Herd Morality and Conformity

Herd Morality and Conformity in Martin Eden describes the pressure to let accepted opinion dictate how a person thinks, behaves, and measures a life. Martin condemns this dependence across class lines: the gang whose approval once shaped his youthful conduct and the respectable society surrounding Ruth Morse are, in his view, alike governed by ready-made rules. Yet the idea also reaches beyond social manners. His discovery of a repeatable formula for newspaper stories shows how conformity can be manufactured as a product, while his later dispute over editorial authority reveals its power to make existing institutions seem naturally right.

Social formulas and commercial fiction

Martin’s clearest practical encounter with formula comes when financial hardship sends him back to hack-work. He rereads twenty rejected stories to learn how not to write a newspaper storiette, then deduces the conventions he believes the market demands: no tragedy, unhappy ending, beautiful language, subtle thought, or delicate feeling. Instead, the story should offer abundant, pure, noble sentiment of the familiar patriotic or honest-poor variety. His conclusion is not that readers simply share one opinion; it is that their expectations can be anticipated and reproduced through a standard recipe.

The recipe turns romance into a sequence of predictable outcomes. A couple is separated, some deed or revelation brings them together, and marriage bells conclude the story. Martin can vary the causes of separation and reconciliation almost indefinitely, but the wedding ending remains fixed. Even catastrophe, in his account, cannot interrupt that required closure. He consults The Duchess for tone, develops half a dozen stock forms, and uses them as tables from which stories can be assembled without fresh reasoning. In half an hour he can frame about a dozen plots, then fill one in after a day’s serious work, sometimes in the hour before bed. He tells Ruth that he can nearly do it in his sleep; the real work, he says in effect, lies in constructing the frames, which has become mechanical.

This episode makes conformity more than an abstract failing of individuals. A commercial convention narrows what can be published and encourages a standardized emotional response; Martin adapts to that pressure because small sales have offered a possible means of living. The work is therefore both his calculated accommodation to a market and an example of the formulaic culture he diagnoses. His ingenuity in multiplying plot variations does not free the stories from their prescribed destination. The forms allow endless combinations while keeping the same marriage ending in place.

Herd behavior across class lines

After his sister has urged him to get a job, Martin reflects bitterly on the lives of people around him. He imagines members of his own class and Ruth’s class proceeding by narrow formulas, copying one another’s opinions instead of becoming individuals or fully living. In a mental procession, Bernard Higginbotham appears arm in arm with Mr. Butler, and Hermann von Schmidt beside Charley Hapgood. Martin judges these figures by standards of intellect and morality he has acquired through reading, then asks himself where the great souls are. His answer is that he cannot find them among the people summoned by his imagination.

The scene matters because his condemnation does not stop at the boundary between working people and the bourgeois world. Martin sees different social circles as sharing a dependence on approval, even where their habits and status differ. His own earlier life provides the sharpest test of that claim. In an imagined encounter with his former self, he accuses the young hoodlum of wearing ready-made opinions as surely as ready-made clothes and of shaping his actions for popular approval. The young Martin had been acclaimed as the real thing by his gang, and that recognition helped sustain his rule within it.

Martin also reinterprets the violence and sexual rivalry of that past as conduct learned from the group’s standards, not as proof of independent strength. He recalls the fight with Cheese-Face as an act shaped partly by the refusal to yield and partly by a surrounding belief that manhood meant ferocity and physical harm. He further accuses his younger self of pursuing other fellows’ girls because the instinctive standards of the people around him set the pace. The remembered hoodlum is thus not an exception to herd morality but its earlier embodiment: the adult critic recognizes that he, too, once accepted his community’s measures of worth.

The divided self and self-judgment

Martin’s imagined procession ends unexpectedly when the young hoodlum appears after all the other figures have been dismissed. This arrival turns social criticism inward. Rather than positioning himself as someone who was always independent, Martin confronts the gap between his former conduct and his present standards. The vision changes: the stiff-rimmed hat and square-cut coat give way to milder clothes, toughness leaves the face, and the eyes lose their hardness. The altered figure resembles Martin as he now is, absorbed in a book beneath a student lamp.

The book is The Science of AEsthetics. Martin enters the apparition, trims the lamp, and continues reading. The gesture gives intellectual study a concrete place in the scene, but it also makes his transformation visible as a change in practice and self-understanding rather than an unbroken personal virtue. He has not escaped the history he condemns; he can name its social pressures because he recognizes their former hold on him. At the same time, the scene does not establish that his new judgments make him immune to conformity. His belief that his own standards of intellect and morality authorize him to dismiss others leaves a tension between independence and self-certainty.

Conformity and established authority

In a later discussion with Ruth about an editor’s revision of his Sea Lyrics, Martin extends his criticism from popular social habits to cultural authority. Ruth suggests that an editor’s qualifications should count as evidence that the revision was justified. Martin answers by attacking the persistence of the established: people, he argues, treat what already exists as not merely right but the best possible, as though its present survival proved its fitness under every condition. He attributes that assumption to ignorance and to a kind of unexamined mental process, then objects that people who only think they think can determine the lives of those who genuinely do.

The exchange reveals both the force and the limitation of his critique. Martin sees editorial legitimacy and social acceptance as capable of turning convention into apparent proof of merit. Ruth, however, says she does not know the thinker he invokes and finds Martin too general to follow; she had been asking specifically about editors’ qualifications. Their disagreement is therefore not simply between conformity and freedom. It also concerns whether a broad theory of social authority adequately addresses a concrete editorial decision. Martin’s language outruns Ruth’s question, leaving the argument unresolved rather than demonstrating that every established judgment is automatically false.

Significance

The novel links conformity to repeated structures at several scales: the gang’s standards of manhood, social circles’ imitation of one another, the fixed plot machinery of commercial fiction, and the presumption that established institutions are justified by their existence. In each case, a convention can appear natural because people have learned to repeat it and reward those who follow it. Martin’s response is to value independent judgment and intellectual effort, but his own history prevents that ideal from being treated as effortless or complete. He once depended on his gang’s approval, later turns formulas into a deliberate writing tool, and sometimes makes his critique so general that it fails to meet Ruth’s specific concern. Herd morality in the novel is consequently both an object of Martin’s attack and a pressure he must recognize in his own past and work.