a hearing, or at least a place in print, and was thus encouraged in
acquiring a fixed habit of writing, to the exclusion of any other
bread-winning pursuit. He is already to be classed as a "general
writer," corresponding to the comprehensive wants of the "general
reader," and with this industry on his hands it is not enough for him to
keep up the ingenuous self-reliance of youth: he finds himself under an
obligation to be skilled in various methods of seeming to know; and
having habitually expressed himself before he was convinced, his
interest in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a
mistake, and to feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse to
decide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, that
dream of aerial unlimited movement at will without feet or wings, which
were once but the joyous mounting of young sap, are already taking shape
as unalterable woody fibre: the impulse has hardened into "style," and
into a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in the
presence of other men's failures is turning into the official arrogance
of one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself been
called on to execute; the dreamy buoyancy of the stripling has taken on
a fatal sort of reality in written pretensions which carry consequences.
He is on the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing Bombus who
combines conceited illusions enough to supply several patients in a
lunatic asylum with the freedom to show himself at large in various
forms of print. If one who takes himself for the telegraphic centre of
all American wires is to be confined as unfit to transact affairs, what
shall we say to the man who believes himself in possession of the
unexpressed motives and designs dwelling in the breasts of all
sovereigns and all politicians? And I grieve to think that poor Pepin,
though less political, may by-and-by manifest a persuasion hardly more
sane, for he is beginning to explain people's writing by what he does
not know about them. Yet he was once at the comparatively innocent stage
which I have confessed to be that of my own early astonishment at my
powerful originality; and copying the just humility of the old Puritan,
I may say, "But for the grace of discouragement, this coxcombry might
have been mine."

Pepin made for himself a necessity of writing (and getting printed)
before he had considered whether he had the knowledge or belief that
would furnish eligible matter. At first perhaps the necessity galled him
a little, but it is now as easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible a
habit as the outpouring of inconsiderate talk. He is gradually being
condemned to have no genuine impressions, no direct consciousness of
enjoyment or the reverse from the quality of what is before him: his
perceptions are continually arranging themselves in forms suitable to a
printed judgment, and hence they will often turn out to be as much to
the purpose if they are written without any direct contemplation of the
object, and are guided by a few external conditions which serve to
classify it for him. In this way he is irrevocably losing the faculty of
accurate mental vision: having bound himself to express judgments which
will satisfy some other demands than that of veracity, he has blunted
his perceptions by continual preoccupation. We cannot command veracity
at will: the power of seeing and reporting truly is a form of health
that has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnly
said, "The penalty of untruth is untruth." But Pepin is only a mild
example of the fact that incessant writing with a view to printing
carries internal consequences which have often the nature of disease.
And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we have
anything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which has
not been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth
considering what effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearly
there is a sort of writing which helps to keep the writer in a
ridiculously contented ignorance; raising in him continually the sense
of having delivered himself effectively, so that the acquirement of more
thorough knowledge seems as superfluous as the purchase of costume for a
past occasion. He has invested his vanity (perhaps his hope of income)
in his own shallownesses and mistakes, and must desire their prosperity.
Like the professional prophet, he learns to be glad of the harm that
keeps up his credit, and to be sorry for the good that contradicts him.
It is hard enough for any of us, amid the changing winds of fortune and
the hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which is
another's calamity; but one may choose not to enter on a course which
will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, committing ourselves
to be continually pleased that others should appear to be wrong in order
that we may have the air of being right.

In some cases, perhaps, it might be urged that Pepin has remained the
more self-contented because he has _not_ written everything he believed
himself capable of. He once asked me to read a sort of programme of the
species of romance which he should think it worth while to write--a
species which he contrasted in strong terms with the productions of
illustrious but overrated authors in this branch. Pepin's romance was to
present the splendours of the Roman Empire at the culmination of its
grandeur, when decadence was spiritually but not visibly imminent: it
was to show the workings of human passion in the most pregnant and
exalted of human circumstances, the designs of statesmen, the
interfusion of philosophies, the rural relaxation and converse of
immortal poets, the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of the
quaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the gorgeous delirium of
gladiatorial shows, and under all the secretly working leaven of
Christianity. Such a romance would not call the attention of society to
the dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics, the vulgarity of
small schoolmasters, the manners of men in livery, or to any other form
of uneducated talk and sentiments: its characters would have virtues and
vices alike on the grand scale, and would express themselves in an
English representing the discourse of the most powerful minds in the
best Latin, or possibly Greek, when there occurred a scene with a Greek
philosopher on a visit to Rome or resident there as a teacher. In this
way Pepin would do in fiction what had never been done before: something
not at all like 'Rienzi' or 'Notre Dame de Paris,' or any other attempt
of that kind; but something at once more penetrating and more
magnificent, more passionate and more philosophical, more panoramic yet
more select: something that would present a conception of a gigantic
period; in short something truly Roman and world-historical.

