Moral Tales, Past and Present

I

IF every tale with a moral were therefore a moral tale, a consideration of moral tales would involve nine tenths of all the stories ever written in English — an obviously impossible undertaking. In literary parlance, however, a moral tale is not merely one which has a moral, nor even one which states its moral. Instead — so flexible is language — it is often a piece of writing distinctly immoral, for its special mark is this: that in it certain approved spiritual qualities are assured of fat material reward; you eat your porridge and therefore your cake arrives to you.

The literary worth of fiction burdened with such a requirement is seldom great. As stories, moral tales are unimportant; as interpreters of the age producing them, they are more illuminating than either its masterpieces or its state papers. A dozen, matched one against the other, present as if in mosaic the authentic picture of the time in which they were written, the exposition for that time of precisely what constituted its porridge and precisely what its cake — and equally, of course, of how cake and porridge differed from those of another age. To do such matching for each of the three latest centuries is to see the guiding principle of each write itself out before us.

The tale itself has existed since fiction began; the title was first applied to it in the eighteenth century. Near the end of that neat and discussable period, there came into prominence one of the cleverest women who has ever lived — not the most talented, only the cleverest; a woman with scarcely a spark of writing genius, but with as much business genius to apply to writing as Walt Mason has to-day — Mrs. Hannah More, the world’s first best-seller. Toward the middle of her life, after many less successful experiments, Mrs. More centred her attention on the kind of story for which she is now chiefly remembered. She had always written. In her moral-tale period she wrote enormously and sold after the fashion of Zane Grey — two million copies of ‘Cheap Repository Tracts’ in the course of a single year, and this when book buyers were a limited class and a Chatterton could lately have starved for want of them.

Whatever sold in that fashion furnished urgent, satisfactions to the generation buying it. An analysis of any of the tales with which the ‘Cheap Repository’ was chiefly filled serves to show what those satisfactions were, and in the showing to spread before us the mind of middle-class England of the time as a zoölogist spreads the web of a frog’s foot under his microscope.

‘The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain’ is perhaps the best known of the stories. A gentleman, riding across the downs, sees a shepherd watching his flock and checks his horse to speak to him.

Mr. Johnson asked the shepherd what sort of weather it would be on the morrow.

‘It will be such weather as pleases me,’ said the shepherd, ' because it will be such weather as pleases God, and whatever pleases Him pleases me.’

No gentleman, whatever his century, could break off a dialogue so auspiciously begun. The shepherd, encouraged, goes on to describe his mode of life.

‘ I have a wife and eight children whom I bred up in that little cottage —’

The cottage indicated is a hovel of one room, the wife bedridden beneath a leaky thatch and above a carpetless floor; but in spite of these seeming drawbacks the speaker insists that he and his are happy and blessed. For one thing, only three of his eight children are under five years old; for another, —

‘Our little maids get first a halfpenny and then a penny a day by knitting. The boys get a trifle for keeping the birds off the corn — and if they did not get a farthing for it, I would make them do it just the same for the sake of giving them early habits of labor.’

When the gentleman applauds — how can he fail of applauding ? — these correct sentiments, —

The poor man’s tears started to his eyes. . . . ‘Indeed you great folk can hardly imagine how it raises and cheers a poor man’s heart when such as you condescend to talk familiarly with him. . . . And so far from creating disrespect, Sir, and that nonsensical, wicked notion about equality . . .’

No subversive doctrine among the working classes here — not in the eighteenth century and with Mrs. More directing their destiny. Encouraged by the gentleman’s receptive attitude, the shepherd goes on to tell of one occasion of special blessedness.

‘One Sunday afternoon when my wife was at her worst and we had tapped our last sixpence . . .’

A shilling and a blanket is what the story comes to, with a bit of nonnegotiable good counsel thrown in, but the wife’s comment on these acquisitions deserves recording.

‘ Oh,’ said she, ‘it is too much. We are too rich. I am frightened lest we have our whole portion in this world.’

