 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. All Things Considered by G. K. Chesterton Section 11. Fairy Tales Some solemn and superficial people, for nearly all very superficial people are solemn, have declared that the fairy tales are immoral. They base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in the war between giants and boys, some cases in which the latter indulged in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes. The objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The fairy tales are at root, not only moral in the sense of being innocent, but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being moralizing. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of fairyland, but there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the best official counts. Mr. W. B. Yates and other sensitive modern souls, feeling that modern life is about as black a slavery as ever oppressed mankind, they are right enough there, have specially described Elfland as a place of utter ease and abandonment, a place where the soul can turn every way at will like the wind. Science denounces the idea of a capricious God, but Mr. Yates' school suggests that in the world everyone is a capricious God. Mr. Yates himself has said a hundred times that sad and splendid literary style, which makes him the first of all poets now writing in English. I will not say of all English poets, for Irishmen are familiar with the practice of physical assault. He has, I say, called up a hundred times the picture of the terrible freedom of the fairies, who typify the ultimate anarchy of art, where nobody grows old or weary or wise, where nobody grows old or godly or grave. But, after all, it is a shocking thing to say. I doubt whether Mr. Yates really knows the real philosophy of the fairies. He's not simple enough. He is not stupid enough. Though I say it, who should not, in good-sounding human stupidity, I would knock Mr. Yates out any day. The fairies like me better than Mr. Yates. They can take me in more, and I have my doubts whether this feeling of the free, wild spirits on the crest of hill or wave is really the central and simple spirit of folklore. I think the poets have made a mistake. Because the world of the fairy tales is a brighter and more varied world than ours. They have fancied it less moral. Really, it is brighter and more varied because it is more moral. Suppose a man could be born in a modern prison. It's impossible, of course, because nothing human can happen in a modern prison, though it could sometimes in an ancient dungeon. A modern prison is always inhuman, even when it is not inhumane. But suppose a man were born in a modern prison, and grew accustomed to the deadly silence and the disgusting indifference, and suppose he were then suddenly turned loose upon life and laughter of Fleet Street. He would, of course, think that the literary men in Fleet Street were a free and happy race. Yet how sadly, how ironically, is this the reverse of the case? And so, again, these toiling serfs in Fleet Street, when they catch a glimpse of the fairies, think the fairies are utterly free. But fairies are like journalists in this and many other respects. Fairies and journalists have an apparent gaiety and a delusive beauty. Fairies and journalists seem to be lovely and lawless. They seem to be both of them, too exquisite to descend to the ugliness of everyday duty. But it is an illusion created by the sudden sweetness of their presence. Journalists live under law, and so, in fact, does fairy land. If you really read the fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other. The idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery tales. The whole happiness of fairy land hangs upon a thread, upon one thread. Cinderella may have a dress woven on supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance, but she must be back when the clock strikes twelve. The king may invite fairies to the christening, but he must invite all the fairies, or frightful results will follow. Bluebeer's wife may open all the doors but one. A promise is broken to a cat, and the whole world goes wrong. A promise is broken to a yellow dwarf, and the whole world goes wrong. A girl may be the bride of the God of love himself, if she never tries to see him. She sees him, and he vanishes away. A girl is given a box on conditions that she does not open it. She opens it, and all the evils of this world rush out at her. A man and woman are put in a garden on condition that they do not eat one fruit. They eat it, and lose their joy in all the fruits of the earth. This great idea, then, is the backbone of all folklore. The idea that all happiness hangs on one thin veto. All positive joy depends on one negative. Now it is obvious that there are many philosophical and religious ideas akin to or symbolized by this, but it is not with them I wish to deal here. It is surely obvious that all ethics ought to be taught to this fairy tale tune. That if one does the thing forbidden, one imperils all the things provided. A man who breaks his promise to his wife ought to be reminded that, even if she is a cat, the case of the fairy cat shows that such conduct may be unconscious. A burglar just about to open someone else's safe should be playfully reminded that he is in the perilous posture of the beautiful Pandora. He is about to lift the forbidden lid and loosen evils unknown. The boy eating someone's apples in someone's apple tree should be a reminder that he has come to a mystical moment of his life, when one apple may rob him of all others. This is the profound morality of fairy tales which, so far from being lawless, go to the root of all law. Instead of finding, like common books of ethics, a rationalistic basis for each commandment, they find the great mystical basis for all commandments. We are in this fairy land on sufferance. It is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world. The vetoes are indeed extraordinary, but then so are the concessions. The idea of property, the idea of someone else's