G. K. Chesterton - "A Miscellany of Men"

Edgar Saltus - "Imperial Purple"

Unknown - "The Fall of the Niebelungs"

Norman Lindsay - "The Magic Pudding"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Problems of Conduct

D >> Durant Drake >> Problems of Conduct




In the first place, we cannot be sure, beforehand, that such a fight
will not be successful. Forlorn hopes sometimes win. We must encourage
men to venture, to take chances; only so can the great evils that ride
mankind be banished. If there is a fighting chance of accomplishing
a great good it is contemptible not to try; society must maintain a
code that leads at times to quixotic acts.

In the second place, the fight, even if in itself hopeless, is sure
to have valuable indirect results. It arouses others to the need; it
stimulates in others the willingness to sacrifice self-interest and
work for the general good. Every such honorable defeat has its share
in the final victory. The subtle benefits that result from such moral
gallantry are not evident on the surface, but they are there. No push
for the right is wholly wasted. It pays mankind to let its heroes
lavish their lives in apparently ineffective struggles; through their
example the apathetic masses are stirred and moved a little farther
toward their goal.

In general, we may say that the belief that virtue is not the right
road to happiness betrays inexperience and immaturity of judgment.
A moderate degree of morality saves man from many pitfalls into which
his unrestrained impulses would lead him. The highest levels of morality
bring a degree of happiness unknown to the "natural man." Who are the
happiest people in the world? The saints; those who are inwardly at
peace, who play their part with absolute loyalty. Even the irremediable
misfortunes of life do not affect them as they do the worldly man;
they have "learned the luxury of doing good." Of morality a recent
writer says, "Its distribution of felicity is ideally just. To him
who is most unselfish, who sinks most thoroughly his own interests
in those of the race of which he is a unit, it awards the most complete
beatitude." [Footnote: J. H. Levy, of London, in a funeral oration.]
To him who complains that he is moral but not happy, the answer is,
Be more moral! A high enough morality, a complete enough consecration,
will lead, in all but very abnormal cases, to happiness in the individual
life, as well as make its due contribution to the happiness of others.

Is there anything better than morality?

It is this lack of vision, this immature skepticism as to the
service of morality to human welfare, that has fired a flame of
revolt in certain minds, a revolt not merely against incidental
defects and outworn conceptions of morality, but against morality
uberhaupt. The declamations of these Promethean rebels make it
clear, however, that their protest is but the old fault of
condemning a necessary institution altogether for its imperfections
or its abuses. Morality has been blended with superstition and
tyranny, has been often blind, perverted, narrow, checking noble
impulses and choking the rich and happy development of life. But it
is one thing to arraign these accidents and corruptions of morality;
it is quite another to discard the whole system of guidance of which
they are but the excrescences and mistakes. This usurping is, of
course, also in large part a thirst for novelty, a love of paradox,
of practicing ingenuity in making the better appear the worse; it is
in part a volcanic eruption of suppressed longings and a protest
against the inadequacy of our present code to provide opportunity
and happiness for the masses. The motives vary with the individual
rebels.

It must suffice, however, from among the many leaders of this
revolt, to quote that clever but unbalanced German iconoclast,
Nietzsche. Typical of his doctrine is the following: [Footnote:
Genealogy of Morals (ed. Alex. Tille), Foreword, p. 9.] "Never until
now was there the least doubt or hesitation to set down the 'good'
man as of higher value than the 'evil' man-of higher value in the
sense of furtherance, utility, prosperity, as regards MAN in general
(the future of man included). What if the reverse were true? What if
in, the 'good' one also a symptom of decline were contained, and a
danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic by which the present might
live AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FUTURE? Perhaps more comfortably, less
dangerously, but also in humbler style- more meanly? So that just
morality were to blame, if a HIGHEST MIGHTINESS AND SPLENDOR of type
of man-possible in itself were never attained? And that, therefore,
morality itself would be the danger of dangers?"

