Is Life Worth Living? by William Hurrell Mallock (best ereader for textbooks TXT) 📕

This is the great question of the votaries of such joys as these.24

Thus if we look at life in the mirror of art, we shall see how the supernatural is ever present to us. If we climb up into heaven it is there; if we go down into hell it is there also. We shall see it at the bottom of those two opposite sets of pleasures, to the one or the other of which all human pleasures belong. The source of one is an impassioned struggle after the supernatural right, or an impassioned sense of rest upon attaining it; the source of the other is the sense of revolt against it, which in various ways flatters or excites us. In both cases the supernatural moral judgment is the sense appealed to, primarily in the first case, and secondarily if not primarily in the second. All the life about us is coloured by this, and naturally if this be destroyed or wrecked, the whole aspect of life will change for us. What then will this change be? Looking still into the mirror of art, the general character of it will be very readily perceptible. I noticed just now, in passing, how Measure for Measure and Faust would suffer in their meaning and their interest, by the absence on our part of a certain moral judgment. They would become like a person singing to a deaf audience—a series of dumb grimaces with no meaning in them. The same thing is equally true in all the other cases. Antigone's heroism will evaporate;25 she will be left obstinate only. The lives of Macbeth and Hamlet will be tales of little meaning for us, though the words are strong. They will be full of sound and fury, but they will signify nothing. What they produce in us will be not interest but a kind of wondering weariness—weariness at the weary fate of men who could 'think so brainsickly of things.' So in like manner will all the emphasis and elaboration in the literature of sensuality become a weariness without meaning, also. Congreve's caustic wit will turn to spasmodic truism; and Théophile Gautier's excess of erotic ardour, into prolix and fantastic affectation. All its sublimity, its brilliance, and a large part of its interest, depend in art on the existence of the moral sense, and would in its absence be absolutely unproducible. The reason of this is plain. The natural pains and pleasures of life, merely manipulated by the imagination and the memory, have too little variety or magnitude in them without further aid. Art without the moral sense to play upon, is like a pianist whose keyboard is reduced to a single octave.

And exactly the same will be the case with life. Life will lose just the same qualities that art will—neither more nor less. There will be no introduction of any new interests, but merely the elimination of certain existing ones. The subtraction of the moral sense will not revolutionise human purposes, but simply make them listless. It will reduce to a parti-coloured level the whole field of pains and pleasures. The moral element gives this level a new dimension. Working underneath it as a subterranean force, it convulses and divides its surface. Here vast areas subside into valleys and deep abysses; there mountain peaks shoot up heavenwards. Mysterious shadows begin to throng the hollows; new tints and half-tints flicker and shift everywhere; mists hang floating over ravines and precipices; the vegetation grows more various, here slenderer, there richer and more luxuriant; whilst high over all, bright on the topmost summits, is a new strange something—the white snows of purity, catching the morning streaks on them of a brighter day, that has never as yet risen upon the world below.

With the subtraction, or nullifying, of the moral force, all this will go. The mountains will sink, the valleys be filled up; all will be once more dead level—still indeed parti-coloured, but without light and shadow, and with the colours reduced in number, and robbed of all their vividness. The chiaro-oscuro will have gone from life; the moral landscape, whose beauty and grandeur is at present so much extolled, will have dissolved like an insubstantial pageant. Vice and virtue will be set before us in the same grey light; every deeper feeling either of joy or sorrow, of desire or of repulsion, will lose its vigour, and cease any more to be resonant.

