 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton. CHAPTER XI. A DEFENCE OF HERALDRY The modern view of heraldry is pretty accurately represented by the words of the famous barrister who, after cross-examining for some time a venerable dignitary of herald's college, summed up his results in the remark that the silly old man didn't even understand his own silly old trade. Heraldry, properly so-called, was, of course, a wholly limited and aristocratic thing. But the remark needs a kind of qualification not commonly realized. In a sense there was a plebeian heraldry, since every shop was, like every castle, distinguished not by a name, but by a sign. The whole system dates from a time when picture-writing still really ruled the world. In those days few could read or write. They signed their names with a pictorial symbol, a cross, and a cross is a great improvement on most men's names. Now there is something to be said for the peculiar influence of pictorial symbols on men's minds. All letters we learn were originally pictorial and heraldic. Thus the letter A is the portrait of an ox, but the portrait is now reproduced in so impressionistic a manner that but little of the rural atmosphere can be absorbed by contemplating it. But as long as some pictorial and poetic quality remains in the symbol, the constant use of it must do something for the aesthetic education of those employing it. Public houses are now almost the only shops that use the ancient signs, and the mysterious attraction which they exercised may be, by the optimistic, explained in this manner. They are taverns with names so dreamlike and exquisite that even Sir Wilfred Lawson might waver on the threshold for a moment, a poet to struggle with the moralist. So it was with the heraldic images. It is impossible to believe that the red lion of Scotland acted upon those employing it merely as a naked convenience, like a number or a letter. It is impossible to believe that the kings of Scotland would have cheerfully accepted the substitute of a pig or a frog. There are, as we say, certain real advantages in pictorial symbols, and one of them is that everything that is pictorial suggests without naming or defining. There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect, and do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets. They never dispute that the Hawthorne says the best and wittiest thing about the spring. Thus in the old aristocratic days there existed this vast pictorial symbolism of all the colors and degrees of aristocracy. When the great trumpet of equality was blown almost immediately afterwards was made one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this pride and vivacity all these towering symbols and flamboyant colors should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a crest and the cheese monger a war cry. The grocer who sold margarine as butter should have felt that there was a stain on the estation of the Higginses. Instead of doing this the Democrats made the appalling mistake, a mistake at the root of the whole modern melody, of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did not say, as they should have done, to the commoner citizen, you are as good as the Duke of Norfolk, but use that meaner democratic formula. The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are. For it cannot be denied that the world lost something, finally, and most unfortunately, about the beginning of the nineteenth century. In former times the mass of the people was conceived as mean and commonplace, but only as comparatively mean and commonplace. They were dwarfed and eclipsed by certain high stations and splendid callings. But with the Victorian era came a principle which conceived men not as comparatively, but as positively mean and commonplace. A man of any station was represented as being by nature a dingy and trivial person, a person born as it were in a black hat. It began to be thought that it was ridiculous for a man to wear beautiful garments, instead of it being, as of course it is, ridiculous for him to deliberately wear ugly ones. It was considered affected for a man to speak bold and heroic words, whereas of course it is emotional speech which is natural and ordinary and civil speech which is affected. The whole relations of beauty and ugliness of dignity and ignominy were turned upside down. Beauty became an extravagance, as if top hats and umbrellas were not the real extravagance. A landscape from the land of the goblins, dignity became a form of foolery and shamelessness, as if the very essence of a fool were not a lack of dignity. And the consequence is that it is practically most difficult to propose any decoration or public dignity for modern men without making them laugh. They laugh at the idea of carrying crests and coats of arms instead of laughing at their own boots and neckties. We are forbidden to say that tradesmen should have a poetry of their own, though there is nothing so poetical as trade. A grocer should have a coat of arms worthy of his strange merchandise gathered from distant and fantastic lands. A postman should have a coat of arms capable of expressing the strange honor and responsibility of the man who carries men's souls in a bag. The chemist should have a coat of arms symbolizing something of the mysteries of the House of Healing, the cavern of a merciful witchcraft. There were in the French Revolution a class of people at whom everyone laughed and at whom it was probably difficult, as a practical matter, to refrain from laughing. They attempted to erect by means of huge wooden statues the brand-new festivals, the most extraordinary new religions. They adored the goddess of reason, who would appear even when the fullest allowance had been made for their many virtues, to be the deity who had least smiled upon them. But these capering maniacs disowned alike by the old world and the new were men who had seen a great truth unknown alike to the new world and the old. They had seen the thing that was hidden from the wise and understanding from the whole modern democratic civilization down to the present time. They realized that democracy must have a heraldry, that it must have a proud and high-colored pageantry, if it is to keep always before its own mind, its own sublime mission. Unfortunately for this ideal the world has in the matter followed English democracy rather than French. And those who look back to the nineteenth century will assuredly look back to it as we look back to the reign of the Puritans, as the time of black coats and black tempers. From the strange life the men of that time led, they might be assisting at a funeral of liberty instead of at its christening. The moment we really believe in democracy we will begin to blossom, as aristocracy blossomed, into symbolic colors and shapes. We shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves. For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous. CHAPTER XII A DEFENCE OF UGLY THINGS There are some people who state that the exterior, sex or physique of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind. But these people need not detain us. There are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing. However often they are made. But while nothing in this world would persuade us that a great friend of Mr. Forbes Robertson, let us say, would experience no surprise or discomfort at seeing him enter the room in the bodily form of Mr. Chaplin, there is a confusion constantly made between being attracted by exterior, which is natural and universal, and being attracted by what is called physical beauty, which is not entirely natural and not in the least universal. Or rather, to speak more strictly, the conception of physical beauty has been narrowed to mean a certain kind of physical beauty, which no more exhausts the possibilities of external attractiveness than the respectability of a Clapham builder exhausts the possibilities of moral attractiveness. The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been the Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with the stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism, an asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish severity had at least common sense as its basis. It recognized that men lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees of blood, certain consequences might follow. But they did not starve their instinct for contrasts and combinations. Their prophets gave two wings to the ox and any number of eyes to the cherubim, with all the riotous ingenuity of Louis Carroll. But the Greeks carried their police regulation into Elfland. They vetoed not the actual adulteries of the earth, but the wild weddings of ideas, and forbade the bands of thought. It is extraordinary to watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The chimera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have been proud. But when we see it in Greek pictures, we feel inclined to tie a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Whoever feels that the giants in Greek art and poetry were really big, big as some folklore giants have been. In some Scandinavian story, a hero walks for miles along a mountain ridge, which eventually turns out to be the bridge of the giant's nose. That is what we should call, with a calm conscience, a large giant. But this earthquake fancy terrified the Greeks and their terror has terrified all mankind out of their natural love of size, vitality, variety, energy, and ugliness. Nature intended every human face, so long as it was forcible, individual and expressive, to be regarded as distinct from all others, as a poplar is distinct from an oak, and an apple tree from a willow. But what the Dutch gardeners did for the trees, the Greeks did for the human form. They lopped away its living and sprawling features to give it a certain academic shape. They hacked off noses and paired down chins with a ghastly horticultural calm. And they have really succeeded so far as to make us call some of the most powerful and endearing faces ugly, and some of the most silly and repulsive faces beautiful. This disgraceful via the media, this pitiful sense of dignity, has bitten far deeper into the soul of modern civilization than the external and practical puritanism of Israel. The Jew at the worst told a man to dance in fetters. The Greek put an exquisite vase upon his head and told him not to move. Scripture says that one star differs from another in glory, and the same conception applies to noses. To insist that one type of face is ugly, because it differs from that of the Venus of Milo, is to look at it entirely in a misleading light. It is strange that we should resent people differing from ourselves. We should resent much more violently. They're resembling ourselves. This principle has made a sufficient hash of literary criticism, in which it is always the custom to complain of the lack of sound logic in a fairy tale and the entire absence of true oratorical power in a three-act farce. But to call another man's face ugly, because it powerfully expresses another man's soul, is like complaining that a cabbage has not two legs. If we did so, the only course for the cabbage would be to point out with severity, but with some show of truth, that we were not a beautiful green all over. But this frigid theory of the beautiful has not succeeded in conquering the art of the world, except in name. In some quarters, indeed, it has never held sway. A glance at Chinese dragons or Japanese gods will show how independent are orientals of the conventional idea of facial and bodily regularity. And how keen and fiery is their enjoyment of real beauty, of Gogolais, of sprawling claws, of gaping mouths and writhing coils. In the Middle Ages, men broke away from the Greek standard of beauty and lifted up in adoration to heaven great towers, which seemed alive with dancing apes and devils. In the full summer of technical artistic perfection, the revolt was carried to its real consummation in the study of the faces of men. Rembrandt declared the sane and manly gospel that a man was dignified, not when he was like a Greek god, but when he had a strong square nose like a cudgel, a boldly blocked head like a helmet and a jaw like a steel trap. This branch of art is commonly dismissed as the grotesque. We have never been able to understand why it should be humiliating to be laughable, since it is giving an elevated artistic pleasure to others. If a gentleman who saw us in the street were suddenly to burst into tears at the mere thought of our existence, it might be considered disquieting and uncomplementary, but laughter is not uncomplementary. In truth, however, the phrase grotesque is a misleading description of ugliness in art. It does not follow that either the Chinese dragons or the Gothic gargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the least intended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance of satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality. And here lies the whole key of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jut out in shameless decision from the cliff. We like to see the red pine stand up heartily upon a high cliff. We like to see a chasm cloven from end to end of a mountain. With equally noble enthusiasm we like to see a nose jut out decisively. We like to see the red hair of a friend stand up heartily in bristles upon his head. We like to see his mouth broad and clean cut like the mountain crevasse. At least some of us, like all this, it is not a question of humor. We do not burst with amusement at the first sight of the pines or the chasms, but we like them because they are expressive of the dramatic stillness of nature. Her bold experiments, her