The point of this tirade is that morality puts a wet blanket over
human powers; it is a bourgeois ideal, saving men, indeed, from
pain, but also robbing life of its picturesqueness and glory. Many
people frankly prefer "interesting" to "good" people; Nietzsche
generalizes this feeling. Morality is to him uninteresting, dull, a
code for slaves, for the clash of combat, the tang of cruelty and
lust, the tingle of unrestrained power. Every man for himself then,
and the Devil take the hindmost. Shocked as we are by this brutal
platform, there is something in it that appeals to the red blood and
adventurous spirit in us; after all, we are not far removed from the
savage, and the thought of a psalm-singing, tea-drinking, tamely
good world is abhorrent to the marrow of us. Stevenson, with his
delightfully irresponsible audacity, sighs for an occasional
"furlough from the moral law"; and there are times for most of us
when it seems as if we should choke and smother under the
everlasting "Thou shalt not!" But the daring rebel, the defiant
Titan, comes creeping back to the shelter of morality with a
headache or something worse, and discovers that his Promethean
boldness was but childish petulance; that it is futile and foolish
to try to escape the inexorable laws of human life. There are, in
fact, two adequate answers that can be made to the despiser of
morality:

(1) Dull or not, repressive or not, morality is absolutely necessary.
It is better than the pain, the insecurity, the relapse into barbarism,
that immorality implies. Our whole civilization, everything that makes
human life better than that of the beasts of prey, would collapse
without its foundation of moral obedience. The regime of slashing
individualism would kill off many of the weaker who are precious to
humanity-a Homer (if he was blind), a Keats, a Stevenson; nay, if
carried to extreme, it would put an end to the race. For who are the
weakest, the "hindmost," but the babies! Sympathy and love and self
sacrifice, at least in parents, are necessary if the race is to endure
a generation. But even for the individual, the penalties of immorality
are too obvious to need recapitulation. If morality is repression,
it is the minimal repression consistent with the maintenance of
successful and happy life. Its real aim is to bring life, and life
more abundantly.

(2) But if we are looking for something great, for adventure and
excitement and battle against odds, we can find it much better than
in brutally slashing at our fellows, or running amuck at the beck of
our impulses, by putting our valor at the service of some really great
human endeavor. If we want to get into the big game, the great
adventure, we must pit ourselves, with the leaders of mankind, against
the hostile universe. The men and women who set our blood tingling
and our hearts beating fastest are-Darwin, discoverer by patient labor
of a great cosmic law; Pasteur, conqueror at last over a terrible human
disease; Peary, first to plant foot upon the axis of the world; Goethals,
builder of a canal that links the oceans. The steady march of a
moralized civilization, presenting united front to the cosmos,
is infinitely more glorious than the futile, aimless, and petty struggles
of an anarchic immorality. Our half-disciplined life is already far richer
and more romantic than the life of Nietzsche's "supermen" could
be; and we are only a little way along the road of moral progress.
The real superman will be a BETTER man, a man of tenderness
and chivalry, of loyalty and self-control, a man of disciplined heart
and purified will; to attain to such a supermanliness is, indeed, a heroic
and splendid achievement, worthy of our utmost endeavor, and calling
into play all our noblest powers.

Some there are, accustomed to the vision of tables of stone engraved
by the hand of God and set up for man's obedience amid Sinaitic thunders,
for whom the discovery of the humble human and prehuman origin, and
the stumbling hit-or-miss evolution, of morality dulls its sanctity.
But any one who is tempted for this reason to deride morality may console
himself with the reflection that everything else of supreme importance
in human life is of plebeian ancestry. Reason, art, government,
religion, had their crude and superstition-ridden beginnings. Man
himself was once hardly different from a monkey. Yet there is a spark
of the divine in him and in all these arts and institutions which he
with the aid of the cosmic forces has evolved. Surely a juster judgment
may find a sublimity in this age-long march from the clod toward the
millennium that could never belong to the spectacular but very
provincial myths of the Semites. The emotions ever lag behind the
intellect; and our hearts may still yearn for the neighborly and
passionate battle-god of the Pentateuch. Moreover, we shall continue
to recognize a vast fund of truth and insight in those early folk tales
and primitive codes. But there comes a deeper breath to the man who
realizes that morality and religion long antedate the Jewish
revelation, and comes to see God in the tens and hundreds of thousands
of years of slow but splendid human progress. Historical codes of
morals are, indeed, seamed with superstition and are progressively
displaced; but morality persists. At no time has man wholly solved
the problem of life, but he must ever live by the best solution he
has found. The innumerable codes are so many experiments, their very
differences bearing witness to the need of some set of guiding
principles for conduct.

