 14. The Romance of Rustand Rustand, the romantic dramatist of France and a very national poet, died almost on the day of the Great National Triumph. He had lived, to use his own imaginative heraldry, to see the golden eagles of Gaul and Rome drive back the black eagles of Prussia and Austria. He was too much of an earlier generation to take the precise part of Piquet or Claudel in the process which banished the birds of barbaric night from the lands of the eagles of the sun. But the part he had played in that earlier time might well merit the use of a kindred metaphor drawn from his own fairyland of ornithology. He had a special claim to use, as one of his titles, the noble medieval name of Chanticleer. He might well be called the Gallic Coq in that earlier twilight of vultures and bats. The end of the nineteenth century was a time of pessimism for Europe, and especially of pessimism for France, for pessimism was the shadow of Prussianism. Rustand was really a coq that crowed before the coming of sunrise. When it came it was red as blood, but the sun rose. But that medieval nickname of the Coq contains a still more appropriate criticism. The word clear is always a clue to Rustand's country and to Rustand's work. He suffered in the decadent days. He suffers to some extent still, from a strange blunder which supposes that what is clear must be shallow. It is chiefly founded on false figures of speech, and is akin to the mysteriously meaningless saying that still waters run deep. It is repeated without the least reference to the evident fact that the stillest of all waters do not run at all. They lie about in puddles, which are nonetheless shallow because they are covered with scum. Such were the north German philosophies fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century. Men believed in the puddles' profundity solely because of its opacity. When the decadent critics sneered at Rustand's popularity they were simply sneering at his lucidity. They were protesting against his power of conveying what he meant in the most direct and telling fashion. They were complaining bitterly because he did not think with a German accent, which is nearly the same thing as an impediment in the speech. The wit with which all his dialogues blazed was also a positive disadvantage in that middle-headed modern world, which even now will only begin to realize gradually the greatness of France. Nothing has been so senselessly underrated as wit, even when it seems to be the mere wit of words. It is dismissed as merely verbal, but in fact it is more solemn writing that is merely verbal or rather merely verbose. A joke is always a thought. It is grave and formal writing that can be quite literally thoughtless. This applies to jokes when they are not only quite verbal but quite vulgar. A good pun, or even a bad pun, is more intellectual than mere polysyllables. The man, the presumably prehistoric man, who invented the phrase, when is a door not a door, when it's a jar, made a serious and successful mental effort of selection and combination. But a Prussian professor might begin on the same problem, when is a door not a door, when its dourishness is a becoming rather than a being, and when the relativity of dourishness is coordinated with the evolution of doors from windows and skylights, of which approximation to new function, et cetera, et cetera. And the Prussian professor might go on like that forever and never come to the end because he would never come to the point. A pun or a riddle can never be, in that sense, a fraud. Real wisdom may be better than real wit, but there is much more sham wisdom than there is sham wit. This is the immediate point about Rustand, who had very real wit, but wit of a very poetic and sometimes epic order. It is very characteristic of him, and very puzzling to his critics, that he was witty even in repudiating wit. In the scene of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the hero pleads, in his friend's name, against the preciosity of the heroine, he quite naturally uses the phrase, touching the evaporation of truth, in artificial terminology, et qu'est la fin de fin, n'est-ce pas la fin de fin? That involves a pun, and also involves a point, and it is a subject on which it would be quite easy to be earnest and pointless. A philosopher need never come to an end in talking about ends, precisely because he is not required to amuse anybody, he is not required to mean anything. Every page, every paragraph, almost every line of Rustand's plays, bristles with these points, which are both verbal and vital. If any critic thinks it was easy to produce them by the hundred, there is an exceedingly easy test. Let him try to produce one. In attempting to joke in this fashion, he will probably find himself thinking for the first time. For that matter, merely to make one of the better puns of punch or hood's annual would be enough to stump most of the skeptics who have been taught in the Teutonic schools to think a thing creative because it is chaotic, and vast because it is vague. A modern thinker will find it easier to make up a hundred problems than to make up one riddle, for in the case of the riddle he has to make up the answer. The drama of Rustand was full of answers, if they seem to the superficial merely to be ringing repartets. In the ballad of the duel the hero says that the sword thrust shall come at the end of the envoy, but something like it seems to come continually at the end of the line. But these retorts are really much more than superficial because they have the ring of dogma, of affirmation and certainty, and therefore of triumph. The wit is a heroic wit, and his subtitle was strictly correct when he called Cyrano a heroic comedy. It was written in a literary period which was far too pessimistic to rise, even to heroic tragedy. It will grow in value in a more virile time when the air has been cleared by a great crusade. Rustand's poetry will certainly remain. It may not remain among the very greatest poetry, for the very reason that he fulfilled the office rather of the trumpet than the lyre. But he himself may well have shared the spirited taste of his own hero, and have preferred that something even more noble than the laurel should remain as a feather in his cap. Section 15 of the Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jennifer Painter. The Uses of Diversity by G. K. Chesterton. Section 15. Wishes. Most of us, I suppose, have amused ourselves with the old and flippant fancy of what poets or orators would feel like if their wild wishes came true. The poet would not be a little surprised if the somewhat inadequate wings of a dove suddenly sprouted from his shoulder blades. And I suspect that even the baby who cries for the moon would be rather frightened if it fell out of the sky, crushing forests and cities like a colossal snowball, shutting out the stars and darkening the earth it had illuminated. Shelley was magnificently moved when he wished to be a cloud driven before the wild west wind. But even Shelley would have been not a little disconcerted if he had found himself turning head over heels in midair the instant he had written the line. He would even be somewhat relieved, I fancy, to fall upon the thorns of life and bleed a little more. When Keats, the human nightingale, lay listening to the feathered one, he expressed a strong desire for a long drink of red wine. In this I believe him to have accurately analyzed his own sentiments. But when he proceeds to explain that he is strongly inclined at that moment to wish himself dead, I entertain strong doubts as to whether he is equally exact. And by no means certain that he would really like to cease upon the midnight. Even with no pain. Such skeptical fantasies, I say, have occurred to most of us. They do not spoil fine poetry for those who really like it. They only salt it with humor and human fellowship. Things seriously beautiful are perhaps the only things that we can just about complete spiritual safety. One cannot insult the poem, except by being afraid of the parody. But I think there is another and more curious cause for this common human fancy of a wild wish, which is disappointed by being fulfilled. The idea is very common, of course, in popular tradition. In the tale of King Midas, in the tale of the black pudding, in the tale of the galoshes of fortune. My own personal feeling about it, I think, is that a world in which all ones wishes were fulfilled would quite apart from disappointments, be an unpleasant world to live in. The world would be too like a dream. And the dream too like a nightmare. The ego would be too big for the cosmos. It would be a bore to be so important as that. I believe a great part of such poetic pleasure, as I have, comes from a certain disdainful indifference in actual things. Demeter withered up the cornfields. I like the cornfields because they grow in spite of me. At least I can lay my hand on my heart and say that no cornfield ever grew with my assistance. Ajax defied the lightning. But I like the lightning because it defies me. I enjoy stars and the sun or trees and the sea because they exist in spite of me. And I believe the sentiment to be at the root of all that real kind of romance, which makes life not a delusion of the night, but an adventure of the morning. It is indeed in the clash of circumstances that men are most alive. When we break a lance with an opponent, the whole romance is in the fact that the lance does break. It breaks because it is real. It does not vanish like an elfin spear. And even when there is an element of the marvellous or impossible in true poetry, there is always also this element of resistance, of actuality and shock. The most really poetical impossibility is an irresistible force colliding with an immovable post. When that happens, it will be the end of the world. It is true, of course, that marvels, even marvels of transformation illustrate the noblest histories and traditions. But we should notice a rather curious difference, which the instinct of popular legend has in almost all cases kept. The wonder working done by good people, saints and friends of man is almost always represented in the form of restoring things or people to their proper shapes. St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children, finds a boiling pot in which two children have been reduced to a sort of Irish stew. He restores them miraculously to life, because they ought to be children and ought not to be Irish stew. But he does not turn them into angels. And I can remember no case in hagiology of such an official promotion. If a woman were blind, the good wonder workers would give her back her eyes. If a man were halt, they would give him back his leg. But they did not, I think, say to the man, you are so good that you really ought to be a woman. Or to the woman, you are so bothered, it is time you had a holiday as a man. I do not say that there are no exceptions, but this is the general tone of the tales about good magic. But on the other hand, the popular tales about bad magic especially full of the idea that evil alters and destroys the personality. The black witch turns a child into a cat or a dog. The bad magician keeps the prince captive in the form of a parrot. Or