The Defendant

refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in
Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier
things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got
to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would
be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other
words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously
significant phrase, _another man_. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale
of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the
Decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward
to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday,
Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a
nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One
great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in
which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by
declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend
the feelings of a man about to be hanged:

  'For he that lives more lives than one
  More deaths than one must die.'

And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which
descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain
itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which
imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a
play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be
human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of
the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we
know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us,
to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us--this is the
grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.

Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a
vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the
greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two
mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief, or love, or
aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like
all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it
_exegi monumentum oere perennius_ was the only sentiment that would
satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see
the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together.
But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the
moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said,
that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take
from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement
of a vow. For what could be more maddening than an existence in which
our mother or aunt received the information that we were going to
assassinate the King or build a temple on Ben Nevis with the genial
composure of custom?

The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent
of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to
listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to
imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on
mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently
imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a
phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two
words--'free-love'--as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.
It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage
merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.
Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest
liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him
as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the
heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every
liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one
that he wants.

In Mr. Bernard Shaw's brilliant play 'The Philanderer,' we have a vivid
picture of this state of things. Charteris is a man perpetually
endeavouring to be a free-lover, which is like endeavouring to be a
married bachelor or a white negro. He is wandering in a hungry search
for a certain exhilaration which he can only have when he has the
courage to cease from wandering. Men knew better than this in old
times--in the time, for example, of Shakespeare's heroes. When
Shakespeare's men are really celibate they praise the undoubted
advantages of celibacy, liberty, irresponsibility, a chance of continual
change. But they were not such fools as to continue to talk of liberty
when they were in such a condition that they could be made happy or
miserable by the moving of someone else's eyebrow. Suckling classes love
with debt in his praise of freedom.

  'And he that's fairly out of both
  Of all the world is blest.
  He lives as in the golden age,
  When all things made were common;
  He takes his pipe, he takes his glass,
  He fears no man or woman.'

This is a perfectly possible, rational and manly position. But what have
lovers to do with ridiculous affectations of fearing no man or woman?
They know that in the turning of a hand the whole cosmic engine to the
remotest star may become an instrument of music or an instrument of
torture. They hear a song older than Suckling's, that has survived a
hundred philosophies. 'Who is this that looketh out of the window, fair
as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners?'

As we have said, it is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a
retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterilizing spirit in
modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt
to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern
Jingoes practically say, 'Let us have the pleasures of conquerors