MORAL BOOKS {Chesterton}
[There has been] a certain change in the general view of morals; not, I think, a change for the better. We have grown to associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness; according to us, a moral book is about moral people. But the old idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was about immoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogarth's ‘Gin Lane’ or ‘Stages of Cruelty,’ or it recorded, like the popular broadsheet, ‘God's dreadful judgment’ against some blasphemer or murderer. There is a philosophical reason for this change. The homeless skepticism of our time has reached a sub-conscious feeling that morality is somehow merely a matter of human taste—an accident of psychology. And if goodness exists only in certain human minds, a man wishing to praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it that there is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it is supreme. Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that virtue is visionary. Every book which admits evil is felt in some vague way to be admitting that goodness is unreal.
The modern instinct is that if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that remains good. But the older feeling was that if the heart of man was ever so evil, there was something that remained good—goodness remained good. An actual avenging virtue existed outside the human race; to that men rose, or from that men fell away. Therefore, of course, this law was as much demonstrated in the breach as in the observance. If Tom Jones violated morality, so much the worse for Tom Jones.
Fielding did not feel, as a melancholy modern would have done, that every sin of Tom Jones was in some way breaking the spell, or we may even say the fiction, of morality. Men spoke of the sinner breaking the law; but it was the law that broke him... [Fielding] would not have thought that he was serving morality at all of he had written a book about nice people... Telling the truth about the terrible struggle of the human soul is surely a very elementary part of the ethics of honesty. If the characters are not wicked, the book is.
This older and firmer conception of right as existing outside of human weakness and without reference to human error, can be felt in the very lightest and loosest of the works of old English literature. it is commonly unmeaning enough to call Shakespeare a great moralist; but in this particular way Shakespeare is a very typical moralist. Whenever he alludes to right and wrong it is always with this old implication. Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.
—G.K. Chesterton, ‘Tom Jones and Morality,’ All Things Considered
I was attempting to clear the library shelf—Walter de la Mare, Francis Palgrave, Jacksonville architecture. As I flipped through a volume of Chesterton’s essays, my eye was arrested by this sentence: ‘If the characters aren’t wicked, then the book is.’ It chimed uncannily with an ongoing family discussion about the portrayal of sin in books and movies. Chesterton brilliantly connected this issue with another that had been occupying my mind—that of the objective, active reality of virtue. {I love Chesterton’s phrase ‘an actual avenging virtue.’}
Thanks to a birthday present, I am now a proud member of the American Chesterton Society!
• detail from the cover art for The Goody-Naughty Book: The Naughty Side by Sarah Corey Rippey •
September 10, 2013