Beauty and the Beast

by Theodore Dalrymple (March 2009)

At the same time, of course, there is the problem of evil: how it arises, and how it triumphs. No one troubles himself to anything like the same extent over the problem of good: how it arises, or how it triumphs. Perhaps this is testimony to the victory of Rousseau’s idea that we are fundamentally good by nature, though deformed by society, over that of Original Sin, which proposes that we are all sinful from birth. Suffice it to say that no one would nowadays subscribe to the idea of one of the Wesleys (I forget which) with regard to the beating of children, that it is never too soon to begin God’s glorious work.

It occurred to me in view of the problem of good – I mean the literary problem, not the metaphysical one – to try to write interestingly of some of the very good people whom it has been my fortune to encounter in my passage through this vale of tears we call the world. Somerset Maugham once tried the experiment, but I am not sure that he succeeded. It is difficult for wasps suddenly to turn cuddly.

Having not long qualified, I went to work in a large hospital in Africa – Rhodesia to be exact. The hospital was a very good one, and the nurses of one of the wards were supervised by a senior nurse who was fat, jolly, competent and of surpassing kindness. She, too, lived with her aged mother, in what used to be known to the whites as the African township. This consisted of thousands of identical small concrete houses with tin roofs.

The township was dangerous: full of shebeens, where vast quantities of maize beer were drunk by young men who became quarrelsome and violent, inflamed by every kind of dissatisfaction and frustration. But the nurse’s home, to which I was invited several times, was a haven of tranquillity, spotlessly clean and with a tiny but immaculately kept garden.

In summary, it may be said that evil attracts and engrosses us in a way that good rarely does.

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