 Section 6 of fancies versus fads by G.K. Chesterton 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 Section 6. On Being an Old Bean I was looking at some press cuttings that had pursued me down to a remote cottage beside a river of Norfolk, and as it happened, those that caught my eye were mostly not from the vulgar monopolist press, but from all sorts of quieter and even more studious publications. But what struck me as curious about the collection as a whole was the selection, among half a hundred things that were hardly worth saying, of the things that were considered worth repeating. There seemed to be a most disproportionate importance attached to a trivial phrase I had used about the alleged indecorum of a gentleman calling his father an old bean. I had been asked to join in a discussion in the morning post, touching the alleged disrespect of youth towards age, and I had done so, chiefly because I have a respect for the morning post for its courage about political corruption and cosmopolitan conspiracies in spite of deep disagreement on other very vital things. And I said what I should have thought was so true as to be trite. I said that it makes life narrower and not broader to lose the special note of piety or respect for the past still living and that to call an old man an old bean is merely to lose all intelligent sense of the significance of an old man. Since then, to my great entertainment, I seem to have figured in various papers as a sort of ferocious heavy father, come out on my own account to curse the numerous young sprigs who have called me an old bean. But this is an error. I should be the last to deny that I am heavy, but I am not fatherly, nor am I ferocious. At any rate, I am not ferocious about this. Individually, I regard the question with a detachment verging on indifference. I cannot imagine anybody except an aged and very lean vegetarian, positively dancing with joy at being called an old bean, and I am not a very lean vegetarian. But still less can I imagine anyone regarding the accusation with horror or resentment. The sins and crimes blackening the career of a bean must be comparatively few. Its character must be simple and free from complexity, and its manner of life innocent. A philosophic rationalist wrote to me the other day to say that my grubbing in the grossest superstitions of the past reminded him of an old sow-pig rooting in the refuse of the kitchen heap, and expressed a hope that I should be dragged from this occupation and made to resume the cap and bells of your. That is something like a vigorous and vivid comparison, though my feminist friends may be distressed at my being compared to a sow as well as a pig, and though I am not quite clear myself about how the animal would get on when he had resumed the cap and bells of your. But it would certainly be a pity when it was possible to find this image in the kitchen heap to be content with one from the kitchen garden. It would indeed be a lost opportunity to work yourself up to the furious pitch of calling your enemy a beast and then only call him a bean. From the extracts I saw, it would seem that certain ladies were especially lively in their protest against my antiquated prejudices and rioted in quite a bean-fest of old beans. The form the argument generally takes is to ask why parents and children should not be friends, or, as they often put it, I deeply regret to say, pals. Neither term seems to me to convey a sufficiently distinctive meaning, and I take it that the best term for what they really mean is that they should be comrades. Now, comradeship is a very real and splendid thing, but this is simply the cat of comradeship. A boy does not take his mother with him when he goes bird-nesting, and his affection for his mother is of another kind, unconnected with the idea of her climbing a tree. Three men do not generally take an aged and beloved aunt with them as part of their luggage on a walking tour, and if they did, it would not be so much disrespectful to age as unjust to youth. For this confusion between two valuable but varied things, like most of such modern confusions, is quite as liable to obscurantist as to mutinous abuse, and is as easy to turn into tyranny as into license. If a boy's aunts are his comrades, why should he need any comrades except his aunts? If his father and mother are perfect and consummate pals, why should he fool away his time with more ignorant, immature and insufficient pals? As in a good many other modern things, the end of the old parental dignity would be the beginning of a new parental tyranny. I would rather the boy loved his father as his father than feared him as a Frankenstein giant of a superior and supercilious friend, armed in that unequal friendship with all the weapons of psychology and psychoanalysis. If he loves him as a father, he loves him as an older man. And if we are to abolish all differences of tone towards those older than ourselves, we must presumably do the same to those younger than ourselves. All healthy people, for instance, feel an instinctive and almost impersonal affection for a baby. Is a baby a comrade? Is he to climb the tree and go on the walking tour? Or are we on his account to abolish all trees and tours? Are the grandfather aged ninety, the son aged thirty, and the grandson aged three, all to set out together on their travels with the same knapsacks and knickerbockers? I have read somewhere that in one of the ten or twelve or two hundred types of filial piety reverenced by the Chinese, one was an elderly sage and statesman who dressed up as a child of four and danced before his yet more elderly parents to delight them with the romantic illusion that they were still quite young. This in itself could not but attract remark, but this in itself I am prepared to defend. It was an exceptional and even extraordinary festivity, like the reversals of the Saturnalia, and I wish we could have seen some vigorous old gentleman like Lord Housebury or the Archbishop of Canterbury performing a similar act of piety. But in the utopia of comrade ship, now commended to us, old and young are expected normally to think alike, feel alike and talk alike, and may therefore normally and permanently be supposed to dress alike. Whether the parents dress as children or the children as parents, it is clear that they must all dress as pals, whatever be the ceremonial dress of that rank. I imagine it as something in tweeds with rather a loud check. As I considered these things I looked across the kitchen garden of the cottage, and the association of peas and beans brought the fancy back to the foolish figure of speech with which the discussion began. There is a proverb, which is like most of our popular sayings, a country proverb, about things that are as like as two peas. There is something significant in the fact that this is as near as the rural imagination could get to a mere mechanical monotony, for as a matter of fact it is highly improbable that any two peas are exactly alike. A survey of the whole world of peas, with all their forms and uses, would probably reveal every sort of significance between the sweet peas of sentiment and the dried peas of asceticism. Modern machinery has gone far beyond such rude rural attempts at dullness. Things are not as like as two peas in the sense that they are as like as two pins, but the flippant phrase under discussion does really imply that they are as like as two beans. It is really part of the low and leveling philosophy that assimilates all things too much to each other. It does not mean that we see any fanciful significance in the use of the term as in a country proverb. It is not that we see an old gentleman with fine curling white hair and say to him poetically, permit me venerable cauliflower to inquire after your health. It is not that we address an old farmer with a deep and rich complexion saying, I trust most admirable of beet roots that you are as well as you look. When we say, how are you old bean? The error is not so much that we say something rude, but that we may say nothing because we mean nothing. As I happened to meet at that moment a girl belonging to the family of the cottage, I showed her the cutting and asked her opinion upon the great progressive problem of calling your father an old bean, at which she laughed derisively and merely said, as if anybody would. End of Section 6. Recording by Linda Johnson. Long lists are being given of particular cases in which children have suffered in spirits or health from alleged horrors of the Kinema. One child said to have had a fit after seeing a film, another to have been sleepless with some fixed idea taken from a film, another to have killed his father with a carving knife through having seen a knife used in a film. This may possibly have occurred, though if it did anybody of common sense would prefer to have details about that particular child rather than about that particular picture. But what is supposed to be the practical moral of it, in any case? Is it that the young should never see a story with a knife in it? Are they to be brought up in complete ignorance of the merchant of Venice because Shylock flourishes a knife for a highly disagreeable purpose? Are they never to hear of Macbeth, lest it should slowly dawn upon their trembling intelligence that it is a dagger that they see before them? It would be more practical to propose that a child should never see a real carving knife and still more practical that he should never see a real father. All that may come, the era of preventive and prophetic sciences only begun. We must not be impatient, but when we come to the cases of morbid panic after some particular exhibition there is yet more reason to clear the mind of Kant. It is perfectly true that a child will have the horrors after seeing some particular detail. It is quite equally true that nobody can possibly predict what that detail will be. It certainly need not be anything so obvious as a murder or even a knife. I should have thought anybody who knew anything about children or for that matter anybody who had been a child would know that these nightmares are quite incalculable. A hint of horror may come by any chance in any connection. If the kinema exhibited nothing but the views of country vicarages or vegetarian restaurants, the ugly fancy is as likely to be stimulated by these things as by anything else. It is like seeing a face in the carpet. It makes no difference that it is the carpet at the vicarage. I will give two examples from my own most personal circle. I could give hundreds from here, say. I know a child who screams steadily for hours if he had been taken past the Albert Memorial. This was not a precocious precision or excellence in his taste in architecture, nor was it a premature protest against all that gimm-crack German culture which nearly entangled us in the downfall of the barbaric tyranny. It was the fear of something which he himself described with lurid simplicity as, the cow of the India rubber tongue. It sounds rather a good title for a creepy short story. At the base of the