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 Routledge Research in Constitutional Law

PHILOSOPHY, OBLIGATION
AND THE LAW
BENTHAM’S ONTOLOGY OF NORMATIVITY

Piero Tarantino
This book, containing a lucid account of Bentham’s ontology and epistemology
and an assessment of its significance, will be welcomed by both Bentham scholars
and historians of philosophy more generally. Not since C.K. Ogden’s pioneering
work in the 1930s have we seen such a stimulating work on this under-appreciated
and yet fascinating and important area of Bentham’s thought.
Philip Schofield, University College London, UK

Piero Tarantino’s work explores Bentham’s fascinating and profoundly original

theory on the ontology of normativity. The book provides an illuminating and
impressive interpretation of all the pieces Bentham put together to develop a
theory of normativity out of a general ontological framework. Everyone with
an interest in the deepest questions in the philosophy of normativity will derive
much instruction from the book. I highly recommend it.
Peter Stemmer, University of Konstanz, Germany
Philosophy, Obligation and the Law

This book presents a comprehensive investigation of the notion of obligation in

Bentham’s thought. For Bentham, obligation is a fictitious – namely linguistic –
entity, whose import and truth lie in empirical perceptions of pain and pleasure,
‘real’ entities.
This work explores Bentham’s fictionalism, and aims to identify the general
features that ethical fictitious entities (including obligation) share with other
kinds of fictitious entities. The book is divided into two parts: the first examines the
ontological and epistemological foundations of Bentham’s distinction between
real and fictitious entities; the second part addresses the normative and motiva-
tional aspects of moral and legal notions.
This book reveals the centrality of the following issues to Bentham’s legal
reform: logic, theory of language, physics, metaphysics, metaethics, axiology,
moral psychology, the structure of practical reasoning and action with reference
to the law.

Dr Piero Tarantino is a researcher at Centre Bentham, Sciences Po Law School,

Paris, France.
Routledge Research in Constitutional Law

This series features thought-provoking and original scholarship on constitutional

law and theory. Books explore key topics, themes and questions in the field with
a particular emphasis on comparative studies. Where relevant, titles will engage
with political and social theory, philosophy and history in order to offer a rounded
analysis of constitutions and constitutional law.
Series Editor: David Marrani
Available titles in this series include:

Philosophy, Obligation and the Law

Bentham’s Ontology of Normativity
Piero Tarantino

The Internet and Constitutional Law

The Protection of Fundamental Rights and Constitutional
Adjudication in Europe
Edited by Oreste Pollicino and Graziella Romeo

Engineering Constitutional Change

A Comparative Perspective on Europe, Canada and the USA
Edited by Xenophon Contiades

Colonial and Post-colonial Constitutionalism in the Commonwealth

Peace, Order and Good Government
Hakeem O. Yusuf

The Legal Philosophy and Influence of Jeremy Bentham

Essays on ‘Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence’
Edited by Guillaume Tusseau

Constitutionalism in the Global Realm

A Sociological Approach
Poul F. Kjaer

The Accountability Gap in EU law

Marios Costa
Philosophy, Obligation and
the Law
Bentham’s Ontology of Normativity

Piero Tarantino
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 2018 Piero Tarantino
The right of Piero Tarantino to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
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without intent to infringe.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-49657-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-02126-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Galliard
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
To my mother Carmela, my father Giacomo,
and my sister Paola for their unshakable love and
never-ending support
Contents

Foreword xii
Acknowledgements xvi
List of abbreviations xviii

From the normative question to Bentham 1

The ontology of fiction

The theory of real and fictitious entities and its
relation with the normative question 11

1 The distinction between reality and fiction 21

1.1 Real entities 21

The map of entities 21
Perceptible entities 24
Inferential entities 27
The belief in the existence of real entities 31
1.2 Fictitious entities 36
Empirical ontology and linguistic ontology 36
The area of reality and the area of fiction 40
Unreal or fabulous entities 45
1.3 Language and imagination 47
Verbal reality 47
The linguistic process of substantiation 50
The operations of the human mind 51

2 The representation of the physical world 59

2.1 The epistemology of physics 59

The fictitious framework of reality 59
The Ten Predicaments 61
The notions of relation and causality 64
The image of the physical world 66
x Contents
2.2 The double meaning of existence 67
An empirical account of existence 67
A linguistic account of existence 69
The reconciliation between realism and constructivism 75
2.3 The connection between reality and fiction 76
Empirical realism and constructivism 76
Sense-perception and the human mind 77
The ontological function of language 80

The normativity of fiction

The evolution of the theory of real and fictitious entities 85

3 Ethical fictitious entities 91

3.1 The problem of definition 91

The import and truth of real entities and fictitious entities 91
The method of paraphrasis 95
The definition of obligation 98
The notions of right and power 105
3.2 Moral qualities 110
Good versus bad or evil 110
Right and wrong 113
The theory of virtue 117
3.3 Pleasure and pain 125
Pathematic perceptions 125
The causation of action 128
Making a promise 131

4 Normativity and motivation 135

4.1 The foundations of ethics 135

The principle of utility 135
The criticism of asceticism and sympathy 145
The attack on the schools of thought adverse to utility 150
Empirical constructivism 155
Constructivism and fictionalism 158
4.2 The theory of action 163
Law and human behaviour 163
Practical reason 167
The understanding and the will 171
Exciting or moderating cause 173
Act 173
Circumstances 174
 Contents xi
Motives 176
Intentionality 180
Consciousness, disposition and consequences 182
An example of practical reasoning 182
4.3 Instrumental rationality 187
Desire-belief and means-end model 187
Sanction and obligation 199
The law as a real entity 210
Conflicting motives in practical reasoning 212
Duty and interest junction principle 216

