Part 11
I do not jeer at literal accuracy: I think it an excellent safeguard for all of us. The person who has never indulged in a literal falsehood is the less likely to have indulged in a real one. Generally speaking, words follow facts with a certain closeness. Not always, however. I may truthfully say that my teeth are my own, if I have paid for them; but I shall none the less give a wrong impression to the engaging creature who has asked me if they are false. Substitute serious equivalents for that kind of veracious reply, and you will see what I mean. I am not at all sure that, where there is room for doubt, the people I have cited will not largely take the benefit of the doubt to themselves. I am not sure, for example, that the formula “I will not tell any one” stands to them for anything but a fallible human prophecy--something apt to be set at naught by the God who maketh diviners mad. I strongly suspect that mere loyalty will never make them hold their tongues. And I am quite sure that they will often be silent when silence is the most damnable lie of all. For, in their technical sense, silence can never be a lie.
In this short distance, we have come near to the heart of the matter. Remember that the only lie forbidden in the Decalogue is false witness against one’s neighbor. I may feel real respect for the lady on the porch--when I think that it may be hailing, I feel positive awe--but I should not like to make her the recipient of an intimate confidence. Such a person is wholly at the mercy of the unscrupulous. To be, for one’s self, at the mercy of the unscrupulous, suggests, I admit, the saint; to be, for one’s friends, at the mercy of the unscrupulous, suggests the cad. It is not, for the normal person, a pleasant thing to lie: it is much easier to record the truth quite automatically. There is in each of us who have been decently brought up a natural antipathy to saying “the thing which is not.” The basis of truth is so much the finest basis on which to meet one’s fellow-men! I have much sympathy with the unpopular people who cannot bring themselves, even in a ball-room, to “play the game.” Of all ugly things to be, perhaps a liar is the ugliest. And yet, and yet--We may not go into Victor Hugo’s rapture over the nun in _Les Misérables_ who gave the mendacious answer to Javert; but which of us wishes she had told the inspector that Jean Valjean was actually in the room? Fortunately, such crucial instances are rare; and usually we can benefit our friends most by telling the truth about them--if it were not so, they would not be beloved. It is a poor cause which has to be lied for regularly. But in the rare case like that of Sœur Simplice, let us hope that we, too, should lie, and be as sure as she of making our peace with Heaven.
For one’s self alone, it is a question whether any lie could bring such luxury as that of telling the simple truth. To lie to save one’s self is the mark of the beast; to lie to save another person may make one distrust the cosmos, but at least it is a purer fault. For it seems to be agreed on by all codes that the unselfish motive is a mightily purging element. On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.
Perhaps the greatest conflict for Puritan youth has always come when it faced for the first time the unfamiliar shape of Honor. Honor and John Calvin have fought on many a strange battlefield for the young soul, and the young soul must often have wondered which was friend and which was foe.
Honour and wit, foredamned they sit,
sings Kipling in an atavistic moment. Which of us has not at some time or other shudderingly understood him? And yet it is only the fortuitous trappings of Honor which can so disturb. For the truest thing about Honor is that, like Charity, it “seeks not itself”; and Honor in the mediæval sense was the darling child of the Church. Honor does not break its word; it protects the weak against itself, and against others; it keeps its engagements. It is more immediately concerned with its duty to humanity than with its duty to God; which is doubtless why the Puritan mystic saw it as a foe. The code of honor is the etiquette-book of the Christian; and the people who have attacked it are the people who have considered that Christians needed no etiquette. By our ancestors who were bred in the cold and windy times of the Reformation it was held to deal chiefly with duelling, gaming, and illicit affairs. “The debt of honor,” “the affair of honor”--what do even these corrupted phrases mean except that the gentleman has found more ways to bind himself than the laws of the land afford? I do not know that Honor ever compelled a man to gamble or to provoke a quarrel; but if he has gambled or if he has quarrelled--if he has undertaken to play the lamentable game--he must not skulk behind a policeman, like a cry-baby or a _sans-culotte_, because things have not gone his way. If he has broken, he must pay.
