Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “The foundation of morality does not lie alone in the question of eating and drinking,” said Pascal, with a smile. “It is a deeper matter. Morality is a code of laws so framed that, by practising them, every man may exert himself to the utmost in his own sphere, without injury to himself or disturbance from his neighbours. Morality is the human side of Christianity, as the belief in the redemption of mankind is the divine side. Those who oppose Christianity assert that the practice of morality can be successfully pursued without entertaining any belief in God, and some even pretend that the Christian system of ethics can itself be improved. But it cannot. It provides for every circumstance of human life with equity and justice and teaches men to be honest, industrious and moderate. No system of ethics ever proposed more, and no system ever accomplished so much. And as for the divine part of Christianity, I say that no incentive to morality can be offered by those who deny the future life one-tenth as strong as the hope of heaven. There is a balance of forces in Christianity, as a system, which stamps it as being of divine origin. No human mind could have conceived it, whole and complete, exerting a tremendous influence in a few years, dominating the civilised world after a few centuries. Cæsar was the greatest man that ever lived, and the results of the changes he made and the force of the ideas which he inaugurated, have produced more lasting effects upon the world than have been brought about by any individual in ancient or modern history. He is here, with us to-night. Ask him if the sum of his influence can be compared with the sum of the influence of Christianity.”

  “I was only a man,” said Cæsar, simply.

  There was a short silence. The stars were shining brightly and the gentle ripple of the sea upon the beach came up to the ears of those who sat on the terrace. The night was very soft and sweet and the light breeze stirred the broad leaves and blossoms of the young orange-trees that grew in their great earthen pots along the balustrade. At last Heine spoke.

  “I can find another reason why religion is good,” he said, “but I do not feel sure that it applies any more to Christianity than to other systems. It is good, because it has been the foundation of all the best poetry in the world. If man has any good feelings he tries to express them in verse; so that the excellence of verse is a sort of religious barometer.”

  “That is a very good argument,” said Diana. “I have always thought that the best poetry was written when there was the most religious feeling abroad.”

  “I think that is questionable,” objected Augustus. “The best poetry of the Romans was not written under the influence of religious ideas.”

  “Because it was purely imitative,” answered Cæsar. “But the models we took were. Without Homer there would have been no Virgil — and but for Virgil there might have been no Dante, though Dante was not an imitator.”

  “The finest poem in the world is the Book of Job,” said Heine. “The next best poem is the Iliad, the next the Divine Comedy, the next Paradise Lost, the last great poem the world has seen is probably Faust, though it is not properly a poem, but a tragedy.”

  “But Faust was not written under religious influence,” remarked Gwendoline.

  “Pardon me, madam,” replied Heine, “I think it was. I think Faust is an inquiry into the means of salvation. Goethe did not take Faust through a series of horrible temptations and finally represent him as saving his soul by good works, without a religious intention.”

  “Perhaps not,” acquiesced Gwendoline. “But what becomes of Shakespeare?”

  “He was a great poet, who never wrote but one poem, and that was not worthy of him. He was a dramatist. That is a different matter. Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were dramatists; so were Racine and Corneille, so was Schiller. Dramatic poets are descended from epic poets, who were originally inspired to write by subjects more or less supernatural. There is a difference between the Tragic muse, the Epic muse and the muse of the Sublime Hymn.”

  “Of whom the last was the first, the greatest and the most religious,” said Cæsar. “Even with us, who were imitators, religious tradition lay at the root of almost all poetry.”

  “Why are modern hymns so horribly bad?” asked Lady Brenda.

  “Because Milton, who was the only modern capable of writing sublime hymns, only wrote one — the ‘Ode on the Nativity,’” answered Heine. “Modern hymns are rough specimens of poetry, when they are poetry at all, and are not written by poets as a rule. Some of them are stirring enough, some are pathetic, a great many are sentimental and all are religious. But they are poor literature. People do not avoid reading them because they are religious but because they are badly written.”

  “Then why do not great poets write hymns?” inquired Gwendoline. “I should think it would be very easy for you, for instance.”

  “Not so easy as you imagine, madam,” answered Heine, with a smile. “To write a hymn one must be a great, great poet, which I do not pretend to be; one must be directly inspired by the strongest religious emotions, such as I never felt; and one must have the power to be grand in simple language, which power no one has possessed since Milton. But though nobody writes hymns in our day, religion has such a part in poetry that I doubt whether any one who knew absolutely nothing about Christianity could understand five stanzas of any good modern poet. Christianity pervades everything we think, write and do. We cannot get rid of the consciousness of it. Men may blaspheme and abuse it, but they are only losing their temper because they cannot break Christianity down, as a child screams and beats with its little fists on the heavy door it cannot open. Atheists would be less violent in their language if they were really persuaded that there was no God. Religion is there in spite of them. Other men may be indifferent, selfish and occupied with their own affairs: but they are perfectly conscious that they mean to be tolerably religious when they have time, and they feel an uncomfortable sense of uneasiness when they have done something which is not contrary to law but contrary to religious morality. It is laughable to see a man of that sort trying to beat the devil round the bush, while perfectly conscious that the devil is there, and how he will make haste to do the bad thing he wants to do while he has succeeded for five minutes in muzzling his conscience, lest the uneasy sense of doing wrong should mar his enjoyment in it. A man in that condition always reminds me of a dog, meditating the theft of a piece of meat. He hesitates, wags his tail in anticipation, then looks away with a sheepish expression, wags his tail again, springs on the morsel, gulps it down and then skulks off with his tail between his legs in the profound consciousness of sin.”

