Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

To sum up all these ideas. We find it suggested that the social feelings from which morality sprang, were partly inherited by man from his animal ancestors, partly imitated from observation of the animals he knew so well in his wild life.

And we find it suggested that these social feelings probably began in the love of animals for their young, and in the brotherhood and comradeship of the young for each other.

It was the social feelings of men that made their Bibles: the Bibles did not make the social feelings.

Morality is the result of evolution, not of revelation.

CHAPTER FIVE – THE ANCESTRAL STRUGGLE WITHIN US

I HAVE spoken of the "nature" handed down to us by our fore-parents. I might have said "natures," for our inheritance, being not from one, but from many, is not simple, but compound.

We too commonly think of a man as an Englishman or a Frenchman; as a Londoner or a Yorkshireman; as good or bad.

We too commonly think of a man as one person, instead of as a mixture of many persons. As though John Smith were all John Smith, and always John Smith.

There is no such thing as an unmixed Englishman, Irishman, or Yorkshireman.

There is no such thing as an unmixed John Smith.

Englishmen are bred from the Ancient Briton, from the Roman, from the Piets and Scots, from the Saxons, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Normans, the French. All these varied and antagonistic bloods were mixed in centuries ago.

Since then the mixing has gone on, plentifully varied by intermarriage with Irish, Scots, Dutch, Germans, Belgians, French, Italians, Poles, and Spaniards. We have had refugees and immigrants from all parts of Europe. We have given homes to the Huguenots, and the Emigrés from France, to the Lollards and Lutherans from the Netherlands, to crowding fugitives from Russia, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and Greece. We have absorbed these foreigners and taken them into our blood. And the descendants of all these mixed races are called Englishmen.

The Londoner is a mixture of all those races, and more. From every part of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales; from most parts of Europe, from many parts of America and Asia, and even Africa, streams of foreign blood have flowed in to make the Londoner.

In Yorkshire there are several distinct races, though none of them are pure. There is one Yorkshire type bearing marks of descent from the Norsemen, another bearing marks of descent from the Flemish and French immigrants, and another from the Normandy invaders. I have seen Vikings, Belgians, and Normans all playing cricket in the Yorkshire County team.

In Ireland there are Irishmen from Denmark and Norway, Irishmen from Ancient Mongolia, and, especially in Kerry, Irishmen who seem to be of almost pure Iberian type.

The Iberian Irishman is short, dark, aquiline, and sardonic, with black hair and eyes, and a moustache more like a Tartar's than a European's. The Viking Irishman is big and burly, with blue or grey eyes, and reddish hair and beard; the difference between these two types is as great as that between a Saxon and a Spaniard.

One of these Irish Iberians marries a Yorkshire Dane. Their son marries the daughter of a Lancashire Belgian and an Ancient Briton from Flint; and their children are English.

As I said just now, we think of John Smith as all John Smith and always John Smith.

But John is a mixture of millions of men and women, many of them as different from each other as John Ridd is different from Dick Swiveller, or as Diana of the Crossways is different from Betsy Trotwood. And these uncountable and conflicting natures are not extinct: they are alive and busy in the motley jumble we call John Smith.

John is not all John. He is, a great deal of him, Roman soldier, Ancient Briton, Viking pirate, Flemish weaver, Cornish fisherman, Lowland scholar, Irish grazier, London chorus girl, Yorkshire spinner, Welsh dairymaid, and a host of other gentle and simple, wild and tame, gay and grave, sweet and sour, fickle and constant, lovable and repellent ancestors; from his great-great-grandparent, the hairy treeman, with flat feet and club like a young larch, to his respectable father, the white-fronted, silk-hatted clerk in the Pudsey Penny Savings Bank.

And, being as he is, not all John Smith, but rather the knotted, crossed, and tangled mixture of Johns and Marys, and Smiths and Browns and Robinsons, that has been growing more dense and intricate for tens of thousands of years, how can we expect our good John to be always the same John?

We know John is many Johns in the course of a summer's day. We have seen him, possibly, skip back to the cave-man in a spasm of rage, glow with the tenderness of the French lady who died of the plague in the Fourteenth Century, and then smile the smile of the merry young soldier who was shot at Dettingen – all in the time it takes him to clench and unclench his hand, or to feel in his pocket for a penny, or to flash a glance at a pretty face in the crowd.

