 Section 26 of fancies versus fads. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Fancies versus Fads by G. K. Chesterton. The Evolution of Slaves A very curious and interesting thing has recently happened in America. There has suddenly appeared an organized political attack on Darwinian evolution, led by an old demagogue appealing entirely to the ideals of democracy. I mean no discredit to Mr. Brian in calling him a demagogue, for I should have been far more heartily on his side in the days when he was a demagogue than in the days when he was a diplomatist. He was a much wiser man when he refused to allow the financiers to crucify humanity on a golden cross, than when he consented to allow the Kaiser to crucify it on an iron cross. The movement is religious and therefore popular, but it is protestant and therefore provincial. Its opponents, the old guard of materialism, will of course do their best to represent it as something like the village that voted the Earth was flat. But there is one sharp difference, which is the point of the whole position. If an ignorant man went about saying that the Earth was flat, the scientific man would promptly and confidently answer, Oh, nonsense. Of course it's round. He might even condescend to give the real reasons, which I believe are quite different from the current ones. But when the private citizen rushes wild-eyed down the streets of Heliopolis, Nebraska, calling out, Have you heard the news? Darwin's wrong. The scientific man does not say, Oh, nonsense. Of course he's right. He says, Trimulously, not entirely wrong, surely not entirely wrong, and we can draw our conclusions. But I believe myself, there is a deeper and more democratic force behind this reaction, and I think it worthy of further study. I recently heard a debate on that American system of class privilege, which we call for convenience prohibition, and I was very much amused by one argument that was advanced in its favor. A very intelligent young American, a Rhodes scholar from Oxford, advanced the theses that prohibition was not a violation of liberty because, if it were fully established, its victims would never know what they had lost. If a generation of total abstainers could once grow up without the desire for drink, they would not be conscious of any restraint on their freedom. The argument is ingenious and promising and opens up a wide field of application. Thus, if I happen to find it convenient to keep minors or other proletarians permanently underground, I have only to make sure that all their babies are born in pitch darkness, and they will certainly never imagine the light of day. My action, therefore, will not only be just and benevolent in itself, but will obviously involve not even the faintest infringement of the ideal of freedom. Or if I merely kidnap all the babies from all the mothers in the country, it is obvious that the infants will not remember their mothers, and in that sense will not miss them. There is, therefore, no reason why I should not adopt this course, and even if I hide the babies from their mothers by locking them up in boxes, I shall not be violating the principle of liberty because the babies will not understand what I have done. Or, to take a comparison even closer in many ways, there is an ordinary social problem like dress. I come to the conclusion that ladies spend too much money on dress, that it is a social evil because families suffer from the extravagance, and rivalries and seductions distract the state. I therefore decree on the lines of prohibitionistic logic that the law shall forbid anybody to wear any clothes at all. Nobody who grows up naked, according to this theory, will ever have any regrets for beauty or dignity or decency, and therefore will have suffered no loss. I cannot sufficiently express my admiration for the extraordinary simplicity which can smooth the path of Prussianism with this large elementary and satisfactory principle. So long as we tyrannize enough, we are not tyrannizing at all, and so long as we steal enough, our victims will never know what has been stolen. Seriously, everybody knows that the rich planning, the oppression of the poor, will never lack a psychophant to act as a sophist. But I never dreamed that I should live to enjoy so crude and stark and startling a sophistry's this. But the last example I gave, that of the normality of clothes or of nakedness, has a further relevance in this connection. What is really at the back of the minds of people who say these strange things is one very simple error. They imagine that the drinking of fermented liquor has been an artifice and a luxury. Something odd, like the strange self-indulgence is praised by the decadent poets. This is simply an accident of the ignorance of history and humanity. Drinking fermented liquor is not a fashion like wearing a green carnation. It is a habit like wearing clothes. It is one of the habits that are indeed man's second nature. If indeed they are not his first nature, wine is purest and healthiest in the highest civilization. Just as clothing is most complete in the highest civilization. But there is nothing to show that the savage has not shed the clothes of a higher civilization, retaining only the ornaments. As a good many fashionable people in our own civilization seem to be doing now. And there is nothing to show that ruder races who brew their native beers in Africa or Polynesia have not lost the art of brewing something better. Just as prohibitionist America, before our very eyes, has left off brewing Christian beer and taken to drinking fermented wood pulp and methylated spirit, the very example of modern America falling from better to baser drinks under a dismal taboo is a perfect model of the way in which civilizations have relapsed into savagery and produced the savages we know. But the point is that drink, like dress, is the rule, and the exceptions only prove the rule. There are individuals who, for personal in particular reasons, are right to drink no liquor but water. Just as there are individuals who have to stay in bed and wear no clothes but bedclothes, there have been sects of Muslims and there have been sects of Adamites. There have been, as I have said, arborized peoples fallen so far from civilization as to wear grotesque garments or none, or to drink bad beer or none. But nobody has ever seen primitive man, naked and drinking water. He is a myth of the modern mythologists. Man, as Aristotle saw long ago, is an abnormal animal whose nature it is to be civilized. Insofar as he ever becomes uncivilized, he becomes unnatural and even artificial. Now at the back of all this, of course, the real difference is religious. I only take this one case of what is called temperance for the sake of the wider philosophy that underlies it. When my young American friend talked of the next generation growing up without the desire for alcohol, he had, at the back of his mind, a certain idea. It is the idea which I have just seen expressed by another American in a Hybrow article, in the words, Evolution does not stand still. We are not finished. The world is not finished. What it means is that the nature of man can be modified to suit the convenience of particular men, and this would certainly be very convenient. If the rich man wants the miners to live underground, he may really breed for it a new race as blind as bats and owls. If he finds it cheaper to run the school and school inspections on edomite principles, he can hope to produce edomites not merely as a sect, but as a species. And the same will be true of teetotalism or of vegetarianism. Nature, having evolved man who is an ale-drinking animal, may now evolve a superman or a sub-man who shall be a water-drinking animal, having risen from a monkey who eats nuts to a man who eats mutton. He may rise yet higher by eating nuts again. Thinking people, of course, know that. All that is nonsense. They know there is no such constant flux of adaptation. So far from saying that the evolution of man has not finished, they will point out that, as far as we know, it has not begun. In all the 5,000 years of recorded history, and in all the prehistoric indications before it, there is not a shadow or suspicion of movement or change. In the human biological type, even evolution, let alone natural selection, is only a conjecture about things unknown, compared with the broad daylight of things known in all those thousands of years. The only difference is that evolution seems a probable conjecture, and natural selection is on the face of it an extravagantly improbable one. All this, which is obvious to thinking people, has at last become obvious even to the most on thinking. And that is the meaning of the attack on Darwinism in America and the battle of Mr. Bryan against the missing link. The secret is out. The abscurantism of the professors is over. Those of us who have humbly hammered on this point from time to time suddenly find ourselves hammering on an open door. For these changes almost always come suddenly, which is alone enough to show that human history at least has never been merely an evolution. As Darwinism came with a rush, so anti-Darwinism has come with a rush, and just as people who accepted evolution could not be held back from embracing natural selection, so it is likely enough that many who now see reason to reject natural selection will not be stopped in their course till they have also rejected evolution. They will merely have a vague but angry conviction that the professors have been kidding them, but behind all this there will be a very real moral and religious reaction. The meaning of which is what I have described in this article. It is the profound popular impression that scientific materialism at the end of its hundred years is found to have been used chiefly for the oppression of the people. Of this the most evident example is that evolution itself can be offered as something able to evolve a people who can be oppressed. As in the argument about prohibition, it will offer to breed slaves to produce a new race indifferent to its rights. Morally the argument is quite indistinguishable from justifying assassination by promising to bring up children as suicides who will prefer to be poisoned. End of section 26 Section 27 of fancies versus fans This is a LibraBox recording. All LibraBox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibraBox.org. Fancies versus Fads by G. K. Chesterton Is Darwin Dead? Mr. Ernest Newman, that lively and acute critic, once rebuked the arrogance of those of us who confessed that we knew nothing about music, why he should suppose we are arrogant about it if he does think so, I cannot quite understand. I, for one, am fully conscious of my inferiority to him and others through this deficiency, nor is it, alas, the only deficiency. I have sometimes thought it would be wholesome for anybody who has succeeded pretty well by some trick of some trade to have a huge notice board or diagram hung in front of him all day, showing exactly where he stood in all the other crafts and competitions of mankind. Thus the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, as it rose from the paper on which an entirely new type of villainel had just sprung into being, would encounter the disconcerting facts and figures about his suitability to be a professional acrobat or a pearl