit, the peace and fair name of their children, with a score of other considerations, may counsel such a step ; only with persons of a sentimental leaning the recollection of old days is not the slightest of these considerations.

There are other connections, not recognised as binding by the law, which in course of years become in a manner binding on some men, whose " honour rooted in dishonour stands," from a humane unwillingness to tear up old associations. They cannot endure to think of cutting adrift anybody to whom time has attached them. As has been well said of such connections, " Unless you are utterly heartless and worthless, you will find that the looser tie is not the lighter. A man thinks that he has hung a trinket round his neck, and behold, it is a millstone." It may be worth noticing that here, as in all other dilemmas in which mortals find themselves, a man does well to be very sure of himself before he takes any step which irretrievably cuts him off from his own past history. It is a frightful thing, after a man has

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built a high wall between himself and the past, for him to find the spectre of the past glaring implacably at him over the top of the futile defence. When we have become alienated from people whom we once loved, it is not the scattering of a little dust which will suffice to appease the restless shades of old associations. Perhaps it is lucky for the majority of mankind that they are little sensible of these pains, though it is possible that, if they were more alive to them, the world would present fewer of those harsh and bitter contrasts which seem to the sentimental moralist to compose the sum of human life.

A robust nature throws off a too morbid tenderness for reminiscence, because it is able to see through the fallacy which very commonly underlies the habit of excessive affection for everybody with whom we have at any time been intimate. One often hears a sort of solemn whimpering over what, in such a case, is wrongly called the irony of life. ''What a world this must be," says one, " when here is a man dragging into public court, under circumstances of the deepest ignominy, a woman whom only a few years ago he loved passionately, and swore and meant to love and cherish till death should them part." And, in any case, the sight is mournful enough. Only it is to be remembered that in reality the man is not dragging into court the woman whom he thought he meant

c 2 to love and cherish, but, supposing her to be guilty, the mere counterfeit and simulacrum of that woman. It is the same with all forms of unworthy friendship. The lad with whom you used to play, who was your closest friend at college, is in reality not the same person as the mean knave who abuses your friendship in order to play you a scurvy trick. His nature and his bodily presence may have preserved their identity all the while, but, as far as you are concerned, there are in truth two people. There is the old friend, and there is the new-born knave. The new-comer is no friend, and never was. You may justly and painfully lament that the old friend is dead, but that is no reason why old associations should be allowed to cluster round the new and degenerate nature, to the exclusion of a just recognition of the fact that it is new and degenerate. It would be very shallow to deny that all estrangements, all ruptures with a sweet and pleasant past, have a deeply pathetic side. That, unhappily, is likely to escape no one. This other side is less familiar, and it may contain a certain grain of comfort.

III. Breakdowns

ijOME contemporary and friend said oi Charles Fox, " He lias three passions — women, play, and politics; yet he never formed a creditable connection with a woman in his life; he has squandered all his means at the gaming-table; and,, with the exception of eleven months, he has invariably been in Opposition/'' Unaccountable breakdowns of this kind are among the gravest puzzles of men who look out philosophically upon society, and like to reflect upon the intricacies and contradictions of character. The world is full of people who, either consciously or without knowing it, have failed; that is, have fallen a vast way short of the point to which their qualities and their circumstances alike seemed certain to raise them, without the exertion of a single bit of superhuman or unreasonable virtue. In many, perhaps most, cases, the cause of the failure lies unmistakeably on the surface. Very often some habit, strong enough and noxious enough to destroy all the qualities which tend to success, has been formed in years before the man could see either that he possessed these qualities, or that the habit which he was allowing to get the mastery over him was fatal to them. And people who are concerned to vindicate the ways of God to man on the small fragments of principles by which they usually vindicate the ways of man to his neighbour, confess that there appears something inscrutably harsh in the ease with which a lad or a girl in their teens can, by one slip, blight their whole future.

Besides the cases where the best parts of a man are neutralized by a bad habit of his own, a good many breakdowns may be accounted for by the bad habits of other persons with whom the fallen man has the nnhappiness to be connected. Then there is a whole stock of habits which, though scarcely visible in themselves, are not less pestilent in their consequences than drunkenness or incontinence or systematic idleness. No man can know himself who is not conscious of little subtleties of temper, strange perversities of mood, that he perceives but cannot analyse, and queer creatures of the mind that at critical moments rise out of the dark places of sentiment and turn him

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to the right hand or the left away from the control of his ordinary reason. The rest of us who are watching him, and who think that we have long since found out all the springs of his conduct, are amazed to find him taking the wrong turning with an invincible assurance, and only smiling complacently, as one who knows better than his neighbours, when he is warned of the abyss which awaits him at the end of his wrong turning. It is a bitter moment when one first finds out that a friend whom the gods will to overthrow has been seized with the infatuation which goes before ruin. Poor Charles Lamb, whenever his unhappy sister showed signs of the approach of one of her mental attacks, used to walk along with her to the asylum, both of them often in tears. A man may feel not less wretched when he sees somebody whom he has loved walking along beyond the reach of help, through sheer wrongheadedness, over the verge of the hell of failure.

