Winter XX-XXI. Hypocracy and Pharisaism + The last leaf

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter XIX. Christmas

Is it true that the English are deeply branded with the vice of hypocrisy? The accusation, of course, dates from the time of the Round-heads ["’Roundhead’ was the name given to the supporters of the Parliament during the English Civil War. Also known as Parliamentarians,” their goal was to “establish the republican” (Puritan) “Commonwealth.”]; before that, nothing in the national character could have suggested it. The England of Chaucer, the England of Shakespeare, assuredly was not hypocrite. The change wrought by Puritanism introduced into the life of the people that new element which ever since, more or less notably, has suggested to the observer a habit of double-dealing in morality and religion. The scorn of the Cavalier [the Royalists during the Civil War] is easily understood; it created a traditional Cromwell, who, till Carlyle arose, figured before the world as our arch-dissembler. With the decline of genuine Puritanism came that peculiarly English manifestation of piety and virtue which is represented by Mr. Pecksniff [In Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens, “Seth Pecksniff, a widower with two daughters, who is a self-styled teacher of architecture. He believes that he is a highly moral individual who loves his fellow man, but mistreats his students and passes off their designs as his own for profit.” ] -- a being so utterly different from Tartufe [Tartuffe, or The Impostor, or The Hypocrite by Molière, “hypocritical religious devotee who attempts to seduce Elmire”], and perhaps impossible to be understood save by Englishmen themselves. But it is in our own time that the familiar reproach has been persistently levelled at us. It often sounds upon the lips of our emancipated youth; it is stereotyped for daily impression in the offices of Continental newspapers...

But the word is ill-chosen, and indicates a misconception. The characteristic of your true hypocrite is the assumption of a virtue which not only he has not, but which he is incapable of possessing, and in which he does not believe. The hypocrite may have, most likely has, (for he is a man of brains,) a conscious rule of life, but it is never that of the person to whom his hypocrisy is directed. Tartufe incarnates him once for all. Tartufe is by conviction an atheist and a sensualist; he despises all who regard life from the contrasted point of view. But among Englishmen such an attitude of mind has always been extremely rare... More enlightened critics... call the English “pharisaic” [“1. Pharisaic also Pharisaical Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Pharisees. 2. Hypocritically self-righteous and condemnatory.” ] -- and come nearer the truth.

Our vice is self-righteousness. We are essentially an Old Testament people; Christianity has never entered into our soul; we see ourselves as the Chosen, and by no effort of spiritual aspiration can attain unto humility. In this there is nothing hypocritic... His religion, strictly defined, is an ineradicable belief in his own religiousness. As an Englishman, he holds as birthright the true Piety, the true Morals. That he has “gone wrong” is, alas, undeniable, but never -- even when leering most satirically -- did he deny his creed... he is Pharisee in the minor degree with regard to those of his countrymen who differ from him in dogma; he is Pharisee absolute with regard to the foreigner. And there he stands, representing an empire.

The word hypocrisy is perhaps most of all applied to our behaviour in matters of sexual morality, and here with specially flagrant misuse... your average Englishman takes for granted his country’s moral superiority, and loses no chance of proclaiming it at the expense of other peoples. To call him hypocrite, is simply not to know the man. He may, for his own part, be gross-minded and lax of life; that has nothing to do with the matter; he believes in virtue... He is a monument of self-righteousness, again not personal but national.

Alpha.

This is a peculiar sort of defense. How accurate it is I can’t say, but I don’t know that, as an Englishman of the time, I would really thank him for it. Perhaps he didn’t expect to be thanked.

XXI. Hypocrisy continued

I make use of the present tense, but am I speaking truly of present England? Such powerful agencies of change have been at work during the last thirty years; and it is difficult, nay impossible, to ascertain in what degree they have affected the national character, thus far. One notices the obvious: decline of conventional religion, free discussion of the old moral standards; therewith, a growth of materialism which favors every anarchic tendency. Is it to be feared that self-righteousness may be degenerating into the darker vice of true hypocrisy? For the English to lose belief in themselves -- not merely in their potential goodness, but in their pre-eminence as examples and agents of good -- would mean as hopeless a national corruption as any recorded in history. To doubt their genuine worship, in the past, of a very high (though not, of course, the highest) ethical ideal, is impossible for any one born and bred in England; no less impossible to deny that those who are rightly deemed “best” among us, the men and women of gentle or humble birth who are not infected by the evils of the new spirit, still lead, in a very true sense, “honest, sober and godly” lives. Such folk, one knows, were never in a majority, but of old they had a power which made them veritable representatives of the English ethos. If they thought highly of themselves, why, the fact justified them; if they spoke, at times, as Pharisees, it was a fault of temper which carried with it no grave condemnation. Hypocrisy was, of all forms of baseness, that which they most abhorred. So it is still with their descendants. Whether these continue to speak among us with authority, no man can certainly say. If their power is lost, and those who talk of English hypocrisy no longer use the word amiss, we shall soon know it.

Alpha.

This could have been the conception for, or seed of, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End.

The last leaf.

After a recent series of gusty storms, the Japanese maple out my closed and sealed windows is all but bare now. There are only a few weathered -- withered -- leaves left that don’t even look like leaves -- they are neither green nor red nor yellow but blend in with the branches. They remind me of my aunt who just turned 95. She is blind and bedridden and miserable. One of the last times I spoke with her on the phone she was having a particularly bad day and kept saying she wanted to "go home," what she meant by “home” wasn’t clear to me. Probably she meant one of the places she had “lived” in the past, as opposed to the care facility where she now just exists. But I couldn’t help thinking she meant death -- or the primordial whatever that perhaps precedes and follows what we experience as life. Pure speculation on my part.

My aunt is the last of her generation in the family still alive. Her sisters and all my uncles are all long gone now. She was the baby, so this isn’t so surprising, but an odd sort of inheritance, to be the last repository of a generation of memories and secrets. And yet she still clings to the branch, refusing to fall, after not months but years under hospice care. It is hard for me to see the blessing in this hanging on, but then, it isn’t my life. Fifteen or so years ago she told me about saving up pills so she could end it all when the time came, my mother also talked about not wanting a prolonged death, but the moment for such self-determined actions passed long ago for my aunt. In A. Scott Berg’s book about Katharine Hepburn (titled Kate Remembered but I always think of it as ME! and Kate -- Hepburn's autobiography was titled Me: Stories of My Life) there is a fascinating passage where Irene Selznick reveals that she can die whenever she wants, and then years later, apparently does so -- she died in her bed one night and no cause of death could be determined. The ultimate out-of-body experience, apparently. 

I don’t doubt this, though I have no idea how it works. I often think how different the world might be if this were a common ability.

My aunt already has two great grandchildren and next summer two more of her grandchildren are getting married. There’s still time for the tree to shed that final leaf before the next renewal.

Next: Winter XXII. Puritanism.