Practical Ethics Part 8

+Beauty is a jealous mistress.+--If we trifle with her; if we fall in love with pretentious imitations and elaborate ornamentations which have no beauty in them, but are simply gotten up to sell; then the true and real beauty will never again suffer us to see her face. She will leave us to our idols: and our power to appreciate and admire true beauty will die out.

Fidelity to beauty requires that we have no more things than we can either use in our work, or enjoy in our rest. And these things that we do have must be either perfectly plain; or else the ornamentation about them must be something that expresses a genuine admiration and affection of our hearts. A farmer's kitchen is generally a much more attractive place than his parlor; just because this law of simplicity is perfectly expressed in the one, and flagrantly violated in the other. The study of a scholar, the office of the lawyer and the business man, is not infrequently a more beautiful place, one in which a man feels more at home, than his costly drawing room. What sort of things we shall have, and how many, cannot be determined for us by any general rule; still less by aping somebody else. In our housekeeping, as in everything else, we should begin with the few things that are absolutely essential; and then add decoration and ornament only so fast as we can find the means of gratifying cherished longings for forms of beauty which we have learned to admire and love. "Simplicity of life," says William Morris, "even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside. If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. If the real thing is not to be had, learn to do without it. If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

THE REWARD.

+The refining influence of beauty.+--Devotion to art and beauty in simplicity and sincerity develops an ever increasing capacity for its enjoyment. As Keats, the master poet of pure beauty, tells us,

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pa.s.s into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep, Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

The refining influence of the love of beauty draws us mysteriously and imperceptibly, but none the less powerfully, away from what is false in thought and base in action; and develops a deep and lasting affinity for all that is true and good. The good, the true, and the beautiful are branches of a common root; members of a single whole: and if one of these members suffer, all the members suffer with it; and if one is honored, all are honored with it.

THE TEMPTATION.

+Luxury the perversion of beauty.+--Luxury is the pleasure of possession, instead of pleasure in the thing possessed. Luxury buys things, not because it likes them, but because it likes to have them.

And so the luxurious man fills his house with all sorts of things, not because he finds delight in these particular things, and wants to share that delight with all his friends; but because he supposes these are the proper things to have, and he wants everybody to know that he has them.

The man who buys things in this way does not know what he wants.

Consequently he gets cheated. He buys ugly things as readily as beautiful things, if only the seller is shrewd enough to make him believe they are fashionable. Others, less intelligent than this man, see what he has done; take for granted that because he has done it, it must be the proper thing to do; and go and do likewise. Thus taste becomes dulled and deadened; the costly and elaborate drives out the plain and simple; the desire for luxury kills out the love of beauty; and art expires.

THE VICE OF DEFECT.

+Ugly surroundings make ugly souls.+--The outward and the inward are bound fast together. The beauty or ugliness of the objects we have about us are the standing choices of our wills. As the object, so is the subject. We grow into the likeness of what we look upon. Without harmony and beauty to feed upon, the love of beauty starves and dies. Our hearts become cold and hard. Not being called out in admiration and delight, our feelings brood over mean and sensual pleasures; they dwell upon narrow and selfish concerns; they fasten upon the acc.u.mulation of wealth or the vanquishing of a rival, as subst.i.tutes for the n.o.bler interests that have vanished; and the heart becomes sordid, sensual, mean, petty, spiteful, and ugly. The spirit of man, like nature, abhors a vacuum; and into the heart from which the love of the beautiful has been suffered to depart, these hideous and ugly traits of character make haste to enter, and occupy the vacant s.p.a.ce. What Shakspere says of a single art, music, is true of art and beauty in general:

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils: The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted.

THE VICE OF EXCESS.

+The hollowness of ostentation.+--Man is never proud of what he really enjoys; never vain of what he truly loves; never anxious to show off the tastes and interests that are essentially his own. In order to take this false att.i.tude toward an object, it is necessary to hold it apart from ourselves: a thing which the true lover can never do. He who loves beautiful things will indeed wish others to share his joy in them. But this sharing of our joy in beautiful objects, is a very different thing from showing off our fine things, simply to let other people know that we have them. Ostentation is the vice of ignorant wealth and vulgar luxury. It estimates objects by their expensiveness rather than by their beauty; it aims to awaken in ourselves pride rather than pleasure; and to arouse in others astonishment rather than admiration.

THE PENALTY.

+Vulgarity akin to laziness.+--Art, and the beauty which it creates, costs painstaking labor to produce. And to enjoy it when it is produced, requires at first thoughtful and discriminating attention. The formation of a correct taste is a growth, not a gift. Hence the dull, the lazy, and the indifferent never acquire this cultivated taste for the beautiful in art. This lack of perception, this incapacity for enjoyment of the beautiful, is vulgarity. Vulgarity is contentment with what is common, and to be had on easy terms. The root of it is laziness. The mark of it is stupidity.

At great pains the race has worked out beautiful forms of speech, for communicating our ideas to each other. Vulgarity in speech is too lazy to observe these precise and beautiful forms of expression; it clips its words; throws its sentences together without regard to grammar; falls into slang; draws its figures from the coa.r.s.e and low and sensual side of life, instead of from its pure and n.o.ble aspects.

