 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Heretics by Gilbert K. Chesterton To My Father Introduction by the Publisher Source Heretics was copyrighted in 1905 by the John Lane Company. This electronic text is derived from the 12th, 1919 edition, published by the John Lane Company of New York City, and printed by the Plimpton Press of Norwood, Massachusetts. The text carefully follows that of the published edition, including British spelling. Gilbert K. Chesterton was born in London, England on the 29th of May, 1874. Though he considered himself a mere rollicking journalist, he was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually every area of literature. A man of strong opinions and enormously talented at defending them, his exuberant personality nevertheless allowed him to maintain warm friendships with people such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, with whom he vehemently disagreed. Chesterton had no difficulty standing up for what he believed. He was one of the few journalists who opposed the Boer War. His 1922 eugenics and other evils attacked what was at that time the most progressive of all ideas. The idea that the human race could and should breed the superior version of itself. In the Nazi experience, history demonstrated the wisdom of his once reactionary views. His poetry runs the gommet from the comic 1908 on running after one's hat to dark and serious ballads. During the dark days of 1940, when Britain stood virtually alone against the arm to might of Nazi Germany, these lines from his 1911 Ballad of the White Horse were often quoted. I tell you not for your comfort, yea not for your desire, save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises higher. Though not written for a scholarly audience, his biographies of authors and historical figures like Charles Dickens and St. Francis of Assisi often contain brilliant insights into their subjects. His father Brown mystery stories, written between 1911 and 1936, are still being read and adapted for television. His politics fitted with his deepest trust of concentrated wealth and power of any sort. Along with his friend Hilaire Bellac, and in books like the 1910 What's Wrong with the World, he advocated a view called distributionism that was best summed up by his expression that every man ought to be allowed to own three acres and a cow. Though not known as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world. Some see in him the father of the smallest beautiful movement, and a newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a genuine nationalism for India rather than one that imitated the British. Heretics belongs to yet another area of literature at which Chesterton excelled. A fun-loving and gregarious man, he was nevertheless troubled in his adolescence by thoughts of suicide. In Christianity, he found the answers to the dilemmas and paradoxes he saw in life. Other books in that same series include his 1908 Orthodoxy, written in response to attacks on this book, and his 1925 The Everlasting Man. Orthodoxy is also available as an electronic text. Chesterton died on the 14th of June 1936 in Deaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England. During his life, he published 69 books, and at least another 10 based on his writings have been published after his death. Many of those books are still in print. Ignatius Press is systematically publishing his collected writings. Table of Contents 1. Introductory remarks on the importance of Orthodoxy 2. On the negative spirit 3. On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small 4. Mr. Bernard Shaw 5. Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants 6. Christmas and the Aesthetes 7. Omar and the Sacred Vine 8. Mildness of the Yellow Press 9. The Moods of Mr. George Moore 10. On Santos and Simplicity 11. Science and the Sabbages 12. Paganism and Mr. Lowe's Dickinson 13. Celts and Kelta Files 14. On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family 15. On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set 16. On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity 17. On the Wit of Whistler 18. The Fallacy of the Young Nation 19. Slum Novelists and the Slums 20. Including remarks on the importance of Orthodoxy End of the introduction This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Heretics by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 1 Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word Orthodox. In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was Orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them. They had rebelled against him. The armies with their cruel security. The kings with their cold faces. The decorous processes of state. The reasonable processes of law. All these, like sheep, had gone astray. The man was proud of being Orthodox. He was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness, he was more than a man. He was a church. He was the center of the universe. It was around him that the star swung. All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says with a conscious laugh, I suppose I am very heretical and looks round for applause. The word heresy not only means no longer being wrong, it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word orthodoxy not only no longer means being right, it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right, for obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The Bohemian, with the red tie, ought to pick himself on his orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that whatever else he is, at least he is Orthodox. It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market, because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decade of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere condemned. The doctrine of the rights of man is dismissed with the doctrine of the fall of man. Atheism itself is too theological for us today. Revolution itself is too much of a system. Liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram. The golden rule is that there is no golden rule. We are more and more to discuss details in our politics literature. A man's opinion on tram cars matters. His opinion on Botticelli matters. His opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe. Or if he does, he will have a religion and be lost. Everything matters except everything. Examples are scarcely needed of this total levity on the subject of cosmic philosophy. Examples are scarcely needed to show that whatever else we think of as affecting practical affairs, we do not think it matters whether a man is a spiritualist. Let me, however, take a random instance. At any innocent tea-table, we may easily hear a man say, Life is not worth living. We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day. Nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life. Firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death. Poisons would be used as medicines. Doctors would be called in when people were well. The Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimists will strengthen or disorganize society, for we are convinced that theories do not matter. This was certainly not the idea of those who introduced our freedom. When the old liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religion and philosophical discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that everyone ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that the cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what anyone says. The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound. The latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the sea, a fish unfit for eating. Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now when for the first time anyone can discuss it. The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us for all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist. Then came the Bradloids, the last religious men, the last men who cared about God, but they could not alter it. It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist, but their agony has achieved just this, that now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian. Emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of silence as the Harris Ark. Then we talk about Lord Anglicy and the weather and call it the complete liberty of all the creeds. But there are some people, nevertheless, and I am one of them, who think that the most practical important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that, for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them. In the fifteenth century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude. In the nineteenth century we fed it in flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel. There can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict for practicing. Now in our time philosophy or religion, our theory that is about ultimate things, has been driven out more or less simultaneously than the two fields which it used to occupy. General ideals used to dominate literature. They have been driven out by the cry of art for art's sake. General ideals used to dominate politics. They have been driven out by the cry of efficiency which may be roughly translated as politics or politics' sake. Persistently for the last twenty years the ideals of order or liberty have dwindled in our books. The ambitions of wit and eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments. Literature has purposely become less political. Politics have purposely become less literary. General theories of the relation of things have thus been extruded from both and we are in a position to ask what have we gained or lost by this extrusion? Is literature better? Is politics better? Or having discarded the moralist and the philosopher? When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins for the first time to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes but about their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world. And there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency of a nation than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of the world. A journey to the judgment day and the new Jerusalem. There can be no stronger sign of, of course, material health than the tendency to run after high and wild ideals. It is in the first exuberance of infancy that we cry for the moon. None of the strong men in the strong ages would have understood what you meant by working for efficiency. Hildebrand would have said that he was working not for efficiency but for the Catholic Church. Danton would have said that he was working not for efficiency but for liberty, equality, and fraternity. Even if the ideal of such men were simply the ideal of kicking a man downstairs, they thought of the end like men not of their processes like paralytics. They did not say efficiently elevating my right leg using, you will notice, the muscles of the thigh and calf which are in excellent order. Their feeling was quite different. They were so filled with the beautiful vision of the man lying flat at the foot of the staircase that in the ecstasy the rest followed in a flash. In practice the habit of generalizing and idealizing did not by any means mean worldly weakness. The time of big theories was the time of big results. In the era of sentiment and fine words at the end of the 18th century men were really robust and effective. The sentimentalists conquered Napoleon. The cynics could not catch DeWitt. A hundred years ago our affairs for good or evil were wheeled triumphantly by retourcens. Now our affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men and just as this repudiation of big words and big visions has brought forth a race of small men in politics so it has brought forth a race of small men in the arts. Our modern politicians claim the colossal license of Caesar and the Superman claim that they are too practical to be pure and too patriotic to be moral but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our new artistic philosophers call for the same moral license for freedom to wreck heaven and earth with their energy but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Poet Laureate. I do not say that there are no stronger men than these but will anyone say that there are any men stronger than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion. Whether bondage can be better than freedom may be discussed but that their bondage came to more than our freedom will be difficult for anyone to deny. The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in the strictly artistic classes. They are free to produce anything they like. They are free to write a paradise lost in which Satan shall conquer God. They are free to write a divine comedy in which heaven shall be under the floor of hell. And what have they done? Have they produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by the fierce gibbaline Catholic by the rigid Puritan schoolmaster? We know that they have produced only a few roundels. Milton does not merely beat them at his piety he beats them at their own irreverence. In all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described Veranta lifting his head as in disdain of hell. And the reason is very obvious. Blasphemy is an artistic effect because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion. Neither in the world of politics nor that of literature then has the rejection of general theories proved a success. It may be that there have been many moon-struck and misleading ideals that have from time to time perplex mankind but assuredly there has been no ideal in practice so moon-struck and misleading that there is no ideal of practicality. Nothing has lost so many opportunities as the opportunism of Lord Rosbury. He is indeed a standing symbol of this epic the man who is theoretically a practical man and practically more unpractical than the theorist. Nothing in this universe is so unwise as that kind of worship of worldly wisdom. A man who is perpetually thinking whether this race or that race is strong of whether this cause or that cause is promising is the man who will never believe in anything long enough to make it succeed. The opportunistic politician is like a man who should abandon billiards because he was beaten at billiards and abandoned Gulf because he was beaten at Gulf. There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success. And having discovered that opportunism does fail I have been induced to look at it more largely and inconsequence to see that it must fail. I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the man who killed each other in the Orthodoxy of the Homo Eusion were far more sensible than the people who are quarreling about the Education Act. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness and trying to get defined first of all what was really holy. But our modern educationalists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If the old priest forced a statement on mankind at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it. For these reasons and for many more I for one have come to believe in going back to fundamentals such is the general idea of this book. I wish to deal with my most distinguished contemporaries not personally or in merely literary manner but in relation to the real body of doctrine which they teach. I'm not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a vivid artist or vigorous personality. I'm concerned with him as a heretic that is to say a man whose view of things as the hardy hood to differ from mine. I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive. I am concerned with him as a heretic that is to say a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent and quite wrong. I revert to the doctrinal methods of the 13th century inspired by the general hope of getting something done. Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something let us say a lamppost which many influential persons desire to pull down. A great clad monk who is the spirit of the Middle Ages is approached upon the matter and begins to say in the arid matter of the schoolman, let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of light. If light be in itself good, at this point he is somewhat exclusively knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamppost. The lamppost is down in ten minutes and they go about congratulating each other on their un-nitty-evil practicality. But as things go on, they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled down the lamppost because they wanted the electric light, some because they wanted old iron, some because they wanted darkness because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamppost, some too much. Some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery, some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all and that all depends on what is the philosophy of light, only what we might have discussed under the gas lamp we now must discuss in the dark. CHAPTER II Much has been said, and said truly of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which has often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense, necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It is more wholesome for this reason that it can contemplate the ideal of success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal in what Stevenson called with his usual startling facility, the lost fight of virtue. A modern morality, on the other hand, can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of law. Its only certainty is a certainty of the ill. It can only point to imperfection. It has no perfection to point to. But the monk, meditating upon Christ or Buddha, has in his mind an image of perfect health, a thing of clear colors and clean air. He may contemplate this ideal wholeness and happiness far more than he ought. He may contemplate it to the neglect of exclusion of essential things. He may contemplate it until he has become a dreamer or a driveler. But still, it is wholeness and happiness that he is contemplating. He may even go mad, but he is going mad for the love of sanity. But the modern student of ethics, even if he remains sane, remains sane from an insane dread of insanity. The anchorite rolling on the stones in a frenzy of submission is a healthier person fundamentally than many a sober man and a silk cat who is walking down Cheapside. For many such are good only through a withering knowledge of evil. I'm not at this moment claiming, for the devotee, anything more than this primary advantage, that although he may be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is still fixing his thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness, on a strength that has no limits and a happiness that has no end. Doubtless there are other objections that can be urged without unreason against the influence of God's envisions in morality, whether in the cell or on the street. But this advantage the mystic morality must always have. It is always jollier. A young man may keep himself from vice by continually thinking of disease. He may keep himself from it also by continually thinking of the Virgin Mary. There may be question about which method is the more reasonable or even about which is the more efficient. But surely there can be no question about which is the more wholesome. I remember a pamphlet by that able and sincere secularist, Mr. G. W. Foot, which contained a phrase sharply symbolizing and dividing these two methods. The pamphlet was called Beer and Bible. Those two very noble things, all the nobler for a conjunction which Mr. Foot in her stern old Puritan way seemed to think sardonic, but not which I confess to thinking appropriate and charming. I have not the work by me, but I remember that Mr. Foot dismissed very contemptuously any attempts to deal with the problem of strong rank by religious offices or intercessions. He said that a picture of a drunkard's liver would be more efficacious in the manner of temperance than any prayer or praise. In that picturesque expression it seems to me it is perfectly embodied in the incurable morbidity of modern ethics. In that temple the lights are low, the crowds kneel, the solemn anthems are uplifted. But that upon the altar to which all men kneel is no longer the perfect flesh, the body and substance of the perfect man. It is still flesh, but it is diseased. It is the drunkard's liver of the New Testament that is marred for us, which we take in remembrance of him. Now it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many men in the 18th century. If any ordinary man ever said that he was horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Malthusant, or by the plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was lying, the average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern civilization and every class or trade is such as Zola would never dream of printing, nor is the habit of writing very it is the Victorian prudery and silence which is snoozed still though it is already dying. The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary, honest man, whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings was not either disgusted or even annoyed at the candor of the moderns. What disgusted him and very justly was not the presence of a clear idealism, but the absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism. On the contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing that called names. This is the great difference between some recent developments of nonconformity and the great Puritanism of the 17th century. It was the whole point of the Puritans that they cared nothing for decency. Modern nonconformist newspapers distinguished themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which the founders of nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at kings and queens. But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly about good. The thing which is resented and, as I think rightly resented in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is typical is that, while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things increases in uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what things are right is growing misdeer and misdeer every moment till it goes almost blind with doubt. If we compare, let us say, the morality of the Divine Comedy with the morality of Ibsen's ghosts, we shall see all the modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the inferno of an early Victorian Prudishness, or a Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral instruments, Heaven, Purgatorian Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one, Hell. It is often said, and with perfect truth, that no one could read a play like ghosts and remain indifferent to the necessity of an ethical self-command. It is quite true, and the same is to be said of the most monstrous and material descriptions of the Eternal Fire. It is quite certain the realists like Zola do in one sense promote morality. They promote it in the sense in which the hangman promotes it. In the sense in which the devil promotes it. But they only affect that small minority which will accept any virtue of courage. Most healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they dismiss the possibility of bombs or microbes. Modern realists are indeed terrorists like the dynamiters, and they fail just as much in their effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dynamiters are well-meaning people engaged in the task, so obviously ultimately hopeless, of using science to promote morality. I do not wish the reader to confuse me for a moment with those vague persons who imagine that Ibsen is what they call a pessimist. There are plenty of wholesome people in Ibsen, plenty of good people, plenty of happy people, so men acting wisely and things ending well. That is not my meaning. My meaning is that Ibsen has throughout and does not disguise a certain vagueness and a changing attitude as well as a doubting attitude