When Pepin gave me this programme to read he was much younger than at
present. Some slight success in another vein diverted him from the
production of panoramic and select romance, and the experience of not
having tried to carry out his programme has naturally made him more
biting and sarcastic on the failures of those who have actually written
romances without apparently having had a glimpse of a conception equal
to his. Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated
_naivete_ as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is
talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author
of that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and
affectation of power kept strictly in reserve. His paragraphs now seem
to have a bitter smile in them, from the consciousness of a mind too
penetrating to accept any other man's ideas, and too equally competent
in all directions to seclude his power in any one form of creation, but
rather fitted to hang over them all as a lamp of guidance to the
stumblers below. You perceive how proud he is of not being indebted to
any writer: even with the dead he is on the creditor's side, for he is
doing them the service of letting the world know what they meant better
than those poor pre-Pepinians themselves had any means of doing, and he
treats the mighty shades very cavalierly.

Is this fellow--citizen of ours, considered simply in the light of a
baptised Christian and tax-paying Englishman, really as madly
conceited, as empty of reverential feeling, as unveracious and careless
of justice, as full of catch-penny devices and stagey attitudinising as
on examination his writing shows itself to be? By no means. He has
arrived at his present pass in "the literary calling" through the
self-imposed obligation to give himself a manner which would convey the
impression of superior knowledge and ability. He is much worthier and
more admirable than his written productions, because the moral aspects
exhibited in his writing are felt to be ridiculous or disgraceful in the
personal relations of life. In blaming Pepin's writing we are accusing
the public conscience, which is so lax and ill informed on the momentous
bearings of authorship that it sanctions the total absence of scruple in
undertaking and prosecuting what should be the best warranted of
vocations.

Hence I still accept friendly relations with Pepin, for he has much
private amiability, and though he probably thinks of me as a man of
slender talents, without rapidity of _coup d'oeil_ and with no
compensatory penetration, he meets me very cordially, and would not, I
am sure, willingly pain me in conversation by crudely declaring his low
estimate of my capacity. Yet I have often known him to insult my betters
and contribute (perhaps unreflectingly) to encourage injurious
conceptions of them--but that was done in the course of his professional
writing, and the public conscience still leaves such writing nearly on
the level of the Merry-Andrew's dress, which permits an impudent
deportment and extraordinary gambols to one who in his ordinary clothing
shows himself the decent father of a family.




XV.


DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP

Particular callings, it is known, encourage particular diseases. There
is a painter's colic: the Sheffield grinder falls a victim to the
inhalation of steel dust: clergymen so often have a certain kind of sore
throat that this otherwise secular ailment gets named after them. And
perhaps, if we were to inquire, we should find a similar relation
between certain moral ailments and these various occupations, though
here in the case of clergymen there would be specific differences: the
poor curate, equally with the rector, is liable to clergyman's sore
throat, but he would probably be found free from the chronic moral
ailments encouraged by the possession of glebe and those higher chances
of preferment which follow on having a good position already. On the
other hand, the poor curate might have severe attacks of calculating
expectancy concerning parishioners' turkeys, cheeses, and fat geese, or
of uneasy rivalry for the donations of clerical charities.

Authors are so miscellaneous a class that
their personified diseases, physical and moral,
might include the whole procession of human
disorders, led by dyspepsia and ending in
madness--the awful Dumb Show of a world-historic
tragedy. Take a large enough area
of human life and all comedy melts into
tragedy, like the Fool's part by the side of
Lear. The chief scenes get filled with erring
heroes, guileful usurpers, persecuted discoverers,
dying deliverers: everywhere the
protagonist has a part pregnant with doom.
The comedy sinks to an accessory, and if there
are loud laughs they seem a convulsive transition
from sobs; or if the comedy is touched
with a gentle lovingness, the panoramic scene
is one where

"Sadness is a kind of mirth
So mingled as if mirth did make us sad
And sadness merry."[1]

[Footnote 1: Two Noble Kinsmen.]