From Bentham to the normative question 219

Bibliography 225
Index 234
Foreword
Guillaume Tusseau
professor of public law

sciences po law school, member of the institut

universitaire de france

It truly is a great benthamic pleasure to write a foreword to Piero Tarantino’s

study ambitiously entitled Philosophy, Obligation and the Law, and (only appar-
ently) more modestly presented in the subtitle as an exploration of “Bentham’s
ontology of normativity”.
Legal and political theorists have never denied or underrated the originality and
importance of Jeremy Bentham’s reflections on jurisprudence and legal reform. In
recent times, there has been a growing interest in Bentham’s thought, especially
thanks to the continuous publication of new authoritative editions of his texts,
which have made them available to a wider public in a reliable form. The condi-
tions for historical studies – purporting to restate Bentham’s actual thought – as
well as conceptual studies – focusing on what contribution Bentham’s theories
could offer to abstract philosophical debates – have flourished from several parts
of the world. Different methodological perspectives have been adopted in order
to illuminate the manifold and often neglected contributions which Bentham’s
writings offered and can still offer to the advancement of a variety of fields of
human knowledge, not confined only to the area of law and political science.
Piero Tarantino’s book is representative of these current debates and this
current attitude towards Bentham. By adopting several of the aforementioned
perspectives in a very original fashion, and especially by focusing on conceptual
problems without neglecting the dimension of intellectual history, it provides a
substantial and cutting-edge contribution to the understanding, assessment and
discussion of Bentham’s philosophy.
With two forthcoming collections on public deontology and on the possibility
of codification, Tarantino’s research is one of the major achievements of the project
CodeBentham (ANR-11-IDEX-0005–02), which jointly involved Sciences Po Law
School, Paris xiii University, and Paris iii University. The project gathered jurists,
philosophers, historians, political scientists, anglicists and economists in order to
explore the birth, development, circulation and reception of the idea of codification,
which was conceived by Bentham as a social and cultural construction regarding not
merely law but, more deeply, any form of guidance of human behaviour.
Tarantino’s book investigates Bentham’s treatment of the normative compo-
nent of the practical domains, especially morality and law, and the obligations
they entail. In pursuit of these aims, it examines the ontological framework of the
 Foreword xiii
physical world – or at least of its representation by human beings – and, then, of
the ethical realm. The concept of codification entails a consistent systematization
of a body of rules and standards of behaviour with the purpose of designing the
infrastructure of society and, thus, regulating and coordinating human conduct.
In this sense, codification has a prescriptive character: its objective is not only
to design institutions but also to guide and direct people towards specific ends,
which are envisaged by the author of the code, namely in Bentham’s case: the
greatest happiness of the greatest number. Nevertheless, the “guidance claim” a
code necessarily expresses is by no means self-evident. It involves many crucial
concepts such as normativity, practical reason, motivation, bindingness, obliga-
toriness, mandatoriness, obedience, compliance, etc. Although most of them are
crucial to the understanding of the functioning of normative systems, and espe-
cially legal orders, be it from a legal, a moral or a sociological viewpoint, they
remain what Gallie illuminatingly called “essentially-contested concepts”. One of
Tarantino’s contributions is precisely to elucidate and discuss Bentham’s position –
or positions, inconsistencies and hesitations – in this respect. Having had the
privilege to discuss it with him, my feeling is that what is at stake is not so much
arriving at a definitive picture of what Bentham thought, as following Tarantino’s
peregrination in Bentham’s writings, both published and unpublished. As they
are lively presented and analysed here, one cannot help but be somehow fasci-
nated by Bentham’s efforts at determining a theoretical position that would allow
him, from an operational viewpoint, to imagine the ideal code, able to evolve
depending on the requirements of the principle of utility.
As is suggested in Tarantino’s book, the normativity of a code presupposes
that the world it aims to regulate is somehow “adapted” to such a regulation.
This is where the ontological dimension appears. As is made evident, Bentham’s
practical and concrete reflections about the ends of the law, how behaviour must
be guided, what laws should be enacted, how a statute should be drafted and
promulgated, etc., cannot be severed from a more fundamental, theoretical and
abstract topic: how can the world be made “available” for utilitarian reformism?
What intellectual tools can be imagined to offer the appropriate “reading” or
“picture” of social reality? From this point of view, Tarantino considers it neces-
sary to connect four sub-questions concerning the ontological, epistemological,
normative and motivational facets of an obligation, which remains Bentham’s cen-
tral legal concept to understand the law. These four questions provide him with
a guideline for an overall exploration of the concept of normativity in Bentham’s
philosophy. But the very modal possibility of this normativity presupposes a fic-
tional construction of the world, which leads Bentham to a very specific theory
of language. Hence the subtitle: the ontology of normativity, which according
to my reading needs to be understood both as (i) the nature of normativity in
Bentham’s conceptions of law, morality, religion and more generally human
intercourse, and (ii) the world that is conceptually or practically needed for this
very normativity to be conceivable.
Is the world that is regulated by norms independent from norms, and does
it pre-exist norms? On the contrary, do the normative authorities contribute to
xiv Foreword
shape the social world they deal with? Many scholars would, as I personally have,
struggle with Bentham’s manuscripts in order to decide whether he is closer to
realism or to constructivism. For the first time, Tarantino offers a third possi-
bility. By means of the introduction and adoption of a new historiographical
category, i.e. “empirical constructivism”, he elucidates Bentham’s version of
fictionalism, which underpins the philosopher’s view of the ontological nature
of the different fields of knowledge, including physics, mathematics, morality,
law and religion. Tarantino shows the conceptual unity of Bentham’s theoreti-
cal system: it turns out to be the harmonious combination of empirical realism
inasmuch as it admits the reality of perceptions at the basis of our representation
of the world, and rational constructivism, inasmuch as it acknowledges the power
of the mind to create a framework to think of the world and act. This allows
Tarantino to guide the reader from Bentham’s “ontology of fiction”, regard-
ing the linguistic construction of the framework of the world from perceptual
grounds, to his “normativity of fiction”, specifically concerning the nature of the
practical domains. The detailed explanation of Bentham’s theory of real and ficti-
tious entities provides the theoretical premises for the clarification of the specific
constitution of the ethical subsets.
This is not the place to review all the merits of Tarantino’s study, and I am
confident that the reader will naturally find his or her own many ways to benefit
from it. Let me just point to what struck me when I discovered Tarantino’s manu-
script: the value of the insightful hypotheses he labels “empirical constructivism”,
and then develops as “fictionalist” and “internalist”. Shouldn’t this idea lead us
to explore a kind of pragmatist reading of Bentham’s philosophy? One needs
indeed to remember that William James’ lectures on Pragmatism were dedicated
to John Stuart Mill, who can be portrayed at least partially as Bentham’s heir, and
presented as “A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking”. Might not the
adoption of a pragmatist lens shed light on Bentham’s ontology and epistemology?
How could it help to reconsider the question of the fact-value distinction in utili-
tarian philosophy? How could it contribute to identifying the very specificities of
Bentham’s conception of jurisprudence, which is not merely censorial or merely
expositive? How much could it lead, in the broader context of Dewey’s writ-
ings, to offer new interpretations of Bentham’s theory of democracy and public
deliberation? As is evident from these questions, not only does Tarantino offer a
brilliant self-contained study of Bentham’s philosophy, it also paves the way for
new understandings of it.
A last aspect deserves mention. Tarantino’s interpretative work largely ben-
efits from very recent editorial work. It is no coincidence that his book indirectly
provides the first and, to date, unique commentary of the metaphysical and meta-
ethical sections of Bentham’s Preparatory Principles, a book that might seem
to an inexperienced reader as a morass of annotations without a specific the-
matic focus. In addition, Tarantino’s reconstruction takes advantage of as yet
unpublished Bentham manuscripts on logic and grammar, which, along with his
writings on ontology and language, are crucial to the treatment of the sources
of normativity; unfortunately, these manuscripts are still available only in the
 Foreword xv
imprecise Bowring edition, on which almost all the existing scholarship is based.
Thanks to access to these unedited manuscripts, Tarantino gained an accurate
knowledge of Bentham’s thoughts according to their precise textual formulation
and theoretical evolution. This form of intimacy allows Tarantino to cast light on
Bentham’s intellectual and practical struggles, and how he might himself have
realized how much language was the true matter and texture of intellectual and
practical achievements.
Tarantino’s book entices us to read Bentham’s texts and consider his words
without historiographical prejudices, but with the genuine curiosity and also the
pleasure to discover in them the roots of certain ideas which inspire the present.
Philosophy, Obligation and the Law: Bentham’s Ontology of Normativity offers a
thorough interpretation of Bentham’s thought, firmly grounded on the critical
assessment of his writings. Thanks to that, this book overcomes still persistent
tendencies to reductive and oversimplified reconstructions of Bentham’s philoso-
phy and has the merit of shedding light, from a new fictionalist perspective, on
pivotal concepts such as normativity and practical reason which are at the heart
of our moral life and legal practice. Tarantino tracks down the thread that ties
Bentham’s philosophy to the current reflections on the foundations of practical
reality, and clearly shows how Bentham’s insightful and underexplored fictional-
ist approach can help us possibly to handle and settle, but most of all to express,
crucial questions of our times.
Acknowledgements

Philosophy, Obligation and the Law: Bentham’s Ontology of Normativity is the

outcome of a long, often tortuous, but always fruitful intellectual (and also
physical) journey which I began at the University of Konstanz in 2008 and
ended at the Centre Bentham, Paris in 2017. Two events were crucial in deter-
mining the direction of this journey: the meeting with Professor P. Stemmer,
who aroused my curiosity on the subject of normativity, and the meeting with
Professor G. Tusseau, who led me to the discovery of the richness and fecundity
of Jeremy Bentham’s thought. This singular convergence between two seem-
ingly separate lines of research, namely the normative question and Bentham
studies, is at the origin of this book.
Between 2008 and 2017, I carried out my project in various prestigious uni-
versities, where I had the great opportunity to interact with a large number of
scholars and researchers. Although I am not able to mention all of them here, I
would like to express appreciation to them as they contributed in many ways to
the development of my research and influenced to different extents my meth-
odological approach. I wish to thank Professors P. Stemmer (Department of
Philosophy, University of Konstanz), G. Kohler and F. Cheneval (Centre for
Ethics, University of Zurich), J.-F. Kervégan (NoSoPhi Team, Paris 1 Panthéon-
Sorbonne University), H. Steinfath (Department of Philosophy, University of
Göttingen), and G. Tusseau (Sciences Po Law School – Paris) for supervising
my work from time to time and offering me the best conditions for pursuing
my research. Taking advantage of their expertise and collaborating with their
research groups allowed me to optimize my project on Bentham and normativity
and broaden my skill set. My research activities were financed by a series of institu-
tions, which I gratefully acknowledge: the University of Bari, the State Secretariat
for Education and Research SER – Swiss Confederation, the Government of the
French Republic, the German Academic Exchange Service – DAAD, and Sciences
Po – Paris.
My book was mostly written during my fellowship at the Sciences Po Law
School and my membership at the Centre Bentham. Here, I found the ideal
academic environment, including administrative assistance, to prepare my manu-
script for publication. I am indebted to the people working at the Law School,
to all members of the Centre Bentham and to the participants in the Project
 Acknowledgements xvii
CodeBentham (involving Sciences Po, Paris iii University and Paris xiii University)
for the numerous seminars, meetings and friendly conversations which enabled
me to shape and share my scholarship. My deepest gratitude goes to Professor
G. Tusseau: without his intelligent guidance, generous support and constant
encouragement my longstanding project would hardly have been brought to
completion. Furthermore, I owe him the idea of writing a book about the topics
I was studying.
A special word of thanks is due to Professor P. Schofield for giving me access
and permission to quote his transcription of Bentham’s original manuscripts on
Logic and Universal Grammar, which were indispensable for my study. I wish to
extend my thanks to Professor E. De Champs for supplying me with her tran-
scription of Bentham’s correspondence to D’Alembert (UC 169.052–066).
I would like to thank Professors G. Pellegrino, Schofield, Stemmer and Tusseau,
and the anonymous reviewers who read early versions of my manuscript and pro-
vided me with detailed commentaries, inspiring criticisms and helpful sugges-
tions. I am also grateful to the participants in the Workshop of the Department
of Ethics and Philosophy at the Université Catholique of Lille (29 January 2014),
the International Symposium Peut-on tout codifier? Ambitions et limites d’un par-
adigme (20 May 2015, Sciences Po – Paris), and the ISUS Conference 2016
“Utilitarianism and Institutional Design” (6–8 July, Université Catholique of
Lille) for their thought-provoking remarks, which helped me work out the direc-
tion I wanted to take. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Editor,
Professor D. Marrani, and the Editorial Board for taking my book into their series
Routledge Research in Constitutional Law.
Abbreviations

Bowring: 
The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Published
under the Superintendence of his Executor,
John Bowring.

A Comment on the Commentaries;

A Fragment on Government:  A Comment on the Commentaries and A
Fragment on Government, edited by Burns J.
and Hart H., London: The Athlone Press,
1977.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vari-

Correspondence: 
ous volumes in The Collected Works of Jeremy
Bentham (full references in bibliography).

Deontology;
A Table of the Springs of Action;
Article on Utilitarianism: 
Deontology together with A Table of the Springs
of Action and Article on Utilitarianism,
edited by Goldworth A., Oxford, UK:
Clarendon Press, 1983.

IPML: 
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals
and Legislation, edited by Burns J. and Hart
H., London: The Athlone Press, 1970.

