'_Mary, despite the humble air affected by her, is a deal too haughty for me. It is as much as her foot does, swathed in its white coverings, if it just touches the earth, now purpling where the old serpent writhes. Her eyes are the loveliest eyes in the world; but they are always turned heavenwards, or else they are cast down. They never look you straight in the face. They have never served as the mirror of a human form.... Venus comes, from the sea to take possession of the world, as a goddess who loves men should--quite naked and quite alone.
Earth is more to her liking than is Olympus, and amongst her lovers she has more men than gods. She drapes herself in no faint veils of mystery.
She stands straight upright, her dolphin behind her, and her foot upon her opal-coloured shell. The sun strikes full upon her smooth limbs, and her white hand holds in air the waves of her fair locks, which old father Ocean has sprinkled with his most perfect pearls. One can see her. She hides nothing; for modesty was only made for those who have no beauty. It is an invention of the modern world; the child of the Christian contempt for form and matter._
'_Oh ancient world! all that you held in reverence is held in scorn by us. Thine idols are overthrown in the dust; fleshless anchorites clad in rags and tatters, martyrs with the blood fresh on them, and their shoulders torn by the tigers of thy circuses, have perched themselves on the pedestals of thy fair desirable gods. The Christ has enveloped the whole world in his winding-sheet.... Oh purity, plant of bitterness, born on a blood-soaked soil, and whose degenerate and sickly blossom expands with difficulty in the dank shade of cloisters, under a chill baptismal rain; rose without scent, and spiked all round with thorns, thou hast taken the place for us of the glad and gracious roses, bathed with nard and wine, of the dancing girls of Sybaris!_
'_The ancient world knew thee not, oh sterile flower! thou wast never enwoven in its chaplets of delirious perfume. In that vigorous and healthy society they would have spurned thee under foot disdainfully.
Purity, mysticism, melancholy--three words unknown to thee, three new maladies brought into our life by the Christ!... For me, I look on woman in the old world manner, like a fair slave, made only for our pleasures. Christianity, in my eyes, has done nothing to rehabilitate her.... To say the truth, I cannot conceive for what reason there should be this desire in woman to be looked on as on a level with men.... I have made some love-verses in my time, or at least something that aspired to pass for such ... and there is not a vestige in them of the modern feeling of love.... There is nothing there, as in all the love-poetry since the Christian era, of a soul which, because it loves, begs another soul to love it back again; nothing there of a blue and shining lake, which begs a stream to pour itself into its bosom, that both together they may mirror the stars of heaven; nothing there of a pair of ring-doves, opening their wings together, that they may both together fly to the same nest._'[16]
Such is the account the hero gives of the nature of his love for woman.
Nor does he give this account regretfully, or think that it shows him to be in any diseased condition. It shows rather a return, on his part, to a health that others have lost. As he looks round upon the modern world and the purity that George Eliot says in her verses she would die for, '_Woman_,' he exclaims mournfully, '_is become the symbol of moral and physical beauty. The real fall of man was on the birthday of the babe of Bethlehem_.'[17] It will be instructive to notice further that these views are carried out by him to their full legitimate consequences, even though this, to some degree, is against his will. '_Sometimes_,' he says, '_I try to persuade myself that such passions are abominable, and I say as much to myself in as severe a way as I can. But the words come only from my lips. They are arguments that I make. They are not arguments that I feel. The thing in question really seems quite natural to me, and anyone else in my place would, it seems to me, do as I do._'[18]
Nor is this conception of love peculiar to the hero only. The heroine's conception is its exact counterpart, and exactly fits it. The heroine as completely as the hero has freed herself from any discernment between good and evil. She recoils from abnormal impurity no more than from normal, and the climax of the book is her full indulgence in both.