apples, is a rum idea. But then the idea of there being any apples is a rum idea. It is strange and weird that I cannot with safety drink ten bottles of champagne, but then the champagne itself is strange and weird, if you come to that. If I have drunk of the fairy's drink it is but just that I should drink of the fairy's rules. We may not see the direct logical connection between three beautiful silver spoons and a large ugly policeman, but then who in fairy tales ever could see the direct logical connection between three bears and a giant, or between a rose and a roaring beast? Not only can these fairy tales be enjoyed because they are moral, but morality can be enjoyed because it puts us in fairy land, in a world at once of wonder and of war. Tom Jones and Morality The 200th anniversary of Henry Fielding is very justly celebrated, even if, as far as can be discovered, it is only celebrated by the newspapers. It would be too much to expect that any such merely chronological incident should induce the people who write about Fielding to read him. This kind of neglect is only another name for glory. A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read. This is not in itself wholly unjust. It merely implies a certain respect for the realization and fixed conclusions of the mass of mankind. I have never read Pindar. I mean, I have never read the Greek Pindar. Peter Pindar, I've read all right. But the mere fact that I have not read Pindar, I think, ought not to prevent me and certainly would not prevent me from talking of the masterpieces of Pindar, or of great poets like Pindar or Aeschylus. The very learned men are angular, unenlightened, on this as on many other subjects, and the position they take up is really quite unreasonable. If any ordinary journalist or man of general reading alludes to Vilian or Homer, they consider it a quite triumphant sneer to say to the man, you cannot read medieval French or you cannot read Homeric Greek. But it is not a triumphant sneer, or indeed a sneer at all. A man has got as much right to employ in his speech the established and traditional facts of human history as he has to employ any other piece of common human information. And it is reasonable for a man who knows no French to assume that Vilian was a good poet as it would be for a man who has no ear for music to assume that Beethoven was a good musician. Because he himself has no ear for music, that is no reason why he should assume that the human race has no ear for music. Because I am ignorant, as I am, it does not follow that I ought to assume that I am deceived. The man who would not praise Pindar unless he had read him would be a low distrustful fellow, the worst kind of skeptic who doubts not only God but man. He would be like a man who could not call Mount Everest high unless he had climbed it. He would be like a man who would not admit that the North Pole was cold until he had been there. But I think there is a limit and a highly legitimate limit to this process. I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a Greek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going to abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute and utterly expose Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and outrageous imposter that he is, then I think it will be just as well perhaps, I think at any rate it would do no harm, if he did know a little Greek and even had read a little Pindar. And I think the same situation would be involved if the critic were concerned to point out that Pindar was scandalously immoral, pestulently cynical or low and beastly in his views of life. When people brought such attacks against the morality of Pindar, I should regret that they could not read Greek and when they bring such attacks against the morality of fielding. I regret very much that they cannot read English. There seems to be an extraordinary idea abroad that fielding was in some way an immoral or offensive writer. I have been astounded by the number of the leading articles, literary articles and other articles written about him just now in which there is a curious tone of apologizing for the man. One critic says that after all he couldn't help it because he lived in the 18th century. Another says that we must allow for the change of manners and ideas. Another says that he was not altogether without generous and humane feelings. Another suggests that he clung feebly after all to a few of the less important virtues. What on earth does all this mean? Fielding described Tom Jones as going on in a certain way in which most unfortunately a very large number of young men do go on. It's unnecessary to say that Henry Fielding knew that it was an unfortunate way of going on. Even Tom Jones knew that. He said in so many words that it was a very unfortunate way of going on. He said one may almost say that it had ruined his life. The passage is there for the benefit of anyone who may take the trouble to read the book. There is ample evidence, though even this is of a mystical and indirect kind, there is ample evidence that Fielding probably thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than to be an utter coward and sneak. There is simply not one rag or thread or speck of evidence to show that Fielding thought it was better to be Tom Jones than to be a good man. All that he is concerned with is the description of a definite and very real type of young man, a young man whose passions and whose selfish necessities sometimes seem to be stronger than anything else in him. The practical morality of Tom Jones is bad enough, though not so bad spiritually speaking as the practical morality of Arthur Pendennis or the practical morality of Pip, and certainly nothing like so bad as the profound practical immorality of Daniel de Ronda. The practical morality of Tom Jones is bad, but I cannot see any proof that his theoretical morality was particularly bad. There is no need to tell the majority of modern young men even to live up to the theoretical ethics of Henry Fielding. They would suddenly spring into the