Albert Memorial, I may explain for those who have never enjoyed that monument, are four groups of statuary representing Europe, Asia, Africa and America. America especially is very overwhelming. Born onward on a snorting bison who plunges forward in a fury of western progress and is surrounded with red Indians, Mexicans and all sorts of pioneers, oh, pioneers armed to the teeth. The child passed this transatlantic tornado with complete coolness and indifference. Europe, however, is seated on a bull so mild as to look like a cow, the tip of its tongue is showing and happened to be discoloured by weather, suggesting, I suppose, a living thing coming out of the dead marble. Now nobody could possibly foretell that a weather stain would occur in that particular place and fill that particular child with that particular fancy. Nobody is likely to propose meeting in by forbidding graven images like the Muslims and the Jews. Nobody has said as yet that it is bad morals to make a picture of a cow. Nobody has even pleaded that it is bad manners for a cow to put its tongue out. These things are utterly beyond calculation. They are also beyond counting, for they occur all over the place, not only to morbid children, but to any children. I knew this particular child very well, being a rather older child myself at the time. He certainly was not congenitally timid or feeble-minded, for he risked going to prison to expose a Marconi scandal and died fighting in the Great War. Here is another example out of scores. A little girl, now a very normal and cheerful young lady, had an insomnia of insane terror entirely arising from the lyric of Little Bo Peep. After an inquisition like that of the confessor or the psychoanalyst, it was found that the word bleeding had some obscure connection in her mind with the word bleeding. There was thus perhaps an added whore in the phrase heard, and hearing rather than seeing the flowing of blood. Nobody could possibly provide against that sort of mistake. Nobody could prevent the little girl from hearing about sheep any more than the little boy from hearing about cows. We might abolish all nursery rhymes, and as they are happy and popular and used with universal success, it is very likely that we shall. But the whole point of the mistake about that phrase is that it might have been a mistake about any phrase. We cannot foresee all the fancies that might arise not only out of what we say but of what we do not say. We cannot avoid promising a child a caramel lest he should think we say cannibal or conceal the very word hill lest it should sound like hell. All the catalogues and calculations offered us by the party of caution in this controversy are therefore quite worthless. It is perfectly true that examples can be given of a child being frightened of this, that, or the other. But we can never be certain of his being frightened of the same thing twice. It is not on the negative side by making lists of vetoes that the danger can be avoided. It can never indeed be entirely avoided. We can only fortify the child on the positive side by giving him health and humor and a trust in God, not omitting what will much mystify the moderns and intelligent appreciation of the idea of authority which is only the other side of confidence which alone can suddenly and summarily cast out such devils. But we may be sure that most modern people will not look at it in this way. They will think it more scientific to attempt to calculate the incalculable. So soon as they have realized that it is not so simple as it looks, they will try to map it out, however complicated it may be. When they discover that the terrible detail need not be a knife, but might just as well be a fork, they will only say there is a fork complex as well as a knife complex. And that increase in complexity of complexes is the net in which liberty will be taken. Instead of seeing in the odd cases of the cow's tongue or the bleeding sheep the peril of their past generalizations, they will see them only as starting points for new generalizations. They will get yet another theory out of it, and they will begin acting on the theory long before they have done thinking about it. They will start out with some new and crude conception that sculpture has made children scream or that nursery rhymes have made children sleepless, and the thing will be a clause in a program of reform before it has begun to be a conclusion in a serious study of psychology. That is the practical problem about modern liberty which the critics will not see, of which eugenics is one example and all this amateur child psychology is another. So long as an old morality was in black and white like a chessboard, even a man who wanted more of it made white was certain that no more of it would be made black. Now he is never certain what vices may not be released, but neither is he certain what virtues may be forbidden. Even if he did not think it wrong to run away with a married woman, he knew that his neighbors only thought it wrong because the woman was married. They did not think it wrong to run away with a red-haired woman or a left-handed woman or a woman subject to headaches, but when we let loose a thousand eugenical speculations, all adopted before they are verified and acted on even before they are adopted, he is just as likely as not to find himself separated from the woman for those or any other reasons. Similarly there was something to be said for restrictions, even rather puritanical and provincial restrictions upon what children should read or see, so long as they fenced in certain fixed departments like sex or sensational tortures. But when we begin to speculate on whether other sensations may not stimulate as dangerously as sex, those other sensations may be as closely controlled as sex. When, let us say, we hear that the eye and brain are weakened by the rapid turning of wheels as well as by the most revolting torturing of men, we have come into a world in which cartwheels and steam engines may become as obscene as racks and thumb screws. In short, so long as we combine ceaseless and often reckless scientific speculation with rapid and often random social reform, the result must inevitably be not anarchy but ever-increasing tyranny. There must be a ceaseless and almost mechanical multiplication of things forbidden. The resolution to cure all the ills that flesh is heir to, combined with the guesswork about all possible ills that flesh and nerve and brain cell may be heir to, these two things conducted simultaneously must inevitably spread a sort of panic of prohibition. Scientific imagination and social reform between them will quite logically and almost legitimately have made us slaves. This seems to me a very clear, a very fair, and a very simple point of public criticism. And I am much mystified about why so many publicists cannot even see what it is but take refuge in charges of anarchism, which firstly are not true, and secondly have nothing to do with it. End of Section 7 Section 8 of Fancy vs. Fads 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 Phil Chenevere. Fancy vs. Fads by G. K. Chesterton Section 8 Wings and the Housemaid Among the numberless fictitious things that I have fortunately never written, there was a little story about a logical maiden lady engaging apartments in which she was not allowed to keep a cat or dog, who nevertheless stipulated for permission to keep a bird, and who eventually walked round to her new lodging's accompany by an ostrich. There was a moral to the fable connected with that exaggeration of small concessions, which for instance the Germans indulged about espionage or the Jews about interest. But this fated fancy returned to my mind in another fashion when a very humane lady suggested the other day that every domestic servant, including the bottler I presume, should be described as a home bird. Unless the lady is misreported, which is likely enough, she wanted servants called home birds because they keep the home fires burning which as many will be ready to point out is hardly the particular form in which the domesticity of the nest commonly expresses itself. But I am not at all disposed to derive the lady's real meaning still less her real motives, which referred to a real movement of social conscience and sentiment, however wrongly expressed. She was troubled about the implied insolence of calling servants servants and apparently even of talking about maids or the cook. Therefore she evolved the onothological substitute about which of course it would be easy to evolve a whole aviary of allegorical parodies. It would be easy to ask whether a private secretary is to be called a secretary bird or perhaps the telephone girl a hummingbird, but it will be enough to say generally of the proposal in its present verbal form that one has only to submit it to any living and human housemaid in order to find that particular home bird developing rapidly into a mockingbird. Nevertheless, as I have said, we should not merely dismiss any social doubts thus suggested or any impulse towards a warmer respectful work generally grossly undervalued. Too many people of the more snobbish social strata have treated their servants as home birds. As a howl, for instance, who can be up all night or as vultures who can eat the refuse fit for the dustbin. I would not throw cold water on any indignation on this score, but I note it as typical of the time that the indignation should fail on the side of intelligence, for it is the mark of our time above almost everything else that it goes by associations and not by arguments. That is why it has a hundred arts and no philosophy. Thus, for instance, the lady in question lumps together a number of terms that have no logical connection at all. There is at least a meaning in objecting to one person calling another a servant. As I shall suggest in a moment, there is not much sense in changing the name when you do not change the thing. And there is a great deal of nonsense in denying the status of the servant at the moment when you are making it more servile. Still, anybody can see how the term might be held to hurt human dignity, but the other terms mentioned cannot hurt human dignity at all. I cannot conceive why it should insult a cook to call her a cook, any more than it insults a cashier to call him a cashier, to say nothing of the fact that dealing with cookery is far nobler than dealing with cash. And the third title certainly tells entirely the other way. The word maid is not only a noble old English word with no note of social distinction, for a medieval king might have praised his daughter as a good maid. It is a word loaded with magnificent memories in history, literature, and religion. Joan the maid suggests a little more than Joan the maid servant. And as it says in Mr. Bellock's stirring little poem, By God who made the master maids I know not whence she came, but the sword she bore to save the soul went up like an altar flame. It is needless here to trace the idea back to its splendid sources, or to explain how the word maid has been the highest earthly