definite departures, her fearlessness and savage pride in her children. The moment we have snapped the spell of conventional beauty there are a million beautiful faces waiting for us everywhere, just as there are a million beautiful spirits. End of Chapter 12 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 13 A Defense of Fars I have never been able to understand why certain forms of art should be marked off as something debased and trivial. A comedy is spoken of as degenerating into farce. It would be fair criticism to speak of it changing into farce, but as for degenerating into farce you might equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again a story is spoken of as melodramatic and the phrase, clearly enough, is not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as pantomimic or sensational is innocently supposed to be biting. Heaven knows why for all works of art sensations and a good pantomime, now extinct, is one of the pleasantest sensations of all. This stuff is fit for a detective story, is often said. As who should say, this stuff is fit for an epic. Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of it. These lighter or wilder forms of art having no standards set up for them, no gust or generous artistic pride to lift them up do actually tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children of the great mother they grow up in darkness, dirty and unlettered, and when they are right they are right almost by accident because of the blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of a planet peopled by congenital idiots who cannot find the ends of their own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or effect, a mass of jarring atoms, a prolonged mental torture of the irrelevancy. The ordinary farce seems a world of almost piteous vulgarity where a half-witted and stunted creature is afraid when his wife comes home and amused when she sits down on the doorstep. All this is, in a sense, true, but it is the fault of nothing in heaven or earth except the attitude and the phrases quoted at the beginning of this article. We have no doubt in the world that if the other forms of art had been equally despised, they would have been equally despicable. If people had spoken of sonnets with the same accent with which they speak of music hall songs, a sonnet would have been a thing so fearful and wonderful that we almost regret we cannot have a specimen. A rowdy sonnet is a thing to dream about. If people had said that epics were only fit for children and nursemaids, Paradise Lost might have been an average pantomime. It might have been called Harlequin Satan or How-Adam-Adam. Or who would trouble to bring to perfection a work in which even perfection is grotesque? Why should Shakespeare write off hello? If even his triumph consisted in the eulogy, Mr. Shakespeare is fit for something better than writing tragedies. The case of farce and its wilder embodiment in Harlequin Aid is especially important, that these high and legitimate forms of art glorified by Aristophanes and Molière have sunk into such contempt, maybe due to many causes. I myself have little doubt that it is due to the astonishing and ludicrous lack of belief in hope and hilarity which marks modern aesthetics to such an extent that it has spread even to the revolutionists. Once the hopeful section of men, so that even those who ask us to fling the stars into the sea are not quite sure that they will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary art must be a symbol of some phase of human spirit. But whereas the phase is in human life sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it must have a certain pungency and neatness of form to compensate for its lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round the tea-table may have all the comedy emotions of much-do-about-nothing or North Anger Abbey, but if their actual conversation were reported it would possibly not be a worthy addition to literature. An old man sitting by his fire may have all the desolate grandeur of Lire or Pierre Gouriot, but if he comes into literature he must do something besides set by the fire. The artistic justification, then, of farce and pantomime must consist in the emotions of life which correspond to them, and these emotions are, to an incredible extent, crushed out by the modern insistence on the painful side of life only. Pain, it is said, is the dominant element of life. But this is true only in a very special sense. If pain were for one single instant, literally, the dominant element in life, every man would be found hanging dead from his own bed-post by the morning. Pain, as the black and catastrophic thing, attracts the youthful artist just as the schoolboy draws devils and skeletons and men hanging. But joy is a far more elusive and elvish matter, since it is our reason for existing and a very feminine reason. It mingles with every breath we draw and every cup of tea we drink. The literature of joy is infinitely more difficult, more rare, and more triumphant than the black and white literature of pain. And of all the varied forms of the literature of joy, the form most truly worthy of moral reverence and artistic ambition is the form called farce, or its wilder shape in pantomime. To the quietest human being seated in the quietest house there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things. He will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea water, the clock to point at all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open on a lake or a potato field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said with no darker meaning that he realizes one of our visions. And it may be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and architecture which characterizes pantomime and farce. If the whole affair happened in some alien atmosphere, if a pear tree began to grow apples or a river to run with wine and some strange fairyland the effect would be quite different. The streets and shops and door knockers of the harlequinade which to the vulgar Essie make it seem commonplace are in truth the very essence of the aesthetic departure. It must be an actual modern door which opens and shuts, constantly disclosing different interiors. It must be a real baker whose loaves fly up into the air without his touching them or else the whole internal excitement of this elvish invasion of civilization. This abrupt entrance of Puck into Pimlico is lost. Someday, perhaps, when the present narrow phase of aesthetics has ceased to monopolize the name, the glory of a farcical art may become fashionable. Long after men have ceased to drape their houses in green and gray and to adorn them with Japanese vases an esthete may build a house on pantomime principles in which all the doors shall have their bells and knockers on the inside, all the staircases be constructed