 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Miscellany of Men by G. K. Chesterton Section 9. The Aristocratic Airy The cheap tripper pursued by the curses of the esthetes and the antiquaries really is, I suppose, a symptom of the strange and almost unearthly ugliness of our diseased society. The costumes and customs of a hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness does not necessarily follow from mere poverty or mere democracy or mere unlettered simplicity of mind. But though the tripper, artistically considered, is a sign of our decadence, he is not one of its worst signs, but relatively one of its best, one of its most innocent and most sincere. Compared with many of the philosophers and artists who denounce him, he looks like a god-fearing fisher or a noble mountaineer. His antics with donkey and concertina, crowded chariobanks, and exchanged hats, so clumsy, are not so vicious or even so fundamentally vulgar as many of the amusements of the overeducated. People are not more crowded on a chariobank than they are at a political at home, or even an artistic soiree. And if the female trippers are overdressed, at least they are not overdressed and underdressed at the same time. It is better to ride a donkey than to be a donkey. It is better to deal with the cockney festival which asks men and women to change hats rather than with the modern utopia that wants them to change heads. But the truth is that such small but real element of vulgarity as there is indeed in the tripper is part of a certain folly and falsity which is characteristic of much modernity. And especially of the very people who persecute the poor tripper most. There is something in the whole society, and even especially in the cultured part of it, that does things in a clumsy and undutiful way. A case occurs to me in the matter of Stonehenge which I happened to visit yesterday. Now to a person really capable of feeling the poetry of Stonehenge, it is almost a secondary matter whether he sees Stonehenge at all. The vast void-roll of the empty land towards Salisbury, the grey table-lands like primeval altars, the trailing rain clouds, the vapor of primeval sacrifices, would all tell him of a very ancient and very lonely Britain. It would not spoil his druidic mood if he missed Stonehenge, but it does spoil his mood to find Stonehenge surrounded by a brand new fence of barbed wire with a policeman and a little shop selling picture postcards. Now if you protest against this educated people will instantly answer you. Oh it was done to prevent the vulgar trippers who chip stones in carved names and spoil the look of Stonehenge. It does not seem to occur to them that barbed wire and a policeman rather spoil the look of Stonehenge. The scratching of a name, particularly when performed with a blunt penknife or pencil by a person of imperfect school board education, can be trusted in a little while to be indistinguishable from the greyest hieroglyphic by the grandest druid of old. But nobody could get a modern policeman into the same picture with a druid. This really vital piece of vandalism was done by the educated, not the uneducated. It was done by the influence of the artists or antiquaries who wanted to preserve the antique beauty of Stonehenge. It seemed to me curious to preserve your lady's beauty from freckles by blacking her face all over or to protect the pure whiteness of your wedding garment by dyeing it green. And if you ask, but what else could anyone have done, what could the most artistic age have done to save the monument? I reply, there are hundreds of things the Greeks or medieval might have done, and I have no notion what they would have chosen. But I say that by an instinct in their whole society they would have done something that was decent and serious and suitable to the place. Perhaps some family of knights or warriors would have the heraldry duty of guarding such a place. If so their armor would be appropriate, their tents would be appropriate, not deliberately. They would grow like that. Perhaps some religious order, such as normally employ nocturnal watches and relieving of guard, would protect such a place. Perhaps it would be protected by all sorts of rituals, consecrations or curses, which would seem to you mere raving superstition and silliness. But they do not seem to me one twentieth part so silly, from a purely rational point of view, as calmly making a spot hideous in order to keep it beautiful. The thing that is really vulgar, the thing that is really vile, is to live in a good place without living by its life. Anyone who settles down in a place without becoming part of it is, barring peculiar personal cases, of course, a tripper or a wandering cad. For instance, the Jew is a genuine peculiar case. The wandering Jew is not a wandering cad. He is a highly civilized man in a highly difficult position. The world being divided and his own nation being divided about whether he can do anything else except wander. The best example of the cultured but common tripper is the educated Englishmen on the continent. We can no longer explain the quarrel by calling Englishmen rude and foreigners polite. Hundreds of Englishmen are extremely polite and thousands of foreigners are extremely rude. The truth of the matter is that foreigners do not resent the rude Englishmen. What they do resent, what they do most justly resent, is the polite Englishmen. He visits Italy for Botticelli's or Flanders for Rembrandt's and he treats the great nations that made these things courteously as he would treat the custodians of any museum. It does not seem to strike him that the Italian is not the custodian of the pictures but the creator of them. He can afford to look down on such nations when he can paint such pictures. That is, in matters of art and travel, the psychology of the cad. If living in Italy you admire Italian art while distrusting Italian character, you are a tourist or a cad. If living in Italy you admire Italian art while despising Italian religion, you are a tourist or a cad. It does not matter how many years you have lived there. Tourists will often live a long time in hotels without discovering the nationality of the waiters. Englishmen will often live a long time in Italy without discovering the nationality of the Italians. But the test is simple. If you admire what Italians did without admiring Italians, you are a cheap trooper. The same, of course, applies much nearer home. I have remarked elsewhere that country shopkeepers are justly offended by London people who, coming among them, continue to order older goods from London. It is cat-ish to wink and squint at the color of a man's wine, like a wine taster, and then refuse to drink it. It is equally cat-ish to wink and squint at the color of a man's orchard, like a landscape painter, and then refuse to buy the apples. It is always an insult to admire a thing and not to use it. But the main point is that one has no right to see Stonehenge without Salisbury Plain and Salisbury. One has no right to respect the dead Italians without respecting the live ones. One has no right to visit a Christian society like a diver visiting the deep-sea fishes, fed along a lengthy tube by another atmosphere, and seeing the sights without breathing the air. It is very real bad manners. The New Theologian It is an old story that names do not fit things. It is an old story that the oldest forest is called the New Forest, and that Irish stew is most peculiar to England. But these are traditional titles that tend of their nature to stiffen. It is the tragedy of today that even phrases invented for today do not fit it. The forest has remained new, while it is nearly a thousand years old. But our fashions have grown old, while they were still new. The extreme example of this is that when modern wrongs are attacked, they are almost always attacked wrongly. People seem to have a positive inspiration for finding the inappropriate phrase to apply to an offender. They are always accusing a man of theft when he has been convicted of murder. It must accuse Sir Edward Carson of outrageous rebellion when his offense has really been a sleek submission to the powers that be. They must describe Mr. Lloyd George as using his eloquence to rouse the mob, whereas he has really shown considerable cleverness in damping it down. It was probably under the same impulse, towards a mysterious misfit of names, that people denounced Dr. Inge as the gloomy dean. Now there is nothing whatever wrong about being a dean, nor is there anything wrong about being gloomy. The only question is what dark but sincere motives have made you gloomy? What dark but sincere motives have made you a dean? Now the address of Dr. Inge, which gained him this erroneous title, was mostly concerned with the defense of the modern capitalists against the modern strikers, from whose protest he appeared to anticipate appalling results. Now if we look at the facts about that gentleman's depression, and also about his denary, we shall find a very curious state of things. When Dr. Inge was called the gloomy dean, a great injustice was done him. He had appeared as the champion of our capitalist community against the forces of revolt, and anyone who does that exceeds an optimism rather than pessimism. A man who really thinks that strikers have suffered no wrong, or that employers have done no wrong, such a man is not a gloomy dean, but a quite wildly and dangerously happy dean. A man who can feel satisfied with modern industrialism must be a man with a mysterious fountain of high spirits. An actual occasion is not less curious, because, as far as I can make out, his title to gloom reposes on his having said that our workers demand high wages, while the placid people of the Far East will quite cheerfully work for less. This is true enough, of course, and there does not seem to be much difficulty about the matter. Men of the Far East will submit very low wages for the same reason that they will submit to the punishment known as lead or slicing, for the same reason that they will praise polygamy and suicide, for the same reason that they subject the wife utterly to the husband or his parents, for the same reason that they serve their temples with prostitutes for priests, for the same reason that they sometimes seem to make no distinction between sexual passion and sexual perversion. They do it, that is, because they are heathens. Men with traditions different from ours about the limits of endurance and the gestures of self-respect. They may be very much