 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 26 The Two Noises For three days and three nights the sea had charged England as Napoleon charged her at Waterloo. The phrase is instinctive because away to the last grey line of the sea there was only the look of galloping squadrons, impetuous, but with a common purpose. The sea came on like cavalry, and when it touched the shore it opened the blazing eyes and deafening tongues of the artillery. I saw the worst assault at night on a seaside parade where the sea smote on the doors of England with the hammers of an earthquake, and a white smoke went up into the black heavens. There one could thoroughly realize what an awful thing a wave really is. I talked like other people about the rushing swiftness of a wave, but the horrible thing about a wave is its hideous slowness. It lifts its load of water laboriously in that style at once slow and slippery in which a titan might lift the load of rock, and then let it slip at last to be shattered into a shock of dust. In front of me that night the waves were not like water, they were like falling city walls. The breaker rose first as if it did not wish to attack the earth, it wished only to attack the stars. For a time it stood up in the air as naturally as a tower, then it went a little wrong in its outline, like a tower that might someday fall. When it fell it was as if a powder magazine blew up. I have never seen such a sea. All the time there blew across the land one of those stiff and throttling winds that one can lean up against like a wall. One expected anything to be blown out of shape at any instant, the lamppost to be snapped like a green stalk, the tree to be whirled away like a straw. I myself should certainly have been blown out of shape if I had possessed any shape to be blown out of. For I walked along the edge of the stone embankment above the black and battering sea, and could not rid myself of the idea that it was an invasion of England. But as I walked along this edge I was somewhat surprised to find that as I neared a certain spot another noise mingled with the ceaseless cannonade of the sea. Somewhere at the back, in some pleasure ground or casino or place of entertainment, an undaunted brass band was playing against the cosmic uproar. I do not know what band it was. Judging from the boisterous British imperialism of most of the heirs it played, I should think it was a German band. But there was no doubt about its energy, and when I came quite close under it it really drowned the storm. It was playing such things as Tommy Atkins, and You Can Depend On Young Australia, and many others of which I do not know the words. But I should think they would be John, Pat, and Mac with the Union Jack, or that fine though unwritten poem, Wait Until the Bulldog Gets a Bite of You. Now I for one detest imperialism, but I have a great deal of sympathy with jingoism. And there seemed something so touching about this unbroken and innocent bragging under the brutal menace of nature that it made, if I may so put it, two tunes in my mind. It is so obvious and so jolly to be optimistic about England, especially when you are an optimist and an Englishman. But through all that glorious brass came the voice of the invasion, the undertone of that awful sea. I did a foolish thing. As I could not express my meaning in an article, I tried to express it in a poem. A bad one. You can call it what you like. It might be called Doubt or Brighton. It might be called the Patriot or yet again the German Band. I would call it Two Voices. But that title has been taken for a grossly inferior poem. This is how it began. They say the sun is on your knees, a lamp to light your lands from harm. They say you turn the seven seas to little brooks about your farm. I hear the sea and the new song that calls you empress all day long. Oh fallen and fouled, oh you that lie dying in swamps, you shall not die. Your rich have secrets and strong lust, your poor are chased about like dust, emptied of anger and surprise, and God has gone out of their eyes. Your cohorts break, your captains lie, I say to you, you shall not die. Then I revived a little, remembering that after all there is an English country that the imperialists have never found. The British Empire may annex what it likes, it will never annex England. It has not even discovered the island, let alone conquered it. I took up the two tunes again with a greater sympathy for the first. I know the bright baptismal rains, I love your tender troubled skies, I know your little climbing lanes are peering into paradise, from open hearths to orchard-cool, how bountiful and beautiful. O throttled and without a cry, O strangled and stabbed, you shall not die. The frightful word is on your walls. The east sea to the west sea calls. The stars are dying in the sky. You shall not die. You shall not die. Then the two great noises grew deafening together, the noise of the peril of England and the louder noise of the placidity of England. It is their fault if the last verse was written a little rudely and at random. I see you, how you smile in state, straight from the peak to Plymouth Bar. You need not tell me you are great. I know how more than great you are. I know what William Shakespeare was. I have seen Gainesboro and the grass. O given to believe, O lie, O my mad mother, do not die, whose eyes turn all ways but within, whose sin is innocence of sin, whose eyes blinded with beams at noon, can see the moats upon the moon. You shall your lovers still pursue, to what last madhouse shelters you. I will uphold you, even I. You that are dead, you shall not die. But the sea would not stop for me any more than for Canute, and as for the German Band, that would not stop for anybody. I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday and was engaged in that rich and intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries, which for the keeping off of the profane we disguised by the exoteric name of nothing. At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree, practicing a last without success, that useful trick of knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances. Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen. There was something about their appearance in and relation to the Greenwood that reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what the knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name a favorite cat, and so on. They also said I was damaging the tree, which was, I am sorry to say, not true because I could not hit it. The peculiar philosophical importance, however, of the incident was this. After some half-hours animated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinished poem which was read with great care, and I trust with some profit, and one or two others subtle detective strokes, the elder of the two knights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, that I was a journalist, that I was on the daily news, this was the real stroke. They were shaken with a terror common to all tyrants, that I lived in a particular place as stated, and that I was stopping with particular people in Yorkshire who happened to be wealthy and well-known in the neighborhood. In fact, the leading constable became so genial and complimentary at last that he ended up by representing himself as a reader of my work, and when that was said, everything was settled. They acquitted me and let me pass. But I said, what of this mangled tree? It was to the rescue of that dryad tethered to the earth that you rushed like night errands. You, the higher humanitarians, are not deceived by the seeming stillness of the green things, the stillness like the stillness of the cataract, a headlong and crashing silence. You know that a tree is but a creature tied to the ground by one leg. You will not let assassins with their Swedish daggers shed the green blood of such being. But if so, why am I not in custody? Where are my jives? Produced from some portion of your persons, my moldy straw and my grated window. The facts of which I have just convinced you, that my name is Chesterton, that I am a journalist, that I am living with the well-known and philanthropic Mr. Blank of Ilkley, cannot have anything to do with the question of whether I had been guilty of cruelty to vegetables. The tree is nonetheless damaged, even though it may reflect with the dark pride that it was wounded by a gentleman connected with the liberal press. Wounds in the bark do not more rapidly close up because they are inflicted by people who are stopping with Mr. Blank of Ilkley. That tree, the ruin of its former self, the wreck of what it once was, a giant of the forest, now splintered and laid low by the brute superiority of a Swedish knife. That tragedy, constable, cannot be wiped out even by stopping for several months more with some wealthy person. It is incredible that you have no legal claim to arrest even the most august and fashionable persons on this chart. For you so, why did you interfere with me at all? I made the later and larger part of this speech to the silent wood, for the two policemen had vanished almost as quickly as they came. It is very possible, of course, that they were fairies. In that case, the somewhat illogical character of their view of crime, law, and personal responsibility would find a bright and elvish explanation. Perhaps if I had lingered in the glade till moonrise, I might have seen rings of tiny policemen dancing on the sword, or running about with glow worm belts, arresting grass hoppers for damaging blades of grass. By taking the bolder hypotheses that they were really policemen, I find myself in a certain difficulty. I was certainly accused of something which was either an offence or was not. I was let off because I proved I was a guest at a big house. The inference seems painfully clear. Either it is not a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man. Suppose a very poor person, poorer even than a journalist, a nabby or unskilled laborer tramping in search of work, often changing his lodgings, often perhaps failing in his rent. Suppose he had been intoxicated with the green gaiety of the ancient wood. Suppose he had thrown knives at trees, and could give no description of a dwelling place, except that he had been fired out of the last. As I walked home through a cloudy and purple twilight, I wondered how he would have got on. Moral. We English are always boasting that we are very illogical. There is no great harm in that. There is no subtle spiritual evil in the fact that people always brag about their vices. It is when they begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable. But there is this to be said, that illogicality in your constitution or your legal methods may become very dangerous if there happens to be some great national vice or national temptation, which many take advantage of the chaos. Similarly, a drunkard ought to have strict rules and hours a temperate man may obey his instincts. Take some absurd anomaly in British law. The fact, for instance, that a man ceasing to be an MP has to become a steward of the children hundreds, an office which I believe was intended originally to keep down some wild robbers near children, wherever that is. Obviously, this kind of illogicality does not matter very much for the simple reason that there is no great temptation to take advantage of it. When retiring from Parliament, do not have any furious impulse to hunt robbers in the hills. But if there were a real danger that wise, white-haired, venerable politicians taking