title not only on earth but in heaven. Mother and maiden was never none but she. Here at least modern humanitarian criticism has gone curiously astray, even for its own purposes. Any servant may well be satisfied with the dignity of being called the maid, just as any workman may be rightly honoured by the accident which calls him the man. For in a modern industrial dispute, as reported in the papers, I always feel there is a final verdict and sentence in the very statement of the case as masters versus men. The true objection lies much farther back. It begins with the simple fact that the home-bird is not in her own home. When that particular sparrow stokes the fire as above described, it is not her own fireside. When we happen to meet a canary carrying a coal scuttle, the canary is not generally a coal-owner. In short, wherever we find pelicans, penguins, or flamingos keeping the home fires burning, they may all be earnestly wishing that they could fly away to their homes. Now a moderate amount of this temporary and vicarious domesticity is a natural enough accident in social relations. So long as it does not obscure and obstruct more individual and direct domesticity. In short, there is no particular harm in the maid being a housemaid in someone else's house if she normally has a chance of being a housewife in her own. As I shall suggest at a moment, this is what was really implied in certain older institutions to which the wisest are now looking back. But in any case it is odd that the home-bird should thus plume itself at this moment, for the trend of the time is certainly not towards any domesticity direct or indirect. The birds have long been netted, archaged by cold fear and hunger, into larger and more terrorist systems. The happy home-birds are keeping the factory fires burning. The only legal and industrial tendency seems to be to shut up more and more of the women, though strange, wild, foul in those colossal cages of iron. Nor is the change one of mere aesthetic atmosphere. We know now that it is one of economic fact and may soon be one of legal definition. In a word, it is queer that we should suddenly grow sensitive about calling people servants when we are in the act of making them slaves. Indeed in many concrete cases we may already be said to be making them convicts. The true moral meaning of much that is called the improvement of prisons is not that we are turning prisoners into a better sort of people, but rather that we are treating a better sort of people as prisoners. The broad arrow is broadened in so liberal a fashion as to cover those who would once have been counted respectable, and there is a sense in which the broad arrow, becoming broader, is bound to become blunter. The prison becomes utilitarian as well as disciplinary, as the factory becomes disciplinary as well as utilitarian. The two become simply and substantially the same, for they have to treat the same sort of impecunious people in the same sort of impersonal way. People may differ about the definition of that common condition or status. Some may eagerly salute persons involved as homebirds. Others may prefer to describe them as jailbirds. For the rest, if anybody wants to strike the central stream of moderate sanity in the servant problem, I recommend him first to read with a close attention, or preferably to sing in a loud voice, the song called Sally in Our Alley. In that great and glorious English lyric, the poet does not disguise the accidental disconference of the great system of apprenticeship which was part of the glory of the gills. He even exhibits his Christian prejudices by comparing his master to a Turk. He actually entertains as every reflective social reformer must a hypothetical alternative of the servile state and considers the relative advantages of a slave that rose a galley. But the point is that what makes him refuse and endure is hope, the sure and certain hope of a glorious emancipation. Not the hopeless hope of a chance and a scramble with a general recommendation to get on or get out, but a charter of knowledge and honor that, when his seven long years are passed, a door shall open to him which our age has shut on the great multitude of mankind. Fancy's Versus Fads by G. K. Chesterton The Slavery of Free Verse The truth most needed today is that the end is never the right end. The beginning is the right end at which to begin. The modern man has to read everything backwards, as when he reads journalism first and history afterwards, if at all. He is like a blind man, exploring an elephant and condemned to begin at the very tip of its tail. But he is still more unlucky, for when he has a first principle, it is generally the very last principle that he ought to have. He starts, as it were, with one infallible dogma about the elephant, that its tail is its trunk. He works the wrong way round on principle and tries to fit all the practical facts to his principle. Because the elephant has no eyes in its tail end, he calls it a blind elephant, and expatiates on its ignorance, superstition, and need of compulsory education. Because it has no tusks at its tail end, he says that tusks are a fantastic flourish attributed to a fabulous creature, an ivory chimera that must have come through the ivory gate. Because it does not, as a rule, pick up things with its tail, he dismisses the magical story that it can pick up things with its trunk. He probably says it is plainly a piece of anthropomorphism to suppose that an elephant can pack its trunk. The result is that he becomes as pallid and worried as a pessimist. The world to him is not only an elephant, but a white elephant. He does not know what to do with it, and cannot be persuaded of the perfectly simple explanation, which is that he has not made the smallest real attempt to make head or tail of the animal. He will not begin at the right end, because he happens to have come first on the wrong end. But in nothing do I feel this modern trick of trusting to a fag end rather than a first principle, more than in the modern treatment of poetry. With this or that particular metrical form, or unmetrical form, or unmetrical formlessness, I might be content or not, as it achieves some particular effect or not. But the whole general tendency, regarded as an emancipation, seems to me more or less of an enslavement. It seems founded on one subconscious idea, that talk is freer than verse, and that verse, therefore, should claim the freedom of talk. But talk, especially in our time, is not free at all. It is tripped up by trivialities, tamed by conventions, loaded with dead words, thwarted by a thousand meaningless things. It does not liberate the soul so much when a man can say, You always look so nice, as when he can say, But your eternal summer shall not fade. The first is an awkward and constrained sentence, ending with the weakest word ever used, or rather misused, by man. The second is like the gesture of a giant, or the sweeping flight of an archangel. It has the very rush of liberty. I do not despise the man who says the first, because he means the second. And what he means is more important than what he says. I have always done my best to emphasize the inner dignity of these daily things, in spite of their dull externals. But I do not think it an improvement that the inner spirit itself should grow more external, and more dull. It is thought right to discourage numbers of prosaic people trying to be poetical. But I think it much more of a bore to watch numbers of poetical people trying to be prosaic. In short, it is another case of tale foremost philosophy. Instead of watering the laurel hedge of the cockney villa, we bride the cockney to brick in the plant of Apollo. I have always had the fancy that if a man were really free, he would talk in rhythm, and even in rhyme. His most hurried postcard would be a sonnet, and his most hasty wires like harp strings. He would breathe a song into the telephone, a song which would be a lyric or an epic, according to the time involved in awaiting the call, or in his inevitable altercation with the telephone girl, the duel would be a duet. He would express his preference among the dishes at dinner in short impromptu poems, combining the more mystical gratitude of grace with a certain epigrammatic terseness, more convenient for domestic good feeling. If Mr. Yates can say, an exquisite verse, the exact number of bean-rows he would like on his plantation, why not the number of beans he would like on his plate? If he can issue a rhymed request to procure the honeybee, why not pass the honey? Misunderstandings might arise at first with the richer and more fantastic poets, and Francis Thompson might have asked several times for the gold skins of undelirious wine before anybody understood that he wanted the grapes. Nevertheless, I will maintain that his magnificent phrase would be a far more real expression of God's most glorious gift of the vine, than if he had simply said, in a peremptory manner, grapes, especially if the culture of compulsory education had carefully taught him to pronounce it as if it were gripes. And if a man could ask for a potato in the form of a poem, the poem would not be merely a more romantic, but a much more realistic rendering of a potato. For a potato is a poem. It is even an ascending scale of poems, beginning at the root in subterranean grotesques in gothic manner, with humps like the deformities of a goblin, and eyes like a beast of revelation, and rising up through the green shades of the earth to a crown that has the shape of stars and the hue of heaven. But the truth behind all this is that expressed in that very ancient mystical notion, the music of the spheres. It is the idea that, at the back of everything, existence begins with a harmony, and not a chaos. And therefore, when we really spread our wings and find a wider freedom, we find it in something more continuous and recurrent, and not in something more fragmentary and crude. Freedom is fullness, especially fullness of life, and a full vessel is more rounded and complete than an empty one, and not less so. To vary Browning's phrase, we find in prose the broken arcs, in poetry the perfect round. Prose is not the freedom of poetry. Rather, prose is the fragments of poetry. Prose, at least in the prosaic sense, is poetry interrupted, held up and cut off from its course. The chariot of Phoebus stopped by a block in the strand. But when it begins to move again at all, I think we shall find certain old-fashioned things move with it, such as repetition, and even measure, rhythm, and even rhyme. We shall discover with horror that the wheels of the chariot go round and round, and even that the horses of the chariot have the usual number of feet. Anyhow, the right way to encourage the cortège is not to put the cart before the horse. It is not to make poetry more poetical by ignoring what distinguishes it from prose. There may be many new ways of making the chariot move again, but I confess that most of the modern theorists seem to me to be lecturing on a new theory of its mechanics while it is standing