stature of archangels if they lived up to the theoretical ethics of poor Tom Jones. Tom Jones is still alive, with all his good and all his evil. He is walking about the streets, we meet him every day. We meet with him, we drink with him, we smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him. The only difference is that we have no longer the intellectual courage to write about him. We split up the supreme and central human being, Tom Jones, into a number of separate aspects. We let Mr. J. M. Berry write about him in his good moments and make him out better than he is. We let Zola write about him in his bad moments and make him out much worse than he is. We let Matterlink celebrate those moments of spiritual panic which he knows to be cowardly. We let Mr. Rudyard Kipling celebrate those moments of brutality which he knows to be far more cowardly. We let obscene writers write about the obscenities of this ordinary man. We let purits and writers write about the purities of this ordinary man. We look through one people that makes man out as devils and we call it the new art. We look through another people that makes man out as angels and we call it the new theology. But if we pull down some dusty old books from the bookshelf, if we turn over some old mill-dude leaves and if in that obscurity and decay we find some faint traces of a tale about a complete man, such a man as he is walking on the pavement outside, we suddenly pull a long face and we call it the coarse morals of a bygone age. The truth is that all these things mark a certain change in the general view of morals, not I think a change for the better. We have grown to associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness. According to us a moral book is a book about moral people. But the old idea was almost exactly the opposite. A moral book was a book about immoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogart's Gin Lane or Stages of Cruelty. Or it recorded like the popular broadsheet God's Dreadful Judgment against some blasphemer or murderer. There is a philosophical reason for this change. The homeless skepticism of our time has reached a subconscious feeling that morality is somehow merely a matter of human taste. An accident of psychology. And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man wishing to praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it that there is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it is supreme. Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that virtue is visionary. Every book which admits that evil is real is felt in some vague way to be admitting that good is unreal. The modern instinct is that if the heart of the man is evil there is nothing that remains good. But the older feeling was that if the heart of a man was ever so evil there was something that remained good. Goodness remained good. An actual avenging virtue existed outside the human race. To that men rose or from that men fell away. Therefore of course this law itself was as much demonstrated in the breach as in the observance. If Tom Jones violated morality so much the worse for Tom Jones. Fielding did not feel, as a melancholy modern would have done, that every sin of Tom Jones was in some way breaking the spell, or we may even say destroying the fiction of morality. Men spoke of the sinner breaking the law, but it was rather the law that broke him. And what modern people call the foulness and freedom of fielding is generally the severity and moral stringency of fielding. He would not have thought that he was serving morality at all if he had written a book all about nice people. Fielding would have considered Mr. Ian McLaren extremely immoral and there's something to be said for that view. Telling the truths about the terrible struggle of the human soul is surely a very elementary part of the ethics of honesty. If the characters are not wicked, the book is. This older and firmer conception of right as existing outside human weakness and without reference to human error, can be felt in the very lightest and loosest of the works of old English literature. It is commonly unmeaning enough to call Shakespeare a great moralist, but in this particular way Shakespeare is a very typical moralist. Whenever he alludes to right and wrong it is always with this old implication. Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it. The Maid of Orleans A considerable time ago, at a far too early age in fact, I read Voltaire's La Pucelle, a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of Joan of Arc, very dirty and very funny. I had not thought of it again for years, but it came back in my mind this morning because I began to turn over the leaves of the new Jean Dark by the great and graceful writer Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender sympathy and a sort of sad reverence. It never loses touch with a noble tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant girl through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan and even respectful to her religion, and being myself a furious admirer of Joan the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods and I have come to the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire's. When a man of Voltaire's school has to explode a saint or a great religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool or a common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a saint, he explains the saint as somebody belonging to his particular fussy little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc, though it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not especially Voltaire's nature, but Monsieur France reads Monsieur France's nature into Joan of Arc. All the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with a startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned anywhere, Renan's Vidae Jesus. It has just the same general intention that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least patronize it. My own instinct apart from my opinions would be quite