VERNON LEE'S " BA.LDWIN."
IN the volume of dialogues " On Views and Aspirations," which Vernon Lee has just issued, she makes her chief inter- locut)r, Baldwin, an atheistic sort of Socrates, who describes the result of his education and self-culture as having come to this,— " a creature troubled with the desire to create, yet able only to criticise ; consumed (which is worse) with the desire to affirm, yet condemned to deny ; a life spent in being repelled by the exaggerations of one's friends and attracted by the seeming moderation of one's enemies, in taking exception in the midst of assent ; scepticism in a nature that desires to believe and rely, intellectual isolation for a man who loves to be borne along by the current." And Vernon Lee herself adds, by way of comment :—" A negative being in many respects, my friend Baldwin, as you have already been told, and negative perhaps all the more that, as you see, there is much that is positive in his nature. An illusive, shimmering personality, seem- ingly full of contradictions, yet at the same time almost repulsively cut and dried. Negative, self-contradictory, abstract as becomes an inhabitant of the country which lies, as I have observed, on the boundaries of fact and fancy." Baldwin, how-- ever, whether he lives in the world of fact or in the world of fancy, or on the boundary of the two, is evidently the final cause of Vernon Lee's dialogues. It is his " views and aspirations " which they express. It is his teaching which they were written to embody. What Plato's Socrates is to the dialogues of Plato,. Vernon Lee's Baldwin is to the dialogues of Vernon Lee;—the only difference being that Socrates believes himself to be inspired by a divinity, and that Baldwin looks up to nothing above him- self. It is he who enforces on two companions, the cynic and the agnostic, the "responsibilities of unbelief." It is he who does his best to cut the ground from under the Theist who, more passion- ately than skilfully, pleads for the "consolations of belief." It is he who tries to find for humane men of science a sufficient ground of objection to vivisection without having recourse to either a Divine law or an intuitive morality—which it is throughout assumed that impartial reason must reject. It is he who lays down that the true function of the novel is to show us what life really is, with a little less of inexorable realism than the facts of ex- perience, and a good deal less of dreamy unreality than the spirit of romance ; with more of hope in it than the harsh reality would justify, and more of knowledge in it than the idealistic spirit would admit. It is he who insists that Art should endeavour to introduce idealism into life, for the sake of improving life, and should study reality only in order to be the better able to make the reality of the future higher than the reality of the present. And it is he, finally, who insists that, however deep may be the speculative doubt on which our life rests, we can never really become despairers and pessimists except by first becoming purely self-regarding, and ceasing to devote our best energies to the amelioration of the lot of others. In other words, if the "views and aspirations" of Baldwin were left out of Vernon Lee's book, the dialogues they contain would lose all their drift and pertinence. And it seems to us to be worth while to try and make out what this clever woman who calls herself "Vernon Lee" really wishes us to regard as the ideal teacher of the new age. For all her interlocutors, without exception, treat Christianity as an absolutely exploded superstition, and with only one exception,—that of an enthu- siastic girl who is supposed to struggle vainly against Baldwin's imperturbable logic, and who dies early,—they look upon God as only another name for a perfectly inscrutable and certainly unmoral first cause, to whom (perhaps we ought to say "to which ") it is perfectly vain for men to look either for com- panionship or guidance.
After careful study of them, we should describe Baldwin's. "views and aspirations," as views which uniformly ignore the most important aspect of the question with which they deal, and aspirations which wing their flight in the direction in which they are most likely to be brought down to earth with a shock, if Baldwin's "views " should obtain the prevalence that he expects for them. For what are the most impressive of these views and the most earnest of these aspirations? The most impressive of his views is undoubtedly his contemptuous rejection of Theism, and of course still more of Revelation, and his contention that ethics spring out of the self-preserving instincts of hu man society, which generate human morality, to use his own expressive phrase, as a sort of "rule of the road" for man, "the rule that each coach- man must take a particular side of the street with reference to other coachmen." Again, the most earnest of Baldwin's aspira- tions are his eager desire to give scientific men a substantial ground for condemning and repudiating the cruelties of vivisec- tion, and his equally eager desire to make of Art and Literature beneficent agencies which may fix our thoughts and aims on what is noblest, without too much ignoring the conditions of our actual life.
