 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 5, Chapters 13-15 A Criminal Head When men of science, or more often men who talk about science, speak of studying history or human society scientifically, they always forget that there are two quite distinct questions involved. It may be that certain facts of the body go with certain facts of the soul, but it by no means follows that a grasp of such facts of the body goes with the grasp of the things of the soul. A man may show very learnedly that certain mixtures of race make a happy community, but he may be quite wrong, he generally is, about what communities are happy. A man may explain scientifically how a certain physical type involves a really bad man, but he may be quite wrong, he generally is, about which sort of man is really bad. Thus his whole argument is useless, for he understands only one half of the equation. The drearier kind of Don may come to me and say, Keltz are unsuccessful, look at Irishman for instance, to which I should reply, you may know all about Keltz, but it is obvious that you know nothing about Irishman. The Irish are not in the least unsuccessful, unless it is unsuccessful to wander from their own country over a great part of the earth, in which case the English are unsuccessful too. A man with a bumpy head may say to me, as a kind of New Year greeting, fools have microcephalous skulls or what not, to which I shall reply, in order to be certain of that, you must be a good judge of both of the physical and of the mental fact. It is not enough that you should know a microcephalous skull when you see it, it is also necessary that you should know a fool when you see him, and I have a suspicion that you do not know a fool when you see him, even after the most lifelong and intimate of all forms of acquaintanceship. The trouble with most sociologists, criminologists, etc., is that while their knowledge of their own detail is exhaustive and subtle, their knowledge of man and society to which these are to be applied is quite exceptionally superficial and silly. They know everything about biology, but almost nothing about life. Their ideas of history for instance are simply cheap and uneducated, thus some famous and foolish professor measured the skull of Charlotte Corday to ascertain the criminal type. He had not historical knowledge enough to know that if there is any criminal type, certainly Charlotte Corday had not got it. The skull, I believe afterwards, turned out not to be Charlotte Corday's at all, but that is another story. The point is that the poor old man was trying to match Charlotte Corday's mind with her skull without knowing anything whatever about her mind. But I came yesterday upon yet a more crude and startling example. In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles about criminology about whether wicked men could be made good if their heads were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I know are much too rich and powerful ever to submit to the process, the speculation leaves me cold. I always notice with pain, however, a curious absence of the portraits of living millionaires from said galleries of awful examples. Most of the portraits in which we are called upon to remark the line of the nose to the curve of the forehead appear to be the portraits of ordinary, sad men who stole because they were hungry or killed because they were in a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely. Sometimes it is the remarkable square head. Sometimes it is the unmistakable round head. Sometimes they'll learn to draw attention to the abnormal development. Sometimes to the striking deficiency of the back of the head. I tried to discover what is the invariable factor, the one permanent mark of the scientific criminal type. After exhaustive classification I have come to the conclusion that it consists in being poor. But it was among the pictures in this article that I received the final shock. The enlightenment which has left me in lasting possession of the fact that criminologists are generally more ignorant than criminals. The starved and bitter but quite human faces was one head, neat but old-fashioned, with the powder of the 18th century and a certain almost prim pertinence in the dress which marked the conventions of the upper middle class about 1790. The face was lean and lifted stiffly up. The eyes stared forward with a frightful sincerity. The lip was firm with heroic firmness, all the more pathetic because of a force. Without knowing who it was, one could have guessed that it was a man in the manner of Shakespeare's Brutus, a man of piercingly pure intentions, prone to use government as a mere machine for morality, very sensitive to the charge of inconsistency, and a little too proud of his own clean honorable life. I say I should have known this almost from the face alone, if I had not known who it was. But I did know who it was. It was Robespierre. And underneath the portrait of this pale and too eager moralist were written these remarkable words. Deficiency of ethical instincts, followed by something to the effect that he knew no mercy, which is certainly untrue, and by some nonsense about a retreating forehead. A peculiarity which he shared with Louis XVI and with half the people of his time and ours. Then it was that I measured the staggering distance between the knowledge and the ignorance of science. Then I knew that all criminology might be worse than worthless because of its utter ignorance of that human material, of which it is supposed to be speaking. The man who could say that Robespierre was deficient in ethical instincts is a man utterly to be disregarded in all calculations of ethics. He might as well say that John Bunyan was deficient in ethical instincts. You may say that Robespierre was morbid and unbalanced. And you may say the same of Bunyan. But if these two men were morbid and unbalanced, they were morbid and unbalanced by feeling too much about morality, not by feeling too little. You may say, if you like, that Robespierre was, in a negative sort of way, mad. But if he was mad, he was mad on ethics. He had a company of keen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient of unreason and wrong. Resolved that Europe should not be choked up in every channel by oligarchies and state secrets that already stank. The work was the greatest that was ever given to men to do, except that which Christianity did, in dragging Europe out of the abyss of barbarism after the Dark Ages. But they did it, and no one else could have done it. Certainly we could not do it. We're not ready to fight all Europe on a point of justice. We're not ready to fling our most powerful class as mere refuse to the foreigner. We're not ready to shatter the great states at a stroke. We're not ready to trust ourselves in an awful moment of utter dissolution in order to make all things seem intelligible, and all men feel honorable henceforth. We are not strong enough to be as strong as Danton. We are not strong enough to be as weak as Robespierre. There is only one thing it seems that we can do. Like a mob of children, we can play games upon this ancient battlefield. We can pull up the bones and skulls of the tyrants and martyrs of that unimaginable war, and we can chatter to each other childlessly and innocently about skulls that are imbecile and heads that are criminal. I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know whose are imbecile. The Wrath of the Roses The position of the rose among flowers is like that of the dog among animals. It is so much that both are domesticated as they have some dim feeling that they were always domesticated. There are wild roses and there are wild dogs. I do not know the wild dogs. Wild roses are very nice. But nobody ever thinks of either of them if the name is abruptly mentioned in a gossip or a poem. On the other hand, there are tame tigers and tame cobras, but if one says I have a cobra in my pocket or there is a tiger in the music room, the adjective tame has to be somewhat hastily added. If one speaks of beasts, one thinks first of wild beasts. If a flowers, one thinks first of wild flowers. But there are two great exceptions caught so completely into the wheel of man's civilization and tangled so unalterably with his ancient emotions and images that the artificial product seems more natural than the natural. The dog is not a part of natural history, but of human history, and the real rose grows in a garden. All must regard the elephant as something tremendous, attained, and many especially in our great cultured centers regard every bull as presumably a mad bull. In the same way we think of most garden trees and plants as fierce creatures of the forest or morass taught at last to endure the curb. But with the dog and the rose, this instinctive principle is reversed. With them we think of the artificial as the arch-type, the earth born as the erratic exception. We think vaguely of the wild dog as if he had run away like the stray cat, and we cannot help fancying that the wonderful wild rows of our hedges as they escaped by jumping over the hedge. Perhaps they fled together, the dog and the rose, a singular and on the whole an imprudent elopement. Perhaps the treacherous dog crept from the kennel, and the rebellious rose from the flowerbed and they fought their way out in company, one with teeth and the other with thorns. Possibly this is why my dog becomes a wild dog when he sees roses and kicks them anywhere. Possibly this is why the wild rose is called the dog rose, possibly not. But there is in this degree of dim barbaric truth in the quaint old world legend that I have just invented, that in these two cases the civilized product is felt to be fiercer, nay even the wilder. Nobody seems to be afraid of a wild dog. He is clasped among the jackals and the servile beasts. The terrible cave Canum is written over man's creation. When we read beware the dog it means beware of the tame dog, for it is the tame dog that is terrible. He is terrible in proportion as he is tame. It is his loyalty and his virtues that are awful to the stranger, even the stranger within your