r as the need of poorer
women for a glass of gin, has to help a mother through child-bearing
often enough to feel that he is not living wholly in vain.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-RESPECT IN SURGEONS

The surgeon, though often more unscrupulous than the general
practitioner, retains his self-respect more easily. The human conscience
can subsist on very questionable food. No man who is occupied in doing
a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his
self-respect. The shirk, the duffer, the malingerer, the coward, the
weakling, may be put out of countenance by his own failures and frauds;
but the man who does evil skilfully, energetically, masterfully, grows
prouder and bolder at every crime. The common man may have to found his
self-respect on sobriety, honesty and industry; but a Napoleon needs no
such props for his sense of dignity. If Nelson's conscience whispered to
him at all in the silent watches of the night, you may depend on it it
whispered about the Baltic and the Nile and Cape St. Vincent, and not
about his unfaithfulness to his wife. A man who robs little children
when no one is looking can hardly have much self-respect or even
self-esteem; but an accomplished burglar must be proud of himself. In
the play to which I am at present preluding I have represented an artist
who is so entirely satisfied with his artistic conscience, even to the
point of dying like a saint with its support, that he is utterly selfish
and unscrupulous in every other relation without feeling at the smallest
disadvantage. The same thing may be observed in women who have a genius
for personal attractiveness: they expend more thought, labor, skill,
inventiveness, taste and endurance on making themselves lovely than
would suffice to keep a dozen ugly women honest; and this enables them
to maintain a high opinion of themselves, and an angry contempt for
unattractive and personally careless women, whilst they lie and cheat
and slander and sell themselves without a blush. The truth is, hardly
any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible
point of honor. Andrea del Sarto, like Louis Dubedat in my play, must
have expended on the attainment of his great mastery of design and his
originality in fresco painting more conscientiousness and industry
than go to the making of the reputations of a dozen ordinary mayors and
churchwardens; but (if Vasari is to be believed) when the King of France
entrusted him