It may be said indeed, and very truly, that under favourable circumstances there must always remain a joy in the mere act of living, in the exercising of the bodily functions, and in the exciting and appeasing of the bodily appetites. Will anything, it may be asked, for instance, rob the sunshine of its gladness, or deaden the vital influence of a spring morning?—when the sky is a cloudless blue, and the sea is like a wild hyacinth, when the pouring brooks seem to live as they sparkle, and the early air amongst the woodlands has the breath in it of unseen violets? All this, it is quite true, will be left to us; this and a great deal more. This, however, is but one side of the picture. If life has its own natural gladness which is expressed by spring, it has also its own natural sadness which is expressed by winter; and the worth of life, if this is all we trust to, will be as various and as changing as the weather is. But this is not all. Even this worth, such as it is, depends for us at present, in a large measure, upon religion—not directly indeed, but indirectly. This life of air, and nerve, and muscle, this buoyant consciousness of joyous and abounding health, which seems so little to have connection with faiths or theories, is for us impregnated with a life that is impregnated with these, and thus their subtle influence pervades it everywhere. There is no impulse from without which stirs or excites the senses, that does not either bring to us, or send us on to, a something beyond itself. In each of these pleasures that seems to us so simple, floats a swarm of hopes and memories, like the gnats in a summer twilight. There is not a sight, a sound, a smell, not a breath from sea or garden, that is not full of them, and on which, busy and numberless, they are not wafted into us. And each of these volatile presences brings the notions of right and wrong with it; and it is these that make sensuous life tingle with so strange and so elaborate an excitement. Indirectly then, though not directly, the mere joy in the act of living will suffer from the loss of religion, in the same manner, though perhaps not in the same degree, as the other joys will. It will not lose its existence, but it will lose zest. The fabric of its pleasures will of course remain what it ever was; but its brightest inhabitants will have left it. It will be as desolate as Mayfair in September, or as a deserted college during a long vacation.

We may here pause in passing, to remark on the shallowness of that philosophy of culture, to be met with in certain quarters, which, whilst admitting all that can be said as to the destruction for us of any moral obligation, yet advises us still to profit by the variety of moral distinctions. 'Each moment,' says Mr. Pater for instance, 'some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement, is irresistibly real and attractive for us.' And thus, he adds, 'while all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge, that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious odours, or the work of the artist's hand, or the face of one's friend.' It is plain that this positive teaching of culture is open to the same objections, and is based on the same fallacy, as the positive teaching of morals. It does not teach us, indeed, to let right and wrong guide us in the choice of our pleasures, in the sense that we should choose the one sort and eschew the other; but teaching us to choose the two, in one sense indifferently, it yet teaches us to choose them as distinct and contrasted things. It teaches us in fact to combine the two fruits without confusing their flavours. But in the case of good and evil, as has been seen, this is quite impossible; for good is only good as the thing that ought to be chosen; evil is only evil as the thing that ought not to be chosen; and the only reasons that could justify us in combining them would altogether prevent our distinguishing them. The teachings of positive culture, in fact, rest on the naïve supposition that shine and shadow, as it were, are portable things; and that we can take bright objects out of the sunshine, and dark objects out of the shadow, and setting them both together in the diffused grey light of a studio, make a magical mosaic out of them, of gloom and glitter. Or such teachings, to put the matter yet more simply, are like telling us to pick a primrose at noonday, and to set it by our bed-side for a night-light.

It is plain therefore that, in that loss of zest and interest, which the deadening of the moral sense, as we have seen, must bring to life, we shall get no help there. The massy fabric of which saints and heroes were the builders, will never be re-elected by this mincing moral dandyism.

But there is another last resource of the modern school, which is far more worthy of attention, and which, being entirely sui generis, I have reserved to treat of here. That resource is the devotion to truth as truth; not for the sake of its consequences, but in scorn of them. Here we are told we have at least one moral end that can never be taken away from us. It will still survive to give life a meaning, a dignity, and a value, even should the pursuit of it prove destructive to all the others. The language used by the modern school upon this subject is very curious and instructive. I will take two typical instances. The common argument, says Dr. Tyndall, in favour of belief is the comfort and the gladness that it brings us, its redemption of life, in fact, from that dead and dull condition we have been just considering. 'To this,' he says, 'my reply is that I choose the nobler part of Emerson when, after various disenchantments, he exclaimed "I covet truth!" The gladness of true heroism, visits the heart of him who is really competent to say this.' The following sentences are Professor Huxley's: 'If it is demonstrated to me,' he says, 'that without this or that theological dogma the human race will lapse into bipedal cattle, more brutal than the beasts by reason of their greater cleverness, my next question is to ask for the proof of the dogma. If this proof is forthcoming, it is my conviction that no drowning sailor ever clutched a hen-coop more tenaciously than mankind will hold by such dogma, whatever it may be. But if not, then I verily believe that the human race will go its own evil way; and my only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become,