leave of public life would desire to do this, if, for instance, there were any money in it, then clearly, if we went on saying that the illogicality did not matter when, as a matter of fact, Sir Michael Hicks Beach was hanging shiltern shopkeepers every day and taking their property, we should be very silly. The illogicality would matter, for it would have become an excuse for indulgence. It is only the very good who can live riotous lives. This is exactly what is present in cases of police investigation, such as the one narrated above. There enters into such things a great national sin, a far greater sin than drink, the habit of respecting a gentleman. Snobbishness has, like drink, a kind of grand poetry, and snobbishness has this peculiar and devilish quality of evil that it is rampant among very kindly people with open hearts and houses. But it is our great English vice to be watched more fiercely than smallpox. If a man wished to hear the worst and wickedest thing in England summed up in casual English words, he would not find it in any foul ows or ribald quarreling. He would find it in the fact that the best kind of working man, when he wishes to praise anyone, calls him a gentleman. It never occurs to him that he might as well call him a marquee or a privy consular, that he is simply naming a rank or class, not a phrase for a good man. And this perennial temptation to a shameful admiration must, and I think does, constantly come in and distort and poison our police methods. In this case we must be logical and exact, for we have to keep watch upon ourselves. The power of wealth and that power at its vilest is increasing in the modern world. A very good and just people, without this temptation, might not need perhaps to make clear rules and systems to guard themselves against the power of our great financiers. But that is because a very just people would have shot them long ago from mere native good feeling. CHAPTER XXVIII THE LION In the town of Belfort I take a chair and I sit down in the street. We talk in a cant phrase of the man in the street, but the Frenchman is the man in the street. Things quite central for him are connected with those lamp posts and pavements. Everything from his meals to his martyrdoms. When first an Englishman looks at French town or village, his first feeling is simply that it is uglier than an English town or village. When he looks again, he sees that this comparative absence of the picturesque is chiefly expressed in the plain precipitous frontage of the houses, standing up hard and flat out of the street, like the cardboard houses in a pantomime. A hard angularity, allied perhaps to the harshness of French logic. When he looks a third time, he sees quite simply that it is all because the houses have no front gardens. The vague English spirit loves to have the entrance to its house softened by bushes and broken by steps. He likes to have a little anti-room of hedges half in the house and half out of it, a green room in a double sense. The Frenchman desires no such little pathetic ramparts or halting places, for the street itself is a thing natural and familiar to him. The French have no front gardens, but the street is every man's front garden. There are trees in the street and sometimes fountains. The street is the Frenchman's tavern, for he drinks in the street. It is his dining room, for he dines in the street. It is his British museum, for the statues and monuments in French streets are not as with us of the worst, but of the best art of the country, and they are often actually as historical as the pyramids. The street again is the Frenchman's parliament, for France has never taken its chamber of deputies so seriously as we take our house of commons. And the quibbles of mere elected non-entities in an official room seem feeble to a people whose fathers have heard the voice of Desmoulins like a trumpet under the open heaven, or Victor Hugo shouting from his carriage amid the wreck of the Second Republic. And as the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines in the street, so also he fights in the street and dies in the street, so that the street can never be commonplace to him. Think for instance such a simple object as a lamppost. In London a lamppost is a comic thing. We think of the intoxicated gentleman embracing it, and recalling ancient friendship. But in Paris a lamppost is a tragic thing. For we think of tyrants hanged on it, and of an end of the world. There is or was a bitter republican paper in Paris called La Lantern. How funny it would be if there were a progressive paper in England called the lamppost. We have said then that the Frenchman is the man in the street, and that he can dine in the street and die in the street. And if I ever pass through Paris and find him going to bed in the street, I shall say that he is still true to the genius of his civilization. All that is good and all that is evil in France is alike connected with his open air element. French democracy and French indecency are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors. Compared to a cafe, a public house is a private house. There were two reasons why all these fancies should float through the mind in the streets of this special town of Belfort. First of all it lies close upon the boundary of France and Germany, and boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world. To love anything is to love its boundaries. Thus children will always play on the edge of anything. They build castles on the edge of the sea, and can only be restrained by public proclamation and private violence from walking on the edge of the grass. For when we have come to the end of a thing, we have come to the beginning of it. Hence this town seemed all the more French for being on the very margin of Germany. And though there were many German touches in the place, German names, larger pots of beer, and enormous theatrical barmaids dressed up in outrageous imitation of Alsatian peasants, yet the fixed French color seems all the stronger for the specks of something else. All day long and all night long troops of Dusty swore the scornful little soldiers went plotting through the streets with an air of stubborn disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despised you, but French soldiers look as if they despised you and themselves even more than you. It is a part, I suppose, of the realism of the nation which has made it good at war and science and other things in which what is necessary is combined with what is nasty. And the soldiers and the civilians alike had most of them cropped hair and their curious kind of head, which to an Englishman looks almost brutal, the kind that we call a bullet head. Indeed we are speaking very appropriately when we call it a bullet head, for in intellectual history the heads of Frenchmen have been bullets, yes, and explosive bullets. But there was a second reason why in this place one should think particularly of the open air politics and the open air art of the French. For this town of Belfort is famous for one of the most typical and powerful of the public monuments of France. From the cafe table at which I sit I can see the hill beyond the town, on which hangs the high and flat faced citadel, pierced with many windows and warmed in the evening light. On the steep hill below it is a huge stone lion, itself as large as a hill. It is hacked out of the rock with a sort of gigantic impression. No trivial attempt has been made to make it like a common statue, no attempt to carve the mane into curls or to distinguish the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises, shaking the world. The face of the lion has something of the bold conventionality of Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left like a shapeless cloud of a tempest, as if it might literally be said of him that God had clothed his neck with thunder. Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and in some sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a little while ago. It commemorates the fact that this town was never taken by the Germans through all the terrible year, but only laid down its arms at last at the command of its own government. But the spirit of it has been in this land from the beginning, the spirit of something defiant and almost defeated. As I leave this place and take the railway into Germany the news comes thicker and thicker of the street that southern France is in a flame, and that there perhaps will be fought out finally the awful modern battle of the rich and poor. And as I pass into quieter places for the last sign of France on the skyline I see the lion of Belfort stand at bay, the last sight of that great people which has never been at peace. CHAPTER XXIX Except for some fine works of art which seemed to be there by accident, the city of Brussels is like a bad Paris, a Paris with everything noble cut out and everything nasty left in. No one can understand Paris and its history, who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called the city of pleasure, but it may also very specifically be called the city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion, they are even martyrs for immorality. For the indecency of many of their books and papers is not of the sort which charms and seduces, but of the sort that horrifies and hurts. They are torturing themselves. They lash their own patriotism into life with the same whips which most men use to lash foreigners to silence. The enemies of France can never give an account of her infamy or decay which does not seem insipid and even polite compared with the things which the nationalists of France say about their own nation. They taunt and torment themselves, sometimes they even deliberately oppress themselves. Thus when the mob of Paris could make a government to please itself, it made a sort of sublime tyranny to order itself about. The spirit is the same from the Crusades or Saint Bartholomew to the Apotheosis of Zola. The old religionist tortured men physically for immoral truth. The new realists torture men morally for a physical truth. Now Brussels is Paris without this constant purification of pain. Its indecencies are not regrettable incidents in an everlasting revolution. It has none of the things which make good Frenchmen love Paris. It has only the things which make unspeakable Englishmen love it. It has the part which is cosmopolitan and narrow, not the part which is Parisian and universal. You find there, as commonly happens in modern centres, the worst things of all nations. The daily mail from in England, the cheap philosophies from Germany, the loose novels of France and the drinks of America. But there is no English broad fun, no German kindly ceremony, no American exhilaration and above all, no French tradition of fighting for an idea. Though the boulevards look like the Parisian boulevards, though all the shops look like Parisian shops, you cannot look at them steadily for two minutes, without feeling the full distance between. Let us say King Leopold and fighters like Clemenceau and Deir Elu. For all these reasons and many more, when I had got into Brussels, I began to make all necessary arrangements for getting out of it again, and I had impulsively got into a tram which seemed to be going out of the city. In this tram were two men talking. One was a little man with a black French beard, and the other was a baldish man with bushy whiskers, like the financial foreign count in a three-act farce. And about the time that we reached the suburb of the city, and the traffic grew