towards what is really wisdom and virtue in this life. A vagueness which contrasts very remarkably with the decisiveness with which he pounces on something which he perceives to be a root of evil. Some convention, some deception, some ignorance. We know that the hero of ghosts is mad and we know why he is mad. We do also know that Dr. Stockman is sane but we do not know why he is sane. Ibsen does not profess to know how virtue and happiness are brought about in the sense that he professes to know how our modern sexual tragedies are brought about. Falsehood works ruin in the pillars of society but truth works works equal ruin in the wild duck. There are no cardinal virtues of Ibsenism. There is no ideal man of Ibsen. All this is not only admitted but haunted in the most valuable and thoughtful of all the eulogies upon Ibsen. Mr. Bernard Shaw's quintessence of Ibsenism. Mr. Shaw sums up Ibsen's teaching in the phrase, the golden rule is evil. In his eyes this absence of an enduring and positive ideal, this absence of a permanent key to virtue is the one great Ibsen merit. I'm not discussing now with any fullness whether this is so or not. All I venture to point out with an increased firmness is that it's omission, good or bad. Does leave us face to face with the problem of human consciousness filled with a very definite image of evil and with no definite image of good. To us light must be hence forward the dark thing, the thing of which we cannot speak. To us, as Milton's devils and pandemonium, it is the darkness that is visible. The human race, according to religion, fell once and in falling gained knowledge of good and evil. Now we have fallen a second time and only the knowledge of evil remains to us. A great silent collapse and enormous unspoken disappointment has in our time fallen on our northern civilization. All previous ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there are many of these questions that the most we can do is set up few notice boards at places of obvious danger to warn men, for instance, against drinking themselves to death or ignoring the mere existence of their neighbors. Ibsen is the first to return from the baffled hunt to bring us the tidings of great failure. Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk what is good. We are fond of talking about liberty, that is, as we talk about, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about progress, that is a dodge, to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about education and that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty. This is logically rendered, let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it. Says away with your old moral formulas, I am for progress. This logically stated means, let us not settle what is good, but let us settle whether we are getting more of it. He says, neither in religion nor morality my friend lie the hopes of the race, but in education. This clearly expressed means, we cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children. Mr. H. G. Wells, that exceedingly clear-sighted man, has pointed out in a recent work that this has happened in connection with economic questions. The old economist, he says, made generalizations, and they were in Mr. Wells view mostly wrong. But the new economist, he says, seemed to have lost the power of making any generalizations at all. And they cover this incapacity, with a general claim to be, in specific cases, regarded as experts, a claim proper enough in a hairdresser or a fashion physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of science. But in spite of the refreshing rationality with which Mr. Wells has indicated this, it must also be said that he himself has fallen into the same enormous modern error. In the opening pages of that excellent book, Mankind in the Making, he dismisses the ideals of art, religion, abstract morality, and the rest. And he says that he is going to consider men in their chief function, the function of parenthood. He is going to discuss life as a tissue of births. He is not going to ask what will produce satisfactory saints or satisfactory heroes, but what will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers. The whole list set forward so sensibly that it is a few moments at least before the reader realizes that it is another example of unconscious shirking. What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled what is the good of being a man? You are merely handing on to him a problem you dare not settle yourself. It is as if a man were asked, what is the use of a hammer and answered, to make hammers? And when asked, and of those hammers, what is the use, answered, to make hammers again? Just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the question of the ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all the rest of us are by these phrases, successfully putting off the question of the ultimate value of human life. The case of the general talk of progress is indeed an extreme one. As enunciated today, progress is simply a comparative of which we have not settled a superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress, that is to say, of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what. Progress properly understood has indeed a most dignified and legitimate meaning, but as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. So far from it being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. Nobody has any business to use the word progress unless he has a definite creed and to cast iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal. I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible, at any rate without believing in some infallibility. For the progress by its very name indicates a direction, and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the beginning of the world has there been an age that has less right to use the word progress than we. In the Catholic 12th century, in the philosophical 18th century, the direction may have been good or a bad one. Men may have differed more or less about how far they went and in what direction, but about the direction they did in the main agree, and consequently they had the genuine sensation of progress. But it is precisely about the direction that we disagree. Whether the future excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less liberty, whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut up, whether sexual passion will reach its sanest, in an almost virgin intellectualism, or in a full animal freedom, whether we should love everybody with Tolstoy or spare nobody with Nitechi. These are the things about which we are actually fighting most. It is not merely true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this progressive age. It is more overtrue that the people who have settled least what is progress are the most progressive people in it. The ordinary mass, the men who have never troubled about progress, might be trusted perhaps to progress. The particular individuals who talk about progress would certainly fly to the forewinds of heaven when the pistol shot started the race. I do not therefore say that the word progress is unmeaning, I say it is unmeaning without the previous definition of a moral doctrine, and that it can only be applied to groups of persons who hold that doctrine in common. Progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that it is illegitimate for us. It is a sacred word, a word which could only rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith. Chapter 3 On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject. The only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defense of boars. When Byron divided humanity into the boars and the board, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the boars, the lower qualities in the board, among whom he counted himself. The boar by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The board has certainly proved himself prosaic. We might no doubt find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grass