But I did not set out on the wide survey that would carry me into
tragedy, and in fact had nothing more serious in my mind than certain
small chronic ailments that come of small authorship. I was thinking
principally of Vorticella, who flourished in my youth not only as a
portly lady walking in silk attire, but also as the authoress of a book
entitled 'The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appendix.' I would by
no means make it a reproach to her that she wrote no more than one book;
on the contrary, her stopping there seems to me a laudable example. What
one would have wished, after experience, was that she had refrained from
producing even that single volume, and thus from giving her
self-importance a troublesome kind of double incorporation which became
oppressive to her acquaintances, and set up in herself one of those
slight chronic forms of disease to which I have just referred. She lived
in the considerable provincial town of Pumpiter, which had its own
newspaper press, with the usual divisions of political partisanship and
the usual varieties of literary criticism--the florid and allusive, the
_staccato_ and peremptory, the clairvoyant and prophetic, the safe and
pattern-phrased, or what one might call "the many-a-long-day style."

Vorticella being the wife of an important townsman had naturally the
satisfaction of seeing 'The Channel Islands' reviewed by all the organs
of Pumpiter opinion, and their articles or paragraphs held as naturally
the opening pages in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for the
reception of "critical opinions." This ornamental volume lay on a
special table in her drawing-room close to the still more gorgeously
bound work of which it was the significant effect, and every guest was
allowed the privilege of reading what had been said of the authoress and
her work in the 'Pumpiter Gazette and Literary Watchman,' the 'Pumpshire
Post,' the 'Church Clock,' the 'Independent Monitor,' and the lively but
judicious publication known as the 'Medley Pie;' to be followed up, if
he chose, by the instructive perusal of the strikingly confirmatory
judgments, sometimes concurrent in the very phrases, of journals from
the most distant counties; as the 'Latchgate Argus,' the Penllwy
Universe,' the 'Cockaleekie Advertiser,' the 'Goodwin Sands Opinion,'
and the 'Land's End Times.'

I had friends in Pumpiter and occasionally paid a long visit there. When
I called on Vorticella, who had a cousinship with my hosts, she had to
excuse herself because a message claimed her attention for eight or ten
minutes, and handing me the album of critical opinions said, with a
certain emphasis which, considering my youth, was highly complimentary,
that she would really like me to read what I should find there. This
seemed a permissive politeness which I could not feel to be an
oppression, and I ran my eyes over the dozen pages, each with a strip or
islet of newspaper in the centre, with that freedom of mind (in my case
meaning freedom to forget) which would be a perilous way of preparing
for examination. This _ad libitum_ perusal had its interest for me. The
private truth being that I had not read 'The Channel Islands,' I was
amazed at the variety of matter which the volume must contain to have
impressed these different judges with the writer's surpassing capacity
to handle almost all branches of inquiry and all forms of presentation.
In Jersey she had shown herself an historian, in Guernsey a poetess, in
Alderney a political economist, and in Sark a humorist: there were
sketches of character scattered through the pages which might put our
"fictionists" to the blush; the style was eloquent and racy, studded
with gems of felicitous remark; and the moral spirit throughout was so
superior that, said one, "the recording angel" (who is not supposed to
take account of literature as such) "would assuredly set down the work
as a deed of religion." The force of this eulogy on the part of several
reviewers was much heightened by the incidental evidence of their
fastidious and severe taste, which seemed to suffer considerably from
the imperfections of our chief writers, even the dead and canonised: one
afflicted them with the smell of oil, another lacked erudition and
attempted (though vainly) to dazzle them with trivial conceits, one
wanted to be more philosophical than nature had made him, another in
attempting to be comic produced the melancholy effect of a half-starved
Merry-Andrew; while one and all, from the author of the 'Areopagitica'
downwards, had faults of style which must have made an able hand in the
'Latchgate Argus' shake the many-glanced head belonging thereto with a
smile of compassionate disapproval. Not so the authoress of 'The Channel
Islands:' Vorticella and Shakspere were allowed to be faultless. I
gathered that no blemishes were observable in the work of this
accomplished writer, and the repeated information that she was "second
to none" seemed after this superfluous. Her thick octavo--notes,
appendix and all--was unflagging from beginning to end; and the 'Land's
End Times,' using a rather dangerous rhetorical figure, recommended you
not to take up the volume unless you had leisure to finish it at a
sitting. It had given one writer more pleasure than he had had for many
a long day--a sentence which had a melancholy resonance, suggesting a
life of studious languor such as all previous achievements of the human
mind failed to stimulate into enjoyment. I think the collection of
critical opinions wound up with this sentence, and I had turned back to
look at the lithographed sketch of the authoress which fronted the first
page of the album, when the fair original re-entered and I laid down the
volume on its appropriate table.