the princess in the form of a hind. In the gardens of the evil spirits, human beings are frozen into statues, or tied to the earth as trees. In all such instinctive literature, the denial of identity is the very signature of Satan. In that sense, it is true that the true God is the God of things as they are, or at least as they were meant to be. And I think that something of this healthy fear of losing self through the supernatural is behind the widespread sentiment of the three wishes. The sentiment which says, in the words of Thackeray, fairy roses, fairy rings, turn out sometimes troublesome things. Now the transition may seem queer, but this power of seeing that a tree is there, in spite of you and me, that it holds of God and its own treeishness is of great importance just now in practical politics. We are in sharp collision with a large number of things, some of which are real facts, and all of which are real faiths. We must see these things objectively, as we do a tree, and understand that they exist, whether we like them or not. We must not try and turn them into something different by the mere exercise of our own minds, as if we were witches. I happen to think, for instance, that it is silly of orange men to think they would be persecuted under home rule. But I think it is sillier to think that the orange men do not think so. It is sillier not to see that a man can fire off a gun for a prejudice, as well as he can for an ideal. I disagree with the orange men. I don't disagree with the nationalists. But I deny neither. I sympathize with the labor revolt. I don't sympathize with the feminist revolt. But I deny neither. Then again, both these latter tendencies have succeeded in colliding violently with another reality, the priests of the ancient popular creed of Ireland. They achieved that catastrophe, not because they did not believe the creed, but because they could not even believe that it was believed. Now you can, if you choose, pass your life in a wizard dream in which all your enemies are turned into something else. You can insist that a priest is only a parrot, or a suffragette always a wandering hind. But if you do, you will sooner or later get into your head, what is meant by an immovable post. End of section 15. Section 16 of the uses of diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. The uses of diversity by G. K. Chesterton. The featureists. There are still people talking about futurism, though I should have thought it was now a thing of the past, exploded by its own silly gunpowder train of progressive theory. If a man only believed the world was round because his grandmother said it was flat, another man had only to say it was spiral in order to be a more advanced idiot than either of them. But after all the world is one shape and not another. I don't care which myself, but certainly one, and will be when we all die, and would have been if no worm or weed had ever lived. And it abuses me to notice that the very agnostics who still quote Galileo's phrase about the earth, had yet it moves, are the very people who talk as if truth could be different from age to age, as if the whole world was a different shape when you or I were in a different frame of mind. Progressives of this kind cannot say, and yet it moves, save in the sense that their own foot can roll it about like a football, or that their own finger can stop it as Joshua's stopped the moon. They may control nature like witches, but they cannot appeal to nature like Galileo. They have no abiding objective fact to which to appeal. On the more progressive theory, there is no more immortality about the astronomy of Galileo than the medicine of Galen. But one or two interesting ideas can be found in futurist speculations, essays, lectures, books, et cetera. Indeed, the futurists can be interesting everywhere, but in their pictures. And this is the difficulty of all such movements, the lack of the final fulfillment. I will not put it offensively as by saying that they write a beautiful prospectus, but there are no funds. I do not mean it like that. I will put it poetically by saying that there are beautiful leaves and flowers, but there is no fruit. There are leaves of learning enough to fill a library. There are flowers of rhetoric enough to last a session. They are all about a picture. And there is no picture. Thus, Mr. Nevenson, the eminent English futurist, has explained that pictorial art should be as independent of natural facts as music is. It should not imitate, but utter. Of music, of course, the remark is true and fairly familiar. Certainly three notes on a piano can bring tears to the eyes by reminding us of a dead friend. Though certainly the first noise is not the noise he made when whistling to his dog, nor the second the noise he made when kicking off his boots, nor the third noise he made when blowing his nose. Perhaps the three notes or noises he could never have made. Perhaps he was unmusical, like many magnificent people. I am unmusical myself. Perhaps I say he was unmusical, yet music can express him. This is an interesting fact, that it is only one fact, and the examination of a few others would have shown Mr. Nevenson the shallowness of his artistic philosophy. But Mr. Nevenson and the futurists have never seen a fact before in their lives. Clutch hold of this one and rush after the car progress like poor baby lady and charwomen after a motor bus. Their deduction is this. As his favorite song recalls the friend, though it contains none of his grunts, snorts, or sneezes, so his portrait would better recall his appearance if it contained no trace of his eyes, nose, mouth, hair, if any, masculine sex, anthropoid, or erect posture, or any other oddity by which his friends were in the habit of distinguishing him from a lap post or a large well or from the works of creation in general. Mr. Nevenson says that the most pungent and passionate emotions, such presumably as we have about friendship and even about love, can be conveyed by planes, mathematical proportions, arbitrary or abstract colors, arrangements of line, and all the things we most of us instinctively associate with carpets if not with oil cloth. It is impossible, he says. It is. It is not a contradiction in terms, but if I say it is possible by arranging a tomato, tin pearl buttons, a copy of the second and last number of a tariff reform weekly, one wooden leg, three odd boots, and a bag with a hole in it to induce your worst enemy to burst into tears and give you a million pounds in conscience money, then if you are a monist and a fool, you will answer that it could not happen. But if you are an agnostic and a Christian, you will answer that you tried it on with your worst creditor and it didn't work with him. They don't work with you. They don't work with me. They don't work with anybody. And the reason simply is that these philosophers, like so many modern philosophers, do not possess the patients to see what they are taking for granted. Have you ever seen a fellow fail at the high jump because he had not gone far enough back for his run? That is modern thought. It is so confident of where it is going to that it does not know where it comes from. The quite simple fallacy is this. The only thing we know about the things we call the arts is that when they are good, they all stir the soul in a somewhat similar way. Their roots in savagery or civilization are so different and so dark. The relations to utility or practical life are so prodigiously contrasted. The mere time or space they occupy is so unequal in every case. The psychological explanations of their very existence are so inconsistent and unarctic that we simply do not know whether in one single point we can argue from one art to another. We do not know enough about it. And there is an end of the matter. For instance, many have compared classic poetry with classic architecture. And anyone who has ever felt the virginity and dignity of either will know what such a comparison means. Milton spoke of building a line of poetry. And nobody seems able to talk about silence without talking about marble. But in technical fact, the analogy is only a fancy after all. Treat it for one moment as Mr. Neveson treats the analogy between music and painting, and it is pure preposterous nonsense, like futurism. Who will deny that height, or the appearance of height, is one of the effects of architecture? Who has not read or said or felt that some wall seemed too enormous for any mortals to have made, that some domes seem to occupy heaven, or that some spires seem to strike him out of the sky? But who, on the other hand, ever said that his sonnet was printed higher up on the page than somebody else's sonnet? Who ever either praised or disliked a piece of verse according to its vertical longitude? Who ever said, my sonnet occupied five volumes of the times? But you should see it pasted all in one piece. I have written the tallest trial at Unearth. Mr. Neveson will bring a tear to my eye by exhibiting a pattern and calling it a picture on the same day, when he induces me to read 200 leading articles in the times simply by calling them a tower. They have many of the qualities of a tower. They are long. They are symmetrical. They are all built out of the same old bricks. They sometimes stand up right like the Tower of Diopto. They more often lean very much like the Tower of Pisa. They most frequently fall down to all together and fall on the wrong people like the Tower of Solone. One could pursue such abstracts fancies forever, but the simple fact remains and it is a fact of the senses. The thing is not a tower because it does not tower and the futurist picture is not a picture because it does not depict why one art can do without shapes and another without words and another without movement and another without massiveness and why each of these is necessary to one or the other of them separately. All this we shall know when we know what art means. And I cannot say that the futurists have helped us much in finding out. End of section 16. Section 17 of the uses of diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jennifer Painter. The uses of diversity by G.K. Chesterton. Section 17. The evolution of Emma. Among the many good critical tributes to the genius of Jane Austen, to the fine distinction of her humour, the sympathetic intimacy of her satire, the easy exactitude of her unpretentious style, which have appeared in celebration of her centenary, there is one criticism that is naturally recurrent. The remark that she was quite untouched by the towering politics of her time. This is intrinsically true. Nevertheless, it may easily be used to imply the reverse of the truth. It is true that Jane Austen did not attempt to teach any history or politics. But it is not true that we cannot learn any history or politics from Jane Austen. Any work so piercingly intelligent of its own kind, and especially any work of so wise and humane a kind, is sure to tell us much more than shallower studies covering a larger surface. I will not say much of the mere formality of some of the conventions and conversational forms. For in such things, it is not only not certain that change is important, but it is not even certain that it is final. The view that