thinner and the noises more few, I began to hear what they were saying. Though they spoke French quickly, their words were fairly easy to follow, because they were all long words. Anybody can understand long words, because they have in them all the lucidity of Latin. The man with the black beard said, It must that we have the progress. The man with the whiskers parried this smartly by saying, It must also that we have the consolidation international. This is a sort of discussion which I like myself, so I listened with some care, and I think I picked up the thread of it. One of the Belgians was a little Belgian, as we speak of a little Englander. The other was a Belgian imperialist, for though Belgium is not quite strong enough to be altogether a nation, she is quite strong enough to be an empire. Being a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire only means kicking your inferiors. The man with whiskers was the imperialist, and he was saying, The science, behold there the new guide of humanity. And the man with the beard answered him, It does not suffice to have progress in the science. One must have it also in the sentiment of the human justice. This remark I applauded, as if at a public meeting, but they were much too keen on their argument to hear me. Their views I have often heard in England, but never uttered so lucidly, and certainly never so fast. Though Belgian by a nation, they must both have been essentially French. Whiskers was great on education, which it seems is on the march. All the world goes to make itself instructed. It must that the more instructed enlighten the less instructed. Ah, well, then the European must impose upon the savage the science and the light. Also, apparently, he must impose himself on the savage while he is about it. Today one travelled quickly. The science had changed all. For our fathers they were religious, and what was worse, dead. Today humanity had electricity to the hand. Machines came from triumphing. All the lines and limits of the globe effaced themselves. Soon there would not be but the great empires and confederations, guided by the science. Always the science. Here Whiskers stopped an instant for breath, and the man with the sentiment for human justice had a lop parole off him in a flash. Without doubt humanity was on the march, but towards the sentiments, the ideal, the methods moral and pacific. Humanity directed itself towards humanity. For your wars and empires on behalf of civilization, what were they in effect? The war was it not itself an affair of barbarism? The empires were they not things savage? The humanity had passed all that. She was now intellectual. Tolstoy had refined all human souls with the sentiments the most delicate and just. Man was become a spirit. The wings pushed. At this important point of evolution the tram came to a jerky stoppage, and staring round I found to my stunned consternation that it was almost dark and I was far away from Brussels, that I could not dream of getting back to dinner. In short, that through the clinging fascination of this great controversy on humanity and its recent complete alteration by science or Tolstoy, I had landed myself heaven knows where. I dropped hastily from the suburban tram and let it go on without me. I was alone in the flat fields, out of sight of the city. On one side of the road was one of those small thin woods which are common in all countries but which, by a coincidence, the mystical painters of Flanders were very fond. The night was closing in with cloudy purple and gray. There was one ribbon of silver, the last rag of the sunset. Through the wood went one little path, and somehow it suggested that it might lead to some sign of life. There was no other sign of life on the horizon. I went along it and soon sank into a sort of dancing twilight of all those tiny trees. There is something subtle and bewildering about that sort of frail and fantastic wood. A forest of big trees seems like a bodily barrier, but somehow that mist of thin lines seems like a spiritual barrier. It is as if one were caught in a fairy cloud or could not pass a phantom. When I had well lost the last gleam of the high road, a curious and definite feeling came upon me. Now I suddenly felt something much more practical and extraordinary, the absence of humanity, in human loneliness. Of course there was nothing really lost in my state, but the mood may hit one anywhere. I wanted men, any men, and I felt our awful alliance all over the globe. And at last when I had walked for what seemed a long time, I saw a light too near the earth to mean anything except the image of God. I came out on a clear space and a low long cottage, the door of which was open, but was blocked by a big gray horse who seemed to prefer to eat with his head inside the sitting-room. I got past him and found he was being fed by a young man who was sitting down and drinking beer inside and who saluted me with heavy rustic courtesy, but in a strange tone. The room was full of staring faces like owls, and these I traced at length as belonging to about six small children. Their father was still working in the fields, but their mother rose when I entered. She smiled, but she and all the rest spoke some rude language. Flamend, I suppose, so that we had to be kind to each other by signs. She fetched me beer and pointed out my way with her finger, and I drew a picture to please the children, and as it was a picture of two men hitting each other with swords it pleased them very much. Then I gave a Belgian penny to each child, for, as I said on chance in French, it must be that we have the economic equality. But they had never heard of economic equality, while all Battersea workmen have heard of economic equality, though it is true that they haven't got it. I found my way back to the city, and sometimes after word I actually saw in the street my two men talking, no doubt still saying one that science had changed all in humanity and the other that humanity was now pushing the wings of the purely intellectual. But for me humanity was hooked on an accidental picture. I thought of a low and lonely house in the flats, behind a veil or film of slight trees, a man breaking the ground as men have broken from the first morning, and a huge grey horse champing his food within a foot of a child's head, as in the stable where Christ was born. CHAPTER 30 The Little Birds Who Won't Sing On my last morning on the Flemish coast when I knew that in a few hours I should be in England, my eye fell upon one of the details of Gothic carving of which Flanders is full. I do not know whether the thing is old, though it was certainly knocked about and indecipherable, but at least it was certainly in the style and tradition of the early Middle Ages. It seemed to represent men bending themselves, not to say twisting themselves, to certain primary employments. Some seemed to be sailors tugging at ropes. Others I think were reaping, others were energetically pouring something into something else. This is entirely characteristic of the pictures and carvings of the early thirteenth century, perhaps the most purely vigorous time in all history. The great Greeks prefer to carve their gods and heroes doing nothing, splendid and philosophic as their composure is. There is always something that marks the master of many slaves. But if there was one thing the early Medieval's liked, it was representing people doing something, hunting or hawking or rowing boats or treading grapes or making shoes or cooking something in a pot. The Middle Ages is full of that spirit in all its monuments and manuscripts. The author retains it in his jolly insistence on everybody's type of trade and toil. It was the earliest and youngest resurrection of Europe, the time when the social order was strengthening, but had not yet become oppressive, the time when religious faiths were strong, but had not yet been exasperated. For this reason the whole effect of Greek and Gothic carving is different. The figures in the Elgin marbles, though often reigning their steeds for an instant in the air, seemed frozen forever at that perfect instant. But a mass of medieval carving seems actually a sort of bustle or hubbub in stone. Sometimes one cannot help feeling that the groups actually move in mix, and the whole front of a great cathedral has the hum of a huge hive. But about these particular figures there was a peculiarity of which I could not be sure. Those of them that had any heads had very curious heads, and it seemed to me that they had their mouths open. Whether or not this really meant anything or was an accident of nascent art I do not know. But in the course of wondering I recall to my mind the fact that singing was connected with many of the tasks there suggested, that there were songs for reapers and songs for sailors hauling ropes. I was still thinking about this small problem when I walked along the pier at Ostend, and I heard some sailors uttering a measured shout as they labored, and I remembered that sailors still sing in chorus while they work, and even sing different songs according to what part of their work they are doing. And a little while afterwards when my sea journey was over, the sight of men working in the English fields reminded me again that there are still songs for harvest and for many agricultural routines. And I suddenly wondered why if this were so it should be quite unknown for any modern trade to have a ritual poetry. How did people come to chant rude poems while pulling certain ropes or gathering certain fruit, and why did nobody do anything of the kind when producing any of the modern things? Why is a modern newspaper never printed by people singing in chorus? Why do shopmen seldom, if ever, sing? If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking? If there are songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there not songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a bank? As the train from Dover flew through the Kentish Gardens, I tried to write a few songs suitable for commercial gentlemen. Thus the work of bank clerks, when casting up columns, might begin with a thundering chorus and praise of simple addition. Up, my lads, and lift the ledgers. Sleep and ease are o'er. Hear the stars of morning shouting, two and two or four. Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the softest roar, though we weep and pawn our watches, two and two or four. There's a run upon the bank, stand away, for the manager's a crank, and the secretary drank, and the upper-tuding bank turns to bay. Stand close, there is a run on the bank. Of our ship, our royal one, left the ringing legend run, that she fired with every gun, ere she sank. And as I came into the cloud of London, I met a friend of mine who actually is in a bank, and submitted these suggestions in rhyme for him, for use among his colleagues, but he was not very hopeful about the matter. It was not, he assured me, that he underrated the verse, or in any sense lamented their lack of polish. No, it was rather he felt an indefinable something in the very atmosphere of the society in which we live, that makes it spiritually difficult to sing in banks. And I think he must be right, though the matter is very mysterious. I may observe here that I think there must be some mistake in the calculations of the socialists. They put down all our distress, not to a moral tone, but to the chaos of private enterprise. Now banks are private, but post offices are socialistic. Therefore, I naturally expected that the post office would fall into the collectivist idea of a chorus. Judge of my surprise when the lady in my local post office, whom I urged to sing, dismissed the idea with far more coldness than the bank clerk had done. She seemed indeed to be in a considerably greater state of depression than he. Should anyone suppose that this was the effect of the verses themselves, it is only fair to say that the specimen verse of the post office hymn ran thus. Or, London, our letters are shaken like snow, or wires the world like a thunderbolt go. The news that may marry a maiden in Sark, or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park. Chorus with a swing of joy and energy, or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park. And the more I thought about the matter, the more painfully certain it seemed that the most important and typical modern thing could not be done with a chorus. One could not, for instance, be a great financier and sing, because the essence of being a great financier is that you keep quiet. You could not even in many modern circles be a public man and sing, because in those circles the essence of being a public man is that you do nearly everything in private. Nobody would imagine a chorus of moneylenders. Everyone knows the story of the solicitor core of volunteers who, when the colonel on the battlefield cried, charge, all said simultaneously, six and eight pence. Men can sing while charging in a military, but hardly in a legal sense. And at the end of my reflections I had really got no further than the subconscious feeling of my friend the bank clerk, that there is something spiritually suffocating about our life. Not about our laws merely, but about our life. Bank clerks are without songs, not because they are poor, but because they are sad. Sailors are much poorer. As I passed homewards I passed a little tin building of some religious sort, which was shaken with shouting as the trumpet is torn with its own tongue. They were singing anyhow, and I had for an instant a fancy, I had often had before, that with us the superhuman is the only place where you can find the human. Human nature is hunted, and has fled into sanctuary. I am going to Battersea, I repeated, to Battersea via Paris, Belfort, Hettleburg, and Frankfurt. My remark contained no wit, it contained simply the truth. I am going to wander over the whole world until once more I find a Battersea. Somewhere in the sea of sunset or sunrise, somewhere in the ultimate archipelago of the earth, there is one little island which I wish to find, an island with low green hills and great white cliffs. Travelers tell me that it is called England. Scottish travelers tell me that it is called Britain. And there is a rumor that somewhere in the heart of it there is a beautiful place called Battersea. I suppose it is unnecessary to tell you, said my friend, with an air of intellectual comparison, that this is Battersea. It is quite unnecessary, I said, and it is spiritually untrue. I cannot see any Battersea here. I cannot see any London or any England. I cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair, because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else. And that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both, but it is not them that I am seeking. I am seeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land. It is at last to set foot on one's own country, as a foreign land. Now I warn you that this Gladstone bag is compact and heavy, and that if you utter that word paradox, I shall hurl it at your head. I did not make the world, and I did not make it paradoxical. It is not my fault. It is the truth that the only way to go to England is to go away from it. But when, after only a month's traveling, I did come back to England, I was startled to find that I had told the exact truth. England did break on me at once, beautifully new and beautifully old. To land it dover is the right way to approach England. Most things that are hackneyed are right. For then you see first the full soft gardens of Kent, which are perhaps an exaggeration, but still a typical exaggeration, of the rich, rusty city of England. As it happened also a fellow traveller with whom I had fallen into conversation, felt the same freshness, though for another cause. She was an American lady who had seen Europe and had never seen England, and she expressed her enthusiasm in that simple and splendid way which is natural to Americans, who are the most idealistic people in the world. Their only danger is that the idealist can easily become the idolater, and the American has become so idealistic that he even idealizes money. But to quote a very able writer of American short stories, that is another story. I have never been in England before, said the American lady, yet it is so pretty that I feel as if I have been away from it for a long time. So you have, I said. You have been away for three hundred years. What a lot of ivy you have, she said. It covers the churches and it buries the houses. We have ivy, but I have never seen it grow like that. I am interested to hear it, I replied, for I am making a little list of all the things that are really better in England. Even a month on the continent, combined with intelligence, will teach you that there are many things that are better abroad. All the things that the Daily Mail calls English are better abroad. But there are things entirely English and entirely good. Kippers, for instance, and free trade, and front gardens, and individual liberty, and the Elizabethan drama, and handsome cabs, and cricket. Above all, there is the happy and holy custom of eating a heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine that Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman or a German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a light bursts upon me for the first time. I see the real meaning of Mrs. Gallup and the great cipher. It is merely a mistake in the manner of a capital letter. I withdraw my objections. I accept everything. Bacon did write Shakespeare. I cannot look at anything but the ivy, she said. It looks so comfortable. While she looked at the ivy, I opened for the first time for many weeks in English newspaper, and I read a speech of Mr. Belfour in which he said that the House of Lords ought to be preserved because it represents something in the nature of a permanent public opinion of England, above the ebb and flow of the parties. Now, Mr. Belfour is a perfectly sincere patriot, a man who, from his own point of view, thinks long and seriously about the public needs, and he is moreover a man of entirely an exceptional intellectual power. But alas, in spite of all this, when I had read that speech, I thought with a heavy heart that there was one more thing that I had to add to the list of especially English things, such as kippers and cricket. I had to add the especially English kind of humbug. In France, things are attacked and defended for what they are. The Catholic Church is attacked because it is Catholic and defended because it is Catholic. The Republic is defended because it is Republican and attacked because it is Republican. But here is the ableist of English politicians consoling everybody by telling them that the House of Lords is not really the House of Lords, but something quite different, that the foolish accidental peers whom he meets every night are in some mysterious way experts upon the psychology of the democracy, that if you want to know what the very poor want, you must ask the very rich, and that if you want the truth about Huckston, you must ask for it at Hatfield. If the conservative defender of the House of Lords were a logical French politician, he would simply be a liar. But being an English politician, he is simply a poet. The English love of believing that all is as it should be. The English optimism combined with the strong English imagination is too much even for the obvious facts. In a cold scientific sense, of course, Mr. Belfour knows that nearly all the Lords, who are not Lords by accident, are Lords by bribery. He knows, and as Mr. Bellock excellently said, everybody in Parliament knows the very names of the peers who have purchased their peerages. But the glamour of comfort, the pleasure of reassuring himself and reassuring others, is too strong for this original knowledge. At last it fades from him, and he sincerely and earnestly calls an Englishman to join with him in admiring an August and public-spirited Senate, having wholly forgotten that the Senate really consists of idiots whom he has himself despised, and adventurers whom he has himself ennobled. Your Ivy is so beautifully soft and thick, said the American Lady, it seems to cover almost everything. It must be the most poetical thing in England. It is very beautiful, I said, and as you say, it is very English. Charles Dickens, who was almost more English than England, wrote one of his rare poems about the beauty of Ivy. Yes, by all means, let us admire the Ivy, so deep, so warm, so full of a genial gloom and a grotesque tenderness. Let us admire the Ivy, and let us pray to God and His mercy that it may not kill the tree. Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 32 The Travelers in State The other day, to my great astonishment, I caught a train. It was a train going into the eastern counties, and I only just caught it. And while I was running along the train, amid general admiration, I noticed that there were a quite peculiar and unusual number of carriages marked engaged. On five, six, seven, eight, nine carriages was pasted the little notice at five, six, seven, eight, nine windows were big bland men staring out in the conscious pride of possession. Their bodies seemed more than usually impenetrable. Their faces more than usually placid. It could not be the derby, if for only the minor reasons that it was the opposite direction and the wrong day. It could hardly be the king. It could hardly be the French president, for though these distinguished persons naturally like to be private for three hours, they are at least public for three minutes. A crowd can gather to see them step into the train, and there was no crowd here, or any police ceremonial. Who were those awful persons who occupied more of the train than a bricklayer's bean-feast, and yet were more fastidious and delicate than the king's own suite? Who were these that were larger than a mob, yet more mysterious than a monarch? Was it possible that instead of our royal house visiting the Tsar, he was really visiting us? Or does the House of Lords have a breakfast? I waited and wondered until the train slowed down at some station in the direction of Cambridge. Then the large impenetrable men got out, and after them got out the distinguished holders of the engaged seats. They were all dressed decoriously in one color. They had needly cropped hair, and they were chained together. I looked across the carriage at its only other occupant, and our eyes met. He was a small, tired-looking man, and as I afterwards learned to native of Cambridge, by the look of him some working tradesman there, such as a journeyman, tailor, or a small clock-mender. In order to make conversation, I said, I wondered where the convicts were going. His mouth twitched with the instinctive irony of our poor, and he said, I don't suppose they're going on an holiday at the seaside with the little spades and pails. I was naturally delighted and pursuing the same vein of literary intervention. I suggested that perhaps dons were taken down to Cambridge chained together like this. And as he lived in Cambridge, and