The Defendant | Page 6

the
criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of

humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never
doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is
noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies
spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these
maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who
believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of
people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy
writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call
Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those
iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as
their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a
'many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to be a
many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good
many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as
the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not
touched by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always
on the side of life. The poor--the slaves who really stoop under the
burden of life--have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but
never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling
literature will always be a 'blood and thunder' literature, as simple as
the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS
If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to
solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the
leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one
leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's 'Liberty' seventy-six
times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the
name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in
his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the
top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should
immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes
expressed, was 'an artist in life.' Yet these vows are not more
extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar

periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures
in civic and national civilization--by kings, judges, poets, and priests.
One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great chain
hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical folly.
Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a patch
over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that these two
exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner than
the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and
reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog.
And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high
compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions
which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get there.
But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved
in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as
symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men who did these things were not
decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is
generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men
essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious
direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not hold
water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life,
such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad
promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the
same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain
which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the
beginning. And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of
vows, we shall, unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion
that it is perfectly sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains
together, and that, if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to
do so.
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at
some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should