still. If a wizard before my very eyes works a miracle with a rope, a boy, and a mango plant, I am only theoretically interested in the question of a skeptic who asks why it should not be done with a garden hose, a maiden ant, and a monkey tree. Why not, indeed, if he can do it? If a saint performs a miracle tomorrow by turning a stone into a fish, I shall be the less concerned at being asked, in the abstract, why a man should not also turn a campstool into a cockatoo. But let him do it, and not merely explain how it can be done. It is certain that words such as birds and sweet, which are as plain as fish or stone, can be combined in such a miracle as bear-ruined choirs where late the sweet bird sang. So far as I can follow my own feelings, the meter and fall of the feet, even the rhyme and place in the sonnet, is a great deal to do with producing such an effect. I do not say there is no other way of producing such an effect. I only ask, not without longing, where else in this wide and weary time is it produced? I know I cannot produce it, and I do not in fact feel it when I hear verlibra. I know not where is that Promethean heat, and even to express my ignorance, I am glad to find better words than my own. Prohibition and the Press An organ of the nonconformist conscience, while commenting very kindly on my recent remarks about America, naturally went on to criticize, though equally kind, my remarks about prohibition. Now, so far as I am concerned, the problem is not so much prohibition with a large P as prohibition with a small one. I mean, I am interested not so much in liquor as in liberty. I want to know on what principle the prohibitionists are proceeding in this case, and how they think it applies to any other case, and I cannot for the life of me make out. They might be expected to argue that there is something peculiar in principle about the position of liquor, and make that the basis for attacking liquor. But in point of fact they do not attack liquor, they do quite simply attack liberty. I mean that they are satisfied with saying about this liberty what can obviously be said about any liberty, that it can be and is abominably abused. If that had been a final objection to any form of freedom there never would have been any form of freedom. And there most notably would never have been the particular forms of freedom which are most sacred to the nonconformist conscience. The nonconformists have demanded liberty to secede though they knew it led to an anarchy of sects and spiteful controversies. They had demanded the license to print, though they knew it involved the license to print twenty falsehoods to one truth. I suppose there is nothing in history of which the modern Puritan would be more innocently proud than the thing called the liberty of the press which arose out of the pamphleteering of the 17th century and especially the great pamphlet of Milton. Yet everything that Milton says about allowing controversy in spite of its dangers could be applied word for word to the case of allowing drinking in spite of its dangers. Is not the virtue that shuts itself up in a temperance hotel a fugitive and cloistered virtue? Is not the morality that dare not have wine on the table or in the town emphatically one that dares not sally out to meet its enemy? All Milton's arguments for freedom are arguments for beer. Of course, Milton himself would certainly have applied them to beer. The highly successful brewer to whom he was Latin secretary, a gentleman of the name of Williams, otherwise Cromwell, would hardly have been pleased with him if he had not applied them to beer. For instance, the critic whom I am here venturing to criticize says that people differ about prohibition according to their knowledge or ignorance of the dreadful state of the slums, the ravages of alcoholism in our industrial cities, and all the rest of it. Whether or no this be a good argument against the public house, there is no doubt that I could easily turn it against the public press. I could insist that I am a common Cockney Fleet Street journalist who has done the nightly work for daily papers and fed off nocturnal potato stalls, whereas he is probably a cultivated congregationalist minister writing in a library of theological works. I might say that I know better than he does, or than most people do, the cynicism and the vulgarity and the vices of journalism. But as a matter of fact, the vices of journalism have, by this time, become as evident to the people who read journals as to the people who write them. All responsible people are complaining of the power and condition of the press and know people more than these earnest and ethical nonconformists. It is they who complain most bitterly that a jingo press can manufacture war. It is they who declare most indignately that a sensational press is undermining morality. They often, to my mind, unduly confuse matters of morality with matters of taste. They often, to my mind, denounce as mere jingoism what is simply the deeply democratic and popular character of patriotism. But nobody will deny that, to a large extent, they are legitimately and logically alarmed about the abuses and absurdities of the newspapers. But they have not yet used this as an argument for a veto upon all newspapers. Why in the world should they use the parallel evils as an argument for a veto on all public houses? For my part, I do feel very strongly about the frivolity and irresponsibility of the press. It seems impossible to exaggerate the evil that can be done by a corrupt and unscrupulous press. If drink directly ruins the family, it only indirectly ruins the nation. But bad journalism does directly ruin the nation, considered as a nation. It acts on the corporate national will and sways the common national decision. It may force a decision in a few hours that will be an incurable calamity for hundreds of years. It may drive a whole civilization to defeat, to slavery, to bankruptcy, to universal famine. Even at this moment there are prominent papers wildly urging us to war, not with our foes, but with our friends. There are some journalists so wicked as to want war, almost for its own sake. There are more journalists so weak-minded as to work for war without even wanting it. Let us give one example out of fifty of the sort of phrases that flash bias when we turn over the papers. A headline in enormous letters announces that the French are scuttling out of disputed areas in the Near East. The phrase about scuttling and the policy of scuttle has been familiar and firmly established in English journalism as meaning a cowardly and servile surrender, admitting abject defeat. And the suggestion is that the French, notoriously a nation of cowards, having that tendency to panic, produced by a habit of dancing in a diet of frogs, can vividly be pictured as scampering with screams of terror from the side of a turk with a drawn saber. This is the way our newspapers improve our relations with our allies. Only the newspaper men seem to have gotten a little mixed in their eagerness to expatiate on the wide field of French wildness and ignominy. Only a little while ago the same papers were telling us that the French were furious filibusters forcing war in every corner of the world. We were told that it was France who was militaristic and aggressive and all her rivals were made to scuttle. We were told that it was the Frenchmen and not the turk who was the terrible person holding the drawn saber. In plain words, these journalists are resolved to show that whatever the French do is wrong. If they advance, they are arrogant. If they retreat, they are cowardly. If they keep an army beyond the Rhine they are pursuing a policy of militarism. If they withdraw an army from somewhere else they are pursuing a policy of scuttle. Where Monsieur Poincaré is ready to fight he is a fire-reader who cares for nothing but fighting. Where he is not ready to fight he is a paltrune who is always notoriously too timid to fight. The careful selection of language of this sort for a given period might quite possibly land us in a European war, a war in which we should certainly be on the wrong side and almost certainly on the losing side. Suppose I come forward with this great reform of the prohibition of the press. Suppose I suggest that the police should forcibly shut up all the newspaper offices as the other reformers wish to shut up all the public houses. What answer will the Puritan moralists make to me or on what principle do they distinguish between the one reform and the other? There is no kind of doubt about the harm that journalism does and their own line of argument precludes them from appealing merely to the good that it does. As a matter of fact, far better poems have been written in taverns than are ever likely to appear in daily papers. And from Pantagruel to Pickwick this form of festivity has a role of literary glory to its credit which is never likely to be found in the back files of any newspaper that I know of. But the Puritans do not discuss the healthier tradition of wine. They consider their argument sufficiently supported by the unhealthy effects of gin and bad beer in the slums. And if we adopt that principle of judging by the worst then the worst effects of the press are far wider than the worst effects of the public house. What exactly is the principle by which they distinguish between lawful and unlawful liberty or mixed and unmixed license? I have a rough and ready test which may be right or wrong but which I can at least state. But where has their test been stated? I say that the simplest form of freedom is that which distinguishes the free man from the slave. The ownership of his own body and his own bodily activities. That there is a risk in allowing him this ownership is obvious and has always been obvious. The risk is not confined to the question of drink but covers the whole question of health. But surely the other forms of freedom such as freedom to print are very much more indirect and disputable. A newspaper may be made the instrument of the vilest sort of swindling or starving of a whole people. Why are we to grant the remote right and deny the intimate right? Moreover, a newspaper is a new thing if our fathers had the right to it they never knew it. Fermented liquor is as old as civilization or older. But what I have asked for again and again is simply the principle of the prohibitionists. And I am asking still. 