gates, still more to the stranger half way over your gates. He is alarmed at such deafening and furious docility. He flees from that great monster of mildness. Well I have much the same feeling when I look at the roses, rank, red and thick and resolute round a garden. They seem to me bold and even blustering. I hasten to say that I know even less about my own garden than about anybody else's garden. I know nothing about roses, not even their names. I know only the name rose and rose is in every sense of the word a Christian name. It is Christian in the one absolute and primordial sense of Christian, that it comes down from the age of pagans. The rose can be seen and even smelt in Greek, Latin, provincial, Gothic, Renaissance and Puritan poems. Beyond this mere word rose, which like wine and other noble words, is the same in all the tongues of white men. I know literally nothing. I've heard the more evident and advertised names. I know there is a flower which calls itself the glory of Dijon, which I had supposed to be its cathedral. In any case, to have produced a rose and a cathedral is to have produced not only two very glorious and humane images, but also, as I maintain, two very soldierly and defiant things. I also know there is a rose called Merchil Neal. Note once more the military ring. And when I was walking round my garden the other day I spoke to my gardener, an enterprise of no little valor, and asked him the name of a strange dark rose that had somehow oddly taken my fancy. It was almost as if it reminded me of some turbid element in history and the soul. Its red was not only swarthy but smoky. There was something congested and wrathful about its color. It was at once theatrical and sulky. The gardener told me it was called Victor Hugo. Therefore it is that I feel all roses to have some secret power about them. Even their names may mean something in connection with themselves in which they differ from nearly all the sons of men. But the rose itself is royal and dangerous. Long as it has remained in the rich house of civilization it has never laid off its armor. A rose always looks like a medieval gentleman of Italy with a cloak of crimson and a sword, but the thorn is the sword of the rose. And there is this real moral in the matter that we have to remember that civilization, as it goes on, ought not perhaps to grow more fighting, but ought to grow more ready to fight. The more valuable and reposeful is the order we have to guard, the more vivid should be our ultimate sense of vigilance and potential violence. And when I walk round a summer garden, I can understand how those high mad lords at the end of the Middle Ages, just before their swords clashed, caught at roses for their instinctive emblems of empire and rivalry. For to me any such garden is full of the war of the roses. The gold of Glastonbury. One silver morning I walked into a small gray town of stone, like twenty other gray western towns, which happened to be called Glastonbury, and saw the magic thorn of near two thousand years growing in the open air as casually as any bush in my garden. In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane things, the myth is more important than the history. One cannot say anything stronger of the strange old tale of St. Joseph and the thorn, than that it dwarves St. Dunstan. Standing among the actual stones and shrubs one thinks of the first century, and not of the tenth, one's mind goes back beyond the Saxons, and beyond the greatest statesmen of the Dark Ages. The tale that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend, but it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend, as many modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is quite comic and inconceivable, as if one said that Wat Taylor went to Chicago or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole. We think of Palestine as little, localized, and very private, of Christ's followers as poor folk, estric globus, rooted to their towns or trades, and we think of vast routes of travel and constant world communications as things of recent and scientific origin. But this is wrong, at least the last part of it is. It is part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists tell when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism. Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling cosmopolitan civilization. Long sea voyages were not so quick, but were quite as incessant as today, and though in the nature of things Christ had not many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that he had some, and a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen with a yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed with the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John, which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its platonic tone. I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is divinely appointed judge of the philosophy, and the platonic tone seems to me to prove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians. It was an open province of the Polygot Empire, overrun with all sorts of people of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel, suppose some great prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa. The prophet himself might be a simple or unlettered man, but no one who knows the modern world would be surprised if one of his closest followers were a professor from Heidelberg or an MA from Oxford. All this is not urged here with any notion of proving that the tale of the Thorn is not a myth. As I have said, it probably is a myth. It is urged with much more important object to pointing out the proper attitude towards such myths. The proper attitude is one of doubt and hope and a kind of light mystery. The tale is certainly not impossible, as it is certainly not certain. And through all the ages since the Roman Empire, men have fed their healthy fancies with their historical imagination upon the very twilight condition of such tales. But today, real agnosticism has declined along with real theology. People cannot leave a creed alone, although it is the essence of a creed to be clear. Neither can they leave a legend alone, though it is the essence of a legend to be vague. That saying half skepticism which was found in all rustics, in all ghost tales and fairy tales, seems to be a lost secret. Modern people must make scientifically certain that St. Joseph did or did not go to Glastonbury, despite the fact that it is now quite impossible to find out, and that it does not, in a religious sense, very much matter. But it is essential to feel that he may have gone to Glastonbury. All songs, arts, and dedications, branching and blossoming like the Thorn, are rooted in some such sacred doubt. Taken thus not heavily like a problem, but lightly like an old tale, the thing does lead one along the road of very strange realities, and the Thorn is found growing in the heart of a very secret maze of the soul. Something is really present in the place, some closer contact with the thing which covers Europe, but is still a secret. Somehow the great town and the green bush touch across the world the strange small country of the garden and the grave. There is verily some communion between the Thorn tree and the crown of Thorns. A man never knows what tiny thing will startle him to such ancestral and impersonal tears. Piles of superb masonry will often pass like a common panorama, and on this gray and silver morning the ruined towers of the cathedral stood about me somewhat vaguely like gray clouds. But down in a hollow where the local antiquaries are making a fruitful excavation, a magnificent old ruffian with a pickaxe, whom I believe to have been St. Joseph of Arimathea, showed me a fragment of the old vaulted roof which he had found in the earth, and on the whitish-gray stone there was just a faint brush of gold. This seemed a piercing and sword-like pathos, an unexpected fragrance of all forgotten or desecrated things in the bare survival of that poor little pigment upon the imperishable rock. To the strong shapes of the Roman and Gothic I had grown accustomed, but that weak touch of color was at once tawdry and tender like some popular keepsake. Then I knew that all my fathers were men like me, where the columns and arches were grave and told of the gravity of the builders. But here was one touch of their gaiety. I almost expected it to fade from the stone as I stared. It was as if men had been able to preserve a fragment of a sunset. And then I remembered how the artistic critics have always praised the grave tints and the grim shadows of the crumbling cloisters and ebby towers, and how they themselves often dress up like Gothic runes in the somber tones of dim-gray walls or dark green ivy. I remember how they hated almost all primary things, but especially primary colors. I knew they were appreciating much more delicately and truly than I, the sublime skeletons and the mighty fungoids of the dead Glastonbury. But I stood for an instant alive in the living Glastonbury, gay with gold and colored like the toy book of a child. The end of chapters 13 through 15. 