 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. Heretics by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 5 Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants We ought to see, far enough into a hypocrite, to see even his sincerity. We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man, in which, well, not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot. And the more we approach the problems of human history with this keen and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind. The hypocrites shall not deceive us into thinking them saints, but neither shall they deceive us into thinking them hypocrites. And an increasing number of cases will crowd into our field of inquiry. Cases in which there is really no question of hypocrisy at all. Cases in which people were so ingenuous that they seemed absurd, and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous. There is one striking instance of an unfair charge of hypocrisy. It is always urged against the religious in the past as a point of inconsistency and duplicity that they combined a profession of almost crawling humility with a keen struggle for earthly success and considerable triumph in attaining it. It is felt as a piece of humbug that a man should be very punctilious in calling himself a miserable sinner, and also very punctilious in calling himself King of France. But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. There never was a man in love who did not declare that if he strained every nerve to breaking he was going to have his desire. And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it. The whole secret of the practical success of Christendom lies in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled. For with the removal of all question of merit or payment the soul is suddenly released for incredible voyages. If we ask a sane man how much he merits his mind shrinks instinctively and instantaneously. It is doubtful whether he merits six feet of earth. But if you ask him what he can conquer, he can conquer the stars. Thus comes the thing called romance, a purely Christian product. A man cannot deserve adventures. He cannot earn dragons and hypocrites. The medieval Europe which asserted humility gained romance. The civilization which gained romance has gained the habitable globe. How different the pagan and stoical feeling was from this has been admirably expressed in a famous quotation. Addison makes the great stoic say, "'Tis not in mortals to command success, but we'll do more, Sempronius. We'll deserve it.' But the spirit of romance in Christendom, the spirit which is in every lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with European adventure, is quite opposite. "'Tis not in mortals to deserve success, but we'll do more, Sempronius. We'll obtain it.' And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that everyone has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and mysterious. Humility is so practical of virtue that men think it must be a vice. Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride. It is mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a certain simple love of splendor which amounts to vanity. Humility will always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold. Pride is that which refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much. In a word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success. It is too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue. Humility is not merely too good for this world. It is too practical for this world. I had almost said it is too worldly for this world. The incident most quoted in our day is the thing called the humility of the man of science. And certainly it is a good instance as well as a modern one. Men find it extremely difficult to believe that a man who is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down temples and stretching out hands to the stars is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby and follow his harmless old nose. When a man slits a grain of sand and the universe has turned upside down a consequence, it is difficult to realize that to the man who did it the splitting of the grain is the great affair and the capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one. It is hard to enter into the feelings of a man who regards a new heaven and a new earth in the light of a byproduct. But undoubtedly it was to this almost eerie innocence of the intellect the great men of the great scientific period which now appears to be closing owed their enormous power and triumph. If they had brought the heavens down like a house of cards their plea was not that they had done it on principle their quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident. Whenever there was in them the least touch of pride in what they had done there was good ground for attacking them. But so long as they were wholly humbled they were wholly victorious. There were possible answers to Huxley there was no answer possible to Darwin. He was convincing because of his unconsciousness one might almost say because of his domus. This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science. Man of science are beginning to see themselves as the fine phrase is in the park. They are beginning to be proud of their humility. They are beginning to be aesthetic like the rest of the world. Beginning to spell truths with a capital T. Beginning to talk of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed of the discoveries that their forebearers may. Like the modern English they are beginning to be soft about their own hardness. They are becoming conscious of their own strength that is they are growing weaker. But one purely modern man has emerged in the strictly modern decades who does carry into our world the clear personal simplicity of the old world of science. One man of genius we have who is an artist but who was a man of science and who seems to be marked above all things with this great scientific humility. I mean Mr. H.G. Wells. And in his case, as in the others above Spopenhub, there must be a great preliminary difficulty in convincing the ordinary person that such a virtue is predictable of such a man. Mr. Wells began his literary work with violent visions of last pangs of this planet. Can it be that a man who begins with violent visions is humble? He went on to wilder and wilder stories about carving beasts into men and shooting angels like birds. It's the man who shoots angels and cars beasts into men, humble. Since then he has done something bolder than either of these blasphemies. He has prophesied the political future of all men, prophesied it with aggressive authority and re-ringing decision of detail. Is the prophet of the future of all men humble? It will indeed be difficult and the present condition or current thought about such things as pride and humility to answer the query of how a man can be humble who does such big things and such bold things. But the only answer is the answer which I gave at the beginning of this essay. It is the humble man who does the big things. It is the humble man who does the bold thing. It is the humble man who has the sensational sights of safe to him. And this for three obvious reasons. First, that he strains his own eyes more than other men to see them. Second, that he is more overwhelmed and uplifted with them when they come. And third, that he records them more exactly and sincerely and with less adulteration from his more common place and more conceited everyday self. Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected. That is most romantic. Adventures are to the shy. In this sense, adventures are to the unadventurous. Now this arresting mental humility in Mr. H. D. Wells may be like great many other things that are vital and vivid. Difficult to illustrate by examples. But if I were asked for an example that I should have no difficulty about which example to begin with. The only thing about Mr. H. D. Wells is that he is the only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. One can lie awake at night and hear him grow. Of this growth, the most evident manifestation is indeed a gradual change of opinions. But it is no mere change of opinions. It is not a perpetual leaping from one physician to another like that of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous advance from a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the cheap proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum. It has been even in some sense in advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This fact fixes Mr. Wells' honesty and proves him to be no poser. Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes and their lower classes would be so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat with the other. Certainly no paradoxical charlatan would once found argument for so startling a view whatever had deserted it except for something yet more startling. Mr. Wells has deserted it in favor of the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated or assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class the class of engineers. He has abandoned the sensational theory with the same honorable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he thought it was true now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the most dreadful conclusion that a literary man can come to the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower for ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four. Mr. H.D. Wells exists at present in a gay and exhilarating progress of conservatism. He is finding out more and more that conventions, though silent are alive. As good an example as any of this humidity and sanity of his may be found in his change of view on the subject of science and marriage. He once held to believe the opinion with some singular sociologists still hold that human creatures could successfully be paired and bred after the manner of dogs or horses. He no longer holds that view. Not only does he no longer hold that view but he has written about it in Mankind in the Making with such smashing sense and humor that I find it difficult to believe that anybody else can hold it either. It is true that his chief objection to the proposal is that it is physically impossible which seems to me a very slight objection and almost negligible compared with the others. The one objection to scientific marriage which is worthy of final attention is simply that such a thing could only be