 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTORY ON GARGOILS Alone at some distance from the wasting halls of a disused abbey, I found half sunken in the grass, the gray and goggle-eyed visage of one of those graven monsters that made the ornamental water spouts in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient reigns or striked by recent fungus, but still looking like the head of some huge dragon slain by a primeval hero. And as I looked at it, a thought of the meaning of the grotesque and passed into some symbolic reverie of the three great stages of art. 1. Once upon a time there lived upon an island a merry and innocent people, mostly shepherds and tillers of the earth. They were Republicans, like all primitives and simple souls. They talked over their affairs under a tree, and the nearest approach they had to a personal ruler was the sort of priest or white witch who said their prayers for them. They worshiped the sun, not idolatrously, but as the golden crown of the god, whom all such infants see almost as plainly as the sun. Now this priest was told by his people to build a great tower, pointing to the sky in salutation of the sun god, and he pondered long and heavily before he picked his materials. For he was resolved to use nothing that was not almost as clear and exquisite as sunshine itself. He would use nothing that was not washed as white as the rain can wash the heavens, nothing that did not sparkle as spotlessly as that crown of god. He would have nothing grotesque or obscure. He would not have even anything emphatic or even anything mysterious. He would have all the arches as light as laughter and as candid as logic. He built the temple in three concentric courts, which were cooler and more exquisite in substance each than the other. For the outer wall was a hedge of white lilies ranked so thick that a green stalk was hardly to be seen, and the wall within that was of crystal, which smashed the sun into a million stars. And the wall within that, which was the tower itself, was a tower of pure water, forced up in an everlasting fountain, and upon the very tip and crest of that foaming spire was one big and blazing diamond, which the water tossed up eternally and caught again as a child catches a ball. Now said the priest, I had made a tower, which is a little worthy of the sun. Two. But about this time the island was caught in a swarm of pirates, and the shepherds had to turn themselves into rude warriors and seamen, and at first they were utterly broken down in blood and shame, and the pirates might have taken the jewel flung up forever from their sacred font. And then after years of horror and humiliation, they gained a little and began to conquer, because they did not mind defeat. And the pride of the pirates went sick with them after a few unexpected foils, and at last the invasion rolled back into the empty seas, and the island was delivered. And for some reason, after this, men began to talk quite differently about the temple and the sun. Some indeed said, you must not touch the temple, it is classical, it is perfect, since it admits no imperfections. But the others answered, in that it differs from the sun, that sun that shines on the evil and the good, and on the mud and the monsters everywhere. The temple is of the noon, it is made of white marble clouds and sapphire sky, but the sun is not always of the noon, the sun dies daily, every night he is crucified in blood and fire. Now the priest had taught and fought through all the war, and his hair had grown white, but his eyes had grown young, and he said, God, I was wrong, and they are right. The sun, the symbol of our Father, gives life to all those earthly things that are full of ugliness and energy. All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. Let us point to heaven with tusks and horns and fins and trunks and tails, so long as they all point to heaven. The ugly animals praise God as much as the beautiful. The frog's eyes stand out of his head because he is staring at heaven. The giraffe's neck is long because he is stretching towards heaven. The donkey has ears to hear, let him hear. And under the new inspiration they planned a gorgeous cathedral in the Gothic manner, with all the animals of the earth crawling over it, and all the possible ugly things making up one common beauty, because they all appealed to the God. The columns of the temple were carved like the necks of giraffes. The dome was like an ugly tortoise, and the highest pinnacle was a monkey standing on his head with his tail pointing at the sun. And yet the hole was beautiful, because it was lifted up in one living and religious gesture, as a man lifts his hands in prayer. Three. But this great plan was never properly completed. The people had brought up on great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone, and all the thousand and one oddities that made up that unity. The owls and the elves and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which hideous by themselves, might have been magnificent if reared in one definite proportion and dedicated to the sun. For this was Gothic, this was romantic, this was Christian art, this was the whole advance of Shakespeare upon Sophocles, and that symbol which was to crown it all, the ape upside down was really Christian, for man is the ape upside down. But the rich who had grown riotous in the long peace obstructed the thing, and in some squabble a stone struck the priest on the head, and he lost his memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants, monkeys and giraffes, toads, stools and sharks, all the ugly things of the universe which he had collected to do honor to God. But he forgot why he had collected them. He could not remember the design or the object. He piled them all wildly into one heap fifty feet high, and when we had done it all, the rich and influential went into a passion of applause and cried, this is real art, this is realism, this is things as they really are. That, I fancy, is the only true origin of realism. Realism is simply romanticism that has lost its reason. This is so, not merely in the sense of insanity, but of suicide. It has lost its reason, that is, its reason for existing. The Old Greeks summoned God-like things to worship their God. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summoned all these million creatures to worship their God, and then have no God for them to worship. Paganism was an art of pure beauty. That was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness, and that in my belief was the zenith on the noon. Modern arts and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them, and I will venture to call that the disruption and decay. The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist splendid houses going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity with its gargoyles and grotesques really amounted to saying this, that a donkey could go before all the horses of the world when it was really going to the temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple. Realism means a lost donkey going nowhere. The fragments of feudal journalism or fleeting impression which are here collected are very like the wrecks and driven blocks that were piled in a heap around my imaginary priest of the sun. They are very like that gray and gaping head of stone that I found overgrown with the grass. Yet I will venture to make even of these trivial fragments the high boast that I am a medievalist and not a modern. It is I really have a notion of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all these chaotic capers. But it could be stated this row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles because I can't carve nothing else. I leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the style of the architecture and of the consecration of the church. Chapter 2 The Surrender of a Cockney Every man, though he were born in the belfry of Bow and spent his infancy climbing among chimneys, has waiting for him somewhere a country house which he has never seen but which was built for him in the very shape of his soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found knee-deep in orchards of Kent or mirrored in pools of Lincoln. And when the man sees it he remembers it, though he has never seen it before. Even I have been forced to confess this at last who am a cockney if ever there was one. A cockney not only in principle but with savage pride. I have always maintained quite seriously that the Lord is not in the wind or the thunder of the waste but if anywhere in the still small voice of Fleet Street. I sincerely maintain that nature worship is more morally dangerous than the most vulgar man worship of the cities since it can easily be perverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or cruelty. The Roe would have been a jollier fellow if he had devoted himself to a green grocer instead of to greens. Swinburne would have been a better moralist if he had worshiped the fishmonger instead of worshiping the sea. I prefer the philosophy of bricks and mortar to the philosophy of turnips. To call a man a turnip may be playful but it is seldom respectful but when we wish to pay emphatic honor to a man to praise the firmness of his nature, the squareness of his conduct, the strong humility with which he is interlocked with his equals and silent mutual support, then we invoke the nobler cockney metaphor and call him a brick. But despite all these theories I have surrendered. I have struck my colors at sight at a mere glimpse through the oomping of a hedge. I shall come down to living in the country like any common socialist or simpler lifer. I shall end my days in a village in the character of the village idiot and be a spectacle and a judgment to mankind. I have already learned the rustic manner of leaning upon a gate and I was thus gymnastically occupied at the moment when my eye caught the house that was made for me. It stood well back from the road and was built of good yellow brick. It was narrow for its height like the tower of some border robber and over the front door was carved in large letters 1908. That last burst of sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquarian sentiment overwhelmed me finally. I closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy. My friend, who was helping me lean on the gate, asked me with some curiosity what I was doing. My dear fellow, I said with emotion, I am bidding farewell to forty-three handsome cabsmen. Well, he said, I suppose they would think this country rather outside the radius. Oh, my friend, I cried brokenly. How beautiful London is. Why do they only write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry into cockney. My heart leaves off when I behold the a sky sign in the sky. As I observed in a volume which is too little red, honored on the older English poets, you never saw my golden treasury regilded, or the classics made cockney. It contained some fine lines. O wild West End, thou breath of London's being, or the reminisces of Keats beginning, city of smuts, and mellow fogfulness. I have written many such lines in the beauty of London, yet I never realized that London was really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why? It is because I have left it forever. If you will take my advice, said my friend, you will humbly endeavor not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every literary man must live in the country with pigs and the donkeys and the squires? Chaucer and Spencer and Milton and Dryden lived in London. Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had quite enough of the country. And as for Trumpery, topical journalists like you, why they would cut their throats in the country, you would confess it yourself in your own last words. You hunger and thirst after the streets. You think London the finest place on the planet. And if by some miracle a base water on the bus could come down this green country lane, you would utter a yell of joy. Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him with terrible sternness. Why miserable esthete, I said, in a voice of thunder? That is the true country spirit. That is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic does utter a yell of joy at the sight of base water omnibus. The real rustic does think London the finest place on the planet. In a few moments that I have stood by this style I have grown rooted here like an ancient tree. I have been here for ages. Petulant suburban, I am the real rustic. I believe that the streets of London are paved with gold. And I mean to see it before I die. The evening breeze freshened among the little tossing trees of that lane, and the purple evening clouds piled up and darkened behind my country's sea. The house that belonged to me, making, by contrast, its yellow bricks gleam like gold. At last my friend said, to cut it short then you mean that you will live in the country because you won't like it? What on earth will you do here? Dig up the garden? Dig, I answered in honourable scorn. Dig, do work at my country's seat. No, thank you. When I find a country's seed, I sit in it. And for your other objections you are quite wrong. I do not dislike the country, but I like the town more. Therefore the art of happiness certainly suggests that I should live in the country and think about the town. Modern nature worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things. Terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wants to go to the country. I do it with all the more heartiness because I am that sort of man myself. He must learn to love London again as a rustic loves it. Therefore I quote again from the great Tachni version of the Golden Treasury. Therefore your gas pipes, ye asbestos stoves, forbid not any severing of our loves. I have relinquished but your earthly sight to hold you dear in a more distant way. I'll love the buses lumbering through the wet even more than when I lightly tripped as they. The grimy colour of the London clay is lovely yet. Because I have found the house where I was really born, the tall and quiet house from which I can see London afar off as the miracle of man that it is, the nightmare. A sunset of copper and gold has just broken down and gone to pieces in the west, in grey colours were crawling over everything in earth and heaven. Also a wind was growing, a wind that laid cold finger upon the flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to whisper like conspirators and then to wave like wild hands in signal. I was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and colossal faces. Oh, didst thou love the god of flies who plagued the Hebrews, and was splashed with wine unto the waste, or pashed, who had green barrels for her eyes? I read this poem because I had to review it for the daily news. Still it was genuine poetry of its kind. It really gave out an atmosphere, a fragrant and suffocating smoke, that seemed really to come from the bondage of Egypt or the burden of Tyre. There is not much in common, thank God, between my garden with the grey-green English sky beyond it, and these mad visions of painted palaces, huge headless idols, and monstrous solitudes of red or golden sand. Nevertheless, as I confess to myself, I can fancy and such stormy twilight, some such smell of death and fear. The ruined sunset really looks like one of the ruined temples, a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A black flapping thing detaches itself from one of the somber trees and flutters to another. I know not if it is Owl or Flitter Mouse. I could fancy it was a black cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness, not with the wings of a bird and the head of a baby, but with the head of a goblin and the wings of a bat. I think, if there were light enough, I could sit here and write some very creditable, creepy tale about how I went up the crooked road beyond the church and met something, say a dog, a dog with one eye. Then I should meet a horse, perhaps a horse without a rider. The horse also would have one eye. Then the inhuman silence would be broken. I should meet a man, need I say a one-eyed man, who had asked me the way to my own house, or perhaps tell me that it was burnt to the ground. I could tell a very cozy little tale along some sesh lines, or I might dream of climbing forever the tall, dark trees above me. They are so tall that I feel as if I should find at their tops the nests of the angels. But in this mood they would be dark and dreadful angels, angels of death. Only you see this mood is all bosh. I do not believe in it in the least. That one-eyed universe with its one-eyed men and beasts was only created with one universal wink. At the top of the tragic trees I should not find the angel's nest, I should only find the mare's nest. The dreamy and divine nest is not there. In the mare's nest I shall discover that dim, enormous, opalescent egg from which is hatched the nightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare, when you know it is a nightmare. That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon all artists touching this luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentally frivolous. Sanity may play with insanity, but insanity must not be allowed to play with sanity. Let such poets, as the one I was reading in the garden, by all means be free to imagine what outrageous deities and violent landscapes they like. By all means let them wander freely amid their opium pinnacles and their perspectives. But these huge gods, these high cities are toys. They must never, for an instant, be allowed to be anything else. Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and Nineveh, with Isis and with Ash-Toroth. By all means let him dream of the bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it. By all means let him take up the burden of Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But the old gods must be his dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, his true possessions, should be Christian and simple. And just as a child would cherish most a wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross of wood, so man the great child must cherish most the old plain things of poetry and piety, that horse of wood that was the epic of Ilium, or that cross of wood that redeemed and conquered the world. In one of Stevenson's letters there is a characteristically humorous remark about the appalling impression produced on him in childhood by the beasts with many eyes in the Book of Revelation. If that was heaven, what in the name of Davy Jones was hell like? Now in Sober Truth there's a magnificent idea in these monsters of the apocalypse. It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused, especially that might seem to have senses at once more multiplex and more staring, an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude of eyes. I like those monsters beneath the throne very much, but I like them beneath the throne. It is when one of them goes wandering in deserts and finds a throne for himself, that evil faiths begin, and there is literally the devil to pay, to pay in dancing girls or human sacrifice. As long as those misshapen elemental powers are around the throne, remember that the thing that they worship is the likeness of the appearance of a man. That is, I fancy, the true doctrine of the subject of tales of terror and such things, which unless a man of letters do well and truly believe, without doubt he will end by blowing his brains out or by writing badly. Man, the central pillar of the world, must be upright and straight. Around him all the trees and beasts and elements and devils may crook and curl like smoke if they choose. All really imaginative literature is only the contrast between the weird curves of nature and the straightness of the soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is sure that he will not worship it, but there are some so weak that they will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained to the beautiful. It is not always wrong, even, to go like dainty to the brink of the lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when you look up at hell that a serious miscalculation has probably been made. Therefore I see no wrong in riding with a nightmare tonight. She went as to me from the rocking treetops and the rowing wind. I will catch her and rider through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the roots in the rising tempest as if all wish to fly with us over the moon, like that wild, amorous cow whose child was the moon calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turvy-dom of the heavens. I will answer the call of chaos and old night. I will ride on the nightmare, but she shall not ride on me. Chapter 4 The Telegraph Poles My friend and I were walking in one of those wastes of pine wood which make inland seas of solitude in every part of Western Europe, which have the true terror of the desert since they are uniform and so one may lose their way in them. Stiff, straight, and similar stood up all around us the pines of the wood, like the pikes of a silent mutiny. There is a truth in talking of the varieties of nature, but I think that nature often shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in this very repetition. It is if the earth were resolved to repeat a single shape until the shape shall turn terrible. Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain words such as dog thirty times? By the thirtieth time it's become a word like snark or pobble. Does not become tame, it becomes wild by repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable as a leviathan or a crocometane. It may be that this explains the repetitions in nature. It may be for this reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles. Perhaps they are not repeated so that they may grow familiar. Perhaps they are repeated only in the hope that they may at last grow unfamiliar. Perhaps a man is not startled at the first cat he sees, but jumps into the air with surprise at the seventy-ninth cat. Perhaps he has to pass through thousands of pine trees before he finds the one that is really a pine tree. However, this may be there is something singularly thrilling, even something urgent and intolerant about the endless forest repetitions. There is the hint something like madness in that musical monotony of the pines. I said something like this to my friend and he answered with sardonic truth. Ah, you wait till we come to a telegraph post. My friend was right, as he occasionally is in our discussions, especially upon points of fact. We had crossed the pine forest by one of its paths which happened to follow the wires of the provincial telegraphy. And though the poles occurred at long intervals, they made a difference when they came. The instant we came to the straight pole, we could see that the pines were not really straight. It was like a hundred straight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all brought to judgment suddenly by one straight line drawn with a ruler. All the amateur lines seemed to reel to right and left a moment before I could have sworn they stood as straight as lances. Now I could see them curved and waiver everywhere, like scimitars and yadda-gans. Compared with the telegraph post, the pines were crooked and alive, that lonely vertical rod at once deformed and enfranchised the forest. It tangled it all together and yet made it free, like any grotesque undergrowth, of oak or holly. Yes, said my gloomy friend answering my thoughts. You don't know what a wicked, shameful thing straightness is, if you think these trees are straight. You never will know till your precious intellectual civilization builds a forty-mile forest of telegraph poles. We had started walking from our temporary home later in the day than we had intended, and the long afternoon was already lengthening itself out into a yellow evening. When we came out of the forest onto the hills, above a strange town or village, of which the lights had already begun to glitter in the darkening valley, the change had already happened, which is the test and definition of evening. I mean that while the sky seemed still as bright, the earth was growing blacker against it, especially at the edges, the hills and the pine tops. This brought out yet more clearly the owlish secrecy of pine woods, and my friend cast a regretful glance at them, as he came out under the sky. Then he turned to the view in front, and as it happened, one of the telegraph poles stood up in front of him in the last sunlight. It was no longer crossed and softened by the more delicate lines of pine wood. It stood up ugly, arbitrary, and angular as any crude figure in geometry. My friend stopped, pointing his stick at it, and all his anarchic philosophy rushed to his lips. Demon, he said to me briefly, hold your work. That palace of proud trees behind us is what the world was before you civilized men, Christians or Democrats or the rest, came to make it dull with your dreary rules of morals and equality. In the silent fight of the forest, tree fights speechless against tree, branch against branch, and the upshot of that dumb battle is inequality and beauty. Now lift up your eyes and look at equality and ugliness. See how regularly the white buttons are arranged on that black stick, and defend your dogmas if you dare. Is that telegraph post so much a symbol of democracy, I asked? I fancy that while three men have made the telegraph to get dividends, about a thousand men have preserved the forest to cut wood. But if the telegraph pole is hideous, as I admit, it is not due to doctrine, but rather to commercial anarchy. If anyone had a doctrine about a telegraph pole, it might be carved in ivory and decked with gold. Modern things are ugly because modern men are careless, not because they are careful. No, answered my friend. With his eye on the end of the splendid and sprawling sunset, there is something intrinsically deadening about the very idea of a doctrine. A straight line is always ugly. Beauty is always crooked. These rigid posts at regular intervals are ugly because they are carrying across the world, the real message of democracy. At this moment, I answered, they are probably carrying across the world the message, by Bulgarian rails. They are probably the prompt communication between some two of the wealthiest and wickedest of his children, with whom God has ever had patience. No, these telegraph poles are ugly and detestable. They are inhuman and indecent. But their baseness lies in their privacy, not in their publicity. That black stick with white buttons is not the creation of the soul of a multitude. It is the mad creation of the souls of two millionaires. At least you have to explain, answered my friend gravely, how it is that the hard democratic doctrine and the hard telegraphic outline have appeared together. You have a blessed my soul, we must be getting home. I had no idea it was so late. Let me see. I think this is our way through the wood. Come, let us both curse the telegraph pole for entirely different reasons, and get home before it is dark. We did not get home before it was dark. For one reason or another, we had underestimated the swiftness of twilight and the suddenness of night, especially in the threading of thick woods. When my friend, after the first five minutes of March, had fallen over a log, and I, ten minutes after, had stuck nearly to the knees in Mayer, we began to have some suspicion of our direction. And last, my friend said in a low husky voice, I'm afraid we're on the wrong path. It's pitch dark. I thought we went the right way, I said, tentatively. Well, he said, and then, after a long pause, I can't see any telegraph poles. I have been looking for them. So have I, I said. They're so straight. We groped away for about two hours of darkness in the thick of the fringe of the trees, which seemed to dance round us in derision. Here and there, however, it was possible to trace the outline of something just too erect and rigid to be a pine tree. By these we finally felt our way home, arriving in a cold green twilight before dawn. Chapter 5 The Drama of Dolls In a small gray town of stone in one of the great Yorkshire Dales, which is full of history, I entered a hall and saw an old puppet play, exactly as our father saw it five hundred years ago. It was admirably translated from the old German, and was the original tale of Faust. The dolls were at once comic and convincing, but if you cannot at once laugh at a thing and believe in it, you have no business in the Middle Ages, or in the world, for that matter. The puppet play in question belongs, I believe, to the fifteenth century, and indeed the whole legend of Dr. Faustus, as the color of that grotesque but somewhat gloomy time. It is very unfortunate that we so often know a thing that is past, only by its tail end. We remember yesterday only by its sunsets. There are many instances. One is Napoleon. We always think of him as a fat old despot ruling Europe with a ruthless military machine. But that, as Lord Rosenberry would say, was only the last phase, or at least the last but one. During the strongest and most startling part of his career, the time that made him immortal, Napoleon was a sort of boy, and not a bad sort of boy either, bullet-headed and ambitious, but honestly in love with a woman, and honestly enthusiastic for a cause, the cause of French justice and equality. Another instance is the Middle Ages, which we also remember only by the odor of their ultimate decay. We think of the life of the Middle Ages as a dance of death, full of devils and deadly sins, lepers and burning heretics. But this was not the life of the Middle Ages, but the death of the Middle Ages. It is the spirit of Louis XI and Richard III, not of Louis IX and Edward I. This grim but not unwholesome table of Dr. Faustus, with its rebuke to the mere arrogance of learning, the sound and stringent enough, but it is not a fair sample of the medieval soul at its happiest and sanest. The heart of the true Middle Ages might be found far better, for instance, in the noble tale of Tannhauser, in which the dead staff broke into a leaf and flour to rebuke the pontiff, who had declared even one human being beyond the strength of sorrow and pardon. But there were in the play two great human ideas which the medieval mind never lost its grip on through the heaviest nightmares of its dissolution. They were the two great jokes of medievalism, as they are the two eternal jokes of mankind. Wherever these two jokes exist, there is little health and hope. Wherever they are absent, pride and insanity are present. The first is the idea that the poor man ought to get the better of the rich man. The other is the idea that the husband is afraid of the wife. I have heard that there is a place under the knee which one struck should produce a sort of jump, and that if you do not jump you are mad. I'm sure that there are some such places in the soul. When the human spirit does not jump with joy at either of those two old jokes, the human spirit must be struck