Part of the code of honor begins only when the Christian precept has been broken. Is it so bad a thing, in a fallible world, to be told what to do after you have once done something wrong? The Catechism, as a practical guide, is wofully incomplete without the code of the gentleman as an appendix. If you had sinned, the Puritan told you to repent; and he was quite right. But there is work left for the sinner after the repenting has been done. Both Honor and the Catechism will do their best to keep you out of a mess. The difference comes later: for after you have got into a mess, the Catechism leaves you to God, while Honor shows you how, if you have done ill to fellow beings, to repair that ill and not extend it.
Honor is a matter of practical politics--frightfully unpractical politics, in another sense, they often are. A cynical young woman once said to me that she found cads more interesting than gentlemen, because you could always tell what a gentleman would do in a given situation, whereas you could never tell, in any situation, what a cad would do. Cads may or may not be the proper sport of cynical young women; but to the average busy creature the gentleman is wholly delightful in that he is wholly predicable. The Christian is not predicable, for the simple reason that he has been given a counsel of perfection. You know that any given Christian will, by the day of his majority, have done some, at least, of the things which the Catechism has expressly warned him not to do. “The way that can be walked upon is not the perfect way,” said Laotse long ago. The Church does not believe that you have always done everything that your sponsors in baptism so cheerfully said you would do. The confessional is itself the greatest confession that the Church has ever made. One of the most convenient things about Honor is that its explicit code is limited; and you can say of some men when they die that they have never for a moment ceased to be gentlemen. Honor is of the world, worldly--and some people have distorted that magnificent fact into an accusation. That is what Mr. Kipling has done in “Tomlinson.”
All this about Honor is not so much a digression as an approach. For if few people will quarrel with the lies of implication and of convention, and most people pray to be delivered from the lie of self-defence, the lie “of obligation” cannot be juggled away; and it is the lie of obligation which Honor commands. Honor has never permitted, still less commanded, a lie for personal gain or satisfaction of any kind; but there are cases when the gentleman must lie if he is to be a gentleman. The gentleman does not betray the friend who has trusted him, even though he may bitterly object to having that friend’s secrets on his hands. From that supreme obligation lies sometimes of necessity result. I said just now that Honor and John Calvin must often have fought for the young soul; and it does not take an over-vivid imagination to conceive cases. Religion (in spite of the Decalogue) has tended to lump all lies together as the offspring of the Devil, while the code of the gentleman has always set aside a few lies as consecrated and _de rigueur_. But the gentleman, I venture to say, has always told those lies in the spirit in which a man lays down his life for his friend. For no gentleman lies, on any occasion, with unmixed pleasure. He feels, rather, as if he had put on rags.
It is easier--as some sociologists do--to plot the curves of a desire than to fix the boundaries of truth. The domain of truth is not world-wide: that, we know. They must be home-keepers indeed--perpetually cradled--who need never lie. Literal truth is imprisoned in a palace, like the Pope in the Vatican, affecting to be the ruler of the world. Even the faithful know that the claim is vain. The lies of obligation and convention are not, in the deepest sense, unveracious; for they are not pre-eminently intended to deceive. We expect them of other civilized beings and expect other civilized beings to expect them of us. Speaking such falsehoods, and such falsehoods only, we are still on truth’s own ground. The lie told for the liar’s own sake marks the moment when a man has passed from beneath her standard, across her shadowy sphere of influence, and is already hot-foot into the jungle.