better than we are in hundreds of other ways, and I can quite understand a man, though hardly a dean, really preferring their historic virtues to those of Christendom. A man may perhaps feel more comfortable among his Asiatic coolies than among his European comrades, and as we are to allow the broadest thought in the church, Dr. Inge has as much right to his heresy as anybody else. It is true that, as Dr. Inge says, there are numberless orientals who will do a great deal of work for very little money, and it is most undoubtedly true that there are several high-placed and prosperous Europeans who like to get work done and pay as little as possible for it. But I cannot make out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and traditions, the dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which he has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West. If some thousands of years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge admires, and if some thousands years of Christianity have produced the sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obvious deduction is that Dean Inge would be much happier if he were a heathen Chinese. Instead of supporting Christian missions to Korea or Japan, he ought to be at the head of a great mission in London for converting the English to Taoism or Buddhism. There his passion for the moral beauties of paganism would have free and natural play. His style would improve, his mind would begin slowly to clear, and he would be free from all sorts of little irritating scrupulosities which must hamper even the most conservative Christian in his full praise of sweating and the sack. In Christendom he will never find rest. The perpetual public criticism and public change which is the note of all our history springs from a certain spirit far too deep to be defined. It is deeper than democracy, nay, it may often appear to be non-democratic, for it may often be the special defense of a minority or an individual. It will often leave the Ninety and Nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost. It will often risk the state itself to right a single wrong and do justice though the heavens fall. Its highest expression is not even in the formula of the great gentleman of the French Revolution who said that all men were free and equal. Its highest expression is rather in the formula of the peasant who said that a man's a man for that. And if there were but one slave in England and he did all the work while the rest of us made merry, this spirit that is in us would still cry aloud to God night and day. Whether or no this spirit was produced by, it clearly works with, a creed which postulates a humanized God and a vividly personal immortality. Men must not be busy merely like a swarm or even happy merely like a herd, for it is not a question of men but of a man. A man's meals may be poor but they must not be feast-chill. There must always be that about the meal which permits of its comparison to the sacrament. A man's bed may be hard but it must not be abject or unclean. There must always be about the bed, something of the decency of the death bed. This is the spirit which makes the Christian poor begin their terrible murmur whenever there is a turn of prices or a deadlock of toil that threatens them with vagabondage or pauperization. And we cannot encourage the Dean with any hope that this spirit can be cast out. Christendom will continue to suffer all the disadvantages of being Christian. It is the Dean who must be gently but firmly altered. He had absentmindedly strayed into the wrong continent and the wrong creed. I advise him to chuck it. But the case is more curious still. To connect the Dean with Confucian temples or traditions may have appeared fantastic, but it is not. Dr. Inge is not a stupid old Tory rector, strict both on church and state. Such a man might talk nonsense about the Christian socialists being court chaplains of King Deimos or about his own superb valor in defying the democracy that rages in the front pews of Anglican churches. We should not expect a mere old-fashioned country clergyman to know that Deimos has never been a king in England and precious seldom anywhere else. We should not expect him to realize that if King Deimos had any chaplains they would be uncommonly poorly paid. But Dr. Inge is not old-fashioned. He considers himself highly progressive and advanced. He is a new theologian. That is, he is liberal in theology and nothing else. He is apparently in sober fact and not as in any fantasy, in sympathy with those who would soften the superior claim of our creed by urging the rival creeds of the East, with those who would have soared the virtues of Buddhism or of Islam. He holds a high seat in that modern parliamentary religions where all believers respect each other's unbelief. Now this has a very sharp moral for modern religious reformers. When next you hear the liberal Christians say that we should take what is best in Oriental faiths, make quite sure what are the things that people like Dr. Inge call best. What are the things that people like Dr. Inge propose to take? You will not find them imitating the military valor of the Muslim. You will not find them imitating the miraculous ecstasy of the Hindu. The more you study the broad movement of today, the more you will find that these people want something much less like Chinese metaphysics and something much more like Chinese labor. You will find the leveling of creeds quite unexpectedly close to the lowering of wages. Dr. Inge is the typical Latitudinarian of today, and was never more so than when he appeared, not as the apostle of the blacks, but as the apostle of the black legs. Preached as it is almost entirely among the prosperous and polite, our brotherhood with Buddhism or Mohamedism practically means this, that the poor must be as meek as Buddhists, while the rich may be as ruthless as Mohamedans. That is what they call the reunion of all religions. The Romantic in the Rain The middle classes of modern England are quite fanatically fond of washing and are often enthusiastic for teetotalism. I cannot therefore comprehend why it is that they exhibit a mysterious dislike of rain. Rain, that inspiring and delightful thing, surely combines the qualities of these two ideals with quite a curious perfection. Our philanthropists are eager to establish public baths everywhere. Rain surely is a public bath. It might almost be called mixed bathing. The appearance of persons coming fresh from this great natural lustration is not perhaps polished or dignified, but for the matter of that, few people are dignified when coming out of a bath. But the scheme of rain in itself is one of an enormous purification. It realizes the dream of some insane hygienist. It scrubs the sky. Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starry raptors and starless corners of the cosmos. It is a cosmic spring cleaning. If the Englishman is really fond of cold baths, he ought not to grumble at the English climate for being a cold bath. In these days we are constantly told that we should leave our little special possessions and join in the enjoyment of common social institutions and a common social machinery. I offer the rain as a thoroughly socialist institution. It disregards that degraded delicacy which has hitherto led each gentleman to take his shower bath in private. It is a better shower bath because it is public and communal and best of all because somebody else pulls the string. As for the fascination of rain for the water-drinker, it is a fact the neglect of which I simply cannot comprehend. The enthusiastic water-drinker must regard a rainstorm as a sort of universal banquet and debauch of his own favorite beverage. Think of the imaginative intoxication of the wine-drinker if the crimson clouds sent down Claret or the golden clouds hawk. Paint upon primitive darkness some such scenes of apocalypse, towering and gorgeous skyscrapes in which champagne falls like fire from heaven, or the dark skies grow purple and tawny with the terrible colors of port. All this must the wild abstainer feel as he rolls in the long soaking grass, kicks his ecstatic heels to heaven, and listens to the roaring rain. It is he, the water-drinker, who ought to be the true bacchanal of the forests, where all the forests are drinking water. Moreover, the forests are apparently enjoying it. The trees rave and reel to and fro like drunken giants. They clash boughs as revelers clash cups. They roar on dying thirst and howl the health of the world. All around me, as I write, is the noise of nature drinking, and nature makes a noise when she is drinking, being by no means refined. If I counted Christian mercy to give a cup of cold water to a sufferer, shall I complain of these multitudinous cups of cold water handed round to all living things, a cup of water for every shrub, a cup of water for every weed? I would be ashamed to grumble at it. As Sir Philip Sidney said, their need is greater than mine, especially for water. There is a wild garment that still carries nobly the name of a wild Highland clan. A clan come from those hills where rain is not so much an incident as an atmosphere. Surely every man of imagination must feel a tempestuous flame of Celtic romance spring up within him whenever he puts on a Macintosh. I could never reconcile myself to carrying an umbrella. It is a pompous eastern business carried over the heads of despots in the dry hot lands. Shut up, an umbrella is an unmanageable walking stick. Often it is an inadequate tent. For my part I have no taste for pretending to be a walking pavilion. I think nothing of my hat and precious little of my head. If I am to be protected against wet it must be by some closer and more careless protection. Something that I can forget altogether. It might be a Highland plaid. It might be that yet more Highland thing, a Macintosh. And there is really something in the Macintosh of the military qualities of the Highlander. The proper cheap Macintosh has a blue and white sheen as of steel or iron. It gleams like armor. I like to think of it as the uniform of that ancient clan in some of its old and misty raids. I like to think of all the Macintoshes in their Macintoshes, descending on some doomed lowland village, their wet waterproofs flashing in the sun or moon. For indeed this is one of the real beauties of rainy weather. That while the amount of original and direct light is commonly lessened, the number of things that reflect light is unquestionably increased. There is less sunshine, but there are more shiny things. Such beautifully shiny things as pools and puddles and Macintoshes. It is like moving in a world of mirrors. And indeed this is the last and not the least gracious of the casual works of magic brought by rain. That while it decreases light, yet it doubles it. If it dims the sky, it brightens the earth. It gives the roads to the sympathetic eye something of the beauty of Venice. Shallow lakes of water reiterate every detail of earth and sky. We dwell in a double universe. Sometimes walking upon bare and lustrous pavements, wet under numerous lamps, a man seems a black blot on all that golden looking glass, and could fancy he was flying in a yellow sky. But wherever trees and towns hang head downwards in a pygmy puddle, the sense of celestial topsy-turvydom is the same. This bright, wet, dazzling confusion of shape and shadow of reality and reflection will appeal strongly to anyone with the transcendental instinct about this dreamy and dual life of ours. You will always give a man the strange sense of looking down at the skies. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. A Miscellany of Men by G. K. Chesterton. Section 10. The False Photographer When, as lately, events have happened that seem to the fancy at least, to test if not stagger the force of official government, it is amusing to ask oneself what is the real weakness of civilization, ours especially, when it contends with the one lawless man. I was reminded of one weakness this morning in turning over an old drawer full of pictures. This weakness in civilization is best expressed by saying that it cares more for science than for truth. It prides itself on its methods more than its results. It is satisfied with precision, discipline, good communications rather than the sense of reality. But there are precise falsehoods as well as precise facts. Discipline may only mean a hundred men making the same mistake at the same minute. And good communications may in practice be very like those evil communications which are said to corrupt good manners. Broadly we have reached a scientific age which wants to know whether the train is in the timetable, but not whether the train is in the station. I take one instance in our police inquiries that I happen to have come across, the case of photography. Some years ago a poet of considerable genius tragically disappeared and the authorities or the newspapers circulated a photograph of him so that he might be identified. The photograph, as I remembered, depicted or suggested a handsome, haughty, and somewhat pallid man with his head thrown back with long, distinguished features, colorless, thin hair, and slight moustache. And though conveyed merely by the head and shoulders, a definite impression of height. If I had gone by that photograph I should have gone about looking for a long, soldierly, but listless man with a profile rather like the Duke of Connaughts. Only as it happened I knew the poet personally. I had seen him a great many times and he had an appearance that nobody could possibly forget if seen only once. He had the mark of those dark and passionate Westland scotch, who before burns and after, have given many such dark eyes and dark emotions to the world. But in him the unmistakable strain, Gaelic or whatever it is, was accentuated almost to oddity and he looked like sums for the elf. He was small, with a big head, and a crescent of cold black hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness. Immediately under his eyes his cheekbones had so high a color that they might have been painted scarlet. Three black tufts, two on the upper lip and one under the lower, seemed to touch up the face with fierce mustaches of mephostalies. His eyes had that dancing madness in them which Stevenson saw in the Gaelic eyes of Alan Brecht. But he sometimes distorted the expression by screwing a monstrous monocle into one of them. A man more unmistakable would have been hard to find. You could have picked him up out of any crowd, so long as you had not seen his photograph. But in this scientific picture of him, twenty causes, accidental and conventional, had combined to obliterate him altogether. The limits of photography forbade the strong and almost melodramatic coloring of cheek and eyebrow. The accident of the lighting took nearly all the darkness out of the hair and made him look almost like a fair man. The framing and limitation of the shoulders made him look like a big man, and the devastating bore of being photographed when you want to write poetry made him look like a lazy man. Holding his head back as people do when they are being photographed for shot, but as he certainly never held it normally, accidentally concealed the bald dome that dominated his slight figure. Here we have a clockwork picture. Begun and finished by a button and a box of chemicals, from which every projecting feature has been more delicately and dexterously omitted than they could have been by the most namby-pamby flatterer painting in the weakest watercolors on the smoothest ivory. I happen to possess a book of Mr. Max Beerbaum's caricatures, one of which depicts the unfortunate poet in question. To say it represents an utterly incredible hobgoblin is to express in faint and inadequate language the license of its sprawling lines. The authorities thought it strictly safe and scientific to circulate the poet's photograph. They would have clamped me in an asylum if I had asked them to circulate Max's caricature. But the caricature would have been far more likely to find the man. This is a small but exact symbol of the failure of scientific civilization. It is so satisfied in knowing it has a photograph of a man that it never asks whether it has a likeness of him. Thus declarations, seemingly most detailed, have flashed along the wires of the world ever since I was a boy. We were told that in some row Boer policemen had shot an Englishman, a British subject, an English citizen. A long time afterwards we were quite casually informed that the English citizen was quite black. Well, it makes no difference to the moral question. Black men should be shot on the same ethical principles as white men. But it makes one distrust scientific communications which permitted so startling an alteration of the photograph. I'm sorry we got hold of a photographic negative in which a black man came out white. Later we were told that an Englishman had fought for the Boers against his own flag, which would have been a disgusting thing to do. Later it was admitted that he was an Irishman, which is exactly as different as if he had been a pole. Common sense, with all the facts before it, does see that black is not white, and that a nation that has never submitted has a right to moral independence. But why does it so seldom have all the facts before it? Why are the big, aggressive features, such as the blackness or the Celtic wrath, always left out in such official communications as they were left out in the photograph? My friend the poet had hair as black as an African and eyes as fierce as an Irishman. Why does our civilization drop all four of the facts? Its error is to omit the arresting thing which might really arrest the criminal. It strikes first the chilling note of science, demanding a man above the middle height, chinshaven with grey mouth stash, etc., which might mean Mr. Belfort or Sir Rebder's Buller. It does not seize the first fact of impression, as that a man is obviously a sailor or a Jew or a drunkard or a gentleman or a black or an albino or a prize fighter or an imbecile or an American. These are the realities by which the people really recognize each other. They are almost always left out of the inquiry. The Sultan There is one deep defect in our extension of cosmopolitan and imperial cultures. That is that in most human things, if you spread your butter far, you spread it thin. But there is another fact yet rooted in something dark and irrational in human nature. That is that when you find your butter thin, you begin to spread it. And it is just when you find your ideas wearing thin in your own mind that you begin to spread them among your fellow creatures. It is a paradox, but not my paradox. There are numerous cases in history, but I think the strongest case is this. That we have imperialism in all our clubs at the very time when we have orientalism in all our drawing rooms. I mean that the colonial ideal of such man as Cecil Rhodes did not arise out of any fresh creative idea of the western genius. It was a fad, and like most fads, an imitation. Well, what was wrong with Rhodes was not that like Cromwell or Hildebrand he made huge mistakes, nor even that he committed great crimes. It was that he committed these crimes and errors in order to spread certain ideas, and one one asked for the ideas they could not be found. Cromwell stood for Calvinism, Hildebrand for Catholicism, but Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the world. He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading the principles that he hadn't got. What he called his ideals were the dregs of a Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant but poisonous, that the fittest must survive and that anyone like himself must be the fittest, that the weakest must go to the wall and that anyone he could not understand must be the weakest. That was the philosophy which he lumberingly believed through his life like many another agnostic old bachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion, reverently quoted in the Review of Reviews, were simply the stalest ideas of his time. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hill somewhere in South Africa his church. It was not his fault, I mean, that he could not see that a church all to oneself is not a church at all. It is a madman's cell. It was not his fault that he figured out that God meant as much of the planet to be Anglo-Saxon as possible. Many evolutionists, much wiser, had figured out things even more baby-ish. He was an honest and humble recipient of the plotting popular science of his time. He spread no ideas that any cockney clerk and streatham could not have spread for him, but it was exactly because he had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and ruined republics to spread them. But the case is even stronger and stranger. Fashionable imperialism not only has no ideas of its own to extend, but such ideas as it has are actually borrowed from the brown and black peoples to whom it seeks to extend them. The crusading kings and knights might be represented as seeking to spread Western ideas in the East, but all that our imperialist aristocrats could do would be to spread Eastern ideas in the East, or that very governing class which urges Occidental imperialism has been deeply discolored with Oriental mysticism and cosmology. The same society lady who expects the Hindus to accept her view of politics has herself accepted their view of religion. She wants first to steal their earth and then to share their heaven. The same imperial cynic who wishes the Turks to submit to English science has himself submitted to Turkish philosophy to a holy Turkish view of despotism and destiny. There is an obvious and amusing proof of this in a recent life of Rhodes. The writer admits with proper imperial gloom the fact that Africa is still chiefly inhabited by Africans. He suggests Rhodes in the South confronting savages and Kitchener in the North facing Turks, Arabs, and Sudanese, and then he quotes this remark of Cecil Rhodes. It is inevitable fate that all this should be changed, and I should like to be the agent of fate. That was Cecil Rhodes' one small genuine idea, and it is an Oriental idea. Here we have evident all the ultimate idiocy of the present imperial position. Rhodes and Kitchener are to conquer Muslim Bedouins and Barbarians in order to teach them to believe only in inevitable fate. We are to wreck provinces and pour blood like Niagara, all in order to teach a turf, to say gizmat, which he has said since his cradle. We are to deny Christian justice and destroy international equality, all in order to teach an Arab to believe he is an agent of fate when he has never believed anything else. If Cecil Rhodes' vision could come true, which fortunately is increasingly improbable, such countries as Persia or Arabia would simply be filled with ugly and vulgar fatalists in Billy Cox, instead of with graceful and dignified fatalists in turbines. The best Western idea, the idea of spiritual liberty and danger of a doubtful and romantic future in which all things may happen. This essential Western idea Cecil Rhodes could not spread, because as he says himself, he did not believe in it. It was an Oriental who gave to Queen Victoria the crown of an Empress in addition to that of a Queen. He did not understand that the title of King is higher than that of Emperor. For in the East titles are meant to be vast and wild, to be extravagant poems. The brother of the Sun and Moon, the Caliph who lives forever. The King of England, at least in the days of real kings, did not bear a merely poetical title, but rather a religious one. He belonged to his people and not merely they to him. He was not merely a conqueror, but a father, yes, even when he was a bad father. But this sort of solid sanctity always goes with local affections and limits, and the Cecil Rhodes imperialism set up not the King but the Sultan with all the typically Eastern ideas of the magic of money, of luxury without uproar, of prostate provinces and a chosen race. Indeed, Cecil Rhodes illustrated almost every quality essential to the Sultan, from the love of diamonds to the scorn of women. The Architect of Spears The other day in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusion which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic architecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explained in most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothic eclipses the classical via certain richness and complexity at once lively and mysterious. This is true, but Oriental decoration is equally rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No man ever got out of a turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a cathedral tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India there is the presence of something stiff and heartless, something tortured and silent. Dwarf trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers and hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendor and contrast of their color the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the vision of a sneering sage who sees the whole universe as a pattern. Certainly no one ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens to dislike it. Or again some will say that it is the liberty of the Middle Ages in the use of the comic or even the course that makes the Gothic more interesting than the Greek. There's more truth in this, indeed there is real truth in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals would have passed the censor of plays. We talk of the inimitable grandeur of the old cathedrals, but indeed it is rather their gaiety that we do not dare to imitate. We should be rather surprised if a chorister suddenly began singing Bill Bailey in church, yet that would be only doing in music what the medieval did in sculpture. They put into a misery seat the very scenes that we put into a music hall song, comic domestic scenes similar to the spilling of the beer and the hanging out of the washing. But though the gaiety of Gothic is one of its features, it is also not the secret of its unique effect. We see a domestic topsy-turvy-dom in many Japanese sketches, but delightful as these are with their fairy tree tops, paper houses, and toddling infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of a kind quite different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some have even been so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure in medieval building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is rough, shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed after the same fashion. South sea idols with painted eyes and radiating bristles are a delight to the eye, but they do not affect it in at all the same way as Westminster Abbey. Some again, going to another and almost equally foolish extreme, ignore the course in comic and medievalism and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and simplicity as of a saint with his hands joined in prayer. Here again the uniqueness is missed. There are Renaissance things, such as the ethereal silvery drawings of Raphael. There are even pagan things, such as the praying boy, which express as fresh and austere piety. None of these explanations explain, and I never saw what was the real point about Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln and saw it behind the row of furniture vans. I did not know they were furniture vans. At the first glance and in the smoky distance I thought they were a row of cottages. A low stone wall cut off the wheels and the vans were somewhat of the same color as the yellowish clay or stone of the buildings around them. I had come across that internable eastern plain which is like the open sea, and all the more so because the one small hill and tower of Lincoln stands up in it like a lighthouse. I had climbed the sharp crooked streets up to this ecclesiastical citadel just in front of me was a flourishing and richly colored kitchen garden. Beyond that was the low stone wall. Beyond that the row of vans that looked like houses and beyond and above that straight and swift and dark, light as a flight of birds and terrible as the tower of Babel. Lincoln Cathedral seemed to rise out of human sight. As I looked at it I asked myself the question that I have asked here. What was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not variety. They were solemn, but it was not solemnity. They were farcical, but it was not farce. It was in them the thrills ensues a man of our blood and history that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or an Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda. All of a sudden the vans I had mistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. In the start this gave to my eyes and mind I really fancied that the cathedral was moving toward the right. The two huge towers seemed to start striding across the plain like the two legs of some giant whose body was covered with the clouds. Then I saw what it was. The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive and second, that it is on the march. It is the church militant. It is the only fighting architecture. All it spires are spears at rest, and all its stones are stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion I could hear the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty and numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of imperial elephants. The graven foliage reathed in blue-like banners going to battle. The silence was deafening with all the mingled noises of a military march. The great bell shook down as the organ shook up its thunder. The thirsty, throated gargoyle shouted like trumpets from all the roofs and pinnacles as they passed and from the lectern in the core of the cathedral. The eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his wings of brass. In amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight. The voice of the great half-military master builder, the architect of spears. I could almost fancy he wore armor while he made that church, and I knew indeed that under a scriptural figure he had borne in either hand the trowel and the sword. I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had marched out of the sacred east alive and interlocked like an army. Some eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of the desert. He had slept by it as a world-forgotten pyramid and had been awoke at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the tall pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts. On such a night every snake or sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner of the architecture. And the fiercely colored saints, marching eternally in the flamboyant windows, would have carried their glorials like torches across dark lands and distant seas till the whole mountain of music and darkness and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln Hill. So, for some hundred and sixty seconds, I saw the battle-beauty of the Gothic. Then the last furniture van shifted itself away, and I saw only a church tower in a quiet English town, round which the English birds were floating. End of section 10. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Miscellany of Men by G. K. Chesterton. Section 11. The Man on the Top. There is a fact at the root of all realities today which cannot be stated too simply. It is that the powers of this world are now not trusted simply because they are not trustworthy. This can be quite clearly seen and said without any reference to our several passions or butters and chips. It does not follow that we think such a distrust a wise sentiment to express. It does not even follow that we think it a good sentiment to entertain. But such is the sentiment simply because such is the fact. The distinction can be quite easily defined in an example. I do not think that private workers owe an indefinite loyalty to their employer. But I do think that patriotic soldiers owe a more or less indefinite loyalty to their leader in battle. But even if they ought to trust their captain, the fact remains that they often do not trust him, and the fact remains that he often is not fit to be trusted. Most of the employers and many of the socialists seem to have got a very muddled ethic about the basis of such loyalty and perpetually try to put employers and officers upon the same disciplinary plane. I should have thought myself that the difference was alphabetical enough. It has nothing to do with the idealizing of war or the materializing of trade. It is the distinction in the primary purpose. There might be much more elegance and poetry in a shop under William Morris than in a regiment under Lord Kitchener. But the difference is not in the persons or the atmosphere but in the aim. The British army does not exist in order to pay Lord Kitchener. William Morris's shop, however, artistic and philanthropic, did exist to pay William Morris. If it did not pay the shopkeeper, it failed as a shop. But Lord Kitchener does not fail if he is underpaid, but only if he is defeated. The object of the army is the safety of the nation from one particular class of perils. Therefore, since all citizens owe loyalty to the nation, all citizens who are soldiers owe loyalty to the army. But nobody has any obligation to make some particular rich man richer. A man is bound, of course, to consider the indirect results of his action in a strike, but he is bound to consider that in a swing or a giddy-go-round or a smoking concert, in his wildest holiday or his most private conversation. But direct responsibility, like that of a soldier, he has none. He need not aim solely and directly at the good of the shop, for the simple reason that the shop is not aiming solely and directly at the good of the nation. The shopman is, under decent restraints, let us hope, trying to get what he can out of the nation. The shop assistant may, under the same decent restraints, get what he can out of the shopkeeper. All this distinction is very obvious. At least, I should have thought so. But the primary point which I mean is this, that even if we do take the military view of mercantile service, even if we do call the rebellious shop assistant disloyal, that leaves exactly where it was the question of whether he is, in point of fact, in a good or bad shop. Granted that all Mr. Poole's employees are bound to follow forever the cloven penin of the perfect pair of trousers, it is all the more true that the penin may, in point of fact, become imperfect. Granted that all Barney Barnato's workers ought to have followed him to death or glory, it is still a perfectly legitimate question to ask which he was likely to lead them to. Granted that Dr. Sawyer's boy ought to die for his master's medicines, we may still hold an inquest to find out if he died of them. While we forbid the soldier to shoot the general, we may still wish the general were shot. The fundamental fact of our time is the failure of the successful man. Somehow we have so arranged the rules of the game that the winners are worthless for other purposes. They can secure nothing except the prize. The very rich are neither aristocrats nor self-made men. They are accidents or rather calamities. All revolutionary language is the generation behind the times in talking of their futility. A revolutionist would say with perfect truth that coal owners know next to nothing about coal mining. But we are past that point. Coal owners know next to nothing about coal owning. They do not develop and defend the nature of their own monopoly with any consistent and courageous policy, however wicked, as did the older aristocrats with the monopoly of land. They have not the virtues nor even the vices of tyrants. They have only their powers. It is the same with all the powerful of today. It is the same, for instance, with the high-placed and high-paid official. Not only is the judge not judicial, but the arbiter is not even arbitrary. The arbiter decides not by some gust of justice or injustice in his soul, like the old desperate dooming men under a tree, but by the permanent climate of the class to which he happens to belong. The ancient wig of the judge is often indistinguishable from the old wig of the flunky. To judge about success or failure, one must see things very simply. One must see them in masses, as the artist, half-closing his eyes against details, sees light and shade. That is the only way in which a just judgment can be formed as to whether any departure or development, such as Islam or the American Republic, has been a benefit upon the whole. Seeing close such great erections always abound in ingenious detail and impressive solidity, it is only by seeing them afar off that one can tell if the tower leans. Now if we thus take in the whole tilt or posture of our modern state, we shall simply see this fact, that those classes who have on the whole govern have on the whole failed. If you go to a factory, you will see some very wonderful wheels going round. You will be told that the employer often comes there early in the morning, that he has great organizing power, that if he works over the colossal accumulation of wealth, he also works over its wise distribution. All this may be true of many employers, and it is practically said of all. But if we shade our eyes from all this dazzle of detail, if we simply ask what has been the main feature, the upshot, the final fruit of the capitalist system, there is no doubt about the answer. The special and solid result of the reign of the employers has been unemployment. Unemployment not only increasing, but becoming at last the very pivot upon which the whole process turns. Or again, if you visit the villages that depend on one of the great's wires, you will hear praises, often just of the landlord's good sense or good nature. You will hear of whole systems of pensions or of care for the sick, like those of a small and separate nation. You will see much cleanliness, order, and business habits in the offices and accounts of the estate. But if you ask again what has been the upshot, what has been the actual result of the reign of landlords, again, the answer is plain. At the end of the reign of landlords, men will not live on the land. The practical effect of having landlords is not having tenants. The practical effect of having employers is that men are not employed. The unrest of the populace is therefore more than a murmur against tyranny. It is against a sort of treason. It is the suspicion that even at the top of the tree, even in the seats of the mighty, our very success is unsuccessful. The other kind of man. There are some who are conciliated by conciliation boards. There are some who, when they hear of royal commissions, breathe again or snore again. There are those who look forward to compulsory arbitration courts as to the islands of the blessed. These men do not understand the day that they look upon or the sights that their eyes have seen. The almost sacramental idea of representation, by which the few may incarnate the many, arose in the Middle Ages and has done great things for justice and liberty. It has had its real hours of triumph, as when the state's general meant to renew France's youth like the Eagles, or when all the virtues of the Republic fought and ruled in the figure of Washington. It is not having one of its hours of triumph now. The real democratic unrest at this moment is not an extension of the representative process, but rather a revolt against it. It is no good giving those in revolt more boards and committees and compulsory regulations. It is against these very things that they are revolting. Men are not only rising against their oppressors, but against their representatives, or as they would say, their misrepresentatives. The inner and actual spirit of workaday England is coming out not in the applause, but in the anger, as a God who should come out of his tabernacle to rebuke and confound his priests. There is a certain kind of man whom we see many times in a day, but whom we do not in general bother very much about. He is the kind of man of whom his wife says that a better husband, when he's sober, you couldn't have. She sometimes adds that he never is sober, but this is in anger and exaggeration. Really, he drinks much less and works much more than the modern legend supposes. But it is quite true that he has not the horror of bodily outbreak, natural to the classes that contain ladies, and it is quite true that he never has that alert and inventive sort of industry, natural to the classes from which men can climb into great wealth. He has grown partly by necessity, but partly also by temper, accustomed to have dirty clothes and dirty hands normally, and without discomfort. He regards cleanliness as a kind of separate and special costume to be put on for great festivals. He has several really curious characteristics which would attract the eyes of sociologists if they had any eyes. For instance, his vocabulary is coarse and abusive, in market contrast to his actual spirit which is generally patient and civil. He has an odd way of using certain words of really horrible meaning, but using them quite innocently and without the most distant taint of the evils to which they allude. He is rather sentimental, and like most sentimental people, not devoid of snobbishness. At the same time he believes the ordinary, manly, common places of freedom and fraternity, as he believes most of the decent traditions of Christian men. He finds it very difficult to act according to them, but this difficulty is not confined to him. He has a strong and individual sense of humor, and not much power of corporate or militant action. He is not a socialist. Finally he bears no more resemblance to a labour member than he does to a city alderman or a diehard duke. This is the common labourer of England, and it is he who is on the march at last. See this man in your mind as you would see him in the street. Realize that it is his open mind we wish to influence, or his empty stomach we wish to cure. And then