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DAME NATURE'S DUMB SERMON.

IT was said of old time that “to him that hath shall more be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have.” This was one way of stating a sequence of events which occurs everywhere and always, and which seems to have the eternity of a natural law about it. Its modern expression is—popularly and inexactly—“Might makes right.”; scientifically, “The struggle for existence issues in the survival of the fittest.” It seems very hard lines for him that hath not—for the mightless; for the imperfectly fitted—that Nature should be dead against him in this way; and even the fact that the net result of such behaviour on nature's part has, in our day, come to include the determination on the part of some few of the mighty to fit up the unfit for the securing of survival and other benefits,—even this fact is scarcely obvious enough as yet to afford the comfort it might afford if seen. Meanwhile the main truth holds. Success succeeds in eternally successful succession; and “Try, try, try, again” means only Fail, fail, fail, again, till the right nail, or the strongest rival, be hit on the head, when further trying page: 4 becomes superfluous, and might gets dubbed right for the instruction of all who come after.

There are many matters of individual and national conduct which are classed as “right” and “wrong,” and much fussed over as such, especially by Englishmen and Englishwomen. Dame Nature dumbly hints that the world at its present phase is not much helped by the use of these two words, and might get on better were the words “fair” and “unfair” used instead of them. The substitution would seldom, at any rate, make nonsense of sense, while here and there it might make sense of nonsense. If, concerning any matter of human conduct, one makes a definite and open-minded appeal to the nature of things, one is apt to get some tacit, deep-down answer wholly snubbing to the “principles” in deference to which one has condemned Dick or Tom, or rejoiced over Harry. It takes the honesty of a whole philosopher to risk an unflattering reply from Dame Nature, so that the nature of things is frequently evaded in moral judgments, and one blunders along blindly and pharisaically enough. One fears one knows not what at the rude hands of sheer social fact. Speak of it in euphemisms, listen to it through cotton-wool, peep at it through rose-coloured glasses, touch it with tongs; or else—what? The sun will possibly go down at noon, or cats will be caught fixedly regarding potentates, or—more horribly still—unvested moral and social rights will be getting the upper hand, and we shall be quite at sea as to who deserves to be considered what. Well, Nature holds her peace, and lets things declare themselves, and if the moral observer will not be at the trouble of keeping even with her, she will forestall him, and oust him.

Natural recompenses are terribly impersonal; they begin and end at a matter-of-fact reference to the thing page: 5 done. The proper personality of the doer suffers or exults according to his own make, so that his actual feelings commonly seem to bear but the most accidental relation to what he “deserves” to feel as the doer of his own deeds. The so-called “saint” continually may be seen experiencing what is disagreeable, and missing what is delightful through his very “saintliness”; and often enough at the hands and to the advantage of the assumed “sinner,” who enjoys not only his sin, but all the consequences of it, too, that he can take note of. This is a fact not to be flinched; and personally directed homilies in face of it seem to have a tinge of swagger and bombast about them. Pigs' ears have, very generally, no ambition to become silk purses.

Nothing prevails but might, alias fitness:—readiness for emergency, muscle to meet it, and wit to profit by it. The freest community and the most brutal of tyrants, the most lucid truth and the most banefult superstitution possesses one and the same title to existence. Fitness, apart from goodness, keeps the ruler on his throne. Fitness, apart from truth, binds the creed on its disciples. The fitness lies not in the thing alone, but in its relation to what is there before it. The fit survive, whatever they are, and wherever, and whenever. The parasite survives uncommonly, even unto the billionth generation. His fitness procures him admission into a man's fourth-rate blood, which fourth-rate blood suits him down to the ground. Nature patronises her parasite, whoever else snubs him as of inferior moral calibre. Would you deny his right to existence? Your writ remains without endorsement, unless, and until you have first destroyed his might. To do that, you must constitute yourself that part of nature which opposes and limits him. Thus only can you turn the scale of might between the parasite and his betters. If the means of subsistence be page: 6 anywhere such that tenth-class lives can thrive on them, only tenth-class lives will, then and there, be found; and thrive these will; for they have the eternal right of might on their side. Obviously if there be only mud to live in, you must turn your lungs to gills of some coarse make. Do it, or suffocate. At your peril you hold by your fine air-breathing apparatus. If you worship it, moreover,—that is, if you like its uselessness, and cling to it, and make sacrifices to it—it will mock you. Worship always smacks of idolatry, and idols always, sooner or later, turn and rend you.

