Literature and Moral Purposes

Thu, 01 Nov 1990 00:00:00 -0500

It is tedious when a speaker begins by protesting modestly that he is inadequate to the task before him, or that he is the last person who should have been asked to discuss the theme of his address. We are apt to dismiss such wincing disclaimers as belonging to what Goldsmith called “the decorums of stupidity.” But the fact is that speakers often do feel inadequate to their task, and I am one of them at this moment. “Why, then, did you accept the invitation to speak?” you ask. I did it because I was intrigued by the theme proposed, and wanted to think about it. I may even have been so vain as to suppose that I might say something illuminating about it. But as I thought and wrote and wrote and thought, I was driven to admit that I had bitten off a very large chaw, and that I could chew only a part of it.

The subject is “Literature and Moral Purpose.” It is not a particularly engaging title, but I was unable to come up with anything better that was equally descriptive. What I am going to talk about is how far literature may be expected to discuss moral problems and what contribution it can make to their solution, without being untrue to itself.

I suppose I had better make some attempt to define or to give some general notion of what is meant by moral purpose. Is it not to give some guidance toward whatever is good as opposed to what is evil? But at once we meet a difficulty, for in some parts of the world things are considered to be good, or at least within the bounds of reasonable conduct, which are condemned elsewhere. Consider pederasty and sodomy, for instance, which were tolerated in the pagan world, but which until about the middle of this century were thought to be immoral in the Christian and Judaic world. But now the Christian and Judaic world, or a considerable part of it, has done a moral U-turn and what was condemned is tolerated, if not countenanced, even among members of the clergy, who are expected to be moral exemplars.

Presumably this is because among the seven Virtues, the Natural Virtues are regarded as less needful to the good life than the Supernatural Virtues. If one has Faith, Hope, and Charity, one may presumably manage with a smattering of Justice, Fortitude, Prudence, and Temperance. But these are very deep and stormy waters, and only subtle theologians can swim in them. As a literary man—specifically a novelist and a playwright—I must keep within the bounds of what I may be expected to know. And what I know is this: Virtually all novelists, playwrights, and poets of serious artistic purpose become inevitably involved in problems of morality, but such writers are on dangerous and artistically ruinous ground when they allow their work to be dominated by moral purpose.

When, for example, one speaks of great works of imaginative literature that have an avowed moral purpose, one thinks at once of Paradise Lost, in which Milton the artist so overreached Milton the theologian that Satan emerges as by far the most interesting character in the poem, and we are all drawn to admire him; in Paradise Regained, where Satan is reduced from the proud rebel to a much lesser tempter and schemer, the genius of Milton seems to be less happy. Or consider The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is remorselessly and unanswerably moral, so far as it goes, but which lives by the beauty of its style and its succession of vivid portraits and pictures. When we read that book as children, did we ever want to be Christian? Did we not yearn more toward one of the lesser roles, even that of Giant Despair? Reprobate children that we were, we thought that Christian was rather a pill, and that the others were full of exciting life.

Literature which is moral before it is artistic is rarely on the level of Milton or Bunyan. When I was a boy, I was a voracious reader. My home had plenty of moral literature on its shelves, and I was urged to read it for my betterment. There was lots of other literature, as well, but I was not forbidden, only discouraged, from reading it as it was said to be “beyond me,” which I quickly discovered meant that it dealt with life pretty much as life was, and not as the determinedly moral writers wanted me to think. My parents had both been brought up in uncompromisingly Christian homes, and so we had many books which they had won as Sunday School prizes—which meant that they had good memories rather than aggressively contrite hearts.

How awful those prize books were! I shall not bore you with too much detail about them, but I must mention one which was called Striving to Help. It was about a noble boy whose father was a business failure, not through any fault of his own but because evil men worked against him. The boy possessed a child’s printing press, equipped with rubber type, and he single-handedly lifted his family out of despair by going into the printing business. He sought orders from temperance societies to print their notices, and thus he killed two moral birds with one stone, although evil boys often altered the bills he printed to give them a pro-alcohol bias. But he won through in the end, because right always triumphs. He was very decent to his father, and never rubbed it in that his father was a failure. To his mother, of course, he was an object of almost hysterical adoration. There was an Oedipal element in this story which, at the time, I did not appreciate.

I have since wondered if some of those writers of moral tales for youth knew just what they were doing. Even Louisa May Alcott—unquestionably a writer of substantial gifts—included puzzling things in her books. Think of Little Men, which I read with avidity. One of the little men is a boy called Ned, and he is a boy of wavering moral character; but at Plumstead School he comes under the influence of Professor Bhaer, a German pedagogue who has an unusual method of discipline. When Ned is naughty, the Professor does not punish him; oh, no—the Professor makes Ned strike him on the hands with the cane, as hard as he can, until Ned is reduced to tears, because he dearly loves and admires the Professor. Even as a boy, I thought there was something decidedly kinky about the Professor. But did Louisa May Alcott know it? (She was not wholly without kinks herself.)