imposed on unthinkable slaves and cowards. I do not know whether the scientific marriage mongers are right, as they say, or wrong, as Mr. Wells says, in saying that medical supervision would produce strong men. I'm only certain that if it did, the first act of the strong and healthy men would be to smash the medical supervision. The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it connects the idea of health with the idea of care. What is health to do with care? Health has to do with carelessness. In special and abnormal cases it's necessary to have care. When we are peculiarly unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. But even then we're only trying to be healthy in order to be careless. If we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men and they ought to be told to be careful. But when we are sociologists we are addressing the normal man. We are addressing humanity and humanity ought to be told to be breathlessness itself. For all the fundamental functions of a man ought emphatically to be performed with pleasure and for pleasure. They emphatically ought not to be performed with precaution or for precaution. A man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy and emphatically not because he has a body to sustain. A man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat but because he loves foils or horses or high mountains and loves them for their own sake. And a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated. The food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking about his tissues. The exercise will really get him into training so long as he is thinking about something else. And the marriage will really stay in some chance of cruising generous blooded generation if it had its own natural and generous excitement. It is the first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities, it should be accepted as luxuries. Let us then be careful about the small things such as scratch or slight illness or anything that can be managed with care but in the name of all sanity let us be careless about the important things such as marriage or the fountain of our very life will fail. Mr. Wells however is not quite clear enough of the narrow scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually ought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected with the great scientific fallacy. I mean the habit of beginning not with the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men. In his new utopia he says for instance that a chief point of the utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun with the human soul, that is if he had begun on himself he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He would have found to put the matter shortly that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises in the mere fact of having a self and not from any accidents of education or ill treatment. And the weakness of all utopias is this that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share and then they are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered to the moon. And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells' indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism. The evolution in his utopia of all patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that utopia must be a world state or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to occur to him that for a good many of us if it were a world state we should still make war on it in the world. For if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in thinking there will be not varieties in government. The fact is very simple unless you are going deliberately to prevent the thing being good you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible to prevent the conflict of civilizations because it is impossible to prevent conflict between ideals. If there were no longer our modern strife between nations there would be only a strife between utopias. For the highest thing does not tend to union only. The highest thing tends also to differentiation. You can often get meant to fight for the union but you can never prevent them from fighting also for differentiation. This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism the fierce nationalism of the great european civilization. It is also incidentally the meaning of the doctrine of the trinity. But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells philosophy is the somewhat deeper one that he expresses in a very entertaining manner in the introductory part of the new utopia. This philosophy in some sense amounts to the possibility of philosophy itself. At least he maintains that there are no secure and reliable ideas upon which we can rest with a final mental satisfaction. It will be both clearer however and more amusing to quote Mr. Wells himself. He says nothing endures nothing is precise and certain except the mind of a pendant being indeed there is no being the universal becoming of individualities and Plato turned his back on truth when he turned toward his museum of specific ideals. Mr. Wells says again there is no abiding thing in what we know we change from weaker to stronger lights and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below. Now when Mr. Wells says things like this I speak with all respect when I say that he does not observe an evident mental distinction. It cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in what we know or if that were so we should not know it and all should not call it knowledge. Our mental state may be very different from that of somebody else some thousands of years back but it cannot be entirely different or else we should not be conscious of a difference. Mr. Wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxes that sit by the springs of truth. He must surely see that the fact of the two things being different implies that they are similar. The hair and the tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness but they must agree in the quality of motion. The swiftest hair cannot be swifter than an isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness. When we say that the hair moves faster we say that the tortoise moves and when we say of a thing that it moves we say without need of other words that there are things that do not move and even in the act of saying that things change we say that there is something unchangeable. But certainly the best example of Mr. Wells fallacy can be found in the example which he himself chooses. It is quite true that we see a dim light which compared with a darker thing but which compared with a stronger light is darkness. The quality of light remains the same thing or else we should not call it a stronger light or recognize it as such. If the character of light were not fixed in the mind we should be quite as likely to call a denser shadow a stronger light or vice versa. If the character of light became even for an instant unfixed, if it became even by a hair's breadth doubtful if for example they are crept into our idea of light some vague idea of bloomness, then in that flash we have become doubtful whether the new light has more light or less. In brief the progress may be as varying as a cloud but the direction must be as rigid as a French road. North and south are relative in the sense that I am north of Bournemouth and south of St. Bergen. But if there be any doubt of the position of the north pole there is an equal degree of doubt of whether I am south of Spitzbergen at all. The absolute idea of light may be practically unattainable. We may not be able to procure pure light. We may not be able to get to the north pole but because the north pole is unattainable it does not follow that it is indefinable and it is only because the north pole is not indefinable that we can make a satisfactory map of Brighton and Worthing. In other words Plato turned his face to truth but his back on Mr. H. D. Wells when he turned to his museum of specified ideals. It is precisely here that Plato shows his sense. It is not true that everything changes. The things that change are all the manifest and material things. There is something that does not change and that is precisely the abstract quality. The invisible idea Mr. Wells says truly enough that a thing which we have seen in one connection is dark we may see in another connection is light but the thing common to both incidents is the mere idea of light which we have not seen at all. Mr. Wells might grow taller and taller for unending eons till his head was higher than the loneliest star. I can imagine his writing a good novel about it. In that case he would see the trees first as tall things and then as short things. He would see the clouds first as high and then low. But there would remain with him through the ages in that starry loneliness the idea of tallness. He would have in the awful spaces for companion and comfort the definite conception that he was growing taller and not for instance growing fatter. And now it comes to my mind that Mr. H. D. Wells actually has written a very delightful romance as tall as trees and that here again he seems to me to have been a victim of this vague relativism. The food of the gods is, like Mr. Bernard Shaw's play in essence a study of the Superman idea and it lies I think even through the veil of the half-petamimic allegory open to the same intellectual attack. We cannot be expected to have any regard for a great creature if he does not in any manner conform to our standards for unless he passes our standard of greatness we cannot even call him great. Knight G summed up all that is interesting in the Superman idea when he said man is a thing which has to be surpassed. But the very word surpass implies the existence of a standard common to us and the things surpassing us. If the Superman is more manly than men are of course they will ultimately deify him even if they happen to kill him first but he is simply more Supermanly. They may be quite indifferent to him as they would be to another seemingly aimless monstrosity. He must submit to our test even in order to overhaul us. Mere force or size even is the standard but that alone will never make men think of a man as superior. Giants as in the wise old fairy tales are vermin. Superman if not good men are vermin. The food of the gods is the tale of Jack the giant killer told from the point of view of the giant. This has not I think been done before in literature but I have little doubt that the psychological substance of it existed in