The Ignominy of Being Good

IN a recent sermon I heard it stated that, along with the dread of diphtheria, and the bubonic plague, and having your child sold into slavery, there had disappeared out of the world the fear of being caught reading the Bible. I was especially struck by that statement, because the time lies within my own memory when the fear of being caught reading the Bible had not disappeared out of the world. Perhaps it lies within the memory of any man who has had the fortune of a pious rearing. I should speak with hesitation for the girls, but I say with confidence that it is habitual for healthy boys of a certain age to be ashamed of being good. And much as I enjoy rising to an optimistic sermon, I cannot help doubting whether the fear of being caught reading the Bible has actually disappeared.

When I was nine years old, through some accidental preoccupation during one of my recitation hours, I received a prize for good conduct. The prize consisted of a pale blue ribbon placed upon the lapel of my jacket. Now, I am not ashamed to-day when I remember that I received that prize, because I know that it was accidental. I was subject to fits of absentmindedness in which I neglected the business of the hour. And of those it took only the one prize to cure me. I never did it again. So I am not ashamed of it now, but I was then, and I wore my jacket inside out at recess for a week, earnestly wishing that virtue was its own reward.

That state of mind, which let us call the ignominy of the virtuous, is not confined to boys of nine years. I have seen mortification in the faces of grown men and women when they were accused of saintliness. They would accept with more complacency the tribute that they were getting to be devils in their old age. Nor is the attitude purely jocular or colloquial. At a commencement concert in a church not long ago, a young man stood up in the pulpit and sang, with all the idealistic enthusiasm of the great poet who wrote it, —

And the parson applauded with the rest, understanding in a sort of mental parenthesis, I suppose, that it was not a sacred or Sunday concert.

To recur to a greater poet, some of the most scandalous and soul-shocking exclamations of Walt Whitman are but a revolt against the insipid taste of the talk we use in Sunday-school. Well he says,—

Walt Whitman had enough perspicuity and insolence to see and say that there is something disgusting about what we call being good.

We find it pretty strong in the churches where sometimes we go to learn how to be good. Much of what we learn there is summed up in the figures that occupy the stained-glass windows. If there is a living man, with the sap of nature running in his veins, who would consent to be one of those boneless saints, I have yet to see him. My impression of the whole tribe is that they need help. And if there is anything in the world that would sour me against virtue, it would be to have those lank and morose representatives of it stalking round me.

Winter before last a play appeared in New York called The Servant in the House. To sum it up briefly: the home of a preacher was full of trouble and sin; they hired a butler, and the butler turned out to be a reincarnation of Jesus; he won them all, by the power of his character, to piety and peace. The butler was supposed to represent our highest ideal of a man. What then was his first characteristic? He dressed like a woman. He had on a long gown. He could n’t run. He could n’t kick. What was his next characteristic? He walked like Chopin’s Funeral March, pausing to regain his equilibrium over each foot. Speed was inconceivable to him. It was unsaintly. And then he came and laid a long solemn hand over a man’s shoulder and called him ‘comrade’ at breakfast the first time he ever saw him.

Now, there is just one answer to that sort of thing in these days, and it is, ‘Aw come off! ’ And everybody uses it. I think I could sum up the whole tonecolor of that hero by saying that you had difficulty in making him laugh, and when he did laugh it was a special express act of geniality in the deific, and you felt as if you must have been honored. The play was very popular, and is said to have gone a long way toward reforming the morals of the churchly; but to my soul it was so distasteful to see that stained-glass mediæval degeneration of the idea of Jesus, who was a man, brought out on the boards as if he were anybody’s conception of what he would like to be or have in his house, that I could sit through the play only because I enjoyed scorning it.