Now here we have a specimen of love raised to intensity, but divested as far as possible of the religious element. I say divested as far as possible, because even here, as I shall prove hereafter, the process is not complete, and something of religion is still left fermenting. But it is quite complete enough for our present purpose. It will remind us in the sharpest and clearest way that love is no force which is naturally constant in its development, or which if left to itself can be in any way a moral director to us. It will show us that many of its developments are what the moralist calls abominable, and that the very worst of these may perhaps be the most attractive, and be deliberately presented to us as such by men of the most elaborate culture. We shall thus see that love as a test of conduct, as an aim of life, or as an object of any heroic devotion, is not love in general, but love of a special kind, and that to fulfil this function it must not only be selected from the rest, but also removed from them, and set above them at a quite incalculable distance. And the kind thus chosen, let me repeat again (for this, though less obvious, is more important still), is not chosen because it is naturally intense, but it becomes intense because it is the chosen one.
Here then lies the weak point in the position of the positive moralists, when they hold up such love to us as so supreme a treasure in life. They observe, and quite correctly, that it is looked upon as a treasure; but the source of its preciousness is something that their system expressly takes from it. That choice amongst the loves, so solemn and so imperious and yet so tender, which descends like a tongue of flame upon the love it delights to honour; which fixes on a despised and a weak affection, taking it like Elisha from his furrows, or like David from his pastures, setting it above all its fellows, and making it at once a queen and prophetess--this is a choice that positivism has no power to make; or which, if it makes, it makes only a caprice, or a listless preference. It does not, indeed, confound pure love with impure, but it sets them on an equal footing; and those who contend that the former under these conditions is intrinsically more attractive to men than the latter, betray a most nave ignorance of what human nature is.
Supposing, for argument's sake, that to themselves it may be so, this fact is not of the slightest use to them. It is merely the possession on their part of a certain personal taste, which those who do not share it may regard as disease or weakness, and which they themselves can neither defend nor inculcate. It is true they may call their opponents hard names if they choose; but their opponents can call them hard names back again; but in the absence of any common standard, the recriminations on neither side can have the least sting in them. Could, however, any argument on such a matter be possible, it is the devotees of impurity that would have the strongest case; for the pleasures of indulgence are admitted by both sides, while the merits of abstention are admitted by only one.
Let us go back, for instance, in connection with this matter, to what Professor Huxley has told us is the grand result of education. It leads us away, he says, from '_the rank and steaming valleys of sense_,' up to the '_highest good_,' which is '_discerned by reason_,' '_resting in eternal calm_.' And let us ask him again, what, as uttered by a positivist, these words can by any possibility mean. '_The rank and steaming valleys of sense_'! Why are they rank and steaming? Or, if they are, why is that any condemnation of them? Or, if we do condemn them, what else are we to praise? The entire raw material, not of our pleasures only, but of our knowledge also, is given us, say the positive school, by the senses. Surely then to condemn the senses must be to condemn life. Let us imagine Professor Huxley talking in this way to Theophile Gautier. Let us imagine him frowning grimly at the licentious Frenchman, and urging him with all vehemence to turn to the _highest good_. The answer will at once be, '_That is exactly, my dear Professor, what I do turn to. And, listen_,' he might say--the following is again a passage from his own writings--'_to the way in which I figure the highest good to myself. It is a huge building, with its outer walls all blind and windowless; a huge court within, surrounded by a colonnade of white marble; in the midst a musical fountain with a jet of quick-silver in the Arabian fashion; leaves of orange-trees and pomegranates placed alternately; overhead the bluest of skies and the mellowest of suns; great long-nosed greyhounds should be sleeping here and there; from time to time barefoot negresses with golden ankle-rings, fair women servants white and slender, and clad in rich strange garments, should pass between the hollow arches, basket on arm, or urn poised on head._[19]
_Three things give me pleasure, gold, marble, and purple--brilliance, mass, and colour. These are the stuffs out of which my dreams are made; and all my ideal palaces are constructed of these materials._'[20] What answer could Professor Huxley make to this that would not seem to the other at once barbarous and nonsensical? The best answer he could make would be simply, '_I do not agree with you_.' And to this again the answer would at once be, '_That is because you are still hampered by prejudices, whose only possible foundations we have both removed; and because I am a man of culture, and you are not._'
Let us also consider again that other utterance of Professor Huxley's, with which I began this chapter. According to the positive view of morals, he says, those special sets of happiness that a moral system selects for us, have no more to do with any theory as to the reason of their selection, than a man's sight has to do with his theory of vision, or than the hot taste of ginger has to do with a knowledge of its analysis. That is a most clear and succinct statement of the whole positive position; and we shall now be able to profit by its clearness, and to see how all that it does is to reveal confusion. In the first place, Professor Huxley's comparisons really illustrate the very fact that he designs them to invalidate. It is precisely on his theory of vision that a man's sight practically does depend. All sight, so far as it conveys any meaning to him, is an act of inference; and though generally this process may be so rapid that it is not perceived by him, yet the doubt often felt about distant or unusual objects will make him keenly conscious of it. Whilst as to ginger and the taste produced by it, the moral question is not whether it is hot or not; but whether or no it will be for our advantage to eat it; and this resolves itself into two further questions; firstly, whether its heat is pleasant, and secondly whether its heat is wholesome. On the first of these Professor Huxley throws no light whatever; whilst as to the second, it really hangs entirely on the very point that he cited as indifferent. We must have some knowledge, even though it be only vague and negative, of the nature of a food, before we know whether it will be well for us in the long run to habitually eat it, or to abstain from it.
