Last month the post brought me two interesting letters, and the reader will understand how interesting they were to me when I tell him that one was from Mr. Sears, of the firm of Appleton, who not knowing me personally had written to Messrs. Heinemann to tell them that the firm he represented could not publish the "Memoirs" unless two stories were omitted; "The Lovers of Orelay," and "In the Luxembourg Gardens,"--Messrs. Heinemann had forwarded the letter to me; my interest in the other letter was less direct, but the reader will understand that it was not less interesting when I tell that it came from the secretary of a certain charitable institution who had been reading the book in question, and now wrote to consult me on many points of life and conduct. He had been compelled to do so, for the reading of the "Memoirs" had disturbed his mind. The reader will agree with me that disturbed is probably the right word to use. To say that the book had undermined his convictions or altered his outlook on life would be an exaggeration. "Outlook on life" and "standard of conduct" are phrases from his own vocabulary, and they depict him.
"Your outlook on life is so different from mine that I can hardly imagine you being built of the same stuff as myself. Yet I venture to put my difficulty before you. It is, of course, no question of mental grasp or capacity or artistic endowment. I am, so far as these are concerned, merely the man in the street, the averagely endowed and the ordinarily educated. I call myself a Puritan and a Christian. I run continually against walls of convention, of morals, of taste, which may be all wrong, but which I should feel it wrong to climb over. You range over fields where my make-up forbids me to wander.
"Such frankness as yours is repulsive, forbidding, demoniac! You speak of woman as being the noblest subject of contemplation for man, but interpreted by your book and your experiences this seems in the last analysis to lead you right into sensuality, and what I should call illicit connections. Look at your story of Doris! I do want to know what you feel about that story in relation to right and wrong. Do you consider that all that Orelay adventure was put right, atoned, explained by the fact that Doris, by her mind and body, helped you to cultivate your artistic sense? Was Goethe right in looking upon all women merely as subjects for experiment, as a means of training his aesthetic sensibilities? Does it not justify the seduction of any girl by any man? And does not that take us straight back to the dissolution of Society? The degradation of woman (and of man) seems to be inextricably involved. Can you regard imperturbedly a thought of your own sister or wife passing through Doris' Orelay experience?"
The address of the charitable institution and his name are printed on the notepaper, and I experience an odd feeling of surprise whenever this printed matter catches my eye, or when I think of it; not so much a sense of surprise as a sense of incongruity, and while trying to think how I might fling myself into some mental attitude which he would understand I could not help feeling that we were very far apart, nearly as far apart as the bird in the air and the fish in the sea. "And he seems to feel toward me as I feel toward him, for does he not say in his letter that it is difficult for him to imagine me built of the same stuff as himself?" On looking into his letter again I imagined my correspondent as a young man in doubt as to which road he shall take, the free road of his instincts up the mountainside with nothing but the sky line in front of him or the puddled track along which the shepherd drives the meek sheep; and I went to my writing table asking myself if my correspondent's spiritual welfare was my real object, for I might be writing to him in order to exercise myself in a private debate before committing the article to paper, or if I was writing for his views to make use of them. One asks oneself these questions but receives no answer. He would supply me with a point of view opposed to my own, this would be an advantage; so feeling rather like a spy within the enemy's lines on the eve of the battle I began my letter. "My Dear Sir: Let me assure you that we are 'built of the same stuff.' Were it not so you would have put my book aside. I even suspect we are of the same kin; were it otherwise you would not have written to me and put your difficulties so plainly before me." Laying the pen aside I meditated quite a long while if I should tell him that I imagined him as a young man standing at the branching of the roads, deciding eventually that it would not be wise for me to let him see that reading between the lines I had guessed his difficulty to be a personal one. "We must proceed cautiously," I said, "there may be a woman in the background.... The literary compliments he pays me and the interest that my book has excited are accidental, circumstantial. Life comes before literature, for certain he stands at the branching of the roads, and the best way I can serve him is by drawing his attention to the fallacy, which till now he has accepted as a truth, that there is one immutable standard of conduct for all men and all women." But the difficulty of writing a sufficient letter on a subject so large and so intricate puzzled me and I sat smiling, for an odd thought had dropped suddenly into my mind. My correspondent was a Bible reader, no doubt, and it would be amusing to refer him to the chapter in Genesis where God is angry with our first parents because they had eaten of the tree of good and evil. "This passage" I said to myself, "has never been properly understood. Why was God angry? For no other reason except that they had set up a moral standard and could be happy no longer, even in Paradise. According to this chapter the moral standard is the origin of all our woe. God himself summoned our first parents before him, and in what plight did they appear? We know how ridiculous the diminutive fig leaf makes a statue seem in our museums; think of the poor man and woman attired in fig leaves just plucked from the trees! I experienced a thrill of satisfaction that I should have been the first to understand a text that men have been studying for thousands of years, turning each word over and over, worrying over it, all in vain, yet through no fault of the scribe who certainly underlined his intention. Could he have done it better than by exhibiting our first parents covering themselves with fig leaves, and telling how after getting a severe talking to from the Almighty they escaped from Paradise pursued by an angel? The story can have no other meaning, and that I am the first to expound it is due to no superiority of intelligence, but because my mind is free. But I must not appear to my correspondent as an exegetist. Turning to his letter again I read:
"I am sorely puzzled. Is your life all of a piece? Are your 'Memoirs' a pose? I can't think the latter, for you seem sincere and frank to the verge of brutality (or over). But what is your standard of conduct? Is there a right and a wrong? Is everything open to any man? Can you refer me now to any other book of yours in which you view life steadily and view it whole from our standpoint? Forgive my intrusion. You see I don't set myself as a judge, but you sweep away apparently all my standards. And you take your reader so quietly and closely into your confidence that you tempt a response. I see your many admirable points, but your center of living is not mine, and I do want to know as a matter of enormous human interest what your subsumptions are. I cannot analyze or express myself with literary point as you do, but you may see what I aim at. It is a bigger question to me than the value or force of your book. It goes right to the core of the big things, and I approach you as one man of limited outlook to another of wider range."