"Well, what do you think of them?" said Vorticella, with an emphasis
which had some significance unperceived by me. "I know you are a great
student. Give me _your_ opinion of these opinions."

"They must be very gratifying to you," I answered with a little
confusion, for I perceived that I might easily mistake my footing, and I
began to have a presentiment of an examination for which I was by no
means crammed.

"On the whole--yes," said Vorticella, in a tone of concession. "A few of
the notices are written with some pains, but not one of them has really
grappled with the chief idea in the appendix. I don't know whether you
have studied political economy, but you saw what I said on page 398
about the Jersey fisheries?"

I bowed--I confess it--with the mean hope that this movement in the nape
of my neck would be taken as sufficient proof that I had read, marked,
and learned. I do not forgive myself for this pantomimic falsehood, but
I was young and morally timorous, and Vorticella's personality had an
effect on me something like that of a powerful mesmeriser when he
directs all his ten fingers towards your eyes, as unpleasantly visible
ducts for the invisible stream. I felt a great power of contempt in her,
if I did not come up to her expectations.

"Well," she resumed, "you observe that not one of them has taken up that
argument. But I hope I convinced you about the drag-nets?"

Here was a judgment on me. Orientally speaking, I had lifted up my foot
on the steep descent of falsity and was compelled to set it down on a
lower level. "I should think you must be right," said I, inwardly
resolving that on the next topic I would tell the truth.

"I _know_ that I am right," said Vorticella. "The fact is that no critic
in this town is fit to meddle with such subjects, unless it be Volvox,
and he, with all his command of language, is very superficial. It is
Volvox who writes in the 'Monitor,' I hope you noticed how he
contradicts himself?"

My resolution, helped by the equivalence of dangers, stoutly prevailed,
and I said, "No."

"No! I am surprised. He is the only one who finds fault with me. He is
a Dissenter, you know. The 'Monitor' is the Dissenters' organ, but my
husband has been so useful to them in municipal affairs that they would
not venture to run my book down; they feel obliged to tell the truth
about me. Still Volvox betrays himself. After praising me for my
penetration and accuracy, he presently says I have allowed myself to be
imposed upon and have let my active imagination run away with me. That
is like his dissenting impertinence. Active my imagination may be, but I
have it under control. Little Vibrio, who writes the playful notice in
the 'Medley Pie,' has a clever hit at Volvox in that passage about the
steeplechase of imagination, where the loser wants to make it appear
that the winner was only run away with. But if you did not notice
Volvox's self-contradiction you would not see the point," added
Vorticella, with rather a chilling intonation. "Or perhaps you did not
read the 'Medley Pie' notice? That is a pity. Do take up the book again.
Vibrio is a poor little tippling creature, but, as Mr Carlyle would say,
he has an eye, and he is always lively."

I did take up the book again, and read as demanded.

"It is very ingenious," said I, really appreciating the difficulty of
being lively in this connection: it seemed even more wonderful than that
a Vibrio should have an eye.

"You are probably surprised to see no notices from the London press,"
said Vorticella. "I have one--a very remarkable one. But I reserve it
until the others have spoken, and then I shall introduce it to wind up.
I shall have them reprinted, of course, and inserted in future copies.
This from the 'Candelabrum' is only eight lines in length, but full of
venom. It calls my style dull and pompous. I think that will tell its
own tale, placed after the other critiques."

"People's impressions are so different," said I. "Some persons find 'Don
Quixote' dull."

"Yes," said Vorticella, in emphatic chest tones, "dulness is a matter of
opinion; but pompous! That I never was and never could be. Perhaps he
means that my matter is too important for his taste; and I have no
objection to _that_. I did not intend to be trivial. I should just like
to read you that passage about the drag-nets, because I could make it
clearer to you."