But let us return to the noble boy in Striving to Help. That boy made me feel very cheap indeed, for I too had a boy’s printing press, and it produced the messiest, worst-spelled, and most despicable work that anybody had ever seen. The most abject temperance society would have scorned to employ me. Fortunately, my father was not a failure, or my family would have sunk under the weight of my ineptitude.

Noble boys in fiction were the bane of my life. My family subscribed, on my behalf, to a journal called The Youth’s Companion, which originated in Boston, and every month it arrived, heavy with tales of noble boys who imposed their moral superiority on everybody around them by much the same sort of admirable industry. In my dark heart I hated those boys. They were unfailingly noble in their behavior toward girls, and I confess that there were times when my feelings about girls fell below their standard. I knew quite a few girls, and they were divided between the voluptuously desirable and beastly little sneaks and tattletales.

Only one thing saved me, I now believe. The boys in the Sunday School books were all English, and the boys in The Youth’s Companion were all Americans—usually Bostonians. I was a Canadian, and I grew up believing that Canadians were different—a lower order of being, incapable of morality in its highest reaches. One of the satisfactions of being a Canadian is that one is not expected to be a good example.

I gagged on tales of moral animals, like Beautiful Joe. You may not have encountered this powerfully moral dog, who met with much of the world’s evil in the form of wicked and cruel masters. But Joe was a sort of Canine Christian, and what was more, a Total Abstainer; Joe’s lips never touched alcohol. But I knew a few dogs in real life, most of whom were idiots, and whose moral behavior was well below Joe’s standard, for Joe lived a life of unwavering chastity, and the dogs I knew did not.

I could not stomach Little Lord Fauntleroy, who presented me with a political puzzle especially hard for a Canadian: What was that boy, and what did he do? He was an American, but by chance he inherited a title and went to England and became a Lord, and thereafter was remorselessly democratic toward anyone who kept it firmly in mind that he was a Lord, and behaved accordingly. The Little Lord existed to hammer home two things that were presented as mighty truths: We must be democratic and we must recognize the moral superiority that goes with poverty. It was easy, I thought, to be a democrat if everybody toadied to you, and I wished that the Little Lord could spend a few days at the school I went to, where to be known as a tireless reader (for I could not conceal it) was to be an outcast. Many of my persecutors enjoyed the blessing of poverty, but it did not seem to improve their characters. They were savage, jealous, and without bowels of compassion.

My sanity was saved by the books I read on the sly. Dickens, where evil people were plentiful and often rich, successful, and attractive. Thackeray, where snobbery seemed to be the mainspring of much of the action. Thomas Hardy, where life was complicated by opposed moralities and the uncontrollable workings of Destiny, and where God was decidedly not a loving Father. I did not know it at the time, but of course these were the works of literary artists who observed life with keen eyes and wrote about what they saw, as their widely varying temperaments enabled them to see. When I myself became a writer, it was these whom I chose to follow, as best I could, and not the aggressive moralists.

When I went to Oxford, I fell in with a young man in my college who had already been ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He found out that I had ambitions as a playwright and he conceived a great scheme: We would collaborate on a series of plays based on the great moral tales of the Bible—The Sacrifice of Isaac, Moses and the Golden Calf, Naboth’s Vineyard, and the like. I would write the plays, but he would supply the theology, the moral fervor, the zeal. I pointed out to him that in the eighteenth century, Mrs. Hannah More had had produced, in 1782, four Sacred Dramas: Moses in the Bulrushes, David and Goliath, Belshazzar, and Daniel. Even the authoress could not really like them. She wrote: “It would not be easy, I believe, to introduce Sacred Dramas on the English Stage. The scrupulous would think it profane, while the profane would think it dull.” My friend the young dominie was not daunted: We would succeed where Mrs. More had failed. But I was not convinced. In my childhood I had seen sacred dramas— Queen Esther and The Prodigal Son —and even in such a stage-struck child as I they produced a profound ennui. I had a lot of trouble getting rid of that ambitious young parson, I may tell you.

The problem was that I had changed my personal definition of the word “moralist.” For me, it meant not someone who imposes a moral system upon his art, but someone who sees as much of life as he can, and who draws what conclusions he may. What courses of action lead to what results? Are there absolute standards of good and evil? To what degree is what appears to be acceptable to society rooted in the truth of a particular man or woman? To what degree may the acceptance of a popular or socially approved code of conduct define or perhaps distort a character? Where do the springs of behavior lie; to what degree may they be controlled; how far is a human creature accountable to his group or his country or his professed belief (or unbelief) for what he does? How far is it permissible to talk of what a human creature makes of his life, and to what degree does an element of which he may be unaware in himself make his life for him? How far may we accept the dictum that life is a dream, and that we are creatures in that dream, which is being dreamed by something of which we have no knowledge? These, it seems to me, are the concerns of a true moralist. He is an observer and a recorder; he may not permit himself to be the judge, except by indirection.

Continue Reading »

First Things RSS Feed - Robertson Davies

Literature and Moral Purposes