The Connexion Between Taste and Morals: Two lectures

by Mark Hopkins

In regard to this very extensive, and therefore important department of human conduct, there seem to be two common mistakes. The first consists in disregarding it altogether. There are many men whose characters, in their sketching and outline, are fine, and which, seen at a distance, appear well; but on approaching them, they seem coarse and very imperfect. In all the great duties of life they appear to advantage; but through negligence, or some greater failing, the minor duties, and especially the department of manners, is entirely neglected. They seem like stately trees, in the trunk and main branches of which the sap circulates vigorously, but does not reach and animate the smaller twigs, and give to the leaves their perfect green.

A second, and more common mistake, is the giving up of this department to the control of taste under the guidance of selfishness. The manners are polished, and all the forms of politeness adopted, not for the purpose of making others happy, but of securing to ourselves their esteem, and of effecting our own ends in life. This is the school of manners recommended by Chesterfield, and young persons are often exhorted to pay attention to their manners on this ground. In this case the sap does not circulate at all, and the leaves are painted.

But to me it seems, that this whole class of actions falls within the province of morality. Wherever human happiness is concerned, there is room for principle to operate, and the constitution of society will never be sound, and its beauty will never be perfect, till the sap of principle circulates to the extremities of human action. The true polish and beauty of society can result only from the principle of benevolence showing itself in a graceful and practical attention to the minor wants and to the feelings of others. But whatever we may decide in regard to their respective limits in this department, it is obvious that taste, so far as it goes, must be favorable to morals.

We now pass to what is indisputably the province of morals. And here our first inquiry will be, what are the circumstances under which the emotions of taste are awakened by moral actions? In reply to this inquiry I observe, that the emotion of beauty, leaving sublimity for the present out of the question, is awakened by a moral action chiefly, and perhaps solely, when it springs from the principle of duty acting in coincidence with the desires, the affections, or some other natural and inferior principle of action. This point is of practical importance, and requires illustration. Man, as we all know, has various principles of action,—such as instincts, desires, affections, passions. These may impel him to a course of action directly opposed to that indicated by a sense of duty, and they may also lead him to perform the same actions as are dictated by it; and the position is, that moral beauty arises when there is a partial or entire coincidence between the principle of duty and these inferior powers.

That this is so is evident, because there are many actions which are right, which are imperatively required by duty, which yet do not awaken in the mind of the impartial spectator any admiration—for we must here keep in mind the distinction already made between admiration and approbation. The simple payment of a debt, for example, does not awaken any admiration, though we approve the act and should strongly condemn him who should not do it when it was in his power. In this case, there can be mingled with the performance of duty no play of the generous emotions. He who performs all his actions solely from a sense of duty, has our approbation, our respect; but he who, in addition to this, is possessed of warm affections, which always coincide in their promptings with what is right, has also our admiration and love. Duty is to the affections, in the conduct of life, what logic is to rhetoric in a discourse. Logic forms an excellent body for a discourse; we assent to it, we approve it, it is good, all good, but it awakens no admiration. It is not till rhetoric sends its warm life-blood to mantle on the cold cheek of logic, and clothes its angular form in the garments of taste, that we begin to admire the discourse. And so it is with duty. It is an excellent body to the course of our conduct in life; nothing else will do, but it may be so performed as to appear unamiable and even repulsive. In order to be beautiful, there must be connected with it some manifestation of natural affection or graceful emotion.

And here I may remark, that though we have a right to expect of every man that he will do his duty, yet the display of this beauty is not equally within the power of all, since the existence and manifestation of emotion depend, to some extent, upon the temperament. As there are some who have naturally a meagre intellect, so there are others whose minds seem to be barren of those finer sympathies and affections of our nature which are the verdure of the soul, and upon which the eye always rests with pleasure. The characters of some good men are dry and unattractive. They are harsh, and hard-visaged, and seem too much like wooden men, moved by rule and calculation. Such persons often seem better, and worse, than they really are. Their freedom from extravagancies on the one hand, and on the other, that want of feeling which is wrongly termed by many hardness of heart, is equally the result of temperament.

