The Defendant

If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable
works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to
take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught
at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and
warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet
they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their
idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of
the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively
criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the
high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room
tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in
Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or
suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are our
luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled
in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very
time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether
morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny
Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the
proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it
(quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading
philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant
that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are
placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.

But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are the
criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of
humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never
doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is
noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies
spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these
maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who
believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of
people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy
writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call
Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those
iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as
their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a
'many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to
be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good
many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as the
coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched
by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on
the side of life. The poor--the slaves who really stoop under the
burden of life--have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but
never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling
literature will always be a 'blood and thunder' literature, as simple as
the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS

If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to
solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the
leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one
leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's 'Liberty' seventy-six
times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the
name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in
his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on
the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should
immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes
expressed, was 'an artist in life.' Yet these vows are not more
extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar
periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures
in civic and national civilization--by kings, judges, poets, and
priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great
chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical
folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a
patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that
these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any
saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary
and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like
a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very
high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions
which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get
there.

But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved
in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as
symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men who did these things were not
decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is
generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men
essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious
direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not
hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments
of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad
promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same
monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which
it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning.
And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall,
unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly
sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains together, and that,
if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.

The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some
distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep
the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of the
weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and is
the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man