diver. On the other hand, the radiant victor in the great international egg and spoon race can see at a glance how very far down he stands, so to speak, in the queue of those waiting for the post of astronomer royal. Most of us have at least one or two gaps in our general culture and information, and sometimes whole departments of knowledge are practically hidden from whole generations and classes of mankind. There is something very defective and disproportionate about even the ideal culture of a modern man. It may be that Mr. Newman is deeply read in that medieval theology, which is still the subconscious basis of most morality, but it is also possible that he is not. He may have at his fingers ends that military art which has often turned the fortunes of history, but he may not. He would be nonetheless a highly cultivated gentleman, if he did not. Yet the mystical and the military mind have been at least as pivotal and practical in history as the musical mind. I can admire them all, but I have no claim to possess any of them. But my ignorance of music happens to assist me with a convenient metaphor in the more controversial matter of my ignorance of science. I once made some remarks about the decline of Darwinism in a review of the Wells Outline of History. This aroused rather excited criticism, but one comparatively calm critic challenged what really interests me in the matter. He said that my conundrums about the wing of the bat and similar things could easily be solved on purely Darwinian lines by any competent zoologist, or even by one so incompetent as myself. The conundrum in question, of course, concerns the survival value of features in their unfinished state. If a thing can fly, it may survive. And if it has a wing, it may fly. But if it cannot fly with half a wing, why should it survive with half a wing? Yet Darwinism presupposes that numberless generations could survive before one generation could fly. Now it is quite true that I am not even an incompetent zoologist, and that my critic is more competent than I if only in the mere fact of being a zoologist at all. Nevertheless, I adhere to my opinion, and to do so for a reason that seems to me worthy of some little consideration. I do it because this does happen to be exactly one of those questions on which, as it seems to me, the independent critic has really a right to check the specialist. For it is a larger question of logic, and not a smaller question of fact. It is like the difficulty of believing that a half penny can fall head or tail a hundred times running, which has nothing to do with the numismatic value of the coin. It is like the difficulty of believing that a mere tax could make a loaf cheaper, which has nothing to do with the agrarian craft of growing corn. There is a general tide of reason flowing against such improbabilities, even if they are possibilities. They would still be exceptions, and reason would be on the side of the rule. And whatever the details of natural history, this thing is against the very nature of things. To explain what I mean, I will take this parallel of the technique of music, of which I know even less than of the technique of natural history. To begin with a simple, though moving musical instrument, suppose an expert told me that a coach horn could be blown quite as well as if it were only two feet long. I should believe him, partly because it seems probable enough, and partly because I know nothing about the matter. I am not even an incompetent coach horn blower, but I should certainly not believe him if he told me. As a generalization about all musical instruments, that half a musical instrument was better than no music, or even as good as any music, I should disbelieve it because it is inconsistent with the general nature of a musical instrument or any instrument. I should disbelieve it long before I had thought of the thousand particular instruments to which it does not apply. I should not primarily need to think of the particular examples, though they are obvious enough. A stringed instrument cannot even be called stringed without two fixed points to hold both ends of the string. At the stage when the fiddle strings floated like filaments in the void, feeling their way towards an evolutionary other end of nowhere, there could be nothing serving any purpose of a fiddle. A drum with a hole in it is not a drum at all, but an evolutionary drum has to turn slowly into a drum. When it has begun by being only a hole, I cannot see any survival for a bagpipe that begins by being slit. I think such bagpipes would die with all their music in them. I feel a faint doubt mingled with fascination about the idea that a violin could grow out of the ground like a tree. It would at least make a charming fairy story, but whether or no a fiddle could grow like a tree. I feel sure nobody could play on it while it was still only a twig, but all these, as I say, are only examples that throng into the mind afterwards of a principal scene in a flash from the first of things serving particular purposes by a balance and arrangement of parts. It cannot be generally true that they are fit for use before they are finished for use. It is against the general nature of such things and can only be true by an individual coincidence. I can see for myself, for instance, that some particular case like the trunk of an elephant might really be compared to the simpler case of the coach horn. Length and flexibility are mere matters of degree, and I might possibly find it convenient if my nose were six inches longer and sufficiently lively to be able to point right and left at various objects on the tea table. But this is simply an accident of the particular qualities of length and laxity, not a general truth about the qualities of growth and use. It is not in the least true that I should experience the least convenience from the membrane between my fingers, thickening or widening a little, even if an evolutionist at my elbow comforted and inspired me with the far-off divine event when my descendant should have the wings of a bat. Until the membrane can really be spread properly from point to point it is like the fiddle string before it is stretched properly from point to point. It is no nearer serving its ultimate purpose than if it were not there at all. But it would be easy to find a similar animal parallel to the drum with a hole in it. There are monsters who would die instantly if they could not close the holes in their head underwater. One supposes they would have died swiftly before their closing apparatus could develop slowly. But the principle is a general one and is involved in the very nature of any apparatus. It is only by way of figure of speech in defense of the freedom of the ignorant that I take the type of a musical apparatus. I take it because I am entirely ignorant of musical instruments. I am of the candid class of those who have never tried to perform on the violin. I cannot play upon this pipe, especially if it be a bagpipe. But if anybody tells me that the wildest pee broach rose from a whisper gradually, as a hole in the windbag was filled up gradually, why then I shall not be so rude. I hope as to say that there is a windbag in his head, but I shall venture to say that there is a hole in his argument. And if he says that pieces of wood came together slowly, stick by stick, to form a fiddle, and that before it was yet a fiddle at all, the stick's discourse most excellent music, why, I fear I shall be content to say fiddle sticks. There is another answer often made which seems, to me, even more illogical. The critic generally says it is unreasonable to expect from the geological record that continuous gradation of types which the challengers of Darwinism demand. He says that only a part of the earth can be examined, and that it could not in any case prove so much. This mode of argument involves an amazing oblivion of what is the thing to be proved, and who is trying to prove it. By hypothesis, the Darwinians are trying to prove Darwinism. The anti-Darwinians are not trying to prove anything, except that the Darwinians have not proved it. I do not demand anything in the sense of complaining anything or the absence of anything. I am quite comfortable in a completely mysterious cosmos. I am not reviling the rocks or cursing the eternal hills for not containing these things. I am only saying that these are the things they would have to contain to make me believe something that somebody else wants me to believe. These traces are not things that the anti-Darwinian demands. They are things that the Darwinian requires. The Darwinian requires them in order to convince his opponent of Darwinism. His opponent may be right or wrong, but he cannot be expected to accept the mere absence of them as proof of Darwinism. If the evidences in support of the theory are unfortunately hidden, why then? We do not know whether they were in support of the theory. If the proofs of natural selection are lost, why then? There are no proofs of natural selection, and there is an end of it. And I would respectfully ask these critics what would be thought of a theological or miraculous argument which thus based itself on the very gaps in its own evidence. Let them indulge in the flight of fancy that I have just told them. Let us say that I saw the devil at Brighton, and that the proof of his presence there can still be seen on the sands in gigantic marks of a cloven hoof as big as the foot of an elephant. Suppose we all search the sands of Brighton and find no such thing, and suppose I then say that, after all, the tide might have washed away the footprints, or that the fiend may have flown through the air from his little country seat at the dyke, or that he may have walked along the hard asphalt of Brighton parade as proudly as once upon the flaming moral. To those acquainted with Brighton parade, this will seem probably enough, but there would be a fallacy in merely saying that the evil spirit may have done all this. The skeptic will not unnaturally reply, yes, he may, and he may not, and it may be a legend, and you may be a liar. And I think our little investigation is now concluded. I am very far indeed from calling the Darwinian a liar, but I shall continue to say that he is not always a logician. End of Section 27. When the author of If Winter Comes brought out another book about the life of the family, it was almost as much criticized as the first book was praised. I do not say that there was nothing to criticize, but I do say that I was not convinced by the abstract logic of the criticism. Probably the critics would have accepted it as a true story if the author had not been so incautious as to give it a true moral. And the moral is not fashionable in the press at the moment, for it is to the effect that a woman may gain a professional success at the price of a domestic failure. And it is the convention of journalism at this moment to support what is feminist against what is feminine. Anyhow, while the story might be criticized, the criticisms can certainly be criticized. It is not really conclusive to say that a woman may be ambitious in business without her children going to the bad. It is just as easy to say that a woman may be ambitious in politics without helping to murder an old gentleman in his bed. But that does not make Macbeth either inartistic or untrue. It is