'Moralizing Strains'

IN the days of my youth, among the so-called senior subjects in college there was always a course in moral philosophy. Nowadays it is called ethics, but I do not believe it. is really the same thing. Ethics sounds like a much lighter, a more frivolous subject than moral philosophy. However, I cannot tell. I took that course in moral philosophy in my senior year (students always ‘take’ courses, probably by analogy with taking medicine), and, when I had taken it, my dear old professor told me with a catch in his voice that I had been positively his worst student in the subject. ‘I have had some pretty bad ones in my day, but I really think you take the cake.’

‘But you passed me, Professor,’ said I, thinking I had him.

‘Passed you! Confound you, of course I passed you,’ he replied. ‘Do you suppose I wanted you all over again?’

Now I had a great respect for my professor, because no one had ever told me so many home-truths without any hard feeling on either side; and for that reason I forbore to ask him whether, in view of his reason for passing me, his own morals did not seem a little mixed. Besides, I knew that he would cheerfully agree. Teaching moral philosophy as he did, he took, in real life, an innocent pleasure in pretending to be immoral. And so I left him without further argument, merely recalling to my own mind how many times he had told us that moral philosophy was the most theoretical of subjects.

Nevertheless, as we are likely to do with many subjects that we study — or, shall we say, take? — in college, I have wished ever since that I had not been the worst student ever known to my professor; for nowadays, when we are hearing so much about the New Morality, it would be at least handy even once to have known something about the Old Morality — in a systematic and philosophical way, I mean. But I never studied the latter, as my professor seems to have discovered; and, as a consequence, I have never been able to determine whether my own morality is of the new variety or the old. And I seem never to have time to read up and find out. After leaving college, one goes on working from day to day, being good or bad by rule of thumb, and never being quite sure whether one’s morals are even up-to-date, until one fine day some youngster, whose morals are of the very latest model, comes along and calls one Victorian, or something terrible like that; and then one is filled with chagrin, and spends the rest of the day mourning over one’s lost opportunities.

Such ignorance is the more unfortunate in one of my generation. We who grew up in the peaceful eighteenseventies and eighties are somewhat in the pathetic case of the man who, when asked whether he liked white meat, replied: ‘I don’t know. When I was a child my father always got it, and now I am a father, my children always get it.’ We were born after the old morality had lost a good deal of its fine fury, and before the new morality had been popularized by certain novelists; and I ascribe to this cause a certain levity which I seem to detect in my coevals. We apparently lack the preternatural solemnity of both our grandfathers and our grandchildren, and lacking it, it is hard to see how we can ever amount to much. Sidney Smith recognized the danger when he pointed out that, contrary to the laws of physics, his brother had risen in life through gravity and he himself had sunk through levity. For it is the man who can say ‘an undisputed thing in such a solemn way who gets on in the world. A light mind is a practical misfortune. I envy a speaker who can say, ‘ Life is superficial because it is spent too much on the surface,’ with so wise an air that his hearers all breathe, ‘How true!’ He will go far.

But to return to moral philosophy, which, when I was a senior, impressed me as the most solemn of subjects. Ignorant as I am, I may be all wrong when I say that it seems to me that nobody dares to be as moral nowadays as almost everybody did, say, a hundred years ago. We were pretty moral in my youth — much more so than to-day; but nothing to what people were in 1820.

In that simple era the New Morality and Higher Ethics had never been heard of; and, as a consequence, everybody knew exactly what was moral and what was not. The people of that day would have been extremely puzzled by many of the problems propounded in our contemporary plays and novels. Running off with another man’s wife, for example, was a custom or habit which they could never excuse, for they had not come to realize how exceedingly complex, and even intricate, the motives may be which lead one to do it. For them it simply was not right; and if anyone in the neighborhood did it, they did not hesitate to write a letter to the newspaper and say what they thought of him. They were too primitive to realize how difficult it is to decide for or against so unconventional an action, or how many biological, psychological, sociological, and economic questions one must consider before one can do it with a clear conscience. In their day, of course, men did run off with other men’s wives, just as they do to-day; but they seem to have done so impulsively, and they would have been quick to admit that in doing so they*were immoral. The burden of public opinion upon ardent souls was, therefore, much more severe than it is upon our contemporary heroes and heroines, who live in an age of acute intellectuality.

