THE DANGERS OF PLEASURE

Evening Star, Issue 20193, 5 June 1929, Page 11

THE DANGERS OF PLEASURE

——•— A TIMELY ARTICLE Ever since human beings acquired j the capacity to form a judgment the view has been widely held that a little pleasure is a dangerous thing. Even those of ns who occasionally defend the milder, if not the wilder, pleasures of our fellow-creatures are continually brought to a point at which we suspect that other people are enjoying themselves too much. I have never yet met a single human being, however anti-Pnritanical (writes “T.Y.,” in the ‘New Statesman’), who did not frown on the pleasures of somebody else. No mind is broad enough to embrace in the same tolerant vision all the pleasures, spiritual, intellectual, and physical, of humanity. Some of the extremest anti-puritans are shocked when they sec people throwing halfcrown counters on to the roulette tables at Monte Carlo. A man who defends “Ulysses” will often make up for this by angrily denouncing the public for reading the works of Miss Dell. It is possible to be the champion of a. scarlet siir and at the same time to be intolerant of a peccadillo. All this suggests that somewhere in the mind of every human being is a linger- I ing suspicion of the ruinous wickedness ; of pleasure. 1 During the last few days wo have had in the law courts two examples of this eternal human attitude to enjoyment. A twenty-two-year-old girl was brought up before the magistrate at Canterbury on a charge of stealing from her employer, and the police declared that her lapse was due to her love of dancing and dress. _ “The girl liked to be off every evening in order to go to dances.” Binding her over for two years, the magistrate made her immunity from punishment conditional on ! her ceasing to go to dancing halls dur- 1 ing that period. The other case was that of a boy of thirteen who had \ stolon nine shillings from a shop near | Slough. The magistrates placed him 1 on probation for two years, an 1 at the 1 .same time ordered him, till his period 1 of probation was over, to abstain from smoking and from attending cinemas. Clearly, in the view of the magistrates, the love of dancing ami tno influence of the cinema were the chief reasons why a girl and a, boy, otherwise ordinarily virtuous, had become criminals. The magistrate who forbade the girl to dance did so, T take it, not in r.rdt-r to punish her, but in order to protect i her from temptation. Similarly. Ike magistrates who prohibited the hoy from visiting the cinema must have been induced to do so primarily by the conviction that he would he a better boy if he saw fewer moving pictures.

1 am not sure whether, in either case, the assumption is quite reasonable. When we hear of a man who has ruined himself by gambling, or through drink, or for love of a mercenary and utterly selfish voman, it is often suggested that, if iramblng and drink were abolished, and if iheic were no vampires in the human race, the man would have been saved from ruin. _ It is possible that there arc cases in which that would have been so, but there is also something to ho said for the theory that most men who ruin themselves, if they are prevented from ruining themselves in one way, will ruin themselves in another. That is why, I believe, it is hopeless to attempt to make the world better by attacking individual pleasures >uch as the majority of human beings indulge in with no conspicuous ill effects. If you accept the old-fashioned evangelical point of view, however, you will bo logically bound to condemn almost every form of enjoyment- not only betting and drinking,' but playgoing, dancing, and even novel-read-ing. Half a century ago it was possible to meet people wha had never read a, novel, not because they had something better to do, but because they regarded novel-reading as wrong There were still more people who had never been inside a theatre; there are probably thousands even -o day who believe that the doorway of the theatre pit is also the doorway of the Bottomless Pit. As J was going into the theatre in Belfast one night many years ago, I was stopped by an old man who looked like the Ancient Mariner, and who asked: “If there’s

a firo in there to-night, and you’re burnt to death, where do you think you will go to?” It was difficult to persuade old men like this one that one was not conscious of the slightest guilt in going to a musical comedy or playing a game of cards. In their view a playgoer knew that he was doing wrong just as clearly as a thief or a murderer. And their belief in the evil nature of such pleasures, since there is no warrant for it in the Bible, must have been founded on the assumption that they were sinful because they were irresistible temptations to sin.