Just so, with just such self-distrustand easily roused rapture, do all of Hannah More’s low-born characters acknowledge their mercies — except in the cases of recreants headed straight for gallows or jail. There is never a doubt in the mind of any shepherd of them all about the righteousness of his laboring for less than the price of food, never any troublesome question as to how squire or curate or lady got those extra coals and blankets which they give or withhold at pleasure. And just so surely as the submissive spirit exists, just so surely does its owner profit by it in substantial though limited form.

Mrs. More, however, was far too good a churchwoman to make submission to one’s earthly betters the only negotiable virtue. ‘Them that’s above’ could receive tribute direct — and pay for it liberally, too. Mrs. Simpson, in ‘All’s for the Best,’ reduced through no fault of her own to an almshouse, faces her Niagara of misfortunes with a supine good cheer all but idiotic in its persistency. When atrocious harm comes to her or hers, she attributes it straight to God and thanks Him for the sending. In return for her somewhat insulting religious faith, the reader sees her presently inheriting a snug and unexpected legacy and along with it a still more satisfying revenge upon the worst of her persecutors. Evidently God, like the squire, knows the rules of the moral-tale game.

‘Tom White, the Post-Boy’ threatens for the moment to depart from these rules, for at its beginning Tom appears as a loose, wild, dangerous fellow — one who sings secular songs, races with other coachmen, and now and then takes his glass. Through misfortunes, however, he is brought to repentance, gives up coaching, becomes a sober farmer.

Farmer White soon found that a dairy Could not well be carried on without a mistress, and began to think seriously of marrying.

He hears of — not sees, merely hears of — a woman who promises to suit his needs.

She lived in a family as an upper maid. She was prudent, sober, industrious, and religious. Her neat and plain appearance at church (for she was seldom seen anywhere else) was an example to all persons of her station. . . . He took down his hat from the nail in order to wait on Dr. Sheppard [for whom she worked] and ask his consent, for he thought it would be very unhandsome to decoy away his faithful servant from her place without his consent.

Luckily the doctor consents. Else this impetuous wooer would leave the girl of his choice in her place indefinitely. Observe how cool-blooded they are — he to have her because she can properly conduct a dairy, she to have him because he asks her. And on their union the minister pronounces his blessing: ‘As ye have chosen each other from the best of motives—’ Any motive better than prudence? Not any. The trifle known as love is strictly reserved for their betters.

Prudence and humility, content with their station, overflowing gratitude to their superiors — these are the qualities these pictured maids and coachmen and shepherds and farmers are full of. And these are the qualities that caused their employers to buy the ‘Cheap Repository Tracts’ even up into the millions.

If underlings would not always act that way, — and, unhappily, at the end of the century some of them were beginning to be most wickedly restive, — if they would not, at least it was a comfort to see them made to do so in a field where making was possible. If Susan in the flesh insisted on grumbling because her sleeping corner in the cellar was damp and heatless, because she dined seven times a week on potatoes while her employers were dining on venison — if she were so forgetful in life, all the more was it a satisfaction to see her dutifully curtseying on the printed page. The buyers of the Tracts were the people curtseyed to, and so long as that remained the case the curtseys arrived unfailingly. How far their arrival helped to reënforce the habit of mind they represented — well, Mrs. More and her coworkers were wellmeaning men and women, thoroughly conscientious ones, but their seats in Heaven were probably not secured for them through the suffrages of their social subordinates.

II

But with the turn of the century something happened to the English middle class, and also, therefore, to the kind of story it fed on. Industrialism was spreading fast in England, trade growing every day more aggressive. It is possible to dig out the facts of its spread, or some of them, from history. There is no need to go digging if we follow the moral tale. As clearly as in a chart it points out who now is at the top of the wheel, what sets of useful compliances have turned into virtues.

