 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton. Section 27. Chapter 15. Part 1. Wells and the World State. There was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate the past, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation. Some of the most brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. J. L. Garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientific aviators luminously discussed the new science. Among their graceful felicitations and grave and quiet analyses, a word was said or a note was struck, which I myself can never hear even in the most harmless after-dinner speech, without an impulse to leap up and yell and smash the decanters and wreck the dinner table. Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury, and never since have I been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. I heard it when block and the old prophets of pacifism by panic preached that war would become too horrible for patriots to endure. It sounded to me like saying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist that would finally cure me of loving my dog. And I felt it again when all these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about the inevitable effect of aviation in bridging the Atlantic, and establishing alliance and affection between England and America. I resent the suggestion that a machine can make me bad, but I resent quite equally the suggestion that a machine can make me good. It might be the unfortunate fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and Mr. Fitz Arlington Blinkensop, inhabiting the suburban villa and garden next to mine, and I might even be largely to blame for it. But if somebody told me that a new kind of lawnmower had just been invented, of so cunning a structure that I should be forced to become a bosom friend of Mr. Blinkensop, whether I like it or not, I should be very much annoyed. I should be moved to say that if that was the only way of cutting my grass I would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my neighbor. Or suppose the difference were even less defensible. Suppose a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife, and suppose somebody told him that the introduction of an entirely new vacuum cleaner would compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his wife. It would be found, I fancy, that human nature of course that vacuum. Reasonably spirited human beings will not be ordered about by bicycles and sewing machines, and a sane man will not be made good, let alone bad, by the things he has himself made. I have occasionally dictated to a typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a typewriter, even of the newest and most complicated mechanism. Nor have I ever met a typewriter, however complex, that attempted such a tyranny. Yet this, and nothing else, is what is implied in all such talk of the airplane annihilating distinctions as well as distances, and an international aviation abolishing nationalities. This, and nothing else, was really implied in one speaker's prediction that such aviation will almost necessitate an Anglo-American friendship. Incidentally, I may remark, it is not a true suggestion, even in the practical and materialistic sense, and the speaker's phrase refuted the speaker's argument. He said that international relations must be more friendly when men can get from England to America in a day. Well, men can already get from England to Germany in a day, and the result was a mutual invitation of which the formalities lasted for five years. Men could get from the coast of England to the coast of France very quickly, through nearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling with arms against each other. They could get there very quickly when Nelson went down by that Burford Inn to embark for Trafalgar. They could get there very quickly when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at Belone that filled England with alarms of invasion. Are these the amiable and pacific relations which will unite England and America when an Englishman can get to America in a day? The shortening of the distance seems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that endless guerrilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in the Middle Ages, when French invaders carried away the bells of rye, and the men of those flats of V. Sussex gloriously pursued and recovered them. I do not know whether American privateers landing at Liverpool would carry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitute for the superstitious symbols of the past. I know not if the English on ripe reflection would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back. But anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot fight each other because they are near to each other, and if it were true there would never have been any such thing as a border warfare in the world. As a fact border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it was most difficult to bring under control, and our own traditional position in face of this new logic is somewhat disconcerting. We have always supposed ourselves safer because we were insular and therefore isolated. We have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on having enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbors, and now they are telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up with our neighbors. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers because a frontier only produces fighting, and now we are trusting to a frontier as the only thing that will produce friendship. But as a matter of fact, and for a far deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier will not produce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship, and we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness. But apart from this fallacy about the facts I feel, as I say, a strong abstract anger against the idea, or what some would call the ideal. If it were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, even if they were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think of the most tragic truth in the world. A man so improved would be, in an exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it. But in truth he cannot be so completely coerced into good, and in so far as he is incompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. Of the financial characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers in such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is evil. The light in their bodies is darkness, and the highest objects of such men are the lowest objects of ordinary men. Their peace is mere safety, their friendship is mere trade, their international friendship is mere international trade. The best we can say of that school of capitalism is that it will be unsuccessful. It has every other vice, but it is not practical. It has at least the impossibility of idealism. And so far as remoteness can carry it, that inferno is indeed a utopia. All the visible manifestations of these men are materialistic, but at least their visions will not materialize. The worst we suffer, but the best we shall at any rate escape. We may continue to endure the realities of a cosmopolitan capitalism, but we shall be spared its ideals. But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats whose vision takes so vulgar a form. I am interested in the same thing when it takes a far more subtle form in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to suggest that in his vision the Englishmen and the American are to embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and differences must be melted into the huge mould of a world state, or else, and I think these are almost his own words, we shall be destroyed by the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. In effect, men must abandon patriotism, or they will be murdered by science. After this, surely no one can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific over other types of training. Greek may be a good thing or no, but nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point, everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burnt up like Simel, or poisoned like Socrates. Philosophy, theology, and logic may or may not be idle academic studies, but nobody supposes that the study of philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to manufacture racks and thumb screws against their will, or that even logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be the only branch of study in which people have to be waived back from perfection, as from pestilence. But my business is not with the scientific dangers which alarm Mr. Wells. But with the remedy he proposes for them, or rather with the relationship of that remedy to foundation and future of America. Now it is not too much to say that Mr. Wells finds his model in America. The world state is to be the United States of the world. He answers almost all objections to the practicability of such a peace among states by pointing out that the American states have such a peace, and by adding truly enough that another turn of history might easily have seen them broken up by war. The pattern of the world state is to be found in the new world. Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for the American constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing in that constitution. The point appeared in answer to a question which many like myself must have put in this matter, the question of despotism and democracy. I cannot understand any Democrat not seeing the danger of so distant and indirect a system of government. It is hard enough anywhere to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough to get a little town council to fulfill the wishes of a little town, even when the townsmen meet the town counselors every day in the street, and could kick them down the street if they liked. What the same town counselors would be like if they were ruling all their fellow creatures from the North Pole, or the New Jerusalem, is a vision of oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Timberlane. This difficulty in all representative government is felt everywhere, and not least in America. But I think that if there is one truth apparent in such a choice of evils, it is that monarchy is at least better than oligarchy, and that where we have to act on a large scale, the most genuine popularity can gather round a particular person, like a pope or a president of the United States, or even a dictator like Caesar or Napoleon, rather than around a more or less corrupt committee which can only be defined as an obscure oligarchy. And in that sense, any oligarchy is obscure. For people to continue to trust 27 men, it is necessary, as a preliminary formality, that people should have heard of them. And there are no 27 men of whom everybody has heard, as everybody in France has heard of Napoleon, and as all Catholics have heard of the pope, or all Americans have heard of the president. I think the mass of ordinary Americans do really elect their president, and even where they cannot control him, at least they watch him, and in the long run they judge him. I think therefore that the American Constitution has a real popular institution in the presidency. But Mr. Wells would appear to want the American Constitution without the presidency. If I understand his words rightly, he seems to want the great democracy without its popular institution. Alluding to this danger that the world state might be a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely in the sense of autocracy. He asks whether the president of the world state would not be rather too tremendous a person, and seems to suggest in answer that there need not even be any such person. He seems to apply that the committee controlling the planet could meet almost without anyone in the chair, certainly without anyone on the throne. I cannot imagine anything more manifestly made to be a tyranny than such an ascephalous aristocracy. But while Mr. Wells' decision seems to me strange, his reason for it seems to me still more extraordinary. He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in