The very word Honor, as used by the world, fails to express any elevated sentiment. How immeasurably below the sentiment of Duty! It is a word of easy virtue, that has been prostituted to the most opposite characters and transactions. From the field of Pavia, where France suffered one of the worst reverses in her annals, the defeated king writes to his mother, "All is lost, except honor." At a later day, the renowned French cook, Vatel, in a paroxysm of grief and mortification at the failure of two dishes for the table, exclaims, "I have lost my honor!" and stabs himself to the heart.[68] Montesquieu, whose writings are constellations of epigrams, calls honor a prejudice only, which he places in direct contrast with virtue,—the former being the animating principle of monarchy, and the latter the animating principle of a republic; but he reveals the inferiority of honor, as a principle, when he adds, that, in a well-governed monarchy, almost everybody is a good citizen, while it is rare to meet a really good man.[69] The man of honor is not the man of virtue. By an instinct pointing to the truth, we do not apply this term to the high columnar qualities which sustain and decorate life,—parental affection, justice, benevolence, the attributes of God. He would seem to borrow a feebler phrase, showing a slight appreciation of the distinctive character to whom reverence is accorded, who should speak of father, mother, judge, angel, or finally of God, as persons of honor. In such sacred connections, we feel, beyond the force of any argument, the mundane character of the sentiment which plays such a part in history and even in common life.
The rule of honor is founded in the imagined necessity of resenting by force a supposed injury, whether of word or act.[70] Admit the injury received, seeming to sully the character; is it wiped away by any force, and descent to the brutal level of its author? "Could I wipe your blood from my conscience as easily as this insult from my face," said a Marshal of France, greater on this occasion than on any field of fame, "I would lay you dead at my feet." Plato, reporting the angelic wisdom of Socrates, declares, in one of those beautiful dialogues shining with stellar light across the ages, that to do a wrong is more shameful than to receive a wrong.[71] And this benign sentiment commends itself alike to the Christian, who is bid to render good for evil, and to the enlightened soul of man. But who confessing its truth will resort to force on any point of honor?
In ancient Athens, as in unchristianized Christian lands, there were sophists who urged that to suffer was unbecoming a man, and would draw down incalculable evil. The following passage, which I translate with scrupulous literalness, will show the manner in which the moral cowardice of these persons of little faith was rebuked by him whom the gods of Greece pronounced Wisest of Men.
"These things being so, let us inquire what it is you reproach me with: whether it is well said, or not, that I, forsooth, am not able to assist either myself or any of my friends or my relations, or to save myself from the greatest dangers, but that, like the infamous, I am at the mercy of any one who may choose to smite me on the face (for this was your juvenile expression), or take away my property, or drive me out of the city, or (the extreme case) kill me, and that to be so situated is, as you say, the most shameful of all things. But my view is,—a view many times expressed already, but there is no objection to its being stated again,—my view, I say, is, O Callicles, that to be struck on the face unjustly is not most shameful, nor to have my body mutilated, nor my purse cut; but that to strike and cut me and mine unjustly is more shameful and worse—and stealing, too, and enslaving, and housebreaking, and, in general, doing any wrong whatever to me and mine, is more shameful and worse—for him who does the wrong than for me who suffer it. These things, which thus appeared to us in the former part of this discussion, are secured and bound (even if the expression be somewhat rustical) with iron and adamantine arguments, as indeed they would seem to be; and unless you, or some one stronger than you, can break them, it is impossible for any one, saying otherwise than as I now say, to speak correctly: since, for my part, I always have the same thing to say,—that I know not how these things are, but that, of all whom I have ever discoursed with as now, no one is able to say otherwise without being ridiculous."[72]
Such is the wisdom of Socrates, as reported by Plato; and it has found beautiful expression in the verse of an English poet, who says,—
"Dear as freedom is, and in my heart's
Just estimation prized above all price,
I had much rather be myself the slave
And wear the bonds than fasten them on him."[73]