Mrs. More had glorified chiefly the hereditary owner, not the very great but the near great, squires and small landholders and gentlefolk generally. The social groups with which Miss Edgeworth, for example, deals are the same, but with how altered an emphasis! Hereditary owners appear in her stories, but less often as patrons and noble examples than as examples of the other sort, warnings against idleness and spendthrift habits. Lady Diana Sweepstakes — her name alone condemns her. And who can look for good out of young Squire Jack Dashforth? The obedient servants, the humble farm laborers, are obedient and humble still, but mostly now to people who rose, if not from their own ranks, yet from those appreciably nearer to them. The self-made man is in the saddle and scattering his dust as he rides upon his former despiser.

He is worth looking at, too, this selfmade man, for reasons other than his self-making. The Victorian Age is implicit in him. Consider Mr. Gresham, the deus ex machina of ‘Waste Not, Want Not.’

Mr. Gresham, a Bristol Merchant, who had by honorable industry and economy accumulated a fortune, retired from business to a new house. . . . Mr. Gresham did not imagine a new house alone could make him happy. He did not propose to live in idleness and extravagance. . . . He was fond of children — and he determined to adopt one of his relations. He had two nephews and he invited them both . . .

In the blessed nineties, there used to be a poem familiar to the pages of all school readers, ‘Which Shall It Be?’ which dwelt upon the plight of parents faced by just that dilemma of the wealthy adopting relative. In ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ no plight exists— no more than one existed earlier for the family of Susan when the needs of the Sheppard family lifted her from her own attic and set her down in theirs. Tender emotions, except in carefully selected instances, are still the property of the possessing class.

Mr. Darford, who appears in ‘The Manufacturers,’ is Mr. Gresham again, slightly disguised by a change of occupation.

By patient and persevering attention to business, Mr. John Darford . . . had secured himself in his old age a competent fortune . . . the comforts without the vanities of life. He was often heard to declare that he thought a busy manufacturer might be as happy as any idle gentleman.

Someone should page Mrs. More in the matter of that last sentiment. It falls in various forms from the lips of a score of Mr. Darfords, each one retired on the fruits of his own saving. It is notable, however, that though the place of the born man is taken now by the self-made one, it is still a retired self-made one who fills it. Even in the early nineteenth century it is not quite decent to be observed in the process of trade. The successful retired uncle, the elderly adopting uncle, is the favorite figure of Miss Edgeworth’s generation.

And what an uncle! He does not ‘propose to live in extravagance.’ He prefers ‘the comforts without the vanities.’ He hangs mottoes on his walls — WASTE NOT, WANT NOT — instead of pictures. He not only wears a fustian coat, — that could be forgiven him, — but he descants continually on the virtues of fustian coats as above those of handsomer appearance.

And his nephews are marked as legibly as he by the time which produced them. Mr. Gresham’s pair are children, Hal and Ben. In the opening hours of their visit to him, Mr. Gresham presents each with a sum of money — not, by the way, to give them pleasure, but that he ‘might have an opportunity of judging of their dispositions and the habits they had acquired.’

Hal spends the money given him partly for cakes and mostly for a handsome uniform for sports — sports directed, as it happens, by that same opprobrious Lady Diana Sweepstakes. Ben uses his to buy a warm coat for a beggar. Well and good! Ben, having been charitable, should get his reward in an approving conscience and probably he does, but he gets it also in tangible payments through every page of the story. Hal, on the other hand, falls as swiftly into misfortune. His cakes at once make him sick, his fine shoes trip him into the mud, his uniform brings only instant derision. Just as the moral tale of the earlier period was busy showing how, for the poor, earthly privation was part guaranty of heavenly pleasure, so for this period the moral tale is intent on proving pleasures to be not so very pleasurable after all.

It is a wonder, indeed, that readers of these early nineteenth-century tales ever wanted any delightful thing, so little and such brief delight is allowed to attach to its possession. Whether it be the unlucky Hal, or Rosamund, in ‘The Purple Jar,’ who, shopping for shoes with her mother, — sensible shoes, we may be sure, — sees a vase shining in the store window and loses her heart to its color, or Charles, in ‘The Manufacturers,’ peering longingly through his factory window to watch the squire ride by in his pink coat, one and all they are headed for misfortune, for disillusionment prompt and often repeated, until all alike can sum up their acquired wisdom in the formula of Rosamund, which, much condensed, runs something like this: ‘I see you are right, dear mother; I see now how foolish it is to want a thing because it is pretty instead of because it is useful.’