a thing is old fashioned is itself a fashion and may soon be an old fashion. We have seen this in many recurrences of female dress, but it has a deeper basis in human nature. The truth is that a praise can be falsified by use without being false. In fact, it can seem stale without being really stilted. Those who see a word as merely worn out fail to look forward as well as back. I know of two poems by two Irish poets of two different centuries, essentially on the same theme, the lover declaring that his love will outlast the mere popularity of the beauty. One is by Mr. Yates and begins, though you are in your shining days. The other is by Tom Moore and begins, believe me, if all those endearing young charms. The latter language strikes us as ridiculously florid and overwrite, but Moore was far from being ridiculous. Believe me, as he would say, it was no poet tester who wrote those heck-nid words about the silent harp and the harps that breaks for liberty. And if English were read some day by strangers as a classic language, I am not sure that endearing would not endure as a better word than shining, or even that, after some repetition and reaction, it might not seem as strained to say shining as to say shiny. Yet Mr. Yates also is a great poet, as I called him last week. Only the printer or somebody altered it to a good one, a mysteriously moderate emanation. Similarly, when one of Jane Austen's heroines wants to say that the hero is a good fellow, she expresses confidence in what she calls his work. This goes her younger modern readers to madness, yet in truth, the term is far more philosophic and eternal than the terms they would use themselves. They would probably say he was nice. And Jane Austen would indeed be avenged. For the best of her heroes, Henry Tilney himself foresaw and fulminated against the unmeaning ubiquity of that word, a prophet of the poor reason of his age, seeing in a vision of the future, the fall of the human mind. Negatively, of course, the historic lesson from Jane Austen is enormous. She is perhaps most typical of her time in being supremely irreligious, her very virtuous glitter with the cold sunlight of the great secular epoch between medieval and modern mysticism. In that small masterpiece, Northanger Abbey, her unconsciousness of history is itself a piece of history. For Catherine Moreland was right, as young and romantic people often are. A real crime had been committed in Northanger Abbey. It is implied in the very name of Northanger Abbey. It was the crucial crime of the 16th century, when all the institutions of the poor were savagely seized to be the private possessions of the rich. It is strange that the name remains. It is stranger still that it remains unrealized. We should think it odd to go to tea at a man's house and find it was still called a church. We should be surprised if a gentleman's shooting box at Clebury were referred to as Clebury Cathedral, but the irony of the 18th century is that Catherine was healthily interested in crimes, and yet never found the real crime, and that she never really thought of it as an abbey, even when she thought of it most as an antiquity. But there is a positive as well as a negative way in which her greatness, like Shakespeare's, illuminates history and politics because it illuminates everything. She understood every intricacy of the upper middle class and the minor gentry, which were to make so much of the mental life of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is said that she ignored the poor and disregarded their opinions. She did, but not more than all our governments and all our acts of parliaments have done, and at least she did consistently ignore them. She ignored where she was ignorant. Well, it would have been for the world if others had ignored the working class until they understood it as well as she did the middle class. She was not a student of sociology. She did not study the poor, but she did study the students, or at least the social types which were to become the students of the poor. She knew her own class and knew it without illusions. And there is much light on later problems to be found in her delicate delineation of vanities and snobberies and patronage. She had to do with the human heart. And it is that which cometh out of the heart that defileeth the nation, philanthropy, efficiency, organization, social reform. And if the weaker brethren still wonder why we should find in baby week or welfare work a dangerous spirit from which its best adherents find it hard to free themselves, if they doubt how such a danger can be reconciled with the personal delicacy and idealism of many of the women who work such things, if they think that fine words or even fine feelings will guarantee a respect for the personality of the poor, I really do not know that they could do better than sit down. I trust not for the first time to the reading of Emma. For all this that has happened since might well be called the evolution of Emma. That unique and formidable institution, the English lady has indeed become much more of a public institution. That is, she has made the same mistakes on a much larger scale. The softer for steadiousness and finer pride of the more gracious 18th century heroine may be seen to make her a shadow by comparison. It seems cruel to say that the breaking off of Harriet's humbler engagement foreshadows the indiscriminate development of divorce for the poor. It seems horrible to say that Emma's small matchmaking has in it the seed of the pestilence of eugenics. But it is true. With a gentleness and justice and sympathy with good intentions, which clear her from the charge of common cynicism, the great novelist does find the spring of her heroine's eras and of many of ours. That spring is a philanthropy and even a generosity secretly founded on gentility. Emma Woodhouse was a wit. She was a good woman. She was an individual with a right to her own opinion. But it was because she was a lady that she acted as she did and thought she had a right to act as she did. She is the type in fiction of a whole race of English ladies, in fact, for whom refinement is religion. Her claim to oversee and order the social things about her consisted in being refined. She would not have admitted that being rich had anything to do with it. But as a fact, it had everything to do with it. If she had been very much richer, if she had had one of the great modern fortunes, if she had had the wider modern opportunities for the rich, she would have thought it her duty to act on the wider modern scale. She would have had public spirit and political grasp. She would have dealt with a thousand Robert Martins and a thousand Harriet Smiths and made the same muddle about all of them. That is what we mean about things like baby week. And if there had been a baby in the story, Miss Woodhouse would certainly have seen all its educational needs with a brilliant clearness. And we do not mean that the work is done entirely by Mrs. Parr-Diggle. We mean that much of it is done by Miss Woodhouse. But it is done because she is Miss Woodhouse and not Martha Muggins or Jemima Jones, because the Lady Bountiful is a lady first and will restore every bounty but freedom. It is noted that there are few traces of the French Revolution in Miss Austen's novels. But indeed, there have been few traces of it in Miss Austen's country. The peculiarity which has produced the situation I describe is really this, that the new sentiment of humanitarianism has come when the old sentiment of aristocracy has not gone. Social superiors have not really lost any old privileges. They have gained new privileges, including that of being superior in philosophy and philanthropy, as well as in riches and refinement. No revolution has shaken their secret security or menace them with the awful peril of becoming no more than men. Therefore, their social reform is but their social refinement grown restless. And in this old tea cup, comedy can be found, far more clearly appreciated than in more ambitious books about problems and politics. The psychology of this mere restlessness in the rich when it first stirred upon its cushions. Jane Austen described a narrow class, but so truthfully that she has much to teach about its after adventures when it remained narrow as a class and broadened only as a sect. End of section 17. Section 18 of the Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. The Uses of Diversity by G. K. Chesterton. The Pseudo-Scientific Books. There is a certain kind of modern book which must, if possible, be destroyed. It ought to be blown to pieces by the dynamite of some great satyrists like Swift or Dickens. As it is, it must be patiently hacked into pieces even by some plodding person like myself. I will do it, as George Washington said, with my little hatchet, though it might take a long time to do it properly. The kind of book I mean is the Pseudo-Scientific book. And by this I do not mean that the man who writes it is a conscious quack or that he knows nothing. I mean that he proves nothing. He simply gives you all his cocksure and yet shaky modern opinions and calls it science. Books are coming out with so-called scientific conclusions. Books in which there is actually no scientific argument at all. They simply affirm all the notions that happen to be fashionable in loose intellectual clubs and call them the conclusions of research. But I am no more awed by the flying fashions among prigs than I am by the flying fashions among snobs. Snobs say they have the right kind of hat. Prigs say they have the right kind of head. But in both cases I should like some evidence beyond their own habit of staring at themselves in the glass. Suppose I were to write about the current fashions in dress, something like this. Our ignorant and superstitious ancestors had straight hat brems. But the advance of reason and equality has taught us to have curly hat brems. In early times short fronts are triangular. But science has shown that they ought to be round. Barbaric peoples had loose trousers. But enlightened and humane peoples have tight trousers. And so on and so on. You would naturally rebel at this simple style argument. You would say, but hang it all. Give us some facts. Prove that the new fashions are more enlightened. Prove that men think better in the new hats. Prove that men run faster in the new trousers. I have just read a book which has been widely recommended, which is introduced to the public by Dr. Salibi. And which is, I understand, written by a Swiss scientist of great distinction. It is called Sexual Ethics by Professor Forrell. I began to read the book therefore with respect. I finished reading it with stupifaction. The Swiss professor is obviously an honest man, though too puritanical to my taste. And I am told that he does really know an enormous lot about insects. But as for the conception of proving a case, as for any notion that a new opinion needs to prove, and that it is not enough when you knock down great institutions to say that you don't like them, it is clear that no such conceptions have ever crossed his mind. Science says that man has no conscience. Science says that man and woman must have the same political powers. Science says that sterile unions