A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham
They talk about art as though they knew all about it and what they don’t know weren’t worth knowing. But art isn’t as simple as all that. How can it be when so many diverse things enter into its origins: sex, imitation, play, habit, boredom and the wish for change, emotional desire for enhancement of pleasure or diminution of pain.
It is the irreparableness of every action which makes life so difficult. Nothing occurs again precisely as it came about before, and in the most important things there has been no previous experience to guide one. It is once for all that one takes each action, and every mistake is irremediable. Sometimes, looking back, one is appalled at one’s errors, one seems to have wasted so much time in idle byways, and often to have mistaken the road so completely that whole years appear frustrate.
In most biographies it is the subject’s death which is most interesting. That last inevitable step has a fascination and even a practical interest which no previous event can equal. I cannot understand why a biographer, having undertaken to give the world details of a famous man’s life, should hesitate, as so often happens, to give details of his death also. It is the man’s character which is the chief interest, his strength and weakness, his courage and despondency; and these are nowhere more apparent than on a death-bed. It imports us as much to know how great men die as to know how they live. Our lives are conditioned by outer circumstances, but our death is our own. To see how others have taken that final journey is the only help we have when ourselves we enter upon it.
Sometimes I ask myself at night what I have done that day, what new thought or idea I have had, what particular emotion I have felt, what there has been to mark it off from its fellows; and too often it appears to me insignificant and useless.
Moralists say that the performance of duty brings happiness. Duty is dictated by law, by public opinion, and by conscience. Each by itself may have no great power, but the three together are probably irresistible. But public opinion and law are sometimes antagonistic—as in duelling on the continent; and public opinion is variable; what one section reprobates another approves; and different professions, army, church and commerce, have their different standards.
There are occasions when to do one’s duty obviously is not a pleasure; then often enough it is not done, and for its performance new sanctions must be found. In the Boer War officers placed in dangerous positions surrendered very easily, preferring that dishonour to the chance of death; and it was not till some were shot and more cashiered that the majority nerved themselves to a stouter courage.
After all, the distinctive element of Christianity as it is taught by the divines is the consciousness of sin. It is this which looms in the outlook on life of believers, intimidating them, and renders them unable and unwilling to take existence frankly. The theory of man is imperfect, they say, unless the fact of sin is recognised. But what is sin? Sin is an action which troubles the conscience. And what is conscience? It is the feeling you have that you have done something of which others (and maybe God) would disapprove. It would be interesting to attempt an analysis of conscience. It would be necessary to examine how it arose, the estimation in which it has been held, its psychological ground and the affairs upon which it exercises sway. The Pathan who has killed his man is not conscience-stricken, nor is the Corsican who has murdered his enemy in vendetta. The scrupulous Englishman will hesitate to lie; the Spaniard, no less scrupulous, will not think twice about it.
Cesare Borgia may well be taken as an example of almost perfect self-realisation. The only morality, so far as the individual is concerned, is to give his instincts, mental and bodily, free play. In this lies the æsthetic beauty of a career, and in this respect the lives of Cesare Borgia and of Francis of Assisi are parallel. Each fulfilled his character and nothing more can be demanded of any man. The world, judging only of the effect of action upon itself, has called one infamous and the other saintly. How would the world judge such a man as Torquemada, the most pious creature of his age, who perfected an instrument of persecution which has cost more deaths and greater misery than many a long and bloody war?
On the individual in relation to himself there is neither obligation nor duty: to the individual the words are meaningless, and it is only in his relation to others that they acquire significance. With regard to himself the individual has perfect freedom, for there is no power with authority to give him orders.
Society makes rules for its own preservation, but the individual can have no duty toward society: there is nothing to restrain him but prudence. He can go his own way, freely, doing what he wills, but he must not complain if society punishes him when he does not act in accordance with its dictates. More efficacious than all the laws society has made for its self-preservation is the institution of conscience, setting thereby a policeman in every man’s bosom to see that its laws are obeyed; and it is singular that even in a man’s most private affairs, where one might imagine society has no concern, conscience leads him to act according to the good of this organism outside himself.
One of the great differences between Christianity and Science is that the first gives a high and important value to the individual, while to the other, to Science, he is of no account.