had seen several dons, he was pleased with such a scheme. Then, when we had ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent, and the bleak gray eyes of the little man grew sadder and emptier than an open sea. I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same. Because all modern sophists are only sophists, and there is such a thing as mankind. Then it last, and it fell in as exactly as the right last note of a tune one is trying to remember, he said, well, I suppose we have to do it. And in those three things, his first speech and his silence and his second speech, there were all the three great fundamental facts of the English democracy. Its profound sense of humor, its profound sense of pathos, and its profound sense of helplessness. It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt, like that of a jolly hostess, to bring the shy people out. For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence. Now, people talk of democracy as being coarse and turbulent. It is a self-evident error in mere history. Aristocracy is the thing that is always coarse and turbulent. For it means appealing to the self-confident people. Democracy means appealing to the different people. Democracy means getting those people to vote who would never have the cheek to govern, and according to Christian ethics, the precise people who ought to govern are the people who have not the cheek to do it. There is a strong example of this truth in My Friend in the Train. The only two types we hear of in this argument about crime and punishment are two very rare and abnormal types. We hear of the stark sentimentalist who talks as if there were no problem at all, as if physical kindness would cure everything, as if one needed only Pat Nero and Stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental. It is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous, which is absurd. Then again we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery type of sentimentalist. I mean the sentimentalist who says with a sort of splutter, vlog the brutes, or who tells you with an innocent obscenity what he would do with a certain man, always supposing the man's hands were tied. This is the more effeminate type of the two. But both are weak and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern Babel. Yet you very rarely meet either of them in a train. You never meet anyone else in a controversy. The man you meet in a train is like this man that I met. He is emotionally decent. Only he is intellectually doubtful. So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could be done to criminals. He feels bitterly how much better it would be if nothing need be done. But something must be done. I suppose we have to do it. In short, he is simply a sane man, and of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head. Now the real difficulty of discussing decently this problem of the proper treatment of criminals is that both parties discuss the matter without any direct human feeling. The denouncers of wrong are as cold as the organizers of wrong. Humanitarianism is as hard as in humanity. Let me take one practical instance. I think the flogging arranged in our modern prisons is a filthy torture. All its scientific paraphernalia, the photographing, the medical attendance, prove that it goes on to the last foul limit of the boot and rack. The cat is simply the rack without any of its intellectual reasons. Holding this view strongly I open the ordinary humanitarian books or papers, and I find a phrase like this. The lash is a relic of barbarism. So is the plow. So is the fishing net. So is the horn or the staff or the fire lit in winter. What an inexpressibly feeble phrase for anything one wants to attack. A relic of barbarism. It is as if a man walked naked down the street tomorrow, and we said that his clothes were not quite in the latest fashion. There is nothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism. Man is a relic of barbarism. Civilization is a relic of barbarism. But torture is not a relic of barbarism at all. In actuality it is simply a relic of sin. But in comparative history it may well be called a relic of civilization. It has always been most artistic and elaborate when everything else was most artistic and elaborate. Thus it was detailed exquisite in the late Roman Empire, in the complex and gorgeous 16th century, in the centralized French monarchy a hundred years before the revolution, and in the great Chinese civilization to this day. This is first and last the frightful thing we must remember. Insofar as we grow instructed and refined we are not, in any sense, whatever, naturally moving away from torture. We may be moving toward torture. We must know what we are doing if we are to avoid the enormous secret cruelty which has crowned every historic civilization. The train moves more swiftly through the sunny English fields. They have taken the prisoners away and I do not know what they have done with them. THE END OF CHAPTER XXXIII A railway station is an admirable place, although Ruskin did not think so. He did not think so because he himself was even more modern than the railway station. He did not think so because he was himself feverish, irritable, and snorting like an engine. He could not value the ancient silence of the railway station. In a railway station he said you are in a hurry and therefore miserable. But you need not be either, unless you are as modern as Ruskin. A true philosopher does not think of coming just in time for his train, except as a bat or a joke. The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to be late for the one before. Do this and you will find in a railway station much of the quietude and consolation of a cathedral. It has many of the characteristics of a great ecclesiastical building. It has vast arches, void spaces, colored lights, and, above all, it has recurrence or ritual. It is dedicated to the celebration of water and fire, the two prime elements of all human ceremonial. Lastly, a station resembles the old religions rather than the new religions in this point. Do people go there? In connection with this it should also be remembered that all popular places, all sites actually used by the people, tend to retain the best routine of antiquity very much more than any localities or machines used by any privileged class. Things are not altered so quickly or completely by common people as they are by fashionable people. Ruskin could have found more memories of the Middle Ages in the underground railway than in the grand hotels outside the stations. The great palaces of pleasure which the rich build in London all have brazen and vulgar names. Their names are either snobbish like the Hotel Cecil or, worse still, cosmopolitan like the Hotel Metropole. But when I go in a third class carriage, from the nearest circle station to Battersea to the nearest circle station to the Daily News, the names of the stations are one long litany of solemn and saintly memories. Leaving Victoria I come to a park belonging especially to St. James the Apostle, then I go to Westminster Bridge whose very name alludes to the awful Abbey. Charing Cross holds up the symbol of Christendom. The next station is called a Temple, and Black Friars remembers the medieval dream of a brotherhood. If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million feet of the crowd. At the worst the uneducated only wear down old things by sheer walking, but the educated kick them down out of sheer culture. I feel all this profoundly as I wander about the empty railway station where I have no business of any kind. I have extracted a vast number of chocolates from automatic machines. I have obtained cigarettes, toffee, scent, and other things that I dislike by the same machinery. I have weighed myself with sublime results, and this sense, not only of the healthiness of popular things, but of their essential antiquity and permanence, is still in possession of my mind. I wander up to the bookstore, and my faith survives even in the wild spectacle of modern literature and journalism. Even in the crudest and most clamorous aspects of the newspaper world, I still prefer the popular to the proud and fastidious. If I had to choose between taking in the Daily Mail and taking in the Times, the dilemma reminds one of a nightmare, I should certainly cry out with the whole of my being for the Daily Mail. Even mere bigness preached in a frivolous way is not so irritating as mere meanness preached in a big and solemn way. People buy the Daily Mail, but they do not believe in it. They do believe in the Times, and apparently they do not buy it. But the more the output of paper upon modern world is actually studied, the more it will be found to be in all its essentials, ancient and human, like the name of Charing Cross. Linger for two or three hours at a station bookstore, as I am doing, and you will find that it gradually takes on the grandeur and historic elusiveness of the Vatican or Bode-Leon Library. The novelty is all superficial. The tradition is all interior and profound. The Daily Mail has new additions, but never a new idea. Everything in a newspaper that is not the old human love of altar or fatherland is the old human love of gossip. Modern writers have often made game of the old chronicles because they chiefly record accidents and prodigies. A church struck by lightning, or a calf with six legs. They do not seem to realize that this old barbaric history is the same as new democratic journalism. It is not that the savage chronicle has disappeared. It is merely that the savage chronicle now appears every morning. As I moved thus mildly and vaguely in front of the bookstore, my eye caught a sudden and scarlet title that for the moment staggered me. On the outside of a book I saw written in large letters, Get On or Get Out. The title of the book recalled to me with a sudden revolt and reaction, all that does seem unquestionably new and nasty. It reminded me that there was in the world of today that utterly idiotic thing, a worship of success, a thing that only means surpassing anybody in anything, a thing that may mean being the most successful person in running away from a battle, a thing that may mean being the most successfully sleepy of the whole row of sleeping men. When I saw those words, the silence and sanctity of the railway station were for the moment shadowed. Here I thought there is at any rate something anarchic and violent and vile. This title at any rate means the most disgusting individualism of the individualistic world. In the fury of my bitterness and passion I actually bought the book, thereby ensuring that my enemy would get some of my money. I opened it, prepared to find some brutality, some blasphemy, which would really be an exception to the general silence and sanctity of the railway station. I was prepared to find something in the book that was as infamous as its title. I was disappointed. There was nothing at all corresponding to the furious decisiveness of the remarks on the cover. After reading it carefully I could not discover whether I was really to get on or get out. But I had a vague feeling that I should prefer to get out. A considerable part of the book, particularly toward the end, was concerned with the detailed description of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Undoubtedly Napoleon got on. He also got out. But I could not discover in any way how the details of his life given here were supposed to help a person aiming at success. One anecdote described how Napoleon always