fact. I have little doubt that the giant whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life force but ultimately was the case he happened to have two heads he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. He would enlarge on a subtle modernity of such equipment enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view or to correct himself with promptitude. Jack was the champion of the enduring human standards of the principle of one man one head and one man one conscience of the single head and the single heart and the single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the giant was particularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know was whether he was a good giant that is a giant who was any good to us. What were the giant's religious views? What his views on politics and the duties of the citizen was he fond of children or fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense? To use the fine phrase for emotional sanity was his heart in the right place. Jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in order to find out. The old and correct story of Jack the giant killer is simply the whole story of man. If it were understood we should need no bibles or histories but the modern world in particular does not seem to understand it at all. The modern world like Mr. Wells is on the side of the giants the safest place and therefore the meanest and the most prosaic. The modern world when it praises its little caesars talks of being strong and brave but it does not seem to see the eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of these ideas. The strong cannot be brave only the weak can be brave and yet again in practice only those who can be brave can be trusted in time of doubt to be strong. The only way in which a giant could really keep himself in training against the inevitable Jack would be by continually fighting other giants ten times as big as himself that is by ceasing to be a giant to becoming a jack. Thus that sympathy with the small or the defeated as such with which we liberals and nationalists have been often reproached is not a useless sentimentalism at all as Mr. Wells and his friends fancy. It is the first law of practical courage to be in the weakest campus to be in the strongest school nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity more good than the advent of a race of supermen for them to fight like dragons. If the superman is better than we of course we need not fight him but in that case why not call him the saint but if he is merely stronger whether physical, mentally or morally stronger I do not care of farthing then he ought to have to reckon with us at least for all the strength we have. If we are weaker than he that is no reason why we should be weaker than ourselves if we are not tall enough to touch the giant's knees that's no reason why we should become shorter by falling on our own but that is at the bottom of the meaning of all the modern hero worship and celebration of the strongman the Caesar the Superman that he may be something more than a man we must be something less. doubtless there is an older and better hero worship than this but the old hero was a being who like Achilles was more human than humanity itself Knight she Superman is cold and friendless Achilles is so foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughter his armies in the agony of his bereavement Mr. Shaw said Caesar says in his desolate pride he was never hoped can never despair the old answers from his awful hill was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow a great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men he is a man so strong that he feels more and when Knight she says a new commandment I give to you be hard he is really saying a new commandment I give to you be dead sensibility is the definition of life giant killer I have wealth on this matter of Mr. Wells and the Giants not because it is especially prominent in his mind I know that the Superman does not bulk so large in his cosmos is in that of Mr. Bernard Shaw I have wealth on it for the opposite reason because this heresy of immortal hero worship has taken I think a slighter hold of him and may perhaps still be prevented from perverting one of the best thinkers of the day in the course of the new Utopia Mr. Wells makes more than one admiring illusion to Mr. W. E. Hensley that clever and unhappy man lived in admiration of a vague violence and was always going back to rude old tales and rude old ballads to strong and primitive literatures to find the praise of strength and the justification of tyranny but he could not find it it is not there the primitive literature is shown in the Tale of Jack the Giant Killer the strong old literature is all in praise of the weak the rude old tales are as tender to minorities as any modern political idealist the rude old ballads are as sentimentally concerned for the underdog as the Aborigines Protection Society when men were tough and raw when they lived amid hard knocks and hard laws when they knew what fighting really was they had only two kinds of songs the first was a rejoicing that the weak had conquered the strong the second a lamentation that the strong had for once in a way conquered the weak for this defiance of the status quo this constant effort to alter the existing balance this premature challenge to the powerful is the whole nature and in most secret of the psychological adventure which is called man in his strength to disdain the forlorn hope is not only a real hope it is the only real hope of mankind in the course of ballads of the Greenwood men are admired most when they define not only the king but what is more to the point the hero the moment Robin Hood becomes the sort of Superman that moment the chivalrous chronicler shows us Robin thrashed by a poor tinker whom he thought to trust aside and the chivalrous chronicler makes Robin Hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration this magnanimity is not a product of modern humanitarianism it is not a product of anything to do with peace this magnanimity is merely one of the lost arts of war the Henleites called for a sturdy and fighting England and they go back to the fierce whole stories of the sturdy and fighting English and the thing that they find written across that fierce old literature everywhere is the policy of Majuba End of Chapter 5 This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org Heretics by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 6 Christmas and the Estates The world is round so round that the schools of optimism and pessimism have been arguing from the beginning whether it is the right way up the difficulty does not arise so much from the mere fact that good and evil are mingled in roughly equal proportions it arises chiefly from the fact that men always differ about what parts are good and what evil hence the difficulty which besets undenominational religions they profess to include what is beautiful in all creeds but they appear to many to have collected all that is dull in them all the colors mixed together in purity are to make a perfect white mixed together on any human paint box they make a thing like mud and a thing like very many new religions such a blend is often something much worse than any one creed taken separately even the creed of the thugs the error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is really the good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion and this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who have the misfortune to think of some religion or other that the parts commonly counted are bad and the parts commonly counted bad are good it is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group but to admire it in a photographic negative it is difficult to congratulate all their whites on being black and all their blacks on their whiteness this will often happen to us in connection with human religions take two institutions which bear witness to the religious energy of the 19th century take the Salvation Army and the philosophy of Auguste Comte the usual verdict of educated people on the Salvation Army is expressed in some such words as these I have no doubt they do a great deal of good but they do it in a vulgar and profane style their aims are excellent but their methods are wrong to me unfortunately the precise reverse of this appears to be the truth I do not know whether the aims of the Salvation Army are excellent but I am quite sure their methods are admirable their methods are the methods of all intense and hardy religions they are popular like all religion military like all religion public and sensational like all religion they are not reverent any more than Roman Catholics are reverent for reverence in the sad and of the term reverence is the thing only possible to infidels that beautiful twilight you will find in Euripides in Renan and Matthew Arnold but in men who believe you will not find it you will find only laughter and war a man cannot pay that kind of reverence to truth solid as marble they can only be reverent towards a beautiful lie and the Salvation Army though their voice has broken out in a mean environment and an ugly shape are really the old voice of glad and angry faith hot as the riots of Dionysius wild as the gargoyles of Catholicism not to be mistaken for philosophy Professor Huxley in one of his clever phrases called the Salvation Army Corribantic Christianity Huxley was the last and noblest of those Stoics who have never understood the cross he had understood Christianity he would have known that there never has been and never can be any Christianity that is not Corribantic and there is this difference between the matter of aims and the matter of methods that the judge of the aims of a thing like the Salvation Army is very difficult the judge of their ritual and atmosphere is very easy no one perhaps but a sociologist can understand but any healthy person can see that banging grass symbols together must be right a page of statistics a plan of model dwellings anything which is rational is always difficult for the lame mind but the thing which is irrational anyone can understand that is why religion came so early into the world and spread so far while science came so late into the world and has not spread at all history unanimously attests the fact that it is only mysticism which stands the smallest chance of being understood by the people common sense has to be kept as an esoteric secret in the dark