the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man to attack. But there are some things too big for a man to patronize. And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessively unreasonable. I have no knowledge of history, but I have as much knowledge of reason as Anatole France. And if anything is irrational, it seems to me that the Renan-France way of dealing with miraculous stories is irrational. The Renan-France method is simply this. You explain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by inventing natural stories that have no foundation. Suppose that you are confronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk into the sky. It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not think that he did. It is, in my opinion, even more philosophical to reply that he may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is to write like this. When we consider Jack's curious and even perilous heredity which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind. Moreover there is little doubt that he must have met some wandering conjurer from India who told him about the tricks of the mango plant and how it is sent up to the sky. We can imagine these two friends, the old man and the young, wandering in the woods together at evening, looking at the red and level clouds, as on that night when the old man pointed to a small beanstalk and told his two imaginative companion that this also might be made to scale the heavens. And then when we remember the quite exceptional psychology of Jack, when we remember how there was in him a union of the prosaic, the love of plain vegetables with an almost irrelevant eagerness for the unattainable, for invisibility and the void, we shall no longer wonder that it was to him especially that was sent this sweet, though merely symbolic dream of the tree uniting earth and heaven. That is the way that Renan and France write, only they do it better. But really a rationalist like myself becomes a little impatient and feels inclined to say, but hang it all, what do you know about the heredity of Jack, or the psychology of Jack? You know nothing about Jack at all, except that some people say that he climbed up a beanstalk. Nobody would ever have thought of mentioning him if he hadn't. You must interpret him in terms of the beanstalk religion. You cannot merely interpret religion in terms of him. We have the materials of this story, and we can believe in them or not, but we have not got the materials to make another story. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of Monsieur Anatole France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible to his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore dismiss it, and her to fairyland with Jack and the beanstalk, he tries to invent a real story for which he can find no real evidence. He produces a scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any scientific proof. It is as if I, being entirely ignorant of botany and chemistry, said that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and argon got into the subsidiary ducts of the Corolla. To take the most obvious example, the principal character in Monsieur France's story is a person who never existed at all. Joan's wisdom and energy, it seems, came from a certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest trace in all the multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation I can find for this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a peasant girl could not possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very hard for a free thinker to remain democratic. The writer seems altogether to forget what is meant by the moral atmosphere of a community. To say that Joan must have learnt her vision of a virgin overthrowing evil from a priest is like saying that some modern girl in London, pitying the poor, must have learnt it from a labour member. She would learn it, or the labour member learnt it, in the whole state of our society. But that is the modern method, the method of the Reverend Skeptic. When you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the outside, you pretend that you understand the inside. As Renon the rationalist could not make any sense out of Christ's most public acts, he proceeded to make an ingenious system out of his private thoughts. As Anatole France, on his own intellectual principle, cannot believe in what Joan of Arc did, he professed to be her dearest friend and to know exactly what she meant. I cannot feel it to be a very rational manner of writing history, and sooner or later we shall have to find some more solid way of dealing with those spiritual phenomenon, with which all of history is as closely spotted and spangled as the sky is with stars. Joan of Arc is a wild and wonderful thing enough, but she is much saner than most of her critics and biographers. We shall not recover the common sense of Joan till we have recovered her mysticism. Our wars fail because they begin with something sensible and obvious, such as getting to Pretoria by Christmas, but her wars succeeded because it began with something wild and perfect, the saints delivering France. She put her idealism in the right place and her realism also in the right place. We moderns get both displaced. She put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims where they ought to be. She put her practicality into her practice. In modern imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always we insist quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy. It is not for us to explain this flaming figure in terms of our tired and queerless culture. Rather we must try to explain ourselves by the blaze of such fixed stars. Those who called her a witch, hot from hell, were much more sensible than those who depicted her as a silly sentimental maiden prompted by her perished priest. If I have to choose between the two schools of her scattered enemies, I should take my place with those subtle clerks who thought her divine mission devilish rather than with those rustic aunts and uncles who thought it impossible. With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since Browning. His energy was of somewhat the same kind. Browning was intellectually intricate because he was morally simple. He was too simple to explain himself. He was too humble to suppose that other people needed any explanation. But his real energy and the real energy of Francis Thompson was best expressed in the fact that both poets were at once fond of immensity and also fond of detail. Any common imperialist can have large ideas so long as he is not called upon to have small ideas also. Any common scientific philosopher can have small ideas so long as he is not called upon to have large ideas as well. But the great poets used the telescope and also the microscope. Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons. Now because they are talking about something too large for anyone to understand and now again because they are talking about something too small for anyone to see. Francis Thompson possessed both these infinities. He escaped by being too small as the microbe escapes or he escaped by being too large as the universe escapes. Anyone who knows Francis Thompson's poetry knows quite well the truth to which I refer. For the benefit of any person who does not know it I may mention two cases taken from memory. I have not the book by me so I can only render the poetical passages in a clumsy paraphrase. But there was one poem of which the image was so vast that it was literally difficult for a time to take it in. He was describing the evening earth with its mist and fume and fragrance and represented the whole as rolling upwards like a smoke. Then suddenly he called the whole ball of the earth the terrible and said that some gigantic spirit swung it slowly before God. That is the case of the image too large for comprehension. Another instance sticks in my mind of the image which is too small. In one of his poems he says that abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by pontifical death. There are about ten historical and theological puns in that one word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a pontiff means a bridge maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that death may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least priests and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can get separated from another thing. These ideas and twenty more are all actually concentrated in the word pontifical. In Francis Thompson's poetry, as in the poetry of the universe you can work infinitely out and out, but yet infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the mark of greatness and he was a great poet. Beneath the tide of praise which was obviously due to the dead poet there is an evident undercurrent of discussion about him. Some charges of moral weakness were at least important enough to be authoritatively contradicted in the nation and in connection with this and other things there has been a continuous stir of comment upon his attraction to and gradual absorption in Catholic theological ideas. This question is so important that I think it ought to be considered and understood even at the present time. It is of course true that Francis Thompson devoted himself more and more to poems, not only purely Catholic but one may say purely ecclesiastical, and it is more overtrue that if things go on as they are going on at present more and more good poets will do the same. Poets will tend toward Christian orthodoxy for a perfectly plain reason because it is about the simplest and freest thing now left in the world. On this point it is very necessary to be clear. When people impute special vices to the Christian church they seem entirely to forget that the world, which is the only other thing there is has these vices much more. The church has been cruel, but the world has been much more cruel. The church has plotted, but the world has plotted much more. The church has been superstitious, but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself. Now poets in our epic will tend towards ecclesiastical religions strictly because it is just a little more free than anything else. Take for instance the case of symbol and ritualism. All reasonable men believe in symbol, but some reasonable men do not believe in ritualism by which they mean I imagine a symbolism too complex, elaborate and mechanical. But whenever they talk of ritualism they always seem to mean the ritualism of the church. Why should they not mean the ritual of the world? It is much more ritualistic. The ritual of the army, the ritual of the navy, the ritual of the law courts, the ritual of parliament are much more ritualistic. The ritual of a dinner party is much more ritualistic. Priests may put gold and great jewels on the chalice, but at least there is only one chalice to put them on. When you go to a dinner party they put in front of you five different chalices of five weird and heraldic shapes to symbolize five different kinds of wine, an insane extension of ritual from which Mr. Percy Dürmer would fly shrieking. A bishop wears a miter, but he is not thought more or less of a bishop according to whether you can see the very latest curves in his miter. But a swell is thought more or less of a swell according to whether you can see the very latest curves in his hat. There is more fuss about symbols in the world than in the church. And yet, strangely enough, though men fuss more about the worldly symbols they mean less by them, it is the mark of religious forms that they declare something unknown. But it is the mark of worldly forms that they declare something which is known and which is known to be untrue. When the pope in an encyclical calls himself your father it is a matter of faith or of doubt. But when the duke of Devonshire in a letter calls himself yours obediently you know that he means the opposite of what he says. Religious forms are at the worst fables. They might be true. Secular forms are falsehoods. They are not true. Take a more topical case. The German emperor has more uniforms than