SH02_Hugh Kenrick

by Edward Cline

  Concurrent with the escalation of hostilities among the European powers, the intellectual realm advanced haltingly. Old ideas, beliefs, and customs fought a desperate and often vicious rearguard action against ineluctable refutation and the phenomenon of man being recast as a Lockean individual capable of acting on his own power for his own ends.

  The phenomenon was not welcome in all quarters: there were those in this realm who wished men to remain a deferential subject of the church and state, to labor under those institutions’ rules and conditions to produce the glories and wonders of the age, tithed by one hand and taxed by the other. The French were the most enthusiastic exponents of the phenomenon, but could not practice it openly under an absolute monarchy allied with a powerful church. The English, by grace of a monarchy limited by a jealous legislature, indulged it by default. In France, Diderot was imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes for offending a Court lady with his method of arguing in favor of Locke’s thesis on the evidence of the senses. In England, while a man could be tried in the Old Bailey for publicly libeling the sovereign or slandering the Virgin Mary, virtually anything else could be said in private or in print about the state and church without fear of official or ecclesiastic retribution. Virtually anything could be said, but little done; it was an actionable offense to assault the Crown or Church with more than words. In England, a treatise on atheism could be bought for three shillings in any bookseller’s shop, though its author was likely either a High Churchman such as Swift or a Dissenter who had submitted to the test oath; in France, an author could argue his atheism only in elegant, hyperbolic prose in a manuscript circulated privately among friends and colleagues. In England, the treatise would be signed by “Anonymous” or “A Concerned Gentleman” or a Roman-style pseudonym; in France, under the author’s true signature.

  It was not long before Hugh Kenrick realized that the Society of the Pippin consciously confined itself to words, and that even in this realm there existed risk, for many of the things asserted and debated among its members could be construed by the authorities as conspiracy to sedition. The risk was rarely discussed; prudence and discretion kept it at bay.

  Hugh attended several meetings of the Society as a silent observer and occasional recorder of the club’s minutes. Soon the rule was suspended, and he was permitted to join in the discussions. Only Mathius objected to the suspension. His protests were congenially countered by the other members, though no one could determine whether his strenuous arguments against allowing Hugh to speak were based exclusively on tradition, superstition, envy of Hugh’s erudition and acumen, or jealousy when the members paid Hugh more attention than he thought was due. Mathius was as wily in argumentation as any of his colleagues, but he had never introduced an original subject for discussion. Hugh not only raised novel ideas, but could examine and argue them in depth. This virtue fascinated all the members, including Mathius. His objections were overruled, and Mathius managed to cloak his bruised pride behind a convincing mien of good fellowship and savoir-vivre. Thus, his colleagues discounted their unspoken suspicions of envy or jealousy, and ascribed to his dissensions mere inordinate worry and, as one of the members humorously put it, “a brief interval of Tory gout.”

  * * *

  “Ego humilibus devitare, superbis autem tribuere aestimatum meus.”

  This radical inversion of a common Christian homily—“God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble”—was the opening statement of Hugh’s first “paper” to the Society, and it took the members by surprise.

  “Sublime!” exclaimed Elspeth

  “Wickedly delicious!” laughed Claude.

  “It borders on the blasphemous!” remarked Mathius.

  Muir frowned and turned to Tobius. “I have not been schooled in Latin, my friend. What has he said?”

  Tobius leaned over and said, “‘I shun the humble, but reward the proud my esteem.’”

  Muir grinned at Hugh. “A wonderful ethic!”

  Hugh chuckled. “I would have translated it in due course, had you but given me the time,” he said. He then gave a half-hour discourse on the importance of pride in man’s life, and made sharp distinctions between it and vanity. He ended with the statement: “For the man of spirit, there is no serenity in servitude, nor peace in passivity, when his liberty is under assault, when his life and field of action have been abbreviated by the vanity of power. For the man of spirit, servitude gnaws at his pride, and consumes his time, while in the lesser man passivity may cripple his soul, and inculcate in him an unreasoning malice toward those who are neither servile nor passive.”

  “What are the alternatives, then?” asked Abraham.

  “None, sir. Just…liberty.”

  “Have you finished, Miltiades?” asked Tobius, the chairman.

  Hugh bowed in answer, and took his seat. His doing so touched off an explosion of speculation. Hugh finished his dessert and listened to the excited exchanges between the other members, and waited for them to come to the inevitable conclusions. When they had, he deftly fielded a barrage of questions.

  “Is your discourse a direct answer to Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man?” asked Claude. “It is a work, may I remind you, revered both here and on the Continent.”

  “In part, sir,” answered Hugh. “My answer is in reply to many standard works. Pope, for example, attempts to exalt man and humble him, too. He lauds self-interest, but avers it should stem from a concern for others.”

  Steven asked, “Are you a deist?”

  “When I think of God, perhaps I am. But the notion grows fainter each time I address the subject with my reason.”

  “Are you, then, an…atheist?” asked Mathius.

  “Very likely,” said Hugh. “I have not given the matter much thought.”