Hold by your chances while you have them. Nature has no pets, and will not deal you out an extra supply of chances, if you let those you have slip, no, not because you are your own very self, and know it. The fit survive, even when they are below knowing it, or anything. Whether they ought to, or are “meant” to, or whether they serve someone's or something's ultimate turn by so doing, is neither here nor there. They do survive, and pry as we will, we can find nothing more suggestive than that. Fitness is not usefulness, it adaptedness. Where there is mud, gills beat lungs; where there is air, lungs beat gills; where there is despair, brutality mocks culture; where there is comfort, there is no discontent, noble or ignoble.

Nothing is ever aware of itself as provisional; flourishing established facts such as—shall we say—monarchism, or perhaps Buddhism, or more widely still, as mankind, are in no sort disturbed by an inward sense of incipient otherness. Only some curious eye from time to time catches them in the senseless act of becoming what they are not; and meanwhile by what might of fitness anything at any date happens to have does it maintain its right to remain itself, and to serve itself in its own name. Sufficient unto page: 7 the hey-day of anything whatsoever is the adaptedness thereof.

I mark your answer. “Weak things,” you say, “sometimes live out their time too. Now and then quixotic trustfulness, or woman's faithfulness, survives betrayal, or a wild rose reaches red-berry stage, or a quite harmless lark hatches out every egg in her nest there under the grass.” The reply is—Muscle is not the only token of might; why call these things weak, since they have given the only proof of power there is?—since they have succeeded in overcoming or eluding whatever might else have devoured them? And as to your “harmless” lark. What do the grubs say? My point is that, from a grubby point of view, even grub-existence is better than not.

Meanwhile, whether grubby or grand, goody or good, be fit. It is your one chance. Otherwise your medium will murder you. Do not cultivate fitness for water when you have to live in air, nor for the Pole when you have to live at the Equator, nor for Bohemia when you have to live in Philistia, nor for Olympus when your horizon is that of Christendom. No chatter about “right,” or even “rights,” will save you or serve you if you try that plan. Contrariwise (and it is folly to blink the fact), fit yourself thoroughly for any place whatsoever, then no matter though, in general parlance, “hell” be the accepted name of that place, you will at any rate be quite comfortable there, and will feel yourself a successful person and in good company, and so far from envying your cousins and your aunts their psalmody in Abraham's bosom, you will pity them in (of course, scrupulously tacit) but profoundest honesty, and thank the devil and all his angels that you are not expected, even for relationship's sake, to dance atten- attendance page: 8 dance at their little heavenly festivities. Indeed, so wll off may you chance to feel yourself, that the question may even arise anon—What if the aunts are wrong as to what is what, and the localities have chanced upon misnomers? If you get so far as that, a swaddled moral may further show feeble signs of effort to disengage itself from the folds of your beatified consciousness. This may not take place, in which case your comfort will remain complete, and you will gladly die of it. But if it does, a sword will be in your hand, which—use unspitefully. He with ears, let him hear.