MISS ALCOTT’S NEW ENGLAND
I remember being very much impressed--and not a little shocked--when a friend of mine told me that she had never, in her childhood, been able to get any real pleasure out of Louisa Alcott’s stories. It had never occurred to me that being brought up in New York instead of in New England, or even being of Southern instead of Pilgrim stock, could make all that difference. Miss Alcott seemed the safe inheritance, the absolutely inevitable delight, of childhood. _Little Women_ was as universal as _Hamlet_. I remembered perfectly that French playmates of mine in Paris had loved _Les Quatre Filles du Docteur March_ (though the French version was probably somewhat expurgated). If children of a Latin--moreover, of a Royalist and Catholic--tradition could find no flaw in Miss Alcott’s presentment of young life, I could not see why any free-born American child should fail to find it sympathetic.
I questioned my friend more closely. Her answer set me thinking; and it is probably to her that I owe my later appreciation of Miss Alcott’s special quality and special documentary value. For what my friend said was simply that the people in the books were too underbred for her to get any pleasure out of reading about them. My friend was not, when I knew her, a snob; and I took it that she had made the criticism originally at a much earlier age. All children are as snobbish as they know how to be; and I fancy that the child’s perennial delight in fairy-tales is not due solely to the epic instinct. One is interested in princes and princesses, when one is eight, simply because they are princes and princesses. Of royalty, one is perfectly sure. I have never known a child who did not prefer the goose-girl to be a princess in disguise, or who felt any real sympathy with the princess who was only a disguised goose-girl. You do not have to expound the Divine Right to any one under twelve. Peasants are an acquired taste; and socialism is an illusion of age.
Out of such axioms as these, I made my explanation of my friend’s heterodoxy. I remembered my own reaction, when very young, on a story that centred in a masked ball to which all the inhabitants of the kingdom were bidden. All the milkmaids went as court ladies, and all the court ladies went as milkmaids--a mere rounding out of the Petit Trianon episode. The moral was obvious; and I recall being frightfully disturbed by my own absolute certainty that, if I had been going to a masked ball, I should, without hesitation, have gone as grandly as I possibly could. I should never have gone as a milkmaid, so long as the costumer had a court train left. Did it perhaps mean that I was, on the whole, nearer to the milkmaid than to the court lady? I did not like the story, but I have never, to this day, forgotten it. Perhaps my friend had been of the same age when she discriminated against Miss Alcott. But then, I and my contemporaries had made no such discrimination. As I say, it set me to thinking. Since then, I have read Miss Alcott over, not once, but many times, and I think I understand.
The astounding result of re-reading Miss Alcott at a mature age is a conviction that she probably gives a better impression of mid-century New England than any of the more laborious reconstructions, either in fiction or in essay. The youth of her characters does not hinder her in this; for childhood, supremely, takes life ready-made. Mr. Howells’s range is wider, and he is at once more serious and more detached. Technically, he and Miss Alcott can be compared as little as _Madame Bovary_ and the _Bibliothèque Rose_. Yet, although their testimonies often agree, his world does not “compose” as hers does. It may be his very realism--his wealth of differentiating detail, his fidelity to the passing moment--that makes his early descriptions of New England so out of date, so unrecognizable. Miss Alcott is content to be typical. All her people have the same background, live in the same atmosphere, profess the same ideals. Moreover, they were ideals and an atmosphere that imposed themselves widely during their period. Mr. Howells gives us modern instances in plenty, but nowhere does he give us clearly the quintessential New England village. It is precisely the familiar experiences of life in that quintessential village that Miss Alcott gives us, with careless accuracy, without _arrière-pensée_. And it must be remembered that, in spite of Dr. Holmes’s brave and appropriating definitions of aristocracy, and the urbanity which the descendants of our great New Englanders would fain persuade us their ancestors possessed, our great New Englanders were essentially villagers, and that the very best thing to be said of them is that they wrought out village life to an almost Platonic perfection of type. “Town” will not do to express the Boston, the Cambridge, the Salem, the Concord, of an earlier time: it smacks too much of London--and freedom. The Puritans founded villages; and, spiritually speaking, the villages that they founded are villages still. The village that Miss Alcott knew best was Concord; and if, for our present purpose, we find it convenient to call Concord typical of New England, we shall certainly not be doing New England any injustice.