just as easy to say that a woman may be ambitious in society without tricking her husband into a debtor's prison so that she may spend the time with a bald-headed nobleman with red whiskers. But that does not make the great scene in Vanity Fair unconvincing either in detail or design. The question in fiction is not whether that thing must occur but whether that sort of thing may occur and whether it is significant of larger things. Now, this business of the woman at work and the woman at home is a very large thing and this story about it is highly significant. For in this matter the modern mind is inconsistent with itself. It has managed to get one of its rather crude ideals in flat contradiction to the other. People of the progressive sort are perpetually telling us that the hope of the world is in education. Education is everything. Nothing is so important as training the rising generation. Nothing is really important except the rising generation. They tell us this over and over again with slight variations of the same formula and never seem to see what it involves. For if there be any word of truth in all this talk about the education of the child, then there is certainly nothing but nonsense in nine tenths of the talk about the emancipation of the woman. If education is the highest function in the state, why should anybody want to be emancipated from the highest function in the state? It is as if we talked of commuting the sentence that condemned a man to be president of the United States or a reprieve coming in time to save him from being pope. If education is the largest thing in the world, what is the sense of talking about a woman being liberated from the largest thing in the world? It is as if we were to rescue her from the cruel doom of being a poet like Shakespeare or to pity the limitations of an all-around artist like Leonardo da Vinci. Nor can there be any doubt that there is truth in this claim for education. Only precisely the sort of which it is particularly true is the sort called domestic education. Private education really is universal. Public education can be comparatively narrow. It would really be an exaggeration to say that the schoolmaster who takes his pupils in free hand drawing is training them in all the uses of freedom. It really would be fantastic to say that the harmless foreigner who instructs a class in French or German is talking with all the tongues of men and angels, but the mother dealing with her own daughters in her own home does literally have to deal with all forms of freedom because she has to deal with all sides of a single human soul. She is obliged, if not to talk with the tongues of men and angels, at least to decide how much she shall talk about angels and how much about men. In short, if education is really the larger matter, then certainly domestic life is the larger matter. And official or commercial life the lesser matter. It is a mere matter of arithmetic that anything taken from the larger matter will leave it less. It is a mere matter of simple subtraction that the mother must have less time for the family if she has more time for the factory. If education, ethical and cultural, really were a trivial and mechanical matter, the mother might possibly rattle through it as a rapid routine before going about her more serious business of serving a capitalist for hire. If education were merely instruction, she might briefly instruct her babies in the multiplication tables before she mounted to hire and nobler spheres as the servant of a milk trust or the secretary of a drug combine. But the moderns are perpetually assuring us that education is not instruction. They are perpetually insisting that it is not a mechanical exercise and must on no account be an abbreviated exercise. It must go on at every hour. It must cover every subject. But if it must go on at all hours, it must not be neglected in business hours. And if the child is to be free to cover every subject, the parent must be free to cover every subject too. For the idea of a non-parental substitute is simply an illusion of wealth. The advanced advocate of this inconsistent and infinite education for the child is generally thinking of the rich child. And all this particular sort of liberty should rather be called luxury. It is natural enough for a fashionable lady to leave her little daughter with the French governess, or the Czechoslovakian governess, or the ancient Sanskrit governess, and know that one or other of these sides of the infant's intelligence is being developed, while she, the mother, figures in public as a moneylender or some other modern position of dignity. But among poorer people there cannot be five teachers to one pupil. Generally there are about fifty pupils to one teacher. There it is impossible to cut up the soul of a single child and distribute it among specialists. It is all we can do to tear in pieces the soul of a single schoolmaster and distribute it in rags and scraps to a whole mob of boys. And even in the case of the wealthy child it is by no means clear that specialists are a substitute for spiritual authority. Even a millionaire can never be certain that he has not left out one governess in the long procession of governesses perpetually under his marble portico, and the omission may be as fatal as that of the king who forgot to ask the bad fairy to the christening. The daughter, after a life of ruin and despair, may look back and say, had I but also had a Lithuanian governess, my fate as a diplomatist's wife in Eastern Europe would have been very different. But it seems rather more probable, on the whole, that what she would miss would not be one or other of these special accomplishments, but some common sense code of morals or general view of life. The millionaire could no doubt hire a Mahatma or mystical prophet to give his child a general philosophy, but I doubt if the philosophy would be very successful even for the rich child and it would be quite impossible for the poor child. In the case of comparative poverty, which is the common lot of mankind, we come back to a general parental responsibility, which is the common sense of mankind. We come back to the parent as the person in charge of education. If you exalt the education, you must exalt the parental power with it. If you exaggerate the education, you must exaggerate the parental power with it. If you depreciate the parental power, you must depreciate education with it. If the young are always right and can do as they like, well and good, let us all be jolly, old and young, and free from every kind of responsibility. But in that case, do not come pestering us with the importance of education when nobody has any authority to educate anybody. Make up your mind whether you want unlimited education or unlimited emancipation, but do not be such a fool as to suppose you can have both at once. There is evidence, as I have noted, that the more hard-headed people, even of the most progressive sort, are beginning to come back to realities in this respect. The new work of Mr. Hutchinson's is only one of many indications among the really independent intelligences, working on modern fiction, that the cruder culture of merely commercial emancipation is beginning to smell a little stale. The work of Ms. Clements-Dane and even of Ms. Sheila K. Smith contains more than one suggestion of what I mean. People are no longer quite so certain that a woman's liberty consists of having a latch key without a house. They are no longer wholly convinced that every housekeeper is dull and prosaic, while every bookkeeper is wild and poetical. And among the intelligent, the reaction is actually strengthened by all the most modern excitements about psychology and hygiene. We cannot insist that every trick of nerves or train of thought is important enough to be searched for in libraries and laboratories, and not important enough for anybody to watch by simply staying at home. We cannot insist that the first years of infancy are of supreme importance and that mothers are not of supreme importance, or that motherhood is a topic of sufficient interest for men, but not of sufficient interest for mothers. Every word that is said about the tremendous importance of trivial nursery habits goes to prove that being a nurse is not trivial. All tends to the return of the simple truth that the private work is the great one and the public work the small. The human house is a paradox, for it is larger inside than out. But in the problem of private versus public life there is another neglected truth. It is true of many masculine problems as well as of this feminine problem. Indeed, feminism falls here into exactly the same mistake as militarism and imperialism. I mean that anything on a grand scale gives the illusion of a grand success. Curiously enough, multiplication acts as a concealment. Repetition actually disguises failure. Take a particular man and tell him to put on a particular kind of hat and coat and trousers and to stand in particular attitudes in the back garden and you will have great difficulty in persuading yourself or him that he has passed through a triumph and transfiguration. Order four hundred such hats and eight hundred such trousers and you will have turned the fancy costume into a uniform. Make all the four hundred men stand in the special attitudes on Salisbury plain and there will rise up before you the spirit of a regiment. Let the regiment march past and if you have any life in you above the brutes that perish you will have an overwhelming sense that something splendid has just happened or is just going to begin. I sympathize with this moral emotion in militarism. I think it does symbolize something great in the soul which has given us the image of St. Michael but I also realize that in practical relations that emotion can get mixed up with an illusion. It is not really possible to know the characters of all the four hundred men in the marching column as well as one might know the character of the one man attitudinizing in the back garden. If all the four hundred men were individual failures we could still vaguely feel that the whole thing was a success. If we know the one man to be a failure we cannot think him a success. That is why a footman has become rather a foolish figure while a foot soldier remains rather a sublime one or rather that is one of the reasons for there are others much more worthy. Anyhow footmen were only formidable or dignified when they could come in large numbers like foot soldiers when they were in fact the feudal army of some great local family having some of the loyalty of local patriotism. Then a livery was as dignified as a uniform because it really was a uniform. A man who said he served the Neville's or rode with the Douglas's could once feel much like a man fighting for France or England but military feeling is mob feeling noble as mob feeling may be. Parading one footman is like lunching on one pea or curing baldness by the growth of one hair. There ought not to be anything but a plural for flunkies any more than for measles or vermin or an amalculay or the sweets called hundreds and thousands. Strictly speaking I suppose that a logical latinist could say I have seen an amalcula but I never heard of a child having the moderation to remark I have eaten a hundred and thousand. Similarly any one of us can feel that to have