CHAPTER VI
THE ART OF MORALS
I
No man has ever counted the books that have been written about morals. No subject seems so fascinating to the human mind. It may well be, indeed, that nothing imports us so much as to know how to live. Yet it can scarcely be that on any subject are the books that have been written more unprofitable, one might even say unnecessary.
For when we look at the matter objectively it is, after all, fairly simple. If we turn our attention to any collective community, at any time and place, in its moral aspect, we may regard it as an army on the march along a road of life more or less encompassed by danger. That, indeed, is scarcely a metaphor; that is what life, viewed in its moral aspect, may really be considered. When thus considered, we see that it consists of an extremely small advance guard in front, formed of persons with a limited freedom of moral action and able to act as patrols in various directions, of a larger body in the rear, in ancient military language called the blackguard and not without its uses, and in the main of a great compact majority with which we must always be chiefly concerned since they really are the army; they are the community. What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command—whether or not issued by leaders the army believes it has itself chosen—of which the significance is hidden, and beyond this the duty of keeping in step with the others, or of trying to keep in step, or of pretending to do so.[[89]] It is an automatic, almost unconscious process and only becomes acutely conscious when the individual is hopelessly out of step; then he may be relegated to the rear blackguard. But that happens seldom. So there is little need to be concerned about it. Even if it happened very often, nothing overwhelming would have taken place; it would merely be that what we called the blackguard had now become the main army, though with a different discipline. We are, indeed, simply concerned with a discipline or routine which in this field is properly described as custom, and the word morals essentially means custom. That is what morals must always be for the mass, and, indeed, to some extent for all, a discipline, and, as we have already seen, a discipline cannot properly be regarded as a science or an art. The innumerable books on morals, since they have usually confused and befogged this simple and central fact, cannot fail to be rather unprofitable. That, it would seem, is what the writers thought—at all events about those the others had written—or else they would not have considered it necessary for themselves to add to the number. It was not only an unprofitable task, it was also—except in so far as an objectively scientific attitude has been assumed—aimless. For, although the morals of a community at one time and place is never the same as that of another or even the same community at another time and place, it is a complex web of conditions that produces the difference, and it must have been evident that to attempt to affect it was idle.[[90]] There is no occasion for any one who is told that he has written a “moral” book to be unduly elated, or when he is told that his book is “immoral” to be unduly cast down. The significance of these adjectives is strictly limited. Neither the one book nor the other can have more than the faintest effect on the march of the great compact majority of the social army.
Yet, while all this is so, there is still some interest in the question of morals. For, after all, there is the small body of individuals ahead, alertly eager to find the road, with a sensitive flair for all the possibilities the future may hold. When the compact majority, blind and automatic and unconscious, follows after, to tramp along the road these pioneers have discovered, it may seem but a dull road. But before they reached it that road was interesting, even passionately interesting.
The reason is that, for those who, in any age, are thus situated, life is not merely a discipline. It is, or it may become, really an art.
II
That living is or may be an art, and the moralist the critic of that art, is a very ancient belief. It was especially widespread among the Greeks. To the Greeks, indeed, this belief was so ingrained and instinctive that it became an implicitly assumed attitude rather than a definitely expressed faith. It was natural to them to speak of a virtuous person as we should speak of a beautiful person. The “good” was the “beautiful”; the sphere of ethics for the Greeks was not distinguished from the sphere of æsthetics. In Sophocles, above all poets, we gather the idea of a natural agreement between duty and inclination which is at once both beauty and moral order. But it is the beautiful that seems to be most fundamental in τὸ καλὸν, which was the noble, the honourable, but fundamentally the beautiful. “Beauty is the first of all things,” said Isocrates, the famous orator; “nothing that is devoid of beauty is prized.... The admiration for virtue comes to this, that of all manifestation of life, virtue is the most beautiful.” The supremely beautiful was, for the finer sort of Greeks, instinctively if not always consciously, the supremely divine, and the Argive Hera, it has been said, “has more divinity in her countenance than any Madonna of them all.” That is how it came to pass that we have no word in our speech to apply to the Greek conception; æsthetics for us is apart from all the serious business of life, and the attempt to introduce it there seems merely comic. But the Greeks spoke of life itself as a craft or a fine art. Protagoras, who appears to-day as a pioneer of modern science, was yet mainly concerned to regard living as an art, or as the sum of many crafts, and the Platonic Socrates, his opponent, still always assumed that the moralist’s position is that of a critic of a craft. So influential a moralist as Aristotle remarks in a matter-of-fact way, in his “Poetics,” that if we wish to ascertain whether an act is, or is not, morally right we must consider not merely the intrinsic quality of the act, but the person who does it, the person to whom it is done, the time, the means, the motive. Such an attitude towards life puts out of court any appeal to rigid moral laws; it meant that an act must befit its particular relationships at a particular moment, and that its moral value could, therefore, only be judged by the standard of the spectator’s instinctive feeling for proportion and harmony. That is the attitude we adopt towards a work of art.
It may well appear strange to those who cherish the modern idea of “æstheticism” that the most complete statement of the Greek attitude has come down to us in the writings of a philosopher, an Alexandrian Greek who lived and taught in Rome in the third century of our Christian Era, when the Greek world had vanished, a religious mystic, moreover, whose life and teaching were penetrated by an austere ascetic severity which some would count mediæval rather than Greek.[[91]] It is in Plotinus, a thinker whose inspiring influence still lives to-day, that we probably find the Greek attitude, in its loftiest aspect, best mirrored, and it was probably through channels that came from Plotinus—though their source was usually unrecognised—that the Greek moral spirit has chiefly reached modern times. Many great thinkers and moralists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it has been claimed, were ultimately indebted to Plotinus, who represented the only genuinely creative effort of the Greek spirit in the third century.[[92]]
Plotinus seems to have had little interest in art, as commonly understood, and he was an impatient, rapid, and disorderly writer, not even troubling to spell correctly. All his art was in the spiritual sphere. It is impossible to separate æsthetics, as he understood it, from ethics and religion. In the beautiful discourse on Beauty, which forms one of the chapters of his first “Ennead,” it is mainly with spiritual beauty that he is concerned. But he insists that it is beauty, beauty of the same quality as that of the physical world, which inheres in goodness, “nor may those tell of the splendour of Virtue who have never known the face of Justice and of Wisdom beautiful beyond the beauty of Evening and of Dawn.” It is a beauty, he further states,—though here he seems to be passing out of the purely æsthetic sphere,—that arouses emotions of love. “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love, and a trembling that is also delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen, and this souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more deeply who are the more truly apt to this higher love—just as all take delight in the beauty of the body, but all are not strung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.” Goodness and Truth were on the same plane for Plotinus as Beauty. It may even be said that Beauty was the most fundamental of all, to be identified ultimately as the Absolute, as Reality itself. So it was natural that in the sphere of morals he should speak indifferently either of “extirpating evil and implanting goodness” or of “introducing order and beauty to replace goodness”—in either case “we talk of real things.” “Virtue is a natural concordance among the phenomena of the soul, vice a discord.” But Plotinus definitely rejects the notion that beauty is only symmetry, and so he avoids the narrow conception of some more modern æsthetic moralists, notably Hutcheson. How, then, he asks, could the sun be beautiful, or gold, or light, or night, or the stars? “Beauty is something more than symmetry, and symmetry owes its beauty to a remoter principle”—its affinity, in the opinion of Plotinus, with the “Ideal Form,” immediately recognised and confirmed by the soul.