Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Debasing the Moral Currency

"Il ne faut pas mettre un ridicule ou il n'y en a point: c'est se gater

le gout, c'est corrompre son jugement et celui des autres. Mais le

ridicule qui est quelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grace

et d'une maniere qui plaise et qui instruise."

I am fond of quoting this passage from La Bruyere, because the subject

is one where I like to show a Frenchman on my side, to save my

sentiments from being set down to my peculiar dulness and deficient

sense of the ludicrous, and also that they may profit by that

enhancement of ideas when presented in a foreign tongue, that glamour of

unfamiliarity conferring a dignity on the foreign names of very common

things, of which even a philosopher like Dugald Stewart confesses the

influence. I remember hearing a fervid woman attempt to recite in

English the narrative of a begging Frenchman who described the violent

death of his father in the July days. The narrative had impressed her,

through the mists of her flushed anxiety to understand it, as something

quite grandly pathetic; but finding the facts turn out meagre, and her

audience cold, she broke off, saying, "It sounded so much finer in

French--_j'ai vu le sang de mon pere_, and so on--I wish I could repeat

it in French." This was a pardonable illusion in an old-fashioned lady

who had not received the polyglot education of the present day; but I

observe that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiring

acceptance solely by virtue of the French language, and one may fairly

desire that what seems a just discrimination should profit by the

fashionable prejudice in favour of La Bruyere's idiom. But I wish he had

added that the habit of dragging the ludicrous into topics where the

chief interest is of a different or even opposite kind is a sign not of

endowment, but of deficiency. The art of spoiling is within reach of the

dullest faculty: the coarsest clown with a hammer in his hand might

chip the nose off every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand

grinning at the effect of his work. Because wit is an exquisite product

of high powers, we are not therefore forced to admit the sadly confused

inference of the monotonous jester that he is establishing his

superiority over every less facetious person, and over every topic on

which he is ignorant or insensible, by being uneasy until he has

distorted it in the small cracked mirror which he carries about with him

as a joking apparatus. Some high authority is needed to give many worthy

and timid persons the freedom of muscular repose under the growing

demand on them to laugh when they have no other reason than the peril of

being taken for dullards; still more to inspire them with the courage to

say that they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and their

children of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men,

by burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich fishmongers in

the stalls and their assistants in the gallery. The English people in

the present generation are falsely reputed to know Shakspere (as, by

some innocent persons, the Florentine mule-drivers are believed to have

known the _Divina Commedia_, not, perhaps, excluding all the subtle

discourses in the _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_); but there seems a clear

prospect that in the coming generation he will be known to them through

burlesques, and that his plays will find a new life as pantomimes. A

bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous corpulence from which he

will frantically dance himself free during the midnight storm; Rosalind

and Celia will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and

shepherdesses; Ophelia in fleshings and a voluminous brevity of

grenadine will dance through the mad scene, finishing with the famous

"attitude of the scissors" in the arms of Laertes; and all the speeches

in "Hamlet" will be so ingeniously parodied that the originals will be

reduced to a mere _memoria technica_ of the improver's puns--premonitory

signs of a hideous millennium, in which the lion will have to lie down

with the lascivious monkeys whom (if we may trust Pliny) his soul

naturally abhors.

I have been amazed to find that some artists whose own works have the

ideal stamp, are quite insensible to the damaging tendency of the

burlesquing spirit which ranges to and fro and up and down on the earth,

seeing no reason (except a precarious censorship) why it should not

appropriate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves to

make up the treasure of human admiration, hope, and love. One would have

thought that their own half-despairing efforts to invest in worthy

outward shape the vague inward impressions of sublimity, and the

consciousness of an implicit ideal in the commonest scenes, might have

made them susceptible of some disgust or alarm at a species of burlesque

which is likely to render their compositions no better than a dissolving

view, where every noble form is seen melting into its preposterous

caricature. It used to be imagined of the unhappy medieval Jews that

they parodied Calvary by crucifying dogs; if they had been guilty they

would at least have had the excuse of the hatred and rage begotten by

persecution. Are we on the way to a parody which shall have no other

excuse than the reckless search after fodder for degraded

appetites--after the pay to be earned by pasturing Circe's herd where

they may defile every monument of that growing life which should have

kept them human?

The world seems to me well supplied with what is genuinely ridiculous:

wit and humour may play as harmlessly or beneficently round the changing

facets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling

sea or the dewy meadows. Why should we make our delicious sense of the

ludicrous, with its invigorating shocks of laughter and its

irrepressible smiles which are the outglow of an inward radiation as

gentle and cheering as the warmth of morning, flourish like a brigand on

the robbery of our mental wealth?--or let it take its exercise as a

madman might, if allowed a free nightly promenade, by drawing the

populace with bonfires which leave some venerable structure a blackened

ruin or send a scorching smoke across the portraits of the past, at

which we once looked with a loving recognition of fellowship, and

disfigure them into butts of mockery?--nay, worse--use it to degrade the

healthy appetites and affections of our nature as they are seen to be

degraded in insane patients whose system, all out of joint, finds

matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, makes every passion

preposterous or obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life into a

second chaos hideous enough to make one wail that the first was ever

thrilled with light?