with incurable paralysis. There is hope for people who have gone down into the hells of greed and economic oppression. At least I hope there is, for we are such a people ourselves. But there is no hope for a people that does not exult in the abstract idea of the peasant scoring off the prince. There is hope for the idol and the adulteress, for the men that desert their wives and the men that beat their wives. But there is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them. The first idea, the idea about the man at the bottom coming out on top, is expressed in this puppet play in the person of Dr. Faust's servant Casper. Sentimental old tones, regretting the feudal times, sometimes complain that in these days Jack is as good as his master. But most of the actual tales of the feudal times turn on the idea that Jack is much better than his master, and certainly it is so in the case of Casper and Faust. The play ends up with the damnation of the learned and illustrious doctor, followed by a cheerful and animated dance by Casper, who has been made watchman of the city. But there was a much keener stroke of medieval irony earlier in the play. The learned doctor has been ransacking all the libraries of earth to find a certain rare formula, now almost unknown, by which he can control the infernal deities. At last he procures the one precious volume, opens it at the proper page, and leaves it on the table while he seeks some other part of his magic equipment. The servant comes in, reads off the formula, and immediately becomes an emperor of the elemental spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He summons and dismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston rod working at high speed. He keeps them flying between the doctor's house and their own more unmentionable residences. Till they faint with rage and fatigue. There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that. The idea of the great levelers, luck, and laughter. The idea of a sense of humor defying and dominating hell. One of the best points in the play, as performed in this Yorkshire town, was that the servant Casper was made to talk Yorkshire, instead of the German rustic dialect which he talked in the original. That also smacks of the good air of that epic. In those old pictures and poems, they always made things living by making them local. Thus, clearly enough, the one touch that was not in the old medieval version was the most medieval touch of all. That other ancient and Christian jest that a wife is a holy terror occurs in the last scene where the doctor who wears a fur coat throughout to make him seem more offensively rich and refined, is attempting to escape from the avenging demons and meets his old servant in the street. The servant obligingly points out a house with the blue door and strongly recommends Dr. Faustus to take refuge in it. My old woman lives there, he says, and the devils are more afraid of her than you are of them. Faustus does not take this advice, but goes on meditating and reflecting, which had been his mistake all along, until the clock strikes twelve and dreadful voices talk Latin in heaven. So Faustus in his fur coat is carried away by little black imps, and serve him right for being an intellectual. Chapter six, The Man and His Newspaper I had a little station, which I declined to specify, somewhere between Oxford and Gulford. I missed the connection or miscalculated a route in such manner that I was left stranded for rather more than an hour. I adore waiting at railway stations, but this was not a very sumptuous specimen. There was nothing on the platform except the chocolate automatic machine, which eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no corresponding chocolate, and a small paper stall with a few remaining copies of a cheap imperial organ, which we will call the Daily Wire. It does not matter which imperial organ it was, as they all say the same thing. Though I knew it quite well already, I read it with gravity as I strolled out of the station and up the country road. It opened with the striking phrase that the radicals were setting class against class. It went on to remark that nothing had contributed more to making our empire happy and enviable, to create that obvious list of glories which you can supply for yourself, the prosperity of all classes in our great cities, our populous and growing villages, the success of our rule in Ireland, etc., etc., then the sound, Anglo-Saxon readiness of all classes in the state to work hardly hand in hand. It was this alone the paper assured me that had saved us from the horrors of the French Revolution. It is easy for the radicals, it went on very solemnly. To make jokes about the dukes, very few of these revolutionary gentlemen have given to the poor one half of the earnest thought, tireless unselfishness, and truly Christian patience that are given to them by the great landlords of this country. We are very sure that the English people with their sturdy common sense will prefer to be in the hands of English gentlemen rather than in the myery claws of socialist fucking ears. Just when I had reached this point, I nearly ran into a man. Despite the populousness and growth of our villages, he appeared to be the only man for miles. But the road up which I had wandered turned and narrowed with equal abruptness, and I nearly knocked him off the gate on which he was leaning. I pulled up to apologize, and since he seemed ready for society, and even pathetically pleased with it, I tossed the daily wire over a hedge and fell into speech with him. He wore a wreck of respectable clothes, and his face had that thebie in refinement, which one sees in small tailors and watchmakers, in poor man of sedentary trades. Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt, and tattered as himself. But I do not think that the tragedy that he symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood. There was a fixed look in his face, which told that he was one of those who, in keeping body and soul together, had difficulties not only with the body, but also with the soul. He was a cockney by birth, and retained the touching accent of those streets from which I am in exile. But he had lived nearly all his life in this countryside, and he began to tell me of the affairs of it in that formless, tale-formos way in which the poor gossip about their great neighbors. Names kept coming and going in the narrative like charms or spells, unaccompanied by any biographical explanation. In particular the name of somebody called Sir Joseph multiplied itself with the omnipresence of a deity. I took Sir Joseph to be the principal landowner of the district, and as the confused picture unfolded itself, I began to form a definite and by no means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph. He was spoken of in a strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a child might speak of a stepmother or an unavoidable nurse, something intimate, but by no means tender, something that was waiting for you by your own bed and board, that told you to do this and forbade you to do that with a kipris that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not appear that Sir Joseph was popular, but he was a household word. He was not so much a public man as a sort of private god or omnipotence. The particular man to whom I spoke said he had been in trouble, and that Sir Joseph had been pretty hard on him. And under that gray and silver cloud land, with the background of those frostbitten and wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me a tale which true or false, was as heart-rending as Romeo and Juliet. He had slowly built up in the village a small business as a photographer, and he was engaged to a girl at one of the lodges whom he loved with passion. I'm the sort that had better marry, he said, and for all his frail figure I knew what he meant. But Sir Joseph, and especially Sir Joseph's wife, did not want a photographer in the village. It made the girls vain, or perhaps they disliked this particular photographer. He worked and worked until he had just enough to marry on, honestly. And almost on the eve of his wedding the lease expired, and Sir Joseph appeared in all his glory. He refused to renew the lease, and the man went wildly elsewhere. But Sir Joseph was ubiquitous, and the whole of that place was barred against him. In all that country he could not find a shed in which to bring home his bride. The man appealed and explained, but he was disliked as a demagogue as well as a photographer. Then it was as if a black cloud came across the winter sky, for I knew what was coming. I forgot even in what words he told of nature-maddened and set free. But I still see, as in a photograph, the grey muscles of the winter trees, standing out like tight robes, as if all nature were on the rack. She had to go away, he said. Wouldn't her parents, I began and hesitated on the word forgive? Oh, her people forgave her, he said, but her ladyship? Her ladyship made the sun and moon and stars, I said impatiently. So, of course, she can come between a mother and the child of her body. Well, it does seem a bit hard, he began, with a break in his voice. But good lord, man, I cried. It isn't a matter of hardness, it's a matter of impious and indecent wickedness. If here Sir Joseph knew the passions he was playing with, he did you a wrong, for which in many Christian counties he would have a knife in him. The man continued to look across the frozen fields with a frown. He certainly told his tale was real resentment, whether it was to her false or only exaggerated. He was certainly sullen and injured, but he did not seem to think of any avenue of escape. At last he said, Well, it's a bad world, let's hope there's a better one. Amen, I said, but when I think of Sir Joseph, I understand how many have hoped there was a worse one. Then we were silent for a long time and felt the cold of the day crawling up. And at last I said abruptly. The other day, at a budget meeting, I heard, he took his elbows off the style and seemed to change from head to foot like a man coming out of sleep with a yawn. He said in a totally new voice, louder but much more careless. Ah, yes sir, this is your budget, the reticles are doing a lot of arm. I listened intently and he went on. He said with a sort of careful precision, setting class against class, that's what I call it. Why what's made our empire, except the readiness of all classes to work artily and in hand. He walked a little up and down the lane and stamped with a cold, and then he said, what I say is, what else kept us from the errors of the French Revolution. My memory is good. And I waited in tense eagerness for the phrase that came next. They may laugh at Dukes. I'd like to see him half as kind as Christian and patient as lots of the landlords are. Let me tell you, sir, he said, facing around at me with a final air of one launching a paradox. The English people have some common sense, and they'd rather be in the hands of gentlemen than in the claws of a lot of socialist thieves. I had an indescribable sense that I ought to applaud, as if I were a public meeting. The insane separation in the man's soul between his experience and his ready-made theory was but a type of what covers quarter of England. Turned away, I saw the daily wire sticking out of his shabby pocket. He bade me farewell in a quiet blaze of catchwords, and went stumping up the road. I saw his figure grow smaller and smaller in a great green landscape, even as the free man has grown smaller and smaller in the English countryside. End of chapters four through six. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Alarms and Discursions by G. K. Chesterton Section 3 Chapters 7 through 9 The Appetite of Earth I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has somehow got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it. After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis, I came to the conclusion that I like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat. I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly. The kitchen garden is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard. But why is it that the word orchard sounds as beautiful as the word flower garden, and yet also sounds more satisfactory? I suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery that it contains things to eat. The cabbage is a solid. It can be approached from all sides at once. It can be realized by all senses at once. Compared with that, the sunflower, which can only be seen, is a mere pattern. A thing painted on a flat wall. Now it is this sense of the solidity of things that can only be uttered by the metaphor of eating. To express the cubic content of a turnip, you must be all rounded at once. The only way to get all round a turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has love solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things to eat. If only brown peat taste that as good as it looks. If only white firwood were digestible. We talk rightly of giving stones for bread, but there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles, certain split stones of blue and green that make me wish my teeth were stronger. Somebody, staring into the sky with the same ethereal appetite, declared that the moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiously accept the full doctrine. I am a modernist in this matter. That the moon is made of cheese I have believed from childhood, and in the course of every month the giant of my acquaintance bites a big round piece out of it. This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree actually contradicted by the senses and the reason. First, because if the moon were made of green cheese it would be inhabited. And second, because if it were made of green cheese it would be green. A blue moon is said to be an unusual sight, but I cannot think that a green one is much more common. In fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every other sort of cheese except the green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like cream cheese, the circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky above a cornfield in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese, rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Hanfleur. I have seen it look like an ordinary sensible cheddar cheese in an ordinary sensible Prussian blue sky. And I have once seen it so naked and runious looking, so strangely lit up, that it looked like Geyer cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it, as if it had come in boiling in unnatural milk from mysterious and unearthly cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green, and I incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough. The moon like everything else will ripen by the end of the world, and in the last days we shall see it ticking on those volcanic sunset colors and leaping with that enormous and fantastic light. But this is a parenthesis and one perhaps slightly lacking in prosaic actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations, the phrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example of this imagery of eating and drinking on a large scale. The same huge fancy is in the phrase, if all the trees were bread and cheese, which I have cited elsewhere in this connection, and in that noble nightmare of a Scandinavian legend in which Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry out of a horn. In an essay like the present, first intended as a paper to be read before the Royal Society, one cannot be too exact, and I will concede that my theory of the gradual via science of our satellite is to be regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law finely demonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific world. It is a hypothesis that holds the field, as the scientists say of a theory, when there is no evidence for it so far. But the reader needs to be under no apprehension that I have suddenly gone mad, and shall start biting large pieces out of the trunks of trees or seriously altering by large semicircular mouthfuls, the exquisite outline of the mountains. This feeling for expressing a fresh solidity by the image of eating is really a very old one. So far from being a paradox of perversity, it is one of the oldest common places of religion. If anyone wondering about wants to have a good trick or test for separating the wrong idealism from the right, I will give him one on the spot. It is a mark of false religion that it is always trying to express concrete facts as abstract. It calls sex affinity. It calls wine alcohol. It calls brute starvation the economic problem. The test of true religion is that its energy drives exactly the other way. It is always trying to make men feel truths as facts. Always trying to make abstract things as plain and solid as concrete things. Always trying to make men not merely admit the truth, but see, smell, handle here, and devour the truth. All great spiritual scriptures are full of the invitation not to test, but to taste, not to examine, but to eat. Their phrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and dreadful wine. Worldliness and the polite society of the world has despised this instinct of eating, but religion has never despised it. When we look at a firm, fat, white, cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not suggest that we should desire to eat it. That would be highly abnormal. But I really mean that we should think it good to eat. Good for someone else to eat, for indeed, for someone else is eating it. The grass that grows upon its top is devouring it silently, but doubtless with an uproarious appetite. Simmons and the social tie. It is a platitude, and nonetheless true for that, that we need to have an ideal in our minds with which to test all realities. But it is equally true and less noted that we need a reality with which to test ideals. Thus I have selected Mrs. Buttons, a charwoman in Battersea, as touchstone of all modern theories about the mass of women. Her name is not Buttons. She's not in the least a contemptible nor entirely comic figure. She has a powerful stoop and an ugly attractive face. A little like that of Huxley, without the whiskers, of course. The courage with which she supports the most brutal bad luck has something quite creepy about it. Her irony is incessant and inventive. Her practical charity very large, and she is wholly unaware of the philosophical use to which I put her. But when I hear the modern generalization about her sex on all sides, I simply substitute her name and see how the thing sounds then. When on the one side the mere sentimentalist says, let women be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domestic ornament, then I merely repeat it to myself in the other form. Let Mrs. Buttons be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art, etc. It is extraordinary what a difference the substitution seems to make. And on the other hand, when some of the suffragettes say in their pamphlets and speeches, woman leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the scepter of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought, in order to understand such a sentence, I say it over again in the amended form. Mrs. Buttons leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the scepter of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought. Somehow it sounds quite different. And yet when you say woman, I suppose you mean the average woman, and if most women are as capable and critical and morally sound as Mrs. Buttons, it is as much as we can expect and a great deal more than we deserve. But this study is not about Mrs. Buttons. She would require many studies. I will take a less impressive case of my principle, the principle of keeping in mind an actual personality when we are talking about types or tendencies or generalized ideals. Take, for example, the question of the education of boys. Almost every post brings me pamphlets expounding some advanced and suggestive scheme of education. The pupils are to be taught separate. The sexes are to be taught together. There should be no prizes. There should be no punishment. The master should lift the boys to his level. The master should descend to their level. We should encourage the heartiest comradeship among boys and also the tenderest spiritual intimacy with masters. Toil must be pleasant and holidays must be instructive. With all these things I am natally impressed and somewhat bewildered. But on the Great Buttons principle I keep in my mind and apply to all these ideals one still vivid fact, the face and character of a particular schoolboy whom I once knew. I'm not taking