Let us apply this illustration to love. Professor Huxley's ginger shall stand for the sort of love he would most approve of; and love, as a whole, will be represented by a varied dessert, of which ginger is one of the dishes. Now what Professor Huxley has to do is to recommend this ginger, and to show that it is divided by an infinite gulf--say from prunes or from Huntley and Palmer's biscuits. But how is he to do this?
To say that ginger is hot is to say nothing. To many, that may condemn instead of recommending it: and they will have as much to say for their own tastes if they rejoin that prunes and biscuits are sweet. If he can prove to them that what they choose is unwholesome, and that if they eat it they will be too unwell to say their prayers, then, supposing they want to say their prayers, he will have gained his point. But if he cannot prove that it is unwholesome, or if his friends have no prayers to say, his entire recommendation dwindles to a declaration of his own personal taste. But in this case his whole tone will be different. There will be nothing in it of the moral imperative. He will be only laughed at and not listened to, if he proclaims his own taste in sweetmeats with all the thunders of Sinai. And the choice between the various kinds of love is, on positive principles, only a choice between sweetmeats. It is this, and nothing more, than this, avowedly; and yet the positivists would keep for it the earnest language of the Christian, for whom it is a choice, not between sweetmeats and sweetmeats, but between a confectioner's wafer and the Host.
It may perhaps be urged by some that, according to this view of it, purity is degraded into a bitter something, which we only accept reluctantly, through fear of the consequences of its alternatives. And it is quite true that a fear of the consequences of wrong love is inseparably connected with our sense of the value of right love. But this is a necessity of the case; the quality of the right love is in no way lowered by it, and it will lead us to consider another important point.
It is impossible to hold that one thing is incalculably better than others, without holding also that others are incalculably worse than it.
Indeed, the surest test we can give of the praise we bestow on what we choose, is the measure of condemnation we bestow on what we reject. If we maintain that virtuous love constitutes its own heaven, we must also maintain that vicious love constitutes its own hell. If we cannot do the last we certainly cannot do the first. And the positive school can do neither. It can neither elevate one kind of love nor depress the others; and for this reason. The results of love in both cases are, according to their teaching, bounded by our present consciousness; and our present consciousness, divorced from all future expectation, has no room in it for so vast an interval as all moral systems postulate between the right love and the wrong. Indeed, if happiness be the test of right, it cannot, as a general truth, be said that they are practically separable at all. It is notorious that, as far as the present life goes, a man of even the vilest affections may effectually elude all pain from them.
Sometimes they may injure his health, it is true; but they need not even do that; and if they do, it necessitates no moral condemnation of them, for many heroic labours would do just the same. Injury to the health, at any rate, is a mere accident; so is also injury to the reputation; and conditions are easily conceivable by which both these dangers would be obviated. The supposed evils of impurity have but a very slight reference to these. They depend, not on any present consciousness, but on the expectations of a future consciousness--a consciousness that will reveal things to us hereafter which we can only augur here.
_I do not know them now, but after death God knows I know the faces I shall see: Each one a murdered self with last low breath, 'I am thyself; what hast thou done to me?'
'And I, and I thyself!' lo each one saith, 'And thou thyself, to all eternity.'_[21]
Such is the expectation on which the supposed evils of impurity depend.
