Chapter 21

"Why, thus: our modern familiarity with the intellectual work of all times and races has made people perceive that in past days indecency was always part and parcel of literature, and that to try to weed it out is to completely alter the character of at least a good half of the literature of the past. Hence, some of us moderns, shaken as we are in all our conventional ideas, have argued that this so-called indecency is a legitimate portion of all literature, and that the sooner it is re-introduced into that of the present the better, if our literature is to be really vital and honest. Now, these people do not perceive that the literature of the past contained indecencies, merely because, being infinitely less self-conscious, less responsible than now, the literature of those days contained fragments of every portion of the civilization which produced it. For besides what I might call absolute indecency, in the sense of pruriency, the literature of the past is full of filth pure and simple, like some Eastern town; a sure proof this, that if certain subjects which we taboo were not tabooed then, it was not from any conscious notion of their legitimacy, but from a general habit of making literature, like the street of some Oriental or mediæval town, the scene of every sort of human action, important or trifling, noble or vile; regarding it as the place for which the finest works were painted or carved, and into which all the slops were emptied. Hence, in our wanderings through the literature of the past, our feet are for ever stumbling into pools of filth, while our eyes are seeking for the splendid traceries, the gorgeous colours above; our stomachs are turned by stenches even while we are peeping in at some wonderful rose garden or fruit orchard. I think you might almost count on your fingers the books up to the year 1650, in which you are sure of encountering no beastliness--choice gardens or bowers of the soul, or sacred chapels kept carefully tidy and pure--viz., Milton, Spenser, the _Vita Nuova_, Petrarch, Tasso--things, you see, mainly sacred or spiritualistic--sort of churches where only devotion of some sort goes on; but if we go out to where there is real life, life complete and thoughtless--Shakspeare, Rabelais, Molière, Ariosto, Cervantes, Aristophanes, Horace--the evil odours meet us again at every step. Well, now-a-days this has all been misunderstood. People have imagined that an inevitable nuisance of the past ought also to be a deliberately chosen nuisance of the present: a line of argument which appears to me to be similar to that of a man, who, because the people of Lisbon used, in the days of my grandfather, to practise a very primitive system of sewerage, should recommend that the inhabitants of modern London should habitually empty their slops on to the heads of passers-by. I am crude? Well, it is by calling nasty things by beautiful names that we are able to endure their existence. I think that people who should attempt such literary revivals ought to be fined, as the more practical revivers of old traditions certainly would be."

Cyril paused a moment. "I think that these sort of offenders, like Whitman, are not evil-doers, but merely snobs: they offend not good morals, but good taste."

"That's just such an artistic and well-bred distinction as I should expect from you," answered Baldwin, rather contemptuously. "I wonder what that word 'good taste' signifies to your mind? Everything and nothing. They are offenders against good taste, you say. Well, let us see how. If I hang a bright green curtain close to a bright blue wall-paper, you will say it is bad taste; if I set Gray's 'Elegy' to one of Strauss's waltzes, that is bad taste also; and if I display all my grand furniture and plate (supposing I had it) to my poor neighbour, whose chintz chair is all torn, and who breakfasts out of a cup without a handle, that also is bad taste. Each for a good reason, and a different one; in each case I am inflicting an injury, too slight and inadvertent to be sin, against something: the green curtain and blue paper combination pains your eye; the Gray's 'Elegy' and Strauss's waltz combination annoys your common sense; the contrast between my riches and your poverty inflicts a wound on your feelings; you see that all sins against taste are merely a hurting of something in somebody. So that, if writing indecent poems is an offence against good taste, it means that it also inflicts some such injury. That injury is simply, as the world has vaguely felt all along, an injury to your neighbour's morals."

"But," put in Cyril, "such a man as Whitman has no immoral intention, nor is he immoral in the sense that Ariosto and Byron are sometimes immoral. The man is not a libertine, but a realist. He wishes people to live clean lives; all he says is, that everything which is legitimate, innocent, necessary in life, is also legitimate and innocent in literature. And although I should rather select other subjects to write about, and would rather he did so likewise, I cannot deny that there is logic in saying that there can be no harm in speaking of that which there is no harm in doing."