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 Mary Lou in New York City. Fancy's Versus Fads by G.K. Chesterton. The Mercy of Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. Arnold Bennett recently wrote one of his humorous and humane coseries pleading very properly for social imagination and the better understanding of our fellows. He carried it however to the point of affirming as some fatalists do, that we should never judge anybody in the sense of condemning anybody in connection with his moral conduct. Some time ago, the same distinguished writer showed that his mercy and magnanimity were indeed on a heroic scale by reviewing a book of mine and even saying many kind things about it. But to these he added a doubt about whether true intelligence could be consistent with the acceptance of any dogma. In truth, there are only two kinds of people. Those who accept dogmas and know it and those who accept dogmas and don't know it. My only advantage over the gifted novelist lies in my belonging to the former class. I suspect that his unconsciousness of his dogmas extends to an unconsciousness of what he means by a dogma. If it means merely the popular idea of being dogmatic, it might be suggested that saying that all dogmatism is unintelligent is itself somewhat dogmatic. And something of what is true of his veto on dogma is also true on his veto of condemnation, which is really a veto on vetoes. Mr. Arnold Bennett does not darken the question with the dreary metaphysics of determinism. He is far too bright and adroit a journalist for that. But he does make a simple appeal to charity and even Christianity, basing on it the idea that we should not judge people at all or even blame them at all. Like everybody else who argues thus, he imagines himself to be pleading for mercy and humanity. Like everybody else who argues thus, he is doing the direct contrary. This particular notion of not judging people really means hanging them without trial. It would really substitute for judgment, not mercy, but something much more like murder. For the logical process through which the discussion passes is always the same. I have seen it in a hundred debates about fate and free will. First, somebody says, like Mr. Bennett, let us be kinder to our brethren and not blame them for faults we cannot judge. Then some casual, common-sense person says, do you really mean you would let anybody pick your pocket or cut your throat without protest? Then the first man always answers, as Mr. Bennett does, oh no, I would punish him to protect myself and protect society, but I would not blame him because I would not venture to judge him. The philosopher seems to have forgotten that he set out with the idea of being kinder to the cut throat and the pickpocket. His sense of humor should suggest to him that the pickpocket might possibly prefer to be blamed rather than go to penal servitude for the protection of society. Now, of course, Mr. Bennett is quite right in the most mystical and therefore the most deeply moral sense. We do not know what God knows about the merits of a man, nor do we know what God knows about the needs of a community. A man who poisons his little niece for money may have mysterious motives and excuses we cannot understand, and so he may serve mysterious social purposes we cannot follow. We are not infallible when we think we are punishing criminals, but neither are we infallible when we think we are protecting society. Our inevitable ignorance seems to me to cut both ways, but even in our ignorance one thing is vividly clear. Mr. Bennett's solution is not the more merciful, but the less merciful of the two. To say that we may punish people but not blame them is to say that we have a right to be cruel to them but not a right to be kind to them. For after all, blame is itself a compliment. It is a compliment because it is an appeal and an appeal to a man as a creative artist, making his soul. To say to a man rascal or villain in ordinary society may seem abrupt, but it is also elliptical. It is an abbreviation of a sublime spiritual apostrophe for which there may be no time in our busy social life. When you meet a millionaire who corners many markets out at dinner in Mayfair and greet him, as is your custom, with the exclamation scoundrel, you are merely shortening for convenience some such expression as how can you, having the divine spirit of man that might be higher than the angels, drag it down so far as to be a scoundrel? When you are introduced at a garden party to a cabinet minister who takes tips on government contracts and when you say to him in the ordinary way, scamp, you are merely using the last word of a long moral disquisition which is in effect how pathetic is the spiritual spectacle of this cabinet minister who being from the first made glorious by the image of God condescends so far to lesser ambitions as to allow them to turn him into a scamp. It is a mere taking of the tale of a sentence to stand for the rest like saying bus for omnibus. It is even more like the case of that 17th century Puritan whose name was something like if Jesus Christ had not died for thee, thou hadst been damned, Higgins. But who was for popular convenience referred to as damned Higgins. But it is obvious anyhow that when we call a man a coward and so doing, asking him how he can be a coward when he could be a hero. When we rebuke a man for being a sinner, we imply that he has the powers of a saint. But punishing him for the protection of society involves no regard for him at all. It involves no limit of proportion in the punishment at all. There are some limits to what ordinary men are likely to say that an ordinary man deserves. But there are no limits to what the danger of the community may be supposed to demand. We would not, even if we could, boil the millionaire in oil or skin the poor little politician alive, for we do not think a man deserves to be skinned alive for taking commissions on contracts. But it is by no means so certain that the skinning of him alive might not protect the community. Corruption can destroy communities and torture can determine. At any rate, the thing is not so self-evidently useless as it is self-evidently unjust and vindictive. We refrain from such fantastic punishments, largely because we do have some notion of making the punishment fit the crime and not merely fit the community. If the state were the sole consideration, it may be inferred a priori that people might be much more cruel. And, in fact, where the state was the sole consideration, it was found an experience that they were much more cruel. They were much more cruel precisely because they were freed from all responsibilities about the innocence or guilt of the individual. I believe that in Heathen, Rome, the model of a merely civic and secular loyalty, it was a common practice to torture the slaves of any household subjected to legal inquiry. If you had remonstrated because no crime had been proved against the slaves, the state would have answered in the modern manner, we are not punishing the crime, we are punishing the community. Now, that example is relevant just now in more ways than one. Of course, I do not mean that this was the motive of all historical cruelties or that some did not spring from quite an opposite motive, but it was the motive of much tyranny in the Heathen world. And in this, as in other things, the modern world has largely become a Heathen world. And modern tyranny can find its prototype in the torturing of Heathen slaves in two fundamental respects. First, that the modern world has returned to the test of the Heathen world, that of considering service to the state and not justice to the individual. And second, that the modern world, like the Heathen world, is here inflicting it chiefly on subordinate and submerged classes of society on slaves or those who are almost slaves. For the Heathen state is a servile state and no one has more of this view of the state than the state socialists. The official labor politician would be the first to say in theory that punishment must not be a moral recompense, but merely a social regulation. And he would be the first to say in practice that it is the poor and ignorant who must be regulated. Doubtless it is one thing to be regulated and another to be tortured. But when once the principle is admitted broadly, the progress towards torture may proceed pretty briskly. In the psychological sphere, it is already as bad as it has ever been. It may come as a surprise to the humanitarian to learn it, but it is nonetheless true that a mother may undergo moral torture in the last degree when her children are taken from her by brute force. And that incident has become so common in the policing of the poor nowadays as hardly to call for notice. And that example is particularly relevant to the present argument. Nobody could pretend that the affectionate mother backward child deserves to be punished by having all the happiness taken out of her life. But anybody can pretend that the act is needed for the happiness of the community. Nobody will say it was so wicked of her to love her baby that she deserves to lose it, but it is always easy to say that some remote social purpose will be served by taking it away. Thus the elimination of punishment means the extension of tyranny. Men would not do things so oppressive so long as they were vindictive. It is only when punishment is purged of vengeance that it can be as villainous as that. For that matter, it would be easy to find examples much nearer than this one to the torturing of the Roman slaves. There is a very close parallel in the third degree as applied by the police to the criminal class on suspicion, especially in America. For the criminal class is a submerged class like the slaves, and it is but an experiment on the nerves in one way instead of another, like a preference for the rack rather than the thumb screw. But the point is that it is applied to the criminal type without any proof that it is in this case criminal. And the thing is justified not by the criminality of the individual, but by the needs of the state. The police would answer exactly as the pagans answered. We are not punishing the crime. We are protecting the community. This tyranny is spreading, and there is no hope for liberty or democracy until we all demand again with a tongue of thunder the right to be blamed. We shall never feel like free men until we assert again our sacred claim to be punished. The denunciation of a man that he chose to do is itself the confession that he chose to do it. And it is beneath his dignity to admit that he could have done nothing else. The only alternative theory is that we can do nothing but what we do, and our rulers can do anything whatever to restrain us. Compared with that, it would be better that roaring mobs should rise all over England to be hanged. End of section 11 The Mercy of Mr. Arnold Bennett. Section 12 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. Recording by Mary Lou in New York City. Fancies versus Fads by G.K. Chesterton. Section 12. A defense of dramatic unities. Injustice is done to the old classical rules of artistic criticism because we do not treat them as artistic criticism. We first turn them into police regulations and then complain of them for being so. But I suspect with the submission of a number to ignorance that the art canons of Aristotle and others were much more generally artistic in the sense of atmospheric. We allow a romantic critic to be as dogmatic as Ruskin and still feel that he is not really being so despotic as Beaulieu. If a modern, like Mitelink says that all drama is in an open door at the end of an empty passage, we do not take it literally as an extra exit in case of fire. But