consider seriously, if you can, the five men, including two of his own alleged oppressors, who were summoned as a royal commission to consider his claims when he or his sort went out on strike upon the railways. I knew nothing against, indeed I know nothing about any of the gentlemen then summoned, beyond a bare introduction to Mr. Henderson whom I liked, but whose identity I was in no danger of confusing with that of a railway porter. I do not think that any old gentleman, however absent-minded, would be likely on arriving at Houston, let us say, to hand his Gladstone bag to Mr. Henderson, or to attempt to reward that politician with two pence. Of the others I can only judge by the facts about their status as set forth in the public press. The Chairman, Sir David Harrell, appeared to be an ex-official, distinguished in, of all things in the world, the Irish Constabulary. I have no earthly reason to doubt that the Chairman meant to be fair, but I am not talking about what men mean to be, but about what they are. The police in Ireland are practically an army of occupation. A man serving in them or directing them is practically a soldier, and of course he must do his duty as such. But it seems truly extraordinary to select as one likely to sympathize with the democracy of England, a man whose whole business and life it has been to govern against its will the democracy of Ireland. What should we say if Russian strikers were offered the sympathetic arbitration of the head of the Russian police in Finland or Poland? And if we do not know that the whole civilized world sees Ireland with Poland as a typical oppressed nation, it is time we did. The Chairman, whatever his personal virtues, must be by instinct and habit akin to the capitalists in the dispute. To more of the commissioners actually were the capitalists in the dispute. Then came Mr. Henderson pushing his trolley and cheerily crying by your leave, and then another less known gentleman who had corresponded with the Board of Trade and had thus gained some strange claim to represent the very poor. Now, people like this might quite possibly produce a rational enough report, and in this or that respect even improve things. Men of that kind are tolerably kind, tolerably patriotic, and tolerably business-like. But if anyone supposes that men of that kind can conceivably quiet any real quarrel with the man of the other kind, the man whom I first described, it is frantic. The common worker is angry exactly because he has found out that all these boards consist of the same well-dressed kind of man, whether they are called governmental or capitalist. If anyone hopes that he will reconcile the poor, I say, as I said at the beginning, that such a one has not looked on the light of day or dwelt in the land of the living. But I do not criticize such a commission except for one most practical and urgent purpose. It will be answered to me that the first kind of man whom I spoke could not really be on boards and committees, as modern England is managed. His dirt, though necessary and honorable, would be offensive. His speech, though rich and figurative, would be almost incomprehensible. Let us grant for the moment that this is so. This kind of man with his sooty hair or sanguinary adjectives cannot be represented at our committees of arbitration. Therefore the other kind of man, fairly prosperous, fairly plausible, at home at least with the middle class, capable at least of reaching and touching the upper class, he must remain the only kind of man for such counsels. Very well. If then you give, at any future time, any kind of compulsory powers to set counsels to prevent strikes, you will be driving the first kind of man to work for a particular master as much as if you drove him with a whip, the medieval villain. I see that there had been more attempts at the whitewashing of King John. But the gentleman who wrote has a further interest in the matter, for he believes that King John was innocent, not only on this point, but as a whole. He thinks King John has been very badly treated, though I am not sure whether he would attribute to that plantagenet, a saintly merit, or merely a humdrum respectability. I sympathize with the whitewashing of King John merely because it is a protest against our waxwork style of history. Everybody is in a particular attitude, with a particular moral attributes. Rufus is always hunting, and Cordy Leon always crusading. Henry VIII always marrying, and Charles I always having his head cut off. Alfred rapidly and in rotation, making his people's clocks and spoiling their cakes, and King John pulling out Jew's teeth with the celerity and industry of an American dentist. Anything is good that shakes all this stiff simplification, and makes us remember that these men were once alive, that is mixed, free, flippant, and inconsistent. It gives the mind a healthy kick to know that Alfred head fits, that Charles I prevented enclosures, that Rufus was really interested in architecture, and that Henry VIII was really interested in theology. And as these scraps of reality can startle us into a more solid imagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they are on the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I of Puritan, and John a jolly good fellow, if this makes us feel that they were people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself think that John was a nice gentleman, but for all that the popular picture of him is all wrong. Whether he had any generous qualities or not, he had what commonly makes them possible, their devil courage, for instance, and hot headed decision. But above all he had a morality which he broke, but which we misunderstand. The medieval mind turned centrally upon the pivot of free will. In their social system the medieval were too much party per pale as their heralds would say, too rigidly cut up by fences and quarterings of guild or degree. But in their moral philosophy they always thought of man as standing free and doubtful at the crossroads in a forest. While they clad and bound the body and to some extent the mind too stiffly and quaintly for our taste, they had a much stronger sense than we have of the freedom of the soul. For them the soul always hung poised like an eagle in the heavens of liberty. Many of the things that strike a modern as most fantastic came from their keen sense of the power of choice. For instance, the greatest of the schoolmen devotes folios to the minute description of what the world would have been like if Adam had refused the apple. What king's laws, baby's animals, planets would have been in an unfallen world. So intensely does he feel that Adam might have decided the other way, that he sees a complete and complex vision of another world, a world that now can never be. This sense of the stream of life in a man that may turn either way can be felt through all their popular ethics in legend, chronicle, and ballot. It is a feeling which has been weakened among us by two heavy intellectual forces, the Calvinism of the 17th century and the physical science of the 19th. Whatever other truths they may have taught have darkened this liberty with a sense of doom. We think of bad men as something like black men, a separate and incurable kind of people. The Byronic spirit was really a sort of operatic Calvinism. It brought the villain upon the stage, the lost soul, the modern version of King John. But the contemporaries of King John did not feel like that about him, even when they detested him. They instinctively felt him to be a man of mixed passions like themselves, who was allowing his evil passions to have much too good a time of it. They might have spoken of him as a man in considerable danger of going to hell, but they would not have talked of him as if he had come from there. In the ballads of Percy or Robin Hood, it frequently happens that the King comes upon the scene and his ultimate decision makes the climax of the tale. But we do not feel, as we do in the Byronic or modern romance, that there is a definite stage direction, enter Tyron. Nor do we behold a deuce ex machina, who is certain to do all that is mild and just. The King in the ballad is in a state of virile indecision. Sometimes he will pass from a towering passion to the most sweeping magnanimity and friendliness. Sometimes he will begin an act of vengeance and be churned from it by a jest. Yet this august levity is not moral indifference, it is moral freedom. It is the strong sense in the writer that the King, being the type of man with power, will probably sometimes use it badly and sometimes well. In this sense, John is certainly misrepresented, for he is pictured as something that none of his own friends or enemies saw. In that sense, he was certainly not so black as he is painted, for he lived in a world where everyone was piebald. King John would be represented in a modern play or novel as a kind of degenerate, a shifty-eyed moral maniac with a twist in his soul's backbone and green blood in his veins. The medievals were quite capable of boiling him in melted lead, but they would have been quite incapable of despairing of his soul in the modern fashion. A striking afortiori case is that of the strange medieval legend Robert the Devil. Robert was represented as a monstrous birth sent to an embittered woman, actually an answer to prayers to Satan, and his earlier actions are simply those of the infernal fire lit loose upon Earth. Yet though he can be called almost literally a child of hell, yet the climax of the story is his repentance at Rome and his great reparation. That is the paradox of medieval morals, as it must appear to the moderns. We must try to conceive a race of men who hated John and sought his blood and believed every abomination about him, who would have been quite capable of assassinating or torturing him in the extremity of their anger, and yet we must admit that they would not really have been fundamentally surprised if he had shaved his head in humiliation, given all his goods to the poor, embraced the lepers in a Lazarus house, and been canonized as a saint in heaven. So strongly did they hold that the pivot of will should turn freely, which now is rusted and sticks. For we, whatever our political opinions, certainly never think of our public men like that. If we hold the opinion that Mr. Lloyd George is a noble tribune of the populace and protector of the poor, we do not admit that he can ever have altered with the truth or bargained with the powerful. If we hold the equally idiotic opinion that he is a red and rabbit socialist maddening mobs into mutiny and theft, then we expect him to go on maddening them and us. We do not expect him, let us say, suddenly to go into a monastery. We have lost the idea of repentance, especially in public things. That is why we cannot really get rid of our great national abuses of economic tyranny and aristocratic Everest. Progress, in the modern sense, is a very dismal drudge, and mostly consists of being moved on by the police. We move on because we are not allowed to move back. But the really ragged prophets, the real revolutionists who held high language in the palaces of kings, they did not confine themselves to saying onward Christian soldiers, still less onward futurist soldiers. What they said to high emperors and to whole empires was, Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die? End of Section 11. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Miscellany of Men by G. K. Chesterton. Section 12. The Divine Detective. Every person of sound education enjoys detective stories, and there are even several points on which they have a hearty superiority to most modern books. The detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive. But those who have enjoyed the Roman policier must have noted one thing, that when the murderer is caught, he is hardly ever hanged. That, says Sherlock Holmes, is the advantage of being a private detective. After he has caught, he can set free. The Christian Church can best be defined as an enormous private detective, correcting that official detective the state. This indeed is one of the injustices done to historic Christianity, injustices which arise from looking at complex exceptions and not at the large and simple fact. We are constantly being told that theologians used racks and thumb screws, and so they did. Theologians used racks and thumb screws, just as they used thimbles and three-legged stools, because everybody else used them. Christianity no more created the medieval tortures than it did the Chinese tortures. It inherited them from any empire, as heathen as the Chinese. The church did, in an evil hour, consent to imitate the commonwealth and employ cruelty. But if we open our eyes and take in the whole picture, if we look at the general shape and color of the thing, the real difference between the church and the state is huge and plain. The state in all lands and ages has created a machinery of punishment, more bloody and brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutal everywhere. The church is the only institution that ever attempted to create a machinery of pardon. The church is the only thing that ever attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to avenge, but in order to forgive them. The stake and rack were merely the weakness of the religion, its snobberies, its surrenders to the world. Its specialty, or if you like its oddity, was this merciless mercy, the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not slay. I can best illustrate what I mean by referring to two popular plays on somewhat parallel topics, which have been successful here and in America. The passing of the third floor back is a humane and reverent experiment, dealing with the influence of one unknown but divine figure as he passes through a group of squalid characters. I have no desire to make cheap fun of the extremely abrupt conversions of all these people. That is a point of art, not of morals, and after all many conversions have been abrupt. This saviour's method of making people good is to tell them how good they are already, and in the case of suicidal outcasts whose moral backs are broken and who are soaked with sincere self-contempt, I can imagine that this might be quite the right way. I should not deliver this message to authors or members of parliament because they would so heartily agree with it. Still, it is not altogether here that I differ from the moral of Mr. Jerome's play. I differ vitally from his story because it is not a detective story. There is in it none of this great Christian idea of tearing their evil out of man. It lacks the realism of the saints. Redemption should bring truth as well as peace, and truth is a fine thing, though the materialists did go mad about it. Things must be faced even in order to be forgiven. The great objection to letting sleeping dogs lie is that they lie in more senses than one. But in Mr. Jerome's passing of the third floor back, the Redeemer is not a divine detective, pitiless in his resolve to know and pardon. Rather, he is a sort of divine dupe who does not pardon at all because he does not see anything that is going on. It may or may not be true to say Toot Comprendi as Toot Partener, but it is much more evidently true to say Rain Comprendi as Rain Partener. And the third floor back does not seem to comprehend anything. He might, after all, be a quite selfish sentimentalist who founded comforting to think well of his neighbors. There is nothing very heroic and loving after you have been deceived. The heroic business is to love after you have been undeceived. When I saw this play, it was natural to compare it with another play which I had not seen but which I have read in its printed version. I mean Mr. Ran Kennedy's Servant in the House, the success of which sprawls over so many of the American newspapers. This also is concerned with the dim, yet evidently divine figure changing the destinies of a whole group of persons. It is a better play structurally than the other. In fact, it is a very fine play indeed, but there is nothing aesthetic or fastidious about it. It is as much or more than the other sensational, democratic, and if I use the word in a sound and good sense, salvationist. But the difference lies precisely in this, that the Christ of Mr. Kennedy's play insists on really knowing all the souls that he loves. He declines to conquer by a kind of supernatural stupidity. He pardons evil, but he will not ignore it. In other words, he is a Christian and not a Christian scientist. The distinction doubtless is partly explained by the problems severly selected. Mr. Jerome practically supposes Christ to be trying to save disreputable people, and that of course is naturally a simple business. Mr. Kennedy supposes him to be trying to save the reputable people, which is a much larger affair. The chief characters in The Servant in the House are a popular and strenuous vicar, universally respected, and his fashionable and forcible wife. It would have been no good to tell these people they had some good in them, for that was what they were telling themselves all day long. They had to be reminded that they had some bad in them, instinctive idolatries and silent treasons, which they always tried to forget. It is in connection with these crimes of wealth and culture that we face the real problem of positive evil. The whole of Mr. Blatchford's controversy about sin was vitiated throughout by one's consciousness that whenever he wrote the word sinner, he thought of a man in rags. But here again we can find truth merely by referring to vulgar literature, its unfailing fountain. Whoever beads a detective story about poor people. The poor have crimes, but the poor have no secrets, and it is because the proud have secrets that they need to be detected before they are forgiven. The Elf of Japan. There are things in this world of which I can say seriously that I love them, but I do not like them. The point is not merely verbal, but psychologically quite valid. Cats are the first things that occur to me as examples of the principle. Cats are so beautiful that a creature from another star might fall in love with them, and so incalculable that he might kill them. Some of my friends take quite a high moral line about cats. Some, like Mr. Titterton, I think, admire a cat for its moral independence and readiness to scratch anybody if he does not behave himself. Others, like Mr. Bellow, regard the cat as cruel and secret, a fit friend for witches, one who will devour everything except indeed poisoned food. So utterly lacking is it in Christian simplicity and humility. For my part I have neither of these feelings. I admire cats as I admire catkins, those little fluffy things that hang on trees. They are both pretty and both furry and both declare the glory of God. And this abstract exultation in all living things is truly to be called love, for it is a higher feeling than mere affectionate convenience. It is a vision. It is heroic, and even saintly, in this, that it asks for nothing in return. I love all the cats in the street, as St. Francis of Assisi loved all the birds in the wood, or all the fishes in the sea. Not so much, of course, but then I am not a saint. But he did not wish to bridle a bird and ride on its back as one bridles and rides on a horse. He did not wish to put a collar around a fish's neck, marked with the name Francis and the address Assisi, as one does with a dog. He did not wish them to belong to him, or himself to belong to them. In fact, it would be a very awkward experience to belong to a lot of fishes. But a man does belong to his dog, in another but equally real sense with that in which the dog belongs to him. The two bonds of obedience and responsibility vary very much with the dogs and the men, but they are both bonds. In other words, a man does not merely love a dog as he might, in a mystical moment, love any sparrow that perched on his windowsill or any rabbit that ran across his path. A man likes a dog, and that is a serious matter. To me, unfortunately perhaps, for I speak merely of individual taste, a cat is a wild animal. A cat is nature personified. Like nature it is so mysterious that one cannot quite repose even in its beauty. But like nature again it is so beautiful that one cannot believe that it is really cruel. Perhaps it isn't, and there again it is like nature. Men of old time worship cats as they worshiped crocodiles, and those magnificent old mystics knew what they were about. The moment in which one really loves cats is the same as that in which one moderately and within reason loves crocodiles. It is that divine instant when a man feels himself, no, not absorbed into the unity of all things, although some fancy, but delighting in the difference of all things. At the moment when a man really knows he is a man, he will feel, however faintly, a kind of fairy tale pleasure in the fact that a crocodile is a crocodile. All the more will he exalt in the things that are more evidently beautiful than crocodiles, such as flowers, and birds, and