"Yes," said Baldwin, "that is just the argument of such men. And the answer is simply that there are things which are intended to be done and _not_ to be spoken about. What you call logic is no logic at all, but a mere appeal to ignorance. It so happens that the case is exactly reversed--that there are a great many things which there is not the smallest immorality in speaking about, and which it would be the most glaring immorality to do. No one shrinks from talking about murder or treachery; nay, even in the very domain of sexual relations there need not be the smallest immorality, nothing at all perverting, in a play which, like the whole Orestes trilogy, or _Othello_, or _Faust_, turns upon adultery or seduction; no one also has the slightest instinct of immorality in talking about the most fearful wholesale massacres. Yet the world at large, ever since it has had any ideas of good and evil, has had an instinct of immorality in talking of that without which not one of us would exist, that which society sanctions and the church blesses. And this exactly because it is as natural as murder--of which we speak freely--is the contrary. For, exactly because certain instincts are so essential and indispensable, Nature has made them so powerful and excitable; there is no fear of their being too dormant, but there is fear of their being too active, and the consequences of their excess are so hideously dangerous to Nature itself, so destructive of all the higher powers, of all the institutions of humanity; the over-activity of the impulses to which we owe our birth is so ruinous of all that for which we are born, social, domestic, and intellectual good, nay, to physical existence itself, that Nature even has found it necessary to restrain them by a counter-instinct--purity, chastity--such as has not been given us to counteract the other physical instincts, as that of eating, which can at most injure an individual glutton, but not affect the general social order. Hence, the slightest artificial stimulus is a danger to mankind, and the giving thereof a crime; for the experience of all times tells us what modern psychology is beginning to explain--viz., the strange connection between the imagination and the senses, the hitherto mysterious power of awakening physical desires, of almost reproducing sensation, possessed by the mind, even as the mention of dainty food is said to make the mouth water, and the description of a surgical operation to make the nerves wince. So that the old intuition, now called conventionalism, which connects indecency with immorality, is entirely justified. Crime may be spoken of just because it is crime, and our nature recoils therefrom; indeed, I think that now-a-days, when our destructive instinct (except in small boys and professors of physiology) is becoming effete, there has ceased to be any very demoralizing influence in talking even of horrors. But the immorality of indecency is quite unlike the immorality of--how shall I distinguish?--of ordinary immorality. In the case of the latter the mischief lies in the sophistication of the reason or the perversion of the sympathies; as, for instance, in Machiavel's 'Prince,' or any of a hundred French novels. In the former case, that of indecency, the immorality lies in the risk of inducing a mood which may lead to excess--that is, to evil. And, as a rule, I think this inducing of a mood is the commonest source of moral danger, whether the mood be a sensual or a destructive one."

"I don't see how you make that out; although I now understand what at first seemed to me mere inexplicable instincts--founded on nothing."

"Some things are inexplicable, perhaps, but be sure instincts are not founded on nothing. Misconceptions are mere false conceptions; but a good half of what people call social convention is based upon a perfectly correct conception, only mankind has forgotten what that conception was. Well, I should place the various sorts of demoralization of which literature is capable in this order: No. 1, and least dangerous, sophistication of judgment; No. 2, and more dangerous, perversion of sympathy; No. 3, and most dangerous, inducement of questionable frame of mind. And I place them thus because it seems to me that this is the order of facility, and, consequently, universality; I mean that fewest people can be found who depend sufficiently on their deliberate ideas, and most effort is required to sophisticate them; whereas, least effort is required, and most effect produced, in the matter of inducing a mood; the perversion of sympathy is half-way. Of course, if we could imagine (as once or twice has actually been the case) that the moral ideas of a whole people were sophisticated, that would be the worst, because the least remediable; but, in the first place, people act but little from ideas, or few persons do, and it is difficult to alter people's ideas; and, in the second place, the sophistication of conscience of single individuals is kept in check by the steadfastness of the mass of mankind, and, consequently, as in such men as Diderot, reduced to mere talk, without corresponding action. But a mood is easily induced without the reason even perceiving it, and the more necessary the mood is to nature, the more easily it will be aroused--the more unnatural an evil, the less danger of it; the more an evil is the mere excess of the necessary, the more danger there is of it."

"It is curious how you marshal ideas into their right places," said Cyril. "There remains one thing to be said about the ethics of impropriety. The people who go in for writing upon subjects which thirty years ago would have distinctly been forbidden, do not all of them write as Whitman does: they are not all what I should call openly beastly. They do their best, on the contrary, to spiritualize the merely animal."