A second (less ornamental) copy was at her elbow and was already opened,
when to my great relief another guest was announced, and I was able to
take my leave without seeming to run away from 'The Channel Islands,'
though not without being compelled to carry with me the loan of "the
marked copy," which I was to find advantageous in a re-perusal of the
appendix, and was only requested to return before my departure from
Pumpiter. Looking into the volume now with some curiosity, I found it a
very ordinary combination of the commonplace and ambitious, one of those
books which one might imagine to have been written under the old Grub
Street coercion of hunger and thirst, if they were not known beforehand
to be the gratuitous productions of ladies and gentlemen whose
circumstances might be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanity
that happened to have been directed towards authorship. Its importance
was that of a polypus, tumour, fungus, or other erratic outgrowth,
noxious and disfiguring in its effect on the individual organism which
nourishes it. Poor Vorticella might not have been more wearisome on a
visit than the majority of her neighbours, but for this disease of
magnified self-importance belonging to small authorship. I understand
that the chronic complaint of 'The Channel Islands' never left her. As
the years went on and the publication tended to vanish in the distance
for her neighbours' memory, she was still bent on dragging it to the
foreground, and her chief interest in new acquaintances was the
possibility of lending them her book, entering into all details
concerning it, and requesting them to read her album of "critical
opinions." This really made her more tiresome than Gregarina, whose
distinction was that she had had cholera, and who did not feel herself
in her true position with strangers until they knew it.

My experience with Vorticella led me for a time into the false
supposition that this sort of fungous disfiguration, which makes Self
disagreeably larger, was most common to the female sex; but I presently
found that here too the male could assert his superiority and show a
more vigorous boredom. I have known a man with a single pamphlet
containing an assurance that somebody else was wrong, together with a
few approved quotations, produce a more powerful effect of shuddering at
his approach than ever Vorticella did with her varied octavo volume,
including notes and appendix. Males of more than one nation recur to my
memory who produced from their pocket on the slightest encouragement a
small pink or buff duodecimo pamphlet, wrapped in silver paper, as a
present held ready for an intelligent reader. "A mode of propagandism,"
you remark in excuse; "they wished to spread some useful corrective
doctrine." Not necessarily: the indoctrination aimed at was perhaps to
convince you of their own talents by the sample of an "Ode on
Shakspere's Birthday," or a translation from Horace.

Vorticella may pair off with Monas, who had also written his one
book--'Here and There; or, a Trip from Truro to Transylvania'--and not
only carried it in his portmanteau when he went on visits, but took the
earliest opportunity of depositing it in the drawing-room, and
afterwards would enter to look for it, as if under pressure of a need
for reference, begging the lady of the house to tell him whether she,
had seen "a small volume bound in red." One hostess at last ordered it
to be carried into his bedroom to save his time; but it presently
reappeared in his hands, and was again left with inserted slips of paper
on the drawing-room table.

Depend upon it, vanity is human, native alike to men and women; only in
the male it is of denser texture, less volatile, so that it less
immediately informs you of its presence, but is more massive and capable
of knocking you down if you come into collision with it; while in women
vanity lays by its small revenges as in a needle-case always at hand.
The difference is in muscle and finger-tips, in traditional habits and
mental perspective, rather than in the original appetite of vanity. It
is an approved method now to explain ourselves by a reference to the
races as little like us as possible, which leads me to observe that in
Fiji the men use the most elaborate hair-dressing, and that wherever
tattooing is in vogue the male expects to carry off the prize of
admiration for pattern and workmanship. Arguing analogically, and
looking for this tendency of the Fijian or Hawaian male in the eminent
European, we must suppose that it exhibits itself under the forms of
civilised apparel; and it would be a great mistake to estimate
passionate effort by the effect it produces on our perception or
understanding. It is conceivable that a man may have concentrated no
less will and expectation on his wristbands, gaiters, and the shape of
his hat-brim, or an appearance which impresses you as that of the modern
"swell," than the Ojibbeway on an ornamentation which seems to us much
more elaborate. In what concerns the search for admiration at least, it
is not true that the effect is equal to the cause and resembles it. The
cause of a flat curl on the masculine forehead, such as might be seen
when George the Fourth was king, must have been widely different in
quality and intensity from the impression made by that small scroll of
hair on the organ of the beholder. Merely to maintain an attitude and
gait which I notice in certain club men, and especially an inflation of
the chest accompanying very small remarks, there goes, I am convinced,
an expenditure of psychical energy little appreciated by the
multitude--a mental vision of Self and deeply impressed beholders which
is quite without antitype in what we call the effect produced by that
hidden process.

