 This is a LibreVox recording. All LibreVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton. Authors note, the defences of which this volume is composed have appeared in the speaker and are here reprinted after revision and amplification by permission of the editor. Portions of The Defense of Publicity appeared in the Daily News October 1901. Chapter 1. In Defense of a New Edition. The reissue of a series of essays so ephemeral and even so superfluous may seem at the first glance to require some excuse. The best excuse is, they will have been completely forgotten and therefore may be read again with entirely new sensations. I am not sure, however, that this claim is so modest as it sounds, for I fancy that Shakespeare and Balzac, if moved to prayers, might not ask to be remembered, but to be forgotten, and forgotten thus. For if they were forgotten, they would be everlastingly rediscovered and reread. It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main, from seeing things as splendid as they are. The ancients were not wrong when they made leth the boundary of a better land. Perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb back upon the bank of the earth and fancy himself in Elysium. If, therefore, I am certain that most sensible people have forgotten the existence of this book, I do not speak in modesty or in pride. I wish only to state a simple and somewhat beautiful fact. In one respect, the passing of the period during which a book can be considered current has afflicted me with some melancholy, for I had intended to write anonymously in some daily paper a thorough and crushing exposure of the work inspired mostly by a certain artistic impatience of the too indulgent tone of the critiques and manner in which a vast number of my most monstrous fallacies have passed unchallenged. I will not repeat that powerful article here, for it cannot be necessary to do anything more than to warn the reader against the perfectly indefensible line of argument adopted at the end of page 28. I am also conscious that the title of the book is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is a legal metaphor, and speaking legally a defendant is not an enthusiast for the character of King John or the domestic virtues of the prairie dog. He is one who defends himself a thing which the present writer, however poisoned his mind, may be with paradox, certainly never dreamed of attempting. Criticism upon the book considered as literature, if it can't be so considered, I should of course never dream of discussing. Firstly because it is ridiculous to do so, and secondly because there was in my opinion much justice in such criticism. But there is one manner on which an author is generally considered as having a right to explain himself since it has nothing to do with capacity or intelligence, and that is the question of his morals. I am proud to say that a furious uncompromising and very effective attack was made upon what was alleged to be the utter immorality of this book by my excellent friend Mr. C. F. G. Masterman in The Speaker. The tendency of that criticism was to the effect that I was discouraging improvements and disguising scandals by my offensive optimism. Quoting the passage in which I said that diamonds were to be found in the dustbin, he said, There is no difficulty in finding good in what humanity rejects. The difficulty is to find it in what humanity accepts. The diamond is easy enough to find in the dustbin. The difficulty is to find it in the drawing room. I must admit, for my part, without the slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in drawing rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing room. But I merely mention this, purely ethical attack, in order to state, in as few sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement, but in reality it is a singular truth that the era in which pessimism has been decried from the housetops is also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into decay. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. No man ever did and no man ever can create or desire to make a bad thing good or an ugly thing beautiful. There must be some germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash or deck out a goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf or myfistiles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle skepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good, we are revolutionaries. If the world is evil, we must be conservatives. These essays feudal as they are considered as serious literature are yet ethically sincere since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards. GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON END OF CHAPTER I In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a level, and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with loose rocks and boulders so big as to be like mountains broken loose. The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it has always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a prophet as much more gigantic than after-profits as the boulders are more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some words, words that seemed shameful and tremendous, and the world in terror buried him under a wilderness of stones. The place is the monument of ancient fear. If we followed the same mood of fancy it would be more difficult to imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that primal persecution. What secretive, sensational thought lies buried under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation, it is a convention. The curse against God is exercise one in the primer of minor poetry. It was not assuredly for such babyish solemnities that our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring. For the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells, as primarily the pointing out of the earth. Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope, the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For the mind and eyes of the average man, this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of human history that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility. This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city. Every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed. The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not, firstly because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist therefore drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry even unto death, the right way is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could in three days pull down and rebuild the temple. Every one of the great revolutionists from Isaiah to Shelley have been optimists. They have been indignant not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot, he is simply a rejected lover. He suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in general. It becomes increasingly apparent therefore that the world is in a permanent danger of being misjudged. That this is no fanciful or mystical idea may be tested by simple examples. The two absolutely basic words good and bad, descriptive of two primal and inexplicable sensations, are not and never have been used properly. Things that are bad are not called good by any people who experience them, but things that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity. Let me explain a little. Certain things are bad as far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a toothache good in itself, but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing insofar as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife, not good enough for us. What we call a bad hat is a good hat, not good enough for us. What we call bad cookery is good cookery, not good enough for us. What we call bad civilization is a good civilization, not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole arctic continent does not make ivory black. Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else beside a continual parasite. Therefore I have investigated the dust heaps of humanity and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged but eternally and systematically engaged in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. I have found that every man is disposed to call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is and the snow of Christmas a little less white than it is. Therefore I have imagined that the main business of man, however humble, is defense. I have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required, when worldlings despise the world, that a counsel for the defense would not have been out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary and man was rejected of men. End of chapter 2 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 3 A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature. The vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense. But it is not vulgar intrinsically. It is the actual center of a million flaming imaginations. In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored and therefore did not properly speaking despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his mustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole underworld of popular composition in a similar darkness. For today, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar compositions and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness. There is a terrible cerchean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything, it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggerations and misconceptions than the current boy's literature of the lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture. The people must have conversation. They must have houses and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatist persona, for it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional storyteller goes from village to village with a small carpet, and I wish sincerely that anyone had the moral courage to spread that carpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury. Fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly be too short for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too long for its conclusion is merely to be deplored like the last half-penny or the last pipe-light. And so while the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood. There is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and The Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immemorial. But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common sense recognition of this fact, that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness, we begin generally speaking by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole, and a dignified surprise that the errand boys under discussion do not read the egoist and the master-builder. It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge that Apple's appease hunger is traceable through some curious literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humor. If I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence of Mr. George Moore's novel, I should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people, that gutter boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books. Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Cain walks the streets openly and cannot be put in prison for an anti-climax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish. So far as I have seen them in connection with the dirtiest bookstalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these. The whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventure, rambling, disconnected, and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical history. The medieval knight, the eighteenth-century dualist, and the modern cowboy, recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his turkey carpet as by such dehumanized and naked narratives as this. Among these stories there are a certain number which deals sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws, and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duvall. That is to say they do precisely the same thing as Scott's Ivanhoe, Scott's Rob Roy, Scott's Lady of the Lake, Byron's Corsair, Wordsworth's Rob Roy's Grave, Stevenson's McCare, and Max Pemberton's The Iron Pirate and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of loxley in Ivanhoe will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park. No one thinks that the unconscious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for a life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class we recognize that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it. It might at least cross our minds that for whatever other reason the Iron Boy reads the Red Revenge. It really is not because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives. In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the lower classes when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian. It is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says with a modest swagger I have invited twenty-four factory hens to tea. If he said, I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea, everyone would see the humor of so simple a classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing. We have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is in fact nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists, for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built, for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms it is not built at all. Clearly there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram. If the authors and publishers of Dick Deadshot and such remarkable works were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated classes, which take down the names of every man however distinguished who was caught at university extension lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us to all correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we, for they with all their idiocy are normal, and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal, books recommending profligacy and pessimism at which the highest sold errand boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstore in Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or suicide, his thought would be seized by the police. These things are our luxuries, and with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing with the equivocal German professors whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it quite unjustly of lubricity and indecency we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving. But it is we who are the morbid exceptions. It is we who are the criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of humanity with their vast mass of idle books and idle words have never doubted and never will doubt that courage has splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales. We are told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul which we call penny dreadfuls, a plainer and a better gospel, than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a many-faced and fickle traitor, but at least it is a better aim than to be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. Dionunzio's downwards. So long as the course and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture, it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor, the slaves, who really stoop under the burden of life, have often been mad, scatterbrained, and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their driveling literature will always be a blood-and-thunder literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men. CHAPTER IV. A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS If a prosperous modern man with the high hat and froth coat were to solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the leaves on every third tree and holland walk, to hop up to the city on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of mills' liberty seventy-six times, to collect three hundred dandelions in fields belonging to any one of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the top of an omnibus, or to make any such unusual undertaking. We should immediately conclude that the man was mad, or as it is sometimes expressed, was an artist in life. Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures in civic and national civilization, by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great chain hung there was said, for ages, as a monument to that mystical folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog, and it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high compliment to the holy city by setting out forth under conditions which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get there. But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time, we should, as we have set, regard them as symbols of the decadence. But the men who did these things were not decadent. They belong generally to the most robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust stage. Again it will be urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious direction of a superstitious religious system. This again will not hold water, for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad promise and performances, the same misshapen imagination, and the same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction to explain which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of the vows from the beginning. And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall, unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly sane and even sensible to swear to chain mountains together, and that if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so. The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of oneself, of the weakness and mutability of oneself, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk. Not because it is silly to do so. He does many sillier things. But because he has a profound conviction that before he had got the three hundred and thirty-ninth leaf on the first tree, he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home the tea. In other words, we fear that by the time he will be, in the common but hideously significant phrase, another man. Now it is this horrible fairytale of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the decadence, that John Patterson should, with apparent calm, look forward to being a certain general barker on Monday or McGregor on Tuesday. Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday and Sam's Lug on Thursday may seem a nightmare, but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago in which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend the feelings of a man about to be hanged. For he that lives more lives than one, more deaths than one, must die. And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadence and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing, the hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest green room in which to be human. Now this is the condition of the decadent, of the esthete, of the free lover, to be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scare us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us. This is the grinning tyranny of decadence, which is called freedom. Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows, the man who made a vow however wild, give a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief for love or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be it was like all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it, exegy monumentum, or parenis, was the only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see the emotional opportunity. He would vow to chain two mountains together, but then he would quite as cheerfully vow to change the earth to the moon, and the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said, that he was in truth saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality, which is the excitement of a vow. For what could be more maddening than an existence in which our mother or aunt received the information that we were going to assassinate the king or build a temple on Ben Nevis with the genial composure of custom? The revolt against vows has been carried on in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being as it is a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words, free love, as if a lover ever had been or ever could be free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavored grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibilities. But they do not respect him as the old church respected him. They do not write his oath upon the heavens as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty, except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants. In Mr. Bernard Shaw's brilliant play, The Philanderer, we have a vivid picture of this state of things. Charteris is a man perpetually endeavoring to be a free lover, which is like endeavoring to be a married bachelor or a white negro. He is wandering in a hungry search for a certain exhilaration which he can only have when he has the courage to cease from wandering. Men knew better than this in old times, in the time, for example, of Shakespeare's heroes. When Shakespeare's men are really celibate, they praise the undoubted advantages of celibacy, liberty, irresponsibility, a chance of continual change. But they were not such fools as to continue to talk of liberty when they were in such a condition that they could be made happy or miserable by the moving of someone else's eyebrow. Suckling classes love with depth in his phrase of freedom. And he that's fairly out of both of all the world is blessed. He lives as in the golden age, when all things made were common. With his pipe he takes his glass, he fears no man or woman. This is a perfectly possible rational and manly position. But what have lovers to do with effectations of fearing no man or woman? They know that in the turning of a hand the whole cosmic engine to the remotest star may become an instrument of music or an instrument of torture. They hear a song older than sucklings that has survived a hundred philosophies. Who is this that looketh out of the window? Fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. As we have said it is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a retreat behind us, that is to our minds the sterilizing spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus in politics the modern jingos practically say, Let us have the pleasures of conquerors without the pains of soldiers. Let us sit on sofas and be a hearty race. Thus in religion and morals the decadent mystics say, Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint. Let us sing hymns alternately to the Virgin and Priapas. Thus in love and free lovers say, Let us have the splendor of offering ourselves without the peril of committing ourselves. Let us see whether one cannot commit suicide an unlimited number of times. Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments doubtless for the spectator, the amateur, and the esthete. But there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who stars himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice, and it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of the stars and the snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in back ways and retreats. But surely sooner or later the towering flame will rise from the harbor announcing that the reign of the cowards is over, and a man is burning his ships. End of Chapter 4 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 5 A Defense of Skeletons One little time ago I stood among a memorial English trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of yigdrasils. As I watched among these living pillars I became gradually aware that the rustics who lived and died in their shadow adopted a very curious conversational tone. They seemed to be constantly apologizing for the trees as if they were a very poor show. After elaborate investigation I discovered that their gloomy and penitent tone was traceable to the fact that it was winter and all the trees were bare. I assured them that I did not resent the fact that it was winter, that I knew the thing had happened before and that no forethought on their part could have averted this blow of destiny. But I could not in any way reconcile them to the fact that it was winter. There was evidently a general feeling that I had caught the trees in a kind of disgraceful dishebel and that they ought not to be seen until, like the first human sinners, they had covered themselves with leaves. So it is quite clear that while very few people appear to know anything of how trees look in winter the actual forester's know less than anyone. So far from the line of the tree the trees bear appearing harsh and severe. It is luxuriously indefinable to an unusual degree. The fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette. The tops of two or three high trees, when they are leafless, are so soft that they seem like the gigantic broom of that fabulous lady who was sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in comparison hard to gross and blotchy. The clouds of night do not more certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure the tree. The actual sight of the little wood with its gray and silver sea of life is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloming that a figure stepping towards us in the checkered twilight seems as if he were breaking through unfathomable depths of spider webs. But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a pianist. One winter that healthy ascetic carries his gigantic razor over the hill and valley and shaves all the trees like the monks. We feel surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they were less like mobs. But it does appear to be a deep and essential difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure or of the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree. It is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man. The importance of the human skeleton is very great and the horror with which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than the bulldog whose popularity never wanes and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton since nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it. One ground exists for this terror. A strange idea has infected humanity that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left naked after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution, but both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own. All the police creaking, all the wheels turning in the house of livelihood as in the house of life. There is no reason why this creature, new as I fancy to art, the thriving skeleton, should not become the essential symbol of life. The truth is that man's horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all. It is man's eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the skeleton is the reminder that the ground plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be genteel, a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of animals carrying with quite a dandified levity the most monstrous shapes and appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings and legs when they are necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe which is ridiculous. From the animacule with a head too big for its body, up to the comet with a tail too big for its head. But when it comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humor rather abruptly deserts