As I say, what strikes one on first re-reading her, is the extraordinary success with which she has given us our typical New England. Some of her books, obviously, are less successful in this way than others--_Under the Lilacs_, for example, or _Jack and Jill_, where (one cannot but agree with her severer critics) there is an inexcusable amount of love-making. There is an equally inexcusable amount of love-making, it is interesting to remember, in much of the earlier Howells. But for contemporary record of manners and morals, you will go far before you match her masterpiece, _Little Women_. What Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Laurie do not teach us about life in New England at a certain time, we shall never learn from any collected edition of the letters of Emerson, Thoreau, or Hawthorne.
The next--and equally astounding--result of re-reading Miss Alcott was, for me, the unexpected and not wholly pleasant corroboration of what my friend had said about her characters. They were, in some ways, underbred. Bronson Alcott (or shall we say Mr. March?) quotes Plato in his family circle; but his family uses inveterately bad grammar. “Don’t talk about ‘labelling’ Pa, as if he was a pickle-bottle!”--thus Jo chides her little sister for a malapropism. Bad grammar we might expect from Jo, as a wilful freak; but should we expect the exquisite Amy (any little girl will tell you how exquisite Amy is supposed to be) to write to her father from Europe, about buying gloves in Paris, “Don’t that sound sort of elegant and rich?”
The bad grammar, in all the books, is constant. And yet, I know of no other young people’s stories, anywhere, wherein the background is so unbrokenly and sincerely “literary.” Cheap literature is unsparingly satirized; Plato and Goethe are quoted quite as every-day matters; and “a metaphysical streak had unconsciously got into” Jo’s first novel. In _The Rose in Bloom_, Miss Alcott misquotes Swinburne, to be sure, but she does it in the interest of morality; and elsewhere Mac quotes other lines from the same poet correctly. Of course, we all remember that Emerson’s _Essays_ helped on, largely, Mac’s wooing--if, indeed, they did not do the whole trick. And has there ever been an “abode of learning”--to slip, for a moment, into the very style of _Jo’s Boys_--like unto Plumfield, crowned by “Parnassus”? After all, too, we must remember how familiarly even those madcaps, Ted and Josie, bandied about the names of Greek gods. The boys and girls who scoff at the simple amusements of Miss Alcott’s young heroes and heroines are, alack! not so much at home with classical mythology as the young people they despise. Yet, as I say, the bad grammar is everywhere--even in the mouths of the educators.
Breeding is, of course, not merely a matter of speech; and I fancy that my friend referred even more specifically to their manners--their morals being unimpeachable. Miss Alcott’s people are, as the author herself says of them, unworldly. They are even magnificently so; and they score the worldly at every turn. You remember Mrs. March’s strictures on the Moffats? and Polly’s justifiable criticisms of Fanny Shaw’s friends? and Rose’s utter lack of snobbishness about Phœbe, the little scullery-maid, who eventually was brought up with her? Of course, Archie’s mother objects, at first, to his marrying Phœbe, but she is soon reconciled--and apologetic.
Granted their unworldliness, their high scale of moral values, where, then, is the trace of vulgarity that is needed to make breeding bad? They pride themselves on their separation from all vulgarity. “My mother is a lady,” Polly reflects, “even if”--even if she is not rich, like the Shaws. The March girls are always consoling themselves for their vicissitudes by the fact that their parents are gentle-folk. Well, they are underbred in precisely the way in which, one fancies, the contemporaries of Emerson in Concord may well have been underbred. It is the “plain living” side of the “high thinking.” They despised externals, and, in the end, externals had their revenge. Breeding, as such, is simply not a product of the independent village. (Some one may mention Cranford; but you cannot call Cranford independent, with its slavish adherence to the etiquette of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson, its constant awed reference to Sir Peter Arley and the “county families.”) The villagers have not--and who supposes that Bronson Alcott and Thoreau had it?--the gift of civilized contacts. A contact, be it remembered, is not quite the same thing as a relation. Manners are a natural growth of courts. Recall any mediæval dwelling of royalty; then imagine life lived in those cramped chambers, in the perpetual presence of superiors and inferiors alike--and lived informally!