UC: Bentham Manuscripts, University College

London Library (UC 101.088: box 101,
folio 088).
From the normative question
to Bentham

A discourse of 768VO pages has been written on the import of this single term
Obligation. I have written page after page myself upon the same subject, which
have gone into the fire. So long as we have not as yet acquired a clear conception
of our subject, there is no end to what we write.1

Jurists in general, have not known what foundation to give to obligation. If you
inquire what is its principle, you will find the clouds thicken around you.2

The title of this book, Philosophy, Obligation and the Law: Bentham’s Ontology of
Normativity, might appear quite clear at a glance. It suggests that the subject of the
book is a reconstruction of Bentham’s treatment of the notion of obligation. This
idea is also supported by reference to a mysterious ontology of normativity, which
intuitively seems to be related to the concept of obligation. However, when reflect-
ing carefully on such a title, a reader might be perplexed about the meaning of some
words included in it and, in particular, by the notion of normativity to which an
ontological character is ascribed. Moreover, it seems puzzling to talk of an ontology
of normativity in Bentham’s work, as he never used the noun normativity because
it was unknown to him.
This title, then, requires a terminological explanation which entails concep-
tual and historical clarification. The meaning of normativity, the centrality of the
notion of obligation involved in it, and its relation with Bentham’s philosophy
need to be specified. This is the task to which this introduction is devoted. It aims
to outline a theoretical path from the contemporary debates on practical norma-
tivity to the Benthamite reflection on ethics, with special regard to its constitutive
idea of obligation.
Expressions such as normative principle, normative grounds and normative rea-
sons are increasingly recurrent. They are employed in various fields of knowledge,
especially with reference to human behaviour, with the purpose of identifying and
qualifying their foundations. Despite this large and growing usage, the meaning

1 Preparatory Principles, 146.

2 General View of a Complete Code of Laws, Bowring iii, 180.
2 From the normative question to Bentham
of the technical word normativity, along with its cognate normative, still remains
general and quite opaque;3 furthermore, attempts to clarify it and its historical
developments have often proved controversial.
By and large, normativity concerns the principles, grounds or reasons for
something, such as an action, a system of laws, a discipline and so forth.4 In this
sense, we can talk of the normativity of a legal rule punishing an individual who
commits a crime, the normativity of a moral standard involving not lying and the
normativity of a religious command prohibiting idolatry; normativity in these
contexts means the ability of such norms to direct human behaviour. A legal rule,
a moral standard and a religious command are, indeed, ought-statements, that
is, prescriptions pointing out that something ought to be done or that someone
ought to behave in accordance with them.5
Likewise, values and virtues, such as goodness, rightness, prudence, probity,
beneficence and so forth, are normative since, when they qualify an act, a habit,
a disposition and a propensity, they do not merely express a belief about these
things, but they recommend their approval and adoption.6 Values and virtues
guide those who acknowledge them: compliance with what is regarded as valu-
able or virtuous is needed. Holding that something is good or right means that
it is worth being adopted or pursued and, then, that it ought to be adopted or
pursued. So, an agent who regards an action as right feels bound to perform it.7
What do we mean when we say that the elements making up practical real-
ity, such as rules, standards, commands, values and virtues, are normative? What
does their normativity consist in? Practical notions, such as norms and values,
entail an obligation, inasmuch as they exercise the prerogative to make a claim
on their subjects’ conduct in order to influence and direct it. Their normativity
consists in this prerogative, namely in this guidance claim, having a binding force.
Hence, the notion of obligation is at the heart of the concept of normativity. An
investigation into the normativity of practical reality is an investigation into the
requirements derived from it.

3 See, for example, Copp 2004, 8; Stemmer 2008, 12.

4 In theoretical sciences also we may acknowledge a form of normativity: saying that a principle is
normative means that it is a reason to believe in a certain state of affairs depending on or deriving
from it.
5 On the notion of ought, see Kelsen 1945, 35–7.
6 About the idea that moral elements are endowed with normativity, see, for example, Copp 2004, 7:
“Moral thought and discourse concern how we are to act, what we are to choose, and how we are
to live; they involve us in evaluating, prescribing, and recommending. I use the term ‘normative’ to
speak of this phenomenon.” In other words, normativity concerns the action-guiding and choice-
guiding prerogative of the elements making up the ethical domain.
7 The normativity of practical reality is clearly explained by Korsgaard 1996a, 8–9: “ethical standards
are normative. They do not merely describe a way in which we in fact regulate our conduct. They
make claims on us; they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least, when we invoke them,
we make claims on one another. When I say that an action is right I am saying that you ought to
do it; when I say that something is good I am recommending it as worthy of your choice.” See also
Korsgaard 1996a, 11: “when you think an action is right, you think you ought to do it – and this
consideration at least frequently provides you with a motive for doing it.”
 From the normative question to Bentham 3
These requirements should not only compel an agent to do something but
also motivate him/her to conform his/her behaviour to them. Normativity
proves to be deeply intertwined with motivation. Compliance with practical ele-
ments, which constrain the will to do something, is to be obtained through an
agent’s decision.8
Normativity is the constitutive property of practical reality and, as Stemmer
(2008, 3) makes clear, this property is intimately related to the concept of obliga-
tion, consisting in the fact that people ought to do something.9 The existence of
rules, orders, commands, standards, norms, values and virtues lies in their nor-
mativity, i.e. in their binding character. They aim to compel or orient an agent’s
deliberation when he/she is involved in a reasoning on what to do. Practical
reality is, thus, built on the idea of obligation and, by virtue of this, it is different
from physical reality.
Such considerations on the ontological structure of the practical domain lead
us to a foundational issue, concerning the grounds of the obligation to do some-
thing under which an agent is placed when reflecting on that action. What are the
sources of the normativity of the practical world, that is, of the claim of practical
elements to regulate our behaviour? Answering this question consists in settling
the so-called normative question, which is framed by Korsgaard as an investiga-
tion into “what justifies the claims that morality makes on us”; in this sense, it
involves the seeking of “a philosophical foundation for morality” that does not
merely consist in “an explanation of moral practices.”10 The normative question
concerns the foundations of practical reality, namely the grounds or reasons on
which the obligations that practical elements impose on us are based. It aims to
justify the constraints that practical notions put on our will.
The understanding of the claim that an obligation makes on us to obtain
compliance is the objective of the normative question. It requires the enlighten-
ment of the roots of practical disciplines such as morality, law and religion. It is
important to clarify why moral, legal and religious values and standards have an
action-guiding authority, thereby uncovering what endows them with a norma-
tive feature. The ultimate purpose of the normative question, therefore, is to
justify the prerogative of morality, law and religion to impose a constraint on the
agent’s conduct.
The topic of normativity has lately aroused considerable interest in the area of
practical philosophy, especially in the field of morality, leading to a major debate
and a flurry of literature. From the 1970s onwards, an increasing number of
scholarly works dealing with normativity have been written. Today, the normative

8 On the connection between normativity and motivation, and its problematic nature see Korsgaard
1996, 44: “The idea that moral conduct is obligatory, like the idea that moral judgments express
internal reasons, is intended to capture both elements of the normativity of morality: both its
power to motivate and to bind.”
9 More generally, on the ontology of normativity see Stemmer 2008, 1–13.
10 Korsgaard 1996a, 9–10: “When we seek a philosophical foundation for morality we are not
looking merely for an explanation of moral practices. We are asking what justifies the claims that
morality makes on us. This is what I am calling ‘the normative question’.”
4 From the normative question to Bentham
question lies at the core of contemporary philosophical debates and is relevant to
the grounds of morality, law and religion. Normativity is acknowledged as the dis-
tinctive property of practical reality, inasmuch as practical entities, such as moral
values, legal norms and religious orders, provide standards of conduct.
The understanding of normativity in terms of reasons for action is common
in the current debate. This interpretation was first suggested by Raz, who states
that “the normativity of all that is normative consists in the way it is, or provides,
or is otherwise related to reasons.”11 By reason for action philosophers mean
“a consideration that counts in favour of” the performance of an action.12 The
normative character of practical elements, such as social rules, moral considera-
tions, religious beliefs and legal directives, lies in their ability to give rise to reasons
that influence and modify people’s behaviour, by compelling their practical delib-
eration and choice. Consistent with this approach, the majority of scholars have
focused their attention on normative reasons, investigating their sources, their
nature, their authoritative power over an agent’s reflection and decision, and their
relation to motivation.13
As regards the normative question, a new and promising research path, com-
plementary to a purely systematic approach, consists in tracing it back to its
historical roots. Leading thinkers, such as Darwall, Korsgaard and Schneewind,
agree in identifying the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British moral tradi-
tion as the philosophical context from which the so-called normative question, in
the sense of an investigation of the foundations of morality, arises, before finding
its mature exposition in Kant’s practical thought. As Korsgaard observes:

Many of the moves in the contemporary debate were anticipated in the

debate between the Rationalists and the Sentimentalists of the eighteenth
century. At the center of their dispute was the notion of obligation, a term
they used primarily to refer to the normativity of duty. The term “obligation”
is a source of confusion, because “an obligation” is sometimes used loosely as
synonym for “a duty,” a required action. But “obligation” refers not so much
to the action as to the requiredness of the action, to its normative pull. We say
that we feel obliged, or are under an obligation, to express our sense that the
claims of morality are claims on us.14

In a nutshell, again with Korsgaard’s words, we may state that “the moral philoso-
phy of the modern period can be read as a search for the source of normativity.”15
Hence, the examination of the normative question brings us back to its origins,

