This being the case, there is nothing in these virtues à la Dickens to “write home about”—as we used to say at a time when we were remarkably rich in such virtues. There is no reason to be particularly proud of qualities which we inherit from our animal forefathers and share with our household pets. The gratifying thing would be if we could find in contemporary society evidences of peculiarly human virtues—the conscious rational virtues that ought to belong by definition to a being calling himself Homo Sapiens. Open-mindedness, for example, absence of irrational prejudice, complete tolerance and a steady, reasonable pursuit of social goods. But these, alas, are precisely what we fail to discover. For to what, after all, are all this squalor, this confusion and ugliness due but to the lack of the human virtues? The fact is that—except for an occasional sport of Nature, born now here, now there, and always out of time—we sapient men have practically no human virtues at all. Spend a week in any great town, and the fact is obvious. So complete is this lack of truly human qualities that we are reduced, if we condescend to look at reality at all, to act like Charles Dickens and congratulate the race on its merely animal virtues. The jolly, optimistic fellows who assure us that humanity is all right, because mothers love their children, poor folk pity and help one another, and soldiers die for a flag, are comforting us on the grounds that we resemble the whales, the elephants and the bees. But when we ask them to adduce evidence of human sapience, to give us a few specimens of conscious and reasonable well-doing, they rebuke us for our intellectual coldness and our general “inhumanity”—which means our refusal to be content with the standards of the animals. However grateful we may feel for the existence in civilised society of these homely jungle virtues, we cannot justifiably set them off against the horrors and squalors of civilised life. The horrors and squalors arise from men’s lack of reason—from their failure to be completely and sapiently human. The jungle virtues are merely the obverse of this animalism, whose Heads is instinctive kindliness and whose Tails is stupidity and instinctive cruelty.
So much for the last consolation of philosophy. We are left with reality. My office in Gog’s Court is situated, I repeat, at the very heart of it, the palpitating heart.
CHAPTER II
Gog’s Court, the navel of reality! Repeating those verses of mine in the silence, I intimately felt the truth of it.
For if of old the sons of squires
And livery stable keepers turned
To flowers and hope, to Greece and God,
We, in our later age have learned
That we are native where we walk.