This is what I call debasing the moral currency: lowering the value of

every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less

of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm

and elevation of our social existence--the something besides bread by

which man saves his soul alive. The bread-winner of the family may

demand more and more coppery shillings, or assignats, or greenbacks for

his day's work, and so get the needful quantum of food; but let that

moral currency be emptied of its value--let a greedy buffoonery debase

all historic beauty, majesty, and pathos, and the more you heap up the

desecrated symbols the greater will be the lack of the ennobling

emotions which subdue the tyranny of suffering, and make ambition one

with social virtue.

And yet, it seems, parents will put into the hands of their children

ridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous "illustrations") of

the poems which stirred their own tenderness or filial piety, and carry

them to make their first acquaintance with great men, great works, or

solemn crises through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which,

with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among their

primary associations, and reduce them throughout their time of studious

preparation for life to the moral imbecility of an inward giggle at what

might have stimulated their high emulation or fed the fountains of

compassion, trust, and constancy. One wonders where these parents have

deposited that stock of morally educating stimuli which is to be

independent of poetic tradition, and to subsist in spite of the finest

images being degraded and the finest words of genius being poisoned as

with some befooling drug.

Will fine wit, will exquisite humour prosper the more through this

turning of all things indiscriminately into food for a gluttonous

laughter, an idle craving without sense of flavours? On the contrary.

That delightful power which La Bruyère points to--"le ridicule qui est

quelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grce et d'une manière

qui plaise et qui instruise"--depends on a discrimination only

compatible with the varied sensibilities which give sympathetic insight,

and with the justice of perception which is another name for grave

knowledge. Such a result is no more to be expected from faculties on the

strain to find some small hook by which they may attach the lowest

incongruity to the most momentous subject, than it is to be expected of

a sharper, watching for gulls in a great political assemblage, that he

will notice the blundering logic of partisan speakers, or season his

observation with the salt of historical parallels. But after all our

psychological teaching, and in the midst of our zeal for education, we

are still, most of us, at the stage of believing that mental powers and

habits have somehow, not perhaps in the general statement, but in any

particular case, a kind of spiritual glaze against conditions which we

are continually applying to them. We soak our children in habits of

contempt and exultant gibing, and yet are confident that--as Clarissa

one day said to me--"We can always teach them to be reverent in the

right place, you know." And doubtless if she were to take her boys to

see a burlesque Socrates, with swollen legs, dying in the utterance of

cockney puns, and were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene among

their bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at all to the

prejudice of their emotions on hearing their tutor read that narrative

of the _Apology_ which has been consecrated by the reverent gratitude of

ages. This is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity:--a new

Famine, a meagre fiend with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a

moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments. These are the

most delicate elements of our too easily perishable civilisation. And

here again I like to quote a French testimony. Sainte Beuve, referring

to a time of insurrectionary disturbance, says: "Rien de plus prompt à

baisser que la civilisation dans des crises comme celle-ci; on perd en

trois semaines le résultat de plusieurs siècles. La civilisation, la

_vie_ est une chose apprise et inventée, qu'on le sache bien: '_Inventas

aut qui vitam excoluere per artes_.' Les hommes après quelques années de

paix oublient trop cette verité: ils arrivent à croire que la _culture_

est chose innée, qu'elle est la même chose que la _nature_. La

sauvagerie est toujours làà deux pas, et, dès qu'on lche pied, elle

recommence." We have been severely enough taught (if we were willing to

learn) that our civilisation, considered as a splendid material fabric,

is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or

ideal feelings. And it is this invisible police which we had need, as a

community, strive to maintain in efficient force. How if a dangerous

"Swing" were sometimes disguised in a versatile entertainer devoted to

the amusement of mixed audiences? And I confess that sometimes when I

see a certain style of young lady, who checks our tender admiration with

rouge and henna and all the blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, with

slang and bold _brusquerie_ intended to signify her emancipated view of

things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I

am sorely tempted to hiss out "_Pétroleuse!_" It is a small matter to

have our palaces set aflame compared with the misery of having our sense

of a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, the

promise of life--penetrating affection, stained and blotted out by

images of repulsiveness. These things come--not of higher education,

but--of dull ignorance fostered into pertness by the greedy vulgarity

which reverses Peter's visionary lesson and learns to call all things

common and unclean. It comes of debasing the moral currency.

The Tirynthians, according to an ancient story reported by Athenaeus,

becoming conscious that their trick of laughter at everything and

nothing was making them unfit for the conduct of serious affairs,

appealed to the Delphic oracle for some means of cure. The god

prescribed a peculiar form of sacrifice, which would be effective if

they could carry it through without laughing. They did their best; but

the flimsy joke of a boy upset their unaccustomed gravity, and in this

way the oracle taught them that even the gods could not prescribe a

quick cure for a long vitiation, or give power and dignity to a people

who in a crisis of the public wellbeing were at the mercy of a poor

jest.