his world state because there will be no wars and no diplomacy. A world state ought doubtless to go round the world, and going round the world seems to be a good training for arguing in a circle. Obviously there will be no wars and no war diplomacy if something has the power to prevent them, and we cannot deduce that the something will not want any power. It is rather as if somebody, urging that the Germans could only be defeated by uniting the Allied commands under Marshal Fosch, had said that after all it need not offend the British generals because the French supremacy need only be a fiction, the Germans being defeated. We should naturally say that the German defeat would only be a reality because the Allied command was not a fiction. Though the universal peace would only be a reality if the world state were not a fiction, and it could not even be a state if it were not a government. This argument amounts to saying first that the world state will be needed because it is strong and then that it may safely be weak because it will not be needed. Internationalism is, in any case, hostile to democracy. I do not say it is incompatible with it, but any combination of the two will be a compromise between the two. The only purely popular government is local and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city, but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities and these remote and altogether alien cities. All Irishmen may know roughly the same sort of things about Ireland, but it is absurd to say they all know the same things about Iceland when they may include a scholar steeped in Icelandic sagas or a sailor who has been to Iceland. To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globetrotters. If your particular outlook really takes in the cannibal islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the cannibal islands or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back. The end of section 27. The end of part one. This is LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. What I saw in America by G.K. Chesterton. Section 28. Chapter 15. Part 2. Wells and the World State. Given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over large areas, I think the nearest thing to democracy is despotism. At any rate I think it is some sort of more or less independent monarchy such as Andrew Jackson created in America. And I believe it is true to say that the two men whom the modern world really and almost reluctantly regards with impersonal respect as clothed by their office with something historic and honorable are the Pope and the President of the United States. But to admire the United States as the United States is one thing. To admire them as the World State is quite another. The attempt of Mr. Wells to make America a sort of model for the federation of all the free nations of the earth, though it is international in intention, is really as narrowly national in the bad sense as the desire of Mr. Kipling to cover the world with British imperialism or of Professor Tritschke to cover it with Prussian Pan-Germanism. Not being schoolboys, we no longer believe it can be done by painting it blue with white spots, even if they are called stars. The insufficiency of British imperialism does not lie in the fact that it has always been applied by force of arms. As a matter of fact it has not. It has been affected largely by commerce, by colonization of comparatively empty places, by geographical discovery and diplomatic bargain. Whether it can be regarded as praise or blame, it is certainly the truth, that among all the things that have called themselves empires, the British has been perhaps the least purely military, and has least both of the special guilt and the special glory that goes with militarism. The insufficiency of British imperialism is not that it is imperial, let alone military. The insufficiency of British imperialism is that it is British, when it is not merely Jewish. It is that, just as a man is no more than a man, so a nation is no more than a nation, and any nation is inadequate as an international model, and a state looks small when it occupies the whole earth. Any polity is narrow, as soon as it is wide as the world. It would be just the same if Ireland began to paint the map green, or Montenegro were to paint it black. The objection to spreading anything all over the world is that, among other things, you have to spread it very thin. But America, which Mr. Wells takes as a model, is in another sense rather a warning. Mr. Wells says very truly that there was a moment in history when America might well have broken off into independent states like those of Europe. He seemed to take it for granted that it was in all respects an advantage that this was avoided. Yet there is surely a case, however mildly we put it, for a certain importance in the world still attaching to Europe. There are some who find France as interesting as Florida, and who think they can learn as much about history and humanity in the marble cities of the Mediterranean as in the wooden towns of the Middle West. Europe may have been divided, but it was certainly not destroyed, nor has its peculiar position in the culture of the world been destroyed. Nothing has yet appeared capable of completely eclipsing it, either in its extension in America or its imitation in Japan. But the immediate point here is perhaps a more important one. There is now no creed accepted as embodying the common sense of all Europe as the Catholic creed was accepted as embodying it in medieval times. There is no culture broadly superior to all the others as the Mediterranean culture was superior to that of the barbarians in Roman times. If Europe were united in modern times it would probably be by the victory of one of its types over others, possibly over all the others. And when America was united finally in the nineteenth century it was taken by the victory of one of its types over others. It is not yet certain that this victory was a good thing. It is not yet certain that the world will be better for the triumph of the North over the South traditions of America. It may yet turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of the North Germans or for the Southern traditions of Germany and of Europe. The men who will not face this fact are men whose minds are not free. They are more crushed by progress than by any pietists by providence. They are not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was all for the best. Now progress is providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no purpose, or if the purpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almost insanely unlikely that there should be in history a period of steady and uninterrupted progress, or in other words a period in which poor bewildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications without making a single mistake. What has to be hammered into the heads of most normal newspaper readers today is that man has made a great many mistakes. Modern man has made a great many mistakes. Indeed, in the case of that progressive and pioneering character, one is sometimes tempted to say that he has made nothing but mistakes. Calvinism was a mistake, and capitalism was a mistake, and Tuthanism and the flattery of the northern tribes were mistakes. In the French, the persecution of Catholicism by the politicians was a mistake, as they found out in the Great War, when the memory gave Irish or Italian Catholics an excuse for hanging back. In England, the loss of agriculture and therefore a food supply in war, and the power to stand the siege was a mistake, and in America the introduction of the Negro slaves was a mistake, but it may yet be found that the sacrifice of the southern white man to them was even more of a mistake. The reason of this doubt is in one word. We have not yet seen the end of the whole industrial experiment, and there are already signs of it coming to a bad end. It may end in Bolshevism. It is more likely to end in the survival state. Indeed, the two things are not so different as some suppose, and they grow less different every day. The Bolshevists have already called in capitalists to help them crush the free peasants. The capitalists are quite likely to call in labor leaders to whitewash their compromise as social reform or even socialism. The cosmopolitan Jews who are the communists in the east will not find it so very hard to make a bargain with the cosmopolitan Jews who are capitalists in the west. The western Jews would be willing to admit a nominal socialism. The eastern Jews have already admitted that their socialism is nominal. It was the Bolshevist leader himself who said, Russia is again a capitalist country. But whoever makes the bargain, and whatever is its precise character, the substance of it will be survival. It will be survival in the only rational and reliable sense. That is, an arrangement by which a mass of men are insured shelter and livelihood in return, or being subjected to a law which obliges them to continue to labor. Of course it will not be called the survival state. It is very probable that it will be called the socialist state. But nobody seems to realize how very near all the industrial countries are to it. At any moment it may appear in the simple form of compulsory arbitration. For compulsory arbitration dealing with private employers is by definition slavery. When workmen receive unemployment pay, and at the same time arouse more and more irritation by going on strike, it may seem very natural to give them the unemployment pay for good and forbid them the strike for good. And the combination of those two things is by definition slavery. And Trotsky can beat any trust magnet as a strike breaker, for he does not even pretend that his compulsory labor is a free bargain. If Trotsky and the trust magnet come to a working compromise, that compromise will be a survival state. But it will also be the supreme and by far the most constructive and conclusive result of the industrial movement in history. Of the power of machinery or money. Of the huge populations of the modern cities. Of scientific inventions and resources. Of all the things before which the agricultural society of the southern confederacy went down. But even those who cannot see that commercialism may end in the triumph of slavery can see that the northern victory has to a great extent ended in the triumph of commercialism. And the point at the moment is that this did definitely mean, even at the time, the triumph of one American type over another American type. Just as much as any European war might mean the triumph of one European type over another. A victory of England over France would be a victory of merchants over peasants. And the victory of Northerners over Southerners was a victory of merchants over Squires. So that the very unity which Mr. Wells contrasted so favorably with war was not only itself due to a war, but to a war which had one of the most questionable and even perilous of the results of war. That result was a change in the balance of power. The predominance of a particular partner. The exaltation of a particular example. The eclipse of excellent traditions when the defeated lost their international influence. In short, it made exactly the same sort of difference of which we speak when we say that 1870 was a disaster to Europe, or that it was necessary to fight Prussia, lest she should Prussianize the whole world. America would have been very different if the leadership had remained with Virginia. The world would have been very different if America had been very different. It is quite reasonable to rejoice that the issue went as it did. Indeed, as I have explained elsewhere, for other reasons I do on the whole rejoice in it. But it is certainly not self-evident that it is a matter for rejoicing. One type of American state conquered and subjugated another type of American state, and the virtues and values of the latter were very largely lost to the world. So if Mr. Wells insists on the parallel of a United States of Europe, he must accept the parallel of a civil war of Europe. He must suppose that