According to positive principles, the expectation will never be fulfilled; the evils therefore exist only in a diseased imagination.
And with the beauty of purity the case is just the same. According to the view which the positivists have adopted, so little counting the cost of it, a pure human affection is a union of two things. It is not a possession only, but a promise; not a sentiment only, but a _pre_-sentiment; not a taste only, but a foretaste; and the chief sweetness said to be found in the former, is dependent altogether upon the latter. '_Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God_,'
is the belief which, whether true or false as a fact, is implied in the whole modern cultus of love, and the religious reverence with which it has come to be regarded. In no other way can we explain either its eclecticism or its supreme importance. Nor is the belief in question a thing that is implied only. Continually it is expressed also, and this even by writers who theoretically repudiate it. Goethe, for instance, cannot present the moral aspects of Margaret's love-story without assuming it. And George Eliot has been obliged to presuppose it in her characters, and to exhibit the virtues she regards as noblest, on the pedestal of a belief that she regards as most irrational. But its completest expression is naturally to be found elsewhere. Here, for instance, is a verse of Mr. Robert Browning's, who, however we rank him otherwise, is perhaps unrivalled for his subtle analysis of the emotions:
_Dear, when our one soul understands The great soul that makes all things new, When earth breaks up, and heaven expands, How will the change strike me and you, In the house not made with hands?_
Here, again, is another, in which the same sentiment is presented in a somewhat different form:
_Is there nought better than to enjoy?
No deed which done, will make time break, Letting us pent-up creatures through Into eternity, our due-- No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?_
_No wise beginning, here and now, Which cannot grow complete (earth's feat) And heaven must finish there and then?
No tasting earth's true food for men, Its sweet in sad, its sad in sweet?_
To the last of these verses a singular parallel may be found in the works of a much earlier, and a very different writer, only the affection there dealt with is filial and not marital. In spite of this difference, however, it will still be much in point.
'_The day was fast approaching_,' says Augustine, '_whereon my mother was to depart this life, when it happened, Lord, as I believe by thy special ordinance, that she and I were alone together, leaning in a certain window that looked into the garden of the house, where we were then staying at Ostia. We were talking together alone, very sweetly, and were wondering what the life would be of God's saints in heaven. And when our discourse was come to that point, that the highest delight and brightest of all the carnal senses seemed not fit to be so much as named with that life's sweetness, we, lifting ourselves yet more ardently to the Unchanging One, did by degrees pass through all things bodily--beyond the heaven even, and the sun and stars. Yea, we soared higher yet by inward musing. We came to our own minds, and we passed beyond them, that we might reach that place of plenty, where Thou feedest Israel for ever with the food of truth, and where life is the Wisdom by which all these things are made. And whilst we were discoursing and panting after her, we slightly touched on her with the whole effort of our heart; and we sighed, and there left bound the first fruits of the spirit, and came back again to the sounds of our own mouths--to our own finite language. And what we then said was in this wise: If to any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of the earth and air and waters, hushed too the poles of heaven, yea the very soul be hushed to herself, and by not thinking on self transcend self, hushed all dreams and imaginary revelations, every tongue and every sign, and whatever exists only in transition--if these should all be hushed, having only roused our ears to Him that made them, and He speak alone, not by them but by Himself, that we might hear His word, not through any tongue of flesh, nor angel's voice, nor sound of thunder, nor in the dark riddle of a similitude, but might hear Him, whom in these things we love--His very self without any aid from these (even as we two for that brief moment had touched the eternal Wisdom)--could this be continued on, and other visions, far unlike it, be withdrawn, and this one ravish and absorb and wrap up its beholders amid these inward joys, so that life might be for ever like that one moment of understanding, were not this, Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord? And when shall that be? Shall it be when we rise again, but shall not all be changed?_'[22]
In this exceedingly striking passage we have the whole case before us.
