For He made the world and all that is in it. And He made it with a moral end in view, as we most of us believe. But not the wisest of us pretends that that moral object is clearly visible. It does not disclose itself to us directly; we are aware of it only indirectly; and are influenced by it forevermore. If the world was so made, who are we that think ourselves so much more adroit than Him as to be able to expose boldly what He veils and to reveal what He hath hidden?
There are those, of course, who see no moral explanation of the universe; but they are not always consistent. There is that famous passage of Joseph Conrad’s in which he declines the ethical view and says he would fondly regard the panorama of creation as pure spectacle—the marvellous spectacle being, perchance, a moral end in itself. And yet no man ever wrote with a deeper manifestation and a more perfect concealment of his moral purpose than Conrad; for exactly the thing to which all his tales are passionate witnesses is the sense of fidelity, of loyalty, of endurance—above all, the sense of fidelity—that exists in mankind. Man, in the Conradist view, is a creature of an inexhaustible loyalty to himself and to his fellows. This inner and utter fidelity it is which makes the whole legend of Lord Jim, which is the despairing cry that rings out at the last in Victory, which reaches lyric heights in Youth, which is the profound pathos of The End of the Tether, which, in its corruption by an incorruptible metal, the silver of the mine, forms the dreadful tragedy of Nostromo. An immortal, Conrad, but not the admiring and passive spectator he diffidently declares himself to be!
10
Have we covered all the cases? Obviously not. It is no more possible to deal with all the authors who go wrong than it is to call all the sinners to repentance. But sin is primarily a question between the sinner and his own conscience, and the errors of authors are invariably questions between the authors and the public. The public is the best conscience many an author has; and the substitution of a private self-justification for a public vindication has seldom been a markedly successful undertaking in human history. Yet there is a class of writers for whom no public vindication is possible; who affect, indeed, to scorn it; who set themselves up as little gods. They are the worshippers of Art. They are the ones who not only do not admit but who deliberately deny a moral purpose in anything; who think that a something they call pure Beauty is the sole end of existence, of work, of life, and is alone to be worshipped. It is a cult of Baal.
For these Artists despise money, and in despising money they cheapen themselves and become creatures of barter. They sneer at morality and reject it; immediately the world disappears: “And the earth was without form, and void.” They demoralize honest people with whom they come in contact by demolishing the possibly imperfect but really workable standards which govern normal lives—and never replacing them. What is their Beauty? It is what each one of them thinks beautiful. What is their Art? It is what each cold little selfish soul among them chooses to call Art. What is their achievement? Self-destruction. They are the spiritual suicides, they are the moral defectives, they are the outcasts of humanity, the lepers among the workers of the world. For them there can be neither pity nor forgiveness; for they deny the beauty of rewarded toil, the sincerity of honest labor, the mystical humanity of man.
Of them no more. Let us go back in a closing moment to the contemplation of the great body of men and women who labor cheerfully and honorably, if rather often somewhat mistakenly, to make their living, to do good work and make the world pay them for it, yet leaving with the world the firm conviction that it has had a little the better of the bargain! These are the authors who “go wrong,” and with whose well-meant errors we have been dealing, not very methodically but perhaps not unhelpfully. Is there, then, no parting word of advice we can give our authors? To be sure there is! When our authors are quite sure they will not go wrong, they may go write!
A BARBARIC YAWP