But not seldom we are mistaken about a man having failed. The fault was our own in expecting too much. And these expectations are, in nine cases out of ten, the effect of supposing that what anybody has a passion for, that he has all the capacity for attaining. At the risk of seeming to strain after a paradox, it would be nearer the truth so say that, in nine cases out of ten, this view represents the very opposite of what is really the case. With men of ardent impetuous temper, like Fox for example, failure is the most effective agent for heightening and intensifying the dominant passion. They want excitement, and a prolonged run of bad luck is one of the most exciting things in the world. Moreover, by a law of mind with which people are only too familiar, men are notoriously most eager for what they have not got, and to a certain extent are not likely to get. Besides this, there is all the difference between a strong passion and a strong reasonable will. Passion overlooks means in its headlong anxiety for ends. Hence the weakness of those who occupy themselves too much with thinking how many thoroughly desirable things there are in the world. Clutching at all, they get a solid handful of none. Men with the best aims constantly break down because they cannot bring their great minds so low as details and items and little detached bits of labour and forethought. If they were to devote to detail a tithe of the mental energy which consumes itself in fruitless pondering upon the extreme desirableness of the desirable things, they would be much more than ten times nearer the attainment of their wishes.

It is a constant puzzle to many persons to ascertain what this or that acquaintance does with all his money. They know his income, they know his general mode and style of life, and they know

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that he has not saved a sixpence. As is sometimes said of an unhealthy person's food, his money seems to do him no good. The most common and the truest answer to this question, why somebody who makes a good deal of money and lives in a moderate way and yet puts nothing by, is that he fritters or muddles his money away. It is not gross extravagance, but carelessness and shiftlessness, which keeps him floundering in the evil waters of neediness. Precisely the same explanation serves for the fact of so many apparently capable men and women never making any way in life. Buoying themselves up with resolves for the future, they allow the current of present circumstance to carry them drifting down wherever it lists. So the future never comes, and the resolves never bear fruit of fulfilment.

In spite of all that misanthropists think and say about the grudging malignity of the world, there is something astounding in the credit to be got from mere resolutions. Unless we have some reason for especial scrutiny, we are apt to be content, in our neighbours, with an inconvertible currency of fine plans and high-sounding designs. A man's promise to perform passes, in many respects, with ordinary happy-go-lucky folk, for as much as in money matters the Bank of England's promise to pay. And with the same kind of people there is a very narrow limitation to the sense of the word failure. The} 7 require strong evidence and a tremendous depth of ignoble ruin before they will . stigmatize a man's career as a failure, a mistake, or a breakdown. There is a certain commonplace standard, easy to satisfy, beyond which nobody expects us to go.

To make a certain income and to have a certain amount saved up are the first duties which the world prescribes to the aspirant after success. No man, it is generally considered, who makes a good income, can be said to have broken down in life. The money test is the first that is applied. And as this is one which can be most easily understood and most widely grasped, it is unreasonable to declaim too much against its use. A large proportion of the people around him can understand with accuracy nothing else about the poet or the philosopher except that he makes such and such sums by his songs or his ideas. It is a great pity that so many persons should be unable to rise to a higher level than this ; but, after all, this level is fertile in very serviceable though humble virtues of its own, and there are levels lower still where they have not even reached anything so high as a conviction about the merits of solvency. Still there are defects about the money test. A man may have failed in spite of earning a good income, just as he may have greatly succeeded though his income may have always stood at a too modest

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figure. We do not mean that silly picturesque platitude that the peasant in his straw-thatched hovel may be happier than the mighty monarch clad in purple and dwelling in marble halls. This is mere nonsense, because the monarch is a great deal more likely to get happiness in spite, or perhaps by reason, of his responsibilities, than the peasant with his mechanical drudgery, dull brain, and slow half-brutish sensibilities. Nobody, except in a fit of spleen, pretends to believe that a peasant is particularly Jiappy. The man is happiest who gets most out of himself on every side of his character; and if he is hard pinched on his back and in his belly, he gets nothing out of himself on any side, except possibly a measure of animal fortitude. But without endorsing this Tuppery folly about monarchs and peasants, we may easily see that, notwithstanding the good income which satisfies the world at large that he has achieved success, the man himself may be perfectly alive to the fact that he has in reality utterly broken down, and has sold his better self for a mess of pottage. In a fiercely money-getting age there is much more of this remorse than the profane vulgar suppose, or, indeed, are capable of supposing.