a mere individual oddity, as you will hear. He was exceptional and yet the reverse of eccentric. He was, in quite sober and strict sense of the words, exceptionally average. He was the incarnation and the exaggeration of a certain spirit, which is the common spirit of boys, but which nowhere else became so obvious and outrageous. And because he was an incarnation, he was in his way a tragedy. I will call him Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but a little slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slight swagger and a semen's roll. He commonly had his hands in his pockets. His hair was dark, straight, and undistinguished, and his face, if one saw it after his figure, was something of a surprise. For while the form might be called big and braggart, the face might have been cold weak and he was certainly worried. It was a hesitating face, which seemed to blink doubtfully in the daylight. He had even the look of one who has received a buffet that he cannot return. In all occupations he was an average boy, just sufficiently good at sports, just sufficiently bad at work to be universally satisfactory. But he was prominent in nothing, for prominence was to him a thing like bodily pain. He could not endure without discomfort a mounting to desperation that any boy should be noticed or sensationally separated from the long line of boys. For him to be distinguished was to be disgraced. Those who interpret schoolboys as merely wooden and barbarous, unmoved by anything but a savage seriousness about talk or cricket, make the mistake of forgetting how much of the schoolboy life is public and ceremonial, having reference to an ideal or if you like to an affection. Boys like dogs have a sort of romantic ritual which is not always their real selves, and this romantic ritual is generally the ritual of not being romantic. The pretense of being much more masculine and materialistic than they are. Boys in themselves are very sentimental. The most sentimental thing in the world is to hide your feelings. It is making too much of them. Stoicism is the direct product of sentimentalism, and schoolboys are sentimental individually, but stoical collectively. For example, there were numbers of boys at my school besides myself who took a private pleasure in poetry. But red hot iron would not have induced most of us to admit this to the masters, or to repeat poetry with the faintest inflection of rhythm or intelligence. That would have been an antisocial egoism. We call it showing off. I myself remember running to school, an extraordinary thing to do, with the mere internal ecstasy in repeating the lines of Walter Scott about the taunts of Maraman or the boasts of Roderick Dew, and then repeating the same lines in class with the colorless decorum of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wish to be invisible in our uniformity, a mere pattern of eaten collars and coats. But Simmons went even further. He felt it as an insult to brotherly equality if any task or knowledge out of the ordinary track was discovered even by accident. If a boy had learned German in infancy, or if a boy knew some terms in music, if a boy was forced to confess feebly they had read the Mill on the Floss, then Simmons was in a perspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less any petty jealousy. What he felt was an honorable and generous shame. He hated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime. It made him want to hide himself, just that feeling of impersonal ignominy, which most of us have when someone betrays indecent ignorance, Simmons had, when someone's betrayed special knowledge. He writhed and went red in the face. He used to put up the lid of his desk to hide his bushes for human dignity, and from behind this barrier he would whisper protests which had the horse emphasis of pain. Oh, shut up, I say. Oh, I say shut up. Oh, shut it, can't you? Once, when a little boy admitted that he had heard of the Highland Claymore, Simmons literally hid his head inside his desk and dropped the lid upon it in desperation. And when I was for a moment transferred from the bottom of the form for knowing the name of Cardinal Newman, I thought he would have rushed from the room. The psychological eccentricity increased if one can call that an eccentricity, which was wild worship of the ordinary. Alas, he grew so sensitive that he could not even bear any question answered correctly without grief. He felt there was a touch of disloyalty or unferternal individualism, even about knowing the right answer to a sum. If asked the date of the Battle of Hastings, he considered it due to social tact and general good feeling to answer 1067. This chivalrous exaggeration led to bad feeling between him and the school authority, which ended in rupture unexpectedly violent in the case of so good humor to creature. He fled from the school, and it was discovered upon inquiry that he had fled from his home also. I never expected to see him again, yet it is one of the two or three odd coincidences in my life that I did see him. At some public sports or recreation ground, I saw a group of rather objectless youths, one of whom was wearing the dashing uniform of a private in the Lancers. Inside that uniform was the tall figure, shy face, and dark stiff hair of Simmons. He had gone to the one place where everyone is dressed alike, a regiment. I know nothing more. Perhaps he was killed in Africa. But when England was full of flags and false triumphs, when everybody was talking manly trash about the welps of the lion and the brave boys in red, I often heard a voice echoing in the undercaverns of my memory. Shut up. Oh, shut up. Oh, I say shut it. Cheese. My forthcoming work in five volumes, The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature, is the work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful if I shall live to finish it. Some overflowing, some such a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to sprinkle these pages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil Ly, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet I can think of just now seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says, if all the trees were bread and cheese, which is indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese, there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil, and this anonymous rhymeer, I can recall no verse about cheese, yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word, yet rhymes to breeze and seas an essential point, that it is emphatic and sound as admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities, where their citizens with no apparent intention except emphasis will often say cheese it, or even quite the cheese. The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient, sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk which is one of the ancestral drinks, not likely to be corrupted with soda water. You know I hope, though I myself have only just thought of it, that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Areated waters only appeared after the fall. But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song. Once in an endeavoring to lecture in several places at once I made an eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and even illogical shape that it necessitated me having lunch on four successive days, in four roadside ends, in four different counties. In each end they had nothing but bread and cheese. Nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese if he can get enough of it. In each end the cheese was good, and in each end it was different. There was a noble Wensley Dale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on. Now it's just here that true poetic civilization differs from that poultry and mechanical civilization which holds us all in bondage. Bad customs are universal and rigid like the modern militarism. Good customs are universal and varied like native chivalry and self-defense. Both the good and bad civilizations cover us with a canopy and protect us from all that is outside. But a good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree, burying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella, artificial, mathematical in shape, not merely universal but uniform. So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary and the substances that are the same, wherever they penetrate. By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese. Being really universal it varies from valley to valley. But if let us say we compare cheeses with soap, that vastly inferior substance, we shall see that soap tends more and more to be merely Smith's soap or Brown's soap set automatically all over the world. If the Red Indians have soap, it is Smith's soap. If the Grand Lama has soap, it is Brown's soap. There is nothing subtly and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderly Tibetan about his soap. I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese. He's not worthy, but if he does, it is probably a local cheese, having some real relation to his life and outlook. Safety matches, tin foods, patent medicines, are all sent all over the world, but they are not produced all over the world. Therefore there is in them a mere dead identity, never that soft play of slight variation which exists in things produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kind or the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whiskey and soda at every outpost of the empire. That is why so many empire builders go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching nature in one of a myriad tints of mood as in the holy act of eating cheese. When I had done my pilgrimage in the four wayside public houses, I reached one of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded with great rapidity and complete inconsistency to a large and elaborate restaurant where I knew I could get many other things besides bread and cheese. I could get that also, however, or at least I expected to get it, but I was sharply reminded that I had entered Babylon and left England behind. The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces, and it is the awful fact that instead of Christian bread he brought me biscuits. Biscuits to one who had eaten the cheese of four great countryside's. Biscuits to one who had proved an new