The Conduct of Life

“PERFECTION is not of this world,” saith the proverb; and it saith well, leaving to us meantime (as all proverbs do—and that is their imperfection!) the task of discovering its true meaning and the reason for it. In the first place, if perfection is not of this world, it certainly is not of any other—that is to say, it is an abstraction; and the abstract is the unreal, the radically, the irremediably unreal.

And why? Why should perfection be unreal?

The demand for perfection is addressed primarily and directly to our actions and urges us to see to it that they be, with reference to their intrinsic purposes, what they pretend to be: pure, unadulterated thought, if it is a case of thinking; pure imagination, if it is a case of art; acts of utility and skill, and nothing else, if these are directed to individual welfare; acts looking toward the universal good (and nothing else), if they are moral or ethical. And when we have this purity, this singleness of being, and only then, do we have “perfection.” But now this curious situation arises: a moral action is consummated only in so far as it restrains and masters impulses that look to the selfish interest of the individual; a practical action, only in so far as it reduces the multiplicity of desires to the unit of the useful; a thought or judgment, only in so far as it controls and sifts the images supplied by fancy; and imagination only in so far as it tranquillises in contemplation the turmoil of desires and practical strivings.

The demand for perfection, accordingly, if it be taken literally, would require that the victory in each of these spheres be so complete as to disable the competitor absolutely, deprive it of all aggressiveness and stifle the slightest protest of rebellion. But if this were to happen, the adversary would be beaten not in a given set of circumstances and in certain connections only, but for good and all. Not conquest merely, but death—destruction root and branch!

And destruction of what? Destruction, in each particular sphere, of the special form of spiritual activity that is prerequisite to the activity of that sphere. For thought presupposes the image; the image an impulse of will; the utilitarian act, all those multiple perceptions which give rise, in turn, to multiple desires; the ethical act, the whole group of hedonistic motives. And so we might go on. Now all these things, in their discordant concord, make up the Spirit in its concrete unity; and therefore no one of them could be destroyed without destroying all the others and the Spirit as well! And this would be a manifest absurdity!

Any given form of spiritual activity, as it asserts itself, does so by gaining ascendency over the other forms, encompassing them, limiting them, and forcing its own imprint upon them. But this preponderance is never so great that the vanquished do not counterattack, leaving their mark, so to speak, on the body of the master as a retaliation for the moment and a promise of a turn of the tables at some other time.

Such marks are the paucae maculae to which we must be reconciled in Homer or in any other poet; for the artist would have his matter fully responsive and obedient, whereas it is rebellious to his impassioned travail. All writers confess to the scratches and bruises they have earned in wrestling with an untameable Beauty, who “writhes and twists and fights back,” as Carducci said of his Muse. In the moral life, they are the backslidings, the waverings, the overdoings, the vain complacencies, the vulgar motives, which, in varying degree but always leaving their traces behind them, blemish every act of a human being, however admirable, however noble it may otherwise appear or be. In the economic life, they are the mistakes we make by yielding to desires that distract us from the goal we have set ourselves; or, to cite an extreme and negative example, the compromises that shrewd and unprincipled men make with moral ideals; for perfect unscrupulousness is never attained: some qualm, some twinge, of conscience is certain to disturb the hardest heart of Pharaoh, which, however cursed by Jehovah, never becomes a stone but remains a heart. In the sphere of thought, they are the obscurities, the misstatements, the hasty judgments, which are present in every work of science. The scholar does his best to avoid or correct them, and he brings his product closer and closer to the ideal, much as the artist polishes his poem or retouches his picture, or the moral man purifies and sublimates his virtue; but he never quite reaches the barrier, much less does he knock it down and trample it underfoot.

So we see how intrinsically impossible it is that one of our acts should be “perfect,” in the sense of being perfectly pure; and it is doubly impossible therefore that any individual should be a “perfect man.” In the first place, the individual is nothing, really, except the sequence of his acts, and these, as we have just observed, are all blemished with imperfections. In the second place, as an individual, he leans toward one or another of the spiritual forms (he is a poet, or a scientist, or a man of affairs, etc.); and every special or stressed capacity carries with it a correlative and special incapacity. The greater a man’s proficiency in his own field, the less perfect he is as the “whole man.” In fact, the best exemplars of the “compleat” man we are most likely to find among the mediocrities. The magnum ingenium, as the phrase runs, is never sine mixtura dementiae, is never without some monumental ineptitude; and the same truth we try to express in another apothegm: that “a man’s defects spring from his very virtues.” What shall we do then? “Bathe our eyes in tears in this grievous pass”? It would be childish to do that; for we may not weep with propriety over something that is beyond laughter and wailing but stands as an essential prerequisite to both smiles and tears. Not only must we not lament, but we must be very, very careful to keep this Demon of Perfection from getting into us! As everybody knows, the worst devil of all is the one that wears an angel’s face!

