MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IHAVE been told that the Catholic Church regard spiritual pride as among the least pardonable of human iniquities. Not being a theologian, I am uncertain of the meaning that should, in this context. be attached to the word " spiritual." Pride is surely a noble quality, implying that there are certain great tyrannies or small weaknesses forbidden by one's self- respect. The motto Aliis licet: libi non licet is one that, in spite of its arrogance, no sensible person would reject. Con- versely, although I agree that modesty is a rewarding social asset, I regard humility with the distaste that I reserve for vanilla cream. Nobody really enjoys a humble person. Yet when the Catholic Church, in their great wisdom, define a special defect as a major sin. I am bound to pay attention to what they say. I presume that what they mean by " spiritual pride " is not merely the ostentation of moral superiority, but the even greater fault of resting upon the laurels of one's own saintliness. 1 have become conscious, during the last two weeks, of both these failings. Not only have I sought by every means to display my saintliness, but I have rested upon its laurels, smiling to myself with the unctuous self-satisfaction of a Murillo. It is revolting to observe how rapidly can be acquired a contempt for the vices that one has only recently discarded. I cultivate a generous and philosophic tolerance for the crimes in which I am myself tempted to indulge ; yet the scorn that I feel and express for those who surrender to temptations other than my own has about it a quality of austere resonance equalled only by that of the Piagnoni of Savonarola. How quick and smarting is the derision that I feel for those-who are unable to master the vices that, but a fortnight ago, held me also enthralled. I quite see that unless I can exorcise the demon by prayer and fasting I also shall fall a victim to spiritual pride. * 4 * 4 Once before in my life I gave up picking. I had been lunch- ing in Soho, and on leaving the restaurant I saw a headline scribbled all careless upon a newsvendor's board. " Germans," 1 read. " enter Paris.7 The shock of this announcement made me reel. I decided to do penance, not for my own sins only, but for the sins of all the world that had brought this great unhappiness upon my beloved France. I decided, there in Soho. to give up smoking. There are moments when the guardian angel, smiling affectionately at human impulses, prevents one from committing the last, the irremediable, absurdity. My angel on this occasion had the foresight to prevent me stating for what term of years this penance was to last. " I shall give up smoking,' I said in my sudden anguish ; but I did not say whether I should commit this act of laceration for ever, for one year, or only for the afternoon. None the less, for four months, during the Battle of Britain, I preserved the promise that I had made to the City of Paris. At the end of that period I realised that England was not to be invaded and that the war was won. I felt certain that Paris would now allow me to resume my habit, being a tolerant city, and one willing to forgive: Fluctuat nec niergitur. I therefore started to smoke again. I had not observed during the four months of my penance any physical improvement of my condition. I did not think, sleep, hear or see better than formerly ; my sense of taste and smell did, I admit, become more sensitive ; but the main physical result of my abstinence was that I swelled and swelled. Within those four months I must have added a stone-and-a-half to my weight. The Savonarola look was absent ; the asceticism of my behaviour was not apparent to the casual observer ; so I started to smoke again. * * 4 * . .
A decade passed. The misery of that May and June of 1941 was succeeded by the satisfactions of victory, the establishment of the Welfare State and the Festival of Britain. Having noticed that during the last winter my bronchial tubes had become so raucous as to be a nuisance to myself and others, I decided that I must repeat the experiment that had been so successful at the time of the fall of Paris. Yet in the interval I had been told by some pedlar of old wives' tales that what was really difficult was not to abandon smoking entirely, but to cut down the.forty cigarettes a day to five, My penance, therefore, must now, on the Demosthenes analogy, take the form of this even more arduous act of self-discipline. Each morning for the last fort- night I have inserted six cigarettes into my case, and every even- ing when I retire to rest there is one cigarette remaining as a Skylon of virtue. It is well known from the records kept by other saints and ascetics who have accomplished similar acts of abnegation that the difficult period is not, as one might have supposed, the period after breakfast, but those aching hours that stretch between the time of dinner and the time of bed. I, there- fore, try to keep my five lonely little cigarettes until after I have eaten my evening meal. I do not find the ordeal intolerable ; I am not conscious of nervous twitchings or bursts of maniac rage ; I am not aware that my impatience with the sluggish movements of my fellow-mortals has sensibly increased since the day of renouncement. .1 well know that I shall start to swell visibly, but that is the price I am prepared to pay. And I am also aware that my spiritual pride, the ostentation of virtue, the Murillo smile of saintliness, have seized me in their grip. I prance with saintliness, as if I were a disciple of Dr. Buchman, which I am not. j6 What I find so delightfully unexpected about the practice of virtue is that it generates a strong desire for perfectibility. Once one starts being good one wants to be even gooder. My sixth cigarette, remaining all solitary in its case when bedtime comes, suggests to me even further devices for the mortification of the flesh. Surely it is an act of self-indulgence to choose for my daily ration the very brand of cigarettes that I most enjoy? The select five must henceforward be composed not of tobacco that I like, but of tobacco that I dislike. I shall abandon the flavours of the West for those of the East. I can well recall how, in the days before the first war, it was regarded as common or eccentric to smoke Virginia tobacco. So acute, in those days, was our sense of smell that we could detect the smoke of a single Virginia cigarette, even at a public banquet, even through the haze of a hundred Havanas, Rdgie, or Melachrino. The person guilty of lighting such an object in a public place was regarded as anti-social. "It stinks," so we would exclaim, "the whole place out." Then came the war and the sad fact that the tobacco of the Turkish, Bulgarian and Greek valleys could no longer be obtained. We were obliged to smoke the Western tobacco, and in the end our palates and elegance were subdued by this Virginian upstart. What is so tragic is that we never, after the war, reverted to the old love. It was as if one had abandoned foie gran by necessity and stuck to leberwurst ever since. But now I shall deliberately return to the Balkan brands. It will render my penance all the more intolerable, and it will give to my saintliness a glow that my friends will instantly recognise as being, not of this world, but of a sweeter world beyond.
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My action in thus discarding the tobacco that I had come to like 'is not dictated solely by spiritual pride or by this new- found delicious urge to be gooder all the time. It is also inspired by a wish to help the Greeks. It seems that, owing to E.C.A.. the Germans have acquired a dastardly taste for American tobacco. In the old days it was the Balkan leaves that fed the German market today the Virginian cigarettes imported into Western Germany alone exceed by one-third the amount of tobacco previously sent by Greece to the whole of the German Reich. It has become my duty to assist the Greek tobacco industry: if my five cigarettes fail to cause improvement I shall increase my ration to fifty a day.
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