Relativity applies to conscience necessarily from the transitoriness of human ideas of good and evil. A man in one age will be conscience-stricken for neglecting to do an act the performance of which in another will be followed by remorse.
Common-sense is often taken as the rule of ethics. But if it is analysed, if its dictates are taken one by one, the student will be astounded at the contradictions he finds. He will not be able to understand how common-sense orders diametrically opposite things in different countries and among different classes and sections in the same country. He will even find that the dictates of common-sense in the same country, in the same class and section, are often mutually incompatible.
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made up of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
Common-sense makes a great show of disinterestedness in regard to our dealings with others, but it is only a show. Take the question whether it is proper to refrain from indulgence till the surrounding want and misery have been removed; common-sense gives an unhesitating negative.
If sensual indulgence is condemned the condemnation should be thorough. If you condemn the appetites of the palate or of sex, you should condemn also the other appetites for warmth, comfort, exercise and the beauties of art and nature. Otherwise it is not sensual indulgence that you condemn, but some other frailty which rests only in the pleasures of eating or of sex.
The success of religious systems is proof of the absorbing egoism of men and of their lack of mental balance.
No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
Wisdom can hardly be termed a virtue, for it is made up of intellectual qualities which one man has and another not. If wisdom is necessary to right action, this can only be possible to the minority of mankind.
Intuitionism rests on the principle of an absolute in morals, and its insecurity appears in the fact that the intuitions which tell men how to act differ from country to country, from age to age, and from man to man. Intuition will tell a man to commit a murder in one age and in another will cause him to revolt from the idea. The judgments which seem to come from no discernible source can very simply be shown to arise from the teaching of childhood and the practice of neighbours. The explanation of intuition is the same as that of advertisement: tell a man ten thousand times that Pears Soap is good for the complexion and eventually he will have an intuitive certainty of the fact.
It is curious to find a father of the church, St. Chrysostom, hinting at the relativeness of morality in the words: “Do not ask how these (Old Testament precepts) can be good, now when the need for them has passed: ask how they were good when the period required them.”
Desire is pleasurable in its early stages, but, becoming intense, is painful. Then the result of desire is the same as that of pain, and we seek to get rid of the desire rather than to obtain the object desired. Sometimes love is so violent that the desire becomes no longer a pleasure but a pain, and then men will kill the woman they love so as to rid themselves of the desire.
Hunger is a desire which is on the boundary line between pain and pleasure. It shows better than any other state that pain and pleasure arise from the degree of desire. When hunger is moderate the sensation is agreeable, and the idea of food gives pleasure; but when it is excessive there is only pain, and then one’s thoughts are engaged not with the satisfactoriness of eating a good dinner, but merely with the getting rid of an unpleasant feeling.
No more stupid apology for pain has ever been devised than that it elevates. It is an explanation due to the necessity of justifying pain from the Christian point of view. Pain is nothing more than the signal given by the nerves that the organism is in circumstances hurtful to it; it would be as reasonable to assert that a danger signal elevates a train. But one would have thought that the ordinary observation of life was enough to show that in the great majority of cases, pain, far from refining, has an effect which is merely brutalising. An example in point is the case of hospital in-patients: physical pain makes them self-absorbed, selfish, querulous, impatient, unjust and greedy; I could name a score of petty vices that it generates, but not one virtue. Poverty also is pain. I have known well men who suffered from that grinding agony of poverty which befalls persons who have to live among those richer than themselves; it makes them grasping and mean, dishonest and untruthful. It teaches them all sorts of detestable tricks. With moderate means they would have been honourable men, but ground down by poverty they have lost all sense of decency.
For the average man a sufficient rule of life is to follow his instincts controlled by the moral standard of the society in which he lives.
He raged, a twopenny halfpenny Prometheus, as unquiet thoughts gnawed at his heart, while he strove to pierce the mystery of life.
I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle may only go straight and the bishop obliquely. These things are to be accepted, and with these rules the game must be played: it is foolish to complain of them.
The study of Ethics is part and parcel of the study of Nature; for man must learn his place in the world before he can act rightly and reasonably.
There is as little justification for ascribing any end or object to the existence of man as for that pre-supposition accepted by the whole of antiquity and by the Middle Ages, that the heavenly bodies must move in circles because the circle is the most perfect figure.