"That is just the most mischievous thing they could possibly do," interrupted Baldwin. "I know the sort of poets you mean. They are the folk who say that things are pure or impure, holy or foul, according as we view them. They are not the brutal, straightforward, naturalistic school; they are the mystico-sensual. Of the two, they are infinitely the worse. For the straightforward naturalistic hogs generally turn your stomach before they have had a chance of doing you any harm; but these persuade themselves and you that, while you are just gloating over sensual images, you are improving your soul. They call brute desire passion, and love lust, and prostitution marriage, and the body the soul. Oh! I know them; they are the worst pests we have in literature."

"But I don't think they are intentionally immoral, Baldwin."

"Do you think any writer ever was intentionally immoral, Cyril?"

"Well, I mean that these men really intend doing good. They think that if only some subjects be treated seriously, without any sniggering or grimacing, there ceases to be any harm in them. They say that they wish to rescue from out of the mire where prudery has thrown it, that which is clean in itself; they wish to show that the whole of Nature is holy; they wish to purify by sanctifying."

Baldwin listened with a smile of contempt. "Of course such words seem very fine," he said; "but a thing is either holy or is not holy: all the incense of poetry and all the hocus-pocus words of mysticism cannot alter its nature by a title. And woe betide us if we once think that any such ceremony of sanctification can take place; woe betide us if we disguise the foul as the innocent, or the merely indifferent as the holy! There is in Nature a great deal which is foul: in that which men are pleased to call unnatural, because Nature herself chastises it after having produced it: there is in Nature an infinite amount of abominable necessity and abominable possibility, which we have reason and conscience to separate from that which within Nature itself is innocent or holy. Mind, I say innocent _or_ holy; for innocence and holiness are very different things. All our appetites, within due limits, are innocent, but they are not therefore holy; and that is just what mystico-sensual poetry fails to perceive, and in giving innocence the rank of holiness it makes it sinful. Do you know what is the really holy? It is that of which the world possesses too little, and can never possess too much: it is justice, charity, heroism, self-command, truthfulness, lovingness, beauty, genius--these things are holy. Place them, if you will, on a poetic altar, that all men may see them, and know them, and love them, and seek after them life-long without ever wearying. But do not enshrine in poetic splendours the merely innocent; that which bestows no merit on its possessor, that which we share with every scoundrel and every animal, that which is so universal that it must for ever be kept in check, and which, unless thus checked by that in ourselves which is truly holy, will degrade us lower than beasts. For in so doing--in thus attempting to glorify that in which there is nothing glorious--you make men think that self-indulgence is sanctity, you let them consume their lives in mere acquiescence with their lusts and laziness, while all around is raging the great battle between good and evil. Worst of all, in giving them this worship of a mystic Ashtaroth or Belial, you hide from them the knowledge of the true God, of the really and exclusively holy, of good, truth, beauty, to know and receive which into our soul we must struggle lifelong with the world and with ourselves; yes, struggle for the sake of the really holy with that mere innocence which is for ever threatening to become guilt."

Baldwin paused; then resumed after a moment: "I believe that mankind as it exists, with whatever noble qualities it possesses, has been gradually evolved out of a very inferior sort of mankind or brutekind, and will, I hope, be evolved into a very superior sort of mankind. And I believe, as science teaches us, that this has been so far effected, and will be further effected henceforward, by an increased activity of those nobler portions of us which have been developed as it were by their own activity; I believe, in short, that we can improve only by becoming more and more different from the original brutes that we were. I have said this to explain to you my feelings towards a young poet of my acquaintance, who is very sincerely smitten with the desire to improve mankind; and has deliberately determined to devote a very fine talent to the glorification of what he calls pure passion, pure in the sense that it can be studied in its greatest purity from the cats on the house tops."

Cyril made a grimace of disgust.

"No, indeed," continued Baldwin, "that poet is not one of the æsthetic-sensual lot you seem to think. He is pure, conscientious, philanthropic; but he is eminently unreasoning. He is painfully impressed by the want of seriousness and holiness with which mankind regards marriage, and his ambition is to set mankind right on this subject, even as another young poet-philanthropist tried to improve family relations in his 'Laon and Cythna.' Now, if you were required to use your poetical talents in order to raise the general view of marriage, in order to show the sanctity of the love of a man and a woman, how would you proceed?"

