Without Prejudice | Page 8

the
confessional of value? Is red the best colour for a soldier's uniform or
for a target? Will it rain to-morrow? Ought any one to carry firearms?
Do we permit the cancan on the English stage? or aërial flights without
nets? Where are the lost Tales of Miletus? Should lawyers wear their
own hair? Was the Silent System so bad? Should a novel have a
purpose? Was the Victoria Fund rightly distributed? What is the origin
of Egyptian civilisation? Is it allowable to say, "It's me"? Every other
doubtful point of grammar and--worse still--of pronunciation; also of
etymology. May we say "Give an ovation"? Is the German Emperor a
genius, or a fool? Should bachelors be taxed? Will the family be
abolished? Ensilage. Why was Ovid banished from Rome? Is the soul
immortal? Is our art-pottery bad? Is the Revised Version of the Bible
superior to the Old? Who stole Gainsborough's picture? Which are the
rarest coins and stamps? Is there any sugar in the blood? Blondes or
brunettes? Do monkeys talk? What should you lead at whist? Should
directors of insolvent companies be prosecuted? Or classics be
annotated? Was Boswell a fool? Do I exist? Does anybody else exist?
Is England declining? Shall the costers stand in Farringdon Street? Do
green wall-papers contain arsenic? Shall we adopt phonetic spelling? Is
life worth living?
The last question at least I thought I could answer, as I bore to bed with
me that headache which you have doubtless acquired if you have been
foolish enough to read the list. If only one were a journalist, one would
have definite opinions on all these points.
And to these questions every day brings a fresh quota. You are
expected to have read the latest paragraph in the latest paper, and the
newest novel, and not to have missed such and such an article in such
and such a quarterly. And all the while you are fulfilling the duties of,
and solving the problems of, son, brother, cousin, husband, father,
friend, parishioner, citizen, patriot, all complicated by specific religious
and social relations, and earning your living by some business that has

its own hosts of special problems, and you are answering letters from
everybody about everything, and deciding as to the genuineness of
begging appeals, and wrestling with some form or forms of disease,
pain, and sorrow.
"Truly, we are imperfect instruments for determining truth," I said to
the Poet. "The sane person acts from impulse, and only pretends to give
a reason. Reason is only called in to justify the verdict of prejudice.
Sometimes the impulse is sentiment--which is prejudice touched with
emotion. We cannot judge anything on pure, abstract grounds, because
the balance is biassed. A human being is born a bundle of prejudices, a
group of instincts and intuitions and emotions that precede judgment.
Patriotism is prejudice touched with pride, and politics is prejudice
touched with spite. Philosophy is prejudice put into propositions, and
art is prejudice put into paint or sound, and religion is a pious opinion.
Every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, a Romanticist, or a
Realist, or an Impressionist, and usually erects his own limitations into
a creed. Every country, town, district, family, individual, has a special
set of prejudices along the lines of which it moves, and which it
mistakes for exclusive truths or reasoned conclusions. Touch human
society anywhere, it is rotten, it crumbles into a myriad notes of
interrogation; the acid of analysis dissolves every ideal. Humanity only
keeps alive and sound by going on in faith and hope,--solvitur
ambulando,--if it sat down to ask questions, it would freeze like the
traveller in the Polar regions. The world is saved by bad logic."
"And by good feeling," added my friend the Poet.
"And in the face of all these questions," I cried, surveying the list
ruefully again, "we go on accumulating researches and multiplying
books without end, vituperating the benefactors who destroyed the
library of Alexandria, and exhuming the civilisations that the
earthquakes of Time have swallowed under. The Hamlet of centuries,
'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,' the nineteenth of that ilk
mouches along, soliloquising about more things in heaven and earth
than were dreamt of in any of its predecessors' philosophies. Ah me!
Analysis is paralysis and introspection is vivisection and culture drives

one mad. What will be the end of it all?"
"The end will be," answered the Poet, "that the overstrung nerves of the
century will give way, and that we shall fall into the simple old faith of
Omar Khayyám:
"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of
Bread, and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness-- O Wilderness
were Paradise enow."
"Yes," said I, "the only wisdom is to live.