Parenting & Family Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham delivers a cold compress where most writers offer incense. “There is no explanation for evil” isn’t a metaphysical mic drop so much as a stylistic refusal: he denies the reader the consolations of motive, origin story, or tidy moral arithmetic. Evil, in this view, isn’t a puzzle to solve but a permanent fixture, like weather. The provocation is in the next move: calling it “a necessary part of the order of the universe.” The word “necessary” needles the sentimental assumption that moral progress is the default plotline. It suggests that darkness isn’t an exception to the system; it’s baked into the system.

The subtext is Maugham’s characteristic skepticism toward grand systems of meaning. He’s not absolving anyone - “necessary” is not “forgivable” - but he is stripping away the melodrama that lets people feel virtuous while remaining ineffective. “To ignore it is childish” targets innocence as a luxury posture, the kind of cultivated naïveté that collapses the moment it’s tested. “To bewail it senseless” skewers the opposite performance: outrage as theater, grief as a substitute for action or clarity.

Contextually, this sits comfortably in a 20th-century world that had learned, repeatedly, that barbarism can be bureaucratic, social, even banal. Maugham, a playwright by trade, understands the audience’s appetite for moral catharsis. He refuses it. The intent is bracing: look straight at evil without mythologizing it, because mythologizing is how we keep it safely “elsewhere” - and how it keeps returning, unrecognized, in familiar forms.