the peasant countries crushed the industrial countries, or vice versa, and that one or the other of them becomes the European tradition, to the neglect of the other. The situation which seems to satisfy him so completely in America is, after all, the situation which would result in Europe, if the Germanic empires, let us say, had entirely arrested the special development of the Slavs, or if the influence of France had really broken off short under a blow from Britain. The old South had qualities of humane civilization which have not sufficiently survived, or at any rate have not sufficiently spread. It is true that the decline of the agricultural South has been considerably balanced by the growth of the agricultural West. It is true, as I have occasion to emphasize in another place, that the West does give the new America something that is nearly a normal peasantry, as appended to the industrial towns. But this is not an answer. It is rather an argumentation of the argument. Insofar as America is saved, it is saved by being patchy, and would be ruined if the Western patch had the same fate as the Southern patch. When all is said, therefore, the advantages of American unification are not so certain that we can apply them to a world unification. The doubt could be expressed in a great many ways, and by a great many examples. For that matter it is already being felt that the supremacy of the Middle West in politics is inflicting upon other localities exactly the sort of local injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling to be free. It has already inflicted what amounts to religious persecution, or the imposition of an alien morality on the wine growing civilization of California. In a word, the American system is a good one, as governments go, but it is too large, and the world will not be improved by making it larger. And for this reason alone I should reject this second method of uniting England and America, which is not only Americanizing England, but Americanizing everything else. But the essential reason is that a type of culture came out on top in America and England in the 19th century, which cannot and would not be tolerated on top of the world. To unite all the systems at the top without improving and simplifying their social organization below would be to tie all the tops of the trees together, where they rise above a dense and poisonous jungle, and make the jungle darker than before. To create such a cosmopolitan political platform would be to build a roof above our own heads, to shut out the sunlight on which only usurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk about in the sun. This is no moment when industrial intellectualism can inflict such an artificial oppression upon the world. Industrialism itself is coming to see dark days, and its future is very doubtful. It is split from end to end with strikes and struggles for economic life, in which the poor not only plead that they are starving, but even the rich can only plead that they are bankrupt. The peasantries are growing not only more prosperous, but more politically effective. The Russian Mojuk has held up the Bolshevist government of Moscow and Petersburg. A huge concession has been made by England to Ireland. The League of Nations has decided for Poland against Russia. It is not certain that industrialism will not wither, even in its own field. It is certain that its intellectual ideas will not be allowed to cover every field, and this sort of cosmopolitan culture is one of its ideas. Industrialism itself may perish, or on the other hand industrialism itself may survive, by some searching and scientific reform that will really guarantee economic security to all. It may really purge itself of the accidental maladies of anarchy and famine, and continue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively clean and humanely shielded machine. At any rate no longer as a man-eating machine. Capitalism may clear itself of its worst corruptions by such reform as is open to it, by creating humane and healthy conditions for labor, and setting the laboring class to work under a lucid and recognized law. It may make Pittsburgh one vast model factory for all who will model themselves upon factories, and may give to all men and women in its employment a clear social status in which they can be contented and secure. And on the day when that social security is established for the masses, when the industrial capitalism has achieved this larger and more logical organization, and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy and ironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely hover over all those graves in the wilderness, where lay the bones of so many gallant gentlemen, men who had also from their youth known and upheld such a social stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade and a slave a slave. The end of section 28, Chapter 15. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton. Section 29, Chapter 16. A New Martin Chuzzle Whip. The aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest this thesis, that the very worst way of helping Anglo-American friendship is to be an Anglo-American. There is only one thing lower, of course, which is being an Anglo-Saxon. It is lower because at least Englishmen do exist, and Americans do exist, and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imagine an American and an Englishman in some way blended together. But if Angles and Saxons ever did exist, they are all fortunately dead now, and the wildest imagination cannot form the weakest idea of what sort of monster would be made by mixing one with the other. But my thesis is that the whole hope and the only hope lies not in mixing two things together, but rather in cutting them very sharply asunder. That is the only way in which two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outside each other to appreciate and admire each other. So long as they are different and yet supposed to be the same, there can be nothing but a divided mind and a staggering balance. It may be that in the first twilight of time man and woman walked about as one quadruped. But if they did, I am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked and kicked up its heels. Then the flaming sword of some angel divided them and they fell in love with each other. Should the reader require an example, a little more within historical range or a little more subject to critical tests than the above prehistoric anecdote, which I need not say was revealed to me in a vision, it would be easy enough to supply them both in a hypothetical and historical form. It is obvious enough, in a general way, that if we begin to subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will not only be rivalry but what is far more deadly and disastrous superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and Switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy. It will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of Holland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparison between them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes against the sea, it will be equally clear that the injustice falls the other way. It will also be clear that the situation of Switzerland on the map has received insufficient study. In both cases there will not only be rivalry but very unbalanced and unjust rivalry. In both cases, therefore, there will not only be enmity but very bitter or insolent enmity. But so long as the two are sharply divided, there can be no enmity because there can be no rivalry. Nobody can argue about whether the Swiss climb mountains better than the Dutch build dykes. Just as nobody can argue about whether a triangle is more triangular than a circle is round. This fancy example is alphabetically and indeed artificially simple. But having used it for convenience, I could easily give similar examples, not a fancy but a fact. I had occasion recently to attend the Christian festivity of a club in London for the exiles of one of the Scandinavian nations. When I entered the room the first thing that struck my eye and greatly raised my spirits was that the room was dotted with the colors of peasant costumes and the specimens of peasant craftsmanship. There were of course other costumes and other crafts in evidence. There were men dressed like myself, only better, in the garb of the modern middle classes. There was furniture like the furniture of any other room in London. Now according to the ideal formula of the ordinary internationalists these things that we had in common ought to have moved me to a sense of the kinship of all civilization. I ought to have felt as the Scandinavian gentlemen wore a collar and tie and I also wore a collar and tie. We were brothers and nothing could come between us. I ought to have felt that we were standing for the same principles of truth because we were wearing the same pair of trousers or rather to speak with more precision, similar pairs of trousers. Anyhow the pair of trousers that cloven pennant ought to have floated infancy over my head as the banner of Europe or the League of Nations. I am constrained to confess that no such rush of emotions overcame me. And the topic of trousers did not float across my mind at all, so far as those things were concerned. I might have remained in a mood of mortal enmity and cheerfully shot or stabbed the best dressed gentleman in the room. Precisely what did warm my heart, with an abrupt affection for that northern nation, was the very thing that is utterly and indeed lamentably lacking in my own nation. It was something corresponding to the one great gap in English history, corresponding to the one great blot on English civilization. It was the spiritual presence of a peasantry dressed according to its own dignity and expressing itself by its own creations. The sketch of America left by Charles Dickens is generally regarded as something which is either to be used as a taunt or covered with an apology. Doubtless it was unduly critical, even of the America of that day. Yet curiously enough it may well be the text for a true reconciliation at the present day. It is true that in this, as in other things, the Dickensian exaggeration is itself exaggerated. It is also true that while it is overemphasized, it is not allowed for. Dickens tended too much to describe the United States as a vast lunatic asylum, but partly because he had a natural inspiration and imagination suited to the description of lunatic asylums, as it was his finest poetic fancy that created a lunatic over the garden wall. So it was his fancy that created a lunatic over the western sea. To read some of the complaints, one would fancy that Dickens had deliberately invented a low and farcical America to be a contrast to his high and exalted England. It is suggested that he showed America as full of rowdy bullies like Hannibal Chalep, or ridiculous windbags like Elijah Pogrom, while England was full of refined and sincere spirits like Jonas Chuselwit, Chevy Slime, Montague Tig, and Mr. Peck Sniff. If Martin Chuselwit makes America a lunatic asylum, what in the world does it make England? We can only say a criminal lunatic asylum. The truth is, of course, that Dickens so described them because he had a genius for that sort of description, for the making of almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as Quillop or Fagan. He made these Americans absurd because he was an artist in absurdity, and no artist can help finding hints everywhere for his own peculiar art. In a word, he created a laughable pogrom for the same reason that he created a laughable Peck Sniff, and that was only because no other creature could have created them. It is often said that we learned to love the characters in romances as if they were characters in real life. I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life, as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly and even appreciate more clearly if we simply thought of them as people in a story. Martin Chuselwit is itself indeed an unsatisfactory and even unfortunate example, for it is, among its author's other works, a rather unusually harsh