the pope. But moreover, the pope's vestments all imply a claim to be something purely mystical and doubtful. Many of the German emperors uniforms imply a claim to be something which he certainly is not and which it would be highly disgusting if he were. The pope may or may not be the vicar of Christ but the Kaiser certainly is not an English colonel. If the thing were reality it would be treason. If it is mere ritual it is by far the most unreal ritual on earth. Now poetical people like Francis Thompson-Will as things stand tend away from secular society and towards religion for the reason above described, that there are crowds of symbols in both but that those of religion are simpler and mean more. To take an evident type the cross is more poetical than the Union Jack because it is simpler. The more simple an idea is the more it is fertile in variations. Francis Thompson could have written any number of good poems on the cross because it is a primary symbol. The number of poems which Mr. Rudyard Kipling could write on the Union Jack is fortunately limited because the Union Jack is too complex to produce luxuriance. The same principle applies to any possible number of cases. A poet like Francis Thompson could deduce perpetually rich and branching meanings out of two plain facts like bread and wine. With bread and wine he can expand everything to everywhere but with a French menu he cannot expand anything except perhaps himself. Complicated ideas do not produce any more ideas. Mongrels do not breed. Religious ritual attracts because there is some sense in it. Religious imagery so far from being subtle is the only simple thing left for poets. So far from being merely superhuman it is the only human thing left for human beings. Christmas. There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes as I am doing in this article. It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is. Up to a certain specific instant you are feeling ordinary and sad for it is only Wednesday. At the next moment your heart leaps up and your soul and body dance together like lovers for in one burst in blaze it has become Thursday. I am assuming of course that you are a worshipper of Thor and that you celebrate his day once a week possibly with human sacrifice. If on the other hand you are a modern Christian Englishman you hail of course with the same explosion of gaiety the appearance of the English Sunday. But I say that whatever the day is that is too euphestive or symbolic it is essential that there should be a clear black line between it and the time going before and all the old wholesome customs in connection with Christmas were to the effect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something before the actual coming of Christmas day. Thus for instance children were never given their presents till the actual coming of the appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up in brown paper parcels out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentally stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications especially it ought to be observed in connection with what are called the Christmas numbers of magazines. The editors of the magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long before the time that the reader is more likely to be still lamenting for the turkey of last year than to have seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the turkey which is to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas day. On consideration I should favor the editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the leg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to the individual choice. Of course all this secrecy about Christmas is merely sentimental and ceremonial. If you do not like what is sentimental and ceremonial do not celebrate Christmas at all. You will not be punished if you don't. Also since we are no longer ruled by those sturdy Puritans who won for us civil and religious liberty you will not even be punished if you do. But I can't understand why anyone should bother about a ceremonial except ceremonially. If a thing only exists in order to be graceful do it gracefully or do not do it. If a thing only exists as something professing to be solemn do it solemnly or do not do it. There is no sense in doing it slouchingly nor is there even any liberty. I can understand the man who takes off his hat to a lady because it is the customary symbol. I can understand him I say in fact I know him quite intimately. I can also understand the man who refuses to take off his hat to a lady like the old Quakers because he thinks that a symbol is superstition. But what point would there be in so performing an arbitrary form of respect that it was not a form of respect? We respect the gentleman who takes off his hat to the lady we respect the fanatic who will not take off his hat to the lady but what should we think of the man who kept his hands in his pockets and asked the lady to take his hat off for him and he felt tired. This is combining insolence and superstition and the modern world is full of the strange combination. There is no mark of the immense weak-mindedness of modernity that is more striking than this general disposition to keep up old forms but to keep them up informally and feebly. Why take something which was only meant to be respectful and preserve it disrespectfully? Why take something which you could easily abolish as superstition and carefully perpetuate it as a bore? There have been many instances of this half-witted compromise. Was it not true, for instance, that the other day that some mad American was trying to buy a Glastonbury Abbey and transfer it stone by stone to America? Such things are not only illogical but idiotic. There's no particular reason that American financier should pay respect to Glastonbury Abbey at all. But if he is to pay respect to Glastonbury Abbey he must pay respect to Glastonbury. If it is a matter of sentiment, why should he spoil the scene? If it is not a matter of sentiment why should he ever have visited the scene? To