These younger characters even more than their elders emphasize the contrasts between eighteenth-century tale and Victorian one. Generally speaking, what are the shortcomings of Hal and Rosamund and their fellows, which bring down misfortune upon them? One is their tendency to admire people of a social rank higher than their own — a tendency for the lack of which they would have been damned in the pages of Mrs. More. A second is still more significant — they desire beauty, a thing with which the Shepherd had no concern. With Hal and Charles the desire is complicated by snobbery. With Rosamund it stands clear; she prefers beauty to shoes.

But to the early nineteenth century either loaf is precious beyond any number of hyacinths. Not only so, but the hyacinths themselves are taboo — and faded besides. In the moral tale of this period, beauty is always dangerous, a thin veil over perdition. It is always tawdry, too, an unworthy distraction from that grim attention to business, that cent-per-cent concentration, which is the very meaning of life to all worthy people. Unworthy ones — lords and ladies and artists and paupers and wrong-minded nephews who object to spending their days in factories — must be brought to grief as fast as may be, or how shall factories go on? The Industrial Age is speaking for its own life in this matter.

There is, though, another source besides the industrial one for that dread of loveliness so clearly seen in the life of the century and so abundantly reflected in its tales. Mr. Darford believes in ‘the comforts but not the vanities.’ Mr. Gresham takes kindly to mottoes as wall decorations. Each of them holds his place by reason of having piled shilling on shilling or acre on acre till the pile made a pedestal. If any suspicion gets abroad that pedestals are not made that way, if there exist exotic goods not dependent on shillings, then what becomes of their eminence? Hal yearning for a pink coat when his uncle has had none — it is as though the Shepherd had undertaken to tell the curate something new about the glories of Heaven.

In the eighteenth century the first commandment, as the moral tale records it, was ‘Stay quiet in your assigned social place; reverence those placed above you,’ for on assigned social place and the reverence of it the whole scheme was based.

In the nineteenth century the commandment has shifted a little; ‘Stay quiet in your assigned mental place; appreciate only what we, your successful neighbors, can appreciate; desire only what we have proved by handling and buying and selling to be good. Otherwise—’ It is heavy with menace, that ‘otherwise.’ The character who disregards it goes downhill as fast as the author can push him, not only losing whatever he has to lose, but developing all the vices as well.

The American tale during this second period — earlier it scarcely existed — is as decisive in this matter of a single standard of taste, and that a tasteless one, as is the English, but at other points it differs significantly. One of these differences is its denial of the importance of heredity — or rather, perhaps, its assertion of the benefits of early privation. Another is its emphasis upon the value of schooling, at least so far as boys are concerned. Take, for example, ‘The Yankee Girl,’ by Mrs. Stowe, who in her early days was a notable producer of moral tales. Mary, the heroine of the story, is wise only in dairy and kitchen and laundry. Her ‘amount of accomplishments so-called was small, including not a word of French and no more music than was comprised in the sweetest of natural voices,’ and tacitly the writer encourages us to applaud Mary for an ambition which limits itself to snowy floors and light loaves. When the question is of George, the hero, however, —

There dwelt in the village a poor, pale, sickly, desponding widow, whose husband, being suddenly killed in a fall, had left to his wife no other treasure than as bright and vigorous a shoot of boyhood as ever grew up fair and flourishing out of an old decaying stock. . . . But — with a deal of general ability, he seemed to have no affinity for anything in particular.

He tries shoemaking and gives it up, tries farming and gives it up. Mrs. More would send him straight to the workhouse. Miss Edgeworth would bring him to late, humiliating repentance. Mrs. Stowe lets us into the secret of his restlessness — he wants to go to school. Not only does he want to go, but the desire is creditable to him. Armed with it, plus the other familiar moral-tale virtues, he sets out from the village, passes from trade to trade, conquers a profession. We see him finally Ambassador at the Court of St. James — and displaying there that spreadeagle assurance that only self-made is well made which should have endeared him (but did not) to the whole DarfordGresham clan.