With regard to the end of human existence compare that old objection of the Aristotelians to the Copernican system. What use, they asked, could be the immeasurable space between the outermost planets and the fixed stars?
That which is universal in mankind cannot be evil: it is a fault with many ethical systems that, more or less arbitrarily, they fix upon certain tendencies of man and call them good; and upon others and call them evil. How much greater would human happiness have been if the gratification of the sexual instinct had never been looked upon as wicked. A true system of ethics must find out those qualities which are in all men and call them good.
The actions to which men accord their praise appear to be those by which themselves, in whole or in part, will benefit; but also they are capable of admiration for any striking, dramatic deeds which strike their fancy or excite their wonder.
That we do not often consciously make pleasure our aim is no argument against the idea that the attainment of pleasure is the object to which all actions tend.
Theoretically there are no bounds to the power of the state except the fear of revolution; the only limit to its action is its own capacity. Consequently the state will nationalise all industries which it can carry on better than individuals, leaving to these only the parts of commerce which individual greed is likely to perform in a more thorough and more economical way. The state must never forget how much truth lies in the axiom of Mandeville that private vices are public benefits.
The right to freedom: there is no such right, except when the state for its own ends favours it.
To the individual, morality can be nothing more than the expression of a personal satisfaction; it is only a matter of æsthetics.
Might is right. There is no such thing as duty or moral obligation. In itself one course of action is as justifiable as another; the well-being of the state is the only standard of ethics. The relation between the individual and the state is a tacit contract: the individual for certain advantages to himself behaves in a way advantageous to the state.
If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.
To the universe and to man no end is discoverable. Everything is relative. Nothing is certain. Morality depends on the state, which is omnipotent. Might is right.
What is the advantage of progress? How does it benefit the Japanese that they have assumed Western Civilisation? Are not the Malays, on the borders of their forests, the Kanakas, on their fertile islands, as happy as the London slummer? What does it all end in? What is the use of it? I don’t know the answer.
That pleasure is transitory is no proof that it is evil, for what can man find that endures to all eternity?
It is salutary to realise the fundamental isolation of the individual mind. We have no certain knowledge of any consciousness but our own. We can only know the world through our own personality. Because the behaviour of others is similar to our own, we surmise that they are like us; it is a shock to discover that they are not. As I grow older I am more and more amazed to discover how great are the differences between one man and another. I am not far from believing that everyone is unique.
I think it can be proved very fairly that pleasure is the end which men set to their endeavours. The word, in puritanical ears, has an unpleasant sound, and many have preferred to talk of happiness; but happiness can only be defined as a continued state of pleasure, and if one deserves blame so does the other: you cannot reasonably call a straight line good if the points that compose it are evil. Of course pleasure need not consist exclusively of sensual gratifications, though it is significant of human feeling that it is those especially to which the mind, in using the word, seems to refer. To the average man the æsthetic pleasures, the pleasures of effort, the pleasures of the imagination are so pale in comparison with the vivid delights of sense that they do not enter his mind when he hears the word.
Some, like Goethe, have taken harmony as that which gives life its justification; and some, like Walter Pater, have taken beauty. But when Goethe tells men to cultivate all their capacities, bidding them to see life whole, he is preaching unabashed hedonism; for surely men gain greater happiness the more completely they develop themselves. To make beauty the aim and end of life is, I think, a little foolish: it is a fair-weather doctrine which can be of small use in any unusual stress; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted; yet the sun that day set no less spendidly than usual.
Conscience. The power of it is well indicated by that statement of John Henry Newman, in a note to the Apologia, that men “would rather be in error with the sanction of their conscience, than be right with the mere judgment of their reason.”
Theologians say that science is met somewhere by a barrier at which it can only confess its helplessness. But is religion in a better case? Tertullian acknowledged that it wasn’t when he made the statement: credo quia absurdum est.
If the use of religion is to make men moral, and so long as it does this dogma
Or is it that the missionaries think that God will condemn to endless torment all who do not share their particular beliefs? No wonder they think you’re cursing and swearing when you say, Good God!
It would be interesting if it could be shown that the fear of death is a European malady: observe the stolid composure with which the Oriental and African races look forward to it.
Perfection seems to be nothing more than a complete adaptation to the environment; but the environment is constantly changing, so perfection can never be more than transitory.