temple of culture and so while the philanthropy of the Salvationists and its genuineness may be a reasonable matter for the discussion of the doctors there can be no doubt about the genuineness of their brass bands for a brass band is purely spiritual and seeks only to quicken the internal life the object of philanthropy is to do good the object of religion is to be good if only for a moment amid a crash of brass and the same antithesis exists about another modern religion I mean the religion of Comte generally known as positivism or the worship of humanity such man as Mr. Frederick Harrison that brilliant and chivalrous philosopher who still by his mere personality speaks for the creed would tell us that he offers us the philosophy of Comte but not all Comte's fantastic proposals for pontiffs and ceremonies the new calendar the new holidays, the saints days he does not mean that we should dress ourselves up as priests of humanity or let all fireworks because it is Milton's birthday to the solid English contest all this appears he confesses to be a little absurd to me it appears the only sensible part of Comteism as a philosophy it is unsatisfactory it is evidently impossible to worship humanity just as it is impossible to worship the Seville Club both are excellent institutions to which we may happen to belong but we perceive clearly that the Seville Club did not make the stars and does not fill the universe and it is surely unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism and then to ask men to worship a being who is 19 million persons in one God neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance but if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient the folly of Comte was wisdom in an age of dusty modernity when beauty was thought of as something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible he alone saw that men must always have the sacredness of memory he saw that while the brutes have all the useful things the things that are truly human are the useless ones he saw the falsehood of that almost universal notion of today the notion that rites and forms are something artificial additional and corrupt ritual is really much older than thought it is much simpler and much wilder than thought a feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do the more agreeable of these consists of dancing, building temples and shouting very loud the less agreeable of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive but everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn was a ritualist before he could speak and if Compticism had spread the world would have been converted not by the Comptus philosophy but by the Comptus calendar by discouraging what they conceived to be weakness of their master the English positivists have broken the strength of their religion a man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr but to be a fool it is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready to wear a wreath around his head for them I myself to take a corpus vile am very certain that I would not read the works of Compti through for any consideration, whatever but I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day that splendid effort failed and nothing in the style of it has succeeded there has been no rationalist festival no rationalist ecstasy men are still in black for the death of God when Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of alleged enmity to human joy Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again over the ground but they have not altered it they have not set up a single new trophy of Ipsen for the world's merriment to rally to they have not given a name to a new occasion of gaiety Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday of Victor Hugo Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptive of the infancy of Ipsen outside people's doors in the snow in the round of our national and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaiety that once covered the whole earth Christmas remains to remind us of those ages whether pagan or Christian when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it in all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly the strange truths about the matter is told in the very word holiday a bank holiday means presumably a day which bankers regard as holy a half holiday means I suppose a day on which schoolboy is only partially holy it is hard to see at first sight why so human a thing as leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and give each other presents in honor of anything the birth of Michelangelo or the opening of Houston station but it does not work as a fact men only become greedily and gloriously material but something spiritualistic take away the nice seen creed and similar things and you do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages take away the strange beauty of the saints and what has remained to us is the far stranger ugliness of wandsworth take away the supernatural and what remains is the unnatural and now I have to touch upon a very sad manner there are in the modern world an admirable class of persons who really make protest on behalf of that antico polkratudo of which Augustine spoke who do long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world William Morris and his followers showed how much brighter were the dark ages than the ages of Manchester Mr. W. B. Yates frames his steps in prehistoric dances but no man knows and joins his voice to forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear Mr. George Moore collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved there are innumerable persons with eyeglasses and green garments who pray for the return of the Maypole or the Olympian games but there is about these people haunting and alarming something would suggest that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas it is painful to regard human nature in such a light but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore does not wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight it is even possible that Mr. W. B. Yates never pulls crackers if so where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions there is a solid and ancient festival tradition still plying a roaring trade in the streets and they think it vulgar if this is so let them be very certain of this that they are the kind of people who in the time of the Maypole would have thought the Maypole vulgar who in the time of Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage vulgar who in the time of the Olympian games would have thought the Olympian games vulgar nor can there be any reasonable doubt that they were vulgar let no man deceive himself if by vulgarity we mean coarseness of speech broadness of behavior gossip force play and some heavy drinking vulgarity there always was whenever there was joy wherever there was faith in the God wherever you have belief you will have hilarity wherever you have hilarity you will have some dangers and as creed and mythology produced this gross and vigorous life so in its turn this gross and vigorous life will always produce creed and mythology if we ever get the English back on to the English land they will become again a religious people if all goes well a superstitious people the absence from the modern life of both the higher and lower forms of faith is largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds if we have no more turnip ghosts that is chiefly from the lack of turnips end of chapter 6 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Heretics by G.K. Chesterton chapter 7 Omar and the Sacred Vine a new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with the problem of strong gring and enthusiasts in the matter range from the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30 to the lady who smashes American bars with an axe in these discussions it is almost always felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine with this I should venture to disagree with a particular ferocity the one genuinely dangerous and a moral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine and for this reason if a man drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure he is trying to obtain something exceptional something he does not expect every hour of the day something which, unless he is a little insane he will not try to get every hour of the day but if a man drinks wine to obtain health he is trying to get something natural something that is that he ought not to be without something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being without the man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary if there were a magic ointment and we took it to a strong man and said this will enable you to jump off the monument doubtless he would jump off the monument but he would not jump off the monument all day long to the delight of the city but if we took it to a blind man saying this will enable you to see he would be under a heavier temptation it would be hard for him not to rub it in his eyes whenever he heard a hoof of a noble horse or the bird singing at daybreak it is easy to deny one's self festivity it is difficult to deny one's self normality hence comes the fact which every doctor knows that it is often perilous to give alcohol to the sick even when they need it I need hardly say that I do not mean that I think that giving of alcohol to the sick for stimulus is necessarily unjustifiable but I do mean that giving it to the healthy for fun is the proper use of it and a great deal more consistent with health the sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound rules a paradox drink because you are happy but never because you are miserable never drink when you are wretched without it or you will be like the grave face gin drinker in the slum but drink when you would be happy without it and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy never drink because you need it no drinking and the way to death and hell but drink because you do not need it for this is irrational drinking and the ancient health of the world for more than 30 years the shadow and glory of a great eastern figure has lain upon our English literature it's Gerald's translation of Omar Kayam concentrated into an immortal poignancy all the dark and drifting hedonism of our time and the splendor of that work it would be merely banal to speak in few other of the books of men has there been anything so combining the gay pugnacity of an epigram