Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT

I often think that when we go down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat we shall all be greatly astonished at the credit and debit items we shall find against our names in the ledger of our life. We shall discover that many of the virtues which we thought would give us a thumping credit balance have not been recorded at all, and that some of our failings have by the magic of celestial book-keeping been entered on the credit side. The fact is that our virtues are often no virtues at all. They may even only be vices, seen in reverse.

Take Smithson Spinks—everyone knows the Smithson Spinks type. What a reputation for generosity the fellow has! What a grandeur of giving he exhales! How noble his scorn for mean fellows! How royal the flash of his hand to his pocket if you are getting up a testimonial to this man, or a fund for that object, or want a loan yourself! No one hesitates to ask Smithson Spinks for anything. He likes to be asked. He would be hurt if he were not asked. And yet if you track Smithson Spinks's generosity to its source you find that it is only pride turned inside out. The true motive of his giving is not love of his fellows, but love of himself and the vanity of a mind that wants the admiration and envy of others. You see the reverse of the shield at home, where the real Smithson Spinks is discovered as a stingy fellow, who grumbles when the boys want new boots and who leaves his wife to struggle perpetually with a load of debt and an empty purse, while he plays the part of the large-hearted gentleman abroad. He believes in his own fiction, but when he looks in the ledger he will have a painful shock. He will turn to the credit side, expecting to find GENEROSITY written in large and golden letters, and he will probably find instead VANITY in plain black on the debit side.

And I—let us say that I flatter myself on being a truthful person. But am I? What will the ledger say? I have a dreadful suspicion that it may put my truthfulness down to the compulsion of a tremulous nerve. I may—who knows?—only be truthful because I haven't courage enough for dissimulation. It may not be a positive moral virtue at all, but only the moral reflection of a timorous spirit. It needs great courage to tell a lie which you have got to face out. I could no more do it than I could dance on the point of a needle.

Consider the courage of that monumental liar Arthur Orton—the sheer unflinching audacity with which he challenged the truth, facing Tichborne's own mother with his impudent tale of being her son, facing judges and juries, going into witness-boxes with his web of outrageous inventions, keeping a stiff lip before the devastating rain of exposure. A ruffian, of course, a thick-skinned ruffian, but what courage!

Now there may be a potential Arthur Orton in me, but he has never had a chance. I have no gift of dissimulation. If I tried it I should flounder like a boy on his first pair of skates. I could not bluff a rabbit. No one would believe me if I told him a lie. My eye would return a verdict of guilty against me on the spot, and my tongue would refuse its office. And therein is the worm that eats at my self-respect. May not my obedience to the ten commandments be only due to my fear of the eleventh commandment—that cynical rescript which runs, "Thou shalt not be found out"? I hope it is not so, but I must prepare myself for the revelations of the ledger in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. For they will be as candid about me and you as about Smithson Spinks.

You can never be absolutely sure of a man's moral nature until you have shipped him, figuratively,

... somewhere east of Suez
Where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no ten commandments,
And a man can raise a thirst—

until in fact you have got him away from his defences, liberated him from the conventions and respectabilities that encompass him with minatory fingers and vigilant eyes, and left him to the uncontrolled governance of himself. Then it will be found whether the virtues are diamonds or paste—whether they spring out of the ten commandments or out of the eleventh. The lord Angelo in Measure for Measure passed for a strict and saintly person—and I have no doubt believed himself to be a strict and saintly person—so long as he was under control, but when the Duke's back was turned the libertine appeared. And note that subtle touch of Shakespeare's. Angelo was not an ordinary libertine. He passed for a saint because he could not be tempted by vice, but only by virtue. Hear him communing with himself when Isabella has gone:

... What is't I dream on?
O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue; never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigour, art and nature
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite.

His saintliness revolted from vice, but his love of virtue opened the floodgates of viciousness. What a paradox is man! I think I have known more than one lord Angelo whose virtue rested on nothing better than a fastidious taste, or an absence of appetite.

That is certainly the case with many people who have the quality of sobriety. Abraham Lincoln, himself a total abstainer, once got into great trouble for saying so. He was addressing a temperance meeting at a Presbyterian church, and said: "In my judgment such of us as have never fallen victims (to drink) have been spared more from the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have fallen." It seemed a reasonable thing to say, but it shocked the stern teetotalers present. "It's a shame," said one, "that he should be permitted to abuse us so in the house of the Lord." They did not like to feel that they were not more virtuous than men who drank and even got drunk. They expected to have a large credit entry for not tippling. Like Malvolio, they mixed up virtue with "cakes and ale." If you indulged in them you were vicious, and if you abstained from them you were virtuous. It was a beautifully simple moral code, but virtue is not so easily catalogued. It is not a negative thing, but a positive thing. It is not measured by its antipathies but by its sympathies. Its manifestations are many, but its root is one, and its names are "truth and justice," which even the Prayer Book puts before "religion and piety."

And to return to the Lincoln formula, if you have no taste for tippling what virtue is there in not tippling? The virtue is often with the tippler. I knew a man who died of drink, and whose life, nevertheless, had been an heroic struggle with his enemy. He was always falling, but he never ceased fighting. And it is the fighting, I think, he will find recorded in the ledger—greatly to his surprise, for he had the most modest opinion of his merits and a deep sense of his moral infirmity.

It is no more virtuous for some men not to get drunk than it is for a Rothschild not to put his hand in his neighbour's pocket in order to steal half-a-crown. He doesn't need a half-crown, and there is no virtue in not stealing what you don't want. That was what was wrong with the "Northern Farmer's" philosophy that those who had money were the best:

Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steäls,
Them as 'as coäts to their backs an' taäkes their regular meäls.
Noä, but it's them as niver knaws wheer a meäl's to be 'ad—
Taäke my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.

It was a creed of virtue which looked at the fact and not at the temptation. He will have found a much more complex system of book-keeping where he has gone. I imagine him standing painfully puzzled at the sort of accounts which he will find made up in the "valley of decision."