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 6. Chapters 16 through 18. The Futurists It was a warm golden evening fit for October. I was watching with regret a lot of little black pigs being turned out of my garden when the postman handed to me with perfunctory haste which doubtless masked his emotion, the Declaration of Futurism. If you ask me what Futurism is, I cannot tell you. Even the Futurists themselves seem a little doubtful. Perhaps they're waiting for the future to find out. But if you ask me what its declaration is, I answer eagerly, for I can tell you quite a lot about that. It is written by an Italian named Marinetti in a magazine which is called Poesia. It is headed Declaration of Futurism in enormous letters. It is divided off with little numbers and starts straight away like this. One, we intend to glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strength of daring. Two, the essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt. Three, literature having up to now glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and slumber, we wish to exalt the aggressive movement, the feverish insomnia, running the perilous leap, the cuff and the blow. While I am quite willing to exalt the cuff within reason, it scarcely seems that you're an entirely new subject for literature as the Futurists imagine. It seems to me that even through the slumber which fills the Siege of Troy, the Song of Roland and the Orlando Furioso and in spite of the thoughtful immobility which marks Pentegrul, Henry V and Valet of Chevy Chase, there are occasional gleams of an admiration for courage, a readiness to glorify the love of danger and even the strength of daring. I seem to remember slightly differently spelt somewhere in literature. The distinction however seems to be that the warriors of the past went in for tournaments which were at least dangerous for themselves while the Futurists go in for motorcars which are mainly alarming for other people. It is the Futurist in his motor who does the aggressive movement but it is the pedestrians who go in for the running and the perilous leap. Section number four says we declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed. A race automobile adorned with great pipes like serpents with explosive breath, a race automobile which seems to rush or exploding powder is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace. It is also much easier if you have the money. It is quite clear however that you cannot be a Futurist at all unless you are frightfully rich. Then follows this lucid and soul-stirring sentence. We will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal steering post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its own orbit but a jolly song it would be so hearty and with such a simple swing in it. I can imagine the Futurist round the fire in a tavern trolling out in chorus some ballad with that incomparable refrain shouting over their swaying flagons some shetch words as these. A notion came into my head as new as it was bright that poems might be written on the subject of a fight. No praise was given to Lancelot, Achilles, Knapp or Corbett but we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal steering post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its own orbit. Then these did should be supposed that Futurism would be so weak as to permit any democratic restraints upon the violence and levity of the luxurious classes there would be a special verse in honor of the motors also my father scaled the mountains in their pilgrimages far but I feel full of energy while sitting in a car and petrol is the perfect wine I lick it and absorb it so we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideals steering post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its own orbit yes it would be a rollicking catch I wish there were space to finish the song or to detail all the other sections in the declaration suffice it to say that Futurism has gratifying dislike both of liberal politics and Christian morals they say gratifying because however unfortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have quarreled they are always united in the feeble hatred of such silly megalomaniacs as these they will glorify war the only true hygiene of the world militarism, patriotism the destructive jester of anarchism the beautiful ideas which kill and the scorn of women they will destroy museums, libraries and fight against moralism, feminism and all utilitarian cowardice the proclamation ends with an extraordinary passage which I cannot understand at all all about something that is going to happen to Mr. Marinetti when he is forty as far as I can make out he will then be killed by other poets who will be overwhelmed with love and admiration for him and they will come against us from afar from everywhere leaping on the cadence of their first poems clawing the air with crooked fingers and senting at the academy gates the good smell of our decaying minds well it is satisfactory to be told however obscurely that this sort of thing is coming to an end some day to be replaced by some other tomfoolery and though I commonly refrain from clawing the air with crooked fingers I can assure Mr. Marinetti that this omission does not disqualify me that I sent the good smell of his decaying mind all right I think the only other point of futurism is contained in this sense it is in Italy that we hurl this overthrowing and inflammatory declaration with which today we found futurism for we will free Italy from her numberless museums which cover her with countless cemeteries I think that rather sums it up the best way one would think one cell from a museum would be not to go there Mr. Marinetti's fathers and grandfathers freed Italy from prisons and torture chambers places where people held by force they being in bondage of moralism attacked governments as unjust real governments with real guns such was their utilitarian cowardice that they would die in hundreds upon the bayonets of Austria I can well imagine why Mr. Marinetti does not wish to look back at the past if there was one thing that could make him look smaller even than before it is that role of dead men's drums and that dream of Garibaldi going by the old radical ghosts go by more real than the living men to assault I know not what ramparded city in hell I mean while the futurist stands outside a museum in a warlike attitude and defiantly tells the official at the turnstile that he will never never come in there was a certain solid use in fools it is not so much that they rush in where angels fear to tread but rather that they let out what devils intend to do some perversion of folly will float about nameless and pervade the whole society then some lunatic gives it a name and henceforth it is harmless with all really evil things when the danger has appeared the danger is over now it may be hoped that the self-indulgent sprawlers of Podesia have put a name once and for all to their philosophy in the case of their philosophy to put a name to it is to put an end to it yet their philosophy has been very widespread in our time it could hardly have been pointed and finished except by this perfect folly the creed of which, please god this is the flower and finish consists ultimately in this statement that it is bold and spirited to appeal to the future now it is entirely weak and half-witted to appeal to the future a brave man ought to ask for what he wants not for what he expects to get a brave man who wants atheism in the future calls himself an atheist a brave man who wants socialism, a socialist a brave man who wants Catholic but a weak-minded man who does not know what he wants in the future calls himself a futurist they have driven all the pigs away all that they had driven away the pigs and left the pigs the sky begins to droop with darkness and all birds and blossoms to descend unfaltering into the healthy underworld where things slumber and grow there was just one true phrase of Mr. Marinetti about himself the feverish insomnia the whole universe is pouring headlong to the happiness of the night it is only the madman who has not the courage to sleep dukes the duke the chamberton was a small but lively relic of a really aristocratic family the members of which were nearly all atheists up to the time of the French Revolution but since that event beneficial in such various ways had been varied about he was a royalist a nationalist and a perfectly sincere patriot in that particular style which consists of ceaselessly asserting that one's country is not so much in danger as already destroyed he wrote cheery little articles for the royalist press entitled the end of France or the last cry or what not and he gave the final touches to a picture of the Kaiser riding across a pavement of prostate Parisians with a glow of patriotic exaltation he was quite poor and even his relations had no money he walked briskly to all his meals at a little open cafe and he looked just like everybody else living in a country where aristocracy does not exist he had a high opinion of it he would yearn for the swords and the stately manners of the Pomards before the revolution most of whom who had been in theory Republicans but he turned with a more practical eagerness to the one country in Europe where the tricolor has never flown and men have never been roughly equalized before the state the beacon and comfort of his life was England which all Europe sees clearly as the one pure aristocracy that remains he had more over a mild taste for sports and kept an English bulldog and he believed the English to be a race of bulldogs of heroic squires and hardy yeoman vassals because he read all this in English conservative papers written by exhausted little leventine clerks but his reading was naturally for the most part in the French conservative papers though he knew English well and it was in these that he first heard of the horrible budget there he read of the confiscatory revolution planned by the Lord Chancellor of the H. Jekker the sinister Georges Lloyd he also read how chivalrously Prince Arthur Belfort of Burleigh had defied that demagogue assisted by Austin the Lord Chamberlain and a gay and witty Walter Lange and being a brisk partisan and a capable journalist he decided to pay England a special visit and report to his papers upon the struggle he drove for an eternity and an open fly through beautiful woods with a letter of introduction in his pocket to one Duke who was to introduce him to another Duke the endless and numberless avenues of bewildering pine woods gave him a queer feeling that he was driving through the countless corridors of a dream yet the vast silence and freshness healed his irritations at modern ugliness and unrest it seemed the background fit for the return of chivalry in such a forest a king and all his court might lose themselves hunting or a night heron might perish with no companion the castle itself when he reached it was somewhat smaller than he had expected but he was delighted with its romantic and castellated outline he was just about to alight when somebody opened