and hostile story. I do not suggest that we should feel towards an American friend that exact shade or tint of tenderness that we feel towards Mr. Hannibal Cello. Our enjoyment of the foreigner should rather resemble our enjoyment of Pickwick than our enjoyment of Peck Sniff. But there is this amount of appropriateness even in the particular example, that Dickens did show in both countries how men can be made amusing to each other. So far the point is not that he made fun of America, but that he got fun out of America. And as I have already pointed out, he applied exactly the same method of selection and exaggeration to England. In the other English stories, written in a more amiable mood, he applied it in a more amiable manner, but he could apply it to an American too, when he was writing in that mood and manner. We can see it in the witty and withering criticism delivered by the Yankee traveler in the musty refreshment room of Mugsby Junction, a genuine example of a genuine American fun and freedom satirizing a genuine British stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody expects the American traveler to admire the refreshment said Mug-Me Junction, but he might admire the refreshment at one of the Pickwicky and Inns, especially if it contained Pickwick. Nobody expects Pickwick to like Pogrom, but he might like the American who made fun of Mug-Me Junction. But the point is that while he supported him in making fun, he would also think him funny. The two comic characters could admire each other, but they would also be amused at each other. And the American would think the Englishman funny because he was English, and a very good reason too. The Englishman would think the American amusing because he was American. Nor can I imagine a better ground for his amusement. Now, many will debate on the psychological possibility of such a friendship founded on a reciprocal ridicule, or rather on a comedy of comparisons. But I'll say of this harmony of humors what Mr. H. D. Wells says of his harmony of states in the unity of his world state. If it be truly impossible to have such a peace, then there is nothing possible except war. If we cannot have friends in this fashion, then we shall sooner or later have enemies in some other fashion. There is no hope in the pompous impersonalities of internationalism. And this brings us to the real and relevant mistake of Dickens. It was not in thinking his Americans funny, but in thinking them foolish because they were funny. In this sense it will be noticed that Dickens' American sketches are almost avowedly superficial. They are descriptions of public life and not private life. Mr. Jefferson Brick had no private life, but Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit undoubtedly had a private life and even kept some parts of it exceedingly private. Mr. Pexniff was also a domestic character, so was Mr. Quill. Mr. Pexniff and Mr. Quill had slightly different ways of surprising their families. Mr. Pexniff by playfully observing Ba when he came home, Mr. Quill by coming home at all. But we can form no picture of how Mr. Hannibal Chalep playfully surprised his family, possibly by shooting at them, possibly by not shooting at them. We could only say that he would rather surprise us by having a family at all. We do not know how the mother of the modern Grouchy managed the modern Grouchy, for her maternity was rather a public than a private office. We have no romantic moonlit scenes of the lovemaking of Elijah Pogrom to balance against the love story of Seth Pexniff. These figures are, all in a special sense, theatrical, all facing one way and lit up by public limelight. Their ridiculous characters are detachable from their real characters, if they have any real characters. And their author might perfectly well be right about what is ridiculous and wrong about what is real. He might be as right in smiling at the pogroms and the bricks as in smiling at the pickwicks and the boffins. And he might still be as wrong in seeing Mr. Pogrom as a hypocrite, as the great Buzzfuss was wrong in seeing Mr. Pickwick as a monster of revolting heartlessness and systematic villainy. He might still be as wrong in thinking Jefferson Brick a charlatan and a cheat, as was that great disciple of Labitar, Mrs. Wilfer, in tracing every wrinkle of evil cunning in the face of Mrs. Boffin, for Mr. Pickwick's spectacles and gators, and Mrs. Boffin's bonnets and boudoir, are, after all, superficial jokes, and might be equally well seen wherever we saw beneath them. A man may smile and smile and be a villain, but a man may also make us smile and not be a villain. He may make us smile and not even be a fool. He may make us roar with laughter and be an exceedingly wise man. Now that is the paradox of America which Dickens never discovered. Elijah Pogrom was far more fantastic than his satirist thought, and the most grotesque feature of Brick and Chalob was hidden from him. The really strange thing was that Pogrom probably did say, rough he may be, so ere are bars, wild he may be, so ere are bufflers. And yet he was a perfectly intelligent and public-spirited citizen, while he said it. The extraordinary thing is that Jefferson Brick may really have said, the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood, and yet Jefferson Brick may have served freedom, resisting unto blood. There really has been a floored school of rhetoric in the United States, which has made it quite possible for serious and sensible men to say such things. It is amusing simply as a difference of idiom or costume is always amusing, just as English idiom and English costume are amusing to Americans. But about this kind of difference there can be no kind of doubt. So sturdy, not to say stuffy a materialist as Ingersoll could say of so shoddy, not to say shady, a financial politician as Blaine, like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine strode down the Hall of Congress and flung his spear full and true at the shield of every enemy of his country and every traducer of his fair name. Compared with that, the passage about bears and buffaloes which Mr. Pogrom delivered in defense of the defaulting postmaster is really a very reasonable and appropriate statement. For bears and buffaloes are wild and rough, and in that sense free, while plumed knights do not throw their lances about like the isseggies of Zulus, and the defaulting postmaster was at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion as James G. Blaine of the Little Rock Railway. But anybody who had treated Ingersoll or Blaine merely as a fool, and a figure of fun, would have very rapidly found out his mistake. Where Dickens did not know Brick or Chalep long enough to find out his mistake. It need not be denied that even after a full understanding he might still have found things to smile at or criticize. I do not insist on his admitting that Hannibal Chalep was as great a hero as Hannibal, or that Elijah Pogrom was as true a prophet as Elijah. But I do say that very seriously, that they had something about their atmosphere and situation that made possible a sort of heroism and even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural at that period in that merry England whose comedy and common sense we sum up under the name of Dickens. When we joke about the name of Hannibal Chalep we might remember of what nation was the general who dismissed his defeated soldiers at Appomattox with words which the historian has justly declared to be worthy of Hannibal. We have fought through this war together. I have done my best for you. It is not fair to forget Jefferson or even Jefferson Davis entirely a favor of Jefferson Brick. For all these three things good, bad, and indifferent go together to form something that Dickens missed merely because the England of his time most disastrously missed it. In this case has in every case the only way to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to measure the defect of our own country. For in this matter the human mind is the victim of a curious little unconscious trick, the cause of nearly all international dislikes. A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually by their strange erratic path avoided his vices as well as his virtues. His own faults are things with which he is so much at home that he at once forgets and assumes them abroad. He is so faintly conscious of them in himself that he is not even conscious of the absence of them in other people. He assumes that they are there so that he does not see that they are not there. The Englishman takes it for granted that a Frenchman will have all the English faults. Then he goes on to be seriously angry with the Frenchman for having dared to complicate them by the French faults. The notion that the Frenchman has the French faults and not the English faults is a paradox too wild to cross his mind. He is like an old Chinaman who should laugh at Europeans for wearing ludicrous top hats and curling up their pigtails inside them, because obviously all men have pigtails as all monkeys have tails. For he is like an old Chinese lady who should justly derive the high heeled shoes of the West, considering them a needless addition to the sufficiently tight and secure bandaging of the foot. For of course all women bind up their feet, as all women bind up their hair. What these celestial thinkers would not think of, or allow for, is the wild possibility that we do not have pigtails, although we do have top hats, or that our ladies are not silly enough to have Chinese feet, though they are silly enough to have high heeled shoes. Nor should we necessarily have come an engineer to the Chinese extravagances, even if the chimney pot hat rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had evolved into a sort of stilts. By the same fallacy the Englishman will not only curse the French peasant as a miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar. That is, he will first complain of the man having the surliness of an independent man, and then accuse him of having the civility of a dependent one. Just as the hypothetical Chinaman cannot believe that we have top hats but not pigtails, so the Englishman cannot believe that peasants are not snobs, even when they are savages. Where he sees that a Paris paper is violent and sensational, and then supposes that some millionaire owns twenty such papers and runs them as a newspaper trust. Surely the yellow press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow, as the British Empire is to paint it red. It never occurs to such critic that the French paper is violent because it is personal, and personal because it belongs to a real and responsible person, and not to a ring of nameless millionaires. It is a pamphlet and not an anonymous pamphlet. In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illustrated. The situation in which the black man first assumes that all mankind is black, and then accuses the rest of the artificial vice of painting their faces red and yellow, or the hypocrisy of whitewashing themselves after the fashion of whited sepulchres. The particular case of it now before us is that of the English misunderstanding of America, and it is based, as in all these cases, on the English misunderstanding of England. For the truth is that England has suffered of late from not having enough of the free shooting of Hannibal Chalep, from not understanding enough that the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood. The prosperous Englishman will not admit this, but then the prosperous Englishman will not admit that he has suffered from anything. That is what he is suffering from. Until lately at least he refused to realize that many of his modern habits had been bad habits, the worst of them being contentment. For all the real virtue in contentment evaporates when the contentment is only satisfaction, and the satisfaction is only self-satisfaction. Now it is perfectly true that America, not England, has seen the most obvious and outrageous official denials of liberty. But it is equally true that it has seen the most obvious flouting of such official nonsense. Far more obvious than any similar evasions