Harper's Weekly/The Philosopher

by John Galsworthy

 

The Philosopher

By JOHN GALSWORTHY

Illustrated by by Guy Pene Du Bois

THE Puritan way of thinking has by no means died out of America or England. No public movement is spared the meddling of the Puritan mind either opposed to it or trying to modify it to suit itself. And the element of humor in contemplating people of that persuasion is added by the fact that they consider themselves profound philosophers

HE had a philosophy as yet untouched. His stars were the old stars, his faith the old faith; nor would he recognize that there was any other, for, not to recognize any point of view except his own was no doubt the very essence of his faith. Wisdom! There was surely none save the flinging of the door to, standing with your back against that door, and telling people what was behind it. For though he did not know what was behind, he thought it low to say so. An "atheist," as he termed certain persons, was to him beneath contempt, an "agnostic," as he termed certain others, a poor and foolish creature. As for a rationalist, positivist, pragmatist, or any other "ist"—well, that was just what they were. He made no secret of the fact that he simply could not understand people like that. It was true. "What can they do save deny?" he would say. "What do they contribute to the morals and the elevation of the world? What do they put in place of what they take away? What have they got, to make up for what is behind that door? Where are their symbols? How shall they move and lead the people? No," he said, "a little child shall lend the people, and I am the little child! For I can spin them a tale, such as children love, of what is behind the door." Such was the temper of his mind that he never flinched from believing true what he thought would benefit himself and others. Amongst other things, he held a crown of ultimate advantage to be necessary to pure and stable living. If one could not say: "Listen, children! there it is, behind the door! Look at it, shining, golden—yours! Not now, but when you die, if you are good. Be good, therefore! For if you are not good—no crown!" If one could not say that what could one say? What inducement hold out? And he would describe the crown— There was nothing he detested more than commercialism. And to any one who ventured to suggest that there was something rather commercial about the idea of that crown, he would retort with asperity.

THE creed that good must be done, so to speak, out of a mere present love of dignity and beauty—just as a man, seeing something he admired, might work to reproduce it, knowing that he would never achieve it perfectly, but going on until he dropped, out of sheer love of going on—he thought vague, futile, devoid of glamor, and contrary to human nature, for he always judged people by himself, and felt that no one could like to go on unless they knew that they would get something if they did. To promise victory therefore was most important. Forlorn hopes, setting your teeth, back to the wall, and all that, was a bleak and wintry doctrine, with no inspiration in it, and led to nothing. And he abominated that other philosopher, who, not presuming to believe in anything, went on, because—as he said—to give up would be to lose his honor. This seemed to him most unpoetic, as well as the very negation of faith; and faith was, as has been said, the mainspring of his philosophy. Once indeed, in the unguarded moment of a heated argument, he had confessed that some day men might not require to use the symbols of religion they used now. It was at once pointed out to him that if he thought that, he could not believe these symbols to be true for all time; and if they were not true for all time, why did he say they were? He was dreadfully upset. Deferring answer, however, for the moment, he was soon able to report that the symbols were true—er—mystically. If a man—and this was the point—did not stand by these symbols, by which could he stand? Tell him that! Symbols were necessary. But what symbols were there in a mere Humanitarianism; a mere vague following of one's own dignity and honor, out of a formless love of the world? How put up a religion of amorphous and unrewarded chivalry and devotion, how put up a blind love of Mystery, in place of a religion of definite crowns and punishments, how substitute a love of mere abstract Goodness, or Beauty, for love of what could be called by a Christian name? Human nature being what it was—it would not do, it absolutely would not do. Though he was fond of the words Mystery, Mystical, he had emphatically no use for them when they were vaguely used by people to express their perpetual (and quite unmoral) reverence for the feeling that they would never find out the secret of their own existence, never even understand the nature of the Universe or God. Mystery of all that kind seemed to him very pagan, almost Nature-worship, having no finality. And if confronted by some one who said he believed in a Mystery, which if it could be understood would naturally not be a Mystery, he would raise his eyebrows. It was that kind of loose, specious, sentimental talk that did so much harm, and drew people away from right understanding of that Great Mystery which, if it was not understood and properly explained, was, for all practical purposes, not a Great Mystery at all. No, it had all been gone into long ago, and he stood by the explanations and intended that every one else should, for in that way alone men were saved; and though he well knew (for he was no Jesuit) that the end did not justify the means, yet in a matter of such all-importance one stopped to consider neither means nor ends—one just saved people. And as for truth—the question of that did not arise, if one believed. What one believed, what one was told to believe, was the truth; and it was no good telling him that the whole range of a man's feeling and reasoning powers must be exercised to ascertain Truth, and that, when ascertained. it would only be relative Truth, and the best available to that particular man. Nothing short of the absolute truth would be put up with, and that guaranteed fixed and immovable, or it was no good for his purpose. To any one who threw out doubts here and doubts there, and even worse than doubts, he had long formed the habit of saying simply, with a smile that he tried hard to make indulgent: "Of course, if you believe that!—"