hundreds and thousands of slaves let alone soldiers might give a certain imaginative pleasure in magnificence. To have one slave reveals all the meanness of slavery for the solitary flunky really is the man in fancy dress the man standing in the back garden in the strange and the fantastic coat and breeches. His isolation reveals our illusion. We find our failure in the back garden when we have been dreaming a dream of success in the marketplace. When you ride through the streets amid a great mob of vassals you may have noticed you have a genial and not ungenerous sense of being at one with them all. You cannot remember their names or count their numbers but their very immensity seems a substitute for intimacy. That is what great men have felt at the head of great armies and the reason why Napoleon or folk would call his soldiers mes enfants. He feels at that moment that they are a part of him as if he had a million arms and legs but it is very different if you disband your army of lackeys or if as is after all possible you have not got an army of lackeys. It is very different if you look at one lackey one solitary solemn footman standing in your front hall. You never have the sense of being caught up into a rapture of unity with him. All your sense of social solidarity with your social inferiors has dropped from you. It is only in public that people can be so intimate as that. When you look into the eyes of the lonely footman you see that his soul is far away. In other words you find yourself at the foot of a steep and staggering mountain crag that is the real character and conscience of a man. To be really at one with that man you would have to solve real problems and believe that your own solutions were real. In dealing with the one man you would really have a far huger and harder job than in dealing with your throng of thousands. And that is the job that people run away from when they wish to escape from domesticity to public work, especially educational work. They wish to escape from a sense of failure which is simply a sense of fact. They wish to recapture the illusion of the marketplace. It is an illusion that departs in the dark interiors of domesticity where the realities dwell. As I've said I am very far from condemning it altogether. It is a lawful pleasure and a part of life in its proper proportion like any other. But I am concerned to point out to the feminists and the faddists that it is not an approach to truth but rather the opposite. Publicity is rather of the nature of a harmless romance. Public life at its very best will contain a great deal of harmless romancing and much more often a very harmful romancing. In other words I am concerned with pointing out that the passage from private life to public life while it may be right or wrong or necessary or unnecessary or desirable or undesirable is always of necessity a passage from a greater work to a smaller one and from a harder work to an easier one. And that is why most of the moderns do wish to pass from the great domestic task to the smaller and easier commercial one. They would rather provide the liveries of a hundred footmen than be bothered with the love affairs of one. They would rather take the solutes of a hundred soldiers than try to save the soul of one. They would rather serve out income tax papers or telegraph forms to a hundred men than meals, conversation and moral support to one. They would rather arrange the educational course in history or geography or correct the examination papers in algebra or trigonometry for a hundred children than struggle with the whole human character of one. For anyone who makes himself responsible for one small baby as a whole will soon find that he is wrestling with gigantic angels and demons. In another way there is something of illusion or of irresponsibility about the purely public function especially in the case of public education. The educationist generally deals with only one section of the pupil's mind but he always deals with only one section of the pupil's life. The parent has to deal not only with the whole of the child's character but also with the whole of the child's career. The teacher sows the seed but the parent reaps as well as sows. The schoolmaster sees more children but it is not clear that he sees more childhood. Certainly he sees less youth and no maturity. The number of little girls who take prussic acid is necessarily small. The boys who hang themselves on bed posts after a life of crime are generally the minority but the parent has to envisage the whole life of the individual and not merely the school life of the scholar. It is not probable that the parent will exactly anticipate crime and prussic acid as the crown of the infant's career but he will anticipate hearing of the crime if it is committed. He will probably be told of the suicide if it takes place. It is quite doubtful whether the schoolmaster or schoolmistress will ever hear of it at all. Everybody knows that teachers have a harassing and often heroic task but it is not unfair to them to remember that in this sense they have an exceptionally happy task. The cynic would say that the teacher is happy in never seeing the results of his own teaching. I prefer to confine myself to saying that he has not the extra worry of having to estimate it from the other end. The teacher is seldom in at the death. To take a milder theatrical metaphor he is seldom there on the night but this is only one of many instances of the same truth that what is called public life is not larger than private life but smaller. What we call public life is a fragmentary affair of sections and seasons and impressions. It is only in private life that dwells the fullness of our life bodily. End of section 28. Recording by Linda Johnson. Section 29. Strikes and the spirit of wonder. There is a story which pleases me so much that I feel sure I have repeated it in print about an alleged and perhaps legendary lady secretary of Madame Blodovatsky or Mrs. Besant who was so much delighted with the new sofa or ottoman that she sat on it by preference when resting or reading her correspondence. At last it moved slightly and she found it was a Mahatma covered with his eastern robe and rigid in prayer or some more impersonal ecstasy. That a lady secretary should have a seat any gentleman will approve that a Mahatma should be sat on no Christian will deny. Nevertheless there is another possible moral to the fable which is a reproach rather to the sitter than the seat. It might be put as in a sort of vision or allegory by imagining that all our furniture really was made thus of living limbs instead of dead sticks. Suppose the legs of the table were literally legs, the legs of slaves standing still. Suppose the arms of an armchair really were arms, the arms of a patient domestic permanently held out like those of an old nurse waiting for a baby. It would be calculated to make the luxurious occupant of the easy chair feel rather like a baby which might do him good. Suppose every sofa were like that of Mrs. Besant's secretary, simply made of a man. They need not be made merely of theosophists or Buddhists, God forbid. Many of us would greatly prefer to trust ourselves to a mausoleum or Turk. This might with strict accuracy be called sitting on an ottoman. I have even read, I think, of some oriental potentate who rejoiced in a name sounding like sofa. It might even be hinted at that some of them might be Christians, but there is no reason, of course, why all of them should not be praying. To sit on a man while he was praying would doubtless require some confidence. It would also give a more literal version of the possession of a pre-deux chair. It would be easy to expand the extravagance into a vision of a whole house alive, an architecture of arms and legs, a temple of temples of the spirit. The four walls might be made of men like the squares in military formation. There is even, perhaps, a shadow of the fantasy in the popular phrases that compare the roof to the human head that named the chimney-pot hat after the chimney, or lightly allude to all modern masculine headdresses as tiles. But the only value of the vision, as of most visions, even the most topsy-turvy ones, is a moral value. It figures forth in emblem enigma the truth that we do treat merely as furniture a number of people who are, at the very least, livestock. And the proof of it is that when they move we are startled, like the secretary sitting on the praying man. But perhaps it is we who should begin to pray. In the current criticisms of the strikes there is a particular tone which affects me not as a matter of politics, but rather of philosophy or even of poetry. It is indeed the servile spirit expressed, if not in its poetry, at least in its rhetoric. But it is a spirit I can honestly claim to have hated and done my best to hammer long before I ever heard of the servile state, long before I ever dreamed of applying this test to strikes, or indeed of applying it to any political question. I felt it originally touching things at once elemental and every day, things like grass or daylight, like stones or daisies. But in the light of it, at least, I always rebelled against the trend or tone of which I speak. It may roughly be described as the spirit of taking things for granted. But indeed, oddly enough, the very form of this phrase rather misses its own meaning. The spirit, I mean, strictly speaking, does not take things for granted. It takes them as if they had not been granted. It takes them as if it held them by something more autocratic than a right, by a cold and unconscious occupation, as stiff as a privilege and as baseless as a caprice. As a fact, things generally are granted ultimately by God, but often immediately by men. But this type of man is so unconscious of what he has been given that he is almost unconscious of what he has got. Not realizing things as gifts, he hardly realizes them as goods. About the natural things with which I began, this oblivion has only inward and spiritual and not outward and political effects. If we forget the sun, the sun will not forget us, or rather, he will not remember us to revenge himself by striking at us with a sunstroke. The stars will not go on strike or extinguish the illumination of the universe as the electricians would extinguish the illumination of the city. And so, while we repeat that there is a special providence in a falling star, we can ignore it in a fixed star. But when we at once ignore and assume thousands of thinking, brooding, free, lonely and capricious human creatures, they will remind us that we can know more order souls than we can order stars. This primary duty of doubt and wonder has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of special industrial quarrels. The workmen might be quite wrong to go on strike, and we should still be much more wrong in never expecting them to go on strike. Ultimately, it is a mystical but most necessary mood of astonishment at everything outside one's own soul, even one's own body. It may even involve a wild vision in which one's own boots on one's own feet seem to be things distant and unfamiliar. And if this sound is shade fantastic, it is far less fantastic than the opposite extreme. The state of the man who feels as if he owned not only his feet, but hundreds of other human feet like a huge centipede, or