him. In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, which was in certain times and respects, a much gloomier period, this idea of the skeleton had a vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pumps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not surely the mere dread of death that did this. For these were ages in which men went to meet death, singing. It was the idea of the degradation of man in the grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in aristocratic stations and ages tend to an impeccable dignity, an endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that they would fall into one grinning mantrap and not rise again, that the whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize. That birth was humorous, coming of age, humorous, drinking and fighting humorous, they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were taught that death was humorous. There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what we call nature lie in her beauty. But the fact that nature is beautiful in the sense that a dado or a liberty curtain is beautiful is only one for charms, and almost an accidental one. The highest and most valuable quality in nature is not her beauty, but her generous and defiant ugliness. A hundred instances might be taken. The croaking noise of the rooks is in itself as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a London Railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse kindness and honesty, and the lover-in-maw could actually persuade himself that this abominable noise resembled his lady-love's name. Has the poet for whom nature means only roses and lilies ever heard a pig grunting? It is a noise that does a man good, a strong snorting, imprisoned noise breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth itself snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest, the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of nature, the value which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as grotesque, as solemn, and as happy as a child. The mood does come when we see all her shapes like the shapes that a baby scrolls upon a slate. Simple, rudimentary, a million years older and stronger than the whole disease that is called art. The objects of earth and heaven seem to combine into a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and levity. The tree above my head is flapping like some gigantic bird standing on one leg. The moon is like the eye of a cyclops. And however much my face clouds with somber vanity or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing forever. End of chapter 5 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 6 A Defense of Publicity It is a very significant fact that the form of art in which the modern world has certainly not improved upon the ancient is what may roughly be called the Art of the Open Air. Public monuments have certainly not improved, nor has the criticism of them improved, as is evident from the fashion of condemning such a large number of them as pompous. An interesting essay might be written on the enormous number of words that are used as insults when they are really compliments. It is in itself a singular study in that tendency which, as I have said, is always making things out worse than they are and necessitating a systematic attitude of defense. Thus, for example, some dramatic critics cast contempt upon a dramatic performance by calling it theatrical, which simply means that it is suitable to a theater and is as much a compliment as calling a poem poetical. Similarly, we speak disdainfully of a certain kind of work as sentimental, which simply means possessing the admirable and essential quality of sentiment. Such phrases are all parts of one peddling and cowardly philosophy and remind us of the days when enthusiast was a term of reproach. But of all this vocabulary of unconscious eulogies, nothing is more striking than the word pompous. Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous. Pomp is its very object. It would be absurd to have columns and pyramids blushing in some coin nook like violets in the wood of spring. And public monuments have in this matter a great and much needed lesson to teach. Valor and mercy and the great enthusiasm ought to be a great deal more public than they are at present. We are too fond, nowadays, of committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence. We have forgotten the old and wholesome morality of the Book of Proverbs. Wisdom cryeth without, her voice is heard in the streets. In Athens and Florence her voice was heard in the streets. They had an outdoor life of war and argument, and they had what modern commercial civilization has never had, an outdoor art. Religious services, the most sacred of all things, have always been held publicly. It is entirely a new and debased notion that sanctity is the same as secrecy. A great many modern poets with the most obtruse and delicate sensibilities love darkness when all is said and done much for the same reason that thieves love it. The mission of a great spire or statue should be to strike the spirit with a sudden sense of pride as with a thunderbolt. It should lift us, with it, into the empty and ennobling air along the base of every noble monument. Whatever else may be written there runs in invisible letters the lines of Swinburne. This thing is God. To be a man with thy might, to go straight in the strength of thy spirit and live out thy life in the light. If a public monument does not meet this first supreme and obvious need, that it should be public and monumental. It fails from the outset. There has arisen lately a school of realistic sculpture which may perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and depressing object in the universe, far more hideous and depressing than one of Mr. H. G. Wells' shapeless monsters of the slime, and not at all unlike them, is the statue of an English philanthropist. Almost at bad, though, of course, not quite as bad, are the statues of English politicians and parliament-fields. Each of them is cased in a cylindrical frock coat and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking garment over the arm that might be either a bathing towel or a light-grade coat. Each of them is in an oratorical attitude which has all the disadvantage of being affected without even any of the advantage of being theatrical. Let no one suppose that such abortions arise merely from technical demerit, and every line of leaden dolls express the fact that they were not set up with any heat of natural enthusiasm for beauty or dignity. They were set up mechanically because it would seem indecorous or stingy if they were not set up. They were even set up sulkily in a utilitarian age which was haunted by the thought that there were a great many more sensible ways of spending money. So long as this is the dominant national sentiment, as is barren, statues and churches will not grow for they have to grow as much as trees and flowers, but this moral disadvantage which lays so heavily upon the early Victorian sculpture lies in a modified degree upon that rough, picturesque, commonplace sculpture which has begun to arise, and of which the statue of Darwin in South Kensington Museum and the statue of Gordon in Trafalgar Square are admirable examples. It is not enough for a popular monument to be artistic like a black charcoal sketch. It must be striking. It must be in the highest sense of the word sensational. It must stand for humanity. It must speak for us to the stars. It must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the longest and blackest catalog has been made of all our crimes and follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed. The two modes of commemorating a public man are a statue and a biography. They are alike in certain respects, as for example in the fact that neither of them resembles the original and that both of them commonly tone down not only all immense vices but all the more amusing of his virtues. But they are treated in one respect differently. We never hear anything about biography without hearing something about the sanctity of private life and the necessity for suppressing the whole of the most important part of a man's existence. The sculptor does not work at this disadvantage. The sculptor does not leave out the nose of an imminent philanthropist because it is too beautiful to be given to the public. He does not depict a statesman with a sack over his head, because his smile was too sweet to be and durable in the light of day. But in biography the thesis is popularly and solidly maintained so that it requires some courage even to hint a doubt of it, that the better a man was the more truly human life he led. The less should be said about it. For this idea the modern idea that sanctity is identical with secrecy, there is one thing at least to be said. It is, for all practical purposes, an entirely new idea. It was unknown to all ages in which the idea of sanctity really flourished. The record of the great spiritual movements of mankind is dead against the idea that spirituality is a private matter. The most awful secret of every man's soul is its most lonely and individual need, its most primal and psychological relationship, the thing called worship, the