with the vague sadness of a song but of its philosophical ethical and religious influence which has been almost as great as its brilliancy I should like to say a word and that word I confess one of uncompromising hostility there are a great many things which might be set against the spirit of the rubyat and against its prodigious influence but one matter of indictment towers ominously above the rest a genuine disgrace to it a genuine calamity to us this is the terrible blow that this great poem has struck against sociability and the joy of life someone called Omar the sad glad old persian sad he is glad he is not in any sense of the word whatever he has been a worse foe to gladness than the Puritans a pensive and graceful oriental lies under the rose tree with his wine pot and his scroll of poems it may seem strange that anyone's thought should at the moment of regarding him fly back to the dark bedside where the doctor doles out brandy it may seem strange or still that they should go back to the gray wastrel shaking with gin and hounds didge but a great philosophical unity links the three in an evil bond Omar Kayam's wine-diving is bad not because it is wine-diving it is bad and very bad because it is medical wine-diving it is the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not happy this is the wine that shuts out the universe not the wine that reveals it it is not poetical drinking which is joyous and instinctive it is rational drinking which is as prosaic as an investment as unsavory as a dose of chamomile whole heavens above it from the point of view of sentiment though not of style rises the splendor of some old English drinking song then pass the bull my comrades all and let the zyder vow where this song was caught up by happy men to express the worth of truly worthy things of brotherhood and guerrility and the brief and kindly leisure of the poor of course the great part of the more solid reproaches directed against the omerite morality are as false and devious as such reproaches usually are one critic whose work I have read had the incredible foolishness to call omer an atheist and a materialist it is almost impossible for an oriental to be either the east understands metaphysics too well for that of course the real objection which a philosophical Christian would bring against the religion of omer is not that he gives no place to god it is that he gives too much place to god his is that terrible theism which can imagine nothing else but deity and which denies altogether the outlines of human personality and human will the ball no question makes a visor knows but here or there as strikes the player goes and he that tossed you down into the field he knows about it all he knows he knows a Christian thinker such as Augustin or Dante would object to this because it ignores free will which is the valor and dignity of the soul the quarrel of the highest Christianity with this skepticism is not in the least that the skepticism denies the existence of god is that it denies the existence of man in this cult of the pessimistic pleasure seeker the rubia stands first in our time but it does not stand alone many of the most brilliant intellects of our time have urged us to the same self-conscious snatching at rare delight Walter Pater said that we were all under sentence of death and the only course was to enjoy exquisite moments simply for those moments' sake the same lesson was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde it is the carp diem religion but the carp diem religion is not the religion of happy people but a very unhappy people great joy does not gather the rose buds while it may its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw great joy has in it the sense of immortality the very splendor of youth is the sense that it is all space to stretch its legs in in all great cosmic literature interesting shandy or pickwig there is this sense of space and incorruptibility we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale it is true enough of course that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in certain passing moments but it is not true that we should think of them as passing or enjoy them simply for those moments' sake to do this is to rationalize the happiness and therefore to destroy it happiness is a mystery like religion and should never be rationalized suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure I do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel I mean something with a violent happiness in it but it is painful happiness a man may have for instance a moment of ecstasy and first love or a moment of victory and battle the lover enjoys the moment but precisely not for the moment's sake he enjoys it for the woman's sake or his own sake the warrior enjoys the moment but not for the sake of the moment he enjoys it for the sake of the flag the cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting but love may be calf love and last a week but the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end these moments are filled with eternity these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary once look at them as moments after patter's manner and they become as cold as patter and his style man cannot love mortal things he can only love immortal things patter's mistake is revealed in his most famous phrase he asks us to burn with a hard gem-like flame flames are never hard and never gem-like they cannot be handled or arranged so human emotions are never hard and never gem-like they are always dangerous like flames to touch or even to examine there is only one way in which our passions can become hard and gem-like purity is by becoming as cold as gems no blow then has ever been struck as the natural loves and laughter of men so sterilizing as this carptium of the esthetes for any kind of pleasure a totally different spirit is required a certain shyness a certain indeterminate hope a certain boyish expectation purity and simplicity are essential to passions yes, even to evil passions even vice demands a sort of virginity Omar orfits Gerald's effect upon the other world we may let go his hand upon this world has been heavy and paralyzing the Puritans, as I have said are far jollier than he the new esthetics who follow Thoreau or Trollstoy are a much livelier company for though the surrender of strong grink and such luxuries may strike us as an idle negation it may leave a man with innumerable natural pleasures and above all with man's natural power of happiness Thoreau could enjoy the sunrise without a cup of coffee if Trollstoy cannot admire marriage at least he is healthy enough to admire mud nature can be enjoyed without even the most natural luxuries a good bush needs no wine but neither nature nor wine nor anything else can be enjoyed if we have the wrong attitude towards happiness and Omar orfits Gerald did have the wrong attitude towards happiness he and those he has influenced do not see that if we are to be truly gay we must believe that there is some eternal gaiety in the nature of things we cannot enjoy thoroughly even a past equator at a subscription dance unless we believe that the stars are dancing to the same tune no one can be really hilarious but the serious man wine says the scripture maketh glad the heart of man but only of the man who has a heart the thing called high spirits is possible only to the spiritual ultimately a man cannot rejoice in anything except the nature of things ultimately a man can enjoy nothing except religion once in the world's history men did believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples and they danced as men have never danced since with this old pagan eudaimonism the sage of the rubia has quite as little to do as he has with any of the Christian variety he is no more a bacchanal than he is a saint Dionysius and his church was grounded on a serious joy to vivere like that of Walt Whitman Dionysius made wine not a medicine but a sacrament Jesus Christ also made wine not a medicine but a sacrament but Omar makes it not a sacrament but a medicine he feasts because life is not joyful he revels because he is not glad drink he says for you know not once you come nor why drink for you know not when you go or where drink because the stars are cruel and the world is idle as the humming top drink because there is nothing worth trusting nothing worth fighting for drink because all things are lapsed in a basic quality and an evil peace so he stands offering us the cup in his hand and at the high altar of christianity stands another figure in whose hand is also the cup of the vine drink he says for the whole world is as red as this wine with the crimson of love and wrath of God drink for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup cup drink for this is my blood of the new testament that is shed for you drink for I know of whence you come and why drink for I know of when you go and where and chapter 7 this is a Libra box recording all Libra box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libra box dot org heretics by G. K. Chesterton chapter 8 the mildness of the yellow press there is a great deal of protest made from one quarter or another nowadays against the influence of that new journalism which is associated with the names of Sir Alfred Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson but almost everybody who attacks it attacks it on the ground that it is very sensational very violent and vulgar and startling I'm speaking in no affected contrarity but in the simplicity of a genuine personal impression when I say that this journalism offends as being not sensational or violent enough the real vice is not that it is startling but that it is quite insupportably tame the whole object is to keep carefully along a certain level of the expected and the common place it may be low but it must take care to be flat never by any chance in it is there any of that real plebeian pungency which can be heard from the ordinary cab man in the ordinary street we have heard of a certain standard of decorum which demands that things should be funny without being vulgar but the standard of this decorum demands that if things are vulgar they shall be vulgar without being funny this journalism does not merely fail to exaggerate life it positively underrates it and it has to do so because it is intended for the faint and languid recreation of men whom the fierceness of modern life has fatigued this press is not the yellow press at all it is the drab press Sir Alfred Harmsworth must