LECTURES ON SOCIAL MORALITY. LECTURE I. SOCIAL MORALITY; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT SHOULD Lecture. I HAVE proposed to deliver a course of lectures on Object Social Morality. You may ask me what I understand of this by that phrase. If my sense of it differed from the ordinary sense I would begin by telling you what the difference is. But so far as I know, my sense is the ordinary sense. What that is I think we may ascertain if we question different writers on Society and the manners of Society about their object. If we can discover something which has been common to them all amidst the greatest disagreements of opinion, taste, and character, we may conclude that to be the aim of the Social Moralist as such. It might seem most natural to take the earliest of them first. My inclination would be in favour of that method. But the old writers are often said to be obsolete or to deal in book-wisdom, not in practical wisdom. I will begin with one who is open to no such suspicion. In the last century a series of Letters appeared of Chesterfield (1694 which you have all heard, which some of you may -1773). What he aimed at in his edu. cation. Forma tion of a habit. The novels possibly have read. They were addressed by Lord Chesterfield to his son. They were intended to form the manners of a young man, to cultivate in him the ease and grace which he may have inherited from at least one of his parents. If I said that Lord Chesterfield composed a Code of Manners for his son's use I should mislead you. He would have objected to the word 'Code,' as savouring of legal pedantry. Formal rules would not have produced the effect he desired. He would rather set before his pupil examples which were to be imitated or shunned. He had studied these examples in France as well as England; he possessed clear and keen habits of observation; he was himself the observed of all observers. For the kind of task which he imposed upon himself no one could be better fitted. The limits of that task were strictly defined. He did not care what it might behove men to do or to be who lay beyond the flaming battlements of 'the world'; he only troubled himself about that class which, according to his charts, was comprehended within 'the world.' In them he sought not merely certain outward acts, but an internal habit, a something which would give to all their doings, words, gestures, evenness and order. He demanded of them for this end abstinence from many ways and practices into which if they did not count themselves members of a special circle they might fall. He assumed the existence of a standard to which they ought to be assimilated. Here is Social Morality as illustrated by one of its professors. If we pass from these letters of Chesterfield to some of the last of the very able and elaborate novels which were produced in the same century, we are presented with other century. and much more varied pictures of Social Morality. Fielding had probably no access to the sacred inclo- Fielding (1707sure within which Chesterfield dwelt. He was a metro- 1754). politan Justice of the Peace; he had known personally something of those who came before him in that capacity, much also of the life of ordinary citizens and country squires, of schoolmasters and clergymen. In them, as well as in the servants who waited upon them, and in the highwaymen who were their terror, he discovered different exhibitions of character, different standards of behaviour, different apprehensions of justice and injustice, of right and of wrong. In every class there was evidently some standard; in every one some apprehension of justice and injustice, of right and wrong. If these had been absent, the members of such classes could not have been represented in any story; they would not have been subjects for a work of Art. The novelist does not pretend to try them by A student any canons of his; but he makes us feel that they had of charactheir canons, and denounced acts which appeared to them a departure from their canons. You see that unlike as Fielding was to Chesterfield, their aim was in this sense similar. It is with a certain disposition or habit or character that both are conversant. You may call it in either if you please an artificial disposition or habit or character. But it is by some means or other wrought into the man or woman. It becomes his or hers. ter. societies But observations upon one or another portion of Habits of English society could not satisfy an age which, how- various ever inferior to ours in facilities for locomotion, was yet compared. becoming acquainted with a number of lands; an age which was hearing of the customs, inventions, heredi Gold smith. tary wisdom of China, to which the falling Mogul Empire was disclosing the faiths and languages that had been buried within it. To compare the modes of thinking and belief, fluctuating or permanent, which prevailed in these lands with those of the West, became a favourite occupation of men of letters. They liked to imagine how a cultivated Chinese or Hindoo or Turk or Persian would regard the manners and notions which he met with in England or France. Oliver Goldsmith, in his Citizen of the World, pursued this line of fancy, noting, in his quiet way, the effect which the follies of his countrymen might produce on a stranger. He was following in the wake of a man more thoroughly cultivated, if not more shrewd, than himself. About a hundred years before Mr. Morier published his clever Hajji Baba in England, the citizens of Paris were excited and charmed by a set of letters said to be addressed by a native of Ispahan to his friends, which criticised rather freely not only their external acts, but the conviction or want of conviction, the beliefs or unbeliefs, out of which the acts arose. The author of the letters, at first anonymous, proved to be a man of ancient family, the President of a Parliament in the South of France, a learned lawyer as well as an accomplished and vivacious writer. In a later time, after he had visited England, the President Montesquieu exhibited the genius which had produced the Persian letters in a work scarcely less lively, but more akin to Esprit des the habits of his profession. His Esprit des Lois is, or Lois, 1748. was till lately, on the list of subjects for our Moral Science Tripos. It is, in fact, a Treatise on Social Morality. There was something Montesquieu perceived in every country besides the laws, written on tables or Montes quieu (16891755). Lettres Persanes, 1721. |