No! there is no need to admit that women would carry away the prize of
vanity in a competition where differences of custom were fairly
considered. A man cannot show his vanity in a tight skirt which forces
him to walk sideways down the staircase; but let the match be between
the respective vanities of largest beard and tightest skirt, and here
too the battle would be to the strong.




XVI.


MORAL SWINDLERS.

It is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of words that "what
a man is worth" has come to mean how much money he possesses; but there
seems a deeper and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that
popular or polite speech assigns to "morality" and "morals." The poor
part these words are made to play recalls the fate of those pagan
divinities who, after being understood to rule the powers of the air and
the destinies of men, came down to the level of insignificant demons, or
were even made a farcical show for the amusement of the multitude.

Talking to Melissa in a time of commercial trouble, I found her disposed
to speak pathetically of the disgrace which had fallen on Sir Gavial
Mantrap, because of his conduct in relation to the Eocene Mines, and to
other companies ingeniously devised by him for the punishment of
ignorance in people of small means: a disgrace by which the poor titled
gentleman was actually reduced to live in comparative obscurity on his
wife's settlement of one or two hundred thousand in the consols.

"Surely your pity is misapplied," said I, rather dubiously, for I like
the comfort of trusting that a correct moral judgment is the strong
point in woman (seeing that she has a majority of about a million in our
islands), and I imagined that Melissa might have some unexpressed
grounds for her opinion. "I should have thought you would rather be
sorry for Mantrap's victims--the widows, spinsters, and hard-working
fathers whom his unscrupulous haste to make himself rich has cheated of
all their savings, while he is eating well, lying softly, and after
impudently justifying himself before the public, is perhaps joining in
the General Confession with a sense that he is an acceptable object in
the sight of God, though decent men refuse to meet him."

"Oh, all that about the Companies, I know, was most unfortunate. In
commerce people are led to do so many things, and he might not know
exactly how everything would turn out. But Sir Gavial made a good use of
his money, and he is a thoroughly _moral_ man."

"What do you mean by a thoroughly moral man?" said I.

"Oh, I suppose every one means the same by that," said Melissa, with a
slight air of rebuke. "Sir Gavial is an excellent family man--quite
blameless there; and so charitable round his place at Tiptop. Very
different from Mr Barabbas, whose life, my husband tells me, is most
objectionable, with actresses and that sort of thing. I think a man's
morals should make a difference to us. I'm not sorry for Mr Barabbas,
but _I am_ sorry for Sir Gavial Mantrap."

I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for I fear it was offensively
brusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was the more pernicious
scoundrel of the two, since his name for virtue served as an effective
part of a swindling apparatus; and perhaps I hinted that to call such a
man moral showed rather a silly notion of human affairs. In fact, I had
an angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes happen,
noticed my anger without appropriating my instruction, for I have since
heard that she speaks of me as rather violent-tempered, and not over
strict in my views of morality.

I wish that this narrow use of words which are wanted in their full
meaning were confined to women like Melissa. Seeing that Morality and
Morals under their _alias_ of Ethics are the subject of voluminous
discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute--seeing
that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief
study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science or that
which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might
expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of
language which lends itself to no wider view of life than that of
village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and
of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous,
rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of
justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one
must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the
European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as
passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since
we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious,
we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching
duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion--the one of
these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too
much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with
God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest
conduct towards men. With such a classification as this it is no wonder,
considering the strong reaction of language on thought, that many minds,
dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are far to seek
for the grounds of social duty, and without entertaining any private
intention of committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or
seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel
themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so,
and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their
dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?" It is of little use to
theorise in ethics while our habitual phraseology stamps the larger part
of our social duties as something that lies aloof from the deepest needs
and affections of our nature. The informal definitions of popular
language are the only medium through which theory really affects the
mass of minds even among the nominally educated; and when a man whose
business hours, the solid part of every day, are spent in an
unscrupulous course of public or private action which has every
calculable chance of causing widespread injury and misery, can be called
moral because he comes home to dine with his wife and children and
cherishes the happiness of his own hearth, the augury is not good for
the use of high ethical and theological disputation.