not address to the tired clerk any observation more witty than the tired clerk might be able to address to Sir Alfred Harmsworth it must not expose anybody anybody who is powerful that is it must not offend anybody it must not even please anybody too much a general vague idea that in spite of all this our yellow press is sensational arises from such external accidents as large type or lurid headlines it is quite true that these editors print everything they possibly can in large capital letters but they do this not because it is startling but because it is soothing to people holy weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted train it is a simplification and a comfort that is presented in this vast and obvious manner the editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers for exactly the same reason that parents and governess use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell the nursery authorities do not use an A as big as a horseshoe in order to make the child jump on the contrary they use it to put the child at his ease to make things smoother and more evident of the same character is the dim man quiet named school which Sir Alfred Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson keep all their sentiments are spelling book sentiments that is to say they are sentiments with which the pupil is already respectfully familiar all their wildest posters are leaves torn from a copy book a real sensational journalism as it exists in France, in Ireland and in America we have no trace in this country when a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill he creates a thrill worth talking about he denounces a leading Irish member for corruption or he charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy when a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson he discovers let us say that the president of the republic the yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this their moral condition is as regards careful veracity about the same but it is their mental caliber which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring things the fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Peking was mendacious but it was not interesting except to those who had private reasons for terror or sorrow it was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation it revealed only vague idea that nothing could be impressive except a great deal of blood real sensationalism of which I happen to be very fond may be either moral or immoral but even when it is most immoral it requires moral courage for it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody if you make any sentient creature jump you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you but the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage their whole method consistent saying with large and elaborate emphasis the things which everybody else says casually and without remembering what they have said when they brace themselves up to attack anything they never reach the point of attacking anything which is large and real and would resound with the shock they do not attack the army as men do in France or the judges as men do in Ireland or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago they attack something like the war office something that is which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend something which is an old joke in forth straight comic papers just as a man shows he has a weak voice by straining it to shout so they show the hopelessly unsensational nature of their minds when they really try to be sensational with the whole world full of big and dubious institutions with the whole wickedness of civilization staring them in the face their idea of being bold and bright is to attack the war office they might as well start a campaign against the weather or form a secret society in order to make jokes about mothers in law nor is it only from the point of view of particular amateurs of the sensational such as myself that it is permissible to say in the words of Cowper's Alexander Selker that their tameness is shocking to me the whole modern world is pining for a genuinely sensational journalism this has been discovered by that very evil and honest journalist Mr. Blatchford who started his campaign against Christianity warned on all sides I believe that it would ruin his paper but who continued from an honorable sense of intellectual responsibility he discovered however that while he had undoubtedly shocked his readers it also greatly advanced his newspaper he was bought first of all by the people who agreed with him and wanted to read it these letters were voluminous I helped and glad to say to swell their volume and they were generally inserted with a generous fullness this was accidentally discovered like the steam engine the great journalist Maxim that if an editor can only make people angry enough they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing some hold that such papers as these are scarcely the proper objects of serious consideration they can scarcely be maintained from a political or ethical point of view in this problem of the mildness and tenderness of the harm's worth's mind there is mirrored the outlines of a much larger problem which is akin to it the harm's worthy and journalist begins with a worship of success and violence and ends in sheer timidity and mediocrity but he is not alone in this nor does he come by this fate merely because he happens personally to be stupid every man however brave who begins by worshiping violence must end in mere timidity every man however wise who begins by worshiping success must end in mere mediocrity the strange and paradoxical fate is involved not in the individual but in the philosophy in the point of view it is not the folly of the man as necessary fall it is his wisdom the worship of success is the only one out of all possible worships of which this is true that its followers are for doomed to become slaves and cowards a man may be a hero for the sake of Mr. Gallup's ciphers or for the sake of human sacrifice but not for the sake of success for obviously a man may choose to fail because he loves Mr. Gallup or human sacrifice but he cannot choose to fail because he loves success when the test of triumph is men's test of everything they never endure long enough to triumph at all as long as matters are really hopeful hope is a mere flattery or platitude it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all like all Christian virtues it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable it was through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all these modern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and acquiescence they desired strength and to them to desire strength was to admire strength to admire strength was simply to admire the status quo they thought that he who wished to be strong to respect the strong he did not realize the obvious verity that he who wishes to be strong despised the strong they sought to be everything to have the whole force of the cosmos behind them to have an energy that would drive the stars but they did not realize the two great facts first that in the attempt to be everything the first and most difficult step is to be something second that the moment a man is something he is essentially defying everything the lower animals say the men of science fought their way up with a blind selfishness if this be so the only real moral of it is that our selfishness if it is to triumph must be equally blind the mammoth did not put his head on one side and wonder whether mammoths were a little out of date mammoths were at least as much up to date as that individual mammoth could make them the great help did not say cloven hooves that are very much worn now he polished his own weapons for his own uses but in the reasoning animal there has arisen a more horrible danger that he may fail to perceiving his own value when modern sociologists talk of the necessity of accommodating oneself to the trend of the time they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything at its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there and that is becoming more and more the situation of modern England every man speaks of public opinion and means by public opinion public opinion minus his opinion every man makes his contribution negative under the erroneous impression that the next man's contribution is positive every man surrenders his fancy to a general tone which is in itself a surrender and over all the heartless and fatuous unity spreads this new and wearisome and platitudinous press incapable of invention incapable of audacity capable only of a civility all the more contemptible because it is not even a civility to the strong but all who begin with force and conquest will end in this the chief characteristic of the new journalism is simply that it is bad journalism it is beyond all comparison the most shapeless, careless and colorless work done in our day I read yesterday a sentence which should be written in letters of gold and adamant it is the very motto of the new philosophy of empire I found it as the reader has already eagerly guessed in Pearson's magazine while I was communing soul to soul with Mr. C. Arthur Pearson whose first and suppressed name I'm afraid is Chilperick it occurred in an article on the American presidential election this is the sentence and everyone should read it carefully and roll it on the tongue till all the honey be tasted a little sound common sense often goes further with an audience of American working men than much high-flown argument a speaker who as he brought forward his points hammered nails into a board 100s of votes for his side at the last presidential election I do not wish to soil this perfect thing with comment the words of mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo but just think for a moment of the mind the strange inscrutable mind of the man of the editor who approved it of the people who are probably impressed by it of the incredible American working man of whom for all I know it may be true think what their notion of common sense must be it is delightful to realize that you and I are now able to win thousands of votes should we ever be engaged in a presidential election by doing something of this kind for I suppose the nails in the board are not essential to the exhibition of common sense there may be variations we may read a little common sense impresses American working men more than