as if he were a universal octopus, and all rails, tubes and tram lines were his own tentacles, the nerves of his own body, or the circulation of his own blood. That is a much worse nightmare, and at this moment a much commoner one. Tennyson struck a true note of the nineteenth century when he talked about the fairy tales of science in the long result of time. The Victorians had a very real and even childlike wonder at things like the steam engine or the telephone, considered as toys. Unfortunately, the long result of time on the fairy tales of science has been to extend the science and lessen the fairy tale, that is, the sense of the fairy tale. Take, for example, the current state of the tubes. Suppose that at an age of innocence you had met a strange man who had promised to drive you by the force of the lightning through the bowels of the earth. Suppose he had offered, in a friendly way, to throw you from one end of London to the other, not only like a thunderbolt, but by the same force as a thunderbolt. Or if we picture it a pneumatic and not an electric railway, suppose he gaily promised to blow you through a pea-shooter to the other side of London Bridge. Suppose he indicated all these fascinating opportunities by pointing to a hole in the ground and telling you he would take you there in a sort of flying or falling room. I hope you would have agreed that there was a special providence in a falling room. But whether or no you could call it providential you would agree to call it special. You would at least think that the strange man was a very strange man. You would perhaps call him a very strange and special liar if he merely undertook to do it. You might even call him a magician if he did do it. But the point is this, that you would not call him a Bolshevik merely because he did not do it. You would think it a wonderful thing that it should be done at all. Passing in that swift car through those secret caverns you would feel yourself whirled away like Cinderella carried off in the coach that had once been a pumpkin. But though such things happened in every fairytale, they were not expected in any fairytale. Nobody turned on the fairies and complained that they were not working because they were not always working wonders. The press in those parts did not break into big headlines of, Pumpkins held up, no transformation scenes, or Wands won't work, famine of coaches. They did not announce with horror a strike of fairy godmothers. They did not draw panic-stricken pictures of mobs of fairy godmothers, meeting in parks and squares merely because the majority of pumpkins still continued to be pumpkins. Now I do not argue that we ought to treat every tube girl as our fairy godmother. She might resent the familiarity, especially the suggestion of anything so near to a grandmother. But I do suggest that we should, by a return to earlier sentiments, realize that the tube servants are doing something for us that we could not do for ourselves, something that is no part of our natural capacities, or even of our natural rights. It is not inevitable, or in the nature of things, that when we have walked as we can or want to, somebody else should carry us further in a cart, even for hire. Or that when we have wandered up a road and come to a river, a total stranger should take us over in a boat, even if we bribe him to do so. If we would look at things in this plain white daylight of wonder that shines on all the roads of the fairytales, we come to see at last the simplest truth about the strikes, which is utterly missed in all contemporary comments on them. It is merely the fact that strikers are not doing something, they are doing nothing. If you mean that they should be made to do something, say so, and establish slavery. But do not be muddled by the mere word strike into mixing it up with breaking a window or hitting a policeman on the nose. Do not be stunned by a metaphor. There are no metaphors in fairytales. End of Section 29. Section 30 of fancies versus fats. 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 April 6090, California, United States of America. Fancies versus Fats by G. K. Chesterton. Section 30. A nodon old nonsense. The suffragettes have found out that they were wrong. I might even be so egotistical as to say they have found out that we were right. At least they have found out that the modern plutocratic parliamentary franchise is what everyone always said it was. In other words, they are startled and infuriated to find that the most vital modern matters are not settled in parliament at all, but mostly by a conflict or compromise between trusts and trade unions. Hence Mrs. Flora Drummond actually cries aloud that she is being robbed of her precious vote and says dramatically, We women are being disenfranchised, apparently by Soviets. It is as if somebody who had just spent half a million, on a sham diamond, that ought never to have deceived anybody, should shriek from the window that thieves had stolen the real diamond that never existed at all. Whether or no, there are Soviets. There are undoubtedly strikes, and I do not underrate the difficulty or danger of the hour. There is at least a case for blaming men for striking right and left, illogically and without a system. There is a case for blaming them for striking steadily and logically, in accordance with a false system. There is a case for the saying that direct action implies such a false system. But there is no case whatever for blaming them for having depreciated the waste paper of the Westminster ballot box. For that was depreciated long before the war, and long before the word Soviet came to soothe and satisfy the mind of Mrs. Drummond. It is absurd to blame the poor miners for discrediting the members of Parliament, who could always be trusted to discredit themselves. It was not the wild destructive Soviet which decided that Parliament should not know who paid the bills of its own political parties. It was Parliament itself. It was not a mad Bolshevist addressing a mob who said that the men of the parliamentary group had to treat charges of corruption among themselves differently from those outside. It was the greatest living parliamentarian in a great parliamentary debate. Miners had no more to be with it than missionaries in the cannibal islands. It was not because men could not get coal that they wanted to get coronets. And the empty coal scuttle did not fill the party chest. But in any case, the policy of people like Mrs. Drummond seems to require explanation. I can only fall back on the suggestion I have already made, that she and her friends insisted on taking shares in a rotten concern. They were quite sincere. So far as anybody can be quite sincere, who flatly refuses to listen to reason. They have no right to complain if those who had to listen to their lawlessness will not listen to their legalism. As a fact, such a lady is rather contemptuous than complaining. She says the miners do not want nationalization, which may or may not be true, but she explains the demand by the old disdainful allusion to agitators or labor leaders who have to beat the big drum or lose their jobs. Nobody, of course, could possibly connect Mrs. Flora Drummond with the idea of a big drum any more than with a big horse or a uniform or its self-created military rank. But this particular school of feminists must not be too festerious in the present case. The miners are poor and rudely instructed men, and cannot be expected to have that touch of quiet, persuasiveness, and softening courtesy, by which the militant suffragettes did so much to defend the historic dignity of their sex. They have to fall back on something only too like a big drum, having no skill in the silvery flutings of the W.S.P.U. or that tender loot which Miss Pankhurst touched at Twilight, but under all the disadvantages of the course or sex, the advocates of nationalization have not yet used all the methods that precedent might suggest to them. Mr. Smiley has not cut up any Raphaels or Rembrandts at the National Gallery nor even set fire to any of the theatres he may happen to pass when he is out for a walk. Mr. Bohnar Law, on returning home at evening, does not find Mr. Sidney Webb. His solitary figure chained to his aralings. One of the suffragettes distinguished herself by getting an inside a grand piano, but it is seldom that we open our own private piano and find a large coal miner inside the instrument. The coal miner may be better at the big drum than the grand piano, but he remains on the outside of both, and his drum is really smaller than some. The big drum, however, is rather a convenient metaphor for something obvious and loud and hollow. And the true moral in the matter is that recent English history was a procession led far too much by the big drum, and the agitation about mere parliamentary votes was one of the most recent and most remarkable examples of it. What will be the future of the present industrial crisis? I will not prophesy. But I do know that every element in the past, which has led to this impasse in the present, has been thus glorified as a mere novelty by such a noisy minority. It was just because sanguine and shallow people found it easier to act than to write, and easier to write than to think, that every one of the changes came which now complicate our position. The very industrialism which makes us dependent on coal, and therefore on coal miners and coal owners, was forced on us by fussy inefficient fools, for whom anything fresh seemed to be free, neither miners nor mine owners could have put out the fire by which Shakespeare told his winter's tale. The unequal ownership which has justly alienated the workers was hurried happily through, because the owners were new, and it did not matter that they were few. The blind hypocrisy with which our press and publicists hardened their hearts, in the great strikes before the war, was made possible by loud evasions about political progress, and especially by the big drum of votes for women. I have begun this essay on a controversial note, with the echo of an old controversy, and yet I do not mean to be merely provocative. The suffragettes are only doing what we all do, and I have only put them first as an example of accumulated abuses, for which we are all responsible. I do not mean to blame the suffragettes, as they blame the socialists, but only to point to an impasse of impotence, for which we are all to blame. I am more and more convinced, that what is wanted nowadays is not optimism or pessimism, but a sort of reform that might more truly be called repentance. The reform of a state ought to be a thing more like the reform of a thief, which involves the admission that he has been a thief. We ought not to be merely inventing consolations, or even merely prophesying disasters. We ought, first and foremost, to be confessing our own very bad mistakes. It is easy enough to say that the world is getting better, by some mysterious thing called progress, which seems to mean providence without purpose. But it is almost as easy to say the world is getting worse, if we assume that it is only the younger generation that has just begun to make it worse. It is easy enough to say that the country is going to the dogs, if we are careful to identify the dogs with the puppies. What we need is not the assertion that other people are going to