And yet, for the great mass of souls that were not particularly ardent, the period must have been a comfortable one to live in. For even though their own moral problems might at times seem intricate, those of their neighbors were always very simple; and when they spoke of their neighbors’ actions they always had one definite rule to guide them — ‘A thing is either right or it is n’t.’ In a world which is complex enough, at best, to have even one rule so easy to apply is a great convenience; and it seems possible that the rarity of neurasthenia among them can be traced to their possession of so simple a formula.

Especially to be envied is the father of the period, because he could plant himself on his hearth-rug, with his legs apart and his hands under his coattails, and thunder moral remarks at his children without any fear of being interrupted. There is nothing that gives one such a sense of well-being as to thunder moral remarks at somebody; but the opportunities for doing so are becoming fewer and fewer. Now and then, in an advertisement in a magazine we see a well-fed and well-preserved man of middle age sitt ing behind an office desk and point ing a finger at a group of cringing operatives, as an illustration of what a course in will-power can do for one; and we see at a glance that he is being moral with all his might, and is, consequently, a happy man. But in real life we rarely see any one do that — certainly never a father. When it is necessary for the modern father to be moral, he tries to be jovial rather than Jovian, and insinuative rather than incendiary. He begins his homily with some such preamble as, ‘Not to seem to preach,’or ‘Not to pose as an oracle,’ or ‘ With no desire to appear omniscient’; and, as like as not., the son or daughter who is listening breaks in encouragingly, ‘That’s right. Don’t come the heavy father, that’s a good fellow,’ or, ‘That’s a dear old thing.’

Who could be moral after that? And is it really quite fair? The modern father has few enough pleasures in any event, and it seems as if he might have been permitted to keep this little one of thundering at his family now and then. No one ever paid much attention to him anyway, even in 1820; but he got an innocent pleasure out of it, as well as an abiding sense of security out of feeling his feet planted firmly on the eternal rock of fundamental right and wrong. He said proudly, ‘I am an oldfashioned man’; and all the other fathers cried, ‘Hear, hear!’ To-day he prefaces his remarks to his family with the phrase, ‘I may be old-fashioned, but —'; and the younger generation giggles.

In 1820 folk admired not only a man who was moral, but a Moral Man, and that is not inevitably the same thing. A Moral Man not only had convictions, but was not afraid to air them in public. ‘I, sir, am a Moral Man,’ he said; and his wife did not. hesitate to proclaim herself a Moral Woman. It is about a hundred years since Lord Melbourne made his famous remark that ‘ Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life,’ feeling, apparently, that solemnity should be reserved for ceremonial occasions. In the noble lord’s day, religion and morals, whatever else they might be, were official.

It was a period of the obvious, when people not only expected to be moralized over, at, and to, but seem to have liked it. They liked to read poems which ended, ‘So live, that when thy summons comes to join’; or, ‘I would that thus, when I shall see The hour of death draw near to me’; or ‘Let us then, be up and doing’; or ‘Thanks, thanks, to thee, my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast, taught.’ A poem seemed properly wound up, applied, and clinched when at the close it rose from the artistic particular to the ethical general, and gave them a neat rule of conduct to remember. They might have their Keats and Shelley, but most of them read their Mrs. Barbauld, L. E. L., and Mrs. Hemans; and their avidity for instruction gave employment to a large class of industrious poets, who spent their days pondering over flowers, butterflies, autumn leaves, larks, and nightingales, in order to extract from these little pagans the most irreproachable Christian sentiments. The pendulum of time has swung so far that the most advanced of our poets today would rather express nothing at all in a poem than express a sentiment.

But in nothing is the revolution more marked than in the attitude of men toward women. Men have always liked to preach to women, even more than to children; and one of the now vanishing pleasures of husbands has been an owlish solemnity in the presence of their wives’ frivolities. The modern husband is careful not to be solemn often on moral topics, because of the modern wife’s curious assumption that she knows as much in that field as he. In the old days, whatever a wife might think on this head, she seems to have kept discreetly to herself. In 1720, to go back no further, she expected to be insulted, arrogantly though neatly, as a matter of course. ‘Nothing so true,’ said one man of that era (though he was, I must admit, a bachelor), —