11 Raz 1999, 67.

12 See, for example, Scanlon 1998, 17; Korsgaard 2008, 207–8.
13 See, for example, Korsgaard 2008, 207–29; Raz 1990, 15–48; Redondo 1999, 13–64; Scanlon
1998, 17–77; Stemmer 2008, 87–134.
14 Korsgaard 1996, 44.
15 Korsgaard 1996a, 18.
 From the normative question to Bentham 5
to the philosophical context within which this foundational issue takes shape, at
least as we know it nowadays.
The current understanding of the notion of normativity has its natural point of
departure in modern British moral philosophy, roughly beginning with Hobbes
and ending with Bentham. Philosophers of the likes of Locke, Shaftesbury,
Hutcheson, Hume and so forth, included in this long period, have been all
together identified as British moralists by recent historiography.16 The lively and
highly productive context in which these philosophers operated was particularly
characterized by a concern with the requirements and demands of morality.
The roots of the contemporary debates on normativity can be found in such
a context, distinguished by a crucial turn in conceiving the idea of obligation.
Darwall acknowledges “fundamental changes involving the concept of obligation
in British ethics of the early modern period, as it developed in the direction of the
view that obligatory force is a species of motivational force – an idea that deeply
informs present thought.”17 So, a distinctive aspect of practical reality in the mod-
ern British tradition appears to be the relation between obligation and motivation,
which is now a matter of contention among scholars dealing with normativity.
British moralists aimed to discover the grounds of morality and to justify them.
Their reflection developed on two interrelated levels: the former pertained to the
clarification of the nature of the obligation implied by morality and the latter
to the explanation of the binding feature of morality.18 Both levels were con-
nected in the general investigation of the sources of the normativity of morality.
Questions concerning the foundations of the practical domain and their norma-
tive force were at the heart of the interests and debates of British moralists, whose
attempts to tackle them produced a variety of theories.
Within such debates, the notion of obligation was put under scrutiny, with the
consequence that it was subject to a process of “radical rethinking and revision”
of its import.19 In particular, obligation began to be related to the idea of the
autonomy of the moral agent. It was seen as springing from the agent’s judgement
on what to do and no longer as deriving from an authority external to him/her,
such as God or nature, as asserted by natural law theorists. As Schneewind argues,
“The moral philosophies of Reid, Bentham, and Kant are the final eighteenth-
century efforts to articulate the normative belief about the dignity and worth of
the individual that led to conceptions of morality as self-governance.”20 So, as a

16 See Selby-Bigge 1987; Raphael 1969.

17 Darwall 1989, 133. See also Darwall 1995, 2.
18 Darwall (1995, 2) has rightly identified the two interrelated questions at the core of British moral-
ists’ thought: “In what might the universal bindingness of morality consist? What makes morality
obligating?” and, more fundamentally, “What is for anything to be binding? What is bindingness,
obligation, or, as moral philosophers are inclined to say these days, normativity itself? In what does
an ought to do consist?”
19 Cf. Darwall 1989, 135–6: “the whole matter of what exactly moral obligation is (or, perhaps more
accurately, what it could be) was undergoing radical rethinking and revision in the period following
Hobbes. [. . .] With the appearance of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, however, we shall see that a
radical shift must have been underway.”
20 Schneewind 1998, 6.
6 From the normative question to Bentham
conclusion of this process of redefinition of obligation, it is the individual that
provides himself/herself with duties.
Bentham’s philosophy came to maturity in a similarly lively and highly produc-
tive period, distinguished by reflection on the foundations of morality. Bentham
is certainly one of the prominent figures in the general process of the rethinking
of moral entities, including the leading notion of obligation. One of Bentham’s
major contributions to practical philosophy lies in conceiving of obligation,
along with other ethical elements, as a fictitious construction of the human
mind, based on sensory experience, and in applying this idea to the legal field.
Notwithstanding certain historiographical tendencies to detach Bentham’s phi-
losophy from his time, the examination of his thought in the eighteenth-century
British moral tradition seems to be fundamental to understanding that the origi-
nality of Bentham’s proposal derives from the intellectual climate of the time. On
the other hand, focusing on Bentham’s reflections concerning the foundations
and the requirements of morality and law adds to and completes the picture of
modern philosophy.
Bentham was deeply influenced by the view of an empirical basis of moral-
ity. Yet he reconciled that sensory approach with the idea of the linguistic
construction of ethical elements. This new connection between empiricism and
constructivism emerges in Bentham’s attempt to tackle fundamental issues in
morality and law, as well as in physics. Bentham understood the concept of
obligation as a fictitious entity created by the human mind in relation to the feel-
ings of pleasure and pain, which are regarded as real entities. The desire to enjoy
pleasure and avert pain makes binding the action instrumental in fulfilling that
desire. Obligation is thus the result of harmonious cooperation between sensibil-
ity and intellectual activity, including particularly the faculties of language and
imagination. Such an ontological perspective on ethics, linking desire and duty,
might be called empirical constructivism, as an alternative to Kant’s more famous
form of transcendental constructivism.21
The fictitious notion of obligation has meaning and truth only if it is referred
to pleasure and pain: they are the pillars on which the human mind builds the
practical domain. The binding and motivating force of an obligation, in which
its character consists, springs from pleasure and pain, which are individually
perceived. So, the investigation of the nature of an obligation is joined to an
investigation of its normative foundations. The ontological and normative – as
well as the epistemological and motivational – features of an obligation depend
on pleasure and pain. From these empirical roots the mind can create a fictitious
ontology endowed with normativity. Ethical elements turn out to be human
artefacts, anchored to physical reality: they can make a guidance claim on us by
virtue of their constitutive relation with pleasure and pain, which have the form
of reward or punishment.

21 On the Kantian form of constructivism, see Rawls 1980, 515–72. For an examination of the
normativity of morality and law in Kant’s thought, see Kervégan 2010, 89–109; 2015, 63–92.
 From the normative question to Bentham 7
Nonetheless, Bentham’s original contribution to the normative question, that
is, to the shaping of the early modern idea of obligation as an internal require-
ment of a self-governing moral agent’s thinking, has largely been overlooked
and is sometimes minimized. Distinguished scholars, dealing with the historical
sources of normativity, neglect to examine Bentham’s treatment of the notion of
obligation as the core element of his fictitious ontology of the practical world.
Even though Bentham’s reflection is certainly a fundamental step in the
“autonomist internalist tradition”22 of modern British ethics, it is not taken into
account by Darwall, who explicitly restricts his analysis to the British moralists’
works produced between 1640 and 1740.23 Korsgaard, on the other hand, draws
attention to Mill, who is read as an upholder of “the reflective endorsement
method.”24 Only Schneewind explicitly acknowledges Bentham’s role in the path
to morality as autonomy, but he surprisingly adds that it is unclear how Bentham
provided a foundation for this new view of morality.25
Many reasons might be advanced to explain why Bentham’s contribution has
been neglected and consequently underrated. One of these is that his writing
style is not as easy and appealing as that of some of the British empiricists such
as Hume or Locke. A number of repetitions, ambiguities and inconsistencies
make interpreting Bentham’s texts somewhat difficult. Bentham was a very pro-
lific writer: he preferred to devote his time to the drafting of his ideas rather
than to giving clarity and consistency to his writings. Furthermore, only a small
part of what he wrote, especially An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation and A Fragment on Government, received the attention of the wider
public.26 Generally speaking, philosophers have failed to recognize the impor-
tance of Bentham’s theory of real and fictitious entities, and its import in the
shaping and settlement of the normative question.
Only in recent times, thanks to the meritorious work of the Bentham
Committee, and the scholars and researchers involved in the Bentham Project,
have new and revised editions of his texts been available to readers. In this way,
the Bowring edition, which for a long time has been and still is the main refer-
ence point for Bentham’s manuscripts, notwithstanding the serious inaccuracies

22 Darwall 1995, 21. Roughly speaking, internalists maintain that moral considerations, including
duties, depend on the agent’s states of mind, such as desires, dispositions, needs and interests;
they oppose externalists, who challenge such a connection and claim the independence of moral
notions from the agent’s states of mind.
23 See Darwall 1995, 1–22.
24 Korsgaard 1996a, 78–84.
25 Cf. Schneewind 1998, 423 and also 6 with the related note 4. On p. 423 Schneewind alleges that
Bentham, with his greatest happiness principle, was more concerned in “settling disputes and
guiding social change,” in which “the balance of utilities was obvious,” than in the investigation of
individual practical reason, based on “the actual balances of pleasure and pain.” Bentham “never
fully explained [. . .] how individuals were to get from the principle of utility a method for making
private decisions.” Hence, according to Schneewind, Bentham’s foundation of morality as self-
governance, entailing “that individual agents be able to reason out for themselves what they ought
to do,” remains unclear.
26 Cf. Twining 2004, 1–2. See also Elster 2013, 140–1.
8 From the normative question to Bentham
resulting from the way they were transcribed, selected and collected, has been
partly superseded and is destined to be fully superseded by more precise, accurate
and even more attractive editions.
Taking advantage of this impressive editorial work,27 along with the increas-
ingly sophisticated literature on Bentham’s utilitarianism and recent works in the
areas of practical philosophy, with particular reference to the topics of normativity
and fictionalism, the present book, Philosophy, Obligation and the Law: Bentham’s
Ontology of Normativity, affords a comprehensive investigation of Bentham’s
treatment concerning the ontological and epistemological foundations of the
normative and motivational character distinguishing morality and law; this is an
important subject which has hitherto been largely unexplored.
The methodological strategy adopted in this book involves addressing the
question of normativity outlined above and teasing out the answers which
Bentham’s writings can give. Bentham’s assessment of the normative claim of
morality and law thoroughly depends on his idea of ethics as a fictitious con-
struction. Philosophy, Obligation and the Law: Bentham’s Ontology of Normativity
aims to disclose Bentham’s original view of the action-guiding prerogative of
morality and law. In pursuit of this general objective, this book is divided into
two parts: the first part examines the ontological and epistemological aspects
of Bentham’s distinction between real and fictitious entities, whose interrela-
tions provide the framework of the ethical realm, as well as the physical world;
the second part throws light on both the normative and motivational aspects of
Bentham’s ethics.
The handling of these issues provided Bentham with the theoretical basis
for his project of State reform; in fact, the institutional design, which Bentham
worked out, is intimately related to his fictionalist conception of the normativity
of the practical world. This is the reason why Bentham’s important and innova-
tive achievements in the area of constitutional law cannot be fully understood as
long as their philosophical premises are not clarified.
Although fictitious, an obligation purports to direct human behaviour.
Bentham’s ontological fictionalism has a distinct practical character that needs
to be scrutinized in its normative and motivational facets. Bentham’s account of
ethics is intertwined with his theory of real and fictitious entities; consequently,
his ontological and linguistic fictionalism provides the key to interpreting his
constructivist view on morality and law.
Moral and legal elements are fictitious entities, that is, experience-based prod-
ucts of the human mind, whose structures and operations have to be identified
and analysed in order to uncover the intimate nature of morality and law and their
function in regulating human action. It is important to understand Bentham’s
treatment of fictitious entities and its bearing on his conception of ethics. When

27 As an example, this book, Philosophy, Obligation and the Law: Bentham’s Ontology of Normativity,
greatly benefits from the very recent edition of Bentham’s Preparatory Principles (2016), which is
an irreplaceable source of his philosophical thought.
 From the normative question to Bentham 9
conceiving of an obligation as a fictitious entity, one needs to explain how it can
influence an agent’s conduct by obtaining his/her compliance. Dealing with such
issues requires first a reconstruction of Bentham’s theory of real and fictitious
entities and then the examination of its application to the ethical field, in order to
clarify and justify the reason-giving ability of morality and law.
Bentham’s texts may be a source of inspiration for settling the normative
question, because they provide useful insights to its understanding.28 They
invite us to rethink certain central aspects of the contemporary debates on
normativity from a new point of view, harmonizing realism and fictionalism,
objectivism and subjectivism, sensibility and rationality: in short, empiricism
and constructivism. Classical philosophical questions strictly related to the
question of normativity, such as the working of practical reason, the causation
of action and the freedom of the will, may benefit from such a point of view.
Bentham’s ideas may help to throw light on the ontological structure of the
practical domain and its normative component.