to vanish on the pressing of a button, and all the dinners, humorous dinners in themselves, come up cooked through a trapdoor. We are very sure at least that it is as reasonable to regulate one's life and lodgings by this kind of arts as by any other. The whole of this view of farce and pantomime may seem insane to us, but we fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing in this strange age of transition is so depressing as its merriment. All the most brilliant men of the day, when they set about the writing of comic literature, do it under one destructive fallacy and disadvantage. The notion that comic literature is in some sort of way superficial. They give us little knickknacks of the brittleness of which they positively boast. Although two thousand years have beaten as vainly upon the follies of the frogs as on the wisdom of the Republic, it is all a mean shame of joy. When we come out from a performance of the Midsummer Night's Dream, we feel as near to the stars as when we come out from King Lear. For the joy of these works is older than sorrow. Their extravagance is saner than wisdom. Their love is stronger than death. The old masters of a healthy madness, Aristophanes or Ravallet or Shakespeare, doubtless had many brushes with the precisions or aesthetics of their day. But we cannot but feel that for honest severity and consistent self-massoration they would always have had respect. But what abyss of scorn inconceivable to any modern would they have reserved for an aesthetic type and movement, which violated morality and did not even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to exuberance, which contented itself with the fool's cap without the bells. CHAPTER 14 A DEFENCE OF HUMILITY The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes. And especially in this age of egoistic idealism there is about one who defends humility, something inexpressibly rake-ish. It is no part of my intention to defend humility on practical grounds. Practical grounds are uninteresting and moreover on practical grounds the case for humility is overwhelming. We all know that the divine glory of the ego is socially a great nuisance. We all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the reason we all do warmly respect humility in other people. But the matter must go deeper than this. If the grounds of humility are found only in social convenience they may be quite trivial and temporary. The egoists may be the martyrs of a nobler dispensation agonizing for a more arduous ideal. The judge, from the comparative lack of ease in their social manner, this seems a reasonable suggestion. There is one thing that must be seen at the outset of the study of humility from an intrinsic and external point of view. The new philosophy of self-esteem and self-assertion declares that humility is a vice. If it be so, it is quite clear that it is one of those vices which are an integral part of original sin. It follows with the precision of clockwork every one of the great joys of life. No one, for example, was ever in love without indulging in a positive debouch of humility. All full-blooded and natural people such as schoolboys enjoy humility the moment they attain hero worship. Humility, again, is said both by its upholders and opponents to be the peculiar growth of Christianity. The real and obvious reason of this is often missed. The pagans insisted upon self-assertion because it was the essence of their creed that the gods, though strong and just, were mystic, capricious, and even indifferent. But the essence of Christianity was, in a literal sense, the New Testament, a covenant with God which opened to man a clear deliverance. Though they themselves secure, they claimed palaces of pearl and silver under the oath and seal of the Unipotent. They believed themselves rich with an irrevocable benediction which set them above the stars, and immediately they discovered humility. It was only another example of the same immutable paradox. It is always the secure who are humble. This particular instance survives in the evangelical revivalists of the streets. They are irritating enough, but no one who has really studied them can deny that the irritation is occasioned by these two things—an irritating hilarity and an irritating humility. This combination of joy and self-prostration is a great deal to universal to be ignored. If humility had been discredited as a virtue at the present day, it is not wholly irrelevant to remark that this discredited has arisen at the same time as a great collapse of joy in current literature and philosophy. Men have revived the splendor of Greek self-assertion. At the same time, they have revived the bitterness of Greek pessimism. A literature has arisen which commands us all to arrogate to ourselves the liberty of self-sufficing deities at the same time that it exhibits us to ourselves as dingy maniacs who ought to be chained up like dogs. It is certainly a curious state of things altogether. When we are genuinely happy, we think we are unworthy of happiness, but when we are demanding a divine emancipation, we seem to be perfectly certain that we are unworthy of anything. The only explanation of the matter must be found in the conviction that humility has infinitely deeper roots than any modern man suppose, that it is a metaphysical and one might almost say a mathematical virtue. Probably this can be best tested by a study of those who frankly disregard humility and assert the supreme duty of perfecting and expressing oneself. These people tend by a perfectly natural process to bring their own great human gifts of culture, intellect, or moral power to a great perfection, successively shutting out everything that they feel to be lower than themselves. Now, shutting out things is all very well, but it has one simple corollary, that from everything that we shut out, we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on the wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense, and this is practically the claim of the egoism, which thinks that self-assertion can obtain knowledge. A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man. The man awaits demonstration, but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle-view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently reveling in the fact that he is not a beetle. The most brilliant exponent of the egoist school, Naichi, with deadly and honorable logic, admitted that the philosophy of self-satisfaction led to looking down upon the weak, the cowardly, and the ignorant. Looking down on things may be a delightful experience, only there is nothing from a mountain to a cabbage that is really seen when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarefied heaven. Only he sees everything foreshortened or deformed. Now if we imagine that a man wished truly, as far as possible, to see everything as it was, he