  “Yes,” said Cæsar, with a soft laugh. “Men have always been like that, but they are more so now than they used to be, because Christianity has popularised the notions of right and wrong and extended them to many points which they did not formerly cover. The question, when a man wanted to do something for his own advantage, used to be ‘Can it be done safely?’ The question now is, ‘What will the world think of it?’”

  “Rather contemptible,” remarked Augustus.

  “No, I think not,” objected Cæsar. “It shows that morality has improved, when a man hesitates to do a bad deed on account of what the world will say. It shows that he wishes to appear moral, because most people are moral, and he desires not to be thought different from other men. It does not prove him any better, but it shows that the general standard is higher; it is a good evidence that whereas formerly might was right, at the present day what is called right is right according to a universal and established opinion. In other words men are restrained from doing wrong by a principle and not by the violent opposition of anybody who is strong enough to resist their outrageous deeds.”

  “And the change can only be attributed to the influence of Christianity,” said Pascal, who had been listening in silence for some time. “I do not see that it can be referred to anything else, because nothing else has been felt through all civilised nations at once. Races differ fundamentally in character. Governments are not in any two modern nations conducted on the same principl
es. But the broad questions and rules of right and wrong are established everywhere alike upon the Christian system, and cannot be said to have been derived from any other source. It is useless to tell people that they may arrive at the conclusions of Christianity without accepting Christianity itself, by analysing the elements of happiness according to the laws of reasonable inquiry. Perhaps they can, but if they do, they have only proved how good a thing Christianity is. If you compare the number of men who might be induced to lead good lives from purely logical motives with those who have led good lives by believing in their religion, the number of the first will appear insignificantly small. To sustain this valuable morality, therefore, you must do one of two things. Either you must maintain the religion that inculcates morality as a consequence of belief, and which has done it successfully; or you must show that every plough-boy, who has been taught at Sunday school to distinguish between right and wrong, is enough of a philosopher to grasp a highly philosophical topic, to follow it through its inevitable logical stages, to arrive at its conclusions and to practise the laws he has thus elaborated, because they satisfy his reason, and not because they appeal to his conscience. I will not use any strong epithets to designate the judgment of those who believe the ploughboy capable of all this. It is enough to say that ploughboys are not able to think deeply enough to do what would be expected of them. But should your reformer persist in destroying religion, in the hope that the ploughboy may be made a philosopher in the course of a few generations of education, your reformer, aforesaid, will find himself obliged to employ a stronger force than existing civil law to coerce the ploughboy, during the interval between the loss of conscience and the acquisition of the philosophical capacity.”

  “That is true,” answered Cæsar. “I see many proofs of it in the present day. These perpetual riots of the anarchists in all parts of the world are the work of men who have lost their belief in religion and their sense of right and wrong, but who have acquired no philosophical intelligence in the place of what they have lost. The result, as you say, is the necessity of coercion, ending in the hanging of numbers of these fellows. It is characteristic of these men that they do not say what they want. On the contrary they say they want ‘nothing,’ as they express it. Their object is to tear down, not to build up. This wanting ‘nothing’ is the result of their thinking ‘nothing,’ during the suspension of their intellectual faculties which have lost belief and gained nothing instead.”

  “And what would you do to stop all this?” asked Lady Brenda.

  “I would maintain religion and the law,” said Cæsar. “It is not my opinion that the existing morality of nations can be so easily destroyed; but it is certain that it should not be molested. The only objects of government are the maintenance of safety against dangers from without and of order within the state. Governments which fail in either of those points must inevitably fall. Therefore any government which permits anarchic principles or a condition of morality which will lead to the propagation of such principles, is doomed.”

  “Yes,” answered Heine, “and it is doomed to a very odd kind of civil war — a war in which the question will be, ‘Do you believe in God?’ Not unlike the French Revolution, except that it would be worse. I daresay the unbelievers might get the better of it for a time.”

  “In the Latin nations — nowhere else,” said Cæsar. “Popular fury of that sort soon dies out, because it never really spreads to the masses of the people. It is a kind of insanity to which the great centres are subject. Bands of furious men spring up, curse God and die, and the next generation sows its wheat upon their graves, and quietly puts up the crosses they tore down. Southern people are more liable to such fits.”

  “It is dreadful to think what such a civil war must be,” exclaimed Diana. “We cannot realise the French Revolution, nor anything like it.”