28 Darwall (1995, 20) argues that “a study of the British moralists on obligation might yield sig-
nificant philosophical benefits, including, perhaps, some clarifications of the issues underlying
contemporary debates about internalism.” This opinion is certainly valid for Bentham’s reflection
on obligation.
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Aunt Cassie at forty-seven had been as shriveled and dried as she was now,
twenty years later.
The old woman said, “My dear girl, I am miserable ... miserable.” And
drying the tears that streamed down her face, she added, “It won’t be long
now until I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine wanted suddenly to laugh, at the picture of Aunt Cassie entering
Paradise to rejoin a husband whom she had always called, even in the
intimacy of married life, “Mr. Struthers.” She kept thinking that Mr.
Struthers might not find the reunion so pleasant as his wife anticipated. She
had always held a strange belief that Mr. Struthers had chosen death as the
best way out.
And she felt a sudden almost warm sense of returning memories, roused
by Aunt Cassie’s passion for overstatement. Aunt Cassie could never bring
herself to say simply, “I’m going to die” which was not at all true. She must
say, “I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine said, “Oh, no.... Oh, no.... Don’t say that.”
“I don’t sleep any more. I barely close my eyes at night.”
She had seated herself now and was looking about her, absorbing
everything in the room, the changes made by the dreadful O’Hara, the
furniture he had bought for the house. But most of all she was studying
Sabine, devouring her with sidelong, furtive glances; and Sabine, knowing
her so well, saw that the old woman had been given a violent shock. She
had come prepared to find a broken, unhappy Sabine and she had found
instead this smooth, rather hard and self-contained woman, superbly
dressed and poised, from the burnished red hair (that straight red hair the
aunts had once thought so hopeless) to the lizard-skin slippers—a woman
who had obviously taken hold of life with a firm hand and subdued it, who
was in a way complete.
“Your dear uncle never forgot you for a moment, Sabine, in all the years
you were away. He died, leaving me to watch over you.” And again the
easy tears welled up.
(“Oh,” thought Sabine, “you don’t catch me that way. You won’t put me
back where I once was. You won’t even have a chance to meddle in my
life.”)
Aloud she said, “It’s a pity I’ve always been so far away.”
 “But I’ve thought of you, my dear.... I’ve thought of you. Scarcely a
night passes when I don’t say to myself before going to sleep, ‘There is
poor Sabine out in the world, turning her back on all of us who love her.’ ”
She sighed abysmally. “I have thought of you, dear. I’ve prayed for you in
the long nights when I have never closed an eye.”
And Sabine, talking on half-mechanically, discovered slowly that, in
spite of everything, she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie. She was no
longer a shy, frightened, plain little girl; she even began to sense a
challenge, a combat which filled her with a faint sense of warmth. She kept
thinking, “She really hasn’t changed at all. She still wants to reach out and
take possession of me and my life. She’s like an octopus reaching out and
seizing each member of the family, arranging everything.” And she saw
Aunt Cassie now, after so many years, in a new light. It seemed to her that
there was something glittering and hard and a little sinister beneath all the
sighing and tears and easy sympathy. Perhaps she (Sabine) was the only one
in all the family who had escaped the reach of those subtle, insinuating
tentacles.... She had run away.
Meanwhile Aunt Cassie had swept from a vivid and detailed description
of the passing of Mr. Struthers into a catalogue of neighborhood and family
calamities, of deaths, of broken troths, financial disasters, and the
appearance on the horizon of the “dreadful O’Hara.” She reproached Sabine
for having sold her land to such an outsider. And as she talked on and on
she grew less and less human and more and more like some disembodied,
impersonal force of nature. Sabine, watching her with piercing green eyes,
found her a little terrifying. She had sharpened and hardened with age.
She discussed the divorces which had occurred in Boston, and at length,
leaning forward and touching Sabine’s hand with her thin, nervous one, she
said brokenly: “I felt for you in your trouble, Sabine. I never wrote you
because it would have been so painful. I see now that I evaded my duty. But
I felt for you.... I tried to put myself in your place. I tried to imagine dear
Mr. Struthers being unfaithful to me ... but, of course, I couldn’t. He was a
saint.” She blew her nose and repeated with passion, as if to herself, “A
saint!”
(“Yes,” thought Sabine, “a saint ... if ever there was one.”) She saw that
Aunt Cassie was attacking her now from a new point. She was trying to pity
her. By being full of pity the old woman would try to break down her
defenses and gain possession of her.
Sabine’s green eyes took one hard, glinting look. “Did you ever see my
husband?” she asked.
“No,” said Aunt Cassie, “but I’ve heard a great deal of him. I’ve been
told how you suffered.”
Sabine looked at her with a queer, mocking expression. “Then you’ve
been told wrongly. He is a fascinating man. I did not suffer. I assure you
that I would rather have shared him with fifty other women than have had
any one of the men about here all to myself.”
There was a frank immorality in this statement which put Aunt Cassie to
rout, bag and baggage. She merely stared, finding nothing to say in reply to
such a speech. Clearly, in all her life she had never heard any one say a
thing so bald and so frank, so completely naked of all pretense of gentility.
Sabine went on coldly, pushing her assault to the very end. “I divorced
him at last, not because he was unfaithful to me, but because there was
another woman who wanted to marry him ... a woman whom I respect and
like ... a woman who is still my friend. Understand that I loved him
passionately ... in a very fleshly way. One couldn’t help it. I wasn’t the only
woman.... He was a kind of devil, but a very fascinating one.”
The old woman was a little stunned but not by any means defeated.
Sabine saw a look come into her eyes, a look which clearly said, “So this is
what the world has done to my poor, dear, innocent little Sabine!” At last
she said with a sigh, “I find it an amazing world. I don’t know what it is
coming to.”
“Nor I,” replied Sabine with an air of complete agreement and sympathy.
She understood that the struggle was not yet finished, for Aunt Cassie had a
way of putting herself always in an impregnable position, of wrapping
herself in layer after layer of sighs and sympathy, of charity and
forgiveness, of meekness and tears, so that in the end there was no way of
suddenly tearing them aside and saying, “There you are ... naked at last, a
horrible meddling old woman!” And Sabine kept thinking, too, that if Aunt
Cassie had lived in the days of her witch-baiting ancestor, Preserved
Pentland, she would have been burned for a witch.
And all the while Sabine had been suffering, quietly, deep inside, behind
the frankly painted face ... suffering in a way which no one in the world had
ever suspected; for it was like tearing out her heart, to talk thus of Richard
Callendar, even to speak his name.
Aloud she said, “And how is Mrs. Pentland.... I mean Olivia ... not my
cousin.... I know how she is ... no better.”
“No better.... It is one of those things which I can never understand....
Why God should have sent such a calamity to a good man like my brother.”
“But Olivia ...” began Sabine, putting an end abruptly to what was
clearly the prelude to a pious monologue.
“Oh!... Olivia,” replied Aunt Cassie, launching into an account of the
young Mrs. Pentland. “Olivia is an angel ... an angel, a blessing of God sent
to my poor brother. But she’s not been well lately. She’s been rather sharp
with me ... even with poor Miss Peavey, who is so sensitive. I can’t imagine
what has come over her.”
It seemed that the strong, handsome Olivia was suffering from nerves.
She was, Aunt Cassie said, unhappy about something, although she could
not see why Olivia shouldn’t be happy ... a woman with everything in the
world.
“Everything?” echoed Sabine. “Has any one in the world got
everything?”
“It is Olivia’s fault if she hasn’t everything. All the materials are there.
She has a good husband ... a husband who never looks at other women.”
“Nor at his own wife either,” interrupted Sabine. “I know all about
Anson. I grew up with him.”
Aunt Cassie saw fit to ignore this. “She’s rich,” she said, resuming the
catalogue of Olivia’s blessings.
And again Sabine interrupted, “But what does money mean Aunt
Cassie? In our world one is rich and that’s the end of it. One takes it for
granted. When one isn’t rich any longer, one simply slips out of it. It has
very little to do with happiness....”
The strain was beginning to show on Aunt Cassie. “You’d find out if you
weren’t rich,” she observed with asperity, “if your father and great-
grandfather hadn’t taken care of their money.” She recovered herself and
made a deprecating gesture. “But don’t think I’m criticizing dear Olivia.
She is the best, the most wonderful woman.” She began to wrap herself
once more in kindliness and charity and forgiveness. “Only she seems to me
to be a little queer lately.”
Sabine’s artificially crimson mouth took on a slow smile. “It would be
too bad if the Pentland family drove two wives insane—one after the other.”
Again Aunt Cassie came near to defeat by losing her composure. She
snorted, and Sabine helped her out by asking: “And Anson?” ironically.
“What is dear Anson doing?”
She told him of Anson’s great work, “The Pentland Family and the
Massachusetts Bay Colony” and of its immense value as a contribution to
the history of the nation; and when she had finished with that, she turned to
Jack’s wretched health, saying in a low, melancholy voice, “It’s only a
matter of time, you know.... At least, so the doctors say.... With a heart like
that it’s only a matter of time.” The tears came again.
“And yet,” Sabine said slowly, “You say that Olivia has everything.”
“Well,” replied Aunt Cassie, “perhaps not everything.”
Before she left she inquired for Sabine’s daughter and was told that she
had gone over to Pentlands to see Sybil.
“They went to the same school in France,” said Sabine. “They were
friends there.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I was against Sybil’s going abroad to school. It
fills a girl’s head with queer ideas ... especially a school like that where any
one could go. Since she’s home, Sybil behaves very queerly.... I think it’ll
stand in the way of her success in Boston. The boys don’t like girls who are
different.”
“Perhaps,” said Sabine, “she may marry outside of Boston. Men aren’t
the same everywhere. Even in Boston there must be one or two who don’t
refer to women as ‘Good old So-and-so.’ Even in Boston there must be men
who like women who are well dressed ... women who are ladies....”
Aunt Cassie began to grow angry again, but Sabine swept over her.
“Don’t be insulted, Aunt Cassie. I only mean ladies in the old-fashioned,
glamorous sense..... Besides,” she continued, “whom could she marry who
wouldn’t be a cousin or a connection of some sort?”
“She ought to marry here ... among the people she’s always known.
There’s a Mannering boy who would be a good match, and James Thorne’s
youngest son.”
 Sabine smiled. “So you have plans for her already. You’ve settled it?”
“Of course, nothing is settled. I’m only thinking of it with Sybil’s
welfare in view. If she married one of those boys she’d know what she was
getting. She’d know that she was marrying a gentleman.”
“Perhaps ...” said Sabine. “Perhaps.” Somehow a devil had taken
possession of her and she added softly, “There was, of course, Horace
Pentland.... One can never be quite sure.” (She never forgot anything,
Sabine.)
And at the same moment she saw, standing outside the door that opened
on the terrace next to the marshes, a solid, dark, heavy figure which she
recognized with a sudden feeling of delight as O’Hara. He had been
walking across the fields with the wiry little Higgins, who had left him and
continued on his way down the lane in the direction of Pentlands. At the
sight of him, Aunt Cassie made every sign of an attempt to escape quickly,
but Sabine said in a voice ominous with sweetness, “You must meet Mr.
O’Hara. I think you’ve never met him. He’s a charming man.” And she
placed herself in such a position that it was impossible for the old woman to
escape without losing every vestige of dignity.
Then Sabine called gently, “Come in, Mr. O’Hara.... Mrs. Struthers is
here and wants so much to meet her new neighbor.”
The door opened and O’Hara stepped in, a swarthy, rather solidly built
man of perhaps thirty-five, with a shapely head on which the vigorous black
hair was cropped close, and with blue eyes that betrayed his Irish origin by
the half-hidden sparkle of amusement at this move of Sabine’s. He had a
strong jaw and full, rather sensual, lips and a curious sense of great physical
strength, as if all his clothes were with difficulty modeled to the muscles
that lay underneath. He wore no hat, and his skin was a dark tan, touched at
the cheek-bones by the dull flush of health and good blood.
He was, one would have said at first sight, a common, vulgar man in that
narrow-jawed world about Durham, a man, perhaps, who had come by his
muscles as a dock-laborer. Sabine had thought him vulgar in the beginning,
only to succumb in the end to a crude sort of power which placed him
above the realm of such distinctions. And she was a shrewd woman, too,
devoted passionately to the business of getting at the essence of people; she
knew that vulgarity had nothing to do with a man who had eyes so shrewd
and full of mockery.
 He came forward quietly and with a charming air of deference in which
there was a faint suspicion of nonsense, a curious shadow of vulgarity, only
one could not be certain whether he was not being vulgar by deliberation.
“It is a great pleasure,” he said. “Of course, I have seen Mrs. Struthers
many times ... at the horse shows ... the whippet races.”
Aunt Cassie was drawn up, stiff as a poker, with an air of having found
herself unexpectedly face to face with a rattlesnake.
“I have had the same experience,” she said. “And of course I’ve seen all
the improvements you have made here on the farm.” The word
“improvements” she spoke with a sort of venom in it, as if it had been
instead a word like “arson.”
“We’ll have some tea,” observed Sabine. “Sit down, Aunt Cassie.”
But Aunt Cassie did not unbend. “I promised Olivia to be back at
Pentlands for tea,” she said. “And I am late already.” Pulling on her black
gloves, she made a sudden dip in the direction of O’Hara. “We shall
probably see each other again, Mr. O’Hara, since we are neighbors.”
“Indeed, I hope so....”
Then she kissed Sabine again and murmured, “I hope, my dear, that you
will come often to see me, now that you’ve come back to us. Make my
house your own home.” She turned to O’Hara, finding a use for him
suddenly in her warfare against Sabine. “You know, Mr. O’Hara, she is a
traitor, in her way. She was raised among us and then went away for twenty
years. She hasn’t any loyalty in her.”
She made the speech with a stiff air of playfulness, as if, of course, she
were only making a joke and the speech meant nothing at all. Yet the air
was filled with a cloud of implications. It was the sort of tactics in which
she excelled.
Sabine went with her to the door, and when she returned she discovered
O’Hara standing by the window, watching the figure of Aunt Cassie as she
moved indignantly down the road in the direction of Pentlands. Sabine
stood there for a moment, studying the straight, strong figure outlined
against the light, and she got suddenly a curious sense of the enmity
between him and the old woman. They stood, the two of them, in a strange
way as the symbols of two great forces—the one negative, the other
intensely positive; the one the old, the other, the new; the one of decay, the
other of vigorous, almost too lush growth. Nothing could ever reconcile
them. According to the scheme of things, they would be implacable
enemies to the end. But Sabine had no doubts as to the final victor; the
same scheme of things showed small respect for all that Aunt Cassie stood
for. That was one of the wisdoms Sabine had learned since she had escaped
from Durham into the uncompromising realities of the great world.
When she spoke, she said in a noncommittal sort of voice, “Mrs.
Struthers is a remarkable woman.”
And O’Hara, turning, looked at her with a sudden glint of humor in his
blue eyes. “Extraordinary ... I’m sure of it.”
“And a powerful woman,” said Sabine. “Wise as a serpent and gentle as
a dove. It is never good to underestimate such strength. And now.... How do
you like your tea?”