if an ancient, like Horace says that all drama demands a closed door which she'll hide Medea where she murders her children, then we do receive it as something rigid and formal like the order to close the shutters on Zeppelin nights. Now how far the classical critics took their rules absolutely I do not know. But I am substantially sure that there is a true instinct whatever exceptions be allowed at the edges. The unities of time and place that is the idea of keeping figures and events within the frame of a few hours or a few yards is naturally derided as a especially artificial affront to the intellect. But I am sure it is an especially true suggestion to the imagination. It is exactly in the artistic atmosphere where rules and reasons are so hard to define that this unification would be most easy to defend. This limitation to a few scenes and actors really has something in it that pleases the imagination and not the reason. There are instances in which it may be broken boldly there are types of art to which it does not apply at all. But wherever it can be satisfied something not superficial but rather subconscious is satisfied. Something revisits us. That is the strange soul of single places the shadow of haunting ghosts or household gods. Like all such things it is indescribable when it is successful. It is easier to describe the disregard of it as unsuccessful. Thus Stevenson's masterpiece The Master of Ballantry always seems to me to fall into two parts the finer which revolves around the inferior and the inferior which rambles through India and America. The slender and sinister figure in black standing on the shore or vanishing from the shrubbery does really seem to have come from the ends of the earth. In the chapters of travel he only serves to show that for a boy's adventure tale a good villain makes a bad hero. And even about Hamlet I am so heretical as to be almost classical. I doubt whether the exile in England does not rather dwarf than dignify the prisoner of Denmark. I am not sure that he got anything out of the pirates he could not have got out of the players and I'm very sure indeed that this figure in black like the other produces a true though intangible effect of tragedy when and because we see him against the great gray background of the house of his fathers. In a word it is what Mr. J.B. Yates the poet's stimulating parent calls in his excellent book of essays the drama of the home. The drama is domestic and is dramatic because it is domestic. We might say that superior literature is centripetal while inferior literature is centrifugal. But oddly enough the same truth may be found by studying inferior as well as superior literature. What is true of a Shakespearean play is equally true of a shilling shocker. The shocker is at its worst when it wanders and escapes through new scenes and new characters. The shocker is at its best when it shocks by something familiar a figure or effect that is already known though not understood. A good detective story also can keep the classical unities or otherwise play the game. I for one am delighted when the dagger of the curate is found to be the final clue to the death of the vicar. But there is a point of honor for the author. He may conceal the curate's crime, but he must not conceal the curate. I feel I am cheated when the last chapter hints for the first time that the vicar had a curate. I am annoyed when a curate who is a total stranger to me is produced from a cupboard or a box in a style at once abrupt and related. I am annoyed most of all when the new curate is only the tool of a terrible secret society ramifying from Moscow or Tibet. These cosmopolitan complications are the dull and not the dramatic element in the ingenious tales of Mr. Oppenheim or Mr. Lücker. They entirely spoil the fine domesticity of a good murder. It is sportsman-like to call spies from the end of the earth, as it is to call spirits from the vasty deep in a story that does not imply them from the start. And this, because the supply is infinite, and the infinite as Coventry Patmore well said is generally alien to art. Everybody knows that the universe contains enough spies or enough specters to kill the most healthy and vigorous vicar. The drama of fiction is in discovering how he can be killed decently and economically within the classic unities of time and place. In short, the good mystery story should narrow its circles like an eagle about to swoop. The spiral should curve inwards and not outwards. And this inward movement is in true poetic mysteries as well as mere police mystifications. It will be assumed that I am joking if I say there is a serious social meaning in this novel reader's notion of keeping a crime in the family. It must seem mere nonsense to find a moral in this fancy about washing gory linen at home. It will naturally be asked whether I have idealized the home merely as a good place for assassinations. I have not. Any more than I have idealized the church as a thing in which the curates can kill the vickers. Nevertheless, the thing, like many things, is symbolic though it is not serious. And the objection to it implies a subtle misunderstanding in many minds of the whole case for the home as I have sometimes had occasion to urge it. When we defend the family, we do not mean it is always a peaceful family. When we maintain the thesis of marriage, we do not mean that it is always a happy marriage. We mean that it is the theater of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter. It is not so much the place where a man kills his wife as a place where he can take the equally sensational step of not killing his wife. There is truth in the cynicism that calls marriage a trial, but even the cynic will admit that a trial may end in an acquittal. And the reason that the family has this central and crucial character is the same reason that makes a prop of liberty. The family is the test of freedom because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself. Other institutions must largely be made for him by strangers, whether the institutions be despotic or democratic. There is no other way of organizing mankind which can give this power and dignity not only to mankind, but to men. If anybody likes to put it so, we cannot really make all men Democrats unless we make all men despots. That is to say, the cooperation of the Commonwealth will be a mere automatic unanimity like that of insects unless the citizen has some province of purely voluntary action, unless he is so far not only a citizen but a king. In the world of ethics, this is called liberty. In the world of economics it is called property. In the world of aesthetics, necessarily so much more dim and indefinable, it is darkly adumbrated in the old dramatic unities of place or time. It must indeed be a mistake in any case to treat such artistic rules as rigidly as if they were moral rules. It was an era if they ever were so treated. It may well be a question whether they were ever meant to be so treated. But when critics have suggested that classical canons were a mere superficial varnish, it may safely be said that it is the critics who are superficial. Modern artists would have been wiser if they had developed sympathetically some of the Aristotelian aesthetics as medieval philosophers developed sympathetically the Aristotelian logic and ethics. For a more subtle study of the unities of time and place, for example as outlined for the Greek drama might have led us towards what is perhaps the last secret of all legend and literature. It might have suggested why poets, pagan or not returned perpetually to the idea of happiness as a place for humanity as a person. It might suggest why the world is always seeking for absolutes that are not abstractions. Why fairyland was always a land, and even the version was almost a man. And of section 12 Section 13 of Fancy's Versus Fads This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Lurie Wilson Fancy's Versus Fads by G.K. Chesterton The Boredom of Butterflies There is one thing which critics perhaps tend to forget when they complain that Mr. H.G. Wells no longer concerns himself with telling a story. It is that nobody else could interest and excite us so much without telling a story. It is possible to read one of his recent novels almost without knowing the story at all. It is possible to dip into it as into a book of essays and pick up opinions here and there. But all the essays are brilliant essays and all the opinions are striking opinions. It does not much matter who holds the opinions. It is possible that the author does not hold them at all and pretty certain that he will not hold them long. But nobody else could make such splendid stuff out of the very refuse of his rejected opinions. Seen from this side even what is called his failure must be recognized as a remarkable success. The personal story may fade away, but it is something of an achievement to be still interesting after becoming impersonal. Like the achievement of the Cheshire cat who could grin when he was no longer there. Moreover, these impersonal and even irresponsible opinions of Mr. Wells, though never conclusive, are always suggestive. Each is a good starting point for thought if only for the thought that refutes it. In short, the critics of Mr. Wells rather exaggerate the danger of his story running to speculation as if it were merely running to seed. Anyhow, they ought to remember that there are two meanings in running to seed and one of them is connected with seed time. I have, however, a particular reason for mentioning the matter here. I confess that there is more than one of Mr. Wells' recent novels that I have both read and not read. I am never quite sure that I have read Shakespeare or all Boss Wells' Johnson. Because I have so long had the habit of opening them anywhere. So I have opened the works of Mr. Wells anywhere and had great fun out of the essays that would have seemed only long parentheses in the story. But on getting to rather closer grips with the last of his stories, the secret places of the heart, I think I have caught a glimpse of a difficulty in this sort of narrative which is something deeper than anything. In a story like Pickwick or Tristram Shandy, regression is never disappointment. But in this case, different as I do from the merely hostile critics, I cannot dispel the atmosphere of disappointment. The story seems inconclusive in a sense beyond anything merely inconsistent. And I fancy I can guess why. A pedantic logician may perhaps imagine that a thing can only be inconclusive at the conclusion. But I really claim the liberty and language of saying that this sort of thing is inconclusive from the start. It begins inconclusive and in that sense begins dull. The hero begins by telling the doctor about a mutable flux of flirtation, about his own experiments as a flanderer, always flitting like a butterfly from flower to flower. Now it is highly probable that the diary of a butterfly would be very dull even if it were only the diary of a day. His round need be no more really amusing than a postman's, since