call this kind of thing vandalism is a very inadequate and unfair description. The vandals were very sensible people. They did not believe in a religion and so they insulted it. They did not see any use for certain buildings and so they knocked them down. But they were not such fools as to encumber their march with the fragments of the edifice they had themselves spoiled. They were at least superior to the modern American mode of reasoning. They did not desecrate the stones because they held them sacred. In another instance of the same illogicality I observed the other day at some kind of at-home I saw what appeared to be a human being dressed in a black evening coat black-dressed waistcoat and black-dressed trousers but with a shirt front made of Yeager wool. What can be the sense of this sort of thing? If a man thinks hygiene is more important than convention what on earth is there to oblige him to wear a shirt front at all? But to take a costume of which the only conceivable cause or advantage is that it is a sort of uniform and then not wear it in the uniform way. This is to be neither a Bohemian nor a Jew nor a Christian. But if a man thinks hygiene is more important than convention what on earth is there to oblige him to wear a shirt front at all? But to take a costume of which the only conceivable cause or advantage is that it is a Bohemian nor a gentleman. It is a foolish effectation. I think, in an English officer of the lifeguards never to wear his uniform if he can help it. But it would be more foolish still if he showed himself about town in a scarlet coat and a Yeager breastplate. It is the custom nowadays to have ritual commissions and ritual reports to make rather unmeaning compromises in the ceremonial of the Church of England. So perhaps we shall have an ecclesiastical compromise in the worship shell where Yeager copes and Yeager miters. Similarly, the king might insist on having a Yeager crown. But I do not think he will, for he understands the logic of the matter better than that. The modern monarch, like a reasonable fellow wears his crown as seldom as he can, but if he does it at all then the only point of a crown is that it is a crown. So let me assure the unknown gentleman in the wool investor that the only point of a white shirt front is that it is a white shirt front. Stiffness may be its impossible defect, but it is certainly its only possible merit. Let us be consistent therefore about Christmas and either keep customs or not keep them. If you do not like the sentiment and symbolism you do not like Christmas. Go away and celebrate something else. I suggest the birthday of Mr. McCabe. No doubt you could have a sort of scientific Christmas with a hygienic pudding and highly instructive presents stuffed into a Yeager stocking. Go and have it then. If you like those things doubtless you are a good sort of fellow and your intentions are excellent. I have no doubt that you are really interested in humanity but I cannot think that humanity will ever be much interested in you. Humanity is unhygienic from its very nature and beginning. It is so much an exception in nature that the law of nature really means nothing to it. Now Christmas is attacked also on the humanitarian grounds. A weta calls it a feast of slaughter and gluttony. Mr. Shaw suggested that it was invented by polterers. That should be considered before it becomes more considerable. I do not know whether an animal killed at Christmas has had a better or worse time than it would have had if there had been no Christmas or no Christmas dinners. But I do know that the fighting and suffering brotherhood to which I belong and owe everything, mankind, would have had a much worse time if there were no such thing as Christmas or Christmas dinners. Whether the turkey which Scrooge gave to Bob Cratchit had experienced the lovelier or more melancholy career than that of less attractive turkeys is the subject upon which I cannot even conjecture. But that Scrooge was better for giving the turkey and Cratchit happier for getting it I know as two facts as I know that I have two feet. What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business, but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business. Nothing shall induce me to darken human homes, to destroy human festivities, to insult human gifts and human benefactions for the sake of some hypothetical knowledge which nature curtained from our eyes. We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty. If we catch sharks for food, let them be killed most mercifully. Let anyone who likes, love the sharks and pet the sharks and tie ribbons round their necks and give them sugar and teach them to dance. But if once a man suggests that a shark is to be valued against a sailor, or that the poor shark might be permitted to bite off a leg occasionally, then I would court Marshall the man. He is a traitor to the ship. And while I take this view of humanitarianism of the anti-Christmas kind, it is cogent to say that I am a strong anti-vivisectionist. That is, if there is any vivisection, I am against it. I am against the cutting up of conscious dogs for the same reason that I am in favor of the eating of dead turkeys. The connection may not be too obvious, but that is because of the strange, unhealthy condition of modern thought. I am against cruel vivisection, as I am against cruel anti-Christmas asceticism, because they both involve the upsetting of existing fellowships and the shocking of normal good feelings for the sake of something that is intellectual, fanciful, and remote. It is not a human thing. It is not a humane thing when you see a poor woman staring hungrily at a bloater to think not of the obvious feelings of the woman, but of the unimaginable feelings of the deceased bloater. Similarly, it is not human. It is not humane when you look at a dog to think about what theoretic discoveries you might possibly make if you were allowed to bore a hole in his head. Both the humanitarian's fancy about the feelings concealed inside the bloater and the vivisectionist's