Take first the most important of his views,—that all life springs from an inscrutable source, which must certainly be unmoral, and cannot by any possibility be stamped with any stamp of righteousness; together with the natural consequence of that view,—namely, that what we call righteousness is determined by
the pressure of social necessity, and merely points out the way in which men can best live with each other and develop each other's qualities. Where is the room there for" nobility " of any kind in human life? The critical point in this " view " is, of course, the implication as to what the feeling of moral obligation is, and how it shows itself. But Baldwin does not even so much as discuss what responsibility, and sin, and guilt mean ; whether they wait to assert themselves in their full strength till society gets itself fully organised, or cast their deepest shadows in primeval conditions of society ; whether the sense of right and wrong attaches most naturally to the consequences or to the inward springs of action, to the result or to the motive; whether the solemnity of the moral law ever nerves the individual to stand up against a whole society, or only speaks in the name of that society ; whether, for instance, the obligation of the soul to discover and announce to the world "moral truth" arises in the secrecy of the heart, and almost without the power of either discerning or expounding the con- sequences of accepting such truth, or whether it is a result of the frequent and reiterated experience that an un- fettered contemplation of the real world, and a candid announcement of what is seen, have always benefited mankind. On none of these aspects of the question does Baldwin touch, nor does he appear even to glance at them. On the contrary, he takes up the question of his friends' responsibility for announcing and justifying their unbelief to others, without any discussion of what responsi- bility means, wherein its sacredness consists, how it originates, what it involves, whether it be a reality at all. Later in the dialogues he deliberately puts aside that question, as one that does not really concern men. Whether there be any power of choice between one practical course and another, is a matter, he declares, which has no bearing on the enforcing of right and the punishment of wrong. Moral necessity or deter- minism may be either true or false, but the duty of en- forcing right and punishing wrong will be unaffected. Society will have just the same right to stamp out involuntary evil, as it has to stamp out voluntary evil, supposing voluntary evil to exist. Iii a word, Baldwin ignores all the critical points of the questions ou which he is most dogmatic. God as the source and inspiration of moral obligation, as the guardian and educator of man's free will, is never considered by him at all. He affirms that if God existed, we must regard him as respon- sible for all the evil acts of man. Yet this, if free will be a reality, is even less reasonable than to say that in making a fallible being, God is responsible for all the errors of man, without even considering how far weak and fallible beings are or are not competent to decide whether it may not be worthy of infallible wisdom to create a being intended for slow and gradual growth in wisdom. In one word, it appears to us that Baldwin's "views " on all the deepest matters, are views formed without even once touching the root-questions on which the truth or falsehood of those views ought properly to turn.
And then as to Baldwin's "aspirations." What can be less hopeful than his " aspiration " to convince men of science that it is a breach of " honour " to make the lower animals suffer, without profit to themselves, in order to benefit man, and man exclusively ? In the first place, the physiologists will reply with one voice, though not, we suspect, very sincerely, that the new insight into physiology and pathology which vivisection will produce, will be of as much advantage to the lower animals as it will be to man himself, and that the only difference is that while the benefit is to be equally divided, the coat will all he borne by the creatures which cannot resist our will. In the next place, they will ask how ethics that arise in social con- venience, in a " rule of the road " for human society, can be made to establish such a law of honour as this,—how the "rule of the road" can have resulted in putting horses into the shaft, and shooting down wolves and tigers, and in slaying sheep and oxen for our food, if it is to be an " honourable " understanding with all the subject races that they shall not suffer what only men gain by P Surely a less obvious result of the convenient understandings which result from mutual social pressures, cau hardly be imagined. Baldwin sets aside " pity " as an emotion quite inadequate to save the lower animals from the torments we might otherwise inflict upon them, and produces " honour " in its place. It is dishonourable, he asserts, to profit by the suffering of creatures which do not share our profit. Well, it may be so ; but even if it is, how is that deducible from the laws of social pressure ? It is convenient enough to physiologists apparently to inflict this pain. Why should the inconvenience it causes to those who are not members of our society be regarded as making it unsocial to inflict it P Baldwin does not attempt to show what he should show, —that unless we extend to creatures who cannot them- selves take account or give us the benefit of the " rule of the road," the full benefit of that rule, we shall soon be violating it amongst ourselves. The truth is that he could not have hit upon better evidence that morality does not arise in any " rule of the road " at all, than his wish to extend all the benefit of that rale to creatures who are incapable on their own behalf of paying any respect to it.
And then as to the next, and perhaps still more earnest, as- piration to which Baldwin gives expression,—the aspiration that the real world may be beautified and softened by the introduc- tion of a larger ideal element into it,—where is he to get his idealism from, if he denies, as he does, that idealism has its root in any real world, in any real being who already is what he desires man gradually to become ? Will not men who are told that morality has been the compromise resulting from the jostling of human lives together till they have been compelled to establish some fixed rules of give and take, suggest that the method which has already produced morality will produce all the requisite improvements in morality,—that if such improvements in the art of living as we have already discovered, have arisen out of collisions and the consequent arrangements dictated by obvious convenience, we should look in the same direction for all future improvements ; that it is idle to inculcate purity of thought or magnanimity of spirit as part of the hope of the future, unless you can justify such atone of mind by the obvious tendency of social movement and social collisions to produce it, —a clearly impossible task ? The truth is that Baldwin wants to combine that intellectual habit of mind which derides moral intuition and ignores any God but Nature, with the intellectual habit of mind which sees how deep and mysterious is the source of human morality, and of the human sense of beauty, and how impossible it is to explain the spell they put upon us, without deriving them from a being as much above ourselves, as physical nature appears to be beneath the noblest part of our life. Baldwin is not a philosopher. He is only an acute thinker who does his best to fit a philosophy that has its origin in the mire, with a pair of wings that may serve to lift it for short swallow- flights into the air.
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