A Defence of Rash Vows
The Speaker, March 9, 1901


If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock coat, were to solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's Liberty seventy-six times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to any one of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should in modern times conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes expressed, was "an artist in life." Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the vows which in the middle ages and similar periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures in civic and national civilisation, by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a patch over his eyes and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get there.

But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time we should, as we have said, regard them as symbols of the "decadence." But the men who did these things were not decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not hold water, for in the purely terrestial and even sensual departments of life, such as love and lust, the mediaeval princes show the same mad promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. We have attempted, in some sense, to do so, and the conclusion to which we have come, rightly or wrongly, and which we now desire to explain, is that it is perfectly sane and even sensible to swear to chain mountains together, and that, if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.

The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of oneself, of the weakness and mutability of oneself, has perilously increased and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, not because it is silly merely (he does many sillier things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other words we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously significant phrase, another man. Now it is this horrible fairy tale of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday, Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday may seem a nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago in which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement, in declaring that he quite comprehended the feelings of a man about to be hanged:-

"For he that lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die."

And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish, is to be be eternally acting a play, without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human. And this is the condition of the decadent, the aesthetic, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us- this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.

Let us turn, on the other hand, to the makers of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief, or love, or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it exegi monumentum oerre Perennius, was the only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see the emotional opportunity: he would vow to chain two mountains together. But then he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said; that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a vow. For what could be more maddening than an existence in which our mother or aunt received with genial composure the information that we were going to assassinate the King or build a temple on Ben Nevis, since they had finally realised that both intentions partook of the characters of Prose Fancies?

The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase; a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words- "free love," as if a lover ever had been or ever could be free. It is the nature of love to bind itself; and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old church respected him. They do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.

As we have said, it is exactly this back-door, this sense of having a retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterilizing spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the ridiculous attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics, the modern Jingoes practically say "Let us have the pleasures of conquerors without the pains of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race." Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent mystics say, "Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint; let us sing hymns alternately to the Virgin and Priapus." Thus, in love the free-lovers say, "Let us have the splendour of offering ourselves without the peril of committing ourselves; let us see whether one cannot commit suicide an unlimited number of times."

Emphatically it will not work. There are thrills, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely sooner or later the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.