communication between the soul and the last reality. This most private matter is the most public spectacle in the world. Anyone who chooses to walk into a large church on Sunday morning may see a hundred men each along with his maker. This is the truth in the presence of one of the strangest spectacles in the world, a mob of hermits. And in thus definitely espousing publicity by making public the most internal mystery, Christianity acts in accordance with its earliest origins and its terrible beginning. It was surely by no accident that the spectacle which darkened the sun-night noon day was set upon a hill. The martyrdoms of the early Christians were public, not only by the caprice of the oppressor, but by the whole desire and conception of the victims. The mere grammatical meaning of the word martyr breaks into pieces at a blow, the whole notion of the privacy of goodness. The Christian martyrdoms were more than demonstrations. They were advertisements. Nowadays the new theory of spiritual delicacy would desire to alter all this. It would permit Christ to be crucified if it was necessary to his divine nature, but it would ask in the name of good taste why he could not be crucified in a private room. It would declare that the act of a martyr and being torn to pieces by lions was vulgar and sensational, though, of course, it would have no objection to being torn in pieces by a lion in one's own parlor of really intimate friends. It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars have never lost their sanctity and they are more shameless and naked and numerous than advertisements of pear soap. It would be a strange world, indeed, if nature was suddenly stricken with this ethereal shame. If the trees grew with their roots in the air, and their load of leaves and blossoms underground, if the flowers closed at dawn and opened at sunset, if the sunflower turned towards the darkness and the birds flew like bats by night. The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 7 A Defense of Nonsense There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours. We may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning. We may think of anything down to a fallen acorn as a descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the goodness of humanity. When we feel that we are nothing but inheritors of a humiliating splendor. But there are other times when everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown from a boy's bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and experimental, that even the white hair of the aged in the fine Biblical phrase is like almond trees that blossom like the white hawthorn grown in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is the heir of all the ages is pretty commonly admitted. It is a less popular but equally important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity. It is good for him to wonder whether he is not a hero and to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth. The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt, and inventive in any age. And if we were asked what was the best proof of the adventurous youth in the nineteenth century, we should say with all respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies that it was to be found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of nonsense. The dong with the luminous nose, at least, is original, as the first ship and the first plough were original. It is true, in a certain sense, of the greatest writers the world has seen. Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Stern have written nonsense, but unless we are mistaken it is in a widely different sense. The nonsense of these men was satiric, that is to say symbolic. It was a kind of exuberant capering around a discovered truth. There is all the difference in the world between the instinct of satire and seeing in the Kaiser's mustaches something typical of him draws them continually larger and larger and the instinct of nonsense which, for no reason whatever, imagines what those mustaches would look like on the present archbishop of Canterbury if he grew them in a fit of absence of mind. We inclined to think that no age except our own could have understood that the quangle-wangle meant absolutely nothing, and the lands of the jumblies were absolutely nowhere. We fancied that if the account of the Nave's trial in Alice in Wonderland had been published in the seventeenth century it would have been bracketed with Bunyan's trial of the faithful as a parody on the state prosecutions of the time. We fancied that if the dong with a luminous nose had appeared in the same period everyone would have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell. It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr. Lear's Nonsense Rhymes. To our mind he is both chronologically and essentially the father of nonsense. We think him superior to Lewis Carroll in one sense. Indeed Lewis Carroll has the great advantage. We know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life. He was a singularly serious and conventional don, universally respected but very much of a pendant and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth and in the dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of nonsense. The idea of escape. Of escape into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear trees and any odd man you meet may have three legs. Lewis Carroll living one life in which he would have sundered morally against anyone who walked on the wrong plot of grass and another life in which he would cheerfully call the sun green and the moon blue was by his very divided nature his one foot on both worlds a perfect type of the position of modern nonsense. His wonderland is a country populated by insane mathematicians. We feel the whole is an escape into a world of masquerade. We feel that if we could pierce their disguises we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare were professors and doctors of divinity enjoying a mental holiday. This sense of escape is certainly less dramatic than Edward Lear because of the completeness of his citizenship in the world of unreason. We do not know his prosaic biography as we know Lewis Carroll's. We accept him as a purely fabulous figure on his own description of himself. His body is perfectly spherical. He weareth a runcible hat. While Lewis Carroll's wonderland is purely intellectual Lear introduces quite another element of the poetical and even emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason but this is not so strong a contrast for after all mankind in the main has always regarded reason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason but with the romantic prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms. Far and few, far and few are the lands where the jumblies live. Is an entirely different type of poetry to that exhibited in Jabberwocky. Carroll with a sense of mathematical neatness makes his whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words but Edward Lear with more subtle and placid effrontery is always introducing scraps of his own elvish dialect into the middle of the simple and rational statements. Until we are almost stunned into admitting that we know what they mean there is a genial ring of common sense about such lines as for his aunt Jabiska said everyone knows that a poble is better without his toes which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The poem seems so easy on the matter that we are almost driven to pretend that we see his meaning that we know the peculiar difficulties of a poble that we are as old travelers in the Gramboolian plain as he is. Our claim that nonsense is a new literature we might almost say a new sense would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than a mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever risen out of mere art any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever risen out of pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth. The principle of art for art's sake is a very good principle if it means there is a vital distinction between the earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth but it is a very bad principle if it means that the tree could grow just as well with its roots in the air. Every great literature has always been allegorical allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great but all life is a battle. The Odyssey because all life is a journey. The Book of Job because all life is a riddle. There is one attitude in which we think that all existence is summed up in the word ghosts another and somewhat better one in which we think it is summed up in the words a Midsummer Night's Dream. Even the vulgarist melodrama or detective story can be good if it expresses something of the delight of the future. The healthy lust for darkness and terror which may come on us any night walking down a dark lane. If therefore nonsense is really to be the literature of the future it must have its own version of the cosmos to offer. The world must not only be the tragic romantic and religious it must be nonsensical also. And here we fancy that nonsense well in a very unexpected way come to the aid of the spiritual view of things. Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exalt in the wonders of creation but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat we cannot properly wonder at it because it is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats to the astonishment of the park keeper. Everything has in fact another side to it like the moon the patroness of nonsense viewed from that other side a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk a man is a quadruped begging on its hind legs a house a gigantic ask hat to cover a man from the sun the chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple with only two. This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder. It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job the argument which convinces the infidel is not as has been presented by the merely rational religionism of the 18th century a picture of the ordered beneficence of the creation but on the contrary a picture of the huge an indecipherable unreason of it hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is? This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and trivial definitions is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense and faith strange as the conjunction may seem are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with the syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. A cleaning person who by merely studying the logical side of things has decided that faith is nonsense does not know how truly he speaks. Later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith. End of chapter 7 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 8 A Defense of Planets A book has at one time come under my notice called Terraferma The Earth Not a Planet. The author was a Mr. D. Wardlaw Scott and he quoted very seriously the opinions of a large number of other persons of whom we have never heard but who are evidently very important. Mr. Beach of South Sea, for example thinks that the world is flat and in South Sea perhaps it is. It is no part of my present intention, however to follow Mr. Scott's arguments in detail. On the lines of such arguments it may be shown that the earth is flat or the matter of that that it is triangular. A few examples will suffice. One of Mr. Scott's objections was that if a projectile is fired from a moving body there is a difference in the distance to which it carries according to the direction in which it is sent. But as in practice there is not the slightest difference whichever way the thing is done. In the case of the earth we have a forcible overthrow of all fancies relative to the motion of the earth and a striking proof that the earth is not a globe. This is altogether one of the quaintest arguments we have ever seen. It never seems to occur to the author, among other things that when the firing and falling of the shot all take place upon the moving body there is nothing whatever to compare them with. As a matter of fact, of course the shot fired in an elephant does actually often travel towards the marksman but much slower than the marksman travels. Mr. Scott probably would not like to contemplate the fact that the elephant, properly speaking swings round and hits the bullet. To us it appears full of a rich cosmic humor. I will only give one other example of the astronomical proofs. If the earth were a globe the distance round the surface say at 45° south latitude could not possibly be any greater than the same latitude north. But since it is found by navigators to be twice the distance, to say the least of it or double the distance it ought to be according to the globular theory it is a proof that the earth is not a globe. This sort of thing reduces my mind to a pulp. I can faintly resist when a man says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have four legs but when he says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have five legs I am crushed. But as I have indicated it is not in the scientific aspect of this remarkable theory that I am for the moment interested. It is rather with the difference between the flat and the round worlds as conceptions in art and imagination that I am concerned. It is a very remarkable thing that none of us are really Copernicans in our actual outlook upon things. We are convinced intellectually that we inhabit a small provincial planet but we do not feel in the least suburban. Men of science have quarreled with the Bible not based upon the true astronomical system but it is certainly open to the Orthodox to say that if it had been it would never have convinced anybody. If a single poem or a single story were really transused with the Copernican idea the thing would be a nightmare. Can we think of a solemn scene of mountain stillness in which some prophet is standing in a trance and then realize that the whole scene is being round like a zeotrope at the rate of nineteen miles a second? Could we tolerate the notion of a mighty king delivering a sublime fiat and then remember that for all practical purposes he is hanging head downwards in space? A strange fable might be written of a man who was blessed or cursed with the Copernican eye and saw all men on the earth like tin tacks clustering round a magnet. It would be singular to imagine how very different the speech of an aggressive ecoist announcing the independence and divinity of man would sound if he were seen hanging on to the planet by his boot-souls. For despite Mr. Wardlaw Scott's horror at the Newtonian astronomy and its contradictions of the Bible the whole distinction is a good instance of the difference between letter and spirit. The letter of the Old Testament is opposed to the conception of another system, but the spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had no theory of gravitation which to the normal person will appear a fact of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of gravitation has curiously Hebrew sentiments in it, a sentiment of combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity by which all things are upon one thread. Thou hast hanged the world upon nothing," said the author of the Book of Job, and in that sentence wrote the whole appalling poetry of modern astronomy. The sense of the preciousness and fragility of the universe, the sense of being in the hollow of a hand, is one which the round and rolling earth gives in its most thrilling form. Mr. Wardlaw Scott's round earth would be the true territory for a comfortable atheist, nor would the old Jews have any objection to being as much upside down as right way up. They had no foolish ideas about the dignity of man. It would be an interesting speculation to imagine whether the world will ever develop a Copernican poetry and a Copernican habit of fancy, whether we shall ever speak of early earth-turn instead of early sunrise and speak indifferently of looking up at the daisies or looking down on the stars. But if we ever do there are really a large number of big and fantastic facts awaiting us, worthy to make a new mythology. Mr. Wardlaw Scott, for example, with genuine, if unconscious imagination, says that according to astronomers there is a vast mountain of water miles high. To have discovered that mountain of moving crystal in which the fishes build like birds is like discovering Atlantis. It is enough to make the old world young again. In the new poetry which we contemplate athletic young men will set out sturdily to climb up the face of the sea. If we once realize all this earth as it is in a land of miracles we shall discover a new planet at the moment that we discover our own. Among all the strange things that men have forgotten the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on a star. In the early days of the world the discovery of a fact of natural history was immediately followed by the realization of it as a fact of poetry. When Man awoke from the long fit of absent-mindedness which is called the automatic animal state and began to notice the queer fact that the sky was blue the grass green he immediately began to use those facts symbolically. Blue, the color of the sky became a symbol of celestial holiness. Green passed into the language as indicating a freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue the symbolism would have been different. But for some mysterious reason this habit of realizing poetically the facts of science has ceased to abruptly with scientific progress and all the confounding portents preached by Galileo and Newton have fallen on deaf ears. They painted a picture of the universe compared with which the apocalypse with its falling stars was a mere idol. They declared that we are all careering through space clinging to a cannon ball and the poets ignore the matter as if it were a remark about the weather. They say that an invisible force holds us in our own armchairs while the earth hurtles like a boomerang and men still go back to the records to prove the mercy of God. They tell us that Mr. Scott's monstrous vision of a mountain of sea water rising in a solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy tale is actually a fact and men still go back to the fairy tale. To what towering heights of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of natural history had continued men's fancy had played with the planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers. We might have had a planetary patriotism in which the green leaf should be like a cockade and the sea an everlasting dance of drums. We might have been proud of what our star has wrought and mourn its heraldry haughtily in the blind tournament of the spirits. All this indeed may surely do yet for with all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing happily that no man knows whether the world is old or young. The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 9 A Defense of China Shepherdesses There are some things of which the world does not like to be reminded, for they are the dead loves of the world. One of these is that great enthusiasm for the Arcadian life which however much it may now lie open to the sneers of realism did beyond all question holds sway for an enormous period of the world's history. From the times that we describe as ancient down to the times that may fairly be called recent. The conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of theocratists, of vigil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Eristo, of Shakespeare, and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathens were stone and brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of the China Shepherdesses. The Catholic Church and the ideal shepherd are indeed almost the only things that have bridged the abyss between the ancient world and the modern. Yet as we say the world does not like to be reminded of this boyish enthusiasm. But imagination, the function of the historian, cannot let so great an element alone. By the cheap revolutionary it is commonly supposed that imagination is a merely rebellious thing, that it has its chief function in devising new and fantastic republics. But imagination has its highest use in a retrospective realization. The trumpet of imagination, like the trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves. Imagination sees Delphi with the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem with the eyes of a Crusader, Paris with the eyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with the eyes of a Euphist. The prime function of imagination is to see our whole orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions. In spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of imagination is not to make things settled, so much as to make settled things strange. Not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders. To the imaginative the truisms are all paradoxes, since they were paradoxes in the stone age. To them the ordinary copy book blazes with blasphemy. Let us then consider in this light the old pastoral Arcadian ideal. But first certainly, one thing must be definitely recognized. This Arcadian art and literature is a lost enthusiasm. To study it is like fumbling in the love letters of a dead man. To us its flowers seem as tawdry as cockades. The lambs that dance to the shepherd's pipe seem to dance with all the artificiality of a ballet. Even our own prosaic toil seems to us more joyous than that holiday. Where its ancient exuberance pass the bounds of wisdom and even virtue its capering seem frozen into the stillness of an antique freeze. In those grey old pictures of Bacchanal seems as dull as an archdeacon. Their very sins seem colder than our restraints. All this may be frankly recognized. All the barren sentimentality of the Arcadian ideal and all its insolent optimism. But, when all is said and done, something else remains through ages in which the most arrogant and elaborate ideals of power and civilization held otherwise undisputed sway. The ideal of the perfect and healthy peasant did undoubtedly represent in some shape or form the conception that there was a dignity in simplicity and a dignity in labour. It was good for the ancient aristocrat even if he could not attain to innocence and the wisdom of the earth to believe that these things were the secrets of the priesthood of the poor. It was good for him to believe that even if heaven was not above him heaven was below him. It was well that he should have amid all his flamboyant triumphs the never extinguished sentiment that there was something better than his triumphs. The conception that there remaineth a rest. The conception of the ideal shepherd seems absurd to our modern ideas. But after all it was perhaps the only trade of the democracy which was equalized with trades of the aristocracy even by the aristocracy itself. The shepherd of pastoral poetry was without doubt very different from the shepherd of actual fact where one innocently piped the other, innocently swore at them. And their divergence in intellect and personal cleanliness was immense. But the difference between the ideal shepherd who danced with Amaryllis and the real shepherd who thrashed her is not a scrap greater than the difference between the ideal soldier who dies to capture the colors and the real soldier who lives to clean his accoutrements. Between the ideal priest who is everlasting by someone's bed and the real priest who is as glad as anyone else to get his own. There are ideal conceptions and real men in every calling. Yet there are few who object to the ideal conceptions and not many after all who object to the real men. The fact then is this. So far from resenting the existence of an art and literature of an ideal shepherd I genuinely regret that the shepherd is the only democratic calling that has ever been raised to the level of heroic callings conceived by an aristocratic age. So far from objecting to the ideal shepherd I wish there were an ideal postman an ideal grocer an ideal plumber. It is undoubtedly true that we should laugh at the idea of an ideal man. It is true and it proves that we are not genuine democrats. Undoubtedly the modern grocer have called upon to act in an Arcadian manner if desired to oblige with a symbolic dance expressive of the delights of grocery or to perform on some simple instrument while his assistants skipped round him would be embarrassed and perhaps even reluctant. But it may be questioned whether the literary reluctance of the grocer is a good thing or evidence of a good condition a poetic feeling in the grocery business as a whole. There certainly should be an ideal image of health and happiness in any trade and its remoteness from the reality is not the only important question. No one supposes that the mass of traditional conceptions of duty and glory are always operative in the mind of a soldier or a doctor that the battle of Waterloo actually makes a private enjoy pipe-claying his trousers or that the health of humanity softens the momentary phraseology of a physician called out of bed at two o'clock in the morning. But although no ideal obliterates the ugly drudgery and ideal of any calling that ideal does in the case of the soldier or the doctor permanently in the background and makes the drudgery worthwhile as a whole it is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists in the case of the vast numbers of honorable trades and crafts on which the existence of a modern city depends. It is a pity that current thought and sentiment offer nothing corresponding to the old conception of patron saints. If they did there would be a patron saint of plumbers and this would alone be a revolution. For it would force the individual craftsmen to believe that there was once a perfect being who did actually plum. When all is said and done then we think it is much open to question whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance of the ideal of the happy peasant. It is foolish enough to suppose that he went about all over ribbons but it is better than knowing that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact. The modern realistic study of the poor does in reality lead the student further astray than the old idyllic notion. For we cannot get the key riskuro of humble life so long as its virtues seem to us as gross as its vices and its joys as sullen as its sorrows. Probably at the very moment that we can see nothing but a dull-faced man smoking and drinking heavily with his friend in a pot-house the man himself is on his soul's holiday, crowned with the flowers of a passionate idleness and far more like the happy peasant than the world will ever know. CHAPTER X A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realize that all of us, ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and lovemaking. The real extraordinary thing is that the most appalling fictions are not actually so popular as the literature which deals with the most undisputed and depressing facts. Men are not apparently so interested in murder and lovemaking as they are in the number of different forms of latch-key which exist in London or the time that it would take a grass-hopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely circulated papers such as tit-bits, science siftings and many of the illustrated magazines is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds of emotional and mental pablom on which it is almost incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous passages in Bradshaw's railway guide read aloud on winter evenings. It is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of mother's seagull syrup because he wished to know what