On Honour
By STRIX HONOUR is a word still current on the golf- course and at the card-table. Corpses, normally male, are from time to time buried with military honours. My impression is that military honours are always described as 'full,' but it may well be that, owing to the need to get a senior member of the Chaplain-General's Directorate to countersign the pro-forma from District Headquarters authorising an issue of blank am- munition to be fired over the grave,' or for some similar reason, interments do from time to time take place to whose protagonist the military honours paid are, technically, something less than full.
County Court judges are, I believe, correctly addressed as 'Your Honour,' and the virtually indiscriminate use of this mode of address by stage Irishmen is possibly a relic of the police-state established in Ireland by the British. Clever people obtain honours degrees, and the Sovereign periodically rewards merit or distinction among her subjects by conferring honours on those held to be especially deserving; when these are hereditary they are referred to as 'the family honours' at the end of obituaries.
But in its primitive sense the word is hardly ever used. You sometimes hear a BBC comedian mention 'the honour of the regiment'; he does so for the same reason that he employs other slightly pretentious archaisms, like `Gadzooks!' or 'the white man's burden,' because they can easily be made to sound funny. I do not know whether among schoolboys a promise given 'on your honour' is still regarded as more binding than an ordinary promise, but 1 suspect that the formula has gone out of fashion.
It would be interesting to establish why our society has dropped from its vocabulary the name of an abstract conception which for so many centuries exerted a powerful influence on Euro- pean mores. The thing itself, however, is still so to speak one of the facts of life. You can hardly criticise a man more severely than by describing his conduct as dishonourable. But why is the ex- pression 'a man of honour' all but obsolete when it comes quite naturally to us to talk about 'a man of integrity,' which is almost but not quite the same thing?
You could argue that we have ceased to talk about honour because there is practically no honour left to talk about, but I think this is nonsense. It may go against the grain to hear Mr. — and Sir — — being called 'right honourable' during debates in the House of Commons; but two hundred years ago the euphemism was being applied in Westminster to a, far wider range of far bigger scoundrels. It would be impossible to prove, and difficult even to maintain, that in the mid twentieth century public and private morality in Britain have sunk below the level attained in any previous age.* Words with bad meanings never seem to go out of currency. Indeed, in much the same way as successful gangs of Chinese bandits used to attract into their ranks deserters from the forces sent against them, they have the power of seduc- ing words which originally had good meanings and taking them on the strength of the pejoratives. Egregious, for instance, means exceptional or surpassing; but if your commanding officer de- scribed you in your annual confidential report as 'egregiously efficient,' you would seriously con- sider exercising your right to appeal against his findings. Nor would you much like it if he wrote that you were 'a very moderate officer,' though he would in fact only be saying that you were temperate in your conduct and avoided extremes.
'There are however as yet no signs that honour is on its way to becoming a dirty word. It has not even suffered the fate which overtakes some 'good' words for no ascertainable reasons and causes them to become (intrepid and dainty are two examples) practically unusable except for purposes of parody. It has simply been put on the shelf.
* * I think this is a pity. It took Europe a long time to evolve the concept of honour; and though it is true that many wicked and foolish things have been done in its name, countries like. Russia and China, on which the Age of Chivalry had no impact, are the poorer for lacking our set of bye- laws to the rules of life. In neither nation, for all their many virtues, is the European ideal of honour understood, let alone accepted as a standard of conduct. We, for instance, are con- stantly being surprised by the alacrity with which Russian and Chinese citizens denounce the mis- deeds of their neighbours, and often indeed of their own flesh and blood, to the authorities. We attribute this to the power of Communism to atrophy personal loyalties.
But in neither country hits the informer ever aroused the detestation with which we regard him, and long before they or anybody else had even heard of Communism the Russians and the Chinese were using this repulsive method to eliminate rivals or to pay off old scores. It is perhaps no accident that Communism, whose squalid twists and shifts are the antithesis of what we understand by honour, should be most firmly established in two countries where honour ,is not understood at all
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It is not however on ideological grounds that I regret the obsolescence of honour as a watch- word, but because it stands for something good which should be kept constantly in mind. Although it is a matter, and a rather nebulous one, which primarily concerns grown-ups, children easily absorb the principles on which it is based and are quick to grasp the concept of personal honour, of something which is built in to all decent people, and which each must jealously preserve. The word itself may sound old-fashioned, but I believe it makes more sense to children than all that gulf about 'citizenship' and muscular circumlocutions like 'playing the game.'
It is silly to talk about honour too much, but it is sillier not to talk about it at all.
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