"I have often thought about that," answered Cyril; "but it has been done over and over again, and I think with most deliberate solemnity and beauty by Schiller and Goethe in the 'Song of the Bell' and in 'Hermann and Dorothea.' Well, I think that poetry can do good work in this line only if the poet see where the real holiness of such love lies; in the love not of the male and the female, but of the man and the woman. For there is nowhere, I think, greater room for moral beauty and dignity than in the choosing by a man of the one creature from whom only death can separate him; of the one friend, not of a phase of his life, but of his whole life; of the one soul which will grow and mature always by the side of his, and having blossomed and borne fruit of good, will gently fade and droop together with his. But this is not the most holy part of the choice, for he is choosing also the mother of his children, the woman who is to give half their nature, half their training, to what children must mean to every honest man: the one chance he possesses of living as he would have wished to have lived, of being what he should wish to have been, his one chance of redeeming his errors, of fulfilling his hopes, of realizing in a measure his own ideals. And to me such a choice, and love in the sense of such a choice, become not merely coldly deliberate, but passionately instinctive, are holy with the holiness that, as you say, is the only real one; holy in all it implies of recognized beauty and goodness, of trust and hope, of all the excellence of which it is at least the supposed forerunner; and its holiness is that upon which all other holiness, all the truthfulness and justice and beauty and goodness of mankind, depends. This is how I view the sanctity of the love between man and woman; how all the greatest poets, from Homer to Schiller, and from Schiller to Mrs. Browning, have viewed it; and it is the only possible view that I can conceive."

Baldwin nodded. "This is how I also see the question. But my young poet is not satisfied with this: he wishes to make men believe in the holiness of that which is no more holy, and far oftener tends to be unholy, than eating or drinking; and in order to make mankind adore, he lavishes all his artistic powers on the construction of an æsthetical temple wherein to enshrine, on the preparation of poetic incense with which to surround, this species of holiness, carefully separated from any extraneous holiness, such as family affection, intellectual appreciation, moral sympathy; left in its complete unmixed simplicity of brute appetite and physical longing and physical rapture; and the temple which he constructs out of all that is beautiful in the world is a harlot's chamber; and the incense which he cunningly distils out of all the sights and sounds of Nature are filthy narcotics, which leave the moral eyes dim, and the moral nerves tremulous, and the moral muscle unstrung. In his desire to moralize he demoralizes; in his desire to sanctify one item of life, he casts aside, he overlooks, forgets, all that which in life is already possessed of holiness. Thus my young poet, in wishing to improve mankind, to raise it, undoes for the time being that weary work of the hundreds of centuries which have slowly changed lust into love, the male and female into a man and a woman, the life of the body into the life of the soul; poetry, one of the highest human products, has, as it were, undone the work of evolution; poetry, which is essentially a thing of the self-conscient intellect, has taken us back to the time when creatures with two legs and no tail could not speak, but only whine and yell and sob--a mode of converse, by the way, more than sufficient for the intercourse of what he is pleased to call the typical Bride and Bridegroom."

They had got out of the strange expanse of brown and green swamp, and after traversing a strip of meagre redeemed land, with stunted trees and yellowish vines, had reached the long narrow line of pine woods which met the beach. They passed slowly through the midst of the woods, brushing the rain-drops off the short, bright, green pines, their wheels creaking over the slippery fallen needles embedded in the sand; while the setting sun fell in hazy yellow beams through the brushwood, making the crisp tree-tufts sparkle like green spun-glass, and their scaly trunks flush rosy; and the stormy sea roared on the sands close by.

"I think your young poet ought to be birched," remarked Cyril; "and if anything could add to my aversion, not for poetry, but for the poetic profession, this would which you have just told me. You see how right I was in saying that I would have more moral satisfaction in being a French cook than in being a poet."

"By no means," answered Baldwin. "In the first place, my young poet ought not to be birched; he ought to be made to reflect, to ask himself seriously and simply, in plain prose, what ideal of life he has been setting before his readers. He ought to be shown that a poet, inasmuch as he is the artist whose material is human feeling and action, is not as free an artist as the mere painter, or sculptor, or composer; he ought to be made to understand that now-a-days, when the old rules of conduct, religious and social, are for ever being questioned, every man who writes of human conduct is required, is bound, to have sound ideas on the subject: that, because now-a-days, for better or for worse, poetry is no longer the irresponsible, uncontrolled, helter-skelter performance of former times, but a very self-conscious, wide-awake, deliberate matter, it can do both much more harm and much more good than it could do before."