or all the leaves of the trees, but this would not be because of our boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety. The board would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of grass as splendid as the swords of an army. The boar is stronger and more joyous than we are. He is a demigod. Nay, he is a god, for it is the gods who do not tire of the iteration of things. To them the nightfall is always new and the last rose as red as the first. The sense that everything is poetical is the thing solid and absolute. It is not a mere matter of phraseology or persuasion. It is not merely true. It is ascertainable. Men may be challenged to deny it. Men may be challenged to mention anything that is not a matter of poetry. I remember a long time ago a sensible sub-editor coming up to me with a book in his hand called Mr. Smith or the Smith family or some such thing. He said, well, you won't get any of your damned amisticism out of this or words to that effect. I am happy to say that I undeceived him, but the victory was too obvious and easy. In most cases the name is unpoetical, although the fact is poetic. In the case of Smith the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic manner for the man to live up to it. The name of Smith is the name of the one trade that even kings respected. It could claim half the glory of the Arma Virumche, which all epics acclaimed. The spirit of the Smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million poems and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith. Even the village children feel that in some dim way the Smith is poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that creative violence. The brute repose of nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the weirdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, when the wheel and the plow share, the sword and the seam hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting card of Mr. Smith, yet our novelists call their hero Elmer Valance, which means nothing, or Vernon Raymond, which means nothing, when it is in their power to give him this sacred name of Smith, this name made of iron and flame. It would be very natural if a certain hauteur, a certain carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip distinguished everyone whose name is Smith. Perhaps it does. I trust so. Whoever else are parvenues, the Smiths are not parvenues. From the darkest dawn of history, this clan has gone forth to battle. Its trophies are on every hand, its name is everywhere, it is older than the nations, and its sign is the hammer of Thor. But as I also remarked, it is not quite the usual case. It is common enough that common things should be poetical. It is not so common that common names should be poetical. In most cases it is the name that is the obstacle. A great many people talk as if this claim of ours, that all things are poetical, were a merely literary ingenuity, a play on words. Precisely the contrary is true. It is the idea that some things are not poetical, which is literary, which is a mere product of words. The word signal box is unpoetical, but the thing signal box is not unpoetical. It is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance, light blood, red and sea, green fires, to keep other men from death. That is the plain, genuine description of what it is. The prose only comes in with what it is called. The word pillar box is unpoetical, but the thing pillar box is not unpoetical. It is the place to which friends and lovers commit their messages, conscious that when they have done so they are sacred and not to be touched, not only by others, but even religious touch by themselves. That red turd is one of the last of the temples, posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic, for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable. We think a pillar box, prosaic, because there is no rhyme to it. We think a pillar box unpoetical because we have never seen it in a poem. But the bold fact is entirely on the side of poetry. A signal box is only called a signal box. It is a house of life and death. A pillar box is only called a pillar box. It is the sanctuary of human words. If you think the name of Smith prosaic, it is not because you are practical and sensible. It is because you are too much affected with literary refinements. The name shouts poetry at you, if you think of it otherwise, it is because you are steep and sodden with verbal reminiscences, because you remember everything in punch or comic cuts about Mr. Smith being drunk or Mr. Smith being hand-packed. All these things are given to you poetical. It is only by a long and elaborate process of literary effort that you have made them prosaic. Now the first and fairest thing to say about Rudyard Kipling is that he has born a brilliant part in thus recovering the lost provinces of poetry. He has not been frightened by that brutal materialistic air which clings only to words. He has pierced through to the romantic, imaginative matter of the things themselves. He has perceived the significance and philosophy of steam and of slang. Steam may be, if you like, a dirty byproduct of science. Slang may be, if you like, a dirty byproduct of language. But at least he has been among the few who saw the divine parentage of these things and knew that where there is smoke there is fire. That is, that wherever there is the foulest of things there is also the purest. Of all he has had something to say, a definite view of things to utter. And that always means that a man is fearless and faces everything. For the moment we have a view of the universe we possess it. Now the message of Rudyard Kipling, that upon which he has really concentrated, is the only thing worth worrying about in him or in any other man. He has often written bad poetry like Wordsworth. He has often said silly things like Plato. He has often given way to mere political hysteria like Gladstone. But no one can reasonably doubt that he means steadily and sincerely to say something and that only serious question is, what is that which he has tried to say. Perhaps the best way of stating this fairly will be to begin with that element which has been most insisted by himself and by his opponents. I mean his interest in militarism. But when we are seeking for the real merits of a man it is unwise to go to his enemies and much more foolish to go to himself. Now Mr. Kipling is certainly wrong in his worship of militarism. But his opponents are generally speaking quite as wrong as he. The evil of militarism is not that it shows certain men to be fierce and haughty and excessively warlike. The evil of militarism is that it shows most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable. The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines. Thus the Praetorian Guard becomes more and more important in Rome as Rome becomes more and more luxurious and feeble. The military man gains the civil power in proportion as the civilian loses the military virtues. And as it was in ancient Rome so it is in contemporary Europe. There never was a time when nations were more militarist. There never was a time when men were less brave. All ages and all epics have sung of arms and of the man, but we have affected simultaneously the deterioration of the man and the fantastic perfection of the arms. And so Rome demonstrated the decadence of Rome and it demonstrates the decadence of Russia. And unconsciously Mr. Kipling has proved this and proved it admirably. For insofar as his work is earnestly understood the military trade does not by any means emerge as the most important or attractive. He has not written so well about soldiers as he had about railway men or bridge builders or even journalists. The fact is that what attracts Mr. Kipling to militarism is not the idea of courage but the idea of discipline. There was far more courage to the square mile in the middle ages when no king had a standing army but every man had a bow or sword. But the fascination