wiped his pen on his knee-bridges. I suppose the moral is, always wipe your pen on your knee-bridges and you will win the battle of Wegrim. Another story told that he let Lucie Gazelle among the ladies of his court. Clearly the brutal practical influence is Lucie Gazelle among the ladies of your acquaintance, and you will be Emperor of the French. Get on with the Gazelle or get out. The book entirely reconciled me to the soft twilight of the station. Then I suddenly saw that there was a symbolic division which might be paralleled from biology. Brave men are vertebrates. They have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle. But these modern cowards are all crustaceans. Their hardness is all on the cover and their softness is inside. But the softness is there. Everything in this twilight temple is soft. CHAPTER 34 THE DEABOLIST Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element of truth. Things that really happened have been mentioned, such as meeting President Krueger or being thrown out of a cab. What I have now to relate really happened, yet there was no element in it of practical politics or of personal danger. It was simply a quiet conversation which I had with another man. But that quiet conversation was by far the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me in my life. It happened so long ago that I cannot be certain of the exact words of the dialogue, only of its main questions and answers. But there is one sentence in it, for which I can answer absolutely, and word for word. It was a sentence so awful that I could not forget it if I would. It was the last sentence spoken, and it was not spoken to me. The thing befell me in the days when I was at art school. An art school is different from almost all other schools or colleges in disrespect. Yet being of new and crude creation and of lack's discipline, it presents an especially strong contrast between the industrious and the idle. People at an art school either do an atrocious amount of work or do no work at all. I belonged along with other charming people to the latter class. And this threw me often into the society of men who were very different from myself and who were idle for reasons very different from mine. I was idle because I was very much occupied. I was engaged about that time in discovering to my own extreme and lasting astonishment that I was not an atheist. But there were others also at Lucens who were engaged in discovering what Carlisle called, I think with needless delicacy, the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth. I value that time in short because it made me acquainted with good representative number of black guards. In this connection there are two very curious things which the critic of human life may observe. The first is the fact that there is one real difference between men and women. That women prefer to talk in twos while men prefer to talk in threes. The second is that when you find, as you often do, three young cats and idiots going about altogether and getting drunk together every day, you generally find that one of the three cats and idiots is for some extraordinary reason not a cat and not an idiot. In these small groups devoted to a driveling dissipation, there is almost always one man who seems to have condescended to his company. One man who, well, he can talk a foul triviality with his fellows and also talk politics with a socialist or philosophy with a catholic. It was just such a man whom I came to know well. It was strange perhaps that he liked his dirty drunken society. It was stranger still perhaps that he liked my society. For hours of the day he would talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture. For hours of the night he would go where I have no wish to follow him even in speculation. He was a man with a long ironical face and close and red hair. He was by class a gentleman, and he could walk like one but preferred for some reason to walk like a groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sort of super jockey as if some archangel had gone on the turf. And I shall never forget the half hour in which he and I argued about real things for the first and last time. Along the front of the big building of which our school was apart ran a huge slope of stone steps, higher, I think, than those that lead up to St. Paul's Cathedral. On a black winter evening he and I were wandering on these cold heights which seemed as dreary as a pyramid under the stars. The one thing visible below us in the blackness was a burning and blowing fire. For some gardener, I suppose, was burning something in the grounds, and from time to time the red sparks went whirling past us like a swarm of scarlet insects in the dark. Above us also was gloom, but if one stared long enough at that upper darkness one saw vertical stripes of gray in the black, and then became conscious of the colossal facade of the Doric building. Fantasimal, yet filling the sky, as if heaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of paganism. The man asked me abruptly why I was becoming orthodox. Until he said it I really had not known that I was. But the moment he had said it I knew it to be literally true. And the process had been so long and full that I answered him at once out of existing stores of explanation. I am becoming orthodox, I said, because I have come rightly or wrongly after stretching my brain till it bursts to the old belief that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes. An imperialist is worse than a pirate. For an imperialist keeps a school for pirates, he teaches piracy disinterestedly and without an adequate salary. A free lover is worse than a profligate. For a profligate is serious and reckless even in his shortest love, while a free lover is cautious and irresponsible even in his longest devotion. I hate modern doubt, because it is dangerous. You mean dangerous to morality, he said in a voice of wonderful gentleness. I expect you are right, but why do you care about morality? I glanced at his face quickly. He had thrust out his neck as he had a trick of doing, and so brought his face abruptly into the light of the bonfire from below, like a face in the footlights. His long chin and high cheekbones were lit up infernally from underneath, so that he looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit. I had an unmeaning sense of being tempted in a wilderness, and even as I paused a burst of red sparks broke past. Aren't those sparks splendid? I said. Yes, he replied. That is all I ask you to admit, said I. Give me those few red specks, and I will deduce Christian morality. Once I thought like you, that one's pleasure in a flying spark was the thing that could come and go with a spark. Once I thought that the delight was as free as the fire. Once I thought that red star we see was alone in space. But now I know that the red star is only on the apex of an invisible pyramid of virtues. That red fire is only the flower on a stalk of living habits which you cannot see. Only because your mother made you say, thank you for a bun, are you now able to thank nature or chaos for those red stars of an instant, or for the white stars of all time. Only because you were humbled before fireworks on the 5th of November do you now enjoy any fireworks that you chance to see. You only like them being red because you were told about the blood of the martyrs. You only like them being bright because brightness is a glory. That flame flowered out of virtues and it will fade with virtues. Seduce a woman and that spark will be less bright. Shed blood and that spark will be less red. Be really bad and they will be to you, like the spots on a wallpaper. He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul. A common harmless atheist would have denied that religion produced humility or humility as simple joy. But he admitted both. He only said, but shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out. Will not the expanding pleasure of ruin? Do you see that fire I asked? If we had a real fighting democracy, someone would burn you in it, like the devil worshipper that you are. Perhaps he said in his tired fairway, only what you call evil I call good. He went down into the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the steps swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my hat in the low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his voice again, but the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled. Then I heard the voice of one of the violists of his associate saying, Nobody can possibly know. And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget. I heard the diabolists say, I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that I shan't know the difference between right and wrong. I rushed out without daring to pause, and as I passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God. I have since heard that he died. It may be said I think that he committed suicide, though he did it with tools of pleasure, not with tools of pain. God help him. I know the road he went, but I have never known or even dared to think what was that place at which he stopped and refrained. Tremendous Trifles by G.K. Chesterton Chapter 35 A Glimpse of My Country Whatever is it that we are all looking for? A fancy that it is really quite close. When I was a boy I had a fancy that heaven or fairy land or whatever I called it was immediately behind my own back and that this was why I could never manage to see it. However often I twisted and turned to take it by surprise. I had a notion of a man perpetually spinning round on one foot like a teetotem in the effort to find that world behind his back which continually fled from him. Perhaps this is why the world goes round. Perhaps the world is always trying to look over its shoulder and catch up with the world which always escapes it, yet without which it cannot be itself. In any case, as I have said, I think that we must always conceive of that which is the goal of all our endeavors as something which is in some strange way near. Science boasts of the distance of its stars, of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things which which they are concerned. Always the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and looking-glass land is only through the looking-glass. So I for one should never be astonished if the next twist of a street led me to the heart of that maze in which all the mystics are lost. I should not be at all surprised if I turned one corner in Fleet Street and saw a yet queerer-looking lamp. I should not be surprised if I turned a third corner and found myself in Elf land. I should not be surprised at this, but I was surprised the other day at something more surprising. I took a turn out of Fleet Street and found myself in England. The singular shock experienced perhaps requires explanation. In the darkest or the most inadequate moments of England there is one thing that should always be remembered about the very nature of our country. It may be shortly stated by saying that England is not such a fool as it looks. The types of England, the externals of England, always misrepresent the country. England is an oligarchial country, and it prefers that its oligarchy should be inferior to itself. The speaking in the House of Commons, for instance, is not only worse than the speaking was, it is worse than the speaking is in all or almost all other places in small debating clubs or casual dinners. Our countrymen probably prefer this solemn futility in the higher places of the national life. It may be a strange sight to see the blind leading the blind, but England provides a stranger. England shows us the blind leading the people who can see. And this again is an understatement of the case. For the English political aristocrats not only speak worse than many other people, they speak worse than themselves. The ignorance of statesmen is like the ignorance of judges. An artificial and affected thing. If you have the good fortune really to talk with a statesman, you will be constantly startled with his saying quite intelligent things. It makes one nervous at first, and I had never been sufficiently intimate with such a man to ask him why it was a rule of his life in Parliament to appear sillier than he was. It is the same with the voters. The average man votes below himself. He votes with half a mind or with a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach. His eye for faces and his ear for music. Also, when sufficiently provoked with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is, the difficulty with English democracy at all elections is that it is something less than itself. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes. This is the tragedy of England. You cannot judge it by its foremost men. Its types do not typify. And on the occasion of which I speak, I found this to be so, especially of that old, intelligent middle class which I had imagined had almost vanished from the world. It seemed to me that all the main representatives of this middle class had gone off in one direction or in the other. They had either set out in pursuit of the smart set or they had set out in pursuit of the simple life. I cannot say which I dislike more myself. The people in question are welcome to have either of them or, as is more likely to have both, in hideous alterations of disease and cure. But all the prominent men who plainly represent the middle class have adopted either the single eyeglass of Mr. Chamberlain or the single eye of Mr. Bernard Shaw. The old class that I mean has no representative. Its food was plentiful, but it had no show. Its food was plain, but it had no fads. It was serious about politics and, when it spoke in public, it committed the solicism of trying to speak well. I thought that this old earnest political England had practically disappeared, and as I say I took one turn out of Fleet Street and found a room full of it. At the top of the room was a chair in which Johnson had sat. The club was a club in which Wilkes had spoken, in a time when even the near-to-well was virile. But all these things by themselves might be merely archaism. The extraordinary thing was that this hall had all the hubbub, the sincerity, the anger, the oratory of the 18th century. The members of this club were of all shades of opinion, yet there was not one speech which gave me that jar of unreality which I often have in listening to the ableist men uttering my own opinion. The Toryism of this club was like the Toryism of Johnson, a Toryism that could use humor and appeal to humanity. The democracy of this club was like the democracy of Wilkes, a democracy that can speak epigrams and fight duels, a democracy that can face things out and endure slander, the democracy of Wilkes, or rather the democracy of Fox. One thing specially filled my soul with the soul of my fathers. Each man speaking whether he spoke well or ill spoke as well as he could from sheer fury against the other man. This is the greatest of our modern dissents, that nowadays a man does not become more rhetorical as he becomes more sincere. An 18th century speaker, when he got really and honestly furious, looked for big words with which to crush his adversary. The new speaker looks for small words to crush him with. He looks for little facts and little sneers. In a modern speech the rhetoric is put into the merely formal part, the opening to which nobody listens. But when Mr. Chamberlain, or a moderate, or one of the harder kind of socialists, becomes really sincere he becomes cockney. The destiny of the empires, or the destiny of humanity, do well enough for mere ornamental preliminaries. But when the man becomes angry and honest, then it is a snarl. Where do we come in? It's your money they want. The man in this 18th century club were entirely different. They were quite 18th century. Each one rose to his feet quivering with passion and tried to destroy his opponent. Not with sniggering, but actually with eloquence. I was arguing with them about home rule. At the end I told them why the English aristocracy really disliked an Irish parliament. Because it would be like their club. I came out again into Fleet Street at night, and by a dim lamp I saw pasted on some tawdry nonsense about waste rolls and how London was rising against something that London had hardly heard of. Then I suddenly saw, as in one obvious picture, that the modern world is an immense and tumultuous ocean full of monstrous and living things. And I saw that across the top of it is spread a thin, very thin sheet of ice of wicked wealth and of lying journalism. And as I stood there in the darkness I could almost fancy that I heard it crack. A somewhat improbable story. I cannot remember whether this tale is true or not. If I read it through very carefully, I have a suspicion that I should come to the conclusion that it is not. But unfortunately I cannot read it through very carefully because you see it is not written yet. The image and the idea that clung to me through a great part of my boyhood. I may have dreamt it before I could talk, or told it to myself before I could read, or read it before I could remember. On the whole, however, I am certain that I did not read it. For children have very clear memories about things like that. And of the books which I was really fond I can still remember. Not only the shape and bulk and binding, but even the position of the printed words on many of the pages. On the whole I inclined to the opinion that it happened to me before I was born. At any rate, let us tell the story now with all the advantages of the atmosphere that has clung to it. You may suppose me, for the sake of argument, sitting at lunch in one of those quick-lunch restaurants in the city where men take their food so fast that it has none of the quality of food, and take their half-hours vacation so fast that it has none of the qualities of leisure. To hurry through one's leisure is the most un-business-like of actions. They all wore tall shiny hats as if they could not lose an instant even to hang them on a peg. And they all had one eye a little off, hypnotized by the huge eye of the clock. In short, they were the slaves of the modern bondage. You could hear their fetters clinking. Each was in fact bound by a chain. The heaviest chain ever tied to a man. It is called a watch-chain. Now among these they're entered and sat down opposite to me, a man who almost immediately opened an uninterrupted monologue. He was, like all other men in the rest, yet he was startling the opposite to them in all manner. He wore a high shiny hat and a long frock coat, but he wore them as such solemn things as they were meant to be worn. He wore the silk hat as if it were a miter, and the frock coat as if it were the ephod of a high priest. He not only hung his hat up on the peg, but he seemed, such was his stateliness, almost to ask permission of the hat for doing so, and to apologize to the peg for making use of it. When he had sat down on a wooden chair with the air of one considering its feelings and given a sort of slight stoop or bow to the wooden table itself as if it were an altar, I could not help some comment springing to my lips. For the man was a big, sanguine-faced, prosperous- looking man, and yet he treated everything with a care that almost amounted to nervousness. For the sake of saying something to express my interest, I said, this furniture is fairly solid, but of course people do treat it much too carelessly. As I looked up doubtfully, my eye caught his, and was fixed as his was fixed, in an apocalyptic stare. I thought it more ordinary as he entered, say for his strange cautious manner. But if the other people had seen him, then they would have screamed and emptied the room. They did not see him, and they went on making a clutter with their forks and a murmur with their conversation. But the man's face was the face of a maniac. Did you mean anything particular by that remark he asked at last, and the blood crawled back slowly into his face? Nothing whatever I answered, one does not mean anything here, it spoils people's digestions. He limped back and wiped his broad forehead with a big handkerchief, and yet there seemed to be a sort of regret in his relief. I thought perhaps, he said in a low voice, that another of them had gone wrong. If you mean another digestion going wrong, I said, I never heard of one here that went right. This is the heart of the empire, and the other organs are in an equally bad way. No, I mean another streak gone wrong. And he said heavily and quietly, but as I suppose that doesn't explain much to you, I think I shall have to tell you the story. I do so with all the less responsibility, because I know you won't believe it. For forty years of my life I invariably left my office, which is in Leadon Hall Street, at half past five in the afternoon, taking with me an umbrella in the right hand and a bag in the left hand. For forty years, two months and four days, I passed out of the side office door, walked down the street on the left hand side, took the first turning to the left and the third to the right, from where I bought an evening paper, followed the road on the right hand side, round two obtuse ankles, and came out, just outside a metropolitan station where I took a train home. For forty years, two months and four days, I fulfilled this course by accumulated habit. It was not a long street that I traversed, and it took me about four and a half minutes to do it. After forty years, two months and four days, on the fifth day, I went out in in the same manner, with my umbrella in the right hand and my bag in the left. And I began to notice that walking along the familiar street tired me somewhat more than usual, and when I turned it I was convinced that I had turned down the wrong one. For now the street shot up quite a steep slant, such as one only sees in the hilly parts of London. And in this part there were no heels at all, yet it was not the wrong street. The name written on it was the same, the shuttered shops were the same, the lamppost and the whole look of the perspective was the same only it was tilted upwards, like a lid. For getting any trouble about breathlessness or fatigue I ran furiously forward and reached the second of my accustomed turnings, which ought to bring me almost within sight of the station. And as I turned that corner I nearly fell on the pavement. For now the street went up straight in front of my face like a steep staircase or the side of a pyramid. There was not four miles round that place so much as the slope, like that of Ludgate Hill. And this was the slope like that of the Matterhorn. The whole street had lifted itself like a single wave, and yet every speck and detail of it was the same, and I saw in the high distance as at the top of an alpine pass picked out in pink letters the name over my paper shop. I ran on, and blindly now, passing all the shops and coming to a part of the road where there was a long gray row of private houses. I had, I know not why, an irrational feeling that I was a long iron bridge in an empty space. An