He took no tea but contented himself with munching a bit of toast and
afterward smoking a cigar, clearly pleased with himself in a naïve way in
the rôle of landlord coming to inquire of his tenant whether everything was
satisfactory. He had a liking for this hard, clever woman who was now only
a tenant of the land—his land—which she had once owned. When he
thought of it—that he, Michael O’Hara, had come to own this farm in the
midst of the fashionable and dignified world of Durham—there was
something incredible in the knowledge, something which never ceased to
warm him with a strong sense of satisfaction. By merely turning his head,
he could see in the mirror the reflection of the long scar on his temple,
marked there by a broken bottle in the midst of a youthful fight along the
India Wharf. He, Michael O’Hara, without education save that which he
had given himself, without money, without influence, had raised himself to
this position before his thirty-sixth birthday. In the autumn he would be a
candidate for Congress, certain of election in the back Irish districts. He,
Michael O’Hara, was on his way to being one of the great men of New
England, a country which had once been the tight little paradise of people
like the Pentlands.
Only no one must ever suspect the depth of that great satisfaction.
Yes, he had a liking for this strange woman, who ought to have been his
enemy and, oddly enough, was not. He liked the shrewd directness of her
mind and the way she had of sitting there opposite him, turning him over
and over while he talked, as if he had been a small bug under a microscope.
She was finding out all about him; and he understood that, for it was a trick
in which he, himself, was well-practised. It was by such methods that he
had got ahead in the world. It puzzled him, too, that she should have come
out of that Boston-Durham world and yet could be so utterly different from
it. He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had
happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great
understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day
she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery
about life which he himself had made long since ... that there is nothing of
such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so
invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life
of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a
woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.
They talked for a time, idly and pleasantly, with a sense of understanding
unusual in two people who had known each other for so short a time; they
spoke of the farm, of Pentlands, of the mills and the Poles in Durham, of the
country as it had been in the days when Sabine was a child. And all the
while he had that sense of her weighing and watching him, of feeling out
the faint echo of a brogue in his speech and the rather hard, nasal quality
that remained from those days along India Wharf and the memories of a
ne’er-do-well, superstitious Irish father.
He could not have known that she was a woman who included among
her friends men and women of a dozen nationalities, who lived a life among
the clever, successful people of the world ... the architects, the painters, the
politicians, the scientists. He could not have known the ruthless rule she put
up against tolerating any but people who were “complete.” He could have
known nothing of her other life in Paris, and London, and New York, which
had nothing to do with the life in Durham and Boston. And yet he did
know.... He saw that, despite the great difference in their worlds, there was
a certain kinship between them, that they had both come to look upon the
world as a pie from which any plum might be drawn if one only knew the
knack.
And Sabine, on her side, not yet quite certain about casting aside all
barriers, was slowly reaching the same understanding. There was no love or
sentimentality in the spark that flashed between them. She was more than
ten years older than O’Hara and had done with such things long ago. It was
merely a recognition of one strong person by another.
 It was O’Hara who first took advantage of the bond. In the midst of the
conversation, he had turned the talk rather abruptly to Pentlands.
“I’ve never been there and I know very little of the life,” he said, “but
I’ve watched it from a distance and it interests me. It’s like something out of
a dream, completely dead ... dead all save for young Mrs. Pentland and
Sybil.”
Sabine smiled. “You know Sybil, then?”
“We ride together every morning.... We met one morning by chance
along the path by the river and since then we’ve gone nearly every day.”
“She’s a charming girl.... She went to school in France with my
daughter, Thérèse. I saw a great deal of her then.”
Far back in her mind the thought occurred to her that there would be
something very amusing in the prospect of Sybil married to O’Hara. It
would produce such an uproar with Anson and Aunt Cassie and the other
relatives.... A Pentland married to an Irish Roman Catholic politician!
“She is like her mother, isn’t she?” asked O’Hara, sitting forward a bit
on his chair. He had a way of sitting thus, in the tense, quiet alertness of a
cat.
“Very like her mother.... Her mother is a remarkable woman ... a
charming woman ... also, I might say, what is the rarest of all things, a
really good and generous woman.”
“I’ve thought that.... I’ve seen her a half-dozen times. I asked her to help
me in planting the garden here at the cottage because I knew she had a
passion for gardens. And she didn’t refuse ... though she scarcely knew me.
She came over and helped me with it. I saw her then and came to know her.
But when that was finished, she went back to Pentlands and I haven’t seen
her since. It’s almost as if she meant to avoid me. Sometimes I feel sorry for
her.... It must be a queer life for a woman like that ... young and beautiful.”
“She has a great deal to occupy her at Pentlands. And it’s true that it’s
not a very fascinating life. Still, I’m sure she couldn’t bear being pitied....
She’s the last woman in the world to want pity.”
Curiously, O’Hara flushed, the red mounting slowly beneath the dark-
tanned skin.
“I thought,” he said a little sadly, “that her husband or Mrs. Struthers
might have raised objections.... I know how they feel toward me. There’s no
use pretending not to know.”
“It is quite possible,” said Sabine.
There was a sudden embarrassing silence, which gave Sabine time to
pull her wits together and organize a thousand sudden thoughts and
impressions. She was beginning to understand, bit by bit, the real reasons of
their hatred for O’Hara, the reasons which lay deep down underneath,
perhaps so deep that none of them ever saw them for what they were.
And then out of the silence she heard the voice of O’Hara saying, in a
queer, hushed way, “I mean to ask something of you ... something that may
sound ridiculous. I don’t pretend that it isn’t, but I mean to ask it anyway.”
For a moment he hesitated and then, rising quickly, he stood looking
away from her out of the door, toward the distant blue marshes and the open
sea. She fancied that he was trembling a little, but she could not be certain.
What she did know was that he made an immense and heroic effort, that for
a moment he, a man who never did such things, placed himself in a position
where he would be defenseless and open to being cruelly hurt; and for the
moment all the recklessness seemed to flow out of him and in its place there
came a queer sadness, almost as if he felt himself defeated in some way....
He said, “What I mean to ask you is this.... Will you ask me sometimes
here to the cottage when she will be here too?” He turned toward her
suddenly and added, “It will mean a great deal to me ... more than you can
imagine.”
She did not answer him at once, but sat watching him with a poorly
concealed intensity; and presently, flicking the cigarette ashes casually from
her gown, she asked, “And do you think it would be quite moral of me?”
He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her in astonishment, as if he
had expected her, least of all people in the world, to ask such a thing.
“It might,” he said, “make us both a great deal happier.”
“Perhaps ... perhaps not. It’s not so simple as that. Besides, it isn’t
happiness that one places first at Pentlands.”
“No.... Still....” He made a sudden vigorous gesture, as if to sweep aside
all objections.
“You’re a queer man.... I’ll see what can be done.”
He thanked her and went out shyly without another word, to stride across
the meadows, his black head bent thoughtfully, in the direction of his new
bright chimneys. At his heels trotted the springer, which had lain waiting
for him outside the door. There was something about the robust figure,
crossing the old meadow through the blue twilight, that carried a note of
lonely sadness. The self-confidence, the assurance, seemed to have melted
away in some mysterious fashion. It was almost as if one man had entered
the cottage a little while before and another, a quite different man, had left it
just now. Only one thing, Sabine saw, could have made the difference, and
that was the name of Olivia.