Vulgarity with reference to dress, dwellings, pictures, reading, is of the same nature. It results from the dull, unmeaning gaze with which one looks at things; the shiftless, slipshod way of doing work; the "don't care" habit of mind which calls anything that happens to fall in its way "good enough."

From all that is precious and beautiful and lovely the vulgar man is hopelessly excluded. They are all around him; but he has no eyes to see, no taste to appreciate, no heart to respond to them. "All things excellent," so Spinoza tells us, "are as difficult as they are rare."

The vulgar man has no heart for difficulty; and hence the rare excellence of art and beauty remain forever beyond his reach.

CHAPTER XIII.

Animals.

Animals stand midway between things and persons. We own them, use them, kill them, even, for our own purposes. Yet they have feelings, impulses, and affections in common with ourselves. In some respects they surpa.s.s us. In strength, in speed, in keenness of scent, in fidelity, blind instinct in the animal is often superior to reason in the man.

Yet the animal falls short of personality. It is conscious, but not self-conscious. It knows; but it does not know that it knows. It can perform astonishing feats of intelligence. But it cannot explain, even to itself, the way in which it does them. The animal can pa.s.s from one particular experience to another along lines of a.s.sociation in time and s.p.a.ce with marvelous directness and accuracy. To rise from a particular experience to the universal cla.s.s to which that experience belongs; and then, from the known characteristics of the cla.s.s, to deduce the characteristics of another particular experience of the same kind, is beyond the power of the brute.

The brute likewise has feelings; but it does not recognize these feelings as parts of a total and permanent self. Pleasure and pain the animal feels probably as keenly as we do. Of happiness or unhappiness they probably know nothing.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Animals can be trained to do right, but they cannot love righteousness.

They can be trained to avoid acts which are a.s.sociated with painful consequences, but they cannot hate iniquity. The life of an animal is a series of sensations, impulses, thoughts, and actions. These are never gathered up into unity. The animal is more than a machine, and less than a person.

THE DUTY.

+We ought to realize that the animal has feelings as keen as our own.+--We owe to these feelings in the animal the same treatment that we would wish for the same feelings in ourselves. For animals as for ourselves we should seek as much pleasure and as little pain as is consistent with the performance of the work which we think it best to lay upon them. The horse cannot choose for itself how heavy a load to draw. We ought to adapt the load to its strength. And in order to do that we must stop and consider how much strength it has. The horse and cow and dog cannot select their own food and shelter. We must think for them in these matters; and in order to do so wisely, we must consider their nature, habits, and capacities. No person is fit to own an animal, who is not willing to take the trouble to understand the needs, capacities, and nature of that animal. And acts which result from ignorance of such facts as can be readily learned are inexcusable.

THE VIRTUE.

+Kindness is the recognition that a feeling of another being is of just as much consequence as a feeling of my own.+--Now we have seen that in some respects animals are precisely like ourselves. Kindness recognizes this bond of the kind, or kinship, as far as it extends. Kindness to animals does not go so far as kindness to our fellow-men; because the kinship between animals and man does not extend as far as kinship between man and man. So far as it does extend, however, kindness to animals treats them as we should wish to be treated by a person who had us in his power. Kindness will inflict no needless suffering upon an animal; make no unreasonable requirement of it; expose it to no needless privation.

THE REWARD.

+Kindness toward animals reacts upon our hearts, making them tender and sympathetic.+--Every act we perform leaves its trace in tendency to act in the same way again. And in its effect upon ourselves it matters little whether the objects on which our kindness has been bestowed have been high or low in the scale of being. In any case the effect remains with us in increased tenderness, not only toward the particular objects which have called it forth, but toward all sentient beings. Kindness to animals opens our hearts toward G.o.d and our fellow-men.

He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear G.o.d who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

THE TEMPTATION.

+We are tempted to forget this sensitive nature of the animal, and to treat it as a mere thing.+--We have a perfect right to sacrifice the pleasure of an animal to the welfare of ourselves. We have no right to sacrifice the welfare of the animal to our capricious feelings. We have no right to neglect an animal from sheer unwillingness to give it the reasonable attention which is necessary to provide it with proper food, proper care, proper shelter, and proper exercise. A little girl, reproved for neglecting to feed her rabbits, when asked indignantly by her father, "Don't you love your rabbits?" replied, "Yes, I love them better than I love to feed them." This love which doesn't love to feed is sentimentality, the fundamental vice of all personal relations, of which we shall hear more later. The temptation arises even here in our relations to the animal. It is always so much easier to neglect a claim made upon us from without, than to realize and respect it.

THE VICE OF DEFECT.

+Ignorant or willful disregard of the nature and welfare of an animal is cruelty.+--Overloading beasts of burden; driving them when lame; keeping them on insufficient food, or in dark, cold, and unhealthy quarters; whipping, goading, and beating them constantly and excessively are the most common forms of cruelty to animals. Pulling flies to pieces, stoning frogs, robbing birds' nests are forms of cruelty of which young children are often guilty before they are old enough to reflect that their sport is purchased at the cost of frightful pain to these poor innocent and defenseless creatures. The simple fact that we are strong and they are weak ought to make evident, to anyone capable of the least reflection, how mean a thing it is to take advantage of our superior strength and knowledge to inflict pain on one of these creatures which nature has placed under the protection of our superior power and knowledge, and lead us to resolve

Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

THE VICE OF EXCESS.