are morally free and without rule. Science says that it is wrong to drink fermented liquor. And all this with a splendid indifference to the two facts. First, that science does not say these things at all. For numbers of great scientists say exactly the opposite. The second, that if science did say these things, a person reading a book of rationalistic ethics might be permitted to ask why. Professor Pharrell may have mountains of evidence, which he has no space to exhibit. We will give him the benefit of that doubt and pass on to the points where any thinking man is capable of judging him. Where this sort of scientific writer is seen in all his glory is in his first abstract arguments about the nature of morality. He is immense. He is not at once simple and monstrous like a whale. He always has one dim principle or prejudice to prove that there is nothing separate or sacred about the moral sense. Professor Pharrell holds this prejudice with all possible decorum and propriety. He always trots out three arguments to prove it, like three old broken need elephants. Professor Pharrell duly trusts them out. They are supposed to show that there is no such thing positively existing as the conscience. And they might just as easily be used to show that there are no such things as wings or whiskers or toes or teeth or boots or books or Swiss professors. The first argument is that man has no conscience because some men are quite mad and therefore not particularly conscientious. The second argument is that man has no conscience because some men are more conscientious than others. And the third is that man has no conscience because conscientious men in different countries and quite different circumstances often do very different things. Professor Pharrell applies these arguments eloquently to the question of human consciences. And I really cannot see why I should not apply them to the question of human noses. Man has no nose because now and then a man has no nose. I believe that Sir William Davinott, the poet, had none. Man has no nose because some noses are longer than others or could smell better than others. Man has no nose because not only are noses of different shapes, but oh, piercing the sword of skepticism, some men use their noses and find the smell of incense nice while some use their noses and find it nasty. Science therefore declares that man is normally noseless. And we'll take this for granted for the next four or 500 pages and we'll treat all the alleged noses of history as the quaint legends of a credulous age. I do not mention these views because they are original, but exactly because they are not. They are only dangerous in Professor Pharrell's book because they can be found in a thousand books of our epoch. This writer, Salome, asserts that Kant's idea of an ultimate conscience is a fable because Mohammedans think it wrong to drink wine while English officers think it right. Really, he might just as well say that the instinct of self-preservation is a fable because some people avoid brandy in order to live long and some people drink brandy in order to save their lives. Does Professor Pharrell believe that Kant, or anybody else, thought that our consciences gave us direct commands about the details of diet or social etiquette? Did Kant maintain that when we had reached a certain stage of dinner, a supernatural voice whispered in our ear, asparagus, or that the marriage between almonds and raisins was a marriage that was made in heaven? Surely it is plain enough that all these social duties are deduced from primary moral duties and may be deduced wrong. Conscience does not suggest asparagus, but it does suggest amiability, and it is thought by some to be an amiable act to accept asparagus when it is offered to you. Conscience does not respect fish and sherry, but it does respect an innocent ritual that will make men feel alike. Conscience does not tell you not to drink your hawk after your port, but it does tell you not to commit suicide, and your mere naturalistic reason tells you that the first act may be easily approximate to the second. Christians encourage wine as something which will benefit men. Tea totalers discourage wine as something that will destroy men. Their conscientious conclusions are different, but their consciences are just the same. Tea totalers say that wine is bad because they think it immoral to say what they think. Christians will not say that wine is bad because they think it immoral to say what they don't think. And a triangle is a three-sided figure, and a dog is a four-legged animal, and Queen Anne is dead. We have indeed come back to alphabetical truths. But Professor Ferrell has not yet even come to them. He goes on laboriously repeating that there cannot be a fixed moral sense because some people drink wine and some people don't. I cannot imagine how it was that he forgot to mention that France and England cannot have the same moral sense because Frenchmen drive cabs on the right side of the road and Englishmen on the left. End of section 18. Section 19 of the Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org recording by Maria Fatima de Silva. The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton. The Humour of King Herod. If I say that I have just been very much amused with the nativity play of the 14th century, it is still possible that I may be misunderstood. What is more important, some thousand years of very heroic history will be misunderstood too. It was one of the Coventry cycle of medieval plays loosely called the Coventry Mysteries similar to the Chester Mysteries and the Townley Mysteries. And I was not amused at the blasphemy of something badly done but at a buffoonery and commonly well done. But as I said at the time, the educated seem to be very ignorant of this fine medieval fun. When I mentioned the Coventry Mystery, many ladies and gentlemen thought it was a murder in the police news. At the best, they supposed it to be the title of a detective story. Even upon a hint of history, they could only recall the story of Godiva which might be called rather a revelation than a mystery. Now, I always read police news and I sometimes write detective stories, nor am I at all ashamed of doing either. But I think the popular art of the past was perhaps a little more cheerful than that of the present. And in seeing this Bethlehem drama, I felt that good news might perhaps be as dramatic as bad news and that it was possibly as thrilling to hear that a child is born as to hear that a man is murdered. Doubtless, there are some sentimental people who like these old plays merely because they are old. My own sentiment could be more truly stated by saying that I like them because they are new. They are new in the imaginative sense, making us feel as if the first star were leading us to the first child. But they are also new in the historical sense to most people owing to that break in our history which makes the Elizabethans seem not merely to have discovered the new world but invented the old one. Nobody could see this medieval play without realizing that the Elizabethan was rather the end than the beginning of a tradition, the crown and not the cradle of the drama. Many things that modern critics call peculiarly Elizabethan are in fact peculiarly medieval. For instance, that the same stage could be the place where meet the extremes of tragedy and comedy or rather farce. That daring mixture is always made a point of contrast between the Shakespearean play and the Greek play or the French classical play. But it is a point of similarity or rather identity between the Shakespearean play and the miracle play. Nothing could be more bitterly tragic than the scene in this nativity drama in which the mothers sing a lullaby to the children they think they have brought into safety the moment before the soldiers of Herod rush in and butcher them screaming on the stage. Nothing could be more broadly farcical than the scene in which King Herod himself pretends that he has manufactured the thunderstorm. In one sense, indeed, the old religious play was far bolder in its burlesque than the more modern play. Shakespeare did not express the unrest of King Claudius by making him fall over his own cloak. He did not convey his disdain for tyranny by letting Macbeth appear with his crown on one side. This was partly, no doubt, an improvement in dramatic art but it was partly also, I think, a weakening of democratic satire. Shakespeare's clowns are philosophers, geniuses, demigods but Shakespeare's clowns are clowns. Shakespeare's kings may be usurpers, murderers, monsters but Shakespeare's kings are kings but in this old devotional drama the king is the clown. He is treated not so much with disdain as with derision, not so much with a bitter smile as with the broad grin. A cat may not only look at a king but laugh at a king like the mythical Cheshire cat, an ancient cat as terrible as a tiger and grinning like a gargoyle. But that Cheshire cat has presumably vanished with the Chester mysteries, the counterpart of these Coventry mysteries. It has vanished with the age and art of gargoyles. In other words, that popular simplicity that could see wrongful powers as something pantomimically absurd, a thing for practical jokes has since been sophisticated by a process nonetheless sad because it is slow and subtle. It begins in the Elizabethans in an innocent and indefinable form. It is merely the sense that though Macbeth may get his crown crookedly he must not actually wear it crooked. It is the sense that though Claudius may fall from his throne he must not actually fall over his footstool. It ended in the 19th century in many refined and ingenious forms in a tendency to find often in the ignorant or criminal classes in dialect or the dropping of H's. It was a sort of satirical slumming. There was a new shade in the comparison of the Coaster with a cat. A Coaster could look at a king and might conceivably laugh at a king but most contemporary art and literature was occupied in laughing at the Coaster. Even in the long lifetime of a good comic paper like Punch we can trace the change from jokes against the palace to jokes against the public house. The difference is perhaps more delicate. It is rather that the refined classes are a subject for refined comedy and only the common people are subject for common farce. It is correct to call this refinement modern yet it is not quite correct to call it contemporary. All through the Victorian time the joke was pointed more against the poor and less against the powerful. But the revolution which ended the long Victorian piece has shaken this Victorian patronage. The Great War which has brought so many ancient realities to the surface has re-enacted before our eyes the miracle play of Coventry. We have seen a real King Herod claiming the Thunders of the Throne of God and answered by the thunder not merely of human wrath but of primitive human laughter. He has done murder by proclamations and he has been answered by caricatures. He has made a massacre of children and been made a figure of fun in the Christmas pantomime for the pleasure of other children precisely because his crime is tragic his punishment is comic. The old popular paradox has returned. End of section 