It is sometimes said that morality, being a merely human invention,
may be discarded when we choose. To this we may reply that morality
bears, indeed, the indisputable marks of human instinct, will, and
reason; but it is not an invention; it is a lesson, slowly learned.
In its humanness lies its value. It is not an alien code, irrelevant
to human nature; it is a natural function; it is the greatest of human
institutions unless that be religion, which is its flower and
consummation. Morality is made for man, for his use and guidance; what
could possibly have greater sanctity or authority for him? Rebel as
he may, and chafe under its restraints, he always comes back to morality;
perhaps to a revised code, but to essentially the same control; for
he cannot do without it. Our morality has its defects, but it is on
the right track. A clearer insight into its teleological necessity,
the purpose it exists to serve, will direct us in our efforts to revise
it, so to fashion it as to make it productive of still greater good
in the time to come. But if we discard it altogether, we are "like
the base Indian" who "threw a pearl away, Richer than all his tribe."

What we need is not to abandon but to steadily improve our code; and
whereas any one can pick flaws, only the man of trained mind and
controlled desire can discover feasible lines of advance. "When all
is said, there is nothing as yet to be changed in our old Aryan ideal
of justice, conscientiousness, courage, kindness, and honor. We have
only to draw nearer to it, to clasp it more closely, to realize it
more effectively; and, before going beyond it, we have still a long
and noble road to travel beneath the stars." [Footnote: Maeterlinck,
"Our Anxious Morality," in The Measure of the Hours.] The conception
of morality as the organization of interests will be found in Plato's
Republic and Aristotle's Ethics, and in many recent ethical books and
papers. Among them are R. B. Perry's Moral Economy, G. Santayana's
Reason in Science (chap. IX); William James, "The Moral Philosopher
and the Moral Life" (in the Will to Believe and Other Essays).

A discussion of whether morality really makes for happiness will be
found in Leslie Stephen, System of Ethics, chap. X; W. L. Sheldon,
An Ethical Movement, chap. VIII. For Nietzsche's theory, see his Beyond
Good and Evil. There are many excellent replies; a brief but adequate
one will be found in Perry, op. cit, chap. I.




PART III


PERSONAL MORALITY




CHAPTER XV


HEALTH AND EFFICIENCY

With the general nature and justification of morality in our minds,
we may now seek to apply our criteria of conduct to the concrete
problems that confront us, first taking up those problems which,
however important their social bearings, are primarily problems of
private life, problems for the individual to settle, and then turning
to those wider problems which the community as a whole must
grapple with and solve by public action.

Bodily health is the foundation of personal morality; to act at all
there must be physical energy available; and, other things equal,
the man with the greatest store of vitality will live the happiest and
most useful life. Christianity has too often forgotten this fundamental
truth, which needs emphasis at the very outset of our concrete studies
in morality.

What is the moral importance of health?

(1) Health is in itself a great contribution to the intrinsic worth
of life. To awake in the morning with red blood stirring in the veins,
to come to the table with hearty appetite, to go about the day's work
with the springing step of abounding energy, and to reach the close
of day with that healthy fatigue that quiets restless desire and betokens
the blessed boon of sound and dreamless sleep-this is to be a long
way on the road to contentment. Health cannot in itself guarantee
happiness if other evils obtrude; but it removes many of the commonest
impediments thereto, and normally produces an increase in all other
values. Heightened vitality means an increased sense of power, a keener
zest in everything; troubles slide off the healthy man that would stick
to the less vigorous. Bodily depression almost always involves mental
depression; our "blues" usually have an organic basis. It was not a
superstition that evolved our word "melancholy" from the Greek "black
(i.e., disordered) liver" nor is it a mere pun or paradox to say that
whether life is worth living depends upon the liver.

More than this, health is opportunity. The man of abundant energy can
taste more of the joys of life, can enlarge the bounds of his
experience, can use precious hours of our brief span which the weakling
must devote to rest, can learn more, can range farther, can venture
all sorts of undertakings from which the other is precluded by his
lack of strength. All these experiences, if they are guided by prudence
and self-control, bring their meed of insight and skill and character.
It is only through living that we grow, and health means the potentiality
of life.

