The Defendant | Page 7

not
keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of
the weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and
is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man
refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in

Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier
things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got
to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be
excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other
words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but
hideously significant phrase, another man. Now, it is this horrible fairy
tale of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the
Decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look
forward to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor
on Tuesday, Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on
Thursday, may seem a nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the
name of modern culture. One great decadent, who is now dead,
published a poem some time ago, in which he powerfully summed up
the whole spirit of the movement by declaring that he could stand in the
prison yard and entirely comprehend the feelings of a man about to be
hanged:
'For he that lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.'
And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which
descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain
itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which
imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a
play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be
human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the
free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know
cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to
be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us--this is the
grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.
Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who
made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to
the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two
mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief, or love, or
aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all
great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it
exegi monumentum oere perennius was the only sentiment that would

satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see
the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains
together. But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth
to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean
what he said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import,
would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the
excitement of a vow. For what could be more maddening than an
existence in which our mother or aunt received the information that we
were going to assassinate the King or build a temple on Ben Nevis with
the genial composure of custom?
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent
of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to
listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to
imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed
on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently
imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a
phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two
words--'free-love'--as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It
is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage
merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.
Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest
liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as
the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the
heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every
liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he
wants.
In Mr. Bernard Shaw's brilliant play 'The Philanderer,' we have a vivid
picture of this state of things. Charteris is a man perpetually
endeavouring to be a free-lover, which is like endeavouring to