In another fashion the American tale led the way for its English contemporary, though here it did not permanently differ from it. Susan, who married good Tom White, the reformed post-boy, had for one of her charms her ‘neat and sober’ appearance — and no other appearance at all, so far as the author informs us. Susan is out of fashion very early in America. The American heroine, whatever else she lack, has beauty of face on her side. Adornment she despises, but a kind Providence makes her always handsome, just as a kind Providence provides her — and this in New England! — with ‘the sweetest of natural voices.’ Only the rich and the idle are ugly.

But allowing for these and other differences between eighteenth century and nineteenth, between England and America, the likenesses are, none the less, far more striking. The foundations of the moral tale remained the same through the years and across the two nations. Always it extolled conformity, always it exalted prudence, always it preached a long patience and a thrifty subservience of spirit. So it was in the two centuries past. What of the one just begun? Does the moral tale exist in the twentieth century? And if it does, what does it now extol ? What are the profitable virtues, the ones to be paid for in soup and shillings or their equivalents, and for what vices are soup and shillings withheld?

III

Since the phenomena of one’s own time are always difficult of recognition, it is worth while, before attempting the answer, to recall once more exactly what a moral tale is. It is that story wherein certain spiritual qualities assure to their possessors the accession of material gains. These qualities do not necessarily represent goodness to any generation except the one exalting them. Most of us of the present day would feel the Shepherd a fitter candidate for examination before a Commission on Lunacy than for the fate that finally befalls him — as paid leader of a Sunday School. Neither need the chosen qualities bear any integral relationship to the gain attained, such as the relationship between patience and the catching of fish. What they must be are qualities gratifying to the important members of the middle-class group, whether squires or retired uncles, qualities the emulation of which tends to maintain the status quo. With this clarification in mind, let us turn back to the twentieth century.

The place to turn first, of course, is to some one of those great popular weeklies which number their readers by the million. In one of the largest of them there appeared within the last lustrum a moral tale so representative that no reader can fail to have its counterpart in mind — ‘Nothing But Business,’ from the typewriter of J. R. Sprague. The story is the story of Henry Parks. It opens when Henry is thirty-two.

Twelve years before, a country boy, he had come to the city to learn the watchmaking trade. Having learned it, he opened a little store on a side street. . . . His workbench was at the front window, where he sat all day repairing watches. . . . People were agreeably surprised when Henry Parks would get up promptly and cheerfully to wait on them.

So far, Henry is a figure familiar enough. He could belong to the nineteenth century as well as the twentieth, to the eighteenth as well as the nineteenth. Readers of Miss Edgeworth can chart his future without hesitation. He will prosper in that little shop, adding diligence to diligence and penny to penny. At sixty or thereabouts, a modest competence will permit him to retire. He will not, however, ‘propose to live in idleness,’ and therefore will pick out a nephew or two —

But something is wrong with Henry. Before a second page is completed, he is headed straight for destruction.

The corner location in a high-rent district was to let, and Parks leased it. . . . He engaged repairmen, salesmen, and a bookkeeper where formerly he had performed all those functions himself. He went into debt. . . .

And even this paragraph does not contain the full list of his indiscretions. He joins a country club, runs accounts at department stores, indulges in hotel luncheons. Presently he owes $12,000 on his stock, bills all overdue and no relief in sight. The sins of Hal were as nothing to the sins of this young man. Our moral-tale sense and our common sense as well warn us that Henry is riding for a fall.

But does the fall arrive? Exactly the reverse. The penalty for Henry’s too rapid expansion is the chance to expand more rapidly still. The penalty for owing $12,000 is the chance to owe $50,000. We leave him at the end of the story secure in his home and his club and his proud ‘leading merchant’ position, carrying his debts debonairly, and soon, no doubt, to be free of them.