the dogs, but the confession that we ourselves have only just come back from the swine. We are also the younger generation, in the sense of being the prodigal son. As somebody said, there is such a thing as the prodigal father. We could purchase hope at the dreadful price of humility, but all thinkers and writers, of all political parties and philosophical sects, seem to shrink from this notion of admitting that they are on the wrong road and getting back onto the right one. They are always trying to pretend, by hook or crook, that they are all on the same somewhat meandering road, and that they were right in going east yesterday, though they are right in going west today. They will try to make out that every school of thought was in advance on the last school of thought, and that no apology is due to anybody. For instance, we might really have a moderate cautious and even conservative reform of the evils affecting labor. If we would only confess that capitalism itself was a blunder, which it is very difficult to undo. As it is, men seem to be divided into those that think it is an achievement so admirable that it cannot be improved upon, and those who think it an achievement so encouraging that it can be improved upon. The former will leave it in chaos, and the latter will probably improve it into slavery. Neither will admit what is the truth, that we have got to get back to a better distribution of property, as it was before we fell into the blunder of allowing property to be clotted into monstrous monopolies. For that involves admitting that we have made a mistake, and that we, none of us, have the moral courage to do. I suggest very seriously that it will do good to our credit for courage and right reason if we drop this way of doing things. The conversions that have converted the world were not affected by this sort of evolutionary curve. Saint Paul did not pretend that he had changed slowly and imperceptibly, from a Pharisee to a Christian. Victor Hugo did not maintain that he had been very right to be a royalist, and only a little more right to be a Republican. If we have come to the conclusion that we have been wrong, let us say so, and congratulate ourselves on being now right, not insinuate that in some relative fashion we were just as right when we were wrong. For in this respect the progressive is the worst sort of conservative. He insists on conserving in the most obstinate and obscurantist fashion all the courses that have been marked out for progress in the past. He does literally, in the rather unlucky metaphor of Tennyson, let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. For anyone who changes in that fashion has only gotten into a groove. There is no obligation on anybody to invent evolutionary excuses for all these experiments. There is no need to be so much ashamed of our blenders as all that. It is human to err, and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred. End of section 30. Fancy's Versus Fads by G.K. Chesterton. Section 31. Milton and Mary England. Mr. Freeman, in contributing to the London Mercury, some of those critical analyses which we all admire, remarked about myself along with compliments only too generous and strictures almost entirely just, that there was very little autobiography in my writings. I hope the reader will not have reason to curse him for this kindly provocation, watching me assume the graceful poses of Marie Bashkertsev, but I feel tempted to plead it in extenuation or excuse for this article which can hardly avoid being egotistical. For though it concerns one of those problems of literature, of philosophy, and of history that certainly interest me more than my own psychology, it is one on which I can hardly explain myself without seeming to expose myself. That valuable public servant, the gentleman with the duster, has passed on from Downing Street, from polishing up the mirrors and polishing off the ministers, to a larger world of reflections in the glass of fashion. I call the glass a world of reflections, rather than a world of shadows, especially as I myself am one of those tenuous shades. And the matter which interests me here is that the critic in question complains that I have been very unjust to Puritans and Puritanism, and especially to a certain ethical idealism in them, which he declares to have been more essential than the Calvinism of which I make so much. He puts the point in a genial but somewhat fantastic fashion by saying that the world owes something to the jokes of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, but more to the moral earnestness of John Milton. This involves rather a dizzy elevation than a salutary depression, and the comparison is rather too overwhelming to be crushing, for I suppose the graceful duster of mirrors himself would hardly feel crushed if I told him he did not hold the mirror up to nature quite so successfully as Shakespeare. Nor can I be described as exactly reeling from the shock of being informed that I am a less historic figure than Milton. I know not how to answer, unless it be in the noble words of Sam Weller. That's what we call a self-evident proposition, as the cat's meat man said to the housemaid when she said he was no gentleman. But for all that, I have a controversial issue with the critic about the moral earnestness of Milton, and I have a confession to make, which will seem to many only too much in the personal manner referred to by Mr. Freeman. My first impulse to write, and almost my first impulse to think, was a revolt of disgust with the decadence and the aesthetic pessimism of the nineties. It is now almost impossible to bring home to anybody, even to myself, how final that fond le siècle seemed to be, not the end of the century, but the end of the world. To a boy, his first hatred is almost as immortal as his first love. He does not realize that the objects of either can alter, and I did not know that the twilight of the gods was only a mood. I thought that all the wit and wisdom in the world were banded together to slander and depress the world, and in becoming an optimist I had the feelings of an outlaw. Like Prince Florizel of Bohemia, I felt myself to be alone in a luxurious suicide club. But even the death seemed to be a living, or rather everlasting death. Today the whole thing is merely dead. It was not sufficiently immortal to be damned, but then the image of Dorian Gray was really an idol with something of the endless youth of a god. Today the picture of Dorian Gray has really grown old. Dodo then was not merely an amusing female, she was the eternal feminine. Today the Dodo is extinct. Then, above all, everyone claiming intelligence insisted on what was called art for art's sake. Today, even the biographer of Oscar Wilde proposes to abandon art for art's sake, and to substitute art for life's sake. But at the time I was more inclined to substitute no art for God's sake. I would rather have had no art at all than one which occupies itself in matching shades of peacock and turquoise for a decorative scheme of blue devils. I started to think it out, and the more I thought of it the more certain I grew that the whole thing was a fallacy, that art could not exist apart from still less in opposition to life, especially the life of the soul which is salvation. And that great art never had been so much detached as that from conscience and common sense, or from what my critic would call moral earnestness. Unfortunately by the time I had exposed it as a fallacy, it had entirely evaporated as a fashion. Since then I have taken universal annihilations more lightly, but I can still be stirred, as man always can be by memories of their first excitement or ambitions by anything that shows the cloven hoof of that particular blue devil. I am still ready to knock him about, though I no longer think he has a cloven hoof or even a lame leg to stand on. But for all that there is one real argument which I still recognize on his side, and that argument is in a single word. There is still one word which the esthete can whisper, and the whisper will bring back all my childish fears that the esthete may be right after all. There is one name that does seem to me a strong argument for the decadent doctrine that art is unmarled. When that name is uttered the world of wild and whistler comes back with all its cold levity and cynical connoisseurship. The butterfly becomes a burden, and the green carnation flourishes like the green bay tree. For the moment I do believe in art for art's sake, and that name is John Milton. It does really seem to me that Milton was an artist, and nothing but an artist, and yet so great an artist as to sustain by his own strength the idea that art can exist alone. He seems to me an almost solitary example of a man of magnificent genius, whose greatness does not depend at all upon moral earnestness or upon anything connected with morality. His greatness is in a style, and a style which seems to me rather unusually separate from its substance. What is the exact nature of the pleasure which I for one take in reading and repeating some such lines, for instance, as those familiar ones? Dying, put on the weeds of Dominic, or in Franciscan think to pass disguised. So far as I can see, the whole effect is in a certain unexpected order and arrangement of words, independent and distinguished, like the perfect manners of an eccentric gentleman. Say, instead, put on in death the weeds of Dominic, and the whole unique dignity of the line has broken down. It is something in the quiet, but not in the quiet sense of the word. Confident inversion of dying, put on, which exactly achieves that perpetual slight novelty which Aristotle profoundly said was the language of poetry. The idea itself is at best an obvious and even conventional condemnation of superstition, and in the ultimate sense a rather superficial one. Coming where it does indeed, it does not so much suggest moral earnestness as rather a moralizing prigishness. For it is dragged in very laboriously into the very last place where it is wanted, before a splendidly large and luminous vision of the world newly created, and the first innocence of earth and sky. It is that passage in which the wanderer, through space, approaches Eden, one of the most unquestionable triumphs of all human literature. That one book at least of Paradise Lost could claim the more audacious title of Paradise Found. But if it was necessary for the poet going to Eden to pass through Limbo, why was it necessary to pass through Lambeth and Little Bethel? Why should he go there via Rome and Geneva? Why was it necessary to compare the debris of Limbo to the details of ecclesiastical quarrels in the 17th century when he was moving in a world before the dawn of all the centuries or the shadow of the first quarrel? Why did he talk as if the church was reformed before the world was made, or as if Latimer lit his candle before God made the sun and moon? Matthew Arnold made fun of those who claimed divine sanction for Episcopacy by suggesting that when God said, Let there be light, he also said, Let there be bishops. But his own favorite Milton went very near suggesting that when God said, Let there be light, he soon afterwards remarked, Let there be nonconformists. I do not feel this merely because my own religious sympathies happen to be rather on the other side. It is