Post-Prandial Philosophy

8. The Role of Prophet

One great English thinker and artist once tried the rash experiment of

being true to himself--of saying out boldly, without fear or reserve,

the highest and noblest and best that was in him. He gave us the most

exquisite lyrics in the English language; he moulded the thought of our

first youth as no other poet has ever yet moulded it; he became the

spiritual father of the richest souls in two succeeding generations of

Englishmen. And what reward did he get for it? He was expelled from his

university. He was hounded out of his country. He was deprived of his

own children. He was denied the common appeal to the law and courts of

justice. He was drowned, an exile, in a distant sea, and burned in

solitude on a foreign shore. And after his death he was vilified and

calumniated by wretched penny-a-liners, or (worse insult still)

apologised for, with half-hearted shrugs, by lukewarm advocates. The

purest in life and the most unselfish in purpose of all mankind, he was

persecuted alive with the utmost rancour of hate, and pursued when dead

with the vilest shafts of malignity. He never even knew in his scattered

grave the good he was to do to later groups of thinkers.

It was a noble example, of course; but not, you will admit, an alluring

one for others to follow.

"Be true to yourself," say the copy-book moralists, "and you may be sure

the result will at last be justified." No doubt; but in how many

centuries? And what sort of life will you lead yourself, meanwhile, for

your allotted space of threescore years and ten, unless haply hanged, or

burned, or imprisoned before it? What the copy-book moralists mean is

merely this--that sooner or later your principles will triumph, which

may or may not be the case according to the nature of the principles.

But even suppose they do, are you to ignore yourself in the

interim--you, a human being with emotions, sensations, domestic

affections, and, in the majority of instances, wife and children on whom

to expend them? Why should it be calmly taken for granted by the world

that if you have some new and true thing to tell humanity (which

humanity, of course, will toss back in your face with contumely and

violence) you are bound to blurt it out, with childish unreserve,

regardless of consequences to yourself and to those who depend upon you?

Why demand of genius or exceptional ability a gratuitous sacrifice which

you would deprecate as wrong and unjust to others in the ordinary

citizen? For the genius, too, is a man, and has his feelings.

The fact is, society considers that in certain instances it has a right

to expect the thinker will martyrise himself on its account, while it

stands serenely by and heaps faggots on the pile, with every mark of

contempt and loathing. But society is mistaken. No man is bound to

martyrise himself; in a great many cases a man is bound to do the exact

opposite. He has given hostages to Fortune, and his first duty is to the

hostages. "We ask you for bread," his children may well say, "and you

give us a noble moral lesson. We ask you for clothing, and you supply us

with a beautiful poetical fancy." This is not according to bargain. Wife

and children have a first mortgage on a man's activities; society has

only a right to contingent remainders.

A great many sensible men who had truths of deep import to deliver to

the world must have recognised these facts in all times and places, and

must have held their tongues accordingly. Instead of speaking out the

truths that were in them, they must have kept their peace, or have

confined themselves severely to the ordinary platitudes of their age and

nation. Why ruin yourself by announcing what you feel and believe, when

all the reward you will get for it in the end will be social ostracism,

if not even the rack, the stake, or the pillory? The Shelleys and

Rousseaus there's no holding, of course; they _will_ run right into it;

but the Goethes--oh, no, they keep their secret. Indeed, I hold it as

probable that the vast majority of men far in advance of their times

have always held their tongues consistently, save for mere common

babble, on Lord Chesterfield's principle that "Wise men never say."

The _r**_ of prophet is thus a thankless and difficult one. Nor is it

quite certainly of real use to the community. For the prophet is

generally too much ahead of his times. He discounts the future at a

ruinous rate, and he takes the consequences. If you happen ever to have

read the Old Testament you must have noticed that the prophets had

generally a hard time of it.

The leader is a very different stamp of person. _He_ stands well abreast

of his contemporaries, and just half a pace in front of them; and he has

power to persuade even the inertia of humanity into taking that one

half-step in advance he himself has already made bold to adventure. His

post is honoured, respected, remunerated. But the prophet gets no

thanks, and perhaps does mankind no benefit. He sees too quick. And

there can be very little good indeed in so seeing. If one of us had been

an astronomer, and had discovered the laws of Kepler, Newton, and

Laplace in the thirteenth century, I think he would have been wise to

keep the discovery to himself for a few hundred years or so. Otherwise,

he would have been burned for his trouble. Galileo, long after, tried

part of the experiment a decade or so too soon, and got no good by it.