The reader will not suspect me of vanity for indulging in these quotations; he will see readily that my desire is to let the young man paint his own portrait, and I hope he will catch glimpses as I seem to do of an earnest spirit, a sort of protestant Father Gogarty, hesitating on the brink of his lake. "There is a lake in every man's heart"--but I must not quote my own writings. If I misinterpret him ... the reader will be able to judge, having the letter before him. But if my view of him is right, my task is a more subtle one than merely to point out that he will seek in vain for a moral standard whether he seeks it in the book of Nature or in the book of God. I should not move him by pointing out that in the Old Testament we are told an eye for an eye is our due, and in the New the rede is to turn the left cheek after receiving a blow on the right. Nor would he be moved by referring him to the history of mankind, to the Boer War, for instance, or the massacres which occur daily in Russia; everybody knows more or less the history of mankind, and to know it at all is to know that every virtue has at some time or other been a vice. But man cannot live by negation alone, and to persuade my correspondent over to our side it might be well to tell him that if there be no moral standard he will nevertheless find a moral idea if he looks for it in Nature. I reflected how I would tell him that he must not be disappointed because the idea changes and adapts itself to circumstance, and sometimes leaves us for long intervals; if he would make progress he must learn to understand that the moral world only becomes beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved. Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage "Two things fill the soul with undying and ever-increasing admiration, the night with its heaven of stars above us and in our hearts the moral law." The only fault I find with this passage is that I read the word "law" where I expected to read the word "idea," for the word "law" seems to imply a Standard, and Kant knew there is none. Is the fault with the translator or with Kant, who did not pick his words carefully? The metaphysician spent ten years thinking out the "Critique of Pure Reason" and only six months writing it; no doubt his text might be emendated with advantage. If there was a moral standard the world within us would be as insignificant as the firmament was when the earth was the center of the universe and all the stars were little candles and Jehovah sat above them, a God who changed his mind and repented, a whimsical, fanciful God who ordered the waters to rise so that his creatures might be overwhelmed in the flood, all except one family (I need not repeat here the story of Noah's Ark and the doctrine of the Atonement) if there was one fixed standard of right and wrong, applicable to everybody, black, white, yellow, and red men alike, an eternal standard that circumstance could not change. Those who believe in spite of every proof to the contrary that there is a moral standard cannot appreciate the beautiful analogy which Kant drew, the moral idea within the heart and the night with its heaven of stars above us. "It is strange," I reflected, "how men can go on worrying themselves about Rome and Canterbury four hundred years after the discovery that the earth moved, and involuntarily a comparison rose up in my mind of a squabble between two departments in an office after the firm has gone bankrupt.... But how to get all these vagrant thoughts into a sheet of paper? St. Paul himself could not proselytize within such limitations, and apparently what I wrote was not sufficient to lead my correspondent out of the narrow lanes of conventions and prejudices into the open field of inquiry. Turning to his letter, I read it again, misjudging him, perhaps ... but the reader shall form his own estimate.
"I honestly felt and feel a big difficulty in reading and thinking over your 'Memoirs' for you are a propagandist whether you recognize that as a conscious mission or not. There is in your book a challenging standard of life which will not wave placidly by the side of the standard which is generally looked up to as his regimental colors by the average man. One must go down. And it was because I felt the necessity of choosing that I wrote to you.
"'Memoirs' is clearly to me a sincere book. You have built your life on the lines there indicated. And there is a charm not merely in that sincerity but in the freedom of the life so built. I could not, for instance, follow my thoughts as you do. I do not call myself a coward for these limitations. I believe it to be a bit of my build; you say that limitation has no other sanction than convention--race inheritance, at least so I gather. Moral is derived from mos. Be it so. Does not that then fortify the common conviction that the moral is the best? Men have been hunting the best all their history long by a process of trial and error. Surely the build of things condemns the murderer, the liar, the sensualist, and the coward! and how do you come by 'natural goodness' if your moral is merely your customary? No, with all respect for your immense ability and your cultured outlook, I do not recognize the lawless variability of the right and the wrong standard which you posit. How get you your evidence? From human actions? But it is the most familiar of facts that men do things they feel to be wrong. I have known a thief who stole every time in pangs of conscience; not merely in the fear of detection. There is a higher and a lower in morals, but the lower is recognized as a lower, and does not appeal to a surface reading of the code of an aboriginal in discussing morals. That, I think is only fair. Your artistic sense is finely developed, but it is none the less firmly based, although there are Victorian back parlors and paper roses.
"You see you are a preacher, not merely an artist. Every glimpse of the beautiful urges the beholder to imitation and vice versa. And that is why your 'Memoirs' are not merely 'an exhibition' of the immoral; they are 'an incitement' to the immoral. Don't you think so? And thinking so would you not honestly admit, that society (in the wide sense, of course--civilization) would relapse, go down, deliquesce, if all of us were George Moores as depicted in your book?"