fancy about the knowledge concealed inside the dog are unhealthy fancies because they upset human sanity that is certain for the sake of something that is of necessity uncertain. The vivisectionist, for the sake of doing something that may or may not be useful, does something that certainly is horrible. The anti-Christmas humanitarian in seeking to have a sympathy with a turkey, which no man can have with a turkey, loses the sympathy he has already with the happiness of millions of the poor. It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality to meet. Thus I have always felt that brutal imperialism and Tolstoyan non-resistence were not only not opposite, but were the same thing. They are the same contemptible thought that conquest cannot be resisted looked at from the two standpoints of the conqueror and the conquered. Thus again, T. Tolstoyanism and the really degraded gin-selling and dram-drinking have exactly the same moral philosophy. They are both based on the idea that fermented liquor is not a drink but a drug. But I am especially certain that the extreme of vegetarian humanity is, as I have said, akin to the extreme of scientific cruelty. They both permit a dubious speculation to interfere with their ordinary charity. The sound moral rule in such matters as vivisection always presents itself to me in this way. There is no ethical necessity more essential and vital than this. The causistical exceptions, though admitted, should be admitted as exceptions. And it follows from this I think that, though we may do a horrid thing in a horrid situation, we must be quite certain that we actually and already are in that situation. Thus all sane moralists admit that one may sometimes tell a lie, but no sane moralist would ever approve of telling a little boy to practice telling lies in case he might one day have to tell a justifiable one. Thus morality has often justified shooting a robber or a burglar, but it would not justify going into the village Sunday school and shooting all the little boys who looked as if they might grow up into burglars. The need may arise, but the need must have arisen. It seems to me quite clear that if you step across this limit, you step off a precipice. Now whether torturing an animal is or is not a moral thing, it is at least a dreadful thing. It belongs to the order of exceptional and even desperate acts. Except for some extraordinary reason, I would not grievously hurt an animal. With an extraordinary reason, I would grievously hurt him. If for example a mad elephant were pursuing me and my family and I could only shoot him so that he would die in agony, he would have to die in agony. But the elephant would be there. I would not do it to a hypothetical elephant. Now it always seems to me that this is the one weak point in the ordinary vivisectionist argument. Suppose your wife were dying. Vivisection is not done by a man whose wife is dying. If it were, it might be lifted to the level of the moment, as would be lying or stealing bread or any other ugly action. But this ugly action is done in cold blood at leisure by men who are not sure that it will be of any use to anybody, men of whom the most that can be said is that they may conceivably make the beginnings of some discovery which may perhaps save the life of someone else's wife in some remote future. That is too cold and distant to rob an act of its immediate horror. That is like training the child to tell lies, for the sake of some great dilemma that may never come to him. You are doing a cruel thing, but not with enough passion to make it a kindly one. So much for why I am an anti-vivisectionist, and I should like to say in conclusion that all other anti-vivisectionists of my acquaintance weaken their case infinitely by forming this attack on scientific speciality in which the human heart is commonly on their side, with attacks upon universal human customs in which the human heart is not at all on their side. I have heard humanitarians for instance speak of vivisection and field sports as if they were the same kind of thing. The difference seems to me simple and enormous. In sport a man goes into a wood and mixes with the existing life of that wood, becomes a destroyer only in the simple and healthy sense in which all the creatures are destroyers, becomes for one moment to them what they are to him. Another animal. In vivisection a man takes a simpler creature and subjects it to subtleties which no one but man could inflict on him, and for which man is therefore gravely and terribly responsible. Meanwhile it remains true that I shall eat a great deal of turkey this Christmas, and it is not in the least true, as the vegetarians say, that I shall do it because I do not realize what I am doing, or because I do what I know is wrong, or that I do it with shame or doubt or a fundamental unrest of conscience. In one sense I know quite well what I am doing, and in another sense I know quite well that I know not what I do. Scrooge and the cratchets and I are, as I have said, all in one boat. The turkey and I are, to say the most of it, ships that pass in the night, and greet each other in passing. I wish him well, but it is really practically impossible to discover whether I treat him well. I can avoid, and I do avoid with horror, all special and artificial tormenting of him, sticking pins in him for fun, or sticking knives in him for scientific investigation. But whether by feeding him slowly and killing him quickly for the needs of my brethren, I have improved in his own solemn eyes, his own strange and separate destiny. Whether I have made him in the sight of God a slave or a martyr, or one whom the gods love and who die young, that is far more removed from my possibilities of knowledge than the most obtuse intricacies of mysticism or theology. A turkey is more a cult and awful than all the angels and dark angels, and so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means, and if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished. End of Section 12. End of All Things Considered by G.K. Chesterton