cats, which are more beautiful than either. But it does not follow that he will wish to pick all the flowers, or to cage all the birds, or to own all the cats. No one who still believes in democracy and the rights of man will admit that any division between men and men can be anything but a fanciful analogy to the division between men and animals. But in a sphere of such fanciful analogy there are even human beings whom I feel to be like cats in this respect, that I can love them without liking them. I feel it about certain quaint and alien societies, especially about the Japanese, the exquisite old Japanese drossmanship of which we shall see no more. Now Japan has gone in for progress and imperialism, had a quality that was infinitely attractive and intangible. Japanese pictures were really rather like pictures made by cats. They were full of feathery softness and of sudden and spirited scratches. If anyone will wander in some gallery, fortunate enough to have a fine collection of those slight water-colored sketches on rice paper which come from the remote east, he will observe many elements in them which a fanciful person might consider feline. There is for instance that odd enjoyment of the tops of trees, those airy traceries of forks and fading twigs, up to which certainly no artist but only a cat could climb. There is that elvish love of the full moon as large and lucid as the Chinese lantern hung in these tenuous branches. That moon is so large and luminous that one can imagine a hundred cats howling under it. Then there is the exhaustive treatment of the anatomy of birds and fish, subjects in which cats are said to be interested. Then there is the slanting cat-like eyes of all these eastern gods and men, but this is getting altogether too coincident. We shall have another racial theory in no time beginning, are the Japanese cats? And though I shall not believe in my theories, somebody else might. There are people among my esteemed correspondents who might believe anything. It is enough for me to say here that in this small respect Japanese affect me like cats. I mean that I love them, I love their quaint and native poetry, their instinct of easy civilization, their unique unreplaceable art, the testimony they bear to the bustling irrepressible activities of nature and demand. If I were a real mystic looking down on them from a real mountain, I am sure I should love them more even than the strong winged and unwearyed birds or the fruitful ever-multiplying fish. But as for liking them as one likes a dog, that is quite another matter. That would mean trusting them. In the old English and Scotch ballads, the fairies are regarded very much in the way that I feel inclined to regard Japanese and the cats. They are not especially spoken of as evil, they are enjoyed as witching and wonderful, but they are not trusted as good. You do not say the wrong words or give the wrong gifts to them, and there is a curious silence about what would happen to you if you did. Now to me Japan, the Japan of art, was always a fairyland. What trees as gay as flowers and peaks as white as wedding cakes? What lanterns as large as houses and houses as frail as lanterns? But the missionary explained, I read in the paper, that the assertion and denial about the Japanese use of torture was a mere matter of verbal translation. The Japanese would not call twisting the thumbs back torture. The Chartered Libertine. I find myself in agreement with Mr. Robert Lind for his most just remark in connection with the Malatesta case, that the police are becoming a peril to society. I have no attraction to that sort of atheist asceticism to which the pure types of anarchism tend. But both an atheist and an ascetic are better men than a spy, and it is ignominious to see one's country thus losing her special point of honor about asylum and liberty. It will be quite a new departure if we begin to protect and whitewash foreign policemen. I always understood it was only English policemen who were absolutely spotless. Who good many of us, however, have begun to feel with Mr. Lind, and on all sides, authorities and officials are being questioned. But there is one most graphic and extraordinary fact which did not lie in Mr. Lind's way to touch upon, but which somebody really must seize and emphasize. It is this, that at the very time when we are all beginning to doubt these authorities, we are letting laws pass to increase their most capricious powers. All our commissions, petitions, and letters to the papers are asking whether these authorities can give an account of their stewardship, and at the same moment all our laws are decreeing that they shall not give any account of their stewardship, but shall become yet more irresponsible stewards. Bills, like the feeble-minded Bill and the inebriate Bill, very appropriate names for them, actually arm with scorpions the hand that has chastised the malatestas and malecas with whips. The inspector, the doctor, the police sergeant, the well-paid person who writes certificates and passes this, that, or the other. This sort of man is being trusted with more authority, apparently because he is being doubted with more reason. In one room we are asking why the government and the great experts between them cannot sail a ship. In another room we are deciding that the government and experts shall be allowed without trial or discussion to amure anyone's body, damn anyone's soul, and dispose of unborn generations with the levity of a pagan god. We are putting the official on the throne while he is still in the dock. The mere meaning of words is now strangely forgotten and falsified, as when people talk of an author's message without thinking whom it is from. And I have noted in these connections the strange misuse of another word. It is the excellent medieval word, charter. I remember the act that sought to save gutter boys from cigarettes was called the children's charter. Similarly the act which seeks to lock up as lunatics, people who are not lunatics, was actually called a charter of the feeble-minded. Now this terminology is insanely wrong, even if the bills are right. Even were they right in theory they would be applied only to the poor, like many better rules about education and cruelty. A woman was lately punished for cruelty because her children were not washed when it was proved that she had no water. From that it will be an easy step in advance thought to punishing a man for wine-bibbing when it is proved that he had no wine. Rifts in right reason widen down the ages, and when we have begun by shutting up confessedly kind person for cruelty, we may yet come to shutting up Mr. Tom Mann for feeble-mindedness. But even if such laws do good to children or idiots, it is wrong to use the word charter. A charter does not mean a thing that does good to people. It means a thing that grants people more rights and liberties. It may be a good thing for gutter boys to be deprived of their cigarettes. It might be a good thing for aldermen to be deprived of their cigars. But I think the Goldsmiths Company would be very much surprised if the king granted them a new charter in place of their medieval charter, and it only meant that policemen might pull the cigars out of their mouths. It may be a good thing that all drunkards should be locked up, and many acute statesmen, King John for instance, would certainly have thought it a good thing if all aristocrats could be locked up. But even that somewhat cynical prince would scarcely have granted to the barons a thing called the Great Charter, and then locked them all up on the strength of it. If he had, this interpretation of the word charter would have struck the barons with considerable surprise. I doubt if their narrow medieval minds could have taken it in. The roots of the real England are in the early Middle Ages, and no Englishman will ever understand his own language or even his own conscience until he understands them, and he will never understand them till he understands this word charter. I will attempt in a moment to state in older, more suitable terms what a charter was. In modern, practical and political terms, it is quite easy to state what a charter was. A charter was the thing that the railway workers wanted last Christmas and did not yet, and apparently will never get. It is called, in the current jargon, recognition, the acknowledgement in so many words by society of the immunities or freedoms of a certain set of men. If there had been railways in the Middle Ages, there would probably have been a railway men's guild, and it would have had a charter from the king defining their rights. A charter is the expression of an idea still true, then almost universal, that authority is necessary for nothing so much as for the granting of liveries. Like everything medieval, it ramified back to a routine religion, and was a sort of small copy of the Christian idea of man's creation. Man was free, not because there was no God, but because it needed a God to set him free. By authority he was free, by authority the craftsmen of the guilds were free, many other great philosophers took and take the other view. The Lucretian pagans, the Muslim fatalists, the modern monists and determinists, all roughly confined themselves to saying that God gave man a law. The medieval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter. Modern feeling may not sympathize with its list of liberties, which include the liberty to be damned, but that has nothing to do with the fact that it was a gift of liberties and not of laws. This was mirrored however dimly in the whole system. There was a great deal of gross inequality, and in other aspects absolute equality was taken for granted. But the point is that equality and inequality were ranks or rights. There were not only things one was forbidden to do, but things one was forbidden to forbid. A man was not only definitely responsible, but definitely irresponsible. The holidays of his soul were immovable feasts. All a charter really meant lingers alive in that poetic phrase that calls the wind a chartered libertine. Lie awake at night and hear the wind blowing. Hear it knock at every man's door, and shout down every man's chimney. Feel how it takes liberties with everything, having taken primary liberty for itself. Feel that the wind is always a vagabond, and sometimes almost a housebreaker. But remember that in the days when free men had charters they held that the wind itself was wild by authority and was only free because it had a father. End of section 12