When he had disappeared Sabine went up to her room overlooking the

sea and lay there for a long time thinking. She was by nature an indolent
woman, especially at times when her brain worked with a fierce activity. It
was working thus now, in a kind of fever, confused and yet tremendously
clear; for the visits from Aunt Cassie and O’Hara had ignited her almost
morbid passion for vicarious experience. She had a sense of being on the
brink of some calamity which, beginning long ago in a hopeless tangle of
origins and motives, was ready now to break forth with the accumulated
force of years.
It was only now that she began to understand a little what it was that had
drawn her back to a place which held memories so unhappy as those
haunting the whole countryside of Durham. She saw that it must have been
all the while a desire for vindication, a hunger to show them that, in spite of
everything, of the straight red hair and the plain face, the silly ideas with
which they had filled her head, in spite even of her unhappiness over her
husband, she had made of her life a successful, even a brilliant, affair. She
had wanted to show them that she stood aloof now and impregnable, quite
beyond their power to curb or to injure her. And for a moment she
suspected that the half-discerned motive was an even stronger thing, akin
perhaps to a desire for vengeance; for she held this world about Durham
responsible for the ruin of her happiness. She knew now, as a worldly
woman of forty-six, that if she had been brought up knowing life for what it
was, she might never have lost the one man who had ever roused a genuine
passion in a nature so hard and dry.
It was all confused and tormented and vague, yet the visit of Aunt
Cassie, filled with implications and veiled attempts to humble her, had
cleared the air enormously.
 And behind the closed lids, the green eyes began to see a whole
procession of calamities which lay perhaps within her power to create. She
began to see how it might even be possible to bring the whole world of
Pentlands down about their heads in a collapse which could create only
freedom and happiness to Olivia and her daughter. And it was these two
alone for whom she had any affection; the others might be damned,
gloriously damned, while she stood by without raising a finger.
She began to see where the pieces of the puzzle lay, the wedges which
might force open the solid security of the familiar, unchanging world that
once more surrounded her.
Lying there in the twilight, she saw the whole thing in the process of
being fitted together and she experienced a sudden intoxicating sense of
power, of having all the tools at hand, of being the dea ex machinâ of the
calamity.
She was beginning to see, too, how the force, the power that had lain
behind all the family, was coming slowly to an end in a pale, futile
weakness. There would always be money to bolster up their world, for the
family had never lost its shopkeeping tradition of thrift; but in the end even
money could not save them. There came a time when a great fortune might
be only a shell without a desiccated rottenness inside.

She was still lying there when Thérèse came in—a short, plain, rather
stocky, dark girl with a low straight black bang across her forehead. She
was hot and soiled by the mud of the marshes, as the red-haired unhappy
little girl had been so many times in that far-off, half-forgotten childhood.
“Where have you been?” she asked indifferently, for there was always a
curious sense of strangeness between Sabine and her daughter.
“Catching frogs to dissect,” said Thérèse. “They’re damned scarce and I
slipped into the river.”
Sabine, looking at her daughter, knew well enough there was no chance
of marrying off a girl so queer, and wilful and untidy, in Durham. She saw
that it had been a silly idea from the beginning; but she found satisfaction in
the knowledge that she had molded Thérèse’s life so that no one could ever
hurt her as they had hurt her mother. Out of the queer nomadic life they had
led together, meeting all sorts of men and women who were, in Sabine’s
curious sense of the word, “complete,” the girl had pierced her way
somehow to the bottom of things. She was building her young life upon a
rock, so that she could afford to feel contempt for the very forces which
long ago had hurt her mother. She might, like O’Hara, be suddenly humbled
by love; but that, Sabine knew, was a glorious thing well worth suffering.
She knew it each time that she looked at her child and saw the clear gray
eyes of the girl’s father looking out of the dark face with the same proud
look of indifferent confidence which had fascinated her twenty years ago.
So long as Thérèse was alive, she would never be able wholly to forget him.
“Go wash yourself,” she said. “Old Mr. Pentland and Olivia and Mrs.
Soames are coming to dine and play bridge.”
As she dressed for dinner she no longer asked herself, “Why did I ever
imagine Thérèse might find a husband here? What ever induced me to come
back here to be bored all summer long?”
She had forgotten all that. She began to see that the summer held
prospects of diversion. It might even turn into a fascinating game. She knew
that her return had nothing to do with Thérèse’s future; she had been drawn
back into Durham by some vague but overwhelming desire for mischief.
 CHAPTER V

