 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, a miscellany of men by G. K. Chesterton. Section 13 The contented man. The word content is not inspiring nowadays. Rather, it is irritating because it is dull. It prepares the mind for a little sermon in the style of the vicar of Wakefield about how you and I should be satisfied with our contrified innocence and our simple village sports. The word, however, has two meanings, somewhat singularly connected. The sweet content of the poet and the cubic content of the mathematician. Some distinguish these by stressing the different syllables. Thus it might happen to any of us at some social juncture to remark gaily of the content of the king of the cannibal islands, Stupot. I am content to be ignorant or not content with measuring the cubic content of my safe. You are stealing the spoons, and there really is an analogy between the mathematical and the moral use of the term, or lack of the observation of which the latter has been much weakened and misused. The preaching of contentment is in disrepute, well deserved insofar that the moral is really quite inapplicable to the anarchy and insane peril of our tall and toppling cities. Content suggests some kind of security, and it is not strange that our workers should often think about rising above their position, since they have so continually to think about sinking below it. The philanthropist who urges the poor to saving and simple pleasures deserves all the derision that he gets. To advise people to be content with what they have got may or may not be sound moral philosophy. But to urge people to be content with what they haven't got is a piece of impudence hard for even the English poor to pardon. But though the creed of content is unsuited to certain special riddles and wrongs, it remains true for the normal of mortal life. We speak of divine discontent. Discontent may sometimes be a divine thing, but content must always be the human thing. It may be true that a particular man in his relation to his master or his neighbor, to his country or his enemies, will do well to be fiercely unsatisfied or thirsting for an angry justice. But it is not true, no sane person can call it true, that man as a whole in his general attitude towards the world, in his posture towards death or green fields, towards the weather or the baby, will be wise to cultivate dissatisfaction. In a broad estimate of our earthly experience, the great truism on the tablet remains. He must not covet his neighbor's ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his. In highly complex and scientific civilizations, he may sometimes find himself forced into an exceptional vigilance. But then, in highly complex and scientific civilization, nine times out of ten, he only wants his own ass back. But I wish to urge the case for cubic content, in which even more than in moral content, I take a personal interest. Now, moral content has been undervalued and neglected because of its separation from the other meaning. It has become a negative rather than a positive thing. In some accounts of contentment, it seems to be a little more than a meek despair. But this is not the true meaning of the term. It should stand for the idea of a positive and thorough appreciation of the content of anything, or feeling the substance and not merely the surface of experience. Content ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased, placidly perhaps, but still positively pleased. Being contented with bread and cheese ought not to mean not caring what you eat. It ought to mean caring for bread and cheese, handling and enjoying that cubic content of the bread and cheese and adding it to your own. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resign to living in it. It ought to mean appreciating what there is to appreciate in such a position, such as the quaint and elvish slope of the ceiling, or the sublime aerial view of the opposite chimney pots. And in this sense, contentment is a real and even an active virtue. It is not only affirmative, but creative. The poet in the attic does not forget the attic in poetic usings. He remembers whatever the attic has of poetry. He realizes how high, how starry, how cool, how unadorned and simple. In short, how attic is the attic. True contentment is the thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare. The absence of this digestive talent is what makes so cold and incredible the tales of so many people who say they have been through things when it is evident that they have come out on the other side quite unchanged. A man might have gone through a plum pudding as a bullet might go through a plum pudding. It depends on the size of the pudding and the man. But the awful and sacred question is, has the pudding been through him? Has he tasted, appreciated and absorbed the solid pudding with its three dimensions and its three thousand tastes and smells? Can he offer himself to the eyes of men as one who has cubically conquered and contained a pudding? In the same way we may ask of those who profess to have passed through trivial or tragic experiences, whether they have absorbed the content of them, whether they licked up such living waters as there was. It is a pertinent question in connection with many modern problems. Thus the young genius says, I have lived in my dreary and squalid village before I found success in Paris or Vienna. The sound philosopher will answer, you have never lived in your village, or you would not call it dreary and squalid. Thus the imperialist, the colonial idealist, who commonly speaks and always thinks with a Yankee accent will say, I have been right away from these little muddy islands and seen God's great seas and prairies. The sound philosopher will reply, you have never been in these islands, you have never seen the wheel of Sussex or the plain of Salisbury, otherwise you could never have called them either muddy or little. Thus the suffragette will say, I have passed through the poultry duties of pots and pans, the drudgery of the vulgar kitchen, but I have come out to intellectual liberty. The sound philosopher will answer, you have never passed through the kitchen, or you never would call it vulgar. Wiser and stronger women than you have really seen a poultry in pots and pans, naturally because there is a poultry in them. It is right for the village violinist to climb into fame in Paris or Vienna. It is right for the stray English man to climb across the high shoulders of the world. It is right for the woman to climb into whatever cathedral or high places she can allow to her sexual dignity. But it is wrong that any of these climbers should kick the ladder by which they have climbed. But indeed these bitter people who record their experiences really record their lack of experiences. It is the countryman who has not succeeded in being a countryman who comes up to London. It is the clerk who has not succeeded in being a clerk who tries on vegetarian principles to be a countryman. And the woman with a past is generally a woman angry about the past she never had. When you have really exhausted an experience, you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through our childhood and youth, and though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful because we have drunk them dry. The angry author is farewell. I have republished all these old articles of mine because they cover a very controversial period in which I was in nearly all the controversies, whether I was visible there or no. And