Part 15

her fiers servant, full of kingly aw And high disdaine, whenas his soveraine Dame So rudely handled by her foe he saw, With gaping jawes full greedy at him came, And, ramping on his shield, did weene the same Have reft away with his sharp rending clawes.

But it was a losing battle. The lion’s sudden fierceness was all in vain.

O then, too weake and feeble was the forse Of salvage beast.

Now that her defender is slain, what is to become of Lady Truth?

Who now is left to keepe the forlorn maid From raging spoile of lawless victor’s will?

The lover of the old order does not stop to ask whether the lion may not have made a mistake, and whether the object of his attack may not have been, instead of a proud Paynim, only a Christian knight who had approached to ask his way. Nor does he feel pity for the pains inflicted by the lion’s “sharp rending clawes.” He only cries, “Poor lion! Poor Lady Truth!”

“But,” says the careful reader, “are you not getting away from your subject? You proposed the question, ‘Why are good people so cruel?’ You began with the conversation of excellent ladies in the drawing-room, and now you have wandered off into faery land, and are talking about the Lady Truth and the noble lion who died in her defense. I fear you are losing your way.”

On the contrary, dear reader, I think, as the children say when they are hunting the thimble, we are “getting warm.” We started out to find a cause for the obliviousness of good people to the pain which they inflict on others, and we have come into the region of allegory. Now, one of the chief reasons why good people are cruel is that it is so easy for them to allegorize.

In an allegory virtues and vices are personified. Each is complete in itself, and when it once has been set going it follows a preordained course. It does not grow into something else, and it is incapable of repentance or improvement. In the morality plays a virtue is as virtuous and a vice as vicious at the beginning as at the end. Spenser prefixes to “The Faerie Queene” a prose explanation of the meaning of each important character. “The first of the Knight of the Red-crosse, in whom I set forth Holynes; the second of Sir Guyon, in whome I sette forth Temperance; the third of Britomartis, a lady knight, in whom I picture Chastity.” Now, after this explanation we are relieved of all those anxieties which beset us when we watch creatures of flesh and blood setting out in the world to try their souls. Everything is as much a matter of invariable law as the reactions of chemical elements. The Knight of the Red-cross may appear to be tempted, but he is really immune. He cannot fall from grace. From that disaster he is protected by the definition. We have only to learn what the word holiness means to know what he will do. As for Sir Guyon, when once we learn that he is Temperance, we would trust him anywhere. For such characters there is nothing possible but ultimate triumph over their foes. And what of their foes? Being allegorical characters, they cannot be reformed. There is nothing to do but to kill them without compunction, or if we can catch them in the traps which they have set for others, and make them suffer the torments they have themselves invented, so much the better. We welcome the knight--

Who slayes the Gyaunt, wounds the Beast, And strips Duessa quight.

We have no compunctions as we watch the administration of poetical justice. Whatever happens to the false Duessa and to such miscreants as Sansfoy and Sansjoy and Sansloy, we say that it serves them right.

If we can only hold fast to the allegorical clue, and be assured that he is dealing with sins and not with persons, we can follow Dante through purgatory without flinching. The moral always is a good one, and full of suggestiveness.

But the moment we mistake an allegorical character for a person of flesh and blood we get into trouble. Even the most perfect parable represents only a certain phase of reality. When it is forced beyond its real intention and taken literally it shocks our sense of humanity. It needs to be interpreted by the same wise spirit that conceived it. We repeat the story of the symbolic virgins who had forgotten to put oil in their lamps, or of the servant who was too timid to put his master’s money out to usury. The child asks, “Wasn’t it cruel of those wise virgins not to give the others just a little of their oil? And after the door was shut and the foolish virgins knew how foolish they were and were sorry, couldn’t the people inside have opened the door just a little bit? And just because the servant was afraid to go to the bank with the money, because it was so little, ought the master to have been so hard with him as to say, ‘Cast ye the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness; there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth?’ Why didn’t he give him another chance?”

Then the parent will explain that these are symbolic characters. Or perhaps he may not try to explain, but change the subject and read a story of real people like that of the prodigal son or the good Samaritan. The child may be made to understand that while the door is always shut against a sin, it is always open for the sinner who repents.

The sensitive child takes up the “Pilgrim’s Progress” and reads of the way Christian went on his way to the heavenly city, meeting all kinds of people, yet apparently without sympathy for most of them. “Why did he leave his wife and little children in the City of Destruction and go off alone? If he knew that the city was to be burned up, why didn’t he stay with them? He doesn’t seem to care very much for what happens to people who are not of his set.” So it seems to be. Mr. Hold-the-world, Mr. Money-love, and Mr. Save-all walk along with him, and then they go off the path to look into a silver-mine. Christian doesn’t take the trouble to find out what became of them. Bunyan says coolly, “Whether they fell into the pit by looking over the brink or whether they went down to dig, or whether they were smothered by the damps that commonly arise, of these things I am not certain; but this I observed, that they were never seen that way again.” Christian goes on after the tragedy perfectly unconcerned, singing a cheerful hymn. It was none of his business what happened to those who wandered off the road. He is rather pleased than otherwise when Vain-Confidence falls into the pit. When “the brisk young lad,” Ignorance, joins him Christian converses with him only long enough to find out his name and where he came from. Then instead of trying to improve him he leaves him behind. Poor Ignorance trudges after, but he never can catch up.

All this is right in an allegory. Ignorance must be left behind, Vain-Confidence must perish in the pit; from the City of Destruction we must flee without waiting for others to follow. This is a very simple lesson in the way of life. The next lesson is more difficult and it is quite different,--how to treat ignorant and vainglorious and otherwise imperfect _persons_.

The first thing we have to remember is that they are persons, and that persons are quite different from allegorical characters. Persons can change their minds, they can repent and aspire after a better life, and above all they have feelings,--which abstract virtues and vices do not have. Does not the cruelty of the good chiefly arise from the fact that they do not see all this?

In a preceding essay we have considered Hawthorne’s judgment on the characters which he himself created. His most powerful story of sin and retribution wears to his eyes “a stern and sombre aspect too much ungladdened by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of Nature and real life.” He was aware that he was depicting not all of life, but only one aspect of it. He saw the characters of the “Scarlet Letter,” as they saw themselves, “in a kind of typical illusion.” He was fully aware that his treatment was symbolic rather than realistic. Real life is infinitely more complex and therefore more full of possibilities of good than any symbolic representation of it.

I do not think that good people are really as cruel at heart as one would be led to think from their words, or even from their acts. I remember a good professor of theology who was discoursing on the way in which the Canaanites were destroyed in order that Israel might possess the land.

“Professor,” asked a literal-minded student, “why did the Lord create the Canaanites, anyhow?”

“The Lord created the Canaanites,” answered the professor, “in order that Israel might have something on which to whet his sword.”

The words were bloodthirsty enough; and yet had I been a Canaanite in distress I should have made my way at once to the good professor’s house. I am sure that the moment he saw me he would have taken me in and ministered tenderly to my distresses and protected me from an unkindly world. But I should have taken the precaution to let him see me before he learned my name. A Canaanite in the abstract would be an abomination to him, and I would have to take pains to make him understand that I was a human being.

The word “cruel” is in its derivation akin to “crude;” it is that which is raw and unripe. Like all other good things, righteousness at first is crude. Crude righteousness takes no account of the difference between a sinner and his sin; it hates both alike with a bitter hatred, and visits on each the same condemnation. It is harsh and bitter. For all that it is a good thing, this unripe fruit of righteousness. Give it time and sunshine, and it will grow sweet and mellow.

The Riverside Press _Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._ _Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._

Transcriber’s Notes:

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.