And the reason for these blessings, seemingly unearned? All the first two thirds of the story are spent in showing it to us — a reason as quaint, quite possibly, to the eyes of later centuries as the reason for the Shepherd’s shilling: Henry is long-suffering with customers. Customers intentionally insulting, customers that the very Shepherd would have thrust out over the sill, Henry endures with a smile.

Then the fat stranger did something calculated to upset the temper of the bestnatured jewelry salesman in the world. . . . But Henry Parks restrained his natural impulses. . . . Henry walked with him to the door, determined to do his full duty. ‘I’m sorry you can’t use the stone,’ he said politely. . . . ‘I’m glad you called, anyway.’

We see him restraining himself with customer after customer in the course of the story. So far as Henry is concerned, the customer is as sacrosanct as the squire used to be. That one of the most irritating should turn out to be a wholesale jeweler who has quarreled with Henry’s rivals, that he should discover the young man’s difficulties, should have $12,000 to spare, should be fairly searching, apparently, for a debtor blessed with business affability instead of business prudence — Well, this, remember, is the moral tale. If Henry has eaten the porridge of his generation, its cake he is entitled to have.

But just as it would be an imperfect account of the Shepherd which attributed to him humility to his betters and no other qualities, so with Henry and his mates the central characteristic of subservience to customers is liberally embroidered by others. There is indeed one other so consistently present in contemporary moral-tale heroes that it might itself be called the central one. This is their willingness to take a gambling chance. Henry expands his jewelry business far beyond the point of safety. All the rest, whether architects or bond salesmen, bank clerks or realestate agents, follow in his steps. The architect goes into building and runs up houses chiefly on hope. The realestate agent buys options and teeters between ruin and huge profit. If any recent heroes have won to their gratuitous rewards by means of prudence, their number is small. As ardently as its predecessor preached caution, the present tale is preaching the taking of risks.

It is in accord with this preaching that the approved and finally successful characters are invariably ready at spending. Fustian coats, ‘the comforts and not the vanities,’ are out of fashion. Henry, his affairs at their worst, telephones his wife to come downtown for luncheon that he may tell her of their impending ruin.

As they sat down at the table . . . he reflected sadly that it might be a long time before he would be able to bring his wife into the handsome hotel dining room again.

He reflected — but he did not therefore seek the cafeteria. None of them do. In the present-day tale the ‘ penny saved’ has not even a tenuous relation to ultimate success.

Perhaps it is an effect of this liberal habit of spending, perhaps it is that the post-Victorian has advanced in his own practice from ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ to ‘The Blind Nydia’ and on to ‘Battersea Bridge,’ but the contemporary moral tale has also surrendered in large part its predecessor’s hostility to beauty. Rosamund could buy her vase now with a measure of approval. If, having bought it, she took it home and cunningly copied it with improvements and set up an art shop, the measure of approval would be full.

And Rosamund setting up an art shop would be only a very little out of place in the twentieth-century tale, for there is still one other shift from the past as significant as the shift from prudence already noted. This is the change in the age for the attaining of rewards. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were at one here. Rich uncles, rewarded shepherds — old, all of them. Even the Darford nephews did not collect on their respective virtues and vices till half their lives had rolled by. The present tale frowns on such delay. Its favorites are still young, are vigorous and actively enjoying when their good things arrive to them. Somewhere between twentyfive and thirty is the favorite period for wisdom to reap its harvest. Just as the tale is preaching, ‘Take risks,’ it is also preaching, ‘and take them now.’

With all these changes, it would seem, at first look, as though the contemporary tale had renounced completely relationship to its forerunner; but this, while it is nearly the case, is not completely so. Out of the array of approved qualities which stretched across the two preceding centuries, there is not much left, certainly, but there still is something. Patience is gone, prudence is gone, humility has changed its object; even honesty, in the strict eighteenth-century sense, is shaded a bit in behalf of cleverness; but, among all these destructions, one virtue remains intact. More enduring than any of its fellows, diligence is with us still. No matter what his generation, no matter who his employer, the moraltale hero labors zealously and loves his task. By that clue, the twenty-first century, looking back to ours, may relate Henry to Ben, and Ben in turn to the Shepherd.