for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread. I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who he was that he should put us under those whom humanity had joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with solid yielding substance like bread. To eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if when he said his prayers he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of modern society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice not against the waiter, but against modern society with this huge and unparalleled modern wrong. CHAPTER 10 THE RED TOWN When a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid there are several courses which the philosopher may pursue. The most obvious is to hit him smartly and with precision on the exact tip of the nose. But if you have scruples, moral or physical about this course you may proceed to employ reason, which in this case has all the savage solidity of a blow with the fist. It is stupid to say that most people are stupid. It's like saying most people are tall when it is obvious that tall can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd to denounce the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind. Should the man have been hammered on the nose and brained with logic and should he still remain cold, a third course opens. Lead him by the hand, himself half-willing toward some sun-lit yet secret meadow, and ask him who made the names of the common wild flowers. They were ordinary people, so far as anyone knows, who gave to one flower the name of the star of Bethlehem and to another a much commoner flower, the tremendous title of the Eye of Day. If you cling to this novice notion that common people are prosaic, ask any common person for the local names of the flowers, names which vary not only from county to county, but even from dale to dale. But curiously enough the case is much stronger than this. It will be said that this poetry is peculiar to the country populace, and that the dim democracies of our modern towns at least have lost it. For some extraordinary reason they have not lost it. Ordinary London slang is full of witty things, said by nobody in particular. True, the creed of our cruel cities is not so sane and just as the creed of the old countryside. But the people are just as clever in giving names to their sins in the city as in giving names to their joys in the wilderness. One could not better sum up Christianity than by calling a small white insignificant flower the star of Bethlehem. But then again one could not better sum up the philosophy deduced from Darwinism than in the one verbal picture of having your monkey up. Who first invented these violent felicities of language? Who first spoke of a man being off his head? The obvious comment on a lunatic is that his head is off him. Yet the other phrase is far more fantastically exact. There is about every madman a singular sensation that his body has walked off and left the important part of him behind. But the cases of this popular perfection in phrase are even stronger when they are more vulgar. What concentrated irony and imagination there is, for instance, in the metaphor which describes a man doing a midnight flitting as shooting the moon? It expresses everything about the runaway. His eccentric occupation, his improbable explanations, his furtive air as of a hunter, his constant glances at the blank clock in the sky. No, the English democracy is weak enough about a number of things. For instance, it is weak in politics. But there is no doubt that democracy is wonderfully strong in literature. Very few books that the culture class has produced of late have been such good literature as the expression, painting the town red. Oddly enough, this last cockney epigram clings to my memory for, as I was walking a little while ago around the corner near Victoria, I realized for the first time that a familiar lamppost was painted all over with a bright vermillion, just as if it were trying, in spite of the obvious bodily disqualification, to pretend that it was a pillar box. I have since heard official explanations of these startling and scarlet objects, but my first fancy was that some dissipated gentleman on his way home at four o'clock in the morning had attempted to paint the town red and got only as far as one lamppost. I began to make a fairy tale about the man, and indeed this phrase contains both a fairy tale and a philosophy. It really states almost the whole truth about those pure outbreaks of pagan enjoyment, to which all healthy men have often been tempted. It expresses the desire to have levity on a large scale, which is the essence of such a mood. The rowdy young man is not content to paint his tutor's door green. He would like to paint the whole city scarlet. The word, which to us best recalls such gigantic esch idiocy, is the word mafficking. The slaves of that Saturnalia were not only painting the town red, they thought they were painting the map red, that they were painting the world red. But indeed this imperial debauch has in it something worse than mere larkiness, which is my present topic. It has an element of real self-flattery and of sin. The jingo who wants to admire himself is worse than the black guard who only wants to enjoy himself. In a very old 9th century illumination, which I have seen depicting the war of the rebel angels in heaven, Satan is represented as distributing to his followers peacock feathers, the symbols of an evil pride. Satan also distributed peacock feathers to his followers on mafficking night. But taking the case of ordinary pagan recklessness and pleasure seeking, it is, as we have said, well expressed in this image. First, because it can phase this notion of filling the world with one private folly, and secondly because of the profound idea involved in the choice of color. Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe. It is the fiercest note. It is the highest light. It is the place where the walls of this world of ours were thinnest, and something beyond burns through. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire which destroys us, in the roses of our romance, and in the awful cup of our religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in first love. Now the profligate is he who wishes to spread this crimson of conscious joy over everything, to have excitement at every moment, to paint everything red. He bursts a thousand barrels of wine to incarnate in the streets, and sometimes in his last madness he will butcher beasts and men to dip his gigantic brushes in their blood. For it marks the sacredness of red in nature that it is secret even when it is ubiquitous, like blood in the human body, which is omnipresent yet invisible. As long as blood lives it is hidden. It is only dead blood that we see. But the earlier parts of the rake's progress are very natural and amusing. Painting the town red is a delightful thing until it is done. It would be splendid to see the Cross of St. Paul as red as the Cross of St. George, and the gallons of red paint running down the dome or dripping from the Nelson column. But when it is done, when you have painted the town red, an extraordinary thing happens. You cannot see any red at all. I can see he is in a sort of vision, the successful artist, standing in the midst of that frightful city, hung on all sides with the scarlet of his shame. And then, when everything is red, he will long for a red rose in a green hedge and long in vain. He will dream of a red leaf and the unable even to imagine it. He has desecrated the divine color and can no longer see it, though it is all around. I see him a single black figure against the red hot hell that he has kindled, where spires and turrets stand up like immobile flames. He has stiffened in a sort of agony of prayer. Then the mercy of heaven is loosened, and I see one or two flakes of snow very slowly begin to fall. The furrows. As I see the corn grow green, all about my neighborhood, there rushes on me for no reason in particular, a memory of the winter. I say rushes for that is the very word for the old sweeping lines of the plow fields. From some accidental turn of a train journey or a walking tour, I saw suddenly the fierce rush of the furrows. The furrows are like arrows. They fly along an arc of sky. They are like leaping animals. They vault an inviolable hill and roll down the other side. They are like battering battalions. They rush over a hill with flying squadrons and carry it with a cavalry charge. They have all the air of Arabs sweeping a desert, of rockets sweeping the sky, of torrents sweeping a watercourse. Nothing ever seemed so living as those brown lines, as they shot sheer from the height of a ridge down to their still whirl of the valley. They were swifter than arrows, fiercer than Arabs, more riotous and rejoicing than rockets, and yet they were only thin straight lines drawn with difficulty, like a diagram by painful and patient men. The men that plowed tried to plow straight, they had no notion of giving great sweeps and swirls to the eye. Those cataracts of cloven earth, they were done by the grace of God. I had always rejoiced in them, but I had never found any reason for my joy. There are some very clever people who cannot enjoy the joy, unless they understand it. There are other, and even cleverer people, who say that they lose the joy the moment they do understand it. Thank God I was never clever, and I could always enjoy things when I understood them, and when I didn't. I can enjoy the orthodox Tory, though I could never understand him. I can also enjoy the orthodox liberal, though I understand him only too well. But the splendor of furrowed fields is this, that like all brave things they are made straight, and therefore they bend. In everything that bows gracefully, there must be an effort at stiffness. Bows are beautiful when they bend, only because they try to remain rigid, and sword blades can curl like silver ribbons, only because they are certain to spring straight again. But the same is true of every tough curve of the tree trunk, of every strong, backed bend of the bow. There is scarcely any such thing as nature, as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity, yielding a little like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole duty of the earth. The cosmos is a diagram just bent beautifully out