3.23. ON DEBTS OF HONOUR.
My ethical disposition is all against punctilio and I set no greater
value on unblemished honour than I do on purity. I never yet met a man
who talked proudly of his honour who did not end by cheating or trying
to cheat me, nor a code of honour that did not impress me as a
conspiracy against the common welfare and purpose in life. There is
honour among thieves, and I think it might well end there as an
obligation in conduct. The soldier who risks a life he owes to his army
in a duel upon some silly matter of personal pride is no better to me
than the clerk who gambles with the money in his master's till. When I
was a boy I once paid a debt of honour, and it is one of the things I am
most ashamed of. I had played cards into debt and I still remember
burningly how I went flushed and shrill-voiced to my mother and got the
money she could so ill afford to give me. I would not pay such a debt of
honour now. If I were to wake up one morning owing big sums that I had
staked overnight I would set to work at once by every means in my power
to evade and repudiate that obligation. Such money as I have I owe under
our present system to wife and sons and my work and the world, and I see
no valid reason why I should hand it over to Smith because he and I have
played the fool and rascal and gambled. Better by far to accept that
fact and be for my own part published fool and rascal.
I have never been able to understand the sentimental spectacle of sons
toiling dreadfully and wasting themselves upon mere money-making to save
the secret of a father's peculations and the "honour of the family," or
men conspiring to weave a wide and mischievous net of lies to save the
"honour" of a woman. In the conventional drama the preservation of the
honour of a woman seems an adequate excuse for nearly any offence short
of murder; the preservation that is to say of the appearance of
something that is already gone. Here it is that I do definitely part
company with the false aristocrat who is by nature and intent a humbug
and fabricator of sham attitudes, and ally myself with democracy. Fact,
valiantly faced, is of more value than any reputation. The false
aristocrat is robed to the chin and unwashed beneath, the true goes
stark as Apollo. The false is ridiculous with undignified insistence
upon his dignity; the true says like God, "I am that I am."