eventually would happen to the young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel whatever our degree of education that it might be possible to read them if we gave a full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures. At the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy bull-baiting or getting drunk. The literature of information is absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves with it than of reading whole pages of Serbeton local directory. To read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence, it would be a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise. It is this fact which constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this particular branch of popular literature. Only at least there is one rather peculiar thing which must injustice be said about it. The readers of this strange science must be allowed to be upon the whole as disinterested as a prophet seeing visions or a child reading fairy tales. Here again we find as we so often do that whatever view of this matter of popular literature we can trust, we can trust least of all the comment and censure current among the vulgar educated. The ordinary version of the ground of this popularity for information which would be given by a person of greater cultivation would be that common men are chiefly interested in those sordid facts that surround them on every side. A very small degree of examination will show us that whatever ground there is for the popularity of these insane encyclopedias it cannot be the ground of utility. The version of life given by a penny novelette may be very moon-struck and unreliable, but it is at least more likely to contain facts relevant to daily life than compilations on the subject of the number of cow's tails that would reach to the North Pole. There are many more people who are in love than there are people who have any intention of counting or collecting cow's tails. It is evident to me that the grounds of this widespread madness of information must be sought in other and deeper parts of human nature than those daily needs which lie so near the surface that even social philosophers have discovered them somewhere in that profound and eternal instinct for enthusiasm and minding other people's business which made great popular movements like the Crusades or the Gordon Riots. I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who actually talked in private life after the manner of his papers. His conversation consisted of fragmentary statements about height and weight and depth and time and population and his conversation was a nightmare of dullness. During the shortest pause he would ask whether his interlocutors were aware how many tons of rust were scraped every year off the Menai Bridge and how many rival shops Mr. Whitley had bought up since he opened his business. The attitude of his acquaintances toward this inexhaustible entertainment varied according to his presence or absence between indifference and terror. It was frightful to think of a man's brain being stocked with such inexpressibly profitless treasures. It was like visiting some imposing British Museum and finding its galleries and glass cases filled with specimens of London mud of common mortar of broken walking sticks and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered that this intolerable prosaic bore had been in fact a poet. I learned that every item of his multitudinous information was totally and unblushingly untrue that for all I knew he had made it up as he went along that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge and that the rival tradesmen and Mr. Whitley were creatures of poet's brain. Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so circumstantial and monotonous so entirely purposeless a liar. With him it must have been a case of art for art's sake. The joke sustained so gravely through a respected lifetime was that order of a joke which is shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities which had struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they were inventions of the human fancy. And here as it seems to me I laid my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which prevents it and will perhaps always prevent it from seeing with the eyes a popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When they look at a work of art good or bad they expect to be interested but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street they do not properly and literally speaking expect to be interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art though it is like many great works of art anonymous they look to life for interest with the same kind of cheerful and irradicable assurance with which we look for interest at a comedy for which we have paid money at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary fastidiousness the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-colored picture the scrawlings in circles of a baby upon the slate of night its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a wallpaper its flowers and fruits have a cockney brilliance like the holiday of a flower girl hence degraded by art to its own level they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man, the taste for news. By this essential taste for news I mean the pleasure in hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of 110 in south wales or that the horses ran away at a funeral in san francisco large masses of the early faiths and politics of the world numbers of the miracles and heroic anecdotes are based primarily upon this law of something that has just happened this divine institution of gossip when christianity was named the good news it spread rapidly not only because it was good but also because it was news so it is that if any of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper we have generally found the navvy interested not in those struggles of parliament and the trades unions which sometimes are and always supposed to be for his benefit but the fact that an unusually large whale has been washed up on the coast of orcany or that some leading millionaire like mr. harmsworth has reported to break a hundred pipes a year the educated classes ployed and demoralized with the mere indulgence of art and mood can no longer understand the idle and splendid disinterestedness of the reader of piercings weekly he still keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of man the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have just moved our baggage any detail of it has value and with a truly sportsman like instinct the average man takes most pleasure in the details which are most complicated yet once difficult and useless to discover those parts of the newspaper which announced the giant useberry and the reigning frogs are really the modern representatives of the popular tendency to produce the hydra and the werewolf and the dog headed men folk in the middle ages were not interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought it was a beautiful prose idol but because they thought it had really been seen it was not like so much artistic literature a refuge indicating the dullness of the world it was an incident pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world that much can be said and is said against the literature of information I do not for a moment deny it is shapeless it is trivial it may give an unreal air of knowledge it unquestionably lies the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it may spoil the chance of better work certainly by wasting time possibly by ruining taste but these obvious suggestions are the objections which we hear so persistently from everyone that one cannot help wondering where the papers in question procure their myriads of readers the natural necessity and natural good underlying such crude institutions is far less often a subject of speculation yet the healthy hungers which lie at the back of the habits of modern democracy are surely worthy of the same sympathetic study that we give to the dogmas of the fanatics long dethroned and the intrigues of common welts long obliterated from the earth and this is the base and consideration which I have to offer that perhaps the taste for shreds and patches of journalistic science and history is not as is continually asserted the vulgar and senile curiosity of a people that has grown old but simply the babyish and indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young and entering history for the first time in other words I suggest that they only tell each other in magazines the same kind of stories of commonplace portents and conventional eccentricities which in any case they would tell each other in taverns science itself is only the exaggeration and specialization of this thirst for useless fact which is the mark of the youth of man but science has become strangely separated from the mere news and scandal of flowers and birds men have ceased to see that a pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower that a flower is as monstrous as a pterodactyl the rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind we have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can be contented with a planet of miracles End of Chapter 10