I wish to gather up into this last article a valedictory violence about all such things, and then pass to where, beyond these voices, there is peace, or in other words, to the writing of Penny Dreadfuls, a noble and much needed work. But before I finally desert the illusions of rationalism, or the actualities of romance, I should very much like to write one last roaring raging book telling all the rationalists not to be so utterly irrational. The book would be simply a string of violent vetoes, like the Ten Commandments. I would call it don'ts for dogmatists, or things I am tired of. This book of intellectual etiquette, like most books of etiquette, would begin with superficial things. But there would be, I fancy, a wailing implication in the words that could not be called artificial. It might begin thus, one, don't use a noun, and then an adjective that crosses out the noun. An adjective qualifies. It cannot contradict. Don't say, give me a patriotism, that is free from all boundaries. It is like saying, give me a pork pie, with no pork in it. Don't say, I look forward to that larger religion that shall have no special dogmas. It is like saying, I look forward to that larger quadruped, who shall have no feet. A quadruped means something with four feet, and a religion means something that commits a man to some doctrine about the universe. Don't let the meek's substantive be absolutely murdered by the joyful exuberant adjective. Two. Don't say, you are not going to say a thing, and then say it. This practice is very flourishing and successful with public speakers. The trick consists of first repudiating a certain view in unfavorable terms, and then repeating the same view in favorable terms. Perhaps the simplest form of it may be found in a landlord of my neighborhood, who said to his tenants in an election speech, of course I'm not going to threaten you, but if this budget passes the rents will go up. The thing can be done in many forms beside this. I am the last man to mention party politics, but when I see the empire rent in pieces by irresponsible radicals, etc., etc. In this hall we welcome all creeds. We have no hostility against any honest belief, but only against that black priest craft and superstition which can accept such a doctrine as, etc. I would not say one word that could ruffle our relations with Germany, but this I will say that when I see ceaseless and unscrupulous armament, etc., please don't do it. Decide to make a remark or not to make a remark, but don't fancy that you have somehow softened the saying of a thing by having just promised not to say it. Three. Don't use secondary words as primary words. Happiness, let us say, is a primary word. You know when you have the thing and you jolly well know it when you haven't. Progress is a secondary word. It means the degree of one's approach to happiness or to some such solid ideal, but modern controversies constantly turn on asking, does happiness help progress? Thus I see in the New Age this week a letter from Mr. Edgerton Swan in which he warns the world against me and my friend Mr. Bellock on the ground that our democracy is spasmodic, whatever that means, while our reactionism is settled and permanent. It never strikes Mr. Swan that democracy means something in itself while reactionism means nothing, accepting connection with democracy. You cannot react except from something. If Mr. Swan thinks I have ever reacted from the doctrine that the people should rule, I wish he would give me the reference. Four. Don't say there is no true creed for each creed believes itself right and the others wrong. Probably one of the creeds is right and the others are wrong. Diversity does not show that most of the views must be wrong. It does not by the faintest logic show they all must be wrong. I suppose there is no subject on which opinions differ with more desperate sincerity than about which horse will win the derby. These are certainly solemn convictions. Men risk ruin for them. The man who puts his shirt on potasi must believe in that animal and each of the other men putting their last garments upon other quadrupeds must believe in them quite as sincerely. They are all serious and most of them are wrong. But one of them is right. One of the faiths is justified. One of the horses does win. Not always even the dark horse, which might stand for agnosticism, but often the obvious and popular horse of orthodoxy. Democracy has its occasional victories and even the favorite has been known to come in first. But the point here is that something comes in first. That there were many beliefs does not destroy the fact that there was one well founded belief. I believe merely upon authority that the world is round. That there may be tribes who believe it to be triangular or oblong does not alter the fact that it is certainly some shape and therefore not any other shape. Therefore I repeat with the wail of imprecation. Don't say that the variety of creeds prevents you from accepting any creed. It is an unintelligent remark. 5. Don't, if anyone calls your doctrine mad, which is likely enough, don't answer that mad men are only the minority and the sane only the majority. The sane are sane because they are the corporate substance of mankind. The insane are not a minority because they are not a mob. The man who thinks himself a man thinks the next man a man. He reckons his neighbor as himself. But the man who thinks he is a chicken does not try to look through the man who thinks he is glass. The man who thinks himself Jesus Christ does not quarrel with the man who thinks himself Rockefeller as would certainly happen if the two had ever met. But the mad men never meet. It is the only thing they cannot do. They can talk. They can inspire. They can fight. They can found religions. But they cannot meet. Many acts can never be the majority, for the simple reason that they can never be even a minority. If two mad men had ever agreed, they might have conquered the world. 6. Don't say that the idea of human equality is absurd because some men are tall and some short, some clever and some stupid. At the height of the French Revolution, it was noticed that Danton was tall and near it short. In the wildest popular excitement of America, it is known that Rockefeller is stupid and that Brian is clever. The doctrine of human equality reposes upon this, that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid, that there is no big man who has not felt small. Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are. 7. Don't say, oh don't say, that primitive man knocked down a woman with a club and carried her away. Why on earth should he? Does the male sparrow knock down the female sparrow with a palm tree? Does the male giraffe knock down the female giraffe with a palm tree? Why should the male have had to use any violence at any time in order to make the female a female? Why should the woman roll herself in the mire lower than the sow or the she-bear and profess to have been a slave where all these creatures were creators, or all these beasts were gods? Do not talk such bosh. I implore you I supplicate you not to talk such bosh. Utterly and absolutely abolish all such bosh, and we may yet begin to discuss these public questions properly. But I fear my list of protests grows too long and I know it could grow longer forever. The reader must forgive my elongations and elaborations. I fancied for the moment that I was writing a book, The End of Section 13, The End of a Miscellany of Men by G. K. Chesterton.