19. Section 20 of the uses of diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jennifer Painter. The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton. Section 20, The Silver Goblets. It was reported that at the sumptuous performance of Henry VIII at his Majesty's Theatre the urns and goblets of the banquet were specially wrought in real and solid silver and in the style of the 16th century. This bombastic literalism is at least very much the fashion in our modern theatricals. Mr. Vincent Crummel's considered it a splendid piece of thoroughness on the part of an actor that he should black himself all over to perform Othello. But Mr. Crummel's ideal falls far short of the theoretic thoroughness of the late Sir Herbert Tree who would consider blacking oneself all over as comparatively a mere sham, compromise and veneer. Sir Herbert Tree would, I suppose, send for a real negro to act Othello and perhaps for a real Jew to act Shiloh though that, in the present condition of the English stage, might possibly be easier. The strict principle of the silver goblets might be a little more arduous and unpleasant if applied, let us say, to the Arabian knights if the manager of His Majesty's theatre presented Aladdin and had to produce not one real negro but a hundred real negroes carrying a hundred baskets of gigantic and genuine jewels. In the presence of this proposal even Sir Herbert might fall back on a simpler philosophy of the drama for the principle in itself admits of no limit if once it be allowed that what looks like silver behind the footlights is better also for really being silver there seems no reason why the wildest developments should not ensue. The priests in Henry VIII might be specially ordained in the green room before they come on. No, if it comes to that the head of Buckingham might really be cut off as in the glad old days lamented by Swinburne before the coming of an emasculate mysticism removed real death from the arena. We might reestablish the goriness as well as the gorgeousness of the amphitheatre. If real wine cups, why not real wine? If real wine, why not real blood? Nor is this an illegitimate or irrelevant deduction. This and a hundred other fantasies might follow if once we admit the first principle that we need to realise on the stage not merely the beauty of silver but the value of silver. Shakespeare's famous phrase that art should hold the mirror up to nature is always taken as wholly realistic but it is really idealistic and symbolic at least compared with the realism of his majesties. Art is a mirror not because it is the same as the object but because it is different. A mirror selects as much as art selects. It gives the light of flames but not their heat. The colour of flowers but not their fragrance. The faces of women but not their voices. The proportions of stockbrokers but not their solidity. A mirror is a vision of things not a working model of them. And the silver seen in a mirror is not for sale. But the results of the thing in practice are worse than its wildest results in theory. This Arabian extravagance in the furniture and decoration of a play has one very practical disadvantage that it narrows the number of experiments, confines them to a small and wealthy class and makes those which are made exceptional, erratic and unrepresentative of any general dramatic activity. One or two insanely expensive works prove nothing about the general state of art in a country. To take the parallel of a performance somewhat less dignified, perhaps, than Sir Herbert Trees, there has lately been in America an exhibition not unanalogous to a conflict in the arena and one for which a real Negro actually was procured by the management. The Negro happened to beat the white man and both before and after this event, people went about wildly talking of the white man's champion and the representative of the black race. All black men were supposed to have prived over all white men in a sort of mysterious Armageddon because one specialist met another specialist and tapped his carrot or punched him in the bread basket. Now the fact is, of course, that these two prize fighters were so specially picked and trained. The business of producing such men is so elaborate, artificial and expensive that the result proves nothing whatever about the general condition of white men or black. If you go in for heroes or monsters, it is obvious that they may be born anywhere. If you took the two tallest men on earth, one might be born in Korea and the other in Camberwell but this would not make Camberwell a land of giants inheriting the blood of Anath. If you took the two thinnest men in the world, one might be a Parisian and the other a Red Indian. And if you take the two most scientifically developed pugilists, it is not surprising that one of them should happen to be white and the other black. Experiments of so special and profusor kind have the character of monstrosities like black tulips or blue roses. It is absurd to make them representative of races and causes that they do not represent. You might as well say that the bearded lady at a fair represents the masculine advance of modern women or that all Europe was shaking under the banded armies of Asia because of the cooperation of the Siamese twins. So the plutocratic tendency of such performances as Henry VIII is to prevent rather than to embody any movement of historical or theatrical imagination. If the standard of expenditure is set so high by custom, the number of competitors must necessarily be small and will probably be of a restricted and unsatisfactory type. Instead of English history and English literature being as cheap as silver paper, they will be as dear as silver plate. The national culture instead of being spread out everywhere like gold leaf will be hardened into a few costly lumps of gold and kept in very few pockets. The modern world is full of things that are theoretically open and popular but practically private and even corrupt. In theory, any tinker can be chosen to speak for his fellow citizens among the English commons. In practice, he may have to spend a thousand pounds on getting elected, a sum which many tinkers do not happen to have spare. In theory, it ought to be possible for any moderately successful actor with a sincere and interesting conception of Wallsley to put that conception on the stage. In practice, it looks as if he would have to ask himself not whether he was as clever as Wallsy but whether he was as rich. He has to reflect not whether he can enter into Wallsley's soul but whether he can pay Wallsley's servants, purchase Wallsley's plate and own Wallsley's palaces. Now people with Wallsley's money and people with Wallsley's mind are both rare and even with him, the mind came before the money, the chance of there being combined a second time is manifestly small and decreasing. The result will obviously be that thousands and millions may be spent on a theatrical misfit and inappropriate and unconvincing impersonation. And all the time, there may be a man outside who could have put on a red dressing gown and made us feel in the presence of the most terrible of the Tudor statesmen. The modern method is to sell Shakespeare for 30 pieces of silver. End of section 20. Section 21 of The Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton. Section 21, The Duty of the Historian. We most of us suffer much from having learned all our lessons in history from those little, abridged history books in use in most public and private schools. These lessons are insufficient, especially when you don't learn them. The latter was indeed my own case, and the little history I know I have picked up since by rambling about in authentic books and countryside. But the bald summaries of the small history books still master, and in many cases mislead us. The root of the difficulty is this, that there are two quite distinct purposes of history. The superior purpose, which is its use for children, and the secondary or inferior purpose, which is its use for historians. The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story. Then it appeals to the heroic heart of all generations, the eternal infancy of mankind. Such a story as that of William Tell could literally be told of any epoch. No barbarian implements could be too rude, no scientific instruments could be too elaborate for the pride and terror of the tale. It might be told of the first flint-headed arrow or the last model machine gun. The point of it is the same. It is as eternal as tyranny and fatherhood. Now, wherever there is this function of the fine story in history, we tell it to children only because it is a fine story. David and the cup of water, Regulus and the atqueus guiebot, Jean Dark kissing the cross of spearwood, or Nelson shot with all his stars, these stir in every child the ancient heart of his race. And that is all that they need do. Changes of costume and local color are nothing. It did not matter that in the illustrated Bibles of our youth, David was dressed rather like Regulus in a Roman cuirass and sandals. Any more than it mattered that in the illuminated Bibles of the Middle Ages, he was dressed rather like Jean Dark in a hood or a visor helmet. It will not matter to future ages if the pictures represent Jean Dark cremated in an asbestos stove or Nelson dying in a top hat. For the childish and eternal use of history, the history will still be heroic. But the historians have quite a different business. It is their affair, not merely to remember that humanity has been wise and great, but to understand the special ways in which it has been weak and foolish. Historians have to explain the horrible mystery of how fashions were ever fashionable. They have to analyze that statuesque instinct of the South that molds the Roman cuirass to the muscles of the human torso or that element of symbolic extravagance in the later Middle Ages which let loose a menagerie upon breast and cask and shield. They have to explain as best they can how anyone ever came to have a top hat, how anyone ever endured an asbestos stove. Now the mere tales of the heroes are a part of religious education. They are meant to teach us that we have souls. But the inquiries of the historians into the eccentricities of every epoch are merely a part of political education. They are meant to teach us to avoid certain perils or solve certain problems in the complexity of practical affairs. It is the first duty of a boy to admire the glory of Trafalgar. It is the first duty of a grown man to question its utility. It is one question, whether it was a good thing as an episode in the struggle between Pitt and the French Revolution. It is quite another that it was certainly a good thing in that immortal struggle between the son of man and all the unclean spirits of sloth and cowardice and despair. For the wisdom of man alters with every age. His prudence has to fit perpetually shifting shapes of inconvenience or dilemma. But his folly is immortal. A fire stolen from heaven. Now the little histories that we learned as children were partly meant simply as inspiring stories. They largely consisted of tales like Alfred and the Cakes or Eleanor and the Poisoned Wound. They ought to have entirely consisted of them. Little children