would certainly proceed on a different principle. He would seek to divest himself for a time of those personal peculiarities which tend to divide him from the thing he studies. It is as difficult, for example, for a man to examine a fish without developing a certain vanity in possessing a pair of legs as if they were the latest articles of personal adornment. But if a fish is to be approximately understood, this physiological dandy-ism must be overcome. The earnest student of fish morality will spiritually, speaking, chop off his legs, and similarly the student of birds will eliminate his arms. The frog-lover will, with one stroke of the imagination, remove all his teeth, and the spirit wishing to enter into all the hopes and fears of jellyfish will simplify his personal appearance to a really alarming extent. It would appear therefore that this great body of ours and all its natural instincts, of which we are proud, and justly proud, is rather an encumbrance at the moment when we attempt to appreciate things as they should be appreciated. We do actually go through a process of mental asceticism, a castration of the entire being, when we wish to feel the abounding good in all things. It is good for us at certain times that ourselves should be like a mere window, as clear and luminous and as invisible. In a very entertaining work over which we have roared in childhood, it is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are, of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grass is short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature, but to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards, the grass is an everlasting forest with dragons for denzians, the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other, the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around, and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven, each higher than the other. Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terrible landscapes. In the desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock, here a miraculous forest of which all the trees have dared to dream. These are the visions of him who, like the child of the fairy-tales, is not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the sage whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance. The whole passionate and intricate life of common things becomes as lost to him as is the life of the Infusoria to a man without a microscope. He rises always through desolate eternities. He may find new systems and forget them. He may discover fresh universes and learn to despise them. But the towering and tropical vision of things as they really are, the gigantic daisies, the heaven-consuming dandelions, the great odyssey of strange colored oceans and strange shaped trees, of dusts like the wreck of temples and thistle down like the ruin of stars, all this colossal vision shall perish with the last of the humble. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibroVox.org The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 15 A Defense of Slang The aristocrats of the 19th century have destroyed entirely their one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and arrogant, but they flaunt unobtrusively and their attempts at arrogance are depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of variety, vivacity and fullness of life. Oligarchy was the world's first experiment in liberty. But now they have adopted the opposite ideal of good form which may be defined as puritanism without religion. Good form has sent them all into black like the stroke of a funeral bell. They engage like Mr. Gilbert's curates in a war of mildness, a positive competition of obscurity. In old times the lords of the earth sought above all things to be distinguished from each other. With that object they erected outrageous images on their helmets and painted preposterous colors on their shields. They wished to make it entirely clear that a Norfolk was as different, say, from an Argyle as a white lion from a black pig. But today their ideal is precisely the opposite one and if a Norfolk and an Argyle were dressed so much alike that they were mistaken for each other they would both go home dancing with joy. The consequences of this are inevitable. The aristocracy must lose their function of standing to the world for the idea of variety, experiment, and color. And we must find these things in some other class. To ask whether we shall find them in the middle class would be to jest upon sacred matters. The only conclusion, therefore, is that it is to certain sections of the lower class, chiefly, for example, to the omnibus conductors with their rich and rococo mode of thought that we must look for guidance towards liberty and light. The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang. Every day a nameless poet weaves some fairy tracery of popular language. It may be said that the fashionable world talks slang as much as the democratic. This is true and it strongly supports the view under consideration. Nothing is more startling than the contrast between the heavy, formal, lifeless slang of the man about town and the light, living, and flexible slang of the costar. The talk of the upper strata of the educated classes is about the most shapeless, aimless, and hopeless literary product that the world has ever seen. Clearly in this again the upper classes have degenerated. We have ample evidence that the old leaders of feudal war could speak on occasion with a certain natural symbolism and eloquence that they had not gained from books. When Cyrano de Bergerac and Rostan's play throws doubts on the reality of Christian's dullness and lack of culture, the latter replies a French phrase. And these two lines sum up truth about the old oligarchs. They could not write three legible letters, but they could sometimes speak literature. Douglas, when he hurled the heart of Bruce in front of him in his last battle, cried out, Pass first, great heart, as thou wilt ever want. A Spanish nobleman, when commanded by the king to receive a high-placed and notorious trader, said, I will receive him in all obedience and burn down my house afterwards. This is a literature without culture. It is the speech of men convinced that they have to assert proudly the poetry of life. Anyone, however, who should seek for such pearls in the conversation of a young man of modern Belgravia would have much sorrow in his life. It is not only impossible for aristocrats to assert proudly the poetry of life. It is more impossible for them than for anyone else. It is positively considered vulgar for a nobleman to boast of his ancient name, which is, when one comes to think of it, the only rational object of his existence. If a man in the street proclaimed with rude feudal rhetoric that he was the Earl of Doncaster, he would be arrested as a lunatic. But