indeed probable that Milton did not appreciate a whole world of ideas in which he saw merely the corruptions, the idea of relics and symbolic acts, and the drama of the deathbed. It does not enlarge his place in the philosophy of history that this should be his only relation, either to the divine demagogy of the dogs of God or to the fantastical fraternity of the jugglers of God. But I should feel exactly the same incongruity if the theological animus were the other way. It would be equally disproportionate if the approach to Eden were interrupted with jokes against Puritans, or if limbo were littered with steeple-crowned hats and the scrolls of interminable Calvinistic sermons. We should still feel that a book of Paradise Lost was not the right place for a passage from Hugh de Brass. So, far from being morally earnest, in the best sense there is something almost philosophically frivolous in the incapacity to think firmly and magnanimously about the first things and the primary colors of the creative palette without spoiling the picture with this ink-slinging of sectarian politics. Speaking from the standpoint of moral earnestness, I confess it seems to me trivial and spiteful and even a little vulgar. After which, impertinent criticism I will now repeat in a loud voice, and for the mere lust of saying it as often as possible, dying put on the weeds of Dominic, or in Franciscan think to pass disguised. And the exuberant joy I take in it is the nearest thing I have ever known to art for art's sake. In short, it seems to me that Milton was a great artist and that he was also a great accident. It was rather in the same sense that his master Cromwell was a great accident. It is not true that all the moral virtues were crystallized in Milton and his Puritans. It is not true that all the military virtues were concentrated in Cromwell and his iron sides. There were masses of moral devotion on the one side and masses of military valor on the other side. But it did so happen that Milton had more ability and success in literary expression and Cromwell more ability and success in military science than any of their many rivals. To represent Cromwell as a fiend or Milton as a hypocrite is to rush to another extreme and be ridiculous. They both believed sincerely enough in certain moral ideas of their time. Only they were not, as seems to be supposed, the only moral ideas of their time. And they were not, in my private opinion, the best moral ideas of their time. One of them was the idea that wisdom is more or less weakened by laughter and a popular taste in pleasure. And we may call this moral earnestness if we like. But the point is that Cromwell did not succeed by his moral earnestness but by his strategy, and Milton did not succeed by his moral earnestness but by his style. And, first of all, let me touch on the highest form of moral earnestness and the relation of Milton to the religious poetry of his day. Paradise Lost is certainly a religious poem, but, for many of its admirers, the religion is the least admirable part of it. The poet professes, indeed, to justify the ways of God to men. But I never heard of any men who read it in order to have them justified, as men do still read a really religious poem, like the dark and almost skeptical book of Job. A poem can hardly be said to justify the ways of God, when its most frequent effect is, admittedly, to make people sympathize with Satan. In all this I am, in a sense, arguing against myself. For all my instincts, as I have said, are against the aesthetic theory that art so great can be wholly irreligious, and I agree that even in Milton there are gleams of Christianity. Nobody quite without them could have written the single line, by the dear might of him that walked the waves. But it is hardly too much to say that it is the one place where that figure walks in the whole world of Milton. Nobody, I imagine, has ever been able to recognize Christ in the cold conqueror who drives a chariot in the war in heaven, like Apollo warring on the Titans. Nobody has ever heard him in the stately disquisitions either of the Council in heaven or of Paradise regained. But apart from all these particular problems, it is surely the general truth that the great religious epic strikes us with a sense of disproportion. The sense of how little it is religious, considering how manifestly it is great. It seems almost strange that a man should have written so much and so well, without stumbling on Christian tradition. Now, in the age of Milton there was a riot of religious poetry. Most of it had moral earnestness, and much of it had splendid spiritual conviction. But most of it was not the poetry of the Puritans. On the contrary, it was mostly the poetry of the Cavaliers. The most real religion, we might say the most realistic religion, is not to be found in Milton, but in Vaughan, in Treyern, in Crescia, in Herbert, and even in Herrick. The best proof of it is that the religion is alive today, as religion and not merely as literature. A Roman Catholic can read Crescia, an Anglo-Catholic can read Herbert, in a direct devotional spirit. I gravely doubt whether many modern congregationalists read the theology of Paradise Lost in that spirit. For the moment, I mention only this purely religious emotion. I do not deny that Milton's poetry, like all great poetry, can awaken other great emotions. For instance, a man bereaved by one of the tragedies of the Great War might well find a historical serenity in the great lines beginning, Nothing is here for tears. That sort of consolation is uttered, as nobly as it could be uttered, by Milton. But it might be uttered by Sophocles, or Goethe, or even by Lucretius or Voltaire. But supposing that a man were seeking a more Christian kind of consolation he would not find it in Milton at all, as he would find it in the lines beginning, they are all gone into the world of light. The whole of the two great Puritan epics do not contain all that is said in saying, Oh, holy hope and high humility. Neither hope nor humility were Puritan specialties. But it was not only in devotional mysticism that these Cavaliers could challenge the great Puritan. It was in a mysticism more humanistic and even more modern. They shine with that white mystery of daylight which many suppose to have dawned with Wordsworth and with Blake. In that sense, they make earth mystical where Milton only made heaven material. Nor are they inferior in philosophic freedom. The single line of Crashall addressed to a woman by thy large drafts of intellectual day is less likely I fancy to have been addressed by Adam to Eve or by Milton to Mrs. Milton. It seems to me that these men were superior to Milton in magnanimity, in chivalry, in joy of life, in the balance of sanity and subtlety, in everything except the fact, not wholly remote from literary criticism, that they did not write so well as he did. But they wrote well enough to lift the load of materialism from the English name and show us the shining fields of a paradise that is not wholly lost. Of such was the anti-Puritan party, and the reader may learn more about it from the author of The Glass of Fashion. There he may form a general idea of how, but for the Puritans, England would have been abandoned to mere ribaldry and license, blasted by the blasphemies of George Herbert, rolled in the mire of the vile materialism of Vaughn, tickled to rebald laughter by the cheap cynicism and teprum familiarities of Crescia and Trearn. But the same Cavalier tradition continued into the next age and indeed into the next century, and the critic must extend his condemnation to include the brutal buffooneries of Bishop Ken or the gay and careless worldliness of Jeremy Collier. Nay, he must extend it to cover the last Tories who kept the tradition of the Jacobites, the careless merriment of Dean Swift, the godless dissipation of Dr. Johnson. None of these men were Puritans. All of them were strong opponents of political and religious Puritanism. The truth is that English literature bears a very continuous and splendid testimony to the fact that England was not merely Puritan. Ben Johnson, in Bartholomew Fair, spoke for most English people and certainly for most English poets. Anti-Puritanism was the one thing common to Shakespeare and Dryden, to Swift and Johnson, to Cobbett and Dickens. And the historical bias the other way has come not from Puritan superiority, but simply from Puritan success. It was the political triumph of the party in the revolution and the resultant commercial industrialism that suppressed the testimony of the populace and the poets. Loyalty died away in a few popular songs. The Cromwellians never had any popular song to die. English history has moved away from English literature. Our culture, like our agriculture, is at once very native and very neglected. And as this neglect is regrettable, if only as neglect of literature I will pause in conclusion upon the later period, two generations after Milton, when the last of the true Tories drank wine with bowling-broke or tea with Johnson. The truth that is missed about the Tories of this tradition is that they were rebels. They had the virtues of rebels. They also had the vices of rebels. Swift had the fury of a rebel. Johnson, the surliness of a rebel. Goldsmith, the morbid sensibility of a rebel. And Scott, at the end of the process, something of the despair and mere retrospection of a defeated rebel. And the Hwig School of Literary Criticism, like the Hwig School of Political History, has omitted or missed this truth about them because it necessarily omitted the very existence of the thing against which they rebelled. For Macaulay and Thackeray and the average of Victorian liberality, the revolution of 1688 was simply an emancipation. The defeat of the stewards was simply a downfall of tyranny and superstition. The politics of the 18th century were simply a progress leading up to the pure and happy politics of the 19th century. Freedom, slowly broadening down, etc., etc. This makes the attitude of the Tory rebels entirely meaningless, so that the critics in question have been forced to represent some of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived as a mere procession of lunatics and ludicrous eccentrics. But these rebels, right or wrong, can only be understood in relation to the real power against which they were rebelling, and their titanic figures can best be traced in the light of the lightning which they defied. That power was a positive thing. It was anything but a mere negative emancipation of everybody. It was as definite as the monarchy which it had replaced, for it was an aristocracy that replaced it. It was the oligarchy of the great Huig families, a very close corporation indeed, having Parliament for its legal form, but the new wealth for its essential substance. That is why these lingering Jacobites appear most picturesque when they are pitted against some of the princes of the new aristocratic order. That is why Bolingbroke remains in the memory, standing in his box at the performance of Cato and flinging forth his defiance to Marlborough. That is why Johnson remains rigid in his magnificent disdain, hurling his defiance at Chesterfield. Churchill and Chesterfield were not small men, either in personality or in power. They were brilliant ornaments of the triumph of the world. They