ought to learn nothing but legends. They are the beginnings of all sound morals and manners. I would not be severe on the point. I would not exclude a story solely because it was true, but the essential on which I should insist would be not that the tale must be true, but that the tale must be fine. The attempts in the little school histories to introduce older and subtler elements, to talk of the atmosphere of puritanism or the evolution of our constitution is quite irrelevant and vain. It is impossible to convey to a barely breached imp, who does not yet know his own community, the exquisite divergence between it and some other community. What is the good of talking about the constitution carefully balanced on three estates to a creature only quite recently balanced on two legs? What is the sense of explaining the puritan shade of morality to a creature who is still learning with difficulty that there is any morality at all? We may put on one side the possibility that some of us may think the puritan atmosphere an unpleasant one or the constitution a trifle rickety on its three legs. The general truth remains that we should teach to the young men's enduring truths and let the learned amuse themselves with their passing errors. It is often said nowadays that in great crises and moral revolutions we need one strong man to decide. But it seems to me that that is exactly when we do not need him. We do not need a great man for a revolution. For a true revolution is a time when all men are great. When despotism really is successful is in very small matters. Everyone must have noticed how essential a despot is to arranging things in which everyone is doubtful because everyone is indifferent. The boats in a water picnic or the seats at a dinner party. Here the man who knows his own mind is really wanted. For no one else ever thinks his own mind worth knowing. No one knows where to go to precisely because no one cares where he goes. It is for trivialities that the great tyrant is meant. But when the depths are stirred in a society and all men's souls grow taller in a transfiguring anger or desire, then I am by no means so certain that the great man has been a benefit even when he has appeared. I am sure that Cromwell and Napoleon managed the mere pikes and bayonets, boots and knapsacks better than most other people could have managed them. But I am by no means sure that Napoleon gave a better turn to the whole French Revolution. I am by no means so sure that Cromwell has really improved the religion of England. As it is in politics with the specially potent man, so it is in history with the specially learned. We do not need the learned man to teach us the important things. We all know the important things, though we all violate and neglect them. Gigantic industry, abysmal knowledge are needed for the discovery of the tiny things, the things that seem hardly worth the trouble. Generally speaking, the ordinary man should be content with the terrible secret that men are men, which is another way of saying that they are brothers. He had better think of Caesar as a man and not as a Roman, for he will probably think of a Roman as a statue and not as a man. He had better think of Cerdylian as a man and not as a crusader, or he will think of him as a stage crusader, for every man knows the inmost core of every other man. It is the trappings and externals erected for an age and a fashion that are forgotten and unknown. It is all the curtains that are curtained, all the masks that are masked, all the disguises that are now disguised in dust and featureless decay. But though we cannot reach the outside of history, we all start from the inside. Someday, if I ransack whole libraries, I may know the outermost aspects of King Stephen and almost see him in his habit as he lived. But the inmost, I know already. The symbols are mouldered and the manner of the oath forgotten. The secret society may even be dissolved. But we all know the secret. End of section 21, read by The Story Girl. Section 13 of the Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording, or LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Farah Iftikar. The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton. Questions of Divorce. I have just picked up a little book that is not only brightly and suggestively written, but is somewhat unique in this sense, that it enunciates the modern and advanced view of woman in such language as a sane person can stand. It is written by Miss Florence Farr, is called Modern Woman, Her Intentions, and is published by Mr. Frank Palmer. This style of story I confess to commonly finding foolish and vain. The new woman's monologue rearies, not because it is unwombly, but because it is inhuman. It exhibits the most exhausting of combinations, the union of fanaticism of speech, with frigidity of soul, the things that made Robespierre seem a monster. The worst example I remember was once trumpeted in a review. A lady doctor who was ever afterwards haunted me as a sort of nightmare of spiritual embecility. I forget her exact words, but they were to the effect that sex and motherhood should be treated neither with ribaldry nor reverence. It is true serious a subject for ribaldry, and I myself cannot understand reverence towards anything that is physical. There, in a few words, is the whole twisted tortured, prigishness which poisons the present age. The person who cannot laugh at sex ought to be kicked, and the person who cannot reverence pain ought to be killed. Until that lady doctor gets a little ribaldry and a little reverence into her soul, she has no right to have any opinion at all about the affairs of humanity. I remember there was another lady, trumpeted in the same review. A French lady who broke off her engagement with the excellent gentleman to whom she was attached on the ground that affection interrupted the flow of her thoughts. It was a thin sort of flow in any case to judge by the samples, and no doubt it was easily interrupted. The author of Modern Woman is bitten a little by the mad dog of modernity, the habit of dwelling disproportionately on the abnormal and the diseased, but she writes rationally and humorously, like a human being. She sees that there are two sides to the case, and she even puts in a fruitful suggestion that, with its subconsciousness and its virtues of the vegetable, the new psychology may turn up on the side of the old womanhood. One may say, indeed, that in such a book as this our amateur philosophizing of today is seen at its fairest. And even at its fairest it exhibits certain qualities of bewilderment and disproportion, which are somewhat curious to note. I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that while they are always talking of things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is. A real problem only occurs when they are admittedly disadvantages in all courses that can be pursued. If it is discovered just before a fashionable wedding that the bishop is locked up in the coal cellar, that is not a problem. It is obvious to anyone but an extreme anti-clerical or practical joker that the bishop must be let out of the coal cellar. But suppose the bishop has been locked up in the wine cellar, and from the obscure noises, sounds of song and dance, etc., it is guessed that he has indiscreetly tested the vintages round him. Then indeed we may properly say that there has arisen a problem. For upon the one hand it is awkward to keep the wedding waiting, while upon the other any hasty opening of the door might mean an episcopal rush and scenes of the most unforeseen description. An incident like this, which must constantly happen in our gay and varied social life, is a true problem because there are in it incompatible advantages. Now, if woman is simply the domestic slave that many of these writers represent, if man has bound her by brute force, if he has simply knocked her down and sat on her, then there is no problem about the matter. She has been locked in the kitchen, like the bishop in the coal cellar, and they both of them ought to be let out. If there is any problem of sex, it must be because the case is not so simple as that, but because there is something to be said for the man as well as for the woman, and because there are evils in unlocking the kitchen door in addition to the obvious good of it. Now, I will take two instances from Ms. Farr's own book of problems that are really problems, and which she entirely misses because she will not admit that they are problematical. The writer asks the substantial question squarely enough, is indissoluble marriage good for mankind? And she answers it squarely enough. For the great mass of mankind, yes. To those like myself who move in the old world dream of democracy, that admission ends the whole question. There may be exceptional people who would be happier without civil government, sensitive souls who really feel unwell when they see a policeman, but we have surely the right to impose the state on everybody if it suits nearly everybody, and if so, we have the right to impose the family and everybody if it suits nearly everybody. But the queer and coagent point is this, that Ms. Farr does not see the real difficulty about allowing exceptions. The real difficulty that has made most legislators reluctant to allow them. I do not say there should be no exceptions, but I do say that the author has not seen the painful problem of permitting any. The difficulty is simply this, that if it comes to claiming exceptional treatment, the very people who will claim it will be those who least deserve it. The people who are quite convinced they are superior are the very inferior people. The men who really think themselves extraordinary are the most ordinary rotters on earth. If you say nobody must steal the crown of England, then probably it will not be stolen. After that, probably the next best thing would be to say anybody may steal the crown of England, for then the crown might find its way to some honest and modest fellow. But if you say those who feel themselves to have wild and wondrous souls and they only may steal the crown of England, then you may be sure there will be a rush for it of all the rag, tag and bobtail of the universe, all the quack doctors, all the sham artists, all the demireps and drunken egotists, all the nationless adventurers and criminal monomaniacs of the world. So, if you say that marriage is for common people, but divorce for free and noble spirits, all the weak and selfish people will dash for the divorce, while the few free and noble spirits you wish to help will very probably, because they are free and noble, go on wrestling with the marriage. For it is one of the marks of real dignity of character not to wish to separate oneself from the honour and tragedy of the whole tribe. All men are ordinary men, the extraordinary men are those who know it. The weakness of the proposition that marriage is good for the common herd, but can be advantageously violated by special experimenters and pioneers is that it takes no account of the problem of the disease of pride. It is easy enough to say that weaker souls had better be guarded, but that we must give freedom to George's sand or make exceptions for George Elliot. The