two enormous gates at the side and the vehicle drove briskly through that is not the house he inquired politely of the driver no sir said the driver controlling the corners of his mouth the lodge sir said the Duke to chamberton pommered this is where the Duke's land begins all no sirs said the man quite in distress we've been in his graces land all day the Frenchman thanked him and leaned back in the carriage feeling as if everything were incredibly huge and vast like gulliver in the country of the broadening eggs he got out and found him a long façade of a somewhat severe building and a little careless man in a shooting jacket and knickerbockers ran down the steps he had a weak fair mustache and the dull blue babyish eyes his features were insignificant but his manner extremely pleasant and hospitable this was the Duke of Aylesbury perhaps the largest landowner in Europe and known only as a horse breeder until he began to write abrupt little letters about the budget he led the French Duke upstairs taking trivialities in a hearty way and there presented him to another and more important English oligarch who got up from a writing desk with a slightly senile jerk he had a gleaming bald head and glasses the lower part of his face was masked with a short dark beard which did not conceal the beaming smile not unnixed with sharpness he stooped a little as he ran like some sedentary head clerk or cashier and even without the checkbook and papers on his desk he would have given the impression to a man of business he was dressed in a light grey check jacket he was the Duke of Windsor the great Unionist statesman between these two loose amiable men the little gull stood erect in his black frock coat with a monstrous gravity of French ceremonial good manners the stiffness led the Duke of Windsor to put him in his ease like a tenant and he said rubbing his hands I was delighted with your letter delighted I shall be very pleased if I can give you or any details my visit said the Frenchman scarcely suffices for the scientific exhaustion of detail I seek only the idea the idea that is always the immediate thing quite so said the other rapidly quite so the idea feeling somehow that it was his turn the English Duke having done all that could be tired of him Palmer had to say I mean the idea of aristocracy I regard this as the last great battle for the idea aristocracy like any other thing must justify itself to mankind aristocracy is good because it preserves a picture of human dignity in the world with that dignity is often obscured by survival necessities aristocracy alone can keep a certain high distance of soul and body a certain noble distance between the sexes the Duke of Aylesbury who had a clouded recollection of having squirted soda water down the neck of a countess on the previous evening looked somewhat gloomy as if lamenting that the erratic spirit of the Latin race the elder Duke laughed heartily and said well well you know we English are horribly practical with us the great question is the land out here in the country do you know this part yes yes try the Frenchman eagerly I see what you mean the country the old rustic life of humanity a holy war upon the bloated and filthy towns what right have these anarchists to attack your busy and prosperous countryside have they not driven under your management are not the English villages always growing larger and gayer under the enthusiastic leadership of their encouraging squires have you not the Maypole have you not Mary England the Duke of Aylesbury made a noise in his throat and then said very indistinctly they all go to London all go to London repeated Pamard with a blank stare why this time nobody answered and Pamard had to attack again the spirit of aristocracy is essentially opposed to the greed of the industrial cities in France there are actually one or two nobles so vile as to drive coal and gas trades and drive them hard the Duke of Windsor looked at the carpet the Duke of Aylesbury went and looked out of the window at length the latter said that's rather stiff you know one has to look after one's own business in town as well do not say it I tell you all Europe is one fight between business and honour if we do not fight for honour who will what other right have we to poor legged sinners to titles and quartered shields except that we staggeringly support some idea of giving things which cannot be demanded and avoiding things which cannot be punished our only claim is to be a wall across Christendom against the Jew peddlers and pawnbrokers Goldstein's and the Duke of Aylesbury swung round with his hands in his pockets oh I say he said you've been reading Lloyd George nobody but dirty radicals can say a word against Goldstein I certainly cannot permit said the elder Duke rising rather shakily the respected name of Lord Goldstein he intended to be impressive but there was something in the Frenchman's eye that is not so easily impressed bear that steel which is the mind of France gentlemen he said I think I have all the details now you have ruled England for 400 years by your own account you have not made the countryside indurable to men by your own account you have helped the victory of vulgarity and smoke and by your own account you are hand and glove with those very money grubbers and adventurers whom gentlemen have no other business but to keep at bay I do not know what your people will do but my people would kill you some seconds afterward he had left the Duke's house and some hours afterward the Duke's estate the glory of grey I suppose that taking this summer as a whole people will not call it an appropriate time for praising the English climate but for my part I will praise the English climate till I die even if I die of the English climate there is no weather so good as English weather in a real sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England in France you have much sun and some rain in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds in Scotland and Ireland you have rain either thick or thin in America you have hells of heat and cold and in the tropics you have sun strokes buried by thunderbolts but all these you have on a broad and brutal scale and you settle down into contentment or despair only in our own romantic country do you have the strictly romantic thing called weather beautiful and changing as a woman the great English landscape painters neglected now like everything that is English have this salient distinction that the weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures it is the subject of their pictures they paint portraits of the weather the weather is set to constable the weather posed for Turner and a deuce of a pose it was this cannot truly be said of the greatest of their continental models or rivals Poisson and Claude painted objects ancient cities or perfect Arcadian shepherds through a clear medium of the climate but in the English painters weather is the hero Turner and a Delphi hero taunting, flashing and fighting melodramatic but really magnificent the English climate a tall and terrible protagonist robed in rain and thunder and snow and sunlight fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground I admit the superiority of many other French things besides French art but I will not yield an inch on the superiority of English weather in painting why the French have not even got a word for weather and you must ask for the weather in French as if you were asking for the time in English then again, variety of climate should always go with stability of a boat the weather in the desert is monotonous and as natural consequence the Arabs wander about hoping it may be different somewhere but in Englishman's house is not only his castle his fairy castle clouds and colors of every very dawn and eve are perpetually touching and turning it from clay to gold or from gold to ivory there is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden which is literally different on every one of 365 days sometimes it seems as near as a hedge and sometimes as far as a faint and fiery evening cloud the same principle by the way applies to the difficult problem of wives variability is one of the virtues of a woman it avoids the crude requirement of polygamy so long as you have one good wife you're sure to have a spiritual harem now along the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a gray day a colorless day gray is a color and can be a very powerful and pleasing color there is also an insulting stylist's speech about one gray day just like another you might as well talk about one green tree just like another a gray clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun so is a green tree if it comes to that but the gray umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape in their tint and tilt one day may be gray like steel another gray like dove's plumage one may seem gray like the deathly frost and another gray like the smoke of substantial kitchens no things could seem further apart than the doubt of gray and the decision of scarlet a gray and red can mingle as they do in the morning clouds and also in a sort of warm smoky stone of which they build the little towns in the west country in those towns even the houses that are holy gray have a glow in them as if their secret firesides were such furnaces of hospitality as faintly to transuse the walls like walls of cloud and wandering in those west land parts I did once really find a signpost pointing up a steep crooked path to a town that was called clouds I did not climb up to it I feared that either the town would not be good enough for the name or I should not be good enough for the town anyhow the little hamlets of the warm gray stone have a genealogy which is not achieved by all the artistic scarlet of the suburbs as if it were better to warm one's hands at the ashes of Glastonbury than at the painted flames of Croydon again the enemies of gray those astute daring and evil-minded men are fond of bringing forward the argument that colors suffer in gray weather and that strong sunlight is necessary to all the hues of heaven and earth here again there are