(2) Health means efficiency, more work done, greater usefulness to
society. Sooner or later every man who is worth his salt finds some
task the doing of which arouses his ambition and becomes his particular
contribution to the world. How bitterly will he then regret the
heritage denied him or foolishly squandered, the handicap of quivering
nerves, muscular flabbiness, wandering mind, that impedes its
accomplishment! Determination and persistence may, indeed, use a frail
physique for splendid service; such names as Darwin, Spencer, Prescott,
remind us of the strength of human will that can override physical
obstacles and by long effort produce a great achievement. But for one
victor in this struggle of will against body there are a hundred
vanquished; and even these men of genius and grit could have
accomplished far more if they had had normally serviceable bodies.

(3) Health makes morality easier and likelier. The pernicious influence
of bodily frailty and abnormality upon mind and morals has always been
recognized (cf. the mens sana in corpore sano of the ancients), but
was never so clearly seen as today. The lack of proper nutrition or
circulation, the state of depressed vitality resulting from want of
fresh air, exercise, or sleep, are important factors in the production
of insanity and crime. Over fatigue means a weakening of the power
of attention, and hence of will, a paralyzing of the highest brain
centers, a lowered resistance to the more primitive instincts and
passions. Chronic irritability, moroseness, pathological impulses of
all sorts, generally betokens eyestrain, dyspepsia, constipation, or
some other bodily derangement. With the regaining of normal health
the unruly impulses usually become quieter, sympathy flows more freely,
the man becomes kinder, more tolerant, and morally sane. Professor
Chittenden of Yale is quoted as saying that "lack of proper physical
condition is responsible for more moral ... ills than any other
factor." Certain temptations, at least, bear more hardly upon the man
of weak and unstrung nerves; in Rousseau's well known words, "The
weaker the body, the more it commands." And in general, abnormal
organic conditions involve a warping of the judgment, a twisted or
unbalanced view of life (e.g. Wordsworth's "Spontaneous reason breathed
by health"), which leads away from the path of virtue. All honor, then,
to the men who have kept clean and true and cheerful through years
of bodily depression; such conquest over evil conditions is one of
the finest things in life. But nobility of character is hard enough
to attain without adding the obstacle of a reluctant body; and although
some virtues are easier to the invalid, and some temptations removed
from his circumscribed field of activity, it remains true in general
that health is the great first aid to morality.

Can we attain to greater health and efficiency? If health is, then,
so important to the individual and society, its pursuit is not a selfish
or a trivial matter; it is rather a serious and unavoidable duty. The
gospel of health is sorely needed in our modern world. Young men and
women use up their apparently limitless capital with heedless waste;
those who start with a lesser inheritance neglect the means at their
command for increasing their stock of strength and winning the power
and exuberance of life that might be theirs. There are, of course,
many cases of undeserved ill health; we ill understand as yet the causes
and enemies of bodily vigor, and many a gallant fight for health has
gone unrewarded. But in the great majority of cases a wise conduct
of life would retain robust strength for the threescore or more years
of our allotted course, increase it for those who start poorly equipped,
and regain it for those who by mischance, blunder, or imprudence have
lost their heritage. Yet half the world hardly knows what real health
is. Our hospitals and sanitariums are crowded, our streets are full
of half-sick people-hollow chests, sallow faces, dark-rimmed eyes,
nervous, run-down, worn-out, brain-fagged, dragging on their existence,
or dying before their time, robbed by stupidity and ignorance of their
birthright of full-breathed rosy-cheeked health, and robbing the
society that has reared them of the full quota of their service. Health
is not merely freedom from disease; we have a right to what Emerson
called "plus health." And among the men who rightly awaken our
enthusiasm are those who out of a frail childhood have built up for
themselves by perseverance and will a manhood of physical power,
endurance, and efficiency.

The principles of health for the normal man are few and simple, the
reward great; what stands in the way is partly our apathy and
indifference, partly our incontinent appetites, partly the unwholesome
and deadening social influences in which we find ourselves enmeshed.
For those who care enough, almost unlimited vistas open up; as Spinoza
has it, "No one has yet found the limits of what the body can do."
William James was convinced [Footnote: See his essay, "The Energies
of Man," in Memories and Studies.] that the potentialities of human
energy and efficiency are but half realized by the best of us. We must
learn better to run the human machine. Our prevalent disregard of the
conditions of bodily vigor, our persistent carelessness in the
elementary matters of hygiene and health, is nothing short of criminal.

"We would have health, and yet still use our bodies ill; Bafflers of
our own prayers from youth to life's last scenes."