But as to lungs. Supposing the medium to be mud, and you hate it. Is there no other alternative save the gill-alternative? Yes; one other—strictly conditional on your locomotive fittings. You may leave. You can quit mephitic company and find other. Also you may go and fetch flannel for your rheumatism, and find a buyer for your wares, and a friend to comprehend your vicissitudes, and you will live the longer. You will also be the longer in finding out how the case really stands with regard to your pet moral distinctions. There are stimulants, tonics, narcotics, anæsthetics to be had for coin at the nearest chemist's shop; and you have, we will suppose, legs to walk there and a tongue to make the bargain withal. Thus (and let some common-sense, on which you pride yourself, be also considered) you feel yourself arbitrator of your circumstances. Arbitrator? Only he that hath ears to hear can hear, though on his hearing depend his rescue from perdition. You have only fitted things to yourself and ruled your medium in so far as you were first ruled and fitted to your medium. Everything you touch is fitting you for better or worse, and everything you feel. Do not you know that the shape of the green leaf as it grows in May is page: 9 momently determined—changed as it grows—by the very weight—ay, the changing weight,—of its own tender, increasing self? Follow that thought; it is true as fact, and there is no bottom to its depth, and there lies the whole universe in its implications. It is as transparent as it is deep. If nothing but your own activities be counted as affecting your lot, yet even these are irresistably making and re-making you as you use them; on no two days are your capabilities precisely similar, and your capabilities plus your whereabouts at the instant make up the sum of your chances. So do not pat your moral self on the back too unguardedly. That very pat may pat you out of the right shape to avail yourself of the next lucky chance, moral or otherwise, that comes along.

Gratuitous malice is rare. Each wants his own way with the world; what else? Good means getting it, or getting on the road to getting it. Bad means the opposite. At the outset everyone has pretty much the same notion of what is worth having or striving for. All have struggled to get it; failing, they have tried to remove the hindrances to getting it. Failing again, there comes the effort to make slight shift without it, while keeping some semblance of it snugly at hand to disguise one's defeat and patch one's pride withal. The successful, in proportion to their success, find their further advantage in the polite siclence of their pity, and loudness, of their praise of any such helpless subterfuge. The mighty—to wit, the wilful, the winsome, the daring, the beautiful, the monied, in a word, the fit—get what everyone, in proportion as he or she knows life, wants. Real joys, real liberties, real means of every kind are necessarily and naturally theirs. “To him that hath shall more be given.” The next mightiest are made welcome to incidental crumbs, always provided that the page: 10 groping after them entails no sharp contact with Samson's pet corn. As to the mightless—here a Hodge and his ten children and ten shillings a week to sustain and develop them withal; there some socially superfluous Miss Grundy, whose limitations, though other, are, if possible, yet sadder, because more lied about—let these and other mightless ones go anywhere where they may learn least truth about themselves; where life, in theory at least, is paraphrased down to meet their few permitted claims, and wehre they may practise calling grapes “sour,” and stones “bread,” till they forget their hunger, learn the lessons of eternal postponement, and fall in love with their prison walls, mistaking them for the lines of a cosmical horizon. Anyhow, might is thus left in peace, and the moral world (as having, perhaps, just complacently closed your volume of optimistic ethics, you disconcertedly find it to be) is in some salient features stated.

Orthodoxies—the effete though canonized leavings of what, at earlier date, were warm, live heresies, for which martyrs, at the hands of yet earlier orthodoxies, suffered and died; conventions—the toughly-stiffened husks of obsolete social valuations; such, and the like, become the “treasure trove” of physical, intellectual, and moral mediocrity, which the mighty, not at all requiring, never grudge them. Moreover, since mediocrity is many-headed, and has in that very fact its own proper pride, there arise in its behalf and to keep it quiet, expedient misnomers and euphemisms of all kinds, so that it remains, if in misery and manacles, yet with exceedingly fine names for both, and the finest of them is—Respectability.

Public practice echoes sub-social Nature's verdict—there are no rights recognised but the rights of might. As to the so-called “laws of nature,” the sectarian may well page: 11 find them inconveniently colourless. They show merely means to ends, and roads to goals; but the rightness or wrongness of the road is necessarily relative, and depends on the end or goal sought. The right way for peace may be the wrong way for pride; the right way to Babaria Barbaria is the wrong way to Utopia; and so on: fitness may be fitness for sunshine or fitness for slime, and Dame Nature, at any rate, will not snub you so long as you choose your goal according to your powers of overcoming the distance and the obstacles between.