two words to be said and it is essential to distinguish it is true the sun is needed to burnish and bring into bloom the tertiary and dubious colors the colors of peat, pea soup impressionist sketches brown velvet coats olives, gray and blue slates the complexions of vegetarians the tints of volcanic rock chocolate cocoa soot, slime, old boots the delicate shades of these do need the sunlight to bring out the faint beauty that often clings to them but if you have a healthy negro taste and color if you choke your garden with poppies and geraniums if you paint your house sky blue and scarlet if you wear let us say a golden top hat tennis crimson frock coat you will not only be visible on the grayest day but you will notice that your costume and environment produce a certain singular effect you will find I mean that rich colors actually look more luminous on a gray day because they are seen against a somber background and seem to be burning with a luster of their own against the dark sky all flowers look like fireworks there is something strange about them at once vivid and secret like flowers traced in a fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch a bright blue sky as necessarily the highlight of the picture and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers but on a gray day the larch spur looks like fall in heaven the red daisies are really the red lost eyes of day and the sunflower is the vice regent of the sun lastly there is this value about the color that men call colorless that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise gray is color that always seems naive of changing to some other color of brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and gold so we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself and when there is gray weather in our hills or gray hairs in our head perhaps they may still remind us of the morning end of chapter 16 through 18 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org alarms and discursions by G. K. Chesterton section 7 chapters 19 through 21 The Anarchist I have now lived for about two months in the country and have gathered the last rich autumnal fruit of a rural life which is a strong desire to see London Artists living in my neighborhood talk rapturously of the rolling liberty of the landscape the living peace of woods but I say to them by fucking them shy or accent ah, that is how cockneys feel for us real old country people the country is reality it is the town that is romance nature is as plain as one of her pigs as commonplace as comic and as healthy but civilization is full of poetry even if it be sometimes an evil poetry the streets of London are paved with gold that is with the very poetry of Averus with these typically bucolic words I touch my hat and go ambling away on a stick with the stiffness of gate proper to the oldest inhabitants while in my more animated moments I am taken for the village idiot exchanging heavy but courteous salutations with other gaffers I reach the station where I ask for a ticket for London where the king lives such a journey mingled a provincial fascination and fear did I successfully perform only a few days ago and alone and helpless in the capital found myself in the tangle of roads around the marble arch a faint prejudice may possess the mind that I have slightly exaggerated my rusticity and remoteness and yet it is true as I came to that corner of the park that for some unreasonable reason of mood I saw all London as a strange city and the civilization itself as one enormous whim the marble arch itself in its new insular position with traffic turning disley all about it struck me as a placid monstrosity what could be wilder than to have a huge arched gateway with people going everywhere except under it if I took down my front door and stood it up all by itself in the middle of my back garden my village neighbors in their simplicity would probably stare yet the marble arch is now precisely that an elaborate entrance and the only place by which no one can enter by the new arrangement the last week pretends to be a gate has been taken away the cab man still cannot drive through it but he can have the delights of riding around it and even on foggy nights the rapture of running into it it has been raised from the rank of a fiction to the dignity of an obstacle as I began to walk across a corner of the park this sense of what is strange in cities began to with some sense of what is stern as well as strange it was one of those queer colored winter days when a watery sky changes to pink and gray and green like an enormous opal the trees that up gray and angular as if in attitudes of agony and here and there on benches under the trees set men as gray and angular as they it was cold even for me who had eaten a large breakfast and purposed to eat a perfectly gargantuan lunch it was colder for the men under the trees and to the eastward to the opalescent haze the warmer whites and yellows of the houses in park lane shown as unsubstantially as if the clouds themselves had taken on the shape of mansions to mock the men who sat there in the cold but the mansions were real mockery no one worth calling a man allows his moods to change his convictions but it is by moods that we understand other men's convictions the bigot is not he who knows he is right every sane man knows he is right the bigot is he whose emotions and imagination are too cold and too weak to feel how it is that other men go wrong at that moment I felt vividly how men might go wrong even unto dynamite if one of those huddled men under the trees had stood up and asked for rivers of blood it would have been erroneous but not irrelevant it would have been appropriate and in the picture that lurid gray picture of insolence on one side and impotence on the other it may be true on the whole it is that this social machine which we have made is better than anarchy still it is a machine and we have made it it does hold those poor men helpless and it does lift those rich men high and such men good lord by the time I flung myself on a bench beside another man I was half inclined to try anarchy for a change the other was of more prosperous appearance than most of the men on such seats still he was not what one calls a gentleman and he had probably worked at some time like a human being he was a small, sharp-faced man with grave, staring eyes and a beard somewhat foreign his clothes were black respectable and yet casual those of a man who dresses conventionally because it was a bore to dress unconventionally as it is attracted by this and other things and wanting an outburst for my bitter social feelings I tempted him into speech first about the cold and then about the general election to this the respectable man replied well, I don't belong to any party myself I am an anarchist I looked up an almost expected fire from heaven this coincidence was like the end of the world I had sat down feeling that somehow or other park lane must be pulled down and I had sat down beside the man who wanted to pull it down I bowed in silence for an instant under the approaching apocalypse and in that instant the man turned sharply and started talking like a torrent understand me he said ordinary people think an anarchist means a man with a bomb in his pocket Herbert Spencer was an anarchist but for that fatal admission of his on page 793 he would be a complete anarchist otherwise he agrees wholly with Pidge this was uttered with such blinding rapidity of syllabification as to be a better test of T totalism than the scotch one saying biblical criticism six times I attempted to speak but he began again with the same rapidity you will say that Pidge also admits governments in that 10th chapter so easily misunderstood Bolger has attacked Pidge on those lines but Bolger has no scientific training Bolger is a psychometrist but no sociologist to anyone who has combined a study of Pidge with the earlier and better discoveries of Bruxy the fallacy is quite clear Bolger confounds social coercion with Corisional social action his rabid rattling mouth shut quite tight suddenly and he looks steadily and triumphantly at me with his head on one side I open my mouth and the mere motion seems to sting him to fresh verbal leaps yes he said that's all very well the Finland group has accepted Bolger but he said suddenly lifting a long finger as if to stop me but Pidge has replied his pamphlet is published he has proved that potential social rebuke is not a weapon of the true anarchist he has shown that just as religious authority and political authority have gone so must emotional authority and psychological authority he has shown I stood up in sort of days I think you remarked that the mere common populace does not quite understand anarchism quite so he said with a burning swiftness as I said they think any anarchist is a man with a bomb whereas but great heavens man I said it's the man with the bomb that I understand I wish you had half his sense what do I care about how many German dons tie themselves in knots about how this society began my only interest is about how soon it will end do you see those fat white houses over in Park Lane where your masters live he assented and muttered something about concentrations of capital well I said if the time ever comes when we all storm those houses will you tell me one thing tell me how we shall do it without authority tell me how you will have an army of revolt without discipline for the first instant he was doubtful and I had bitten him farewell and crossed the street again when I saw him open his mouth and begin to run after me he had remembered something out of pitch I escaped however and as I left on an omnibus I saw again the enormous emblem of the marble arch I saw that massive symbol of the modern mind a door with no house to it the gigantic gate of nowhere how I found the Superman readers of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other modern writers may be interested to know that the Superman has been found I found him he lives in South Croydon my success will be a great blow to Mr. Shaw who has been following quite a false