MODERATION

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 April 1927, Page 7

MODERATION

I A WHIMSICAL HOMILY. in a recent number of “The New Statesman,” its diverting contributor, ‘Y.Y,” has an entertaining disquisition on the subject of moderation. A man in a good position was convicted the other day of defrauding his employers of £3,000, and, according to tile evidence of the police, he attributed his downfall to excessive love of motoring. Had he attributed it to excessive love of betting or excessive love of drinking, what morals would have been drawn! The unhappy man would have been spoken of in a I li<>usa ml liom.es, not as a victim of ex cess, bn* as a victim of betting or of drink. The tiling in which he exceeded would have been regarded as in it self vicious, and it would have been in vain to protest. Io Hie fanatical that a thing may he the occasion of wrong doing and may yet be perfectly innocent. This is clear enough in the case of the convicted motorist. Even the most fanatical pedestrian would not contend that. motoring is a sin because it brought a man Io ruin. A temperate love, of motoring is obviously as innocent as a temperate love of wine. The vice lies in excess, and piety or thrift can just as easily become a vice through excess as motoring or winedrinking. There has always been a school of paradox-makers who have defended excess ami the "Nothiiig-too-much” of the Greeks has never been allowed to pass unchallenged as the last word of wisdom. “Be ye drunken, but not with wine,” is an injunction to the religious; and one of Blake’s most famous proverbs is that which declares that “the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.” All the writers of the Dionysiac school have believed in the virtue of excess, and Luther’s

“Becca fortiter” is a saying of the same temper. Excess, indeed, may justly be praised if we do not praise it to excess. In a lukewarm world it is the enemy of lukewarmness. It is a. protest against virtues that sail among the shallows of caution and

timidity and never venture among the perils of the high seas. St. Paul wouk net have been so good a Christian ii he had not previously been an exces

sive persecutor of Christians. All genius, whether religious or artistic is a kind of excess. The man oi genius is intoxicated with some vision or belief in a world of mainly sober men and women, liven so, 1 doubt if

it is wise to preach a gospel of excess Not one in a million men who get intoxicated is a man of genius, and the excesses of intoxicated men without genius are recorded in some of the darkest pages of history. 'rhe minor revolutionists, the one-idea’d assass-

ns. the street-corner persecutors, have 'or their most part been men who mve imbibed some half-truth to ex-•c;-'s. The truth is. the Road to Ex-

cess leads to the Palace of Wisdom only if a man is born wise. If a man

s temperamently wise, every road cads to the Palace of Wisdom. lie

can turn his very' errors into the stuff of wisdom, and in the end he may even learn wisdom from having played the fool. There is no need, however, to incite simple men to excess. If a man is not born to an inclination to excess, it will be useless for him to attempt to cultivate artificially the spirit of excess. The man who is not born a