Not for one moment would one willingly lose sight of the truth that the
relation of the sexes and the primary ties of kinship are the deepest
roots of human wellbeing, but to make them by themselves the equivalent
of morality is verbally to cut off the channels of feeling through
which they are the feeders of that wellbeing. They are the original
fountains of a sensibility to the claims of others, which is the bond of
societies; but being necessarily in the first instance a private good,
there is always the danger that individual selfishness will see in them
only the best part of its own gain; just as knowledge, navigation,
commerce, and all the conditions which are of a nature to awaken men's
consciousness of their mutual dependence and to make the world one great
society, are the occasions of selfish, unfair action, of war and
oppression, so long as the public conscience or chief force of feeling
and opinion is not uniform and strong enough in its insistance on what
is demanded by the general welfare. And among the influences that must
retard a right public judgment, the degradation of words which involve
praise and blame will be reckoned worth protesting against by every
mature observer. To rob words of half their meaning, while they retain
their dignity as qualifications, is like allowing to men who have lost
half their faculties the same high and perilous command which they won
in their time of vigour; or like selling food and seeds after
fraudulently abstracting their best virtues: in each case what ought to
be beneficently strong is fatally enfeebled, if not empoisoned. Until we
have altered our dictionaries and have found some other word than
_morality_ to stand in popular use for the duties of man to man, let us
refuse to accept as moral the contractor who enriches himself by using
large machinery to make pasteboard soles pass as leather for the feet of
unhappy conscripts fighting at miserable odds against invaders: let us
rather call him a miscreant, though he were the tenderest, most faithful
of husbands, and contend that his own experience of home happiness makes
his reckless infliction of suffering on others all the more atrocious.
Let us refuse to accept as moral any political leader who should allow
his conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by egoistic
passion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral even though he
were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, if at the same
time his sense of the public welfare were supreme in his mind, quelling
all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality. And though we
were to find among that class of journalists who live by recklessly
reporting injurious rumours, insinuating the blackest motives in
opponents, descanting at large and with an air of infallibility on
dreams which they both find and interpret, and stimulating bad feeling
between nations by abusive writing which is as empty of real conviction
as the rage of a pantomime king, and would be ludicrous if its effects
did not make it appear diabolical--though we were to find among these a
man who was benignancy itself in his own circle, a healer of private
differences, a soother in private calamities, let us pronounce him
nevertheless flagrantly immoral, a root of hideous cancer in the
commonwealth, turning the channels of instruction into feeders of social
and political disease.

In opposite ways one sees bad effects likely to be encouraged by this
narrow use of the word _morals_, shutting out from its meaning half
those actions of a man's life which tell momentously on the wellbeing of
his fellow-citizens, and on the preparation of a future for the children
growing up around him. Thoroughness of workmanship, care in the
execution of every task undertaken, as if it were the acceptance of a
trust which it would be a breach of faith not to discharge well, is a
form of duty so momentous that if it were to die out from the feeling
and practice of a people, all reforms of institutions would be helpless
to create national prosperity and national happiness. Do we desire to
see public spirit penetrating all classes of the community and affecting
every man's conduct, so that he shall make neither the saving of his
soul nor any other private saving an excuse for indifference to the
general welfare? Well and good. But the sort of public spirit that
scamps its bread-winning work, whether with the trowel, the pen, or the
overseeing brain, that it may hurry to scenes of political or social
agitation, would be as baleful a gift to our people as any malignant
demon could devise. One best part of educational training is that which
comes through special knowledge and manipulative or other skill, with
its usual accompaniment of delight, in relation to work which is the
daily bread-winning occupation--which is a man's contribution to the
effective wealth of society in return for what he takes as his own
share. But this duty of doing one's proper work well, and taking care
that every product of one's labour shall be genuinely what it pretends
to be, is not only left out of morals in popular speech, it is very
little insisted on by public teachers, at least in the only effective
way--by tracing the continuous effects of ill-done work. Some of them
seem to be still hopeful that it will follow as a necessary consequence
from week-day services, ecclesiastical decoration, and improved
hymn-books; others apparently trust to descanting on self-culture in
general, or to raising a general sense of faulty circumstances; and
meanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to the
average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace of
immorality, though there is not a member of society who is not daily
suffering from it materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatal
cause that must degrade our national rank and our commerce in spite of
all open markets and discovery of available coal-seams.