in England, and nobody who knows the subconscious violence of the American character would ever be surprised if the weapons of Chalep began to be used in that most lawful lawlessness. It is perfectly true that the libation of freedom must sometimes be drunk in blood, and never more one would think than when mad millionaires forbid it to be drunk in beer. But America, as compared with England, is the country where one can still fancy men obtaining the libation of beer by the libation of blood. Vulgar plutocracy is almost omnipotent in both countries. But I think there is now more kick of reaction against it in America than in England. The Americans may go mad when they make laws, but they recover their reason when they disobey them. I wish I could believe that there was as much of that destructive repentance in England, as indeed there certainly was when Cobbett wrote. It faded gradually like a dying fire through the Victorian era, and was one of the very few realities that Dickens did not understand. But anyone who does understand it will know that the day of Cobbett saw the last lost fight for English democracy, and that if he had stood at that turning of the historic road, he would have wished a far better fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against the first machinery, and luck to the Luddite fires. Anyhow, what is watered is a new Martin Chuzzlewit told by a wiser Mark Tapley. It is typical of something somber and occasionally stale in the mood of Dickens when he wrote that book that the same comic servant is not really very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow of Sam Weller, but if Dickens had written it in a happier mood there might have been a truer meaning in Mark Tapley's happiness. For it is true that there is a logical good humor amid unreason and disorder, is one of the real virtues of the English people. It is the real advantage they have in that adventure all over the world, which they were recently and reluctantly induced to call an empire. That receptive ridicule remains with them as a secret pleasure when they are colonists or convicts. Dickens might have written another version of the great romance, and one in which America was really seen gaily by Mark instead of gloomily by Martin. If Mark Tapley might really have made the best of America, then America would have lived and danced before us like Pickwick's England, a fairyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters. And we might still have sympathized as much with the rhetoric of Lafayette Kettle as with the rhetoric of Wilkins MacCulver, or with the violence of Chalep, as with the violence of Boythorne. That new Martin Chuzzlewit will never be written, and the loss of it is more tragic than the loss of Edwin Drude. But every man who has traveled in America has seen glimpses and episodes in that untold tale, and far away on the Red Indian Frontiers, or in the Hamlets in the Hills of Pennsylvania, there are people whom I met for a few hours, for a few moments, whom I nonetheless sincerely like and respect, because I cannot but smile as I think of them. But the converse is also true. They have probably forgotten me, but if they remember, they laugh. What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 17 The Spirit of America I suggest that Diplomatists of the Internationalist School should spend some of their money on staging farces and comedies of cross purposes, foundered on the curious and prevalent idea that England and America have the same language. I know, of course, that we both inherit the glorious tongue of Shakespeare, not to mention the tune of the musical glasses, but there have been moments when I thought that if we spoke Greek and they spoke Latin, we might understand each other better, for Greek and Latin are at least fixed, while American, at least, is still very fluid. I do not know the American language, and therefore I do not claim to distinguish between the American language and the American slang, but I know that highly theatrical developments might follow on taking the words of part of the English slang or the English language. I have already given the example of calling a person a regular guy, which in the States is a graceful expression of respect and esteem, but which on the stage, properly handled, might surely lead the way towards a divorce or duel or something lively. Sometimes coincidence merely clenches a mistake, as it so often clenches a misprint. Every proofreader knows that the worst misprint is not that which makes nonsense, but that which makes sense. Not that which is obviously wrong, but that which is hideously right. He who has a say to right, he got the book and has found it rendered mysteriously as he got the boob, is pensively resigned. It is when it is rendered quite lucidly as he got the boot, that he is moved to a more passionate mood of regret. I have had conversations in which this sort of accident would have wholly misled me if another accident had not come to the rescue. An American friend of mine was telling me of his adventures as a cinema producer, down in the southwest where real Indians were procurable. He said that certain Indians were very bad actors. It passed for me as a very ordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural deficiency. It would hardly seem a crushing criticism to say that some wild Arab chieftain was not very good at imitating a farmyard, or that the grand llama of Tibet was rather clumsy at making paper boats. But the remark might be natural in a man traveling in a paper boat or touring with an invisible farmyard for his menagerie. As my friend was a cinema producer, I suppose he meant that the Indians were bad cinema actors. But the phrase has really a high and austere moral meaning, which my liberty had wholly missed. A bad actor means a man whose actions are bad or morally reprehensible, so that I might have embraced a red Indian who was dripping with gore or covered with atrocious crimes, imagining there was nothing to matter with him beyond a mistaken choice of the theatrical profession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, not to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England village maiden might find herself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish little blue bison, merely through her mistaken sympathy with his financial failure as a film star. The notion gives me glimpses of all sorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theaters. But this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must be curbed. There is one example, however, of this complication of language actually used in contrary senses, about which the same figure can be used to illustrate a more serious fact. Suppose that in such an international interlude an English girl and an American girl are talking about the fiance of the former, who is coming to call. The English girl will be haughty and aristocratic on the stage. The American girl will, of course, have short hair and skirts and will be cynical, Americans being more completely free from cynicism than any people in the world. It is the great glory of Americans that they are not cynical. For that matter, English aristocrats are hardly ever haughty. They understand the game much better than that. But on the stage anyhow, the American girl may say, referring to her friend's fiance, with a cynical wave of the cigarette, I suppose he's bound to come and see you. And at this the blue blood of the veer-devere will boil over. The English lady will be deeply wounded and insulted at the suggestion that her lover only comes to see her, because he is forced to do so. A staggering stage quarrel will then ensue, and things will go from bad to worse, until the arrival of an interpreter who can talk both English and American. He stands between the two ladies waving two pocket dictionaries and explains the error on which the quarrel turns. It is very simple, like the seed of all tragedies. In English, he is bound to come and see you, means that he is obliged or constrained to come and see you. In America it does not. In America it means that he is bent on coming to see you, that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and will surmount any obstacle to do it. The two young ladies will then embrace as the curtain falls. Now when I was lecturing in America I was often told in a radiant and congratulatory manner that such and such a person was bound to come and hear me lecture. It seemed a very cruel form of constriction, and I could not understand what authority could have made it compulsory. In the course of discovering my error, however, I thought I began to understand certain American ideas and instincts that lie behind this American idiom. For as I have urged before, and shall often urge again, the road to international friendship is through really understanding jokes. It is, in a sense, through taking jokes seriously. It is quite legitimate to laugh at a man who walks down the street in three white hats and green dressing gown because he is unfamiliar, but after all the man has some reason for what he does, and until we know the reason we do not understand the story, or even understand the joke. So the Outlander will always seem outlandish in custom or custom, but serious relations depend on our getting beyond the fact of difference to the things wherein it differs. A good symbolical figure for all this may be found among the people who say, perhaps with a self-revealing simplicity, that they are bound to go to a lecture. If I were asked for a single symbolic figure summing up the whole of what seems eccentric and interesting about America to an Englishman, I should be satisfied to select that one lady who complained of Mr. Esquist's lecture and wandered her money back. I do not mean that she was typically American in complaining, far from it. I, for one, have a great and guilty knowledge of all that amiable American audiences will endure without complaint. I do not mean that she was typically American in wanting her money. Quite the contrary. That sort of American spends money rather than hoards it, and when we convict them of vulgarity, we acquit them of avarice. Where she was typically American, summing up a truth individual and indescribable in any other way, is that she used these words. I've risen from a sick bed to come and hear her, and I want my money back. The element in that, which really amuses an Englishman, is precisely the element which properly analyzed ought to make him admire an American. But my point is that only by going through the amusement can he reach the admiration. The amusement is the vision of a tragic sacrifice, for what is avowedly a rather trivial object. Mrs. Asquith is a candid lady of considerable humor, and I feel sure she does not regard the experience of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for which the sick should thus suffer martyrdom. She also is English, and had no other claim but to amuse Americans, and possibly to be amused by them. This being so, it is rather as if somebody said, I have risked my life in fire and pestilence to find my way to the music hall, or I have fasted forty days in the wilderness sustained by the hope of seeing Tati Toddles do her new dance. And there is something rather more subtle involved here. There is something in an Englishman which would make him feel faintly ashamed of saying that he had fasted to hear Tati Toddles or risen from a sick bed to hear Mrs. Asquith. He would feel that it was undignified to confess that he had wanted mere amusement so much, and perhaps that he had wanted anything so much. He would not like, so to speak, to be seen rushing down the street after Tati Toddles or after Mrs. Asquith, or perhaps after anybody. But there is something in it distinct from mere embarrassment and admitting enthusiasm. He might admit the enthusiasm if the objects seemed to justify it. He might perfectly well be serious about a serious thing. But he cannot understand a person being proud of serious sacrifices for what is not a serious thing. He does not like to admit that a little thing can excite him, that he can lose his breath in running or lose his