We cannot say of a people who congregate to praise in the abstract, or in a mimic of reality, what concretely, in their office, or their playground, or their home, they despise, — a people whose words of high eulogy have decayed in their mouths, till their children are ashamed of the titles, and after their schools of virtue, their Sundayschools, name the type of mamma’s boy that they can least endure to play with, — we cannot say that the fear of being good has disappeared out of their world. They have still a disease in their minds, not second to diphtheria in weakening results, — if it be as near akin to sentimental hypocrisy as it looks. Their ideals and their facts are out of gear, and nothing could be more serious.

I have an idea that the cause of this condition is to be discovered way back in the early days of the church. It dates about the time when Saint Augustine wrote a book in which he divided the universe into two parts — the City of God and the City of Satan. And the City of Satan was just about this very world of solids and liquids and gases, and flesh and blood, in which we live together and beget children; and the City of God was something else. It was a general idea of the congregation of those neutral or fanatical persons who had separated themselves from the desires of nature and the needs of society, and conceived themselves to be undergoing a supernatural preparation for another world in which desires and needs and admirations would be altogether different. They were the virtuous and the rest were sinful. And thus it was that sainthood and virtue, and even the commonest kind of door-yard goodness, got separated from the question of the conduct of life in a neighborhood, and lost for ages the spontaneous heroic admiration of the young, and the candid acceptance in whole-heartedness of anybody.

We still feel that there is a sort of milk-blooded inefficiency and lack of temper in them we call saints, and we avoid for ourselves the title. But we keep right on eulogizing them, and putting up their pictures in the window. We lack the audacity to overthrow the whole calendar, and wash out our minds, and start clean with the natural opinion that virtue is what we deeply want in ourselves and the people around us; and if it is not what we want, then it is not virtue.

As we owe this malady to the times of Saint Augustine, we shall find an example of health in the times before him. In the age and city of Pericles, and long before that, the attitude of men’s minds to the question of goodness was ideal. Their Bible was the Iliad, a story of the nation’s heroes, and neither in youth nor age did they stand in terror of being caught reading it. It would teach you how to be a leader of the gang, or a prince of the people, admired and loved although superior to love and admiration. It would make you a man of power and beauty on the powerful and beautiful earth — if not always warmly comfortable to your contemporaries, then a beacon and a light unto posterity.

The admirations of the Greeks, to be sure, and their conduct of life, were not ours, nor need we pine for them. Good counsel, oratory, athletics, horsetaming, strength in battle, hospitality, and the ability to shout loud and carry all the liquor your host offers you — these are some constituents of the Homeric hero, and they are not especially significant for us in our industrial and bed-inhabiting civilization. The significant thing for us is that those qualities of their saints were the very things they admired and demanded of their companions. They praised in their sky-canopied theatres what they loved in the market-place and at the hearth. Their divine temples were peopled with statues of those they would love to see standing there — the chosen of the earth in bodily grace, in athletics, in eloquence, statecraft, warfare, adventure, laughter and jovial conversation — poets, generals, assassins, courtesans, and whoever did to their thinking magnificently carry his part in the drama of our existence here together.

Their ideals being thus geared with the facts of the city they lived in, the love of their ideals was not sterile vapor, but begot conduct. They gave the prizes to their children, not for a sickish and unnatural poverty of demeanor, but for such exploits of individuality and adventurous mischief as in their own hearts they loved. We shall hear much in the coming years about the superiority of the Greek attitude to life, and that in those days men could think straight about morals. The whole essence of that superiority lies in the fact that if you told a hardy Greek boy that a person was virtuous, or that an act was good, he would be attracted to that person or that act, but that the equally hardy modern boy would be repelled.

And if we wish to be superior like the Greeks, we shall see to it that in our times of exaltation we aspire toward a virtue that would be admirable and useful to us in the hours of the days of the week. It can be a virtue higher than any they thought of, because we inherit from Jesus a fervor for the ideal of universal love, and from our Teutonic fathers a pride in recognizing the equality of men, unknown even to the idealists of Athens. But our virtue will never be heartily loved by us, as virtue was loved of old, until it is purged of those elements which we condemn in the reality on six days of the week and praise in the ideal on Sunday.