he has no serious spiritual interest in any of his places of call. Now by starting his hero as a philosopher and also flanderer, and taking seriously his philosophy of flandering, the author as good as tells us to start with that his hero will not have any serious adventures at all. At the beginning of the story, he practically tells us that there will be no story. The story of a fickle man is not a story at all, because there is no strain or resistance in it. Somebody talked about tales with a twist, and it is certain that all tales are tales with a tongue. All the most subtle truths of literature are to be found in legend. There's no better test of the truth of serious fiction than the simple truths to be found in a fairy tale or an old ballad. Now in folklore, there is no such thing as free love. There is such a thing as false love. There is also another thing which the old ballads always talk of as true love. But the story always turns on the keeping of a bond or the breaking of it. And this quite a part from orthodox morality in the matter of the marriage bond. The love may be in the strict sense sinful, but it is never anarchical. There was quite as little freedom for Lancelot or Arthur, quite as little mere forlandering in the philosophy of Tristum as in the philosophy of Gallagher. It may have been unlawful love, but it certainly was not lawless love. In the old ballads, there is the triumph of true love, as in the bailiff's daughter of Islington, or the tragedy of true love as in Helen of Kirkconnell Lee, or the tragedy of false love as in the ballad of Oh Wally Wally, Up the Bank. But there is a triumph nor tragedy in the idea of a vowedly, transient love. And no literature will ever be made out of it except the very lightest literature of satire. And even the satire must be satire on fickleness, and therefore involve an indirect ideal of fidelity. But you cannot make any enduring literature out of love conscious that it will not endure. Even if this mutability were working as morality, it would still be unworkable as art. The decadence used to say that things like the marriage vow might be very convenient for commonplace public purposes, but had no place in the world of beauty and imagination. The truth is exactly the other way. The truth is that if marriage had not existed, it would have been necessary for artists to invent it. The truth is that if constancy had never been needed as a requirement, it would still have been created out of a cloud and air as a poetical requirement. If ever monogamy is abandoned in practice, it will linger in legend and in literature. When society is haunted by the butterfly flitting from flower to flower, poetry will still be describing the desire of the moth for the star, and it will be a fixed star. Literature must always revolve around loyalties for a rudimentary psychological reason, which is simply the nature of narrative. You cannot tell a story without the idea of pursuing a purpose and sticking to a point. You cannot tell a story without the idea of the quest, the idea of the vow, even if it be only the idea of the wager. Perhaps the most modern equivalent to the man who makes a vow is the man who makes a bet. But he must not hedge on a bet. Still less must he Welsh or do he halt when he has made a bet. Even if the story ends with his doing so, the dramatic emotion depends on our realizing the dishonesty of his doing so. That is, the drama depends on the keeping or breaking of a bond if it be only a bet. A man wandering about a race course making bets that nobody took seriously would be merely a bore. And so the hero wandering through a novel making vows of love that nobody took seriously is merely a bore. The point here is not so much that morally it cannot be a credible story, but that artistically it cannot be a story at all. Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal. The shock of beauty is when the irresistible force hits the immovable post. Thus in the last novel of Mr. Wells, what is inconclusive in the second part is largely due to what is convincing in the first part. By the time that the hero meets his new heroine on Salisbury Plain, he has seriously convinced us that there's nothing heroic about him and that nothing heroic will happen to him at any rate in that department. He disenchants the enchantment beforehand and warns the reader against even a momentary illusion. When once a man looks forward as well as backward to disillusionment, no romance can be made of him. Prophelegacy may be made precisely because it implies some betrayal or breaking of a law, but polygamy is not in the least romantic. Polygamy is dull to the point of respectability. When a man looks forward to a number of wives as he does to a number of cigarettes, you can no more make a book out of them than out of the bills from his tobacconist. Anything having the character of a Turkish harem has also something of the character of a Turkey carpet. It is not a portrait but a picture, but a pattern. We may at the moment be looking at one highly colored or even flamboyant figure in the carpet, but we know that on every side in front as well as behind, the image is repeated without purpose and without finality. End of Section 13 Section 14 of Fancies vs. Fads This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Fancies vs. Fads by G.K. Chesterton The Terror of a Toy It would be too high and hopeful a compliment to say that the world is becoming absolutely babyish. For its chief weak-mindedness, is an inability to appreciate the intelligence of babies. On every side we hear whispers that would have appeared half-witted to the wise men of Gotham. Only this Christmas I was told in a toy shop that not so many bows and arrows were being made for little boys because they were considered dangerous. It might in some circumstances be dangerous to have a little bow. It is always dangerous to have a little boy. But no other society, claiming to be sane, would have dreamed of supposing that you could abolish all bows unless you could abolish all boys. With the merits of the latter reform I will not deal here. There is a great deal to be said for such a course and perhaps we shall soon have an opportunity of considering it. For the modern mind seems quite incapable of distinguishing between the means and the end. Between the organ and the disease. Between the use and the abuse. And would doubtless break the boy along with the bow, as it empties out the baby with the bath. But let us, by way of a little study in this mournful state of things, consider this case of the dangerous toy. Now the first and most self-evident truth is that of all the things a child sees and touches the most dangerous toy is about the least dangerous thing. There is hardly a single domestic utensil that is not much more dangerous than a little bow and arrow. He can burn himself in the fire, he can boil himself in the bath, he can cut his throat with a carving knife, he can scald himself with the kettle, he can choke himself with anything small enough, he can break his neck off anything high enough. He moves all day long amid a murderous machinery, as capable of killing and maiming as the wheels of the most frightful factory. He plays all day in a house fitted up with engines of torture like the Spanish Inquisition. And while he thus dances in the shadow of death, he is to be saved from all the perils of possessing a piece of string tied to a bent bow or twig. When he is a little boy it generally takes him some time even to learn how to hold the bow. When he does hold it he is delighted if the arrow flutters for a few yards, like a feather or an autumn leaf. But even if he grows a little older and more skillful and has yet not learned to despise arrows in favor of aeroplanes the amount of damage he could conceivably do with his little arrows would be about one hundredth part of the damage that he could always in any case have done by simply picking up a stone in the garden. Now you do not keep a little boy from throwing stones by preventing him from ever seeing stones. You do not do it by locking up all the stones in the geological museum and only issuing tickets of admission to adults. You do not do it by trying to pick up all the pebbles on the beach for fear he should practice throwing them into the sea. You do not even adopt so obvious and even pressing a social reform as forbidding roads to be made of anything but asphalt or directing that all gardens shall be made on clay and none on gravel. You neglect all these great opportunities opening before you. You neglect all these inspiring vistas of social science and enlightenment. When you want to prevent a child from throwing stones you fall back on the stalest and most sentimental and even most superstitious methods. You do it by trying to preserve some reasonable authority and influence over the child. You trust to your private relation with the boy and not to your public relation with the stone. And what is true of the natural missile is just as true of course of the artificial missile especially as it is a very much more ineffectual and therefore innocuous missile. A man could be really killed like St. Stephen with the stones in the road. I doubt if he could be really killed like St. Sebastian with the arrows but anyhow the very plain principle is the same. If you can teach a child not to throw a stone you can teach him when to shoot an arrow. If you cannot teach him anything he will always have something to throw. If he can be persuaded not to smash the Archdeacon's hat with a heavy flint it will probably be possible to dissuade him from transfixing that headdress with a toy arrow. If his training deters him from heaving half a brick at the postman he will probably also warn him against constantly loosening shafts of death against the policeman. But the notion that the child depends upon particular implements labeled dangerous in order to be a danger to himself and other people is a notion so nonsensical that it is hard to see how any human mind can entertain it for a moment. The truth is that all sorts of fadism both official and theoretical have broken down the natural authority of the domestic institution especially among the poor and the fadists are now casting about desperately for a substitute for the thing they have themselves destroyed. The normal thing is for the parents to prevent a boy from doing more than a reasonable amount of damage with his bow and arrow and for the rest to leave him to a reasonable enjoyment of them. Officialism cannot thus follow the life of the individual boy as can the individual guardian. You cannot appoint a particular policeman to each boy to pursue him when he climbs trees or falls into ponds. So the modern spirit has descended to the indescribable mental degradation of trying to abolish the abusive things by abolishing the things themselves which is as if it were to abolish ponds or abolish trees. Perhaps it will have a try at that before long. Thus we have all heard of savages who try a tomahawk for murder or burn a wooden club for the damage it has done to