balance in reaching after something that might be called silly. Now that is where the American is fundamentally different. To him the enthusiasm itself is meritorious. To him the excitement itself is dignified. He counts it a part of his manhood to fast or fight or rise from a bed of sickness for something, or possibly for anything. His ideal is not to be a lock that only a worthy key can open, but a live wire that anything can touch and anybody can use. In a word there is a difference in the very definition of virility and therefore of virtue. A live wire is not only active it is also sensitive. Thus sensibility becomes actually a part of virility. Something more is involved and the vulgar simplification of the American as the irresistible force and the Englishman as the immovable post. As a fact those who speak of such things nowadays generally mean by something irresistible, something simply immovable or at least something unalterable, motionless even in motion, like a cannonball, for a cannonball is as dead as a cannon. Prussian militarism was praised in that way until it met a French force of about half its size on the banks of the Marne. But that is not what an American means by energy. That sort of Prussian energy is only monotony without repose. American energy is not a soulless machine, for it is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. It is a very small box for so big a thing, but it is not an empty box. But the point is that he is not only proud of his energy, he is proud of his excitement. He is not ashamed of his emotion, of the fire, or even the tear in his manly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel of his machine breaks four billion butterflies an hour. That is the point about American sport, that it is not the least sportive. It is because it is not very sportive that we sometimes say it is not very sporting. It has the vices of a religion. It has all the paradox of original sin in the service of the original faith. It is sometimes untruthful because it is sincere. It is sometimes treacherous because it is loyal. Men lie and cheat for it as they lied for their lords in a futile conspiracy, or cheated for their chieftains in a highland feud. We may say that the vassal readily committed treason, but it is equally true that he readily endured torture. So does the American athlete endure torture. Not only the self-sacrifice, but the solemnity of the American athlete is like that of the American Indian. The athletes in the States have the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, the great historical nation without a sense of humor. They suffer an ascetic regime, not to be matched in any monasticism, and hardly in any militarism. If any tradition of these things remains in a saner age, they will probably be remembered as a mysterious religious order of fakers or dancing dervishes. Who shave their heads and fasted in honor of Hercules or Castor and Pollux. And that is really the spiritual atmosphere, though the gods have vanished, and the religion is subconscious and therefore irrational. For the problem of the modern world is that it has continued to be religious when it has ceased to be rational. Americans really would starve to win a coconut chai. They would fast or bleed to win a race of paper boats on a pond. They would rise from a sick bed to listen to Mrs. Asquith. But it is the real reason that interests me here. It is certainly not that Americans are so stupid as not to know that coconuts are only coconuts, and that paper boats only made a paper. Americans are, on an average, rather more intelligent than Englishmen, and they are well aware that Hercules is a myth and that Mrs. Asquith is something of a mythologist. It is not that they do not know that the object is small in itself. It is that they do really believe that the enthusiasm is great in itself. They admire people for being impressionable. They admire people for being excited. An American so struggling for some disproportionate trifle, like one of my lectures, really feels, in a mystical way, that he is right, because it is his whole morality to be keen. So long as he wants something very much, whatever it is, he feels he has his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of society behind him, and God and the whole universe behind him. Wedged on one leg in a hot crowd at a trivial lecture, he has self-respect. His dignity is at rest. This is what he means when he says he is bound to come to the lecture. Now the Englishman is fond of occasional larks, but these things are not larks, nor are they occasional. It is the essential of the Englishman's lark that he should think it a lark. He should laugh at it even when he does it. Being English myself, I like it, but being English myself, I know it is connected with weakness as well as merits. In its irony there is condescension, and therefore embarrassment. This patronage is a lie to the patron, and the patron is a lie to the aristocratic tradition of society. The larks are a variant of laziness because of leisure, and the leisure is a variant of the security and even supremacy of the gentleman. When an undergraduate at Oxford smashes half a hundred windows, he is well aware that the incident is merely a trifle. He can be trusted to explain to his parents and guardians that it was merely a trifle. He does not say, even in the American sense, that he was bound to smash the windows. He does not say that he had risen from a sick bed to smash the windows. He does not especially think he has risen at all. He knows he has descended, though with delight like one diving or sliding down the banisters, to something flat and farcical and full of the English taste for the bathos. He has collapsed into something entirely commonplace, though the owners of the windows may possibly not think so. This rather indescribable element runs through a hundred English things, as in the love of bathos shown, even in the sound of proper names, so that even the yearning lover in a lyric yearns for somebody named Sally rather than Salome, and for a place called Wapping rather than a place called Westermane. Even in the relapse into routiness, there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There is also what is so large a part of comfort, carelessness. The undergraduate breaks windows because he does not care about windows, not because he does care about more fresh air, like a hygienist, or about more light, like a German poet. Still less does he heroically smash a hundred windows, because they come between him and the voice of Mrs. Asquit. But at least of all does he do it, because he seriously pries himself on the energy apart from its aim, and on the willpower that carries it through. He is not bound to smash the windows, even in the sense of being bent upon it. He is not bound at all but rather relaxed, and his violence is not only a relaxation but a laxity. Finally, this is shown in the fact that he only smashes windows when he is in a mood to smash windows, when some fortunate conjunction of stars and all the tints and nuances of nature whisper to him that it would be well to smash windows. But the American is always ready at any moment to waste his energies on the wider and more suicidal course of going to lectures. And this is because to him such excitement is not a mood but a moral ideal. As I note in another connection, much of the English mystery would be clear to Americans if they understood the word mood. Englishmen are very moody, especially when they smash windows. But I doubt that many Americans understand exactly what we mean by the mood, especially the passive mood. It is only by trying to get some notion of all this that an Englishman can enjoy the final crown and fruit of all international friendship, which is really liking an American to be American. If we only think that parts of him are excellent because parts of him are English, it would be far more sensible to stop at home and possibly enjoy the society of a whole complete Englishman. But anybody who does understand this can take the same pleasure in an American being American that he does in a thunderbolt being swift and a barometer being sensitive. He can see that a vivid sensibility and vigilance really radiate outwards through all the ramifications of machinery and even materialism. You can see that the American uses his great practical powers upon very small provocation, but he can also see that there is a kind of sense of honor, like that of a dualist, in his readiness to be provoked. Indeed, there is some parallel between the American man of action, however vulgar his aims, and the old futile idea of the gentleman with a sword at his side. The gentleman may have been proud of being strong or sturdy. He may too often have been proud of being thick-headed, but he was not proud of being thick-skinned. On the contrary, he was proud of being thin-skinned. He was also seriously thought that sensitiveness was a part of masculinity. It may also be very absurd to read of two Irish gentlemen trying to kill each other for trifles or of two Irish-American millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash, but the very pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose illustrates the same conception, which may be called the virtue of excitability. And it is really this, and not any rubbish about iron willpower and masterful mentality, that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos in its industrial ideals. Being a live wire does not mean that the nerve should be like wires, but rather that the very wires should be like nerves. Another approximation to the truth would be to say that an American is really not ashamed of curiosity. It is not so simple as it looks. Men will carry off curiosity with various kinds of laughter and bravado, just as they will carry off drunkenness or bankruptcy. But very few people are really proud of lying on a doorstep, and very few people are really proud of longing to look through a keyhole. I do not speak of looking through it, which involves questions of honor and self-control. But few people feel that even the desire is dignified. Now I have answered the American, at least by comparison with the Englishman, does feel that his curiosity is consistent with his dignity. Because dignity is consistent with vivacity. He feels it is not merely the curiosity of Paul Pry but the curiosity of Christopher Columbus. He is not a spy but an explorer, and he feels his greatness rather grow with his refusal to turn back, as a traveler might feel taller and taller as he neared the source of the Nile or the Northwest Passage. Many an Englishman has had that feeling about discoveries in dark continents, but he does not often have it about discoveries in daily life. The one type does believe in the indignity, and the other in the dignity of the detective. It has nothing to do with ethics in the mere external sense. It involves no particular comparison in practical morals and manners. It is something in the whole poise and posture of the self, of the way a man carries himself. For men are not only affected by what they are, but still more, when they are fools, by what they think they are, and when they are wise, by what they wish to be. There are truths that have almost become untrue by becoming untruthful. There are statements so often stale and insincere that one hesitates to use them, even when they stand for something more subtle. This point about curiosity is not the conventional complaint against the American interviewer. It is not the ordinary joke against the American child. And in the same way I feel a danger of it being identified with the can't about a young nation, if I say that it has some of the attractions, not of American childhood, but of real childhood. There is some truth in the tradition that the children of wealthy Americans tend to be too precocious and luxurious. But there is a sense in which we can really say that if the children are like adults, the adults are like children. And that sense is in the very best sense of childhood. It is something which the modern world does not understand. It is something that modern Americans do not understand