PAGE 11
A Dialogue On Poetic Morality
by
Cyril nodded. “I understand what you mean,” he said; “but I don’t see the application yet.”
“Well,” answered Baldwin, “I will show you one instance of the application. Have you ever thought over the question of–how shall I call it?–the ethics of the indecent?”
Cyril stared. “No, it never struck me that there were any. I don’t write indecent things, it doesn’t amuse me. I feel not the smallest desire to do so; if anything, I feel rather sick at such things; that is all.”
“That is all for you, but not all for other people. You don’t feel attracted to write on some subjects; well, other people not only feel attracted, but imagine that it is their duty even if they are not.”
“They are swine; I have nothing to do with them.” And Cyril looked as if he had settled the matter.
“But they are not swine; at least, not all of them; or they are not entirely swine, by any means,” insisted Baldwin. “You are not going to tell me that a man like Walt Whitman is a mere pig. Still there are things of his which to you are simply piggish. Either Whitman is a beast or you are a prude.”
“That depends upon difference of nature,” said Cyril quickly, vaguely desirous of putting an end to a discussion which brought forward an anomaly.
“That is merely repeating what I said,” replied Baldwin. “But in reality I think it is not a difference of nature. I think it depends on a difference of reasoned opinion; in short, upon a sophistication of ideas on the part of Whitman. I think it depends in him and the really pure men who uphold his abominations upon a simple logical misconception; a confusion of the fact that certain phenomena have been inevitable, with the supposition that those same certain phenomena are therefore desirable–a confusion between what has been, and could not help being, and what may be and ought to be. It is the attempt to solve a moral problem by an historical test.”
“I don’t understand in the least, Baldwin.”
“Why, thus: our modern familiarity with the intellectual work of all times and races has made people perceive that in past days indecency was always part and parcel of literature, and that to try to weed it out is to completely alter the character of at least a good half of the literature of the past. Hence, some of us moderns, shaken as we are in all our conventional ideas, have argued that this so-called indecency is a legitimate portion of all literature, and that the sooner it is re-introduced into that of the present the better, if our literature is to be really vital and honest. Now, these people do not perceive that the literature of the past contained indecencies, merely because, being infinitely less self-conscious, less responsible than now, the literature of those days contained fragments of every portion of the civilization which produced it. For besides what I might call absolute indecency, in the sense of pruriency, the literature of the past is full of filth pure and simple, like some Eastern town; a sure proof this, that if certain subjects which we taboo were not tabooed then, it was not from any conscious notion of their legitimacy, but from a general habit of making literature, like the street of some Oriental or mediaeval town, the scene of every sort of human action, important or trifling, noble or vile; regarding it as the place for which the finest works were painted or carved, and into which all the slops were emptied. Hence, in our wanderings through the literature of the past, our feet are for ever stumbling into pools of filth, while our eyes are seeking for the splendid traceries, the gorgeous colours above; our stomachs are turned by stenches even while we are peeping in at some wonderful rose garden or fruit orchard. I think you might almost count on your fingers the books up to the year 1650, in which you are sure of encountering no beastliness–choice gardens or bowers of the soul, or sacred chapels kept carefully tidy and pure–viz., Milton, Spenser, the Vita Nuova, Petrarch, Tasso–things, you see, mainly sacred or spiritualistic–sort of churches where only devotion of some sort goes on; but if we go out to where there is real life, life complete and thoughtless–Shakspeare, Rabelais, Moliere, Ariosto, Cervantes, Aristophanes, Horace–the evil odours meet us again at every step. Well, now-a-days this has all been misunderstood. People have imagined that an inevitable nuisance of the past ought also to be a deliberately chosen nuisance of the present: a line of argument which appears to me to be similar to that of a man, who, because the people of Lisbon used, in the days of my grandfather, to practise a very primitive system of sewerage, should recommend that the inhabitants of modern London should habitually empty their slops on to the heads of passers-by. I am crude? Well, it is by calling nasty things by beautiful names that we are able to endure their existence. I think that people who should attempt such literary revivals ought to be fined, as the more practical revivers of old traditions certainly would be.”