John Smith is not English, nor Yorkshire; but human. He is not one man; but many men, and, which counts for more, many women.

And how can we say of John Smith that he is "good" or "bad"? It is like saying of a bottle of beads, mixed of fifty colours, that it is red, or blue. As John's ancestors were made up of good and bad, and as he is made up of them, so John is good and bad in stripes or patches: is good and bad by turns.

We speak of these mixed natures which a man inherits from his fore-parents as his "disposition": we call them "the qualities of his mind," and we wonder when we find him inconsistent, changeable, undecided. Ought we to be surprised that the continual struggle for the mastery amongst so many alien natures leads to unlooked-for and unwished-for results?

Take the case of a council, a cabinet, a regiment, composed of antagonistic natures; what happens? There are disputes, confusion, contradictions, cross-purposes. Well: a man is like a crowd, a Parliament, a camp of ill-matched foreign allies. Indeed, he is a crowd – a crowd of alien and ill-sorted ancestors.

The Great Arteries of Human Nature

But, differ from each other as we may, there are some general qualities – some human qualities – common to most of us.

These common qualities may be split into two kinds, selfish and unselfish.

The selfish instincts come down to us from our earlier brute ancestors.

The unselfish instincts come down to us from our later brute ancestors, and from our human ancestors.

Amongst the strongest and the deepest of man's instincts are love of woman, love of children, love of pleasure, love of art, love of humanity, love of adventure, and love of praise.

I should say that the commonest and most lasting of all human passions is the love of praise: called by some "love of approbation."

From this great trunk impulse there spring many branches. Nearly all our vanities, ambitions, affectations, covetings, are born of our thirst for praise. It is largely in the hope of exciting the wonder or the admiration of our fellows that we toil and scramble and snatch and fight, for wealth, for power, for place; for masterly or daring achievement.

None but misers love money for its own sake. It is for what money will buy that men covet it; and the most desired of the things money will buy are power and display: the value of which lies in the astonishment they will create, and the flattery they will win.

How much meaning would remain to such proud and potent words as glory, riches, conquest, fame, hero, triumph, splendour, if they were bereft of the glamour of human wonder and applause?

What man will bear and do and suffer for love of woman, and woman for love of man; what both will sacrifice for the sake of their children; how the devotee of art and science, literature, or war, will cleave to the work of his choice; with what eagerness the adventurer will follow his darling bent, seeking in the ends of the earth for excitement, happy to gaze once more into the "bright eyes of danger"; with what cheerful steadfastness and unwearied self-denial benevolence will labour for the good of the race; is known to us all. What we should remember is that these and other powers of our nature act and react upon each other: that one impulse checks, or goads, or diverts another.

Thus the love of our fellows will often check or turn aside our love of ourselves. Often when the desire for praise beckons us the dread of blame calls us back again. The love of praise may even lure us towards an act, and baulk us of its performance: as when a cricketer sacrifices the applause of the crowd in order to win the praise of captain or critics.

So will the lust of pleasure struggle against the lust of fame; the love of woman against the love of art; the passion for adventure against the desire for wealth; and the victory will be to the stronger.

Let us look into the human heart (the best way is to look into our own) and see how these inherited qualities work for and against each other.

One of the strongest checks is fear; another is what we call conscience.

Fear springs sometimes from "love of approbation"; we shrink from an act from fear of being found out, which would mean the loss of that esteem we so prize. Or we shrink from fear of bodily pain: as those knew well who invented the terrors of hell-fire.

There is a great deal of most respectable virtue that ought to be called cowardice. Deprive virtue of its "dare nots," and how many "would nots" and "should nots" might survive? Good conduct may not mean the presence of virtue, but the lack of courage, or desire.

But, happily, men do right, also, for right's sake; and because it is right; or they refrain from doing wrong because it is wrong.

The bent towards right conduct arises from one of two sources:

1. Education: we have been taught that certain acts are wrong.

2. Natural benevolence: a dislike to injure others.

The first of these – education – has to do with "environment"; the second is part of heredity. One we get from our fellow-men, the other from our ancestors.

Here let us pause to look into that much-preached-of "mystery" of the "dual consciousness," or "double-self."

We all know that men often do things which they know to be wrong. When we halt between the desire to do a thing, and the feeling that we ought not to do it, we seem to have two minds within us, and these two minds dispute about the decision.