impulse seized me and I pulled up the iron trap of a coal hole. Looking down through it I saw empty space on the stairs. When I looked up again a man was standing in his front garden having apparently come out of his house. He was leaning over the railing and gazing at me. We were all alone on that nightmare road. His face was in shadow, his dress was dark and ordinary, but when I saw him standing so perfectly still I knew somehow that he was not of this world. And the stars behind his head were larger and fiercer than ought to be endured by the eyes of men. If you are a kind angel, I said, or a wise devil, or have anything in common with mankind, tell me what is this street possessed of devils? After a long silence he said, What do you say that it is? It is Bumpton Street, of course I snapped. It goes to Old Gate Station. Yes, he admitted gravely. It goes there sometimes. Just not, however, it's going to heaven. To heaven I said, Why? It's going to heaven for justice, he replied. You must have treated it badly. Remember always that there is one thing that cannot be endured by anybody or anything. That one unendurable thing is to be overworked and also neglected. For instance, you can overwork women, everyone does, but you can't neglect women, I defy you to. At the same time you can neglect tramps and gypsies and all the apparent refuse of the state so long as you do not overwork it. But no beast of the field, no horse, no dog, can endure long to be asked to do more than his work and yet have less than his honor. It is the same with streets. You have worked this street to death and yet you have never remembered its existence. If you had had a healthy democracy, even a pagans, they would have hung this street with garlands and given it the name of a God. Then it would have gone quietly. But at last the street had grown tired of your tireless insolence and is bucking and rearing its head to heaven. Have you never sat on a bucking horse? I looked at the long grey street and for a moment it seemed to me to be exactly like the long grey neck of a horse flung up to heaven. But in a moment my sanity returned and I said, but this is all nonsense. Streets go to the place they have to go. A street must always go to its end. Why do you think so of a street? He asked, standing very still. Because I have always seen it do the same thing. I replied in a reasonable anger. Day after day, year after year, it has always gone to Old Gate Station. Day after I stopped, for he had flung up his head with the fury of the road and revolt. And you, he cried terribly, what do you think the road thinks of you? Does the road think you are alive? Are you alive? Day after day, year after year, you have gone to Old Gate Station? Since then I have respected the things called inanimate. And bowing slightly to the mustard pot, the man in the restaurant withdrew. CHAPTER 37 The Shop of Ghosts Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can get for a half-penny. I make an exception, of course, of the sun, the moon, the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles. You can get them for nothing. Also I make an exception of another thing which I am not allowed to mention in this paper and of which the lowest price is a penny, half-penny. But the general principle will be at once apparent. In the street behind me, for instance, you can now get a ride on an electric tram for a half-penny. To be on an electric tram is to be on a flying castle in a fairytale. You can get quite a large number of brightly colored suites for a half-penny. Also you can get the chance of reading this article for a half-penny along, of course, with other and irrelevant matter. But if you want to see what a vast and bewildering array of valuable things you can get at a half-penny each you should do as I was doing last night. I was gluing my nose against the glass of a very small and dimly lit toy shop in one of the grayest and leanest of the streets of Battersea. But dim as was that square of light it was filled, as a child once said to me, with all the colors God ever made. These toys of the poor were like the children who buy them. They were all dirty. But they were all bright. For my part I think brightness more important than cleanliness, since the first is the soul and the second of the body. You must excuse me. I am a Democrat. I know I am out of fashion in the modern world. As I looked at that palace of pygmy wonders, at small green omnibuses, at small blue elephants, at small black dolls, and small red Noah's arcs, I must have fallen into some sort of unnatural trance. That lit shop window became like the brilliantly lit stage when one is watching some highly colored comedy. I forgot the gray houses and the grimy people behind me, as one forgets the dark galleries and the dim crowds of the theater. It seemed as if the little objects behind the glass were small, not because they were toys, but because they were objects far away. The green omnibus was really a green omnibus, a green base water omnibus passing across some huge desert on its ordinary way to base water. The blue elephant was no longer blue with paint. He was blue with distance. The black doll was really a negro, relieved against passionate, tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming and only man is black. The red Noah's arc was really the enormous shape of earthly salvation, riding on the rain's fallen sea, red in the first morning of hope. Everyone I suppose knows such stunning instances of abstraction, such brilliant blanks in the mind. In such moments one can see the face of one's own best friend as an unmeaning pattern of spectacles or moustaches. They are commonly marked by the two signs of the slowness of the growth and the suddenness of the termination. The return to real thinking is often as abrupt as bumping into man. Very often, indeed in my case, it is bumping into a man. But in any case the awakening is always emphatic and generally speaking it is always complete. Now in this case I did come back with a shock of sanity to the consciousness that I was, after all, only staring into a dingy little toy shop, but in some strange way the mental cure did not seem to be final. There was still, in my mind, an unmanageable something that told me that I had strayed into some odd atmosphere or that I had already done some odd thing. I felt as if I had worked a miracle or committed a sin. It was as if I had at any rate stepped across some border in the soul. To shake off this dangerous and dreamy sense I went into the shop and tried to buy wooden soldiers. The man in the shop was very old and broken, with confused white hair covering his head and half his face, hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial. Yet though he was senile and even sick there was nothing of suffering in his eyes. He looked rather as if he were gradually falling asleep in a not unkindly decay. He gave me the wooden soldiers, but when I put down the money he did not at first seem to see it. Then he blinked at it feebly. Then he pushed it feebly away. No, no, he said vaguely. I never have, I never have. We are rather old-fashioned here. Not taking money, I replied, seems to me more like an uncommonly new fashion than an old one. I never have, said the old man, blinking and blowing his nose. I've always given presents. I'm too old to stop. Good heavens, I said, what can you mean? Why, you might be Father Christmas. I am Father Christmas, he said apologetically and blew his nose again. The lamps could not have been lighted yet in the street outside. At any rate I could see nothing against the darkness but the shining shop window. There were no sounds of steps or voices in the street. I might have strayed into some new and sunless world. But something had cut the cords of common sense and I could not feel even surprised except sleepily. Something made me say, you look ill, Father Christmas. I am dying, he said. I did not speak and it was he who spoke again. All the new people have left my shop. I cannot understand it. They seem to object to me on such curious and inconsistent sort of grounds. These scientific men and these innovators. They say that I give people superstitions and make them to visionary. They say I give people sausages and make them to course. They say my heavenly parts are too heavenly. They say my earthly parts are too earthly. I don't know what they want, I'm sure. How can heavenly things be too heavenly or earthly things too earthly? How can one be too good or too jolly? I don't understand. But I understand one thing well enough. These modern people are living and I am dead. You may be dead, I replied. You ought to know. But as for what they are doing, do not call it living. A silence fell suddenly between us which I somehow expected to be unbroken. But it had not fallen for more than a few seconds when in the utter stillness I distinctly heard a very rapid step coming nearer and nearer along the street. The next moment a figure flung itself into the shop and stood framed in the doorway. He wore a large white hat tilted back as if in impatience. He had tight black old-fashioned pantaloons, a gaudy old-fashioned stock and waistcoat, and an old fantastic coat. He had large wide open luminous eyes like those of an arresting actor. He had a pale nervous face and fringe of beard. He took in the shop and the old man, in a look that seemed literally a flash, and uttered the exclamation of a man utterly staggered. Good Lord! he cried out. It can't be you. It isn't you. I came to ask where your grave was. I'm not dead yet, Mr. Dickens, said the old gentleman with a feeble smile. But I'm dying. He hastened to add reassuringly. But dash it all, you were dying in my time, said Mr. Charles Dickens with animation, and you don't look a day older. I felt like this for a long time, said Father Christmas. Mr. Dickens turned his back and put his head out of the door into the darkness. Dickie roared at the top of his voice. He's still alive. Another shadow darkened the doorway, and a much larger and more full-blooded gentleman in an enormous periwig came in, banning his flushed face with a military hat of the cut of Queen Anne. He carried his head well back like a soldier, and his hot face had even a look of arrogance which was suddenly contradicted by his eyes, which were literally as humble as the dogs. His sword made a gray clatter, as if the shop were too small for it. Indeed, said Sir Richard Steele, to his most prodigious matter, for the man was dying when I wrote about Sir Roger D. Coerley in his Christmas Day. My senses were going dimmer and the room darker. It seemed to be filled with newcomers. It hath ever been understood, said a burly man who carried his head humorously and obstinately, a little on one side. I think he was Ben Johnson. It hath ever been understood, counsel Jacobo, under our King James, and her late Majesty, that such good and hearty customs were fallen sick and like to pass from the world. This gray beard most surely was no lustier when I knew him than now. And I also thought I heard a green-clad man like Robin Hood say in some mixed Norman French. But I saw the man dying. I felt like this a long time, said Father Christmas, in his feeble way again. Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly lent a cross to him. Since when, he asked? Since you were born? Yes, said the old man, and sank, shaking into a chair. I have been always dying. Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish, like a man calling a mob to rise. I understand it now, he cried. You will never die.