BUT he very seldom had to argue on these matters, because people, looking at his face with its upright bone formation, rather bushy eyebrows, and eyes with a good deal of light in them, felt that it would be simpler not. He seemed to them to know his own mind almost too well. Joined to this potent faculty of implanting in men a childlike trustfulness in what he told them was behind the door, he had a still more potent faculty of knowing exactly what was good for them in everyday life. The secret of this power was simple. He did not recognize the existence of what moderns and so-called "artists" dubbed "temperament." All talk of that sort was bosh, and generally immoral hush—for all moral purposes people really had but one temperament, and that was, of course, just like his own. And no one knew better than he what was good for it. He was perfectly willing to recognize the principle of individual treatment for individual cases; but it did not do, in practice, he maintained, to vary that treatment. This instinctive wisdom made him invaluable in all those departments of life where discipline and the dispensation of an even justice were important. To adapt men to the Moral Law was—he thought—perhaps the first duty of a—philosopher, especially in days when there was perceptible a distinct but regrettable tendency to try and adapt the Moral Law to the needs—as they were glibly called—of men. There was, perhaps. in him something of the pedagogue, and when he met a person who disagreed with him, his eyes would shift a bit to the right, and a bit to the left, then become firmly fixed upon that person from under brows rather drawn down; and his hand, large and strong, would move fingers, as if more and more tightly grasping a cane, birch, or other wholesome instrument. He loved his fellow-creatures so that he could not bear to see them going to destruction for want of a timely flogging to salvation.

He was one of those who never felt the need for personal experience of a phase of life, or line of conduct, before giving judgment on it; indeed, he gravely distrusted personal experience. He had opposed, for instance, all relief for the unhappily married long before he left the single state; and when he did leave it, would not admit for a moment that his own happiness was at all responsible for the confirmation of his view that no relief was possible. Hard cases made bad law! But he did not require to base his opinion upon that. He said simply that he had been told there was to be no relief—it was enough. His was a virile intellect.

THE saying "To understand all is to forgive all" left him cold. It was, as he well knew, quite impossible to identify himself with such conditions as produced poverty, disease, and crime, even if he wished to do so (which he sometimes doubted). He knew better, therefore, than to waste his time attempting the impossible, and pinned his faith to an instinctive knowledge of how to deal with all such social ills. A contented spirit for poverty, for disease isolation, and for crime such punishment as would at once deter others, reform the criminal, and convince every one that Law must be avenged and the Social Conscience appeased. On this point of revenge he was very strong. No vulgar personal feeling of vindictiveness, of course, but a strong State-feeling of "an eye for an eye." It was the only taint of Socialism that he permitted himself. Loose thinkers he knew dared to advance the doubt whether a desire for retribution or revenge was not a purely human or individual feeling like hate, love, and jealousy, and that to talk of satisfying such a feeling in the collected bosom of the State was either to talk nonsense—How could a State have a bosom?—or to cause the bosoms of the human individuals who administered the justice of the State to feel that each one of them was itself that Stately bosom, and entitled to be revengeful. "Oh! no!" he would answer to such loose-thinking persons; "Judges of course give expression, not to what they feel themselves, but to what they imagine the State feels." He himself, for example, was perfectly able to imagine which crimes were those that inspired in the bosom of the State a particular abhorrence, a particular desire to be avenged—blackmail, burglary, assaults upon children, and living on the earnings of immoral women; he was certain that the State regarded all these with peculiar detestation, for he had a peculiar detestation of them himself; and if he were a Judge, he would never for a moment hesitate to visit on the perpetrators of such vile crimes the utmost vengeance of the Law. He was no loose thinker. In times bedridden with loose thinking and sickly sentiment he often felt terribly the value of his own philosophy, and was afraid that it was in danger; but not many other people held that view, discerning his finger still very large in every pie—so much so that there often seemed less pie than finger.

It would have shocked him much to realize that he could be considered a fit subject for a study of extravagance; fortunately he had not the power of seeing himself as others saw him, nor was there any danger that he ever would.