practical puzzle is this, that it is precisely the weakest sort of lady novelist who thinks she is George's sand. It is precisely the silliest woman who is sure she is George Elliot. It is the small soul that is sure it is an exception. The large soul is only too proud to be the rule. To advertise for exceptional people is to collect all the salts and sick fancies and futile ambitions of the earth. The good artist is he who can be understood. It is the bad artist who is always misunderstood. In short, the great man is a man. It is always the tenth-rate man who is the superman. Ms. Farr disposes of the difficult question of vows and bonds in love by leaving out altogether the one extraordinary fact of experience on which the whole matter turns. She again solves the problem by assuming that it is not a problem. Concerning oaths of fidelity, et cetera, she writes, we cannot trust ourselves to make a real love knot unless money or custom forces us to bear and so bear. There is always the lurking fear that we shall not be able to keep faith unless we swear upon the book. This is, of course, not true of young lovers. Every first love is born free of tradition. Indeed, not only is first love innocent and valiant, but it sweeps aside all the wise laws it has been taught and burns away experience in its own light. The revelation is so extraordinary, so unlike anything told by poets, so absorbing that it is impossible to believe that the feeling can die out. Now, this is exactly as if some old naturalist settled the bat's place in nature by saying boldly, bats do not fly. It is as if he solves the problem of whales by bluntly declaring that whales live on land. There is a problem of vows as of bats and whales. What Ms. Farr says about it is quite lucid and explanatory. It simply happens to be flatly untrue. It is not the fact that young lovers have no desire to swear on the book. They are always at it. It is not the fact that every young love is born free of traditions about binding and promising about bonds and signatures and seals. On the contrary, lovers wallow in the wildest pedantry and precision about these matters. They do the craziest things to make their love legal and irrevocable. They tattoo each other with promises. They cut into rocks and oaks with their names and vows. They bury ridiculous things in ridiculous places to be a witness against them. They bind each other with rings and inscribe each other in Bibles. If they are raving lunatics, which is not untenable, they are mad solely on this idea of binding and on nothing else. It is quite true that the tradition of their fathers and mothers is in favour of fidelity, but it is emphatically not true that the lovers merely follow it. They invent it anew. It is quite true that the lovers feel their love eternal and independent of oaths, but it is emphatically not true that they do not desire to take the oaths. They have a ravening thirst to take as many oaths as possible. Now, this is the paradox. This is the whole problem. It is not true, as Ms. Fowl would have it, that young people feel free of vows being confident of constancy, while old people invent vows having lost that confidence. That would be much too simple. If that were so, there would be no problem at all. The starting but quite solid fact is that young people are especially fierce in making fetters and final ties at the very moment when they think them unnecessary. The time when they want the vow is exactly the time when they do not need it. That is worth thinking about. Nearly all the fundamental facts of mankind are to be found in its fables, and there is a singularly sane truth in all the old stories of the monsters, such as centaurs, mermaids, sphinxes and the rest. It will be noted that in each of these the humanity, though imperfect in its extent, is perfect in its quality. The mermaid is half a lady and half a fish, but there is nothing fishy about the lady. A centaur is half a gentleman and half a horse, but there is nothing horsy about the gentleman. The centaur is a manly sort of man, up to a certain point. The mermaid is a womanly woman, so far as she goes. The human parts of these monsters are handsome, like heroes or lovely, like nymphs. Their bee-style appendages do not affect the full perfection of their humanity, what there is of it. There is nothing humanly wrong with the centaur, except that he rides a horse without a head. There is nothing humanly wrong with the mermaid. Hood put a good comic motto to his picture of a mermaid, all while that ends well. It is perhaps quite true. It all depends which end. Those old wild images include a crucial truth. Man is a monster, and he is all the more a monster because one part of him is perfect. It is not true, as the evolutionists say, that man moves perpetually up a slope from imperfection to perfection, changing ceaselessly so as to be suitable. The immortal part of a man and the deadly part are jarringly distinct and have always been, and the best proof of this is in such a case as we have considered, the case of the oaths of love. A man's soul is as full of voices as a forest. There are ten thousand tongues there, like all the tongues of the tree, fancies, follies, memories, madnesses, mysterious fears, and more mysterious hopes. All the settlement and same government of life consists in coming to the conclusion that some of those voices have authority and others not. You may have an impulse to fight your enemy, or an impulse to run away from him, a reason to serve your country or a reason to betray it, a good idea for making sweets or a better idea for poisoning them. The only test I know by which to judge one argument or inspiration from another is ultimately this, that all the noble necessities of man talk the language of eternity. When man is doing the three or four things that he was sent on this earth to do, then he speaks like one who should live forever. A man dying for his country does not talk as if local preferences could change. Leonidas does not say, in my present mood I prefer Sparta to Persia. William Tal does not remark. The Swiss civilisation, so far as I can yet see, is superior to the Austrian. When men are making commonwealths, they talk in terms of the absolute, and so they do when they are making, however unconsciously, those smaller commonwealths which are called families. There are in life certain immortal moments, moments that have authority. Lovers are right to tattoo each other's skins and cut each other's names about the world. They do belong to each other in a more awful sense than they know. End of Questions of Divorce Recording by Farah Iftikar Section 23 of the Uses of Diversity This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton Mormonism There is inevitably something comic, comic in the broad and vulgar style which all men ought to appreciate in its place about the panic aroused by the presence of the Mormons and their supposed polygamous campaign in this country. It calls up the absurd image of an enormous omnibus packed inside with captive English ladies with an elder on the box controlling his horses with the same patriarchal gravity as his wives and another elder as conductor calling out higher up with an exalted and allegorical intonation. And there is something highly fantastic to the ordinary healthy mind in the idea of any precaution being proposed. In the idea of locking the Duchess and the Boudoir and the governess in the nursery lest they should make a dash for Utah and become the 93rd Mrs. Abraham Nye or the 100th Mrs. Hiram Boak. But these frankly vulgar jokes like most vulgar jokes cover a popular prejudice which is but the bristly hide of a living principle. Elder Ward recently speaking at Nottingham strongly protested against these rumors and asserted absolutely that polygamy had never been practiced with the consent of the Mormon church since 1890. I think it only just that this disclaimer should be circulated. But though it is most probably sincere I do not find it very soothing. The year 1890 is not very long ago and a society that could have practiced so recently a custom so alien to Christendom must surely have a moral attitude which might be repellent to us in many other respects. Moreover, the phrase about the consent of the church, if correctly reported, has a little of the air of an official repudiating responsibility for unofficial excesses. It sounds almost as if Mr. Abraham Nye might on his own account come into church with 114 wives but people were supposed not to notice them. It might amount to little more than this that the chief elder may allow the 114 wives to walk down the street like a girl's school but he is not officially expected to take off his hat to each of them in turn. Seriously speaking however I have little doubt that Elder Ward speaks the substantial truth and the polygamy is dying or has died among the Mormons. My reason for thinking this is simple. It is the polygamy always tends to die out. Even in the East I believe that counting heads it is by this time the exception rather than the rule. Like slavery it is always being started because of its obvious conveniences. It has only one small inconvenience which is that it is intolerable. Our real error in such a case is that we do not know or care about the greed itself from which a people's customs good or bad will necessarily flow. We talk much about respecting this or that person's religion but the way to respect a religion is to treat it as a religion to ask what are its tenets and what are their consequences but modern tolerance is deffer than intolerance. The old religious authorities at least defined a heresy before they condemned it and read a book before they burned it but we are always saying to a Mormon or a Muslim never mind about your religion come to my arms to which he naturally replies but I do mind about my religion and I advise you to mind your eye. About half the history now taught in schools and colleges is made windy and barren by this narrow notion of political theories. The wars and parliaments of the Puritans made absolutely no sense if we leave out the fact that Calvinism appeared to them to be the absolute metaphysical truth unanswerable, unreplaceable and the only thing worth having in the world. The Crusades and dynastic quarrels of the Norman and Angevan Keens made absolutely no sense if we leave out the fact that these men were enthusiastic for the doctrine, discipline and endowment of Catholicism. Yet I have read a history of the Puritans by a modern nonconformist in which the name of Calvin was not even mentioned which is like writing a history of the Jews without mentioning either Abraham or Moses and I have never read any popular or educational history of England that gave the slightest hint of the motives in the human mind in England with Abbeys and Palestine with Banners. Historians seem to have completely forgotten the two facts. First, that men act from ideas. The second, that it might therefore be as well to discover which ideas. The Medieval's did not believe primarily in chivalry but in Catholicism as producing chivalry among other things. The Puritans did not believe primarily in righteousness and Calvinism as producing righteousness among other things. It was the creed that