even when they possess it. But I think they do possess it. The devil can quote scripture for his purpose, and the text of scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation. It has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom, except as a little child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit. But the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it, that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else. The end of Section 30 Chapter 17 This is the LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. What I Saw in America by G.K. Chesterton Section 31 Chapter 18 The Spirit of England Nine times out of ten a man's broad-mindedness is necessarily the narrowest thing about him. This is not particularly paradoxical. It is when we come to think of it quite inevitable. His vision of his own village may really be full of varieties, and even his vision of his own nation may have a rough resemblance to reality. But his vision of the world is probably smaller than the world. His vision of the universe is certainly much smaller than the universe. Hence he is never so inadequate as when he is universal. He is never so limited as when he generalizes. This is the fallacy in the many modern attempts at a creedless creed, as something variously described as essential Christianity or undenominational religion, or a world faith to embrace all faiths in the world. It is that every sectarian is more sectarian in his unsectarianism than he is in his sect. The emancipation of a Baptist is a very Baptist emancipation. The charity of a Buddhist is a very Buddhist charity, and very different from Christian charity. When a philosopher embraces everything, it generally squeezes everything and squeezes it out of shape. When it digests, it necessarily assimilates. When a theosophist absorbs Christianity, it is rather as a cannibal absorbs Christian missionaries. In this sense it is even possible for the larger thing to be swallowed by the smaller, and for men to move about not only in a Clapham sect, but in a Clapham cosmos under Clapham moons and stars. But if this danger exists for all men, it exists especially for the Englishman. The Englishman is never so insular as when he is imperial, except indeed when he is international. In private life he is a good friend, and in practical politics generally a good ally. But theoretical politics are more practical than practical politics, and in theoretical politics the Englishman is the worst ally the world ever saw. This is all the more curious because he has passed so much of his historical life in the character of an ally. He has been in twenty great alliances, and never understood one of them. He has never been farther away from European politics than when he was fighting heroically in the thick of them. I myself think that this splendid isolation is sometimes really splendid, so long as it is isolation and does not imagine itself to be imperialism or internationalism. With the idea of being international, with the idea of being imperial, comes the frantic and farcical idea of being impartial. Generally speaking, men are never so mean and false and hypocritical as when they are occupied in being impartial. They are performing the first and most typical of all the actions of the devil. They are claiming the throne of God. Even when it is not hypocrisy, but only mental confusion, it is always a confusion worse and worse confounded. We see it in the impartial historians of the Victorian age, who now seem far more Victorian than the partial historians. Hallam wrote about the Middle Ages, but Hallam was far less medieval than Macaulay, for Macaulay was at least a fighter. Huxley had more medieval sympathies than Herbert Spencer, for the same reason, that Huxley was a fighter. They both fought in many ways for the limitations of their own rationalistic epic, but they were nearer the truth than the men who simply assumed those limitations as rational. The war of the Contro-Virginalists was a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters. And in the same way the Englishman never cuts a less convincing figure before other nations, than when he tries to arbitrate between them. I have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity of saving Anglo-American friendship, and a necessity which I myself feel rather too strongly to be satisfied, with the ambassadorial and editorial style of achieving it. I have already said that the worst style of all is to be Anglo-American, or as the more illiterate would express it to be Anglo-Saxon. I am more and more convinced that the way for the Englishman to do it is to be English, but to know that he is English, and not everything else as well. Thus the only sincere answer to Irish nationalism is English nationalism, which is a reality, and not English imperialism, which is a reactionary fiction, or English internationalism, which is a revolutionary one. For the English are reviled for their imperialism because they are not imperialistic. They dislike it, which is the real reason why they do it badly, and they do it badly, which is the real reason why they are disliked when they do it. Nobody calls France imperialistic because she has absorbed Brittany, but everybody calls England imperialistic because she has not absorbed Ireland. The Englishman is fixed and frozen forever in the attitude of a ruthless conqueror, not because he has conquered such people, but because he has not conquered them, but he is always trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy of a better cause. For the really native and vigorous part of what is unfortunately called the British Empire, is not an empire at all, and does not consist of these conquered provinces at all. It is not an empire, but an adventure, which is probably a much finer thing. It was not the power of making strange countries similar to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeing strange countries because they were different from our own. The adventurer did indeed like the Third Son set out to seek his fortune, but not primarily to alter other people's fortunes. He wished to trade with people rather than to rule them. But as the other people remained different from him, so did he remain different from them. The adventurer saw a thousand strange things and remained a stranger. He was the Robinson Caruso on a hundred desert islands, and on each he remained as insular as on his own island. What is wanted for the cause of England today is an Englishman with enough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as the inside. That is, we need somebody who will do for the English what has never been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish peasantry or even any savage tribe. We want people who can make England attractive, quite apart from disputes about whether England is strong or weak. We want somebody to explain not that England is everywhere, but what England is anywhere, not that England is or is not really dying, but why we do not want her to die. For this purpose the official and conventional complements or claims can never get any further than pompous abstractions about law and justice and truth. The ideals which England accepts as every civilized state accepts them, and violates as every civilized state violates them. That is not the way in which the picture of any people has ever been painted on the sympathetic imagination of the world. Enthusiasts for old Japan did not tell us that the Japs recognized the existence of abstract morality, but that they lived in paper houses or wrote letters with paintbrushes. Men who wished to interest us in Arabs did not confine themselves to saying that they are monotheists or moralists. They filled our romances with the rush of Arab steeds or the colors of strange tents or carpets. What we want is somebody who will do for the Englishman with his front garden what was done for the Japanese and his paper house, who shall understand the Englishman with his dog as well as the Arab with his horse. In a word what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that really wants doing. It is to make England attractive as a nationality and even as a small nationality. For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love each other because they are alike. They will never really do that unless they are really alike and then they will not be nations. Nations can love each other as men and women love each other, not because they are alike, but because they are different. It can easily be shown, I fancy, that in every case where a real public sympathy was aroused for some unfortunate foreign people, it has always been accompanied with a particular and positive interest in their most foreign customs and their most foreign externals. The man who made a romance of the Scotch Highlander made a romance of his kilt and even of his dirt. The friend of the Red Indians was interested in picture writing and had some tendency to be interested in scalping. To take a more serious example, such nations as Serbia had been largely commended to international consideration by the study of Serbian epics or Serbian songs. The epic of Negro emancipation was also the epic of Negro melodies. Those who wept over Uncle Tom also laughed over Uncle Remus, and just as the admiration for the Red Indian almost became an apology for scalping, the mysterious fascination of the African has sometimes almost led us into the fringes of the Black Forest of Voodoo. But the sort of interest that is felt even in the Scalpunter and the cannibal, the torturer and the devil worshiper, that sort of interest has never been felt in the Englishman. And this is the more extraordinary, because the Englishman is really very interesting. He is interesting in a special degree in this special manner. He is interesting because he is individual. No man in the world is more misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordinary sense national. A description of English life must be a description of private life. In that sense there is no public life. In that sense there is no public opinion. There have never been those prairie fires of public opinion in England which often sweep over America. At any rate there have never been any such popular revolutions, since the popular revolutions of the Middle Ages. The English are a nation of amateurs. They are even a nation of eccentrics. An Englishman is never more English than when he is considered a lunatic by the other Englishmen. This can be clearly seen in a figure like Dr. Johnson, who has become national, not by being normal, but by being extraordinary. To express this mysterious people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges and heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gardens with large fences, and why they alone among Christians have kept quite consistently the great Christian glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words who study the souls of strange peoples. That would be the true way to create a friendship between England and America, or between England and anything else, yes even between England and Ireland, for this justice at least has already been done to Ireland, and as an indignant patriot I demand a more equal treatment for the two nations. I have already noted the commonplace that in order to teach internationalism, we must talk nationalism. We must make the nations as nations less odious or mysterious to each other. We do not make men love each other by describing a monster with a million arms and legs, but by describing the men as men with their separate and even solitary emotions. As this has a particular application to the emotions of an Englishman, I will return to the topic once more. Now Americans have a power that is the soul and success of democracy, the power of spontaneous social organization. Their high spirits, their humane ideals are really creative, they abound in unofficial institutions. We might almost say in unofficial officialism. Nobody who has ever felt the presence of all the leagues and guilds and colleges and clubs will deny that Whitman was a national when he said he would build states and cities out of the love