if it were discovered that he really was the Earl of Doncaster, he would simply be cut as a cad. No poetical prose must be expected from earls as a class. The fashionable slang is hardly even a language. It is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating certain broad, well-understood states of mind. Bored, cut-up, jolly, rotten, and so on are like the words of some tribe of savages, whose vocabulary has only twenty of them. If a man of fashion wished to protest against some solosism in another man of fashion, his utterance would be a mere string of set phrases, as lifeless as the string of dead fish. But an omnibus conductor, being filled with the muse, would burst out into a solid literary effort. You're a gentleman, aren't you, sir? Your boots is a lot brighter than your'd, but there's precious little of your that's clothes, that's right. Put your cigar in your mouth, cause I can't see your behind it. Take it out again, do you, you're young for smoking, but I've sent for your mother. Going, oh, don't run away, I won't run you, I got a good art I have. Down with cruelty to animals, I say, and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keith's never put into a sonnet so many remote metaphors as a custer puts into a curse. His speech is one long allegory, like Spencer's fairy queen. I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic elusiveness is the characteristic of true slang. Such an expression as keep your air on is positively meridithian in its perverse and mysterious manner of expressing an idea. The Americans have a well-known expression about swelled head as a description of self-approval. And the other day I heard a remarkable fantasia upon this air. An American said that after the Chinese war the Japanese wanted to put on their hats with a shoehorn. This is a monument of the true nature of slang, which consists in getting further and further away from the original conception and treating it more and more as an assumption. It is rather like the literary doctrine of the symbolists. The real reason of this great development of eloquence among the lower orders again brings us back to the case of the aristocracy in earlier times. The lower classes live in a state of war. A war of words. Their readiness is the product of the same fiery individualism as the readiness of the old fighting oligarchs. Any cabman has to be ready with his tongue, as any gentleman of the last century has to be ready with his sword. It is unfortunate that the poetry, which is developed by this process, should be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with heroic eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The essential point is that somebody must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a language. All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we pause for a moment to examine the cheapest canth phrases that pass our lips every day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many sonnets. To take a single instance, we speak of a man in English social relations, breaking the ice. If this were expanded into a sonnet, we should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of everlasting ice. The somber and baffling mirror of the northern nature over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a kind of topsy-turvy-dom of poetry, full of the blue moons and white elephants, of men losing their heads and men whose tongues run away with them, a whole chaos of fairy tales. CHAPTER XVI. The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are first that they are very serious, and secondly that they are in consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humor. The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common sense. The fascination of children lies in this, that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea. There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb, that if we could once understand the common clay of the earth we should understand everything. Similarly we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby worship, and which will support it to the end. Maturity with its endless energies and aspirations may easily be convinced that it will find new things to appreciate, but it will never be convinced at the bottom that it has properly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not found that on which we were born. But the influence of children goes further in its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do, even when we are perfectly simple or ignorant, we do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children, as marvellous, common intelligence in children, as marvellous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in this matter, that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the child so much admired by his worshipers are common enough. The fact is that this is precisely where baby worship is so profoundly right. Any words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful. The child's words and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the philosopher's words and antics are equally wonderful. The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitudes towards our equals in age consist in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consist in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect. We vow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair and reverence, love and fear them. When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations. A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle of speech. Consequently, we find his blunders almost as marvelous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude toward premiers and chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genuinely encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life, generally healthy and motive, but often intolerable in a domestic commonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptious tyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities as rather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told them that they would understand when they were older, we should probably be adopting the best and most crushing attitude toward the weaknesses of humanity. In our relations to children we prove that the paradox is entirely true, that it is possible to combine an amnesty that verges on contempt with a worship that verges upon terror. We forgive children with the same kind of blasphemous gentleness with which Omar Qayyam forgave the omnipotent. The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural, while for some mysterious reason we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels. We seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing. It is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand. But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most