But in moral and social matters the danger is far graver. I would say to

every aspiring youth who sees some political or economical or ethical

truth quite clearly: "Keep it dark! Don't mention it! Nobody will listen

to you; and you, who are probably a person of superior insight and

higher moral aims than the mass, will only destroy your own influence

for good by premature declarations. The world will very likely come

round of itself to your views in the end; but if you tell them too soon,

you will suffer for it in person, and will very likely do nothing to

help on the revolution in thought that you contemplate. For thought that

is too abruptly ahead of the mass never influences humanity."

"But sometimes the truth will out in spite of one!" Ah, yes, that's the

worst of it. Do as I say, not as I do. If possible, repress it.

It is a noble and beautiful thing to be a martyr, especially if you are

a martyr in the cause of truth, and not, as is often the case, of some

debasing and degrading superstition. But nobody has a right to demand of

you that you should be a martyr. And some people have often a right to

demand that you should resolutely refuse the martyr's crown on the

ground that you have contracted prior obligations, inconsistent with the

purely personal luxury of martyrdom. 'Tis a luxury for a few. It befits

only the bachelor, the unattached, and the economically spareworthy.

"These be pessimistic pronouncements," you say. Well, no, not exactly.

For, after all, we must never shut our eyes to the actual; and in the

world as it is, meliorism, not optimism, is the true opposite of

pessimism. Optimist and pessimist are both alike in a sense, seeing they

are both conservative; they sit down contented--the first with the smug

contentment that says "All's well; I have enough; why this fuss about

others?" the second with the contentment of blank despair that says,

"All's hopeless; all's wrong; why try uselessly to mend it?" The

meliorist attitude, on the contrary, is rather to say, "Much is wrong;

much painful; what can we do to improve it?" And from this point of view

there is something we can all do to make martyrdom less inevitable in

the end, for the man who has a thought, a discovery, an idea, to tell

us. Such men are rare, and their thought, when they produce it, is sure

to be unpalatable. For, if it were otherwise, it would be thought of our

own type--familiar, banal, commonplace, unoriginal. It would encounter

no resistance, as it thrilled on its way through our brain, from

established errors. What the genius and the prophet are there for is

just that--to make us listen to unwelcome truths, to compel us to hear,

to drive awkward facts straight home with sledge-hammer force to the

unwilling hearts and brains of us. Not what _you_ want to hear, or what

_I_ want to hear, is good and useful for us; but what we _don't_ want to

hear, what we can't bear to think, what we hate to believe, what we

fight tooth and nail against. The man who makes us listen to _that_ is

the seer and the prophet; he comes upon us like Shelley, or Whitman, or

Ibsen, and plumps down horrid truths that half surprise, half disgust

us. He shakes us out of our lethargy. To such give ear, though they say

what shocks you. Weigh well their hateful ideas. Avoid the vulgar vice

of sneering and carping at them. Learn to examine their nude thought

without shrinking, and examine it all the more carefully when it most

repels you. Naked verity is an acquired taste; it is never beautiful at

first sight to the unaccustomed vision. Remember that no question is

finally settled; that no question is wholly above consideration; that

what you cherish as holiest is most probably wrong; and that in social

and moral matters especially (where men have been longest ruled by pure

superstitions) new and startling forms of thought have the highest _a

priori_ probability in their favour. Dismiss your idols. Give every

opinion its fair chance of success--especially when it seems to you both

wicked and ridiculous, recollecting that it is better to let five

hundred crude guesses run loose about the world unclad, than to crush

one fledgling truth in its callow condition. To the Greeks, foolishness:

to the Jews, a stumbling-block. If you can't be one of the prophets

yourself, you can at least abstain from helping to stone them.

Dear me! These reflections to-day are anything but post-prandial. The

_gnocchi_ and the olives must certainly have disagreed with me. But

perhaps it may some of it be "wrote sarcastic." I have heard tell there

is a thing called irony.