When Anson Pentland came down from the city in the evening, Olivia
was always there to meet him dutifully and inquire about the day. The
answers were always the same: “No, there was not much doing in town,”
and, “It was very hot,” or, “I made a discovery to-day that will be of great
use to me in the book.”
Then after a bath he would appear in tweeds to take his exercise in the
garden, pottering about mildly and peering closely with his near-sighted
blue eyes at little tags labeled “General Pershing” or “Caroline Testout” or
“Poincaré” or “George Washington” which he tied carefully on the new
dahlias and roses and smaller shrubs. And, more often than not, the
gardener would spend half the next morning removing the tags and placing
them on the proper plants, for Anson really had no interest in flowers and
knew very little about them. The tagging was only a part of his passion for
labeling things; it made the garden at Pentlands seem a more subdued and
ordered place. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia that he went through life
ticketing and pigeonholing everything that came his way: manners,
emotions, thoughts, everything. It was a habit that was growing on him in
middle-age.
Dinner was usually late because Anson liked to take advantage of the
long summer twilights, and after dinner it was the habit of all the family,
save Jack, who went to bed immediately afterward, to sit in the Victorian
drawing-room, reading and writing letters or sometimes playing patience,
with Anson in his corner at Mr. Lowell’s desk working over “The Pentland
Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and keeping up a prodigious
correspondence with librarians and old men and women of a genealogical
bent. The routine of the evening rarely changed, for Anson disliked going
out and Olivia preferred not to go alone. It was only with the beginning of
the summer, when Sybil was grown and had begun to go out occasionally to
dinners and balls, and the disturbing Sabine, with her passion for playing
bridge, had come into the neighborhood, that the routine was beginning to
break up. There were fewer evenings now with Olivia and Sybil playing
patience and old John Pentland sitting by the light of Mr. Longfellow’s
lamp reading or simply staring silently before him, lost in thought.
There were times in those long evenings when Olivia, looking up
suddenly and for no reason at all, would discover that Sybil was sitting in
the same fashion watching her, and both of them would know that they, like
old John Pentland, had been sitting there all the while holding books in their
hands without knowing a word of what they had read. It was as if a kind of
enchantment descended upon them, as if they were waiting for something.
Once or twice the silence had been broken sharply by the unbearable sound
of groans coming from the north wing when she had been seized suddenly
by one of her fits of violence.
Anson’s occasional comment and Olivia’s visits to Jack’s room to see
that nothing had happened to him were the only interruptions. They spoke
always in low voices when they played double patience in order not to
disturb Anson at his work. Sometimes he encountered a bit of information
for which he had been searching for a long time and then he would turn and
tell them of it.
There was the night when he made his discovery about Savina
Pentland....
“I was right about Savina Pentland,” he said. “She was a first cousin and
not a second cousin of Toby Cane.”
Olivia displayed an interest by saying, “Was that what you wrote to the
Transcript about?”
“Yes ... and I was sure that the genealogical editor was wrong. See ...
here it is in one of Jared Pentland’s letters at the time she was drowned....
Jared was her husband.... He refers to Toby Cane as her only male first
cousin.”
“That will help you a great deal,” said Olivia, “won’t it?”
“It will help clear up the chapter about the origins of her family.” And
then, after a little pause, “I wish that I could get some trace of the
correspondence between Savina Pentland and Cane. I’m sure it would be
full of things ... but it seems not to exist ... only one or two letters which tell
nothing.”
And then he relapsed again into a complete and passionate silence, lost
in the rustle of old books and yellowed letters, leaving the legend of Savina
Pentland to take possession of the others in the room.
 The memory of this woman had a way of stealing in upon the family
unaware, quite without their willing it. She was always there in the house,
more lively than any of the more sober ancestors, perhaps because of them
all she alone had been touched by splendor; she alone had been in her
reckless way a great lady. There was a power in her recklessness and
extravagance which came, in the end, to obscure all those other plain,
solemn-faced, thrifty wives whose portraits adorned the hall of Pentlands,
much as a rising sun extinguishes the feeble light of the stars. And about her
obscure origin there clung a perpetual aura of romance, since there was no
one to know just who her mother was or exactly whence she came. The
mother was born perhaps of stock no humbler than the first shopkeeping
Pentland to land on the Cape, but there was in her the dark taint of
Portuguese blood; some said that she was the daughter of a fisherman. And
Savina herself had possessed enough of fascination to lure a cautious
Pentland into eloping with her against the scruples that were a very fiber of
the Pentland bones and flesh.
The portrait of Savina Pentland stood forth among the others in the white
hall, fascinating and beautiful not only because the subject was a dark,
handsome woman, but because it had been done by Ingres in Rome during
the years when he made portraits of tourists to save himself from starvation.
It was the likeness of a small but voluptuous woman with great wanton dark
eyes and smooth black hair pulled back from a camellia-white brow and
done in a little knot on the nape of the white neck—a woman who looked
out of the old picture with the flashing, spirited glance of one who lived
boldly and passionately. She wore a gown of peach-colored velvet
ornamented with the famous parure of pearls and emeralds given her, to the
scandal of a thrifty family, by the infatuated Jared Pentland. Passing the
long gallery of portraits in the hallway it was always Savina Pentland whom
one noticed. She reigned there as she must have reigned in life, so bold and
splendorous as to seem a bit vulgar, especially in a world of such sober folk,
yet so beautiful and so spirited that she made all the others seem scarcely
worth consideration.
Even in death she had remained an “outsider,” for she was the only one
of the family who did not rest quietly among the stunted trees at the top of
the bald hill where the first Pentlands had laid their dead. All that was left
of the warm, soft body lay in the white sand at the bottom of the ocean
within sight of Pentlands. It was as if fate had delivered her in death into a
grave as tempestuous and violent as she had been in life. And somewhere
near her in the restless white sand lay Toby Cane, with whom she had gone
sailing one bright summer day when a sudden squall turned a gay excursion
into a tragedy.
Even Aunt Cassie, who distrusted any woman with gaze so bold and free
as that set down by the brush of Ingres—even Aunt Cassie could not
annihilate the glamour of Savina’s legend. For her there was, too, another,
more painful, memory hidden in the knowledge that the parure of pearls and
emeralds and all the other jewels which Savina Pentland had wrung from
her thrifty husband, lay buried somewhere in the white sand between her
bones and those of her cousin. To Aunt Cassie Savina Pentland seemed
more than merely a reckless, extravagant creature. She was an enemy of the
Pentland fortune and of all the virtues of the family.
The family portraits were of great value to Anson in compiling his book,
for they represented the most complete collection of ancestors existing in all
America. From the portrait of the emigrating Pentland, painted in a wooden
manner by some traveling painter of tavern signs, to the rather handsome
one of John Pentland, painted at middle-age in a pink coat by Sargent, and
the rather bad and liverish one of Anson, also by Mr. Sargent, the collection
was complete save for two—the weak Jared Pentland who had married
Savina, and the Pentland between old John’s father and the clipper-ship
owner, who had died at twenty-three, a disgraceful thing for any Pentland to
have done.
The pictures hung in a neat double row in the lofty hall, arranged
chronologically and without respect for lighting, so that the good ones like
those by Ingres and Sargent’s picture of old John Pentland and the
unfinished Gilbert Stuart of Ashur Pentland hung in obscure shadows, and
the bad ones like the tavern-sign portrait of the first Pentland were exposed
in a glare of brilliant light.
This father of all the family had been painted at the great age of eighty-
nine and looked out from his wooden background, a grim, hard-mouthed
old fellow with white hair and shrewd eyes set very close together. It was a
face such as one might find to-day among the Plymouth Brethren of some
remote, half-forgotten Sussex village, the face of a man notable only for the
toughness of his body and the rigidity of a mind which dissented from
everything. At the age of eighty-four, he had been cast out for dissension
from the church which he had come to regard as his own property.
Next to him hung the portrait of a Pentland who had been a mediocrity
and left not even a shadowy legend; and then appeared the insolent,
disagreeable face of the Pentland who had ducked eccentric old women for
witches and cut off the ears of peace-loving Quakers in the colony founded
in “freedom to worship God.”
The third Pentland had been the greatest evangelist of his time, a man
who went through New England holding high the torch, exhorting rude
village audiences by the coarsest of language to such a pitch of excitement
that old women died of apoplexy and young women gave birth to premature
children. The sermons which still existed showed him to be a man
uncultivated and at times almost illiterate, yet his vast energy had founded a
university and his fame as an exhorter and “the flaming sword of the Lord”
had traveled to the ignorant and simple-minded brethren of the English back
country.
The next Pentland was the eldest of the exhorter’s twenty children (by
four wives), a man who clearly had departed from his father’s counsels and
appeared in his portrait a sensual, fleshly specimen, very fat and almost
good-natured, with thick red lips. It was this Pentland who had founded the
fortune which gave the family its first step upward in the direction of the
gentility which had ended with the figure of Anson bending over “The
Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” He had made a large
fortune by equipping privateers and practising a near-piracy on British
merchantmen; and there was, too, a dark rumor (which Anson intended to
overlook) that he had made as much as three hundred per cent profit on a
single shipload of negroes in the African slave trade.
After him there were portraits of two Pentlands who had taken part in the
Revolution and then another hiatus of mediocrity, including the gap
represented by the missing Jared; and then appeared the Anthony Pentland
who increased the fortune enormously in the clipper trade. It was the
portrait of a swarthy, powerful man (the first of the dark Pentlands, who
could all be traced directly to Savina’s Portuguese blood), painted by a
second-rate artist devoted to realism, who had depicted skilfully the warts
which marred the distinguished old gentleman. In the picture he stood in the
garden before the Pentland house at Durham with marshes in the
background and his prize clipper Semiramis riding, with all sail up, the
distant ocean.
Next to him appeared the portrait of old John Pentland’s father—a man
of pious expression, dressed all in black, with a high black stock and a wave
of luxuriant black hair, the one who had raised the family to really great
wealth by contracts for shoes and blankets for the soldiers at Gettysburg and
Bull Run and Richmond. After him, gentility had conquered completely,
and the Sargent portrait of old John Pentland at middle-age showed a man
who was master of hounds and led the life of a country gentleman, a man
clearly of power and character, whose strength of feature had turned slowly
into the bitter hardness of the old man who sat now in the light of Mr.
Longfellow’s lamp reading or staring before him into space while his son
set down the long history of the family.
The gallery was fascinating to strangers, as the visual record of a family
which had never lost any money (save for the extravagance of Savina
Pentland’s jewels), a family which had been the backbone of a community,
a family in which the men married wives for thrift and housewifely virtues
rather than for beauty, a family solid and respectable and full of honor. It
was a tribe magnificent in its virtue and its strength, even at times in its
intolerance and hypocrisy. It stood represented now by old John Pentland
and Anson, and the boy who lay abovestairs in the room next Olivia’s,
dying slowly.

At ten o’clock each night John Pentland bade them good-night and went
off to bed, and at eleven Anson, after arranging his desk neatly and placing
his papers in their respective files, and saying to Olivia, “I wouldn’t sit up
too late, if I were you, when you are so tired,” left them and disappeared.
Soon after him, Sybil kissed her mother and climbed the stairs past all the
ancestors.
It was only then, after they had all left her, that a kind of peace settled
over Olivia. The burdens lifted, and the cares, the worries, the thoughts that
were always troubling her, faded into the distance and for a time she sat
leaning back in the winged armchair with her eyes closed, listening to the
sounds of the night—the faint murmur of the breeze in the faded lilacs
outside the window, the creaking that afflicts very old houses in the night,
and sometimes the ominous sound of Miss Egan’s step traversing distantly