In 1922, equally critical but less brave, we write novels in which we can express the most devastating opinions about the sex through the mouths of our characters; and the ladies read them, just as they did the couplets of 1720. But in 1820, men did the thing archly, with a kind of ogling tenderness, as who should say, ‘Weaker vessels, timorous creatures; they need our guidance, but let us be gentle’; and they sometimes achieved a degree of solemnity without parallel. In such virtuous moments they produced something like this: —

I am Inclined to think that this is the worst poem in the English language, and is, to that extent, worthy of admiration. It has, at any rate, given me more pleasure than many poems of great fame. The meaning of the lines seems to be, Set not your heart on jewelry; and the author used the poor little flowers as a horrible example, because moralists have always loved to do that. But I am especially taken with the way in which he rises on successive waves of emotion, like an aeronaut executing a series of ‘zooms,’ or like Mrs. Raddles going upstairs; and with his manner of marshaling his nouns, each leading its adjectives by the hand, like a young ladies’ academy of the period, out for a promenade. The extreme delicacy of his mind — soft as his subject — is also beyond all praise. I feel sure that the composition gave him a pleasure such as no man can know to-day.

One can picture him in starched neckcloth, ruffled shirt-front, and black smalls, as he watches his wife (‘Pretty, childish creature,’ he murmurs) putting on her bracelets, rings, and necklaces, and then takes his pen in hand and, his brain buzzing with poetic echoes, invokes the Muse in moralizing strains. A moment’s sentimental musing, and all is done. Nothing remains but to write. ’T is as easy as lying. For in 1820 writing poetry was an art within the reach of all men. Given a thought sufficiently didactic, memory could be trusted to do the rest; and phrases like ‘flowery chaplets,’ ‘verdant paths,’ ‘purple pride,’ ‘floating train,’ ‘orient pomp,’ ‘flying robe,’‘glittering show,’ ‘odoriferous sweets,’ ‘shoot profuse,’ ‘Nature’slivery,’ ‘blushing heads,’ and ‘transitory life,’ would flow from the pen as freely as the ink.

But nowadays the writing of poetry has become such hard work that there is no pleasure in it. So long as a poet sought only to be instructive, his brain could secrete lines as the liver bile; but now the art is so hedged about by unreasonable restrictions that Solemnity has ceased altogether to court the Muse. Their final separation, doubtless on the ground of incompatibility, seems to have occurred about the year 1840, when Philip James Bailey published his Festus and Martin Farquhar Tupper his Proverbial Philosophy; and since the birth of these portentous prodigies of longwindedness, Solemnity has sought another spouse.

Looking over the world to-day to discover his latest affinity, one seems to find her in Psychology. He has had other passing fancies meanwhile, for mankind has always to be solemn about something, and during the industrial revolution he was much taken with her dismal sister-science, Political Economy; but it is appropriate that, in an intellectual era like ours, he should be particularly struck by the somewhat indefinite charms of the science of mind, especially since Religion and Morals are not in vogue.

A consideration of this latest liaison leads one to suspect that men are always solemn over something that is abstract, and most solemn when they know least about it. A professional psychologist will chirp merrily enough over his science; but not so a business man, who has recently discovered the psychology of business. There was a time when business was a somewhat light and airy activity, but to-day there is nothing over which one can shake one’s head more darkly or speak with more esoteric depth. The melancholy change is due to the appearance in business of certain long words. Our grandfathers spoke crudely of using the brains one was born with, where we speak of the psychology of efficiency, or the science of industrial management. Simple souls, who feel the weight of too much mystery, flee from it daily to the links or the bleachers; but during office hours they never deviate into mirth. Outside of business, solemnity seems to flourish most greenly in our political journals, where the style most cultivated is the oracular. This is the more interesting because of all subjects politics seems to be the last on which it is safe to be oracular, and to be the one most provocative of levity.

It seems probable, on the whole, that t he hearth-rug on which our forefathers used to make clear the rightness of right and the wrongness of wrong will never lack an occupant. The ladies, who were insulted in 1720 and moralized over in 1820, are doubtless still listening with the sweet patience that has always characterized them. They know that all men to be happy must occasionally be solemn, and that some men, like Mr. Waddington of Wyck, must be solemn all the time. They themselves are never solemn, perhaps because a big word never fills them with awe and because they have a devastating habit of stripping verbiage down to the grain of common sense that may lie hidden within it. Throughout the ages the world has retained its aplomb because of this fine natural balance of the sexes. If ever women should take to being solemn — but the thought is too disturbing even to toy with.