  “You have twisted a truism,” said Tobius, “and created a tenet of a novel ethic. Have you given any thought to the consequences, were it ever to be propagated, on modern morality? The results could not be but revolutionary!”

  Hugh frowned in thought. “It is not wholly a tenet, sir, but the consequence of a new morality. It is but a clue to it. The system in which my statement would be a mere facet awaits the mind and hand of a great philosophical engineer.”

  “It is Aristotelian in color,” remarked Muir.

  “That is true,” said Hugh.

  “The term ‘meus’ or ‘my’ seems to be superfluous,” said Steven. “It is the only flaw in your opening statement.”

  Hugh shook his head. “No, sir. The term specifies the personal action of a particular kind of man, one who does not dispense freely his respect for others in society. Thus the statement is rendered compatible neither with the poor rate, nor with the peerage.”

  The members laughed in unison. Abraham waited until they had finished, then said, “You are critical of the work of one of our sages, sir. Would you not call that an act of vanity?”

  Hugh shrugged. “No, sir. Mr. Pope addressed the subject of man according to his lights, and tried to mate our new vision of man with the old. I take pride in having stated that the union he proposes cannot produce anything but more misery and confusion. The esteem Mr. Pope pays man and reason is leavened by Christian precepts. His work is a beginning, but it is sour to my taste.”

  “It is more than vanity that would prompt one to substitute God with oneself,” said Mathius, “and then utter what could be called a heresy. Satan did so, and look at the world.”

  “Satan must share credit for the world with God, sir, if what occurs in the world is by God’s will.” Hugh smiled. “That is what I would say, if the subject concerned me. My utterance, were it, and not its antipode, a common truism, would contribute to a happier world, and oblige men to regard each other with more honesty than they do now.”

  Mathius asked no more questions.

  “Just think of it,” mused Elspeth. “A new ethic unhobbled by hypocrisy, an ennobling ethic that did not need the angel-water of any church to give it sanctity. It staggers the mind.”<
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  “It is invigorating!” echoed Muir. “Just to begin imagining the consequences makes me heady!”

  Tobius smiled at Hugh, then addressed his colleagues. “Sirs: When the old peerage is deceased, a new peerage shall take its place—the peerage of the intellect!” He gestured with the ornamented cane to Hugh. “And here will be its first marquis!”

  “Hear! Hear!” exclaimed the members, who slapped the tabletop with their open palms. Abraham rose and said, “I propose a toast to a youth who has not only justified his presence in our company, but justified the purpose and character of our society!”

  “But the French philosophes have not even gone that far,” protested Mathius. “Why should we toast such a…dangerous idea?”

  “What?” laughed Claude. “And let the French have all the fun?”

  “For once, an Englishman has had an original idea!” seconded Steven. “Let the French be on the receiving end this time!”

  “I am in correspondence with Helvétius,” said Tobius, “and I shall write him about this on the morrow.”

  “And I with Dumarsais,” said Abraham. “I shall add a postscript to a letter to him I have finished.”

  “You must admit,” said Muir to Mathius, “that the idea proffered by Miltiades is in the spirit of our Society.”

  “Yes,” sighed Mathius. “It is.”

  “Well, then!” exclaimed Abraham. “Here’s to Miltiades!”

  The other men also rose and finished their glasses of port.

  “Your address was a bracing gust of cold air,” said Glorious Swain to Hugh after the meeting had adjourned and the others had dispersed. They sat together in the front of the tavern over glasses of port. “I cannot remember last being so excited by an idea, and I have never seen the others so roused.”

  “Mathius opposes me,” said Hugh. “The tone of his questioning was not one of dispassionate inquiry.”

  “True. I do not know what his profession is, but any subject beyond the realm of poetry and prose is difficult for him to grasp.”

  “He was not merely shocked by my address,” observed Hugh. “He was hostile to it.”

  Swain puffed thoughtfully on his pipe, then smiled. “I have heard the others say of Mathius that his mind resembles a fragrant flower garden, nurtured by a rich but thin soil, in which an oak could never take root.”

  At the next meeting, it was Mathius’s turn to present an idea. He argued, with more emotion than reason, that “man and nature are inseparably intertwined, and that man’s salvation and happiness depend on his eschewing the refinements and pretensions of society, on leading a simpler and blameless life, and on not offending nature. Man would then be in harmony with nature, which would spare him the tribulations of catastrophe, pestilence, and sorrow. Nature is not to be commanded,” he ended. “It is to be obeyed.”

  Mathius bowed, sat down, and waited for a response. After a long silence, Elspeth blurted out, “Gadso, sir! That sentiment would clinch our own demise!”

  “I’m rather fond of society’s refinements,” remarked Claude.

  “What do you mean by its ‘pretensions,’ sir?” asked Muir.

  “In a word,” replied Mathius, “that we can improve on nature. Show me the ship that can’t sink, or the house that won’t fall, or the clock that won’t stop. All that we do, all that we create, is as mortal as we are, and will be conquered by nature.”

  Tobius shook his head. “We command nature by obeying her laws,” he said. “And when we discover the rules of her laws, we arrest her progress.”

