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Page 50
He took me by the hand; the breeze passed through my hair; and in an
instant we were back at the fortress-gate, and I entered the beloved
shelter, with a grateful sense that I was returning home.
XXV
I returned, as I said, with a sense of serene pleasure and security to
my work; but that serenity did not last long. What I had seen with
Amroth, on that day of wandering, filled me with a strange restlessness,
and a yearning for I knew not what. I plunged into my studies with
determination rather than ardour, and I set myself to study what is the
most difficult problem of all--the exact limits of individual
responsibility. I had many conversations on the point with one of my
teachers, a young man of very wide experience, who combined in an
unusual way a close scientific knowledge of the subject with a peculiar
emotional sympathy. He told me once that it was the best outfit for the
scientific study of these problems, when the heart anticipated the
slower judgment of the mind, and set the mind a goal, so to speak, to
work up to; though he warned me that the danger was that the mind was
often reluctant to abandon the more indulgent claims of the heart; and
he advised me to mistrust alike scientific conclusions and emotional
inferences.
I had a very memorable conversation with him on the particular question
of responsibility, which I will here give.
"The mistake," I said to him, "of human moralists seems to me to be,
that they treat all men as more or less equal in the matter of moral
responsibility. How often," I added, "have I heard a school preacher
tell boys that they could not all be athletic or clever or popular, but
that high principle and moral courage were things within the reach of
all. Whereas the more that I studied human nature, the more did the
power of surveying and judging one's own moral progress, and the power
of enforcing and executing the dictates of the conscience, seem to me
faculties, like other faculties. Indeed, it appears to me," I said,
"that on the one hand there are people who have a power of moral
discrimination, when dealing with the retrospect of their actions, but
no power of obeying the claims of principle, when confronted with a
situation involving moral strain; while on the other hand there seem to
me to be some few men with a great and resolute power of will, capable
of swift decision and firm action, but without any instinct for morality
at all."
"Yes," he said, "you are quite right. The moral sense is in reality a
high artistic sense. It is a power of discerning and being attracted by
the beauty of moral action, just as the artist is attracted by form and
colour, and the musician by delicate combinations of harmonies and the
exquisite balance of sound. You know," he said, "what a suspension is in
music--it is a chord which in itself is a discord, but which depends for
its beauty on some impending resolution. It is just so with moral
choice. The imagination plays a great part in it. The man whose
morality is high and profound sees instinctively the approaching
contingency, and his act of self-denial or self-forgetfulness depends
for its force upon the way in which it will ultimately combine with
other issues involved, even though at the moment that act may seem to be
unnecessary and even perverse."
"But," I said, "there are a good many people who attain to a sensible,
well-balanced kind of temperance, after perhaps a few failures, from a
purely prudential motive. What is the worth of that?"
"Very small indeed," said my teacher. "In fact, the prudential morality,
based on motives of health and reputation and success, is a thing that
has often to be deliberately unlearnt at a later stage. The strange
catastrophes which one sees so often in human life, where a man by one
act of rashness, or moral folly, upsets the tranquil tenor of his
life--a desperate love-affair, a passion of unreasonable anger, a piece
of quixotic generosity--are often a symptom of a great effort of the
soul to free itself from prudential considerations. A good thing done
for a low motive has often a singularly degrading and deforming
influence on the soul. One has to remember how terribly the heavenly
values are obscured upon earth by the body, its needs and its desires;
and current morality of a cautious and sensible kind is often worse than
worthless, because it produces a kind of self-satisfaction, which is the
hardest thing to overcome."
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