In studying the question of right and might, one may observe particularly the case of Cæsar, of Mahomet, of Newton, of Napoleon, of Darwin, Rothschild, Vanderbilt, Mrs. Grundy, Worth, Zola, or General Booth. One's own brothers and sisters will do as well, if one can get them into focus. If either Bismarck or Gladstone is getting any amount of snubbing at the hands of Dame Nature, which is it? and why? And is the snubbing to turn out of the personal or the posthumous character?*

The world (not yet being too hot or too cold) is full of human action; men are competing in the market, and passions and emotions are competing in each man. Face this entanglement, and wonder if you can that each man tends to call that felony in another which he calls common-sense in himself. After all, it is only by some such double valuation that anyone can at once, with comfort, follow up all his own chances while curtailing those of a competing neighbour in the degree necessary to his own success. Wonder if you can that language, commercial or controversial, being man's tool, tends to shape itself to his use and in his using; or that where convenient to an

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* NOTE.—This was written in 1888.

page: 12 obvious and immediate end, it often, other things equal, shapes itself to that end, rather than to matters of less apparently pressing concern with which it has a mere dictionary connection. One might know beforehand that where there is nothing at work to make a lie unhandy or painful to handle, and where there is plenty of work lying about that could be cleared out of hand quite shipshape by use of it, that it will be used. Used, just as tentacles, or fins, or hands, or levels, or lenses are; that is without malice, and just because it is a fit means to an end sought. So long as the liar is contented with the lot his lying procures for him, and with the condition of mind in which it leaves him, he in a sense proves his case. He is, for all the conscientious gymnastics of any accomplished moralist, as well off as he wants to be; and that is better off than most accomplished moralists are. So that the case really stands in favour of the liar, if the inside of his conciousness be all that we look at. It is, for instance, not in the nature of things that precisely milkmen, or attorneys, or senators should be to a man more indifferently supplied with sincerity than you or I are; it would be such a very odd coincidence if they were. But it is in the nature of things that, if you or I had to make our living out of milk-selling, our fortune out of the letter of the law, or our fame out of representing a constituency, different emotional emphasis might within a year begin to make itself felt within us, as to the relation of words to fact, or facts to appearances, in the cases of milk, justice, and politics, respectively.

Dame Nature offers a hint or two in her dumb way as to the direction in which, if at all, melioration may take place, and a selected set of fitnesses be aided in crowded out a rejected set. Fences, legislative or other, set up between page: 13 a not yet comfortable human creature and forbidden pastures more beautiful than the way he ought to walk in, will not facilitate adherence to, or progress along that duteous way. Fit up a set of conditions favorable to and remunerative to a ready conscience or a sympathetic tempoer, and then and there, lo! the development and beauty of one and the other. When will men cease to demand figs of thistles, and rid themselves of the pestilent delusion that the finest fruits of civilisation reverse the whole cosmic order in the matter of growth, and are to flourish best where encouragement is smallest! The Alpha of civilisation is barbaric experience; the Omega shall be social sympathy; and Dame Nature's dumbness hinders not, while her determinateness increasingly aids the zig-zag progress of our species towards the high table-land where the solving of self in its own sympathies will abundantly reward the survivor. For to-day let who can be fair, and see ardently or placidly to the enlargement of experience, and to the removal of all artifice which among the easy people stand stands between character and correction, and among the hapless, between character and corroboration.

The sun, say what one will, favours a vigorous maggot at the expense of an ill-fed rose-bud, and is so crude a respecter of persons that he will slay with sunstroke the hatless Briton, be he philosopher, philanthropist, or even bishop, who walks unguardedly in tropic rays, while sparing the thicker-skulled negro drudge as fitter to be spared. Why not? Matter, whatever that mystery may turn out to represent, comes first and is fundamental; then manners; but even a thunderbolt or a blizzard or the crack of doom can only hurt the hurtable.

In morals, fair play is the one thing foeless, and at all times fit. This is Dame Nature's last word but one. Her page: 14 last word is—“My method brought first you, then your humaneness to maturity: respect me: and with the gift that my sternness gave you help me gently to liberate you all.”