In Miss Alcott’s world, all that is changed. According to the older tradition, a totally unchaperoned youth would mean lack of breeding. Here, on the contrary, all the heroines are unchaperoned, while the match-making mamma is anathema. We did not cut off King Charles’s head for nothing. The reward of the unchaperoned daughter is to make a good match. In that rigid school, conventions are judged--and nobly enough, Heaven knows!--from the point of view of morals alone (of absolute, not of historic or evolutionary morals) and many conventions are thereby damned. The result is a little like what one has heard of contemporary Norway. “Underbred” is very likely too strong a word; yet one does see how the social state described in _Little Women_ might easily shock any one brought up in a less provincial tradition. There is too much love-making, for example. Though sweethearting between five-year-olds is frowned on, sweethearting between fifteen-year-olds is quite the thing. In real life, it would not always be safe to marry, very young, your first playmate. Any one who has lived in the more modern New England village knows perfectly well that people still marry, very young, their first playmates, and that disaster often results. Nor can Una always depend on the protection of a lion that is necessarily invisible. Granted that Jo’s precocious sense was right, and that it would have been a mistake for her to marry Laurie; which of us believes that, in real life, she would not have made the mistake? You cannot depend on young things in their teens to foresee the future of their temperaments accurately. One cannot but feel that if Mrs. March really saw the complete unfitness of those two for each other, it was her duty to put a few conventional obstacles in their path.
Perhaps all this was part of what my friend meant by lack of breeding in the traditional sense: the social _laissez-aller_ in extraordinary (and perhaps not eternally maintainable?) combination with moral purity. But I suspect that she referred, as well, to another aspect of Miss Alcott’s environment: to the unmistakable lack of the greater and lesser amenities of life. The plain living is quite as prominent as the high thinking. The whole tissue of the March girls’ lives is a very commonplace fabric. You know that their furniture was bad--and that they did not know it; that their æsthetic sense was untrained and crude--and that they did not care; that the simplicity of their meals, their household service, their dress, their every day manners (in spite of the myth about Amy) was simplicity of the common, not of the intelligent, kind. You really would not want to spend a week in the house of any one of them. Nor had their simplicity in any wise the quality of austerity. Remember the pies that the older March girls carried for muffs (the management whereof was one of the ever unsolved riddles of my childhood).
No: in so far as breeding is a matter of externals, one must admit that there is some sense in calling Miss Alcott’s people underbred. Perhaps we do not choose to call breeding a matter of externals. In that, we should perfectly agree with Miss Alcott’s people themselves; and to that we shall presently come. For what is incontrovertible is that Miss Alcott’s work is a genuine document.
I have spoken of the unimpeachable morality of Miss Alcott’s world. Charlie lost Rose for having drunk one glass of champagne too much. That is the worst sin committed in any of the books, so far as I remember. Of course, the black sheep, Dan, had been in prison; but he had killed his man inevitably, almost helplessly, in self-defence; and besides, the treatment of Dan is purely snobbish, from start to finish. Even Mrs. Jo, while she stands by him, is acutely conscious of the social difference between him and her own kin. The moment he lifts his eyes to Bess--! No: the books are quite snobbish enough, in their way. Nat, foundling and fiddler, is permitted to marry Daisy in the end (though, really, anybody might have married Daisy!). But Nat, though a _parvenu_, is a milk-sop, and is quite able to say that he has never done anything really disgraceful. The fact is that their social distinctions, while they operate socially, are yet all moral in origin. And this is a very “special” note: the bequest, it may well be, of Calvin.
We’re the elect, and you’ll be damned; Hell, like a wallet, shall be crammed With God’s own reprobates.