Popular applause is another stumbling-block which has tripped up men who, but for that, might have won a success to be valued in their hearts, instead of one which they have to use hard persuasion to make themselves value. An author who sells twenty editions of a worthless book only made to catch the groundlings, or a painter who makes a fortune out of silly pictures which he knows to be silly, or a parson who draws huge congregations by sermons that are not altogether insincere and yet are not sincere — each of them no doubt, in elated moods, thinks he has not done so ill in the world, but then at bottom he knows that he has done exceedingly ill for himself. Every little stroke of such success is so much added to the weight of regret in the undated moments. Perhaps in most cases it is the intolerableness of this weight which drives a man who was originally a very small impostor into being eventually a very large and brazen impostor. He is like a drunkard who flies to the bottle to drown the sense of his own ignominy. He requires a dram of the vulgar praise that has undone him, in order to make him forget how ignobly he has sold himself. So he gets deeper and deeper into the slough of claptrap in his books or his paintings or his sermons, or in whatever shape it is that he presents the world with the adulterated lees of his mind.

Breakdowns in life, whether of that gross and palpable sort which all the world can behold, or such as are only visible in the light of the man's

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own conscience, are all the result of some kind of moral wortlilessness. Neither untoward circumstances nor the evil behaviour of others can effect the fall of a man with a firmly based character. They may make him halt in his journey, and stumble and grow weary, and this is bad enough. But there is no ruin in it. On the contrary, until years have stolen away his sap and vigour, the feeling of having got well over a nasty place, though the reminiscence is too painful to allow him to congratulate himself, still inspires him with a sober confidence and a trustworthy self-respect which supports and encourages him in every new venture. People break down because they do not take pains with their character, as they would with their bodies if they were going to fight or to run a race. They seldom keep themselves in moral training. The consequence is that the first blow from the enemy Circumstance, or the first severe spurt in the course, leaves them sprawling and breathless. The man in fine moral condition gets tremendous knocks and bruises like his neighbours, but he is soon healed. Nobody, one may suppose, is in perfect condition, but there is a too plain difference between those who take habitual pains to preserve a healthy balance of character, and those who fritter away their lives in playing shilly-shally with themselves, acting from one set of motives one day and from another set the next, first bringing the body under, and then giving way to every appetite, to-day ascetics, and Sybarites to-morrow. The old Roman proverb ran that nullum numen abesi si sit prudentia, and it is the absence of the virtue to which they gave the name of prudence that we may best express by worthlessness. Lack of foresight and vigilance, of concentration and self-control, of ability to look for remote ends and to discern sure means, implies that limpness and flaccidity of character which almost ensures a crash at the first obstacle that presents itself. And even if there be no crash, there is at best only a feeble hobbling along the path, instead of a vigorous and stalwart stride.

IV. Small Hypocrisies

HE hollowness of a great deal of our social intercourse is a commonplace which makes ardent young men very angry and eloquent and amusing^ and crude- minded older men very sour and shrewish. The one declaim and the other sneer because people who ask you to dinner, and are very happy to have you at their dancing-parties, decline to lend you money or to let you marry their daughters. The conduct of society is constantly being brought back to the first principles, not of society, but of a state of nature. The inconsistency is plain. The grumblers like balls and rural fetes, bat they demand a community of goods, and think they have a right to the hand of any woman they may covet, such as could only exist in the nomadic, or even the fishing and hunting, stage of the progress of the race. They do not see that if asking a man to dinner implies an invitation to him to help himself to as much money as he requires, or to take whichever of the daughters of the house is most to his fancy, then, as soon as this is discovered, the man will not be asked to dinner — that is all. If we are to revert to the Bedouin and Oriental principle, that it is atrociously inhospitable to refuse a guest any favour that he may ask, we shall all grow very careful not to entertain any but married men with more money than they know what to do with. The cramping effects which such a revolution would produce upon hospitality may be very readily imagined. As it is, those who insist that every friend is an impostor who does not wear his heart and his purse and his daughter's heart and purse upon his sleeve, are themselves the worst impostors of all.

They pretend to like a man for the pleasure which his society and that of his friends can give, while all the time they are only thinking, not how they can repay him for this, but how many more material advantages they can extract from his good feeling or his weakness. It seems very pointed and damning to say that the lady who has shaken hands with him in her drawing-room with so much cordiality and enthusiasm would be just as cheerful if she heard the next day that he had become bankrupt. Why should she not be? Surely one may be pleased to see an agreeable man, without binding our heartstrings round him, or staking our peace of mind upon his solvency. Anybody can get a cheap reputation as a philosopher by taking up the line that such a doctrine as this is the glorification of selfishness. The insincerity of the world is one of those fine windy themes which are capable of a very exalted and pleasing treatment. They make a weak man or a weak woman feel ever so much better and holier. Not that such edification has the smallest effect upon their conduct. They would rather esteem it an irreverence to bring the windy high-falutin' principles down from their sacred places into common use. It is a vast comfort to know that they look with proper contempt upon the hypocrisies of society, that is, of their next-door neighbour. The comfort, one supposes, is much the same as that which warms the bosom of the pagan as he thwacks the little wooden god that he adores. The hugest blows that can be heaped upon the back of an abstraction like society do no harm to the abstraction, and they relieve, to a delightful extent, the feelings of the man who raises his right arm to the task.