of the standing army upon Mr. Kipling is not courage, which is scarcely interested in him, but discipline, which is, when all is said and done, his primary theme. The modern army is not a miracle of courage, it has not enough opportunities owing to the cowardice of everybody else. But it is really a miracle of organization and that is the truly Kipling ideal. Kipling's subject is not that valor which properly belongs to war, but that interdependence and efficiency which belongs quite as much to engineers or sailors or mules or railway engines. And thus it is that when he writes of engineers or sailors or mules or steam engines he writes at his best. The real poetry, the true romance which Mr. Kipling has taught, is the romance of the division of labor and the discipline of all the trades. He sings the arts of peace much more accurately than the arts of war and his main contention is vital and valuable. Everything is military in the sense that everything depends upon obedience. There is no perfect epicurean corner, there is no perfectly irresistible place. Everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness, but we're glad that the netmaker did not make the hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. We may jump upon a child's rocking horse for a joke, but we're glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of it unglued for a joke. So far from having merely preached that a soldier cleaning his sidearm is to be adored because he is military, Kipling at his best and clearest has preached that the baker baking loaves and the tailor cutting coats is as military as anybody. Being devoted to this multitudinous vision of duty, Mr. Kipling is naturally a cosmopolitan. He happens to find his examples in the British Empire, but almost any other empire would do as well, or indeed any other highly civilized country. That which he admires in the British Army, he would find even more apparent in the German Army. That which he desires in the British Police, he would find flourishing in the French Police. The idea of discipline is not the whole of life, but it is spread over the whole of the world. And the worship of it tends to confirm in Mr. Kipling a certain note of worldly wisdom, of the experience of the wanderer, which is one of the genuine charms of his best work. The great gap in his mind is what may be roughly called the lack of patriotism. That is to say he lacks altogether the facility of attaching himself to any cause or community finally and tragically. For all finality must be tragic. He admires England, but he does not love her, for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English. There is no harshness in saying this to do him justice. He avows it with his usual picture as candor. In a very interesting poem he says that, if England was what England seems, that is weak and inefficient, if England were not what, as he believes she is, that is powerful and practical, how quick we'd chuck her, but she ain't. He admits, that is, that his devotion is the result of a criticism, and this is quite enough to put it in another category altogether, from the patriotism of the Boers, whom he hounded down in South Africa. In speaking of the really patriotic peoples, such as the Irish, he has some difficulty in keeping a shrill irritation out of his language. The frame of mind which he really describes with duty and nobility is the frame of mind of the cosmopolitan man who has seen men and cities. Or to admire and for to see, or to be old, this world so wide. He is a perfect master of that light melancholy with which a man looks back on having been the citizen of many communities, of that light melancholy which a man looks back on having been the lover of many women. He is the flanderer of the nations, but a man may have learned much about women in flirtations and still be ignorant of first love. A man may have known as many lands as Ulysses and still be ignorant of patriotism. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has asked, in a celebrated epigram, what they can know of England who know England only. It is a far deeper and sharper question to ask, what can they know of England who know only the world? For the world does not include England any more than it includes the church. The moment we care for anything deeply, the world that is, or all the other miscellaneous interests, become our enemy. Christian showed it when they talked of keeping one's self unspotted from the world. But lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the world well lost. Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world. Similarly, I suppose that the church was a part of the world and even the lovers' inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth. The truth is that the moment you love anything, the world becomes your foe. Thus Mr. Kipling does certainly know the world. He is a man of the world with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. He knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice. He has been to England a great many times. He has stopped there for long visits, but he does not belong to it, or to any place. And the proof of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe. The globe-prodder lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place to be compared to Chicago. Chicago is a place to be compared to Timbuktu. But Timbuktu is not a place. Since there, at least, live men who regarded as the universe, and breathe not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men. Diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all, but he is thinking of the things that unite men, hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky. Mr. Kipling, with all his merits, is the globe-prodder. He has not the patience to become part of anything. So great and genuine a man is not to be accused of a merely cynical cosmopolitanism. Still, his cosmopolitanism is his weakness. That weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his finest poems, the Cessina of the Tramp Royal, in which a man declares that he can endure anything in the way of a hunger or a horror, but not permanent presence in one place. In this, there is certainly danger. The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is, the more it travels about. Dust is like this, and the thistle down, and the high commissioner in South Africa. Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy fruit of trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile. In the heated idolists of youth, we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies? But for all that, we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock, but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent, because the moss is alive. The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller. It is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long, the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world. The second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiring, without doubt, to whiz in a motor car around the earth, to feel Arabia as a world of sand, or China as a flash of rice fields. But Arabia is not a world of sand, and China is not a flash of rice fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them, it must not be as tourist or inquires. It must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them. The man standing in his own kitchen garden with a fairy land opening to the gate is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance. The motor car stupidly destroys it. Moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round, the spirit of a schoolmistress. This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made about Cecil Rhodes. His enemies say that he may have had large ideas, but he was a bad man. His friends say that he may have been a bad man, but he certainly had large ideas. The truth is that he was not a man essentially bad. He was a man of much genealogy and many good intentions. But a man with singularly small views. There is nothing large about painting the map red. It is an innocent game for children. It is just as easy to think in continents as to think in cobblestones. The difficulty comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of them. Rhodes' prophecies about the bore resistance are an admirable comment on how the large ideas prosper when it is not a question of thinking in continents, but of understanding a few two-legged men. And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its roiches agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor car civilization, going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the star's suburban end of Chapter 3. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Heretics by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 4 Mr. Bernard Shaw In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities, when genial old Ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy, and the kindly tales of the forgotten Emile Zola, kept our fireside merry and pure, it used to be thought a disadvantage to being misunderstood. It may be doubted whether it is always or even generally a disadvantage. The man who is misunderstood has always disadvantage over his enemies, that they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign. They go out against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows. There are several modern examples of this situation. Mr. Chamberlain, for instance, is a very good one. He constantly eludes or vanquishes his opponents, because his real powers and deficiencies are quite different to those which he is credited, both by friends and foes. His friends depict him as a strenuous man of action. His opponents depict him as a coarse man of business, then as a fact he is neither one nor the other. But an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor. He has one power which is the soul of melodrama, the power of pretending, even when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall. For all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must make some show of misfortune. That sort of hypocrisy is the homage that strength pays to weakness. He talks foolishly, and yet very finely, about his own city that has never deserted him. He wears a flaming and fantastic flower, like a decadent minor poet. As for his bluffness and toughness, and appeals to common sense, all that is, of course, simply the first trick of rhetoric. He fronts his audience with the venerable affection of Mark Antony. I am no orator as Brutus is. But as you know me all, a plain blunt man. It is the whole difference between the aims of the orator and the aim of any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor. The aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor. The aim of the orator is to convince us that he is not an orator. Once let Mr. Chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and his game is won. He has only to compose a theme on empire, and people will say that these plain men say great things on great occasions. He has only to drift in the large loose notions common to all artists of the second reign. And people will say that businessmen have the biggest ideals after all. All his schemes have ended in smoke. He has done nothing that he did not confuse. About his figure there is a Celtic pathos, like the Gaels in Matthew Arnold's quotation. He went forth to battle, but he always fell. He is a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures, but still a mountain. And a mountain is always romantic. There is another man in the modern world who might be called the antithesis of Mr. Chamberlain in every point, who is also a standing monument of the advantage of being misunderstood. Mr. Bernard Shaw is always represented by those who disagree with him. And I fear also, if such exists, by those who agree with him. As a capering humorist, a dazzling acrobat, a quick change artist, it is said that he cannot be taken seriously, that he will defend anything or attack anything, but he will do anything to startle and amuse. All this is not only untrue, but it is glaringly the opposite of the truth. It is as wild as to say that Dickens had not the boisterous masculinity of Jane Austen. The whole force and triumph of Mr. Bernard Shaw lie in the fact that he is a thoroughly consistent man. So far from his power consisting in jumping through hoops or standing on his head, his power consists in holding his own fortress night and day. He puts the Shaw test rapidly and rigorously to everything that happens in heaven and on earth. The standard never varies. The thing which weak-minded revolutionists and weak-minded conservatives really hate and fear in him is exactly this, that his scales such as they are, are held even, and that his law such as it is, is justly enforced. You may attack his principles, as I do, but I do not know of any instance in which you can attack their application. If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the lawlessness of socialists as much as that of individualists. If he dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes it in boars and Irishmen as well as in Englishmen. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of marriage, he dislikes still more the fierce bounds and wilder vows that are made by lawless love. If he laughs at the authority of priests, he laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science, condemns the irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the equal irresponsibility of art. He has pleased all the Bohemians by saying that women are equal to men, but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women. He is almost mechanically just. He has something of the terrible quality of a machine. The man who is really wild and whirling. The man who is really fantastic and incalculable is not Mr. Shaw, but the average cabinet minister. It is Sir Michael Hicks Beach, who jumps through hoops. It is Sir Henry Fowler, who stands on his head. The solid and respectable statesman of that type does really leap from position to position. He is really ready to defend anything or nothing. He is really not to be taken seriously. I know perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be saying thirty years hence. He will be saying what he has always said. If thirty years hence I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent ding, with a silver beard sweeping the earth, and say to him, one can never, of course, make a verbal attack upon a lady, the patriarch will lift his age at hand and fell me to the earth. We know, I say, what Mr. Shaw will be saying thirty years hence. But is there anyone so darkly red in stars and oracles that he will dare to predict what Mr. Asquith will be saying thirty years hence? The truth is that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who believes something is ready and witty because he has all the weapons about him. He can apply his test in an instant. The man engaged in conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw, they fancy he has ten faces. Similarly a man engaged against a brilliant duelist, they fancy that the sword of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand. But this is not really because the man is playing with ten swords. It is because he is always aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre because he does not change with the world. He has climbed into a fixed star and the earth whizzes below him like a zotro. An absence of mild of black coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world. People accuse Mr. Shaw and much sillier persons of proving that black is white, but they never ask whether the current color language is always correct. Ordinary sensible phraseology sometimes calls black white. Certainly calls yellow white and green white and reddish brown white. We call wine white wine, which is as yellow as a blue coat boy's legs. We call grapes white grapes, which are manifestly pale green. We give to the European whose complexion is a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a