The belief on which modern love rests, and which makes it so single and so sacred is, as it were, drawn for us on an enlarged scale: and we see that it is a belief to which positivism has no right. The belief, indeed, is by no means a modern thing. Rudiments of it on the contrary are as old as man himself, and may represent a something that inheres in his very nature. But none the more for this will it be of any service to the positivist; for this something can only be of power or value if the prophecy it inevitably developes into be regarded as a true one. In the consciousness of the ancient world it lay undeciphered like the dark sentence of an oracle; and though it might be revered by some, it could not be denied by any. But its meaning is now translated for us, and there is a new factor in the case. We now can deny it; and if we do, its whole power is paralysed.
This when once recognised must be evident enough. But a curious confusion of thought has prevented the positive school from seeing it.
They have imagined that what religion adds to love is the hope of prolongation only, not of development also; and thus we find Professor Huxley curtly dismissing the question by saying that the quality of such a pleasure '_is obviously in no way affected by the abbreviation or prolongation of our conscious life_.' How utterly this is beside the point may be shown instantly by a very simple example. A painter, we will say, inspired with some great conception, sets to work at a picture, and finds a week of the intensest happiness in preparing his canvas and laying his first colours. Now the happiness of that week is, of course, a fact for him. It would not have been greater had it lasted a whole fortnight; and it would not have been less had he died at the week's end. But though obviously, as Professor Huxley says, it in no way depends on its prolongation, what it does depend on is the belief that it will be prolonged, and that in being prolonged it will change its character. It depends on the belief on the painter's part that he will be able to continue his painting, and that as he continues it, his picture will advance to completion. The positivists have confused the true saying that the pleasure of painting one picture does not depend on the fact that we shall paint many, with the false saying that the pleasure of beginning that one does not depend on the belief that we shall finish it. On this last belief it is plain that the pleasure does depend, largely if not entirely; and it is precisely this last belief that positivism takes away.
To return again, then, to the subject of human love--we are now in a position to see that, as offered us at present by the positive school of moralists, it cannot, properly speaking, be called a positive pleasure at all, but that, it is still essentially a religious one; and that when the religious element is eradicated, its entire character will change.
It may be, of course, contended that the religious element is ineradicable: but this is simply either to call positivism an impossibility, or religion an incurable disease. Here, however, we are touching on a side issue, which I shall by and by return to, but which is at present beside the point. My aim now is not to argue either that positivism can or cannot be accepted by humanity, but to show what, if accepted, it will have to offer us. I wish to point out the error, for instance, of such writers as George Eliot, who, whilst denying the existence of any sun-god in the heavens, are yet perpetually adoring the sunlight on the earth; who profess to extinguish all fire on principle, and then offer us boiling water to supply its place; or who, sending love to us as a mere Cassandra, continue to quote as Scripture the prophecies they have just discredited.
Thus far what we have seen is this. Love as a positive pleasure, if it be ever reduced to such, will be a very different thing from what our positivist moralists at present see it to be. It will perform none of those functions for which they now look to it. It will no longer supply them, as now, with any special pinnacle on which human life may raise itself. The one type of it that is at present on an eminence will sink to the same level as the others. All these will be offered to us indiscriminately, and our choice between them will have no moral value.
None of the ethical epithets by which these varieties are at present so sharply distinguished from each other will have any virtue left in them.
Morality in this connection will be a word without a meaning.
I have as yet dealt only with one of those resources, which have been supposed to impart to life a positive general value. This one, however, has been the most important and the most comprehensive of all; and its case will explain that of the others, and perhaps, with but few exceptions, include them. One or two of these others I shall by and by treat separately; but we will first enquire into the results on life of the change we have been considering already.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Mr. A.C. Swinburne.
[16] _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, pp. 213-222. Ed. Paris. 1875.
[17] _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, p. 223.
[18] _Ibid._, p. 225.
[19] _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, p. 222.
[20] _Ibid._, p. 211.
[21] Dante Gabriel Rosetti.
[22] Aug. Conf., lib. ix. In the earlier part of the passage the extreme redundancy of the original has been curtailed somewhat. In the rendering here given I have to a great extent followed Dr. Pusey.
CHAPTER VI.
LIFE AS ITS OWN REWARD.
'_If in this life only we have hope_--'
What we have now before us is a certain subtraction sum. We have to take from life one of its strongest present elements; and see as well as we can what will then be the remainder. An exact answer we shall, of course, not expect; but we can arrive at an approximate one without much difficulty.