scent and is now looking for the creature in the pool and as for Mr. Wells' notion of generating him out of gases in a private laboratory I always thought it doomed to failure I assure Mr. Wells that the Superman at Croydon was born in the ordinary way though he himself, of course is anything but ordinary nor are his parents unworthy of the wonderful being whom they have given to the world the name of Lady Hypatia Brown now Lady Hypatia Hague will never be forgotten in the East End where she did such splendid social work her constant cry of save the children referred to the cruel neglect of children's eyesight involved in allowing them to play with crudely painted toys she quoted unanswerable statistics to prove that children allowed to look at violet and vermilion often suffered from failing eyesight in their extreme old age and it was owing to her ceaseless crusade that the pestilence of Monkey on the Stick was almost swept from Hoxton the devoted worker would tramp the streets untiringly taking away the toys from all the poor children who were often moved to tears by her kindness her good work was interrupted partly by a new interest in the creed of Zoroaster and partly by a savage blow from an umbrella it was inflicted by a disillute Irish Apple woman who on returning from some orgy to her ill-kept apartment found Lady Hypatia in the bedroom taking down an oleograph which to say the least of it could not really elevate the mind at this the ignorant and partly intoxicated Kelt dealt the social reformer a severe blow adding to it an absurd accusation of theft the ladies exquisitely balanced mind received a shock and it was during a short mental illness that she married Dr. Haag of Dr. Haag himself I hope there's no need to speak anyone even slightly acquainted with those daring experiments in neo-individualist eugenics which are now the one absorbing interest of the English democracy must know his name and often commended to the personal protection of an impersonal power early in life he brought to bear that ruthless insight into the history of religion which he had gained in boyhood as an electrical engineer later he became one of our greatest geologists and achieved that bold and bright outlook upon the future of socialism which only geology can give at first there seemed something like a rift a faint but perceptible fissure between his views and those of his aristocratic wife for she was in favor to use her own powerful epigram of protecting the poor against themselves while he declared piteously in a new and striking metaphor that the weakest must go to the wall eventually however the married pair perceived an essential union in the unmistakable modern character of both their views and in this enlightening and intelligible formula their souls found peace the result is that this union of the two highest types of our civilization the fashionable lady and the all but vulgar medical man has been blessed by the birth of the superman that being whom all the labors and better see are so eagerly expecting night and day for her and Lady Hypatia Hague without much difficulty it is situated in one of the last straggling streets of Croydon and overlooked by a line of poplars I reached the door towards the twilight and it was natural that I should fancifully see something dark and monstrous in the dim bulk of that house which contained the creature who was more marvelous than the children of men when I enter the house I was received with exquisite courtesy by Lady Hypatia and her husband but I found much greater difficulty in actually seeing the Superman who is now about 15 years old and is kept by himself in a quiet room even my conversation with the father and mother did not quite clear up the character of this mysterious being Lady Hypatia who has a pale and poignant face and is clad in those impelpable and pathetic graves and greens she has brightened so many homes in Hoxton did not appear to talk to her offspring with any of the vulgar vanity of an ordinary human mother I took a bold step and asked if the Superman was nice looking he creates his own standard you see, she replied with a slight sigh upon that plane he is more than a palo seen from our lower plane of course and she sighed again I had a horrible impulse and said suddenly has he got any hair it was a long and painful silence and then Dr. Haig said smoothly everything upon that plane is different what he has got is not well, not of course what we call hair but don't you think said his wife very softly don't you think that really for the sake of argument when talking to the mere public hair perhaps you are right said the doctor after a few moments of reflection in connection with hair like that one must speak in parables well what on earth is it I asked in some irritation if it isn't hair or is it feathers not feathers as we understand feathers answered Haig in an awful voice I got up some irritation can I see him at any rate I asked I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity I should like to say that I had shaken hands with the Superman a husband and wife had both got heavily to their feet and stood embarrassed well of course you know said Lady Hypatia with the really charming smile of the aristocratic hostess you know he can't exactly shake hands not hands you know the structure of course I broke out of all social bounds and rushed at the door of the room which I thought to contain the incredible creature I burst it open the room was pitch dark but from the front of me came a small sad yell and from behind me a double shriek you have done it now cried Dr. Haig bearing his bald brow in his hands you have let in a draught on him and he is dead as I walked away from Croydon that night I saw men in black carrying out a coffin that was not of any human shape the wind wailed above me whirling the poplars so that they drooped and nodded like the plumes of some cosmic funeral it is indeed said Dr. Haig the whole universe weeping over the frustration of its most magnificent birth but I thought that there was a hoot of laughter in the high wail of the wind the new house within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house I'm glad they are building it and I am glad it is within a stone's throw quite well within it with a good catapult nevertheless I have not yet cast the first stone at the new house not being strictly speaking guiltless myself in the matter of new houses and indeed in such cases there was a strong protest to be made the whole curse of the last century has been what is called the swing of the pendulum that is the idea that man must go alternately from one extreme to the other it is a shameful and even shocking fancy it is the denial of the whole dignity of mankind when man is alive he stands still it is only when he is dead that he swings but whenever one meets modern thinkers as one often does looking toward a madhouse one always finds an inquiry that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse thus hundreds of people become socialists not because they have tried socialism and found it nice but because they have tried individualism and found it particularly nasty thus many embrace Christian science solely because they are quite sick of heathen science they are so tired of believing that everything is matter they will even take refuge in the revolting fable that everything is mind man ought to march somewhere but modern man in his sick reaction is ready to march nowhere so long as it is the other end of nowhere the case of building houses is a strong instance of this early in the 19th century our civilization chose to abandon the Greek and medieval idea of a town with walls limited and defined with a temple for faith and a marketplace for politics and it chose to let the city grow like a jungle with blind cruelty and bestial unconsciousness so that London and Liverpool are the greatest cities we now see well people have reacted against that they have grown tired of living in a city which is as dark and barbaric as a forest only not as beautiful and there has been an exodus into the country of those who could afford it and some I could name who can't now as soon as this quite rational recoil occurred it flew at once to the opposite extreme people went about with beaming faces boasting that they were 23 miles from a station rubbing their hands they exclaimed and rollicking a size that their butchers only called once a month and that their bakers started out with fresh hot loaves which were quite stale before they reached the table a man would praise this little house in a quiet valley but gloomily admit with a slight shake of the head that a human habitation on the distant horizon was faintly discernible on a clear day rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service and there were many jealous heart-burnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked in the feverish summer of this fanaticism there arose the phrase that this or that part of England is being built over now there is not the slightest objection in itself to England being built over by men any more than there is to it being as it already is built over by birds or by squirrels or by spiders but if birds nests were so thick on a tree that one could see nothing but nests and no leaves at all I should say that the bird civilization was becoming a bit decadent if whenever I tried to walk down the road I found the whole thoroughfare one crawling carpet of spiders closely interlocked I should feel the distress verging on distaste if one were at every turn crowded elbowed overlooked overcharged sweated, racked, rented swindled and sold up by avaricious and arrogant squirrels one might at last remonstrate but the great towns have grown intolerable solely because of such suffocating vulgarities and tyrannies it is not humanity that discusses us in the huge cities it is inhumanity it is not that there are human beings but that they are not treated as such we do not I hope dislike men and women we only dislike their being made into a sort of jam crushed together so that they are not merely powerless shapeless it is not the presence of people that