enduring of all the bonds that hold the cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility Their salinity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism. Their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment. Their fascinating absence of nose seems to give us the most perfect hint of the humor that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven. CHAPTER 17 A DEFENCE OF DETECTIVE STORIES In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populists prefer bad literature to good and accept detective stories because they are bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a book popular. Bradshaw's Railway Guide contains few gleams of psychological comedy, yet it is not read uproariously on winter evenings. If detective stories are read with more exuberance than railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic. Many good books have fortunately been popular. Many bad books, still more fortunately, have been unpopular. A good detective story would probably be even more popular than a bad one. The trouble in this matter is that many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story. It is to them, like speaking of a good devil. To write a story about burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility, this is natural enough. It must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of sensational crime as one of Shakespeare's plays. There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective story as much or rather more difference than there is between a good epic and a bad one. Not only is the detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has a certain definite and real advantage as an agent of the public wheel. The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical. It may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich or purple as the mountain peaks and find the lampposts as old and natural as the trees. Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious, the detective story is certainly the Iliad. No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of Elfland. That in the course of that incalculable journey the casual omnibus assumes the primal colors of a fairyship. The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it. Every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signaling the meaning of the mystery. This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. The city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than the countryside, for while nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, the city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols, but there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol, a message from some man as much as if it were a telegram or a postcard. The narrowest street possesses in every nook and twist of its intention the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon. Every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums. Anything which tends, even under the fantastic form of the minutia of Sherlock Holmes, to assert this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably human characters in flints and tiles is a good thing. It is good that the average man should fall into the habit of looking imaginatively at ten men in the street, even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh might be a notorious thief. We may dream, perhaps, that it might be possible to have another and higher romance of London, that men's souls have strange adventures than their bodies, and that it would be harder and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt their crimes. But since our great authors, with the admirable exception of Stevenson, declined to write of that thrilling mood and moment when the eyes of the great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark, we must give fair credit to the popular literature which, amid a babel of pedantry and precocity, declines to regard the present as prosaic, or the common, as commonplace. Popular art in all ages has been interested in contemporary manners and costume. It dressed the groups around the crucifixion in the garb of Florentine gentlefolk or Flemish burgers. In the last century it was the custom for distinguished actors to present Macbeth in a powdered wig and ruffles. How far we are ourselves in this age from such conviction of the poetry of our own life and manners may easily be conceived by anyone who chooses to imagine a picture of Alfred the Great toasting the cakes dressed in a tourist's knickerbockers or a performance of Hamlet in which the prince appeared in a frock coat with the crepe band round his hat. But this instinct of the age to look back like Lot's wife could not go on forever. A rude, popular literature of the romantic possibilities of the modern city was bound to arise. It has arisen in the popular detective stories as rough and refreshing as the ballads of Robin Hood. There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world and that criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone and somewhat fatuously fearlessly amid the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and foot-pads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful night errantry. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 18 A Defense of Patriotism The decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two is a serious and distressing matter. Only in consequence of such a decay could the current lust of territory be confounded with the ancient love of country. We may imagine that if there were no such thing as a pair of lovers left in the world, all the vocabulary of love might without rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire. If no type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the love of the city that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been written in blood on the same table with the primal passions of our being. On all sides we hear today of the love of our country and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word love means, that they mean by the love of country not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, that something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, or boasted in difference to the ethics of a national war, is mere mysterious gibberish. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word love is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive. It is a part of its doom, and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness was the mark of all great lovers, like Dante, and all great patriots, like Chatham. My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying my mother drunk her sober. No doubt if a decent man's mother took the drink he would share her troubles to the last, but the talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery. What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous jingoism is a renaissance of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will see suddenly. For the first of all the marks of love is seriousness. Love will not accept sham bulletins or the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid counselor the best. Love is drawn to truth by the unearing magnetism of agony. It gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with a vociferous optimism around the deathbed. We have to ask then why it is that this recent movement in England which has honestly appeared to many a renaissance of patriotism seems to us to have none of the marks of patriotism, at least of patriotism in its highest form. Why has the adoration of our patriots been given wholly to qualities and circumstances good in themselves but comparatively material and trivial, trade, physical force, a skirmish at a remote frontier, a squabble in a remote continent? Colonies are things to be proud of, but for a country to be only proud of its extremities is like a man being only proud of his legs. Why is there not a high, central, intellectual patriotism? A patriotism of the head and heart of the empire and not merely of its fists and boots. A rude Athenian sailor may very likely have thought that the glory of Athens lay in rowing with the right kind of oars or having a good supply of garlic. But Pericles did not think that this was the glory of Athens. With us, on the other hand, there is no difference at all between the patriotism preached by Mr. Chamberlain and that preached by Mr. Pat Rafferty, who sings, What do you think of the Irish now? They are both honest, simple-minded, vulgar eulogies upon trivialities and truisms. I have rightly or wrongly a notion of the chief cause of this pettiness in English patriotism of today, and I will attempt to expound it. It may be taken generally that a man loves his own stock and environment and that he will find something to praise in it. But whether it is the most praiseworthy thing or no will depend upon the man's enlightenment as to the facts. If the son of Thackeray, let us say, were brought up in ignorance of his father's fame and genius, it is not improbable that he would be proud of the fact that his father was over six feet high. It seems to me that we, as a nation, are precisely in the position of this hypothetical child of Thackeray's. We fall back upon gross and frivolous things for our patriotism for a simple reason. We are the only people in the world who are not taught in childhood our own literature and our own history. We are, as a nation, in the truly extraordinary condition of not knowing our own merits. We have played a great and splendid part in the history of universal thought and sentiment. We have been among the foremost in that eternal and bloodless battle in which the blows do not slay, but create. In painting and music we are inferior to many other nations, but in literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence, if history be taken as a whole, we can hold our own with any. But all this vast heritage of intellectual glory comes back from our school boys like a heresy, and they are left to live and die in the dull and infantile type of patriotism which they learned from a box of tin soldiers. There is no harm in the box of tin soldiers. We do not expect children to be equally delighted with a beautiful box of tin philanthropists. But there is a great harm in the fact that the subtler and more civilized honour of England is not presented so as to keep pace with the expanding mind. A French boy is taught the glory of Molière as well as that of Turin. A German boy is taught his own great national philosophy before he learns the philosophy of antiquity. The result is that though French patriotism is often crazy and boastful, though German patriotism is often isolated and pedantic, they are neither of them merely dull, common, and brutal, as so often the strange fate of the nation of bacon and loch. It is natural enough and even righteous enough under the circumstances. An Englishman must love England for something. Consequently he tends to exalt commerce or prize-fighting, just as a German might tend to exalt music or a Flemmand to exalt painting, because he really believes it is the chief merit of his fatherland. It would not be in the least extraordinary if a claim of eating up provinces and pulling down princes were the chief boast of Azulu. The extraordinary thing is that it is the chief boast of a people who have Shakespeare, Newton, Burke, and Darwin to boast of. The peculiar lack of any generosity or delicacy in the current English nationalism appears to have no other possible origin but in this fact of our unique neglect and education of the study of the national literature. An Englishman could not be silly enough to despise other nations if he once knew how much England had done for them. Great men of letters cannot avoid being humane and universal. The absence of the teaching of English literature in our schools is, when we come to think of it, an almost amazing phenomenon. It is even more amazing when we listen to the arguments urged by headmasters and other educational conservatives against the direct teaching of English. It is said, for example, that a vast amount of English grammar and literature is picked up in the course of learning Latin and Greek. This is perfectly true, but the topsy-turvenous of the idea never seems to strike them. It is like saying that a baby picks up the art of walking in the course of learning to hop, or that a Frenchman may successfully be taught German by helping oppression to learn Ashanti. Surely the obvious foundation of all education is the language in which that education is conveyed. If a boy has only time to learn one thing, he had better learn that. We have deliberately neglected this great heritage of high national sentiment. We have made our public schools the strongest walls against a whisper of the honour of England. And we have had our punishment in this strange and perverted fact that, while a unifying vision of patriotism can ennoble bands of brutal savages or dingy burgers, and be the best thing in their lives, we, who are the world being judged, humane, honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst thing in ours. What we have done and where we have wandered, we that have produced sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who could walk with Dante, that we should talk as if we have never done anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick black men. We are the children of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are judged, it will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of failing to appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual transgression of failing to appreciate ourselves. The end of Chapter 18 THE END OF THE DEFENDANT by G. K. Chesterton