Romeo will never become a Romeo by willing it. The spirit of excess is either given or withheld at the cradle and fo most men it. is in some form or other given. Hence. I think, the moralists have done well to praise temperance rather than excess. Excess in itself can never be one of the universal virtues, while lemperance is. Temperance is a word that has been debased in modern times, so that, if Socrates returned to earth and found himself tempted to enter a hall where a. meeting of a temperance society was in progress, lie would certainly rise in his place and put some disturbing questions to the orators. Temperance among the Greeks was one of the graces of life. Temperance to-day is a negation not merely of excess, but of t!ie old kind of temperance. Aristotle if i have not misread the little that ! have read of him. condemned this kind of temperance as lie condemned excess. lie set deficiency against excess as its opposing vice. “The man deficient, in the enjoyment of pleasures,” he said, “is the opposite of the profligate; and the middle character is the temperate man.” Every one even to-day would agree with Aristotle, when he discusses the use of money and sets the excess of the .-■pendthrift against the deficiency of the mean man, with the tempeiate man between them as a model. But nowadays our teachers are far more given to attacking the vice of excess I than the vice of deficiency, though it is possible that the one contributes as much to the miseries of flic human race as the other. They do not. realise that the deficient Prohibitionist —1 do not mean the teetotaller, for thousands of teetotallers are temperate men—is not only the opposite, but the fellow in error of the excessive drunkard. In a sense, he is even as excessive as the drunkard. Like the drunkard, he is too much preoccupied with drink, and wastes his life in thoughts of the bottle. No wise man will devote his life mainly to drink, whether from excessive love of it or from excessive hatred of it. And it is the same in regard to every branch of human conduct. It is possible to be excessively preoccupied with sex. for example, either as an extreme debauchee or as an extreme Puritan. The temperate Puritan is, to my mind, as near an approach to the ideal man any other, but there is another kind of extreme Puritan who concentrates all his imagination on one kind of evil to the exclusion of all others and so becomes a partner in the very evil that he hates. ! Hence. I am sure it would be a pleasanter world if our teachers were to return to the old idea of temperance and resurrect the belief in temperance in all things. Aristotle seemed to think that the excessive were more curable than the deficient by a philosophy of temperance—that it was easier, for instance, to convert a spendthrift than to convert a miser into a good citizen. There is sufficient doubt about this, however, to make it worth the while of moralists to address their lessons no longer exclusively to the partisans of excess. At the same time, there is, perhaps, some reason for this concentration on the excessive, since the finest kind of character is that of Hie man with something excessive, in his nature* which is controlled by temperance. Temperance is the horseman of the spirit of excess. The intemperate man is, lilve a bolting horse, a nuisance to himself and others. The man who turned thief through an excessive love of motoring was a man whose ruling passion bolted with him, when, if it had been capably ridden, it might have carried him to happiness. The drunkard is in the same plight; his ruling passion has also bolted. And half the vices of mankind are similarly the

result of bad horsemanship. It. is a good thing to ride a spirited animal, but only if one can ride him. Am! temperance is the supremely skilful rider. At the same time it is by no me ins easy id answer those who contend that the secret of the perfect life is not temperance but the right kind of intemperance. One does not picture St. Francis as a temperate, man. and many of the heroes of the nations have been men who devoted themselves intemperateiy to the salvation of their country or to some great cause. Few men would make ;■ virtue of intemperance in the use of food, drink, or money, or even of vituperative language. But it is difficult to quarrel with the intemperance of sanctity or of self-sacrifice. Even among the religious and the patriotic, however, we can make, a distinction between I lie intemperance of seif-abnegation and the intemperance of self-indulgence. The mtemperance of Tertullian, as he gloats of

Hie picture, of sinners suffering in Hell, is as self-indulgent as if lie had been a drunkard or a gambler. There is no self-indulgence of this kind in St. Francis. He has all the self-con-trol of the temperate man. In politics again, Marat never wins our affections, however we might whitewash him, because, like Tertullian, he was intemperate in the self-indulgent fashion. Self-sacrificing, he sacrificed too much more than himself to the cause. Many revolutions are like

that. It may not be excessive to sacrifice oneself to a cause, but a man should be temperate. in sacrificing other people. Hence, there is something to be said for moderation even among saints ami patriots. Moderation is sometimes given a bad name because it is confused with mediocrity and is associated with middle age, the middle classes and other things that, for some absurd reason, are supposed to be unpleasant. To quarrel with moderation, however, is about as intelligent, as if would be to quarrel with Childs’s Billing of Coronach in the. Derby. Moderation at. its best is the perfect management of a spirited and excessive temperament. Decadent philosophers have denounced it because they have regarded it as a mark of lowered vitality; but the great philosophers have praised it for exactly the opposite reason. They realise that, in a World exclusively populated by men of lowered vitality, it. would be unnecessary to advocate moderation, and that the praise of moderation is .necessary because the ordinary human being is born with far livelier passions than lie can either easily or automatically control. So much is this so that it is logical to admire equally the beauty of moderation and the baantjof excess. Perhaps it is impossible to admire one of them truly without also admiring the other.