makes London appalling it is merely the absence of the people therefore I dance with joy to think that my part of England is being built over so long as it is being built over in a human way at human intervals and in a human proportion so long and short as I am not myself built over like a pagan slave buried in a temple or an American clerk in a star striking pagoda of flats I am delighted to see the faces and the homes of a race of bipeds to which I am not only attracted by strange affection but to which also by a touching coincidence I actually happen to belong I am not one desiring deserts I am not timid of Athens if my town were Athens I would stay in it I am not simian stylides except in the mournful sense that every Saturday I find myself on the top of a newspaper column I am not in the desert repenting of some monstrous sins at least I am repenting of them all right but not in the desert I do not want the nearest human house to be too distant to see that is my objection to the wilderness but neither do I want the nearest human house to be too close to see that is my objection to the modern city I love my fellow man I do not want him so far off that I can only observe anything of him through a telescope nor do I want him so close that I can examine parts of him with a microscope I want him within a stone's throw of me so that whenever it is really necessary I may throw the stone perhaps after all it may not be a stone perhaps after all it may be a bouquet or a snowball or a firework or a free trade loaf perhaps they will ask for the stone and I shall give them bread but it is essential that they should be within reach how can I love my neighbor as myself if he gets out of range for snowballs there should be no institution out of the reach of an indignant toward admiring humanity I could hit the nearest house quite well with the catapult but the truth is that the catapult belongs I know and with characteristic youthful selfishness he has taken it away the end of chapters 19 through 21 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 8 chapters 22 through 24 the wings of stone the preceding essay is about a half-built house on my private horizon I wrote it sitting in a garden chair and as though it was a week ago I have scarcely moved since then to speak of I do not see why I should not go on writing about it strictly speaking I have moved I have even walked across a field a field of turf all fiery in our early summer sunlight and studied the early angular red skeleton which has turned golden in the sun it is odd that the skeleton of a house is cheerful when the skeleton of a man is mournful since we only see it after the man is destroyed at least we think the skeleton is mournful the skeleton himself does not seem to think so anyhow there is something strangely primary and poetic about this site of the scaffolding and main lines of a human building it is a pity that there is no scaffolding around a human baby one seems to see domestic life as the daring and ambitious thing that it is when one looks at those open staircases and empty chambers those spirals of wind and open halls of sky Ibsen said that the art of domestic drama was merely to knock one wall out of the four walls of a drawing room I find the drawing room even more impressive when all four walls are knocked out I have never understood what people mean by domesticity being tame it seems to me one of the wildest of adventures but if you wish to see how high and harsh and fantastic an adventure it is consider only the actual structure of a house itself a man may march up in a rather bored way to bed but at least he is mounting to a height from which he could kill himself every rich silent padded staircase with banisters of oak stair rods of brass and busts and set tees on every landing every set staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up to the infinite to a deadly height the millionaire who stumps up inside the house is really doing the same thing as the tyler or roofmender who climbs up outside the house they are both mounting up into the void they are both making an escalade of the intense inane each is a sort of domestic mountaineer he is reaching a point from which while falling will kill a man and life is always worth living while men feel that they may die I cannot understand people at present making such a fuss about flying ships and aviation when men ever since Stonehenge and the pyramids have done something so much more wild than flying a grasshopper can go astonishingly high up into the air his biological limitation is that he cannot stop there hosts of unclean birds and crappulous insects can pass through the sky but they cannot pass any communication between it and the earth but the army of man has advanced vertically into infinity and has not been cut off it can establish outposts in the ether and yet keep hoping behind it it's erect an insolent road it would be grand as in Jules Verne to fire a cannonball at the moon but would it not be grander to build a railway to the moon yet every building a brick or wood is a hint of that high railroad every chimney points to some star and every tower is a tower of Babel man rising on these awful and unbroken wings of stone seems to me more majestic and more mystic than man fluttering for an instant on wings of canvas and sticks of steel how sublime and indeed almost dizzy is the thought of these veiled letters on which we all live like climbing monkeys many a black-coated clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his somber garb by reflecting that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial elm many a wealthy bachelor of a pile of mansions should look forth at morning and try, if possible to feel like an eagle whose nest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff how sad that the word giddy is used to imply wantonness or levity it should be a high compliment to a man's exalted spirituality and the imagination to say that he is a little giddy I strolled slowly back across the sunset a field of the cloth of gold as I do near my own house its huge size began to horrify me and when I came to the porch of it I discovered with an incredulity as strong as despair that my house was actually bigger than myself a minute or two before there might well have seemed to be a monstrous and mythical competition about which of the two should swallow the other but I was Jonah my house was the huge and hungry fish and even as its jaws darkened and closed about me I had again this dreadful fancy touching the dizzy altitude of all the works of man I climbed the stairs stubbornly planting each foot with savage care as if ascending a glacier when I got to a landing I was wildly relieved by that the very word landing has about it the wild sound of someone washed up by the sea I climbed each flight like a ladder in a naked sky the walls all round me failed and faded into infinity I went up the ladder to my bedroom as mantros went up the ladder to the gallows do you think this is a little fantastic even a little fearful and nervous believe me it is only one of the wild and wonderful things that one can learn by stopping at home three kinds of men roughly speaking there are three kinds of people in this world the first kind of people are people they are the largest and probably the most valuable class we go to this class the chairs we sit down on the clothes we wear the houses we live in when we come to think of it we probably belong to this class ourselves the second class may be called for convenience the poets they are often a nuisance to their families but generally speaking a blessing to mankind the third class is that of the professors or intellectuals sometimes described as the thoughtful people and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind of course the classification sometimes overlaps like all classification some good people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors but the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage I do not offer it lightly it has been the fruit of more than 18 minutes of earnest reflection and research the class called people to which you and I with no little pride attach ourselves as certain casual yet profound assumptions which are called common places as that children are charming or twilight is sad and sentimental or that one man fighting three is a fine sight now these feelings are not crude they are not even simple the charm of children is very subtle it is even complex to the instant of being almost contradictory it is at its very plainest mingled of a regard for hilarity and a regard for helplessness the sentiment of twilight in the vulgarest darling room song or the course's pair of sweetsarts is so far as it goes a subtle sentiment it is strangely balanced between pain and pleasure it might also be called pleasure tempting pain the plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire a man fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately it means many things pity, dramatic surprise a desire for justice a delight in experiment and the indeterminate the ideas of the mob are really very subtle ideas but the mob does not express them subtly the fact does not express them at all except on those occasions not only too rare when it indulges in its erection and massacre now this accounts for the otherwise unreasonable fact of the existence of poets poets are those who share these popular sentiments but can so express them that they prove themselves the strange and delicate things that they really are poets draw out the shy refinement of the rebel where the common man covers the queerest emotions by saying rum little kid lard at her grand power where the stockbroker will only say abruptly evening is closing in now Mr. Yates will write into the twilight where the navvy can only mutter something about pluck and being precious game Homer will show you the hero and rags in his own hall defying the princess at their banquet the poets carry the popular sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch but let it always be remembered that it is the popular sentiments that they are carrying