white man, a picture of more blood curdling than any specter in Poe. Now it is undoubtedly true that if a man asked a waiter in a restaurant for a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish yellow grapes, the waiter would think him mad. It is undoubtedly true that if a government official reporting on the Europeans in Burma said, there are only 2,000 pinkish men here, he would be accused of cracking jokes and kicked out of his post, but it is equally obvious that both men would have come to grief through telling the strict truth. That two truthful man in the restaurant, that two truthful man in Burma, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. He appears eccentric and grotesque because he will not accept the general belief that white is yellow. He has based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed that yet forgotten fact that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth of course must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves. So much then a reasonable appreciation will find in Mr. Shaw to be bracing an excellent. He claims to see things as they are and some things at any rate he does see as they are, which the whole of our civilization does not see at all. But in Mr. Shaw's realism there is something lacking, and that thing which is lacking is serious. Mr. Shaw's old and recognized philosophy was that powerfully presented in the quintessence of Ibsenism. It was in brief that conservative ideals were bad, not because they were conservative, but because they were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the particular case. Every moral generalization oppressed the individual. The golden rule was that there was no golden rule, and the objection to this is simply that it pretends to free man, but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do. What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people. And what is the good of telling a man, or a philosopher, that he has every liberty except the liberty to make generalizations? Making generalizations is what makes him a man. In short, when Mr. Shaw forbids men to have strict moral ideals, he is acting like one who should forbid them to have children. The saying that the golden rule is that there is no golden rule can indeed be simply answered by being turned round, that there is no golden rule is itself a golden rule, or rather it is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron rule, a fetter, on the first movement of a man. But the sensation connected with Mr. Shaw in recent years has been his sudden development of the religion of the Superman. He who had, to all appearance, mocked at the faiths in the forgotten past, discovered a new God in the unimaginable future. He who laid all the blame on ideals, set up the most impossible of all ideals, the ideal of a new creature. But the truth nevertheless is that anyone who knows Mr. Shaw's mind adequately, and admires it properly, must have guessed all this long ago. But the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really are. If he had, he would have fallen on his knees before them. He has always had a secret ideal that has withered all things in this world. He has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human, the monster from Mars with the wise men of the Stoics, with the economic man of the Fabians, with Julius Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman. Now to have this inner and merciless standard may be a very good thing, or a very bad one. It may be excellent or unfortunate, but it is not seeing things as they are. It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a barious with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple, or having only two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus, with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes, as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. And this is what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done. When we really see men as they are, we do not criticize but worship them very rightly. For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull and queer tendencies for this place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. It is only the quite arbitrary and preguish habit of comparison with something else which makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him. A sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical. The mere facts would make our knees knock under, as with religious fear. It is the fact that every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy. It is the fact that every face in the street has the incredible unexpectedness of a fairy tale. The thing which prevents a man from realizing this is not any clear sightedness or experience. It is simply a habit of pedantic and fastidious comparisons between one thing and another. Mr. Shaw, on the practical side, perhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense inhumane. He has even been infected to some extent with the primary intellectual weakness of his new master, Nightsheet. The strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was, the more he would despise other things. The greater and stronger a man is, the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. The Mr. Shaw keeps a lifted head and a contemptuous face before the colossal panorama of empires and civilizations. This does not in itself convince one that he sees things as they are. I should be most effectively convinced that he did, if I found him staring with a religious astonishment at his own feet. What are those two beautiful and industrious beings? I can imagine him murmuring to himself, whom I see everywhere, serving me. I know not why. What fairy godmother made them come trotting out of this elfland when I was born? To god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs must I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me? The truth is that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery of humility and almost of darkness. The man who said, blessed is he that expect us nothing, for he shall not be disappointed, put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth, blessed is he that expect us nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised. The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expect us nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains. Blessed is the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightning, sudden blinding and divine. Until we picture non-entity, we underrate the victory of god and can realize none of the trophies of his ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing. This is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness of Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man, that he is not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception to the general and essential maxim that little things please great minds. And from this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes, incidentally, the peculiar insistence on the superman. After belaboring a great many people for great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered with characteristic sense that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being, with two legs, can be progressive at all. When come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all his limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for new food, but throw the baby out of the window and ask for a new baby. Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man. The old, beard-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain. The things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ, at a symbolic moment, was establishing his great society, he chose for its corner stone, neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward, in a word, a man. And upon this rock he has built his church, and the gates of hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible, for no chain is stronger than its weakest link.