What is this "mysterious" double-self? It is nothing but the contest between heredity and environment; and is not mysterious at all.

Heredity is very old. It reaches back, to the beasts. It passes on to us, generation after generation, for millions of years, certain instincts, impulses, or desires of the beast.

Environment is new. It begins at the cradle. It prints upon us certain lessons of right and wrong. It tells us that we ought not to do certain things.

But the desire to do those things is part of our heredity. It is in our blood. It is persistent, turbulent, powerful. It rises up suddenly, with a glare and a snarl, like a wild beast in its lair. And at the sound of its roar, and the flame of its lambent eyes, and the feel of its fiery breath, memory lifts its voice and hand, and repeats the well-learned lesson with its "shall-nots."

We are told that the animal impulses dwell in the "hind brain," and that morals and thought dwell in the "fore brain." The "dual personality," then, the "double-self," consists of the two halves of the brain; and the dispute between passion and reason, or between desire and morality, is a conflict between the lower man and the higher; between the old Adam and the new.

But it is also, to a great extent, a conflict between the average man and the hero, or leader.

We inherit the roots of morality, that is ta say, the "social instincts," or impulses of unselfish thoughts for others, from the sociable animals. But what we call "ethics," the rules or laws of moral conduct, have been slowly built up by human teachers. These teachers have been men with a special genius for morals. They have made codes of morals higher than the nature of the average man can reach.

But the average man has been taught these codes of morals in his childhood, and has grown up in unquestioning respect for them.

So when his baser nature prompts him to an act, and his memory repeats the moral lesson it has learnt, we have the nature of the average man confronted by the teaching of the superior or more highly moral man.

And there is naturally a conflict between the desire to do evil, and the knowledge of what things are good. It is not easy for Wat Tyler, Corporal Trim, or Sir John Falstaff to follow the moral lines laid down by such men as Buddha, Seneca, or Socrates. Sir John knows the value of temperance; but he has a potent love of sack. Wat knows that it is good for a man to govern his temper; but he is a choleric subject, and "hefty" with a hammer. There was a lot of human nature in the shipwright, who being reminded that St. Paul said a man was better single, retorted that "St. Paul wasn't a North Shields man."

OUR POSSIBILITIES

We know very well that some qualities may make either for good or bad. Strength, ability, courage, emulation, may go to the making of a great hero, or a great criminal..

If a man's bent, or teaching, be good, he will do better, if it be evil he will do worse by reason of his talents, his daring, or his resolution.

Dirt has been defined as "matter in the wrong place": badness might be often defined as goodness misapplied. Courage ill-directed is foolhardiness; caution in excess is cowardice; firmness overstrained is obstinacy.

Many of our inherited qualities are what we call "potentialities": they are "possibilities," capabilities, strong, or potential for good or evil.

Love of praise may drive a man to seek fame as a philanthropist, a tyrant, a discoverer, or a train-robber.

Love of adventure and love of fame had as much to do with the exploits of Gaude Duval and Morgan, the buccaneer, as with those of Drake or Clive.

Nelson was as keen for fame as Buonaparte: but the Englishman loved his country; the Corsican himself.

Doubtless Torquemada had as much religious zeal as St. Francis; but the one breathed curses, the other blessings.

Pugnacity is good when used against tyranny or wrong; it is bad when used against liberty or right.

Men of brilliant parts have failed for lack of industry or judgment. Men of noble qualities have gone to ruin because of some inborn weakness, or bias towards vice. Our minds "are of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." Many of life's most tragic human failures have been "sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh." Ophelia was not the first woman, nor the last by many millions, to perish through reaching for flowers that grow aslant the brook. If virtue is often cowardice, frailty is often love; and the words of Laertes to the "churlish priest" might frequently be spoken for some poor "Bottom Dog" in reproach of the unjust censure of a Pharisee: "a ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling."

We must remember, then, that the happiness or unhappiness of our nature depends not so much upon any special quality as upon the general balance of the whole.

Poor Oscar Wilde had many fine qualities, but his egotism, his vicious taint, and, perhaps, his unfortunate surroundings, drove him to shipwreck, with all his golden talents aboard. Every day noble ships run upon the rocks; every day brave pennons go down in the press of the battle, and are trampled in the blood and dust; every day lackeys ride in triumph, and princes slave on the galleys; every day the sweet buds go to the swine-trough, and the gay and fair young children to shame or the jail.

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