That the doctrine which I now advocate is correct, appears also from the effect produced upon our feelings when we observe habit taking the place of sentiment in the performance of duty. We have all seen persons enter upon a course of virtuous activity, and continue it for a time from a sense of duty, sustained by ardent feeling; but after a time the feeling has died away, and there has come in its stead habit, or a regard to consistency, to sustain the sense of duty in keeping up the same course of external action. When this change has taken place, we are all conscious that the beauty of the conduct is greatly diminished;—its spirit has vanished; the dew of its youth is exhaled.

I said that this was a practical point, and I now wish to show, in connexion with it, precisely how it is that mischief arises from the perversion of moral taste; as was shown, in the former Lecture, how it arises from its perversion in other things. In opposition to the hard and dry characters mentioned above, there are those whose susceptibilities are acute, whose sympathies are quick, whose feelings are generous, whose affections are ardent, who do every thing so promptly and so heartily that impulse seems almost to supply the place of principle. There is something very attractive in a character of this kind; there is an ease and freedom about it which seems to put aside all labor of calculation, and it moreover exhibits our nature in the pleasing garb of natural goodness. It is for this reason that novelists, who draw men as they wish to have them, and not as they are, have almost universally made these fine instincts of humanity the guide of their hero, and the basis of his character. This is, indeed, if I understand it, the basis of this kind of literature, and one chief source of the injury it produces. The exhibition of these instincts, and affections, and emotions, springing up at random and acting without the control of principle, holds out no stimulus to exertion; and their possession and exercise is often in fact, and often too in books, connected with great corruption of moral character.

Taking, therefore, as the main ingredient in the character of those who are to make the chief figure in this kind of writing, what Miss Martineau calls spontaneousness, and which she and a certain wise friend of hers in Boston thought should by all means be encouraged and reverenced, we may mix the other materials somewhat to our taste. An excellent and much-approved receipt for the hero of a novel is the following:—1st. Make him handsome, for beauty is to the body what spontaneousness is to the mind, a sort of physical spontaneousness. Or, if you do not make him handsome, do what amounts to much the same thing, give him an air; let him have something about him that is peculiar, so that those who scan him closely may observe, under those apparently indifferent features, a certain something, a sign of the fire that is slumbering within. 2d. If you find it necessary, for fashion's sake, to put him at school, or at any place for study, make him idle, generous, somewhat mischievous, a great hater of mathematics, (for, so far as my knowledge extends, no hero of a novel ever yet knew any thing about mathematics,) give him some whimsical pursuit for the hours when he chooses to do any thing, and then make him speak, as he has occasion, Italian, French and Spanish, which he learned by instinct. 3d. Make him act from impulse, and not from principle, and get him into difficulty through the influence of these same generous impulses. It is on difficulties thus created that the plot must turn. 4th. Get him in love. 5th. Make him run a gauntlet of difficulties a volume and a half long, furnishing a new illustration of that old adage, "the course of true love never did run smooth." 6th. Marry him, and let him live many years in perfect felicity.

We commonly hear it said, that the chief mischief of novel-reading arises from the false pictures of life which novels present. This is doubtless a source of no small mischief; but in my view, a much greater evil arises from their holding up, directly or indirectly, false principles of action, and casting contempt upon the true; from their leading young persons to admire that which they esteem graceful rather than that which is respectable and right in the conduct of life. There is in those works an unnatural separation made between the principle of virtue and that which gives to virtue its beauty; and principle is represented as formal and cold, and perhaps ridiculous. Prudence, especially, is a virtue which no heroine of a novel must ever be guilty of. In a recent work, which deserves great credit for avoiding the general fault just mentioned, we are yet told that prudence was a virtue for which the heroine was never famous, and a slight odium is cast upon the virtue itself by making it appear, in the rival of the heroine, somewhat stiff and pragmatical.