of comrades. When all this communal enthusiasm collides with the Englishman, it too often seems literally to leave him cold. They say he is reserved, they possibly think he is rude, and the Englishman having been taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take the criticism as a compliment. He admits that he is reserved because he is stern and strong, or even that he is rude because he is shrewd and candid. But as a fact he is not rude and not especially reserved. At least reserve is not the meaning of his reluctance. The real difference lies, I think, in the fact that American high spirits are not only high but level, that the hilarious American spirit is like a plateau, and the humorous English spirit like a ragged mountain range. The Englishman is moody, which does not in the least mean that the Englishman is morose. Dickens, as we all feel in reading his books, is boisterously English. Dickens was moody when he wrote Oliver Twist, but he was also moody when he wrote Pickwick. That is, he was in another and much healthier mood. The mood was normal to him in the sense that nine times out of ten he felt and wrote in that humorous and hilarious mood. But he was, if ever there was one, a man of moods, and all the more of a typical Englishman for being a man of moods. But it was because of this, almost entirely, that he had a misunderstanding with America. In America there are no moods, or there is only one mood. It is the same whether it is called hustle or uplift or whether we regard it as the heroic love of comrades or the last hysteria of the herd instinct. It has been said of the typical English aristocrats of the government offices that they resemble certain ornamental fountains and play from ten till four. And it is true that an Englishman, even an English aristocrat, is not always inclined to play any more than to work. But American sociability is not like the Trafalgar fountains. It is like Niagara. It never stops. Under the silent stars or the rolling storms there seems always to be the same human heat and pressure behind it. It is like the central heating of hotels as explained in the advertisements and announcements. The temperature can be regulated, but it is not, and it is always rather overpowering for an Englishman whose mood changes like his own mutable in shifting sky. The English mood is very like the English weather. It is a nuisance and a national necessity. If anyone wishes to understand the quarrel between Dickens and the Americans, let him turn to that chapter in Martin Chuselwit, in which young Martin has to receive endless defiles and deputations of total strangers each announced by name and demanding formal salutation. There are several things to be noticed about this incident. To begin with it did not happen to Martin Chuselwit, but it did happen to Charles Dickens. Dickens is incorporating almost without alteration a passage from a diary in the middle of a story, as he did when he included the admirable account of the prison petition of John Dickens as the prison petition of Wilkins Macabre. There is no particular reason why even the gregarious Americans should so throng the portals of a perfectly obscure steerage passenger like young Chuselwit. There was every reason why they should throng the portals of the author of Pickwick and Oliver Twist. And no doubt they did. If I may be permitted the aleatory image, you bet they did. Similar troops of sociable human beings have visited much more insignificant English travelers in America, with some of whom I am myself acquainted. I myself have the luck to be a little more stodgy and less sensitive than many of our countrymen, and certainly less sensitive than Dickens. But I know what it was that annoyed him about that unending and unchanging stream of American visitors. It was the unending and unchanging stream of American sociability and high spirits. A people living on such a lofty but level table land do not understand the ups and downs of the English temperament, the temper of a nation of eccentrics, or as they used to be called of humorists. There is something very national in the very name of the old play of every man in his humor. But the play more often acted in real life is every man out of his humor. It is true that, as Matthew Arnold said, that an Englishman wants to do as he likes. But it is not always true even that he likes what he likes. An Englishman can be friendly and yet not feel friendly. Or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. Or he can feel hospitable and yet not welcome those whom he really loves. He can think almost with tears of tenderness about people at a distance who would be boars if they came in at the door. American sociability sweeps away any such subtly. It cannot be expected to understand the paradox or perversity of the Englishman, who thus can feel friendly and avoid friends. That is the truth in the suggestion that Dickens was sentimental. It means that he probably felt most sociable when he was solitary. In all those attempts to describe the indescribable, to indicate the real but unconscious differences between the two peoples, I have tried to balance my words without the irrelevant bias of praise and blame. Both characteristics always cut both ways. On one side this comradeship makes possible a certain communal courage, a democratic derision of rich men in high places, that is not easy in our smaller and more stratified society. On the other hand the Englishman has certainly more liberty if less equality and fraternity. But the richest compensation of the Englishman is not even in the word liberty, but rather in the word poetry. That humor of escape or seclusion. That genial isolation. That healing, a wounded friendship, by what Christian science would call absent treatment. That is the best atmosphere of all for the creation of great poetry. And out of that came bare-ruined choirs, where late the sweet bird sang, and thou was not made for death a mortal bird. In this sense it is indeed true that poetry is emotion remembered in tranquility, which may be extended to mean affection remembered in loneliness. There is in it a spirit not only of detachment, but even of distance. A spirit which does desire, as in the old English rhyme, to be not only over the hills, but also far away. In other words insofar as it is true that the Englishman is an exception to the great truth of Aristotle. It is because he is not so near to Aristotle, as he is to Homer. Insofar as he is not by nature a political animal, it is because he is a political animal. We see it in his relations to the other animals, his quaint and almost illogical love of dogs and horses and dependents whose political rights cannot possibly be defined in logic. Many forms of hunting or fishing are but an excuse for the same thing, which the shameless literary man does without any excuse. Sport is speechless poetry. It would be easy for a foreigner, by taking a few in liberties with the facts, to make a satire about the sort of silent Shelley who decides ultimately to shoot the Skylark. It would be easy to answer these poetic suggestions by saying that he himself might be responsible for ruining the choirs where late the sweet bird sang, or that the immortal bird was likely to be mortal when he was out with his gun. But these international satires are never just, and the real relations of an Englishman and an English word, are far more delicate. It would be equally easy and equally unjust to suggest a similar satire against American democracy, and represent Americans merely as birds of a feather who can do nothing but flock together. But this would leave out the fact that, at least it is not the white feather, that democracy is capable of defiance and of death for an idea. Touching the souls of great nations, these criticisms are generally false because they are critical. But when we are quite sure that we rejoice in a nation's strength, then and not before, we are justified in judging its weaknesses. I am quite sure that I rejoice in any democratic success without Ariere Penci, and nobody who knows me will credit me with a covert sneer at civic equality. And this being granted, I do not think there is a danger in the gregariousness of American society. The danger of democracy is not anarchy. On the contrary, it is monotony. And it is touching this that all my experience has increased my conviction that a great deal that is called female emancipation has merely been the increase of female convention. Now the males of every community are far too conventional. It was the females who were individual. There is a danger of individuality being lost. This indeed is not peculiar to America. It is common to the whole modern industrial world and to everything which substitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the state, or the personal atmosphere of the home. But it is emphasized in America by the curious contradiction that Americans do in theory value and even venerate the individual. But individualism is still the foe of individuality. Where men are trying to compete with each other, they are trying to copy each other. They become featureless by featuring the same part. Personality in becoming a conscious ideal becomes a common ideal. In this respect, perhaps, there is really something to be learned from the Englishman with his turn or twist in the direction of private life. Those who have traveled in such a fashion as to see all the American hotels and none of the American houses are sometimes driven to the excess of saying that the Americans have no private life. But even if the exaggeration has a hint of truth, we must balance it with corresponding truth that the English have no public life. They, on their side, have still to learn the meaning of the public thing, the Republic, and how great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption when the very state itself has become a state secret. The English are patriotic, but patriotism is the unconscious form of nationalism. It is being national without understanding the meaning of a nation. The Americans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept moving too much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations to superficiality and fashion, and too much aware of outside opinion and with too much appetite for outside criticism. But the English are much too unconscious and would be the better for an increase in many forms of consciousness, including consciousness of sin. But even their sin is ignorance of their real virtue. The most admirable English things are not the things that are most admired by the English, or for which the English admire themselves. They are things now blindly neglected and in daily danger of being destroyed. It is all the worse that they should be destroyed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. That is why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for the English. The power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as a nature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasant costume in the Netherlands that it is unique. But the good things of England really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars and revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. The particular kind of beauty there is in an English village, the particular kind of humor there is in an English public house, are things that cannot be found in lands where the village is far more simply and equally governed, or where the vine is far more honorably served and praised. Yet we shall not save them by merely sinking into them with the conservative sort of contentment, even if the commercial rapacity of our plutocratic reforms would allow us to do so. We must, in a sense, get far away from England in order to behold her. We must rise above patriotism in order to be practically patriotic. We must have some sense of more varied and remote things before these vanishing virtues can be seen suddenly for what they are. Almost as one might fancy that a man would have to rise to the dizziest heights of the divine understanding before he saw, as from a peak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing soul.