high-flown argument the speaker who as he made his points pulled buttons off his waistcoat won thousands of votes for his side or sound common sense tells better in America than high-flown argument thus Senator Bud who threw his false teeth in the air every time he made an epigram won the solid approval of American working men or again the sound common sense of a gentleman from Merleswood who stuck straws in his hair during the progress of his speech assured the victory of Mr. Roosevelt there are many other elements in this article on which I should love to linger but the matter I wish to point out is that in that sentence it's perfectly revealed the whole truth of what our Chamberlainites bustlers and empire builders and strong, silent men really mean by common sense they mean knocking with deafening noise and dramatic effect meaning the spits of iron into a useless bit of wood a man goes on to an American platform and behaves like a mountain bank fool with a board and a hammer while I do not blame him I might even admire him he might be a dashing and quite decent strategist he might be a fine romantic actor like Burke flinging the dagger on the floor he may even, for all I know be a sublime mystic profoundly impressed with the ancient meaning of the divine trade of the carpenter and offering to the people a parable in the form of a ceremony all I wish to indicate is the abyss of mental confusion in which such wild ritualism can be called sound common sense and it is in that abyss of mental confusion and in that alone that the new imperialism lives and moves and has its being the whole glory and greatness of Mr. Chamberlain consists in this that if a man hits the right nail on the head nobody cares where he hits it to or what it does they care about the noise of the hammer not the silent drip of the nail before and throughout the African war Mr. Chamberlain was always knocking in nails with ringing decisiveness but when we ask but what have these nails held together where is your carpentry where are your contented outlanders where is your free South Africa where is your British prestige what have your nails done then what answer is there we must go back with an affectionate sigh to our Pearson for the answer to the question of what the nails have done the speaker who hammered nails into a board one thousand so vokes now the whole of this passage is admirably characteristic of the new journalism which Mr. Pearson represents the new journalism which has just purchased the standard to take one instance out of hundreds the incomparable man with the board and nails is described in the Pearson article as calling out as he smelt the symbolic nail lie number one nailed to the mast in the whole office there was apparently no compositor or office boy to point out that we speak of lies being nailed to the counter not to the mast know what any office knew that Pearson's magazine was falling into a stale Irish bull which must be as old as St. Patrick this is the real and essential tragedy of the sale of the standard and not merely the journalism is victorious over literature is it bad journalism is victorious over good journalism it is not that one article which we consider costly and beautiful is being ousted by another kind of article which we consider common or unclean it is that of the same article a worse quality is preferred to a better if you like popular journalism as I do you will know that Pearson's magazine is poor popular journalism you will know that it is certainly as you know bad butter you will know as certainly that it is poor popular journalism as you know that the strand in the great days of Sherlock Holmes was good popular journalism Mr. Pearson has been a monument to this enormous banality about everything he says and does there is something infinitely weak minded he clamors for home crades and has worn ones to print his paper when this glaring fact is pointed out he does not say that the thing was an oversight like a sane man he cuts it off with scissors like a child of three his very cunning is infantile and like a child of three he does not cut it quite off in all human records I doubt if there is such an example of a profound simplicity and deception this is the sort of intelligence the heat of the sane and honorable old Tory journalism if it were really the triumph of the tropical exuberance of the Yankee press it would be vulgar but still tropical but it is not we're delivered over to the bramble and from the meanest of the shrubs comes the fire upon the cedars of Lebanon the only question now is how much longer the fiction will endure that journalists of this order represent public opinion it may be doubted whether any honest and serious terror free former would for a moment maintain there was any majority for terror reform in the country comparable to the ludicrous preponderance which money has given it among the great dailies the only inference is that for purposes of real public opinion the press is now a mere plutocratic power darky doubtless the public buys the wares of these men for one reason or another but there's no more reason to suppose the public admires their politics than the public admires the delicate philosophy of Mr. Cross or the darker and sterner creed of Mr. Blackwell if these men are merely tradesmen there is nothing much to say except that there are plenty like them in the Battersea Park Road and many much better but if they make any sort of attempt to be politicians we can only point out to them that they are not as yet journalists End of Chapter 8 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Heretics by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 9 The Moods of Mr. George Moore Mr. George Moore began his literary career by writing his personal confessions nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them for the remainder of his life He is a man of genuine forcible mind and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction which excites and pleases He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics even longer Everything he writes it is to be fully admitted has a genuine mental power His account of his reason for leaving the Roman Catholic Church is possibly the most admirable tribute to that communion which has been written of late years For the fact of the matter is that the weakness which has rendered Barron the many brilliancies of Mr. Moore is actually that weakness that the Roman Catholic Church is at its best in combating Mr. Moore hates Catholicism because it breaks up the house of looking glasses in which he lives Mr. Moore does not dislike so much being asked to believe in the spiritual existence of miracles or sacraments but he does fundamentally dislike being asked to believe in the actual existence of other people His real quarrel with life is that it is not a dream that can be molded by the dreamer It is not the dogma of the reality of the other world that troubles him but the dogma of the reality of this world The truth is that the tradition of Christianity which is still the only coherent ethic of Europe rests on two or three paradoxes or mysteries which can easily be determined and as easily justified in life One of them for instance is the paradox of hope or faith that is the more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be the man Stevenson understood this and consequently Mr. Moore cannot understand Stevenson Another is the paradox of charity or chivalry that the weaker a thing is the more it should be respected that the more indefensible a thing is the more it should appeal to us for a certain kind of defense Thackery understood this and therefore Mr. Moore does not understand Thackery Now one of these very practical and working mysteries of the Christian tradition and one which the Roman Catholic Church as I say has done her best work in singling out the corruption of the sinfulness of pride pride is a weakness in the character it dries up laughter it dries up wonder it dries up chivalry and energy the Christian tradition understands this therefore Mr. Moore does not understand the Christian tradition for the truth is much stranger even than it appears in the formal doctrine of the sin of pride it is not only true that humility is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride it is also true that vanity is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride vanity is social it is almost a kind of comradeship pride is solitary and uncivilized vanity is active it desires the applause of infinite multitudes pride is passive desiring only the applause of one person which it already has vanity is humorous and can enjoy the joke even of itself pride is dull and cannot even smile and the whole of this difference is the difference between Stevenson and Mr. George Moore who as he informs us has brushed Stevenson aside I do not know where he has been brushed to but wherever it is I fancy is having a good time because he had the wisdom to be vain and not proud Stevenson had a windy vanity Mr. Moore as a dusty egoism hence Stevenson could amuse himself as well as us with his vanity while the richest effects of Mr. Moore's absurdity are hidden from his eyes if we compare this solemn folly with the happy folly with which Stevenson delords his own books and berates his own critics we shall not find it difficult to guess why it is that Stevenson at least found a final philosophy of some sort to live by while Mr. Moore is always walking the world looking for a new one Stevenson had found that the secret of life is fear and humility self is the gorgon vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives pride studies it for itself and is turned to stone it is necessary to dwell on this defect in Mr. Moore because it is really the weakness of work which is not without its strength Mr. Moore's egoism is not really a moral weakness but a very constant and influential aesthetic weakness as well we should really be much more interested in Mr. Moore if he were not quite so interested in himself we feel as if we were being shown through a gallery of really fine pictures into each of which by some useless and discordant convention the artist had represented the same figure in the same attitude the grand canal with the distant view of Mr. Moore effective Mr. Moore through a scotch mist Mr. Moore by firelight runes of Mr. Moore by firelight and so on seems to be the endless series he would no doubt reply that in such a book as this he intended to reveal himself but the answer is that in such a book as