society. To such intellectual levels may the world return. There are indeed yet lower levels. There is a story from America about a little boy who gave up his toy cannon to assist the disarmament of the world. I do not know if it is true, but on the whole I prefer to think so. For it is perhaps more tolerable to imagine one small monster who could do such a thing than many more mature monsters who could invent or admire it. It is one of the peculiarities of the Americans that they combine a power of producing what they satirize as sob stuff with a parallel power of satirizing it. And of the two American tall stories it is sometimes hard to say which is the story and which is the satire. But it seems clear that some people did really repeat this story in a reverential spirit. And it marks, as I have said, much of cerebral decay. You can, with luck, break a window with a toy arrow. But you can hardly bombard a town with a toy gun. If people object to the mere model of a cannon they must equally object to the picture of a cannon. And so to every picture in the world that depicts a sword or a spear there would be a splendid clearance of all the great art galleries of the world. But it would be nothing to the destruction of all the great libraries of the world that would logically extend the principle to all the literary masterpieces that admit the glory of arms. When this progress had gone on for a century or two it might begin to dawn on people that there was something wrong with their moral principle. What is wrong with their moral principle is that it is immoral. Arms, like every other adventure or art of man, have two sides according as they are invoked for the infliction or the defiance of wrong. There is also an element of real poetry and an element of realistic and therefore repulsive prose. The child's symbolic sword and bow are simply the poetry without the prose. The good without the evil. The toy's sword is the abstraction and emanation of the heroic apart from all its horrible accidents. It is the soul of the sword that will never be stained with blood. And of The Terror of a Toy Recording by Justin Barrett In 2015, False Theory and the Theatre, a theatrical manager recently insisted on introducing Chinese labor into the theatrical profession. He insisted on having real Chinaman to take the parts of Chinese servants. And some actors seem to have resented it, as I think very reasonably. A distinguished actress who is clever enough to know better defended it on the ground and just interfere with the perfection of a work of art. I dispute the moral thesis in any case and Nero would no doubt have urged it in defense of having real deaths in the amphitheater. I do not admit in any case that the artist can be entirely indifferent to hunger and unemployment any more than to lions or boiling oil. But as a matter of fact, there is no need to raise the moral question because the case is equally strong in relation to the artistic question. I do not think that a Chinese character being represented by a Chinese actor is the finishing touch to the perfection of a work of art. I think it is the last and lowest phase of the vulgarity that is called realism. It is in the same style and taste as the triumphs on which I believe some actor managers have prided themselves the triumphs of having real silver for goblets or real jewels for crowns. That is not the spirit of a perfect artist but rather of a purse-proud parvignu. The perfect artist would be he who could put on a crown of gilt wire or tinsel and make us feel he was a king. Moreover if the principle is to be extended from properties to persons it is not easy to see where the principle can stop. If we are now to insist on real Asians to act Chuchin Chow why not insist on real Venetians to act the merchant of Venice. We did experiment recently and I believe very successfully in having the Jew acted by a real Jew. But I hardly think we should make it a rule that nobody must be allowed to act Shylock to call upon his father Abraham. Must the carriers of Macbeth and McDuff only be represented by men with names like Macpherson and McNabb must the Prince of Denmark always be in private life a dane must we import a crowd of Greeks before we are allowed to act Troleus and Cressida or a mob of real Egyptians to form the background of Antony and Cleopatra. Will it be necessary to kidnap the methods of the slave trade and force him into acting Othello? It was rather foolishly suggested at one time that our allies in Japan might be offended at the fantastic satire of the Mikado. As a matter of fact, the satire of the Mikado is not at all directed against Japanese things but exclusively against English things. But I certainly think there might be some little ill feeling in Japan if gangs of Japanese Coolies were shipped across two continents merely in order to act in it. If once this singular rule be recognized, a dramatist will certainly be rather shy of introducing Zulus or Red Indians into his dramas going to the difficulty in securing appropriate dramatic talent. He will hesitate before making his hero an Eskimo. He will abandon his intention of seeking his heroine in Sandwich Islands. If he were to insist on introducing real cannibals it seems possible they might insist on introducing real cannibalism. This would be quite in the spirit of Nero and all the art critics of the Roman realism of the amphitheater. But surely it would be putting almost too perfect a finishing touch to the perfection of a work of art. That kind of finishing touch is a little too finishing. They grew more intense when the newspapers that insisted on Chinaman because they could not help being Chinaman began to praise them with admiration and astonishment because they looked Chinese. This opens up a speculation so complex and contradictory that I do not propose to follow it. For I am interested here not in particular incident but in the general idea. It will be a sufficient statement on the mental fact of all the arts. If I say simply I do not believe in the resemblance. I do not believe that a Chinaman does look like a Chinaman. That is I do not believe that any Chinaman will necessarily look like the Chinaman the Chinaman in the imagination of the artist and the interest of the crowd. We all know the fable of the man who imitated a pig and his rival who was hooded because he could only produce what was in fact the squeak of a real pig. The crowd was perfectly right. The crowd was a crowd of very penetrating and philosophical art critics. They had come there not to hear an ordinary pig which they could hear by poking any ordinary pig's die. They had come to hear how the voice of the pig affects the immortal mind and spirit of man. The sort of satire he would make of it what sort of fun he can get out of it what sort of exaggeration he feels to be an exaggeration of its essence and not of its accidents. In other words they had come to hear a squeak but the sort of a squeak which expresses what a man thinks of a pig not the vastly inferior squeak which only expresses what a pig thinks of a man. I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings but it is only men especially wise men who discuss whether pigs can fly. We have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it. Therefore the actor who imitated the quadruped may well have put into his squeak something of the pathetic cry of one longing for the wings of a dove. The quadruped himself might express such sentiment. He might appear and generally does appear singularly unconscious of his own lack of feathers but the same principle is true of things more dignified than the most dignified porker though clad in the most superb plumage. If a vision of a stately Arab has risen in the imagination of an author who is an artist he will be wise if he confides it to an actor who is also an artist. He will be wiser to confide it to an actor than to an Arab. The actor being a fellow countryman and a fellow artist may bring out what the author thinks the Arab stands for whereas the real Arab might be a particular individual who at that particular moment refuse to stand for anything of the sort or for anything at all. The principle is a general one and I mean no respect to China in the porcine parallel or in the figurative association of pigs and pig tails but as a matter of fact the argument is especially apt in the case of China. For I fear that China is chiefly interesting to most of us as the other end of the world. It is valued as something far off and therefore fantastical like a kingdom in the clouds of sunrise. It is not the very real virtues of the Chinese tradition its stoicism of honor its ancient peasant cults that most people want to put into a play. It is the ordinary romantic feeling about something remote and extravagant like the Martians or the man in the moon. It is perfectly reasonable to have that romantic feeling in moderation like other amusements but it is not reasonable to expect the remote person to feel remote from himself or from the other end of the world not to feel it as this end. We must not ask the outlandish Oriental to feel outlandish or a Chinaman to be astonished at being Chinese. If therefore the literary artist has legitimate literary purpose of expressing the mysterious and alien atmosphere which China implies to him he will probably do it much better with the aid of an actor who is not Chinese. Of course I am not criticizing the particular details of the particular performance of which I know little or nothing. I do not know the circumstances and under the circumstances for all I know the experiment may have been very necessary or very successful. I merely protest against a theory of dramatic truth urged in defense of the dramatic experiment which seems to me calculated to falsify the whole art of the drama. It is founded on exactly the same fallacy as that of the infant in Stevenson's nursery rhyme who thought that the Japanese children must suffer from homesickness through always being abroad in Japan. This brings us very near to an odd and rather threadbare theatrical controversy about whether staging should be simple or elaborate. I do not mean to begin that argument all over again. What is really wanted is not so much a simple stage manager as the simple spectator. In a very real sense what is wanted is the simple critic who would be in truth the most subtle critic. The healthy human instincts in these things are at least as much spoiled by sophistication in the stalls as by elaboration on the stage. A really simple mind would enjoy a simple scene and also a gorgeous scene. A popular instinct to be found in all folklore would know well enough when the one or the other was appropriate. But what is involved here is not the whole of that sophistication but only one particular sophistry. And against that sophistry we may well pause to protest. It is the critical fallacy of cutting off a real donkey's head to put it on bottom the weaver when the head is symbolical in that case more appropriate to the critic than the actor. End of section 15 Recording by Tom Mack