no man ever wrote any good poetry to show the childhood was shocking or that twilight was gay and farcical or that a man was contemptible because he had crossed his single sword with three the people who maintain this are the professors or the prigs the poets are those who rise above the people by understanding them of course most of the poets wrote in prose and play for instance and dickens the prigs rise above the people by refusing to understand them by saying that all their dim strange preferences are prejudices and superstitions the prigs make the people feel stupid the poets make the people feel wiser than they could have imagined that they were there are many weird elements in this situation the artist of all perhaps is the fate of the two factors in practical politics the poets who embrace and admire the people are often pelted with stones and crucified the prigs who despise the people are often loaded with lands and crowned in the house of commons for instance there are quite a number of prigs but comparatively few poets there are no people there at all by poets as I have said I do not mean people who write poetry I mean such people as having culture and imagination use them to understand and share the feelings of their fellows as against those who use them to rise to what they call a higher plane crudely the poet differs from the mob by his sensibility the professor differs from the mob by his insensibility he has not sufficient finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob he is coarsely to contradict it to cut across it in accordance with some egoistical plan of his own to tell himself that whatever the ignorance say they are probably wrong he forgets that ignorance often has the exquisite intuitions of innocence let me take one example which may mark out the outline of the contention open the nearest comic paper and let your eyes rest lovingly upon a joke about a mother-in-law now the joke as presented for the populace will probably be a simple joke the old lady will be tall and stout the hand-picked husband will be small and towering but for all that a mother-in-law is not a simple idea she is a very subtle idea the problem is not that she is big and arrogant she is frequently little and quite extraordinarily nice the problem of the mother-in-law is that she is like the twilight half one thing and half another now this twilight truth this fine and even tender embarrassment might be rendered as it really is by a poet only here the poet would have to be some very penetrating and sincere novelist like George Meredith or Mr. H.G. Wells who's Anne Veronica I have just been reading with delight I would trust the fine poets and novelists because they follow the very clue that a mother-in-law is merely a fellow citizen but suppose the professor appears and suppose he says as he almost certainly will a mother-in-law is merely a fellow citizen considerations of sex should not interfere with comradeship regard for age should not influence the intellect a mother-in-law is merely another mind we should free ourselves from these tribal hierarchies and degrees now when the professor says this as he always does I say to him sir you are coarser than comic cuts you are more vulgar and blundering than the most elephantine musical artist you are blinder and grosser than the mob these vulgar knockabouts have at least got hold of a social shade and real mental distinction though they can only express it clumsily you are so clumsy that you cannot get hold of it at all if you really cannot see that the bridegroom's mother and the bride have any reason for constraint or diffidence then you are neither polite nor humane you have no sympathy in you for the deep and doubtful hearts of human folk it is better even to put the difficulty as the vulgar put it than to be pertly unconscious of the difficulty all together the same question might be considered well enough in the old proverb that two is company and three is none this proverb is the truth but popularly it is the truth put wrong certainly it is untrue that three is no company three is splendid company three is the ideal number for pure comradeship as in the three musketeers but if you reject the proverb all together if you say that two and three are the same sort of company if you cannot see whether is a wider abyss between two and three than between three and three million then I regret to inform you that you belong to the third class of human beings that you shall have no company either of two or three but shall be alone in a howling desert till you die the steward of the chilturn hundreds the other day on a stray spur of the chilturn hills I climbed up upon one of those high abrupt windy churchards from which the dead seem to look down upon all the living it was a mountain of ghosts as Olympus was a mountain of gods in that church lay the bones of great puritan lords of a time when most of the power of England was puritan even of the established church and below these uplifted bones lay the huge and hollow valleys of the English countryside where the motors went by every now and then like meteors were stood out in white squares and oblongs in the checkered forest many of the country seats even of those same families now dulled with wealth or decayed with tourism and looking over that deep green prospect on that luminous yellow evening a lovely and austere thought came into my mind a thought as beautiful as the green wood and as grave as the tombs the thought was this that I should like to go into parliament quarrel with my party accept the stewardship of the children hundreds and then refuse to give it up we are so proud in England of our crazy constitutional anomalies that I fancy that very few readers indeed will need to be told about the steward of the children hundreds but in case there should be here or there one happy man who has never heard of such twisted tomfoolery's I will rapidly remind you what this legal fiction is as it is quite voluntary sometimes even an eager affair to get into parliament you would naturally suppose there would also be a voluntary matter to get out again you would think your fellow members would be indifferent or even relieved to see you go especially as by another exercise of the shrewd illogical old English common sense they have carefully built the room too small for the people who have to sit in it but not so my pippins as it says in the Iliad if you are merely a member of parliament lord knows why you can't resign but if you are a minister of the crown lord knows why you can it is necessary to get into the ministry in order to get out of the house and they have to give you some office that doesn't exist or that nobody else wants and thus unlock the door so you go to the prime minister concealing your air of fatigue and say it has been the ambition of my life to be steward of the chilturned hundreds the prime minister then replies I can imagine no man more fitted both morally and mentally for that high office he then gives it to you and you hurdly leave the publics of the continent real anarchically to and fro for lack of a little solid English directness and simplicity now the thought that struck me like a thunderbolt as I sat on the chilturned slope was that I would like to get the prime minister to give me the chilturned hundreds and then startle and disturb him by showing the utmost interest in my work I should profess a general knowledge of my duties but wish to be instructed in the details I should ask to see the under steward and the under under steward and all the fine staff of experienced permanent officials who are the glory of this department and indeed my enthusiasm would not be wholly unreal for as far as I can recollect the original duties of a steward of the chilturned hundreds were to put down the outlaws and brigands in that part of the world well there are a great many outlaws and brigands in that part of the world still and though their methods have so largely altered as to require a corresponding alteration in the tactics of the steward I do not see why an energetic and public spirited steward should not nab them yet for the robbers have not vanished from the old high force to the west of the great city the thieves have not vanished they have grown so large that they are invisible you do not see the word Asia on the map of that neighborhood nor do you see the word thief written across the countryside of England though it is really written in equally large letters I know men governing despotically great stretches of that country whose every step in life has been such that a slip would have sent them to Dartmoor but they trod along the high hard wall between right and wrong the wall as sharp as the sword edge as softly and craftily and lightly as a cat the vastness of their silent violence itself obscured what they were at if they seem to stand for the rights of property it is really because they have so often invaded them and if they do not break the laws it is only because they make them but after all we only need a steward of the children hundreds who really understands cats and thieves men hunt one animal differently from another and the rich could catch swindlers dexterously as they catch otters or antler deer if they were really at all keen upon doing it but then they never have an uncle with antlers nor a personal friend who is an otter when some of the great lords that lie in the churchyard behind me went out against their foes in those deep woods beneath I wager they had bows against the bows of the outlaws and spears against the spears of the robber knights they knew what they were about they fought the evildoers of their age with the weapons of their age if the same common sense were applied to commercial law in 48 hours it would be all over with the American trusts and the African forward finance but it will not be done for the governing class either does not care or cares very much for the criminals and as for me I had a defensive opportunity of being constable of Vicensfield with grossly inadequate powers but I fear I shall never really be steward of the Chiltern Hundreds End of Chapters 22-24