Of course the immediate result of vanity is weakness, as that of pride is strength; but on a wider view there is something to be said for it. Goethe exclaims in Wilhelm Meister, “Would to heaven all men were vain! that is were vain with clear perception, with moderation, and in a proper sense: we should then, in the cultivated world, have happy times of it. Women, it is told us, are vain from the very cradle; yet does it not become them? do they not please us the more? How can a youth form himself if he is not vain? An empty, hollow nature will, by this means, at least contrive to give itself an outward show, and a proper man will soon train himself from the outside inwards.”[[56]] That is to say, vanity, in moderation, may indicate an openness, a sensibility, a teachability, that is a good augury of growth. In youth, at least, it is much preferable to pride.
It is the obnoxious, or in some way conspicuous, manifestations of self-feeling that are likely to receive special names. Accordingly, there are many words and phrases for different aspects of pride and vanity, while a moderate and balanced self-respect does not attract nomenclature. One who has this is more open and flexible in feeling and behavior than one who is proud; the image is not stereotyped, he is subject to humility; while at the same time he does not show the fluttering anxiety about his appearance that goes with vanity, but has stable ways of thinking about the image, as about other matters, and cannot be upset by passing phases of praise or blame. In fact, the healthy life of the self requires the same co-operation of continuity with change that marks normal development everywhere; there must be variability, openness, freedom, on a basis of organization: too rigid organization meaning fixity and death, and the lack of it weakness or anarchy. The self-respecting man values others’ judgments and occupies his mind with them a great deal, but he keeps his head, he discriminates and selects, considers all suggestions with a view to his character, and will not submit to influences not in the line of his development. Because he conceives his self as a stable and continuing whole he always feels the need to be, and cannot be guilty of that separation between being and seeming that constitutes affectation. For instance, a self-respecting scholar, deferent to the standards set by the opinions of others, might wish to have read all the books on a certain subject, and feel somewhat ashamed not to have done so, but he could not affect to have read them when he had not. The pain of breaking the unity of his thought, of disfiguring his picture of himself as a sincere and consistent man, would overbalance any gratification he might have in the imagined approval of his thoroughness. If he were vain he would possibly affect to have read the books; while if arrogant he might feel no compunctions for avowed ignorance of them.
Common-sense approves a just mingling of deference and self-poise in the attitude of one man toward others: while the unyielding are certainly repellent, the too deferent are nearly as much so; they are tiresome and even disgusting, because they seem flimsy and unreal, and do not give that sense of contact with something substantial and interesting that we look for.
“——you have missed
The manhood that should yours resist,
Its complement.”
We like the manner of a person who appears interested in what we say and do, and not indifferent to our opinion, but has at the same time an evident reserve of stability and independence. It is much the same with a writer; we require of him a bold and determined statement of his own special view—that is what he is here for—and yet, with this, an air of hospitality, and an appreciation that he is after all only a small part of a large world.
With some, then, the self-image is an imitative sketch in the supposed style of the last person they have talked to; with others, it is a rigid, traditional thing, a lifeless repetition that has lost all relation to the forces that originally moulded it, like the Byzantine madonnas before the time of Cimabue; with others again it is a true work of art in which individual tendencies and the influence of masters mingle in a harmonious whole; but all of us have it, unless we are so deficient in imagination as to be less than human. When we speak of a person as independent of opinion, or self-sufficient, we can only mean that, being of a constructive and stable character, he does not have to recur every day to the visible presence of his approvers, but can supply their places by imagination, can hold on to some influences and reject others, choose his leaders, individualize his conformity; and so work out a characteristic and fairly consistent career. The self must be built up by the aid of social suggestions, just as all higher thought is.
Honor is a finer kind of self-respect. It is used to mean either something one feels regarding himself, or something that other people think and feel regarding him, and so illustrates by the accepted use of language the fact that the private and social aspects of self are inseparable. One’s honor, as he feels it, and his honor in the sense of honorable repute, as he conceives it to exist in the minds of others whose opinion he cares for, are two aspects of the same thing. No one can permanently maintain a standard of honor in his own mind if he does not conceive of some other mind or minds as sharing and corroborating this standard. If his immediate environment is degrading he may have resort to books or memory in order that his imagination may construct a better environment of nobler people to sustain his standard; but if he cannot do this it is sure to fall. Sentiments of higher good or right, like other sentiments, find source and renewal in intercourse. On the other hand, we cannot separate the idea of honor from that of a sincere and stable private character. We cannot form a habit of thought about what is admirable, though it be derived from others, without creating a mental standard. A healthy mind cannot strive for outward honor without, in some measure, developing an inward conscience—training himself from the outside in, as Goethe says.
It is the result of physiological theories of ethics—certainly not intended by the authors of those theories—to make the impulses of an ideal self, like the sentiment of honor, seem far-fetched, extravagant and irrational. They have to be justified by an elaborate course of reasoning which does not seem very convincing after all. No such impression, however, could result from the direct observation of social life. In point of fact, a man’s honor, as he conceives it, is his self in its most immediate and potent reality, swaying his conduct without waiting upon any inquiry into its physiological antecedents. The preference of honor to life is not at all a romantic exception in human behavior, but something quite characteristic of man on a really human level. A despicable or degenerate person may save his body alive at the expense of honor, and so may almost anyone in moments of panic or other kind of demoralization, but the typical man, in his place among his fellows and with his social sentiments about him, will not do so. We read in history of many peoples conquered because they lacked discipline and strategy, or because their weapons were inferior, but we seldom read of any who were really cowardly in the sense that they would not face death in battle. And the readiness to face death commonly means that the sentiment of honor dominates the impulses of terror and pain. All over the ancient world the Roman legions encountered men who shunned death no more than themselves, but were not so skilful in inflicting it; and in Mexico and Peru the natives died by thousands in a desperate struggle against the Spanish arms. The earliest accounts we have of our own Germanic ancestors show a state of feeling and practice that made self-preservation, in a material sense, strictly subordinate to honor. “Death is better for every clansman than coward life,” says Beowulf,[[57]] and there seems no doubt whatever that this was a general principle of action, so that cowardice was a rare phenomenon. In modern life we see the same subordination of sensation to sentiment among soldiers and in a hundred other careers involving bodily peril—not as a heroic exception but as the ordinary practice of plain men. We see it also in the general readiness to undergo all sorts of sensual pains and privations rather than cease to be respectable in the eyes of other people. It is well known, for instance, that among the poor thousands endure cold and partial starvation rather than lose their self-respect by begging. In short, it does not seem too favorable a view of mankind to say that under normal conditions their minds are ruled by the sentiment of Norfolk: