 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. A Miscellany of Men by G. K. Chesterton. Section 5. The Hypothetical Householder We have read of some celebrated philosopher who was so absent-minded that he paid a call at his own house. My own absent-mindedness is extreme, and my philosophy, of course, is the marvel of men and angels. But I never quite managed to be so absent-minded as that. Some yards, at least from my own door, something vaguely familiar has always caught my eye, and thus the joke has been spoiled. Of course, I have quite constantly walked into another man's house thinking it was my own house. My visits became almost monotonous, but walking into my own house and thinking it was another man's house is a flight of poetic detachment still beyond me. Something of the sensations that such an absent-minded man must feel, I really felt the other day, and very pleasant sensations they were. The best parts of every proper romance are the first chapter and the last chapter, and to knock at a strange door and find a nice wife would be to concentrate the beginning and the end of all romance. Mine was a milder and slighter experience, but its thrill was of the same kind. For I strolled through a place I had imagined quite virgin and unvisited as far as I was concerned, and I suddenly found I was treading in my own footprints, and the footprints were nearly twenty years old. It was one of those stretches of country which always suggests an almost unnatural decay. Tickets and heats that have grown out of what were once great gardens. Garden flowers still grow there as wild flowers, as it says in some good poetic couplet, which I forget. There is something singularly romantic and disastrous about seeing things that were so long a human property and care fighting for their own hand in the thicket. One almost expects to find a decayed dog kennel with the dog evolved into a wolf. This desolate garden land has been even in my youth scrappily planned out for building. The half-built or empty houses had appeared quite threateningly on the edge of this heath even when I walked over it years ago and almost as a boy. I was astonished that the building had gone no further. I suppose somebody went bankrupt and somebody else disliked building. But I remember, especially along one side of this tangle or compass, that there had once been a row of half-built houses. The brick of which they were built was a sort of plain pink. Everything else was a blinding white. The houses smoked with white dust and white sawdust, and on many of the windows were rubbed those round, rough discs of white, which always delighted me as a child. They looked like the white eyes of some blind giant. I could see the crude, parched pink and white fillet still, though I had not thought at all of them for a quarter of my life and had not thought much of them even when I saw them. Then I was an idle, but eager youth walking out from London. Now I was a most reluctantly busy middle-aged person coming in from the country. Youth, I think, seems farther off than childhood, for it made itself more of a secret. Like a prenatal picture, just and tiny and quite distinct, I saw this heath on which I stood, and I looked round for the string of bright half-baked villas. They still stood there, but they were quite rusted and weather-stained, as if they had stood for centuries. I remembered exactly what I had done on that day long ago. I had half-slit on a mirey descent. It was still there. A little lower I had knocked off the top of a thistle. The thistles had not been discouraged, but were still growing. I recalled it because I had wondered why one knocks off the tops of thistles, and then I had thought of Tarquin, and then I had recited most of Macaulay's Virginia to myself. Or I was young. And then I came to a tattered edge where the very toughed head whitened with the sawdust and brick dust from the new row of houses, and two or three green stars of dock and thistle grew spasmodically about the blinding row. I remembered how I had walked up this new, one-sided street all those years ago, and I remembered what I had thought. I thought that this red and white glaring terrace at noon was really more creepy and more lonesome than a glimmering churchyard at midnight. The churchyard could only be full of the ghosts of the dead, but these houses were full of the ghosts of the unborn. And a man can never find a home in the future, as he can find it in the past. I was always fascinated by that medieval notion of erecting a rudely carpentred stage in the street and acting on it a miracle play of the Holy Family or the Last Judgment. And I thought to myself that each of these glaring, gaping, new, Jerry-built boxes was indeed a rickety stage erected for the acting of a real miracle play. That human family that is almost the Holy One, and that human death that is near to the Last Judgment. For some foolish reason, the Last House but one in that imperfect row especially haunted me with its hollow grin and empty window eyes. Something in the shape of this brick and mortar skeleton was attractive and there being no working men about, I strolled into it for curiosity and solitude. I gave, with all the sky-deep gravity of youth, a benediction upon the man who was going to live there. I even remember that for the convenience of meditation I called him James Harrowgate. As I reflected it crawled back into my memory that I had mildly played the fool in that house on that distant day. I had some red chalk in my pocket, I think, and I wrote things on the unpapered plaster walls. Things addressed to Mr. Harrowgate. A dim memory told me that I had written up in what I supposed to be the dining room. James Harrowgate, thank God for meat, then eat and eat, and eat and eat. Or something of that kind. I faintly feel that some longer lyric was scrolled down the walls of what looked like a bedroom, something beginning. One laying what you call your head, O Harrowgate, upon your bed. And there all my memory just limbs and decays. But I could still see quite vividly the plain plastered walls and rude irregular writing, and the places where the red chalk broke. I could see them, I mean, in memory, for when I came down that road again, after a sixth of a century, the house was very different. I had seen it before noon, and now I found it in the dusk. But its windows glowed with lights of many artificial sorts. One of its low square windows stood open. From this there escaped up the road a stream of lamp light and a stream of singing. Some sort of girl, at least, was standing at some sort of piano and singing a song of healthy sentimentalism in that house where, long ago, my blessing had died on the wind and my poems been covered up by the wallpaper. I stood outside that lamp lit house and dusk full of those thoughts that I shall never express, if I live to be a million, any better than I express them in red chalk upon the wall. But after I had hovered a little and was about to withdraw, a mad impulse seized me. I rang a bell. I said in distinct accents to a very smart suburban maid, does Mr. James Heraldgate live here? She said he didn't, but that she would inquire in case I was looking for him in the neighborhood. But I excused her from such exertion. I had one moment's impulse to look for him all over the world, and then decided not to look for him, at all, the priest of spring. The sun has strengthened and the air softened just before Easter day, but it is a troubled brightness which has a breath not only of novelty but of revolution. There are two great armies of the human intellect who will fight till the end on this vital point, whether Easter is to be congratulated on fitting in with the spring or the spring on fitting in with Easter. The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and a story, and even a story must be about a person. There are indeed very voluptuous appetites and enjoyments in mere abstractions like mathematics, logic, or chess. But these mere pleasures of the mind are like mere pleasures of the body. It is they are mere pleasures, though they may be gigantic pleasures. They can never by a mere increase of themselves amount to happiness. A man just about to be hanged may enjoy his breakfast, especially if it be his favorite breakfast, and in the same way he may enjoy an argument with a chaplain about heresy, especially if it is his favorite heresy. But whether he can enjoy either of them does not depend on either of them. It depends upon his spiritual attitude towards a subsequent event, and that event is really interesting to the soul because it is the end of a story and as some hold the end of a person. Now it is this simple truth which, like many others, is too simple for our scientists to see. This is where they go wrong, not only about true religion but about false religions too, so that their account of mythology is more mythical than the myth itself. I do not confine myself to saying that they are quite incorrect when they state, for instance, that Christ was a legend of dying and reviving vegetation, like Adonis a Persephone. I say that even if Adonis was a god of vegetation, they've got the whole notion of him wrong. Nobody to begin with is sufficiently interested in decaying vegetables as such to make any particular mystery or disguise about them. That's certainly not enough to disguise them under the image of a very handsome young man, which is a vastly more interesting thing. If Adonis was connected with the fall of leaves and autumn at the return of flowers in spring, the process of thought was quite different. It is a process of thought which brings up spontaneously in all children and young artists. It brings up spontaneously in all healthy societies. It is very difficult to explain in a diseased society. The brain of man is subject to short and strange snatches of sleep. A cloud seals the city of reason or rests upon the sea of imagination, a dream that darkens as much, whether it is a nightmare of atheism or a daydream of idolatry. And just as we have all sprung from sleep with a start and found ourselves saying some sentence that has no meaning, save in the mad tongues of the midnight, so the human mind starts from its trances of stupidity with some complete phrase upon its lips, a complete phrase which is a complete folly. Unfortunately it is not like the dream sentence, generally forgotten in the putting on of boots or the putting in of breakfast. This senseless aphorism invented when man's mind was asleep still hangs on his tongue and entangles all his relations to rational and daylight things. All our controversies are confused by certain kinds of phrases which are not merely untrue but were always unmeaning, which are not merely inapplicable but were always intrinsically useless. We recognize them whenever a man talks of the survival of the fittest meaning only the survival of the survivors or wherever a man says that the rich have a stake in the country as if the poor could not suffer from misgovernment or military defeat or where a man talks about going on towards progress, which only means going on towards going on, or where a man talks about government by the wise few as if they could be picked out by their pantaloons. The wise few must mean either the few whom the foolish think wise or the very foolish who think themselves wise. There is one piece of nonsense that modern people still find themselves saying even after they are more or less awake by which I am particularly irritated. It arose in the popularized science of the 19th century especially in connection with the study of myths and religions. The fragment of gibberish to which I refer generally takes the form of saying, this god or hero really represents the sun. Or Apollo killing the python means that the summer drives out the winter. Or the king dying in a western battle is a symbol of the sun setting in the west. Now I should really have thought that even the skeptical professors whose skulls are as shallow as frying pans might have reflected that human beings never think or feel like this. Consider what is involved in this supposition. It presumes that primitive man went out for a walk and saw with great interest a big burning spot on the sky. Then he said to primitive woman, my dear, we had better keep this quiet. We mustn't let it get about. The children and the slaves are so very sharp. They might discover the sun any day unless we are very careful so we won't call it the sun. But I will draw a picture of a man killing a snake and whenever I do that you will know what I mean. The sun doesn't look at all like a man killing a snake so nobody can possibly know. It will be a little secret between us and while the slaves and the children fancy I am quite excited with a grand tale of a writhing dragon and a wrestling demigod. I shall really mean this delicious little discovery that there is a round yellow disc up in the air. One does not need to know much mythology to know that this is a myth. It is commonly called the solar myth. Quite plainly of course the case was just the other way. The god was never a symbol or a hieroglyph representing the sun. The sun was a hieroglyph representing the god. Primitive man with whom my friend Dambi is no doubt well acquainted went out with his head full of gods and heroes because that is the chief use of having a head. Then he saw the sun in some glorious crisis of the dominance of noon on the distress of nightfall. And he said that is how the face of a god would shine when he had slain the dragon or that is how the whole world would bleed to westward if the god were slain at last. No human being was ever really so unnatural as to worship nature. No man however indulgent as I am to corpulency even worship a man round as the sun or a woman round as the moon. No man however attracted to an artistic attenuation ever really believed that the dryad was as lean and stiff as the tree. We human beings have never worshiped nature and indeed the reason is very simple. It is that all human beings are super human beings. We have printed our own image upon nature as god has printed his image upon us. We have told the enormous sun to stand still and to have fixed him on our shields carrying no more for a star than for a starfish. And when there were powers of nature we could not for the time control. We have conceived great beings in human shape controlling them. Jupiter does not mean thunder. Thunder means the march and victory of Jupiter. Neptune does not mean the sea. The sea is his. And he made it. In other words what the savage really said about the sea was only my fetish mumbo could raise such mountains out of mere water. What the savage really said about the sun was only my great great grandfather jumbo could deserve such a blazing crown. About all these myths my own position is utterly and even sadly simple. I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found that one of them is not a myth. Turnip ghosts mean nothing if there are no real ghosts. Forged banknotes mean nothing if there are no real banknotes. Heathen gods mean nothing and must always mean nothing to those of us that deny the Christian god. When once a god is admitted even a false god the cosmos begin to know its place which is the second place. When once it is the real god the cosmos falls down before him offering flowers in spring as flames in winter. My love is like a red red rose does not mean that the poet is praising roses under the allegory of a young lady. My love is an arbitras does not mean that the author was a botanist so pleased with the particular Arbatus tree that he said he loved it. Who art the moon and regent of my sky does not mean that Juliet invented Romeo to account for the roundness of the moon. Christ is the son of Easter does not mean that the worshipper is praising the sun under the emblem of Christ. Goddess or god can clothe themselves with spring or summer but the body is more than raiment. Religion almost takes disdainfully the dress of nature and indeed Christianity has done as well with the snows of Christmas as with the snow drops of spring. And when I look across the sun-struck fields I know in my inmost bones that my joy is not solely in the spring for spring alone being always returning would be always sad. There is somebody or something walking there to be crowned with flowers and my pleasure is in some promise yet possible and in the resurrection of the dead. The Real Journalist Our age which has boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack of reality. Never I fancy has there been so grave and startling a divorce between the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it is done. I take the nearest and most tropical instance to hand a newspaper. Nothing looks more neat and regular than a newspaper with its parallel columns, its mechanical printing, its detailed facts and figures, its responsible polysyllabic leading articles. Nothing as a matter of fact goes every night through more agonies of adventure, more hair breath escapes, desperate expedience, crucial counsels, random compromises or barely averted catastrophes. Seen from the outside it