In actual life we encounter the artist who is obsessed with “perfection,” who is ever pursuing the impeccable verse, the sculptured sentence, the picture that is quintessential art; and we set him down as a weak and impotent man who will never get anywhere. We meet the scientist who makes a god of absolute and meticulous accuracy, and we brush him aside as a hollow and futile pedant. We know men who set such store on cleverness that they finally hang themselves in the snare their miraculous ingenuity had set for Fortune. And here are scrupulous and conscientious people intent on cleansing microscopic blemishes from their polished souls and who go about in sackcloth and ashes in atonement for any of their acts which are less than holy; and these we classify as hypocrites and egotists. People, in short, who profess to be developing harmoniously within themselves all the aptitudes of the human being from poetry to strategy, from philosophy to fox-trotting, from the philanthropist’s tenderness of heart to the hero’s fortitude in combat, we look upon as farceurs of low comedy. Artists of real power and ability, scientists who are making real conquests of the unknown, honest citizens and worthwhile men who are spending their time usefully on this earth, are not wasting their energies over such trifles: they aspire to perfection but not in its absurdities; they fear imperfection, but not without common sense. They understand, though they have not always thought the matter out, that the important thing is to win their fight but not necessarily to clean up the battlefield, to master the adversary but not necessarily to kill him or shackle him forever, to exercise their particular form of spiritual activity upon the matter in hand, but not necessarily to suppress the other forms over which they have caused it to prevail. Their effort has been to assert themselves victoriously in their specific capacities; and this has meant sticking to essentials and not worrying about secondary or less important things. They are content with reaching the centre whence they can expand little by little toward the circumference, even if they never quite succeed in touching it at every one of its infinitude of points. Unlucky the man who does not feel the urge of perfection, which is the prompter of all action, of all action with a purpose, of all perficere, of all “doing through.” But mad is the man who would base his whole on the impossible, on the full attainment of his ideal in every one of its details; for this would divert a useful and fertile capacity, a noble mission perhaps, into a sterile and despairing obsession, into a paralysis of life, into the imperfection of perfect perfection.

If a great poet cannot make his voice heard save after many stammerings and even with a few false notes, we know what our duty is: to accept those stammerings and those false notes without too much complaint. If a thinker cannot give us the light of a new truth except by veiling it in places with exaggerations and whimsicalities, let us not fail to see the light because of those few clouds. If a statesman cannot fulfil the mission committed to him by history without some wandering from the straight.and narrow path, without some concession to personal vanity or personal interest, let us forgive those errors and overlook those weaknesses. For their part such men will do well never to accept their failures, much less condone them, so long as they are still at work; but we who set ourselves up as judges will do well by doing differently. And they, again, severe toward themselves as workers and creators, will have moments when they can step aside, and look at themselves as judges; and then they too must be indulgent toward themselves (an indulgence which will also be humility), and accept their imperfections.

All this may seem to be a contradiction, but it is simply a recognition that reality is movement, and our view is therefore no more incoherent than any movement. And it may seem to leave us in the dark as to the imperfections that are to be fought uncompromisingly and those that may be tolerated. But the necessary light we each find in ourselves case by case; just as a traveller on a march knows, case by case, when he can permit himself the “imperfection” of resting—unless he is to choose, by the sheer perfection of his marching ever onward, to lose the capacity for marching altogether.

And, for that matter, theory itself can give us the light required—a basis for distinguishing, that is; and those only fail to see it who start from a false conception of spiritual activity. If we think of a spiritual act as something mechanical, as a sum of little acts (much as geometricians think of a line as an infinite series of points), we are brought to consider perfection and imperfection as matters merely of more or of less. This in turn implies a qualitative parity of perfection and imperfection, and leads to the final conclusion that everything is perfect or imperfect according to momentary whim, that everything—beauty, morality, truth—is after all caprice and illusion.

However, a spiritual act is just the opposite of this: it is the indivisible, and not the divisible, the continuous and not the discontinuous, the thrust upwards towards the heights and not weighable or measurable mass. That is why we say that a work of art either is or is not, that it is alive or that it is dead—no halfway terms being possible. And a thought is either fundamentally true or fundamentally false; and an action is either born of a love of the good, and therefore intrinsically moral; or born of practical calculation and therefore intrinsically selfish.

The imperfection that we may tolerate and to which we may properly be resigned, is the imperfection that clings to the existing virtue and not the imperfection born of a non-existing thing that would pretend to be a real thing. The endurable disease, vita ipsa morbus, is the one which permits an organism to live, think, and act, and not the one which does not even need to be tolerated since it kills the organism out of hand. Acceptable imperfection, in a word, is the living thing that hampers and perhaps here and there disfigures another living thing: it is the overflowing imagination that here and there disturbs sober, dispassionate thought (without however damaging the vital kernel of the thought); it is human frailty—the complex of individual interests—that are seen to lurk about the outer limits of a noble action, but never dare invade its inner heart; it is the love of comfort, the urgency of practical needs, that prevent the artist from bringing his work to perfection ad unguem and allow it to leave his hands with a rough spot here and there, here and there a line unpolished, here and there an error he has not been able to avoid. Such imperfections we may overlook; but not the other kind, not the imperfections that are intrinsic and capital. As Hebbel said of poetic composition, and as we may repeat, in general, for every creation or actuality of the spirit: “We can be sparing of everything, except of the fundamental motive.”

XXVIII. Innocence and Knowledge

INNOCENCE is no longer honoured as an ideal condition of life, and even the poets have ceased to glorify it: Blessed Golden Age of primal innocence

When virtue was not fell to man’s pleasaunce!

For when the idyll is essayed in poetry nowadays, it is not the “innocent” affair it used to be.

And in fact what is innocence, after all? Innocence means inexperience of evil, in one’s self and consequently in others; and since evil exists in ourselves and in others, since evil is present in all things, innocence is another word for ignorance. It implies inability to understand ourselves, others, the world. It implies incomprehension of the imagery produced by art and of the concepts evolved by science—for both art and science relate to experience of life, and if life is good life is also evil. We may, to be sure, yearn for an unspotted innocence; but in the way one yearns for peace and Paradise (for non-being, that is). Quite properly we may try to protect the “innocence” of children and young people, but only to prevent them from acquiring too early experience of emotions they have not yet learned to master (just as we do not begin their mathematics with infinitesimal calculus, and their first experiments in thought with the doctrine of categories). All of us may look back wistfully to the beautiful days when we knew nothing of the world. But those days we had to leave behind us. Often it was our parents and our teachers who rent the veil asunder: “You are not a boy any longer, and you can now be told…” So why set so much store on innocence? At the best, it is an unavoidable defect, an elementary stage of evolution, comparable to the lisping that precedes talking, and to the toppling and tumbling that prepare for the child’s first steps. And why, conversely, all the reproachfulness, suspicion, and depreciation for the opposite of innocence, for that sophistication, or astuteness, or “knowledge,” which is the mother of Wisdom, and which we call “malice” in the Latin tongues; though the word with us has no connotation of wickedness, much less of cruelty, and indicates in him who possesses it simply a keen and clear perception of evil that may very well attend an irreproachable will to do and to promote the good. Such “knowledge” is the one thing which permits us to sound the nethermost depths and penetrate the most secret nooks of human passions and human crimes—whence our understanding of tragedy and romance; and to unmask all the petty motives and trivial weaknesses that furnish the sparkle of comedy. “Knowledge” is our guide through the tangle-wood of history with all its snarls and snares and complexities; and as it teaches us to be shrewd and wary in dealing with human events, so it clears our own view of ourselves, dispelling our illusions, laying bare the unconfessable motives we would hide even from our own consciences. Whatever the sorrows that result, whatever the struggles that may be involved, it is the part of a man always to pluck the bitter apple from the Tree of Good and Evil, and prefer to the innocence that is sottishness the “knowledge” that is intelligence.

So runs one of those arguments that may be taken as typical of a kind of false reasoning which affirms things that are all true but goes wrong by pretending to answer a question that is different from the question asked. In such arguments, as we commonly observe, words are used in senses that diverge slightly from normal usage, so that the reasoning silences without convincing. Though we can find nothing to controvert, we feel somehow that the problem on which light was sought has not been solved: the conclusion is logically unassailable, and the mind is baffled; but our consciences cannot quite be brought to admit that the false answer is the true answer, that the non-existent exists, that the unsound is sound.

In the present case, the fundamental trouble is that “innocence” does not stand to the “knowledge” that is sophistication as ignorance stands to the knowledge that is information or experience. The “innocent” or “ingenuous” person is not a sot, as compared with the astute or shrewd person, presumably intelligent; he is intelligent in a sense in which the other is obtuse, or obtuse in a sense in which the other is intelligent. We are thus brought to compare two different intelligences and two different stupidities, and to prefer the intelligence and the stupidity of innocence to the intelligence and stupidity of astuteness.

If the individual man could realise omniscience and omniversality in his own finite being, there would be no occasion for settling a question like the one raised here. But individuality implies specialisation, specification, limitation—a narrowing of scope which gives individuation its power and its efficiency. That is why each of us is faced with the need of deciding whether it is more urgent, more important, more useful, to know and to see the good that is in men, or to know and to see the baseness and meanness of their motives. Or, to state the situation negatively, we must decide which is the more tolerable: blindness to the good or blindness to evil. The point is this: if the cynic has an eagle eye for evil, he is likely to need spectacles to see anything good; and if he is always sceptical where good is concerned, he is over-credulous where evil is concerned. Almost every day of our lives we meet people so mercilessly critical of others that they cannot see a virtue as radiant as the sun—people who insist on translating into terms of evil the untranslatable poetry of holiness. Our own age is fertile in great artists who display wondrous acuteness and finesse in delineating morbid psychological processes. But ask them to portray plain everyday goodness or simple heroism, and they at once become mawkishly sentimental or trivially rhetorical. On the other hand, we have all had the good fortune to know men of robust intellect and upright character, as revealed in distinguished achievement, who never could be brought by fair means or foul to understand certain vulgar and wretched motives in people who were bound in the end to trick them; and such men we have admired in their sublime childishness—in that obtuseness which was the guarantee of their delicacy of sentiment, that gullibility which was the mainstay of their best manhood.

On this basis the conduct of parents and teachers toward children becomes clearer, along with our homesickness for our “age of innocence,” when, as we say, the world looked rosier to us, purer, better, more beautiful, than it is now. Nor is the latter an empty sentimentality. It is, rather, a harking back to the first and truer vision that opened before our minds, a vision that has been involved and complicated and deepened with the years but which must ever triumph in the end over other concepts of life that may seem wiser on the surface but will prove less sound underneath. Of course, individuality is universality as well as limitation: innocence and knowledge are stresses and not absolutes. The cynic is never without some experience of the good, nor is the naïve simpleton wholly blind to artful manoeuvres—the goose has at least a trace of the fox’s slyness. Whence that solemn “entrance upon life,” prefaced by ritualistic words, which parents of all races and nations hold in store for their children. Hence also the duty incumbent upon all of us to develop such awareness of evil as is indispensable for performing the work we have undertaken. If temperament prevents us from making such compromises, we should withdraw; not because innocence is not a desirable quality, but because it is not an excuse for incompetence. To make a point of ingenuousness is a silly thing, as it is silly also to expect that reality will adapt itself to individual illusion. There are people, for instance, who are forever protesting their disgust at the vileness they have to associate with in political life, at the selfish interests that press upon them from every side. This self-seeking they cannot eradicate; in fact, they must conciliate it to a certain extent or wink at its conciliation. What they are really trying to do is transform, I will not say a chain-gang of convicts, but just an army of politicians into a congregation of spotless souls. The best advice we can give them is that they should retire from politics. If you shiver when you see a corpse, don’t become an undertaker—laudable and necessary as his profession may be. Society, with all the instrumentalities at its disposal, tries to put men into positions where they fit. Wisely it refrains from entrusting to sky-soaring philosophers or ingenuous heroes such portions of its work as require shallower intellects and less noble hearts but an acuter awareness of the frailties of men. Life, in its own processes of failure and success, tends to set thief against thief, rascal against rascal, that they may read in the depths of each other’s souls, fight each other, offset each other, and thus get through with a lot of necessary business that otherwise would never be done in the world.