  “If there is to be such a war in any nation,” said Pascal, “modern scientists as a body will be held responsible for it, rightly or wrongly, just as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and their various supporters have been said to have caused the French Revolution. But I do not think that such a catastrophe is to be expected. The French Revolution was really caused in a great measure by the fearful oppression of the nobles. Now the cry is the oppression of capital. That means that the immediate object of the anarchists is to divide the existing wealth of the capitalists, and the object is insignificant as compared with the question of emancipation from the old seigneurial rights. You may destroy capital, but it will accumulate again in an incredibly short space of time. The utter futility of the idea stamps it as that of most ignorant men, who, as Cæsar said, think ‘nothing’ and wish to produce nothing by tearing everything to pieces and gorging themselves with the fragments. But it is quite true that if there are enough of these fellows in the world to make a revolution, the result will be a civil war in which the question asked will be, ‘Do you believe in God, or do you not?’ And those who do and those who do not will make up the two armies in the field.”

  CHAPTER XI.

  “OH, DO LET us be less serious to-day!” exclaimed Lady Brenda, on the following afternoon, as the whole company found themselves together on the sea-shore in a deep and shady cove of the rocks.

  “Paullo minora canamus!” said Dr. Johnson, thrusting his oaken club into the sand and sitting down upon a smooth boulder.

  “Is it possible to be funny, to order, whenever one likes?” asked Gwendoline.

  “Rarely,” answered her husband. “The majority of people are most amusing when they least wish to be, and most dull when they give themselves the greatest trouble to amuse.”

  “What do you mean by being funny?” asked Diana, turning to Gwendoline.

  “Making people laugh, to be sure.”

  “Making intelligent people laugh,” suggested Heine, by way of improvement upon the definition. “It is easy to make fools laugh. That is the reason so many people believe themselves to be witty. The question amounts to asking whether it is possible to manufacture wit and humour, of a good quality.’

  “Anything that makes one laugh is good,” said Gwendoline.

  “You remind me of an American I once knew, my dear,” answered her husband. “He used to say that there was no bad whiskey; but he admitted that some kinds of whiskey might be better than others.”

  “Sir,” said Johnson, “we are not all omnivorous, nor omnibiberous either. Sir, your friend was a guzzler.”

  “He was,” assented Augustus. “A man who drinks everything he can lay his hands on is a drunkard, and a man who laughs at everything he hears is a fool. But my wife says that anything which will make a man laugh is good. Now men are not all alike. One of my sailors would laugh if one of his companions got wet. But it must be a good joke indeed which would make you smile.”

  “How do you define wit?” asked Lady Brenda, who had a happy faculty for putting very difficult questions.

  “In the sense in which we are speaking of it,” answered Dr. Johnson, “wit means the effect of wit, for the word wit means originally the faculties of the intellect; but what we mean is the result produced by the efforts of a lively fancy. The principal means of exciting laughter in others is to present to their eyes or minds a brief and forcible contrast. Madam, I have seen the vulgar at a penny show laughing very heartily at the sight of a very tall man standing beside a very little man. The tall man alone is an object of astonishment, and the dwarf alone will elicit remark owing to the exiguity of his body; but the two must be placed side by side in order to excite laughter by the contrast of their proportions. I will go further, and say that the dwarf may be laughed at by men of ordinary size, because he is contrasted with them to their own advantage; but ordinary men do not laugh on seeing a man bigger than themselves, unless he be a badly-made man, because they feel an involuntary respect for his apparent physical superiority. Generally, when we are amused by the contrast between two things, it is because the magnitude of the one causes the meanness of the other to appear contempt
ible.”

  “Yes,” said Pascal, musing. “I think that one of the surest methods of ascertaining the truth of a comparison is by reversing the terms of it. When it is untrue, the effect is so startling that it produces laughter. Call Molière the Aristophanes of his age if you please. It is a great compliment to Molière. But when you say that Aristophanes was the Molière of his age, the comparison strikes me as ridiculous, and I laugh. But you need not go far to find comparisons much more absurd and untrue than that, and far more laughable if reversed. It is the contrast displayed which makes us laugh.”

  “Dr. Johnson did that very effectively,” remarked Augustus. “He said of Lord Chesterfield, that he had thought him a lord among wits, but that he found he was only a wit among lords.”

  “That was not wit, sir,” answered Johnson, “it was truth.”

  “Cannot the truth be witty?”

  “Yes, sir. When it surprises. The discovery that poor Chatterton was a literary forger was surprising but not laughable, because his position was not great enough to admit of a great contrast when he was unmasked, and because the work he did was his own. But we cannot help laughing at the theories of the ancients about nature, now that we are acquainted with a few of her laws. What scholar has not laughed at the idea of Kosmas, the Alexandrian, that the sun retired behind a mountain to spend the night? And that the earth, the ocean and the fabulous mountain were all included and enclosed in a luminous oblong box of the exact shape of the tabernacle of Moses? The contrast is very great and it is in our favour, so that we laugh. Even Aristotle might have laughed at Kosmas, and with justice.”

  “But there must be something inherent in the contrast, besides the truth or falsity of it, which makes it laughable,” said Heine. “It was easy for me to call the young Hanoverian nobles, asses. That would not have been funny. But when I said they were asses who talked of nothing but horses, everybody laughed.”