held the course or cunning men of the world at both apes. William the Conqueror was in some ways a cynical and brutal soldier but he did not attach importance to the fact that the church upheld his enterprise. That Harold had sworn falsely on the bones of saints and that the banner above his own lances had been blessed by the Pope. Cromwell was in some ways a cynical and brutal soldier but he did attach importance to the fact that he had gained assurance from on high in the Calvinistic scheme that the Bible seemed to support him. In short, the most important moment in his own life for him was not when Charles I lost his head but when Oliver Cromwell did not lose his soul. If you leave these things out of the story you are leaving out the story itself. If William Rufus was only a red-haired man who liked hunting why did he force Anselm's head under a mitre instead of forcing his head under a headman's axe? If John Bunyan only cared for righteousness why was he in terror of being damned when he knew he was rationally righteous? We shall never make anything of moral and religious movements in history until we begin to look at their practice. For their practice, as in the case of Mormons it's often so unfamiliar and frantic that it is quite unintelligible without their theory. I have not the space even if I had the knowledge to describe the fundamental theories of Mormonism about the universe but they are extraordinarily interesting and a proper understanding of them would certainly enable us to see daylight through the more perplexing customs of this community. And therefore to judge how far polygamy was in their scheme a permanent and self-renewing principle or as is quite probable a personal and unscrupulous accident. The basic Mormon belief is one that comes out of the morning of the earth from the most primitive and even infantile attitude. Their chief dogma is that God is material, not that he was materialized once as all Christians believe nor that he is materialized specially as all Catholics believe but that he was materially embodied from all time. That he has a local habitation as well as a name. Under the influence of this barbaric but violently vivid conception these people crossed a great desert with their guns and oxen patiently, persistently, and courageously as if they were following a vast invisible giant who was standing across the plains. In other words this strange sect by soaking itself solely in the Hebrew scriptures had really managed to reproduce the atmosphere of those scriptures as they are felt by Hebrews rather than by Christians. A number of dull, earnest, ignorant black-coated men with chimney-pot hats, chin-beards and button-chop whiskers managed to reproduce in their own souls the richness and the peril of an ancient oriental experience. If we think from this end we may possibly guess how it was that they added polygamy. In the section 23 Section 24 of the Uses of Diversity this is a labor fox recording all labor fox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit laborfox.org The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton The only objection to the excellent series of pageants that has adorned England of late is that they are made too expensive. The mass of the common people cannot afford to see the pageant so they are obliged to put up with the inferior function of acting in it. I myself got in with the rabble in this way. It was to the church pageant and I was much impressed with certain illuminations which such an experience makes possible. A pageant exhibits all the fun of a fancy dress ball with this great difference that its motive is reverent instead of irreverent. In the one case a man dresses up as his great-grandfather in order to make game of his great-grandfather. In the other case in order to do him honor what the great-grandfather himself would think of either of them, we fortunately have not to conjecture. The alteration is important and satisfactory. All natural men regard their ancestors as dignified because they are dead. It was a great pity and folly that we had fallen into the habit of regarding the Middle Ages as a mere second-hand shop for comic costumes, medieval costume and heraldry had been meant as the very manifestation of courage and publicity and a decent pride. Colors were worn that they might be conspicuous across the battlefield. An animal was rampant on a helmet that he might stand up evident against the sky. The medieval time has been talked of too much as if it were full of twilight and secrecies. It was a time of a vowel and of what many modern people call this was that of his family or his trade or his religion and these are exactly the three things which we now think it bad-taste to discuss. Imagine a modern man being dressed in green and orange because he was a Robinson or imagine him dressed in blue and gold because he was an auctioneer or imagine him dressed in purple and silver because he was an agnostic. He is now dressed only in disguise of a gentle man which tells one nothing at all not even whether he is one. If ever he dresses up as a cavalier or a monk it is only as a joke very often as a disreputable and craven joke. A joke in a mask that vivid and heraldic costume which was meant to show everybody who a man was is now chiefly worn by people at convent garden masquerades who wish to conceal who they are. The clerk dresses up as a monk in order to be absurd. If the monk dressed up as a clerk in order to be absurd I could understand it though the escapade might disturb his monastic superiors a man in a sensible gown and hood might possibly put on a top hat and a pair of trousers in order to cover himself with derision and some extravagance of mystical humility but that a man who knows himself to the startled sky every morning in a top hat and trousers should think at comic to put on a simple and dignified robe and hood is a situation which almost splits the brain. Things like the church pageant may do something towards snubbing the silly and diverse view of the past. Hither too the young stockbroker when he wanted to make a fool of himself dressed up as cardinal Woolsey it may now begin to dawn on him that he ought rather to make a wise man of himself before attempting the impersonation. Nevertheless the truth which the pageant has to tell the British public is rather more special and curious than one might at first assume it is easy enough to say in the rough that modern dress is dingy and that the dress of our fathers was more bright and picturesque but that is not really the point. At full ham palace one can compare the huge crowd of people acting in the pageant with the huge crowd of people looking at it. There is a startling difference but it is not a mere difference between gaiety and gloom. There is many a respectable young woman in the audience who has on her own hat more colors than the whole pageant put together there are belts of brown and black in the pageant itself the puritans round the scaffold of laud or the black rogue doctors of the 18th century there are patches of purple and yellow in the audience the more select young ladies and the less select young gentlemen. It is not that our age has no appetite for the gay or the gaudy it is a very hedonistic age it is not the past ages even the rich symbolic middle ages did not feel any sense of safety in what somber or restrained. A friar in a brown coat is much more severe than an arry in a brown bowler. Why is it that he is also much more pleasant? I think the whole difference is in this that the first man is brown with a reason and the second without a reason. If a hundred monks wore one brown habit it was because they felt that their toil and brotherhood were well expressed in being clad in the course dark color of the earth. I do not say that they said so or even clearly thought so but their artistic instinct went straight when they chose the mud color for laborious brethren or the flame color for the first princes of the church. But when arry puts on a brown bowler he does not either with his consciousness or his subconsciousness that rich soil feel that he is crowning his brows with the brown earth, clasping round his temples a strange crown of clay. He does not wear a dust colored hat as a form of strewing dust upon his head. He wears a dust colored hat because the nobility and gentry who are his models discourage him from wearing a crimson hat or a golden hat or a peacock green hat. He is not thinking of the brownness of brown. It is not to him a symbol of the roots of realism or of a talklinous humility. On the contrary, he thinks it looks rather classy. The modern trouble is not that the people do not see splendid colors or striking effects. The trouble is that they see too much of them and see them divorced from all reason. It is a misfortune of modern language that the word insignificant is vaguely associated with the words small or slight. But a thing is insignificant when we do not know what it signifies. An African elephant lying dead in Ludgate Circus would be insignificant. That is, one could not recognize it as the sign or message of anything. One could not regard it as an allegory or a love token. One could not even call it a hint. In the same way, the solar system is insignificant unless you have some special religious theory of what it means. It is merely big and silly, like the elephant in Ludgate Circus. And similarly, modern life with its fastness, its energy, its elaboration, its wealth is, in the exact sense, insignificant. Nobody knows what we mean. We do not know ourselves. Nobody could explain intelligently why a coat is black, why a waistcoat is white, why asparagus is eaten with the fingers, or why Hammersmith omnibuses are painted red. The Medieval had a much stronger idea of crowding all possible significance into things. If they had consented to waist red paint on a large and ugly Hammersmith omnibus, it would have been in order to suggest that there was some sort of gory magnanimity about Hammersmith. A heraldic lion is no more like a real lion than a chimney pot hat is like a chimney pot, but the lion was meant to be a lion and the chimney pot hat was not meant to be like a chimney pot or like anything else. The resemblance only struck certain philosophers, probably gutter boys, afterwards. The top hat was not intended as a high, uncastillated tower. It was not intended at all. This is the real baseness of modernity. This is, for example, the only real vulgarity of advertisements. It is not that the colors on the posters are bad. It is that they are much too good for the meaningless work which they serve. When at last people see as at the pageant crosses and dragons, leopards and lilies, there is scarcely one of the things that they now see as a symbol they have not already seen as a trademark. If the great Assumption of the Virgin were painted in front of them, they might remember blanks blue. If the Emperor of China were buried before them, the yellow robes might remind them of dashes mustard. We have not the task of preaching color and gaiety to a people that has never had it. To Puritans who have neither seen nor appreciated it, we have a harder task. We have to teach those to appreciate it who have always seen it. End of section 24.