I suppose one may take the popular misuse of the words Morality and
Morals as some excuse for certain absurdities which are occasional
fashions in speech and writing--certain old lay-figures, as ugly as the
queerest Asiatic idol, which at different periods get propped into
loftiness, and attired in magnificent Venetian drapery, so that whether
they have a human face or not is of little consequence. One is, the
notion that there is a radical, irreconcilable opposition between
intellect and morality. I do not mean the simple statement of fact,
which everybody knows, that remarkably able men have had very faulty
morals, and have outraged public feeling even at its ordinary standard;
but the supposition that the ablest intellect, the highest genius, will
see through morality as a sort of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, a
doctrine of dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity. We begin to
understand the acceptance of this foolishness by considering that we
live in a society where we may hear a treacherous monarch, or a
malignant and lying politician, or a man who uses either official or
literary power as an instrument of his private partiality or hatred, or
a manufacturer who devises the falsification of wares, or a trader who
deals in virtueless seed-grains, praised or compassionated because of
his excellent morals.

Clearly if morality meant no more than such decencies as are practised
by these poisonous members of society, it would be possible to say,
without suspicion of light-headedness, that morality lay aloof from the
grand stream of human affairs, as a small channel fed by the stream and
not missed from it. While this form of nonsense is conveyed in the
popular use of words, there must be plenty of well-dressed ignorance at
leisure to run through a box of books, which will feel itself initiated
in the freemasonry of intellect by a view of life which might take for a
Shaksperian motto--

"Fair is foul and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air"--

and will find itself easily provided with striking conversation by the
rule of reversing all the judgments on good and evil which have come to
be the calendar and clock-work of society. But let our habitual talk
give morals their full meaning as the conduct which, in every human
relation, would follow from the fullest knowledge and the fullest
sympathy--a meaning perpetually corrected and enriched by a more
thorough appreciation of dependence in things, and a finer sensibility
to both physical and spiritual fact--and this ridiculous ascription of
superlative power to minds which have no effective awe-inspiring vision
of the human lot, no response of understanding to the connection between
duty and the material processes by which the world is kept habitable for
cultivated man, will be tacitly discredited without any need to cite the
immortal names that all are obliged to take as the measure of
intellectual rank and highly-charged genius.

Suppose a Frenchman--I mean no disrespect to the great French nation,
for all nations are afflicted with their peculiar parasitic growths,
which are lazy, hungry forms, usually characterised by a
disproportionate swallowing apparatus: suppose a Parisian who should
shuffle down the Boulevard with a soul ignorant of the gravest cares and
the deepest tenderness of manhood, and a frame more or less fevered by
debauchery, mentally polishing into utmost refinement of phrase and
rhythm verses which were an enlargement on that Shaksperian motto, and
worthy of the most expensive title to be furnished by the vendors of
such antithetic ware as _Les_ _marguerites de l'Enfer_, or _Les delices
de Beelzebuth_. This supposed personage might probably enough regard his
negation of those moral sensibilities which make half the warp and woof
of human history, his indifference to the hard thinking and hard
handiwork of life, to which he owed even his own gauzy mental garments
with their spangles of poor paradox, as the royalty of genius, for we
are used to witness such self-crowning in many forms of mental
alienation; but he would not, I think, be taken, even by his own
generation, as a living proof that there can exist such a combination as
that of moral stupidity and trivial emphasis of personal indulgence with
the large yet finely discriminating vision which marks the intellectual
masters of our kind. Doubtless there are many sorts of transfiguration,
and a man who has come to be worthy of all gratitude and reverence may
have had his swinish period, wallowing in ugly places; but suppose it
had been handed down to us that Sophocles or Virgil had at one time made
himself scandalous in this way: the works which have consecrated their
memory for our admiration and gratitude are not a glorifying of
swinishness, but an artistic incorporation of the highest sentiment
known to their age.

All these may seem to be wide reasons for objecting to Melissa's pity
for Sir Gavial Mantrap on the ground of his good morals; but their
connection will not be obscure to any one who has taken pains to observe
the links uniting the scattered signs of our social development.