  Hugh remarked, “We do not so much ‘obey’ nature’s laws, sirs, but observe them.”

  “It is a unique thesis you present, sir,” said Abraham, raising his hands to indicate the city beyond the tavern, “here, in the middle of London, as unnatural a phenomenon as one could imagine, one which gives life to so many. London has checkmated nature.”

  “Look at Rome,” insisted Mathius. “And Greece! Both, in the end, humbled and consumed by nature!”

  Elspeth shook his head. “The facts contradict you, sir. They point to those societies having done themselves in, not nature, which merely dispatched her weeds and vines to grow over abandoned temples and market squares.”

  “Liberty was their breakwater against nature, sir,” added Steven. “And when they allowed their liberties to crumble away, so went their societies.”

  “Admit it, Mathius!” laughed Claude. “You had some wrong beef before you composed your thesis, and it has compelled you to bolk such shameless flummery!”

  The members laughed. Mathius retorted, “That was unkind of you, Claude. I have devoted at least as much thought to my thesis as you have to your morning tea!”

  “Nevertheless,” replied Claude, “we forgive you.”

  Again the members laughed, but stopped when Hugh sat forward to speak. Everyone turned to him. “You pose an inanalogous thesis, sir,” he said. “Nature is never so cruel and aggressive as are men. Nature has no intention, no purpose, no goal, no…state of grace to grant, nor one for men to perceive and betray. It does not plot, connive, or single any man out for reward or punishment. It has no soul, no consciousness, and so cannot contrive harmony. It is simply…there. It is merely mechanical, and not sentient.”

  Mathius sniffed. “You are indeed not a deist,” he said.

  “I never claimed to be one,” replied Hugh. “On the other hand, man acts. Nature is governed by her own laws. These laws are impersonal, and if we master them, they can help us live and act. It is an error to personify nature beyond the requirements of humor. I once contemplated penning a moral satire which employed sheep, but abandoned the idea, because it seemed to be a cheap and cowardly way of saying what I wanted to say.”

  The members waited for Mathius to reply. The man wanted to, but could not. His face registered various distortions of speechlessness, and at last settled on an expression of bitterness. This was the only instance in the Society’s annals when a member’s idea had been so thoroughly and unanimously opposed. Mathius fell back in his chair and threw up his hands in concession.

  The Society’s meetings presented Hugh with the opportunity to speak as he could not even at Dr. Comyn’s School for Gentlemen. It was a far more satisfying venue than was the school, for now he had an audience of seasoned, mature minds. At the meetings he could dare to give expression to his most deeply felt and hard-thought ideas. He could hear the other members propose provocative ideas he encountered nowhere else. Glorious Swain—Muir—delivered a provocative address on the notion of conscience, a notion Hugh had never seen defined or challenged anywhere in his wide reading, even though he and Swain had once discussed it.

  “The trouble with the notion of conscience,” said Muir, “is two-fold. I mention only the first, and dwell on the second. The first trouble is its connection with the notion of original sin. Here conscience is viewed as a kind of molasses of guilt applied to all who were, all who are, and all who will be. This connection I hope to address at another time. It is the secular notion of conscience that has troubled me and whetted my curiosity. It suggests a moral knowledge independent of one’s actual character and actions and knowledge. The Bard made an observation on this very phenomenon: ‘Policy sits above conscience.’ Now, I do not think a conscience is a legitimate measure of one’s moral character.” He ended his address with, “A truly moral man has no need of a conscience. All his actions are moral, and are one with his character. His actions are not apart from his conscious morality, and his morality is not an extraneous body of knowledge, sitting in the back of his head, waiting to rebuke him or pounce upon him were he to commit a wrong action. This man’s self is in accord with his virtue. His day-to-day policy and his life-long policy are complementary, in perfect, seamless, indistinguishable harmony…”

  Mathius asked, “But you do not deny the existence of conscience?”

  “No,” answered Muir. “The sad truth is that most men are plagued by one. Conscience makes criminals of men, cau
sing them only to regret their actions, without telling them anything useful, and whether or not they ever commit a crime. How else to explain the numerous, sincere gallows confessions at Tyburn Tree? No, I merely say that conscience is impractical. A truly moral man could not regret or rue his actions.” Muir paused in thought. “Something both practical and moral is wanted, and remains to be discovered.”

  “Presuming that morality is spiritual,” broached Claude, “how could it be practical?”

  “If it is practical, then how could it be spiritual?” asked Tobius.

  Muir said, “In the course of preparing my address to you, I had glimpses of the possibility of such a union. Breathless as these were, I was unable to magnify them for closer scrutiny, nor put them on paper. I no sooner imagined them, then they slipped away back into the fog of my confusion.”

  The members were quiet. It was a disturbing idea that Muir had introduced to them, so disturbing that it caused each of them to think of himself, of his profession, of how he had conducted his own life up to this moment. And in this unsettling but edifying moment, each saw a glimpse of what Muir had glimpsed, and understood the enormity of the obstacles to an answer each sensed was ecstatically right, but knew not why.