Every man for himself then,
and the Devil take the hindmost. Shocked as we are by this brutal
platform, there is something in it that appeals to the red blood and
adventurous spirit in us; after all, we are not far removed from the
savage, and the thought of a psalm-singing, tea-drinking, tamely
good world is abhorrent to the marrow of us. Stevenson, with his
delightfully irresponsible audacity, sighs for an occasional
"furlough from the moral law"; and there are times for most of us
when it seems as if we should choke and smother under the
everlasting "Thou shalt not!" But the daring rebel, the defiant
Titan, comes creeping back to the shelter of morality with a
headache or something worse, and discovers that his Promethean
boldness was but childish petulance; that it is futile and foolish
to try to escape the inexorable laws of human life. There are, in
fact, two adequate answers that can be made to the despiser of
morality:
(1) Dull or not, repressive or not, morality is absolutely necessary.
It is better than the pain, the insecurity, the relapse into barbarism,
that immorality implies. Our whole civilization, everything that makes
human life better than that of the beasts of prey, would collapse
without its foundation of moral obedience. The regime of slashing
individualism would kill off many of the weaker who are precious to
humanity-a Homer (if he was blind), a Keats, a Stevenson; nay, if
carried to extreme, it would put an end to the race.
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