From their point of view they were reasonable enough. _ They believed—it was a favourite image of theirs—that if you put the whole world into one pan of a pair of scales and a single human soul in the other—a single human soul would outweigh in importance the whole world. Starting with this assumption, they had only to prove that one human soul had been ruined by cards in order to advance to the position that all card-playing should bo stopped and such a cosmic tragedy prevented from ever happening again. It was, of course, easy to discover dozens.—even hundreds—of people who had played the fool at cards and who either had been imprisoned or been compelled to fly the country_ as a result of crimes committed in order to repair their gambling losses. To the old-fashioned evangelical this was sufficient evidence of the iniquity of card-playing, and in their opinion any man . who played cards without being ruined as a result was the _ worst sort of sinner, who caused his weaker brethren to offend.

This attitude is scarcely to bo found I among intelligent men and women today. Ju the first place, wo are not confident that a single additional soul would ho saved (in any meaning of the word) if cards disappeared from the face of tlie earth for ever. We know that the ordinary man who plays cards brings ruin neither to himself nor on his family, and wc no more think of condemning cards generally because a weakling occasionally loses more than he can afford at the card table than wo think of condemning motoring on account of the accidents to which it leads. At the same time, the evangelicals in their attitude to pleasures of this kind have their modern successors. You will find them, for the most part, among those who concentrate their attentions on the evils of betting and drink. Many of them are people for whom it is impossible to have anything but the deepest respect. They are men and women of noble character and unselfish purpose. It scorns to mo, however. that they make the same mistake ns the evangelicals in fudging this nr that pleasure hy its effect, not on the ordinary human being, but on that minority of human beings who cannot indulge in it without destroying themselves. There is, I admit, not much to be said in favour of betting; even men who bet would all advise their favourite nephews to leave betting, alone, ft is a game at which it is next door to impossible to win in the long I run, and, in proportion to the money spent on it, the return of pleasure from it is probably less than from any other popular amusement. At the same time, it is folly to suggest that the ordinary iiiiin cannot bet without bringing his wife and family to the verge of starvation or robbing his employer. The fact is, the vast majority | of human beings are much too cautious to risk their fortunes on a horse. The I ordinary man, so far as my experience [ goes, bets within his means, and is in j eo danger of being tempted to rob a ' till in order to put the contents on a j horse. This is nob to deny that thousands of people are wasting a largo amount of thought and money on betting that might be devoted to* worthier causes, and that obsession with dreams of miraculous winnings is a common and dangerous disease. 1 doubt, however, whether, if betting were compulsorily abolished to-morrow, the -world would be appreciably the better or the happier. You would have abolished an amusement., but you would not have i abolished the folly and the selfishness that make the amusement dangerous, j And the same is true of drinking. It is not the pleasure, it is the weakness of the human character that is a danger to society. And we find the same weakness of character—the same selfishness and ill-temper and meanness—in teetotal as in wine-drinking comrau- j nities. ( . Obviously, then, the real problem of the moralist is not to prohibit pleasures, but to strengthen the human character to such a point that, if men indulge in pleasures, they can indulge in them safely. No one feels the slightest concern for the man of reasonably strong character whether in j

the betting ring, at the roulette tabic,or in the public house. He is immune from all the dangers of pleasure. Ho can dance without destruction, and no cinema will tempt him to his ruin. I agree that 1 do not know how to infect human beings with strength of character; 1 have not yet been able myself to cultivate a character strong enough to refuse a cigarette. But I know that it is not the cigarette, but myself, that should ha blamed for this.: The pleasure of smoking may be dangerous, bu it would not be dangerous to me if I were a little more like So-: crates. And it is the same with novel' reading. It helped to ruin Emma Bovary, but obviously conk] do no harm to Dean Inge. It wastes millions of hours that might, so people say, be better employed; but those who waste their hours in this fashion -would in different circumstances waste them over something else. At the same time, it is clear that one pleasure may he less maleficent than another, anti that a pleasant pleasure such as'football may usefully take the place of an unpleasant pleasure such as Hooliganism. Probably the real reformers of our time are those who persuade ns to substitute pleasant pleasures for unpleasant pleasures. The motor ear and the hull may he remembered in history among the most effective moralists of our times.