Happiness that impairs health seldom pays. Where it is a question of
useful work done at the expense of our fatigue, there may be more
question; normally such sacrifices are undesirable; but what seems
over fatigue may not really be so, and the earnest man will err on
this side rather than run risk of pusillanimous shirking. Moreover,
some work practically requires an over effort for its accomplishment;
and no man of mettle will begrudge his very life-blood when necessary.
Overwork is "the last infirmity of noble minds." Yet when not really
necessary, it must be ranked as a sin, and not too generously condoned.
The intense competition of modern industry, the complexity of our
economic machinery, the colossal accumulation of facts which must be
mastered for success, bring heavy pressure to bear upon those who have
their way to make in the world. The pace is fast, and many there are
that die or break from overstrain when at the height of their usefulness.
Such, overpressure does not pay; it means that less work will in the
end get done. When we consider also the moral dangers it involves,
the glumness or irritability of taut nerves, the unhealthy tension
that demands strong excitements and does not know how to rest or enjoy
quiet and restorative pleasures; when we consider the broken men and
women that have to be taken care of, the widows and children of the
workers who have died before their time, the children perhaps weakened
for life because of the tired condition of their parents at birth;
when we consider the number of defective children born to such overworked
parents, we realize that it is not primarily a question of enjoying
life more or less, it is a matter of grave economic and moral import.
[Footnote: Cf. M. G. Schlapp, in the Outlook, vol. 100, p. 782.]
Whether we actually work harder, on the whole, than our forebears,
and whether there is actually a decrease in the health and endurance
of the younger generation today owing to the overstrain of their parents,
is open to dispute. Certainly when one compares a portrait of Reynolds,
Gainsborough, or Stuart with one by Sargent, Thayer, or Alexander,
there is a noticeable difference of type, indicative of a different
ideal of life in the upper stratum of society, an ideal of effort and
efficiency, which is far better than a patrician dilettantism, but
has in turn its dangers.We need to recall the line of AEschylus,
"All the gods' work is effortless and calm." Or Matthew Arnold's
sonnet on Quiet Work:

"One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee, A lesson that on every wind
is borne, A lesson of two duties kept at one Though the loud world
proclaim their enmity: Of toil unsevered from tranquility, Of labor
that in lasting fruit outgrows Far noisier schemes, accomplished in
repose, Too great for haste, too high for rivalry..."

Most of us would find our powers adequate to our duties if we learned
to rest when we are not working, and spend no energy in worry and
fretfulness. [Footnote: Cf. W. James's essay on "The Gospel of
Relaxation," in Talks to Teachers and Students, or Annie Payson Call's
books, of which the best known is Power Through Repose.] This nervous
leakage is a notoriously American ailment; we knit our brows, we work
our fingers, we fidget, we rock in our chairs, we talk explosively,
we live in a quiver of excitement and hurry, in a chronic state of
tension. We need to follow St. Paul's exhortation to "Study to be
quiet"; to learn what Carlyle called "the great art of sitting still."
We must not lower our American ideal of efficiency, of the "strenuous
life"; but it is precisely through that self-control that is willing
to live within necessary limitations, and able to cut off the waste
of fruitless activity of mind and body, that our national efficiency
can be maintained at its highest.

Is continued idleness ever justifiable?

We do not need Stevenson's charming Apology for Idlers, to know that
rest and recreation are as wholesome and necessary as work. But
idleness is only profitable and really enjoyable when it comes as an
interlude in the midst of activity. There is much to be done, and no
one is free to shirk his share of the world's work; we may enjoy our
vacations only as we have earned the right to them. Except for invalids
and idiots, continued idleness never justifiable. Clothes we must have,
and food, and shelter, and much else; if a man does not produce these
things for himself, or some equivalent which he can fairly exchange
for them, he is a parasite upon other men's labor. "Six days shalt
thou labor" is the universal commandment, and "In the sweat of thy
brow shalt thou eat bread." An old Chinese proverb runs, "If there
is one idle man, there is another who is starving." Certainly a state
in which the masses will have their drudgery lightened for them and
opportunity for a well rounded human life given, will be attained only
in a society where there are no drones; and no man or woman worthy
of the name will be content to live idly on the labor of others. "Others
have labored, and we have entered into their labors"; it is not fair
to accept so much without giving what we can in return.