this he does not succeed one of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this that self-consciousness of necessity destroys self-revelation a man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided attempt a theatrical excellence at all points will try to be an encyclopedia of culture and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism thinking about himself will lead to trying to be the universe trying to be the universe will lead to ceasing to be anything if on the other hand a man is sensible enough to think only about the universe he will think about it in his own individual way he will keep virgin the secret of God he will see the grass as no other man can see it he will look at a son that no man has ever known this fact is very practically brought out in Mr. Moore's confessions in reading them we do not feel the presence of a clean cut personality like that of Thackery and Matthew Arnold we only read a number of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions which might be uttered by any clever person but which we are called upon to admire specifically because he is uttered by Mr. Moore he is the only thread that connects Catholicism and Protestantism realism and mysticism he or rather his name he is profoundly absorbed even in views he no longer holds and expects us to be and he intrudes the capital I even where it need not be intruded even where it weakens the force of a plain statement where another man would say it is a fine day Mr. Moore says seen through my temperament the day appeared fine where another man would say Milton has obviously a fine style Mr. Moore would say as the stylist Milton has always impressed me the nemesis of this self-centered spirit is that of being totally ineffectual Mr. Moore has started many interesting crusades but he has abandoned them before his disciples could begin even when he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as the children of falsehood even when he has found reality he cannot find rest one Irish quality he has which no Irishman was ever without and that is certainly a great virtue especially in the present age but he has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting spirit in a man like Bernard Shaw his weakness of introspection and selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting but they will always prevent him winning and chapter nine this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org Heretics by G. K. Chesterton chapter ten on sandals and simplicity the great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people they are not it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them a Frenchman can be proud of being bold and logical and still remain bold and logical a German can be proud of being reflective and orderly and still remain reflective and orderly but an Englishman cannot be proud of being simple and direct and still remain simple and direct in the matter of these strange virtues to know them is to kill them a man may be conscious of being heroic or conscious of being divine but he cannot in spite of all the Anglo-Saxon poets be conscious of being unconscious now I do not think it can be honestly denied that some portion of this impossibility attaches to a class very different in their own opinion at least to the school of Anglo-Saxonism I mean that school of the simple life commonly associated with Tolstoy if a perpetual talk about one's own robustness leads to being less robust it is even more true that a perpetual talking about one's simplicity leads to being less simple one great complaint I think must stand against the modern upholders of the simple life the simple life in all its varied forms from vegetarianism to the honorable consistency of the duke-a-bores this complaint against them stands that they would make us simple in the unimportant things but complex in the important things they would make us simple in the things that do not matter that is in diet, in costume in etiquette complex in the things that do matter in philosophy in loyalty in spiritual acceptance and spiritual rejection it does not so very much matter whether a man eats a grilled tomato or a plain tomato it does very much matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a grilled mind the only kind of simplicity worth preserving is the simplicity of the heart the simplicity which accepts and enjoys there may be a reasonable doubt as to what system preserves this there can surely be no doubt that a system of simplicity destroys it there is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape nuts on principle the chief error of these people is to be found in the very phrase to which they are most attached plain living and high thinking these people do not stand in need of will not be improved by plain living and high thinking they stand in need of the contrary and they would be improved by high living and plain thinking a little high living I say having a full sense of responsibility a little high living would teach them the force and the meaning of the human festivities of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the world it would teach them the historic fact that the artificial is, if anything older than the natural it would teach them that the loving cup is as old as any hunger it would teach them that ritualism is older than any religion and a little plain thinking would teach them how harsh and fanciful are the mass of their own ethics how very civilized and very complicated must be the brain of the Tolstoyan who really believes it to be evil to love one's country and wicked to strike a blow a man approaches wearing sandals and simple raiment a raw tomato held firmly in his right hand and says the affections of family and country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love but the plain thinker will only answer him with a wonder not untinged with admiration what a great deal of trouble you must have taken in order to feel like that high living will reject the tomato plain thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable sinfulness of war high living will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material and plain thinking will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to reserve our horror chiefly for material wounds the only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart if that be gone it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular clothing it is only by tears and terror and the fires that are not quenched if that remain it matters very little if a few early Victorian armchairs remain along with it let us put a complex entree into a simple old gentleman let us not put a simple entree into a complex old gentleman so long as human society will leave my spiritual inside alone I will allow it with a comparative submission to work its wild will with my physical interior I will submit to cigars I will meekly embrace a bottle of burgundy I will humble myself to a handsome cab if only by this means I may preserve to myself the virginity of the spirit which enjoys with astonishment and fear I do not say that these are the only methods of preserving it I incline to the belief that there are others but I will have nothing to do with simplicity which lacks the fear the astonishment the joy alike I will have nothing to do with the devilish vision of a child who is too simple to like toys the child is indeed in these and many other matters the best guide and in nothing is the child so righteously childlike in nothing does he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity than in the fact he sees everything with a simple pleasure even the complex things the naturalist harps always on the distinction between the natural and the artificial the higher kind of naturalist ignores that distinction the child, the tree and the lamppost are as natural and as artificial as each other or rather neither of them are natural but both supernatural for both are splendid and unexplained the flower with which God crowns the one with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the other are equally of the gold of fairy tales in the middle of the wildest fields the most rustic child is ten to one playing at steam engines and the only spiritual or philosophical objection to steam engines is not that men pay for them or work at them or make them very ugly or even that men are killed by them but merely men do not play with them the evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain the wrong is not that engines are too much admired but that they are not admired enough the sin is not that engines are mechanical but that men are mechanical in this matter then as in all other matters treated in this book the conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view a philosophy or religion which is needed and not any change in habit or social routine the things we need most for immediate practical purposes are all abstractions we need a right view of the human lot a right view of the human society and if we were living eagerly and angrily in the enthusiasm of those things living simply in the genuine and spiritual sense desire and danger make everyone simple and to those who talk to us with interfering eloquence about yeager and the pores of the skin and about plasmon and the coats of the stomach at them shall only be hurled the words that are hurled at fobs and gluttons take no thought of what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink or wherewith ye shall be clothed for after all these things do the Gentiles seek but seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you those amazing words are not only extraordinarily good practical politics they are also superlatively good hygiene the one supreme way of making all those processes go right the process of health and strength and grace and beauty the one and only way of making certain of their accuracy is to think about something else if a man is bent on climbing into the seventh heaven he may be quite easy about the pores of his skin if he harnesses his wagon to a star the process will have a most satisfactory effect upon the coats of his stomach for the thing called taking thought the thing for which the best modern word is rationalizing is in its nature inapplicable to all plain and urgent things men take thought and ponder rationalistically touching remote things things that only theoretically matter such as the transit of Venus but only at their peril can man rationalize about so practical a matter as health and of chapter 10