Heretics | Page 8

this primary advantage, that though he may
be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is still fixing his
thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness, on a strength that
has no limits, and a happiness that has no end. Doubtless there are other
objections which can be urged without unreason against the influence
of gods and visions in morality, whether in the cell or street. But this
advantage the mystic morality must always have--it is always jollier. A
young man may keep himself from vice by continually thinking of
disease. He may keep himself from it also by continually thinking of
the Virgin Mary. There may be question about which method is the
more reasonable, or even about which is the more efficient. But surely
there can be no question about which is the more wholesome.
I remember a pamphlet by that able and sincere secularist, Mr. G. W.
Foote, which contained a phrase sharply symbolizing and dividing
these two methods. The pamphlet was called BEER AND BIBLE,
those two very noble things, all the nobler for a conjunction which Mr.
Foote, in his stern old Puritan way, seemed to think sardonic, but which
I confess to thinking appropriate and charming. I have not the work by
me, but I remember that Mr. Foote dismissed very contemptuously any
attempts to deal with the problem of strong drink by religious offices or
intercessions, and said that a picture of a drunkard's liver would be
more efficacious in the matter of temperance than any prayer or praise.
In that picturesque expression, it seems to me, is perfectly embodied

the incurable morbidity of modern ethics. In that temple the lights are
low, the crowds kneel, the solemn anthems are uplifted. But that upon
the altar to which all men kneel is no longer the perfect flesh, the body
and substance of the perfect man; it is still flesh, but it is diseased. It is
the drunkard's liver of the New Testament that is marred for us, which
which we take in remembrance of him.
Now, it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures
of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real
objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the
nineteenth century. If any ordinary man ever said that he was horrified
by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Maupassant, or by the plain
language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was lying. The
average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern
civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never dream of
printing. Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a new habit. On
the contrary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence which is new still,
though it is already dying. The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts
very early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is
that the ordinary honest man, whatever vague account he may have
given of his feelings, was not either disgusted or even annoyed at the
candour of the moderns. What disgusted him, and very justly, was not
the presence of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear idealism.
Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection to
realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing,
the thing that called names. This is the great difference between some
recent developments of Nonconformity and the great Puritanism of the
seventeenth century. It was the whole point of the Puritans that they
cared nothing for decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers
distinguish themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and
adjectives which the founders of Nonconformity distinguished
themselves by flinging at kings and queens. But if it was a chief claim
of religion that it spoke plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all
that it spoke plainly about good. The thing which is resented, and, as I
think, rightly resented, in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is
typical, is that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong
things increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which

sees what things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment,
till it goes almost blind with doubt. If we compare, let us say, the
morality of the DIVINE COMEDY with the morality of Ibsen's
GHOSTS, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done. No one,
I imagine, will accuse the author of the INFERNO of an Early
Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes
three moral instruments--Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of
perfection, the vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen
has only one--Hell. It is often