represented the English governing class when it could really govern, the modern plutocracy when it still deserved to be called an aristocracy also. And the whole point of the position of these men of letters is that they were denying and denouncing something which was growing every day in prestige and prosperity, which seemed to have, and indeed had, not only the present but the future on its side. The only thing it had not got on its side was the ancient tradition of the English populace. That populace was being more and more harried by evictions and enclosures that its old common lands and yeoman freeholds might be added to the enormous estates of the all-powerful aristocracy. One of the Tory rebels has himself made that infamy immortal in the great lines of the deserted village. At least it is immortal in the sense that it can never now be lost for lovers of English literature, but even this record was for a long time lost to the public by undervaluation and neglect. In recent times the deserted village was very much of a deserted poem. But of that I may have occasion to speak later. The point for the moment is that the psychology of these men, in its evil as well as its good, is to be interpreted not so much in terms of a lingering loyalty as of a frustrated revolution. Some of them had, of course, elements of extravagance and morbidity peculiar to their own characters, but they grew ten times more extravagant and more morbid as their souls swelled within them at the success of the shameless and the insolence of the fortunate. I doubt whether anybody ever felt so bitter against the stewards. Now this misunderstanding has made a very regrettable gap in literary criticism. The masterpieces of these men are represented as much more crabbed or cranky or inconsequent than they really were because their objective is not seen objectively. It is like judging the raving of some Puritan preacher without allowing for the fact that the Pope or the King had ever possessed any power at all. To ignore the fact of the great Whig families because of the legal fiction of a free parliament is like ignoring the feelings of the Christian martyrs about Nero because of the legal fiction that the Imperator was only a military general. These fictions do not prevent imaginative persons from writing books like The Apocalypse or books like Gulliver's Travels. I will take only one example of what I mean by this purely literary misunderstanding, an example from Gulliver's Travels itself. The case of the undervaluation of Swift is a particularly subtle one, for Swift was really unbalanced as an individual, which has made it much easier for critics not to keep the rather delicate balance of justice about him. There is a superficial case for saying he was mad, apart from the physical accident of his madness, but the point is that even those who have realized that he was sometimes mad with rage have not realized what he was in a rage with. And there is a curious illustration of this in the conclusion of the story of Gulliver. Everyone remembers the ugly business about the Yahoos and the still uglier business about the real human beings who reminded the returned traveler of Yahoos how Gulliver shrank at first from his friends and would only gradually consent to sit near his wife. And everybody remembers the picturesque but hostile sketch which Thackeray gives of the satire and the satirist of Swift as the black and evil blasphemer sitting down to write his terrible allegory of which the only moral is that all things are and always must be valueless and vile. I say that everybody remembers both these literary passages but indeed I fear that many remember the critical who do not really remember the creative passage and that many have read Thackeray who have not read Swift. Now it is here that purely literary criticism has a word to say. A man of letters may be mad or sane in his cerebral constitution. He may be right or wrong in his political antipathies. He may be anything we happen to like or dislike from our own individual standpoint but there is one thing to which a man of letters has a right whatever he is and that is a fair critical comprehension of any particular literary effect which he obviously aims at and achieves. He has a right to his climax and a right not to be judged without reference to his climax. It would not be fair to leave out the beautiful last lines of paradise lost as mere bathos without realizing that the poet had a fine intention in allowing that conclusion after all the thunder and the trumps of doom to fall and fade away on a milder note of mercy and reasonable hope. It would not be fair to stigmatize the incident of ignorance damned at the very doors of heaven at the end of Bunyan's book as a mere blot of black Calvinist cruelty and spite without realizing that the writer fully intended its fearful irony like a last touch of the finger of fear. But this justice which is done to the Puritan masters of imagination has hardly been done to the great Tory masters of irony. No critic I have read has noticed the real point and climax of that passage about the Yahoos. Swift leads up to it ruthlessly enough for an artist of that sort is often ruthless and it is increased by his natural talent for a sort of mad reality of detail as in his description of the slowly diminished distance between himself and his wife at the dinner table. But he was working up to something that he really wished to say, something which was well worth saying but which few seemed to have thought worth hearing. He suggests that he gradually lost the loathing for humanity with which the Yahoos parallel had inspired him that although men are in many ways petty and animal, he came to feel them to be normal and tolerable, that the sense of their unworthiness now very seldom returns and indeed that there is only one thing that revives it, if one of these creatures exhibits pride. That is the voice of Swift and the cry of reigning aristocracy. It is natural for a monkey to collect nuts and it may be pardonable for John Churchill to collect guineas but to think that John Churchill can be proud of his heap of guineas, can convert them into stars and coronets, and can carry that calm and classic face disdainful above the multitude. It is natural for she-monkeys to be mated somehow but to think that the Duchess of Yarmouth is proud of being the Duchess of Yarmouth. It may not be surprising that the nobility should have scrambled like screaming Yahoos for the rags and ribbons of the revolution, tripping up and betraying anybody and everybody in turn with every dirty trick of treason for anything and everything they could get. But that those of them who had got everything should then despise those who had got nothing, that the rich should sneer at the poor for having no part of the plunder, that this oligarchy of Yahoos should actually feel superior to anything or anybody, that does move the profit of the losing side to an indignation which is something much deeper and nobler than the negative flippancies that we call blasphemy. Swift was perhaps more of a Jeremiah than an Isaiah and a faulty Jeremiah at that, but in his great climax of his grim satire he is nonetheless a seer and a speaker of the things of God because he gives the testimony of the strongest and most searching of human intellects to the profound truth of the meanness and imbecility of pride. And the other men of the same tradition had essentially the same instinct. Johnson was in many ways unjust to Swift, just as Cobbett was afterwards unjust to Johnson. But looking back up the perspective of history we can all see that those three great men were all facing the same way, that they all regretted the rise of a rapacious and paganized commercial aristocracy and its conquest over the old popular traditions, which some would call popular prejudices. When Johnson said that the devil was the first wig he might have merely varied the phrase by saying that he was the first aristocrat. For the men of this Tory tradition, in spirit if not in definition, distinguished between the privilege of monarchy and that of the new aristocracy by a very tenable test, the mark of aristocracy is ambition. The king cannot be ambitious. We might put it now by saying that monarchy is authority, but in its essence aristocracy is always anarchy. But the men of that school did not criticize the oligarch merely as a rebel against those above. They were well aware of his activities as an oppressor of those below. This aspect, as has already been noted, was best described by a friend of Johnson, for whom Johnson had a very noble and rather unique appreciation, Oliver Goldsmith. I hope that the author of an admirable study of Mr. Bellock in this magazine will not think that I am merely traversing one of his criticisms if I venture to add something to it. He used the phrase that Mr. Bellock had been anticipated by Disraeli in his view of England as having evolved into a Venetian oligarchy. The truth is that Disraeli was anticipated by Bowlingbroke and the many highly intelligent men who agreed with him, and not least by Goldsmith. The whole view, including the very parallel with Venice, can be found stated with luminous logic and cogency in the vicar of Wakefield, and Goldsmith attacked the problem entirely from the popular side. Nobody can mistake his Toryism for a snobbish submission to a privilege or title. Princes and lords, the shadow of a shade, a breath can make them as a breath has made, but a bold peasantry, a nation's pride, when once destroyed can never be supplied. I hope he was wrong, but I sometimes have a horrible feeling that he may have been right. But I have here, thank God, no cause for touching upon modern politics. I was educated, as much as my critic, in the belief that Uighism was a pure deliverance, and I hope I am still as willing as he to respect Puritans for their individual virtue, as well as for their individual genius. But it moves all my memories of the unmorality of the nineties to be charged with indifference to the importance of being earnest. And it is for the sake of English literature that I protest against the suggestion that we had no purity except Puritanism, or that only a man like the author of Paradise Lost could manage to be on the side of the angels. On peace day, I set up outside my house, two torches, and twined them with laurel, because I thought at least there was nothing pacifist about laurel. But that night, after the bonfire and the fireworks had faded, a wind grew and blew with gathering violence blowing away the rain. And in the morning I found one of the laurel's posts torn off and lying at random on the rainy ground, while the other still stood erect, green and glittering in the sun. I thought that the pagans would certainly have called it an omen, and it was one that strangely fitted my own sense of some great work, half fulfilled and half frustrated. And I thought vaguely of that man in Virgil, who prayed that he might slay his foe and return to his country. And the gods heard half the prayer, and the other half was scattered to the winds. For I knew we were right to rejoice, since the tyrant was indeed slain, and his tyranny fallen forever. But I know not when we shall find our way back to our own land. End of section 31, Recording by Linda Johnson End of fancies versus fads by G.K. Chesterton