of shape. Everything tries to be straight, and everything just fortunately fails. The foil may curve in the lunge, but there is nothing beautiful about beginning the battle with the crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts, but that is no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. To not be an opportunist, try to be theoretic at all the opportunities. Fate can be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to bend any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight, and life will bend you. Alas, I am giving the moral before the fable, and yet I hardly think that otherwise you could see all that I mean in the enormous vision of the plowed hills. These great furrowed slopes are the oldest architecture of man. The oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest botany his object, and for geometry the mere word proves my case. But when I looked at those torrents of plowed parallels, that great rush of rigid lines, I seemed to see the whole huge achievement of democracy. Here was mere equality, but equality seen in bulk is more superb than any supremacy. Equality free and flying, equality rushing over hill and dale, equality charging the world. That was the meaning of those military furrows, military in their identity, military in their energy. They sculptured hill and dale with strong curves merely because they did not mean to curve at all. They made the strong lines of landscape with their stiffly driven swords of the soil. It is not only nonsense but blasphemy to say that man has spoiled the countryside. Man has created the country. It was his business as the image of God. No hill covered with common scrub or patches of purple heath could have been so sublimely hilly as that ridge up to which the ranked furrows rose like aspiring angels. No valley, confused with needless cottages and towns, can have been so utterly valious as that abyss into which the down rushing furrows raged like demons into the swirling pit. It is the hard lines of discipline and equality that mark out a landscape and give it all its mold and meaning. It is because the lines of the furrow arc ugly and even that the landscape is living and superb. As I think I have remarked elsewhere, the Republic is founded on the plow, the philosophy of sight-seeing. It would be really interesting to know exactly why an intelligent person, by which I mean a person with any sort of intelligence, can and does dislike sight-seeing. Why does the idea of a Chara bank full of tourists going to see the birthplace of Nelson, or the death scene of Simon de Montfort, strike a strange chill to the soul? I can tell quite easily what this dimma version to tourists and their antiquities does not arise from, at least in my case. Whatever my other vices, and they are of course of a lurid caste, I can lay my hand on my heart and say that it does not arise from a paltry contempt for the antiquities, nor yet from the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If there is one thing more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, it is the irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many-colored procession of life, which includes the Chara bank among its many chariots and triumphful cars. I know nothing so vulgar as that contempt for vulgarity which sneers at the clerks on a bank holiday or the cockenies on Margate Sands. The man who notices nothing about the clerk except his cockney accent would have noticed nothing about Simon de Montfort except his French accent. The man who jeers at Jones for having dropped an H might have jeered at Nelson for having dropped an arm. Scorn springs easily to the essentially vulgar-minded, and it is as easy to jive at Montfort as a foreigner or at Nelson as a cripple as to jive at the struggling speech and the main bodies of the mass of our comic and tragic race. If I shrink faintly from this affair of tourists and tombs, it is certainly not because I am so profane as to think lightly either of the tombs or the tourists. I reverence those great men who had the courage to die. I reverence also these little men who have the courage to live. Even if this be conceded, another suggestion may be made. It may be said that antiquities and commonplace crowds are indeed good things like violets and geraniums, but they do not go together. A billy cock is a beautiful object. It may be eagerly urged, but it is not in the same style of architecture as the Ely Cathedral. It is a dome, a small Rococo dome in the Renaissance manner, and does not go with the pointed arches that assault heaven-like spears. A chara-bank is lovely, it may be said, if placed upon a pedestal in worship for its own sweet sake, but it does not harmonize with the curve and outline of the old three-decker on which Nelson died. Its beauty is quite of another source. Therefore, we will suppose our sage to argue, antiquity and democracy should be kept separate as inconsistent things. Things may be inconsistent in time and space, which are by no means inconsistent in essential value and idea. Thus the Catholic Church has water for the newborn and oil for the dying, but she never mixes oil and water. This explanation is plausible, but I do not find it adequate. The first objection is that the same smell of bathos haunts the soul in the case of all deliberate and elaborate visits to beauty spots, even by persons of the most elegant position or of the most protected privacy, especially visiting the Colosseum by moonlight, always struck me as being vulgar as visiting it by limelight. One millionaire standing on the top of Mount Blanc, one millionaire standing in the desert by the Sphinx, one millionaire standing in the middle of Stonehenge is just as comic as one millionaire is anywhere else, and that is saying a good deal. On the other hand, if the billycock had come privately and naturally into Eli Cathedral, no enthusiast for gothic harmony would think of objecting to the billycock, so long of course as it was not worn on the head. But there is indeed a much deeper objection to this theory of the two incompatible excellences of antiquity and popularity. For the truth is that it has been almost entirely the antiquities that have normally interested the populace, and it has been almost entirely the populace who have systematically preserved the antiquities. The oldest inhabitant has always been a clod hopper. I have never heard of his being a gentleman. It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of the sites, of the battles, or the buildings of churches. It is they who remember so far as anyone remembers, the glimpses of fairies, or the graver wonders of saints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by the supercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says that, where there is no vision, the people perish. But it is equally true in practice that where there is no people, the visions perish. The idea must be abandoned then that this feeling of faint dislike towards popular sightseeing is due to any inherent incompatibility between the ideas of special shrines and trophies and the idea of large masses of ordinary men. On the contrary these two elements of sanctity and democracy have been specially connected and alive throughout history. The shrines and trophies were often put up by ordinary men. They were always put up for ordinary men. To whatever things the fastidious modern artist may choose to apply his theory of specialist judgment and an aristocracy of taste, he must necessarily find it difficult really to apply it to such historic and monumental art. Obviously a public building is meant to impress the public. The most aristocratic tomb is a democratic tomb because it exists to be seen. The only aristocratic thing is the decaying corpse, not the undecaying marble. And if the man wanted to be thoroughly aristocratic, he should be buried in his own back garden. The chapel of the most narrow and exclusive sect is universal outside even if it is limited inside. Its walls and windows confront all points of the compass and all quarters of the cosmos. It may be small as a dwelling place, but it is universal as a monument. If its sectarians had really wished to be private, they should have met in a private house. Whenever and wherever we erect national or municipal hall, pillar, or statue, we are speaking to the crowd like a demagogue. The statue of every statesman offers itself for election, as much as the statesman himself. Every epithet on a church slab is put up for the mob, as much as a placard in a general election. And if we follow this track of reflection, we shall, I think, find why it is that modern sites seeing jars on something in us. Something that is not a catish contempt for graves, nor an equally catish contempt for cats. For after all, there is many a church yard, which consists mostly of dead cats, but that does not make it less sacred or less sad. The real explanation, I fancy, is this, that these cathedrals and columns of triumph were meant not for people more cultured and self-conscious than modern tourists, but for people much rougher and more casual. Those leaps of living stone like frozen fountains were so placed and poised as to catch the eye of ordinary, inconsiderate men going about their daily business. And when they are so seen they are never forgotten. The true way of reviving the magic of our great ministers and historic civil curves is not the one which Ruskin was always recommending. It is not to be more careful of historic buildings. Nay, it is rather to be more careless of them. Buy a bicycle in Maidstone to visit an aunt in Dover, and you will see Canterbury Cathedral as it was built to be seen. Go through London only as the shortest way between Croydon and Hempstead, and the Nelson Column will, for the first time in your life, remind you of Nelson. You will appreciate Hereford Cathedral if you have come for cider, not if you've come for architecture. You will really see the place-vendom if you have come on business, not if you have come for art. For it was for the simple and laborious generations of men, practical, troubled about many things, that our fathers reared those portents. There is indeed another element, not unimportant, the fact that people have gone to cathedrals to pray. But in discussing modern artistic cathedral lovers, we need not consider this. End of chapters 10 through 12.