Impressions of Theophrastus Such

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 d********** B*********_. 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.