seems to come round as automatically as the clock and as silently as the dawn. Seen from the inside it gives all its organizers a gasp of relief every morning to see that it has come out at all, that it has come out without the leading article upside down or the Pope congratulated on discovering the North Pole. I will give an instance merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality from the paper that I know best. Here is a simple story, a little episode in the life of a journalist which may be amusing and instructive, the tale of how I made a great mistake in quotation. There are really two stories, the story as seen from the outside by a man reading a paper and the story seen from the inside by the journalist shouting and telephoning and taking notes in shorthand through the night. This is the outside story and it reads like a dreadful quarrel. The notorious G.K. Chesterton, a reactionary torcromata whose one gloomy pleasure was in the defense of orthodoxy and the pursuit of heretics, long calculated and at last launched a denunciation of a brilliant leader of the new theology which he hated with all the furnace of his fanatic soul. In this document Chesterton, darkly deliberately and not having the fear of God before his eyes asserted that Shakespeare wrote the line that reads its old fantastic roots so high. This he said because he had been kept in ignorance by priests or perhaps because he thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and forgotten rhyme called Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Anyhow, that orthodox gentleman made a howling error and received some twenty-five letters and postcards from kind correspondents who pointed out the mistake. But the odd thing is that scarcely any of them could conceive that it was a mistake. The first wrote in the tone of one wearied of epigrams and cried, What is the joke now? Another professed and practiced for all I know, God help him, that he had read through all Shakespeare and failed to find the line. A third wrote in a sort of moral distress asking as in confidence if Gray was really a plagiarist. They were a noble collection but they all subtly assumed an element of leisure and exactitude in the recipient's profession and character which is far from the truth. Let us pass on to the next act of the external tragedy. In Monday's issue of the same paper appeared a letter from the same culprit. He ingenuously confessed that the line did not belong to Shakespeare but to a poet whom he called Gray, G-R-E-Y, which was another cropper or whopper. This strange and illiterate outbreak was printed by the editor with a justly scornful title. Mr. Chesterton, quote, explains, unquote, any man reading the paper at breakfast saw at once the meaning of the sarcastic quotation marks. They meant of course here is a man who doesn't know G-R-E-Y from Shakespeare. He tries to patch it up and he can't even spell G-R-E-Y. And that is what he calls an explanation. That is the perfectly natural inference of the reader from the letter, the mistake and the headline, as seen from the outside. The falsehood was serious, the editorial rebuke was serious, the stern editor and the somber baffled contributor confront each other as the curtain falls. And now I will tell you exactly what really happened. It is honestly rather amusing. It is a story of what journals and journalists really are. A monstrous, lazy man lives in South Bucks, partly by writing a column in the Saturday Daily News. At the time he usually writes it, which is always at the last moment. His house is unexpectedly invaded by infants of all shapes and sizes. His secretary is called away and he has to cope with the invading pygmies. Fighting with children is a glorious thing, but the journalistic question has never understood why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's bricks in revenge for the brothers having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is indurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister's picture book. And whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lighted match. Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday article and that there is only about an hour to do it in. He wildly calls to somebody, probably the gardener, to telephone to somewhere for a messenger. He barricades himself in another room and tears his hair, wondering what on earth he shall write about. A drumming of fists on the door outside and a cheerful bellowing encourage and clarify his thoughts, and he is able to observe some newspapers and circulars and wrappers lying on the table. One is a dingy book catalog. The second is a shiny pamphlet about petrol. The third is a paper called The Christian Commonwealth. He embodies it anyhow and sees in the middle of a page a sentence with which he honestly disagrees. It says that the sense of beauty in nature is a new thing hardly felt before Wordsworth. A stream of images and pictures pour through his head like skies chasing each other or forests running by. Not felt before Wordsworth, he thinks. But oh, this won't do. Bear-ruined choirs where the late sweet birds sing. Night's candles are burnt out. Blowed with living sapphires. Leaving their moon-loved maze. Antique roots fantastic. Antique roots re-tie. What is it in as you like it? He sits down desperately. The messenger rings at the bell. The children drum on the door. The servants run up from time to time to say the messenger is getting bored and the pencil staggers along, making the world a present of 1500 unimportant words and making Shakespeare a present of a portion of Grey's elegy. Putting fantastic roots re-tie instead of antique roots peep out. Then the journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the sister pinched him at Little Hampton. That is the first scene. That is how an article is really written. The scene now changes to the newspaper office. The writer of the article has discovered his mistake and wants to correct it by the next day, but the next day is Sunday. He cannot post a letter, so he rings up the paper and dictates a letter by telephone. He leaves the title to his friends at the other end. He knows that they can spell Grey, G-R-A-Y, as no doubt they can, but the letter is put down by journalistic custom in a pencil scribble and the vowels may well be doubtful. The friend writes at the top of the letter, G-K-C explains, putting initials in quotation marks. The next man passing it on for press is bored with these initials. I am with him there and crosses them out substituting with austere civility. Mr. Chesterton explains in closed in quotes. But, and now he hears the iron laughter of the fates, or the blind bolt is about to fall, but he neglects to cross out the second quote, as we call it, and it goes up to press with a quote between the last words. Another quotation mark at the end explains was the work of one merry moment for the printers upstairs, so the inverted commas were lifted entirely off one word onto the other and a totally innocent title suddenly turned into a blasting sneer. But that would have mattered nothing so far, for there was nothing to sneer at. In the same dark hour, however, there was a printer, who was I suppose so devoted to this government, that he could think of no Grey, G-R-A-Y, but Sir Edward Grey, G-R-E-Y. He spelled it G-R-E-Y by a mere misprint and the whole tale was complete. First plunder, second plunder, and final condemnation. That is a little tale of journalism, as it is. If you call it egotistic and ask was the use of it, I think I could tell you. You might remember it when next some ordinary young workman is going to be hanged by the neck on circumstantial evidence. End of section five. 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 six. The Sentimental Scott. Of all the great nations of Christendom, the Scotch are by far the most romantic. I have just enough Scotch experience and just enough Scotch blood to know this in the only way in which a thing can really be known. That is, when the outer world and the inner world are at one. I know it is always sad that the Scotch are practical, prosaic, and puritan. That they have an eye to business. I like that phrase, an eye to business. Polyphemus had an eye for business. It was in the middle of his forehead. It served him admirably for the only two duties which are demanded in a modern financier and captain of industry. The two duties of counting sheep and of eating men. But when that one eye was put out he was done for. But the Scotch are not one-eyed practical men, though their best friends must admit that they are occasionally business-like. They are quite fundamentally romantic and sentimental. And this is proved by the very economic argument that is used to prove their harshness and hunger for the material. The mass of Scotch have accepted the industrial civilization with its factory chimneys and its famine prices with its steam and smoke and steel and strikes. The mass of the Irish have not accepted it. The mass of the Irish have clung to agriculture with claws of iron and have succeeded in keeping it. That is because the Irish, though far inferior to the Scotch in art and literature, are hugely superior to them in practical politics. You do need to be very romantic to accept the industrial civilization. It does really require all the old Gaelic glamour to make men think that Glasgow is a grand place. Yet the miracle is achieved, and while I was in Glasgow I shared the illusion. I have never had the faintest illusion about Leeds or Birmingham. The industrial dream suited the Scotch. Here was a really romantic vista suited to a romantic people, a vision of higher and higher chimneys taking hold upon the heavens of fiercer and fiercer fires in which adamant could evaporate like dew. Here were taller and taller engines that began already to shriek and gesticulate like giants. Here were thunderbolts of communication which already flashed to and fro like thoughts. It was unreasonable to expect the rapt dreamy romantic Scotch to stand still in such a whirl of wizardry to ask whether he, the ordinary Scotch, would be any the richer. He, the ordinary Scotch, is very much the poorer. Glasgow is not a rich city. It is a particularly poor city ruled by a few particularly rich men. It is not perhaps quite so poor a city as Liverpool, London, Manchester, Birmingham or Bolton. It is vastly poorer than Rome, Ruin, Munich or Cologne. A certain civic vitality, notably in Glasgow, may perhaps be due to the fact that the high poetic patriotism of the Scotch has there been reinforced by the cutting common sense and independence of the Irish. In any case, I think there can be no doubt of the main historical fact. The Scotch were tempted by the enormous but unequal opportunities of industrialism because the Scotch are romantic. The Irish refused those enormous and unequal opportunities because the Irish are clear-sighted. They would not need very clear sight by this time. To see that in England and Scotland, the temptation has been a betrayal. The industrial system has failed. It was coming the other day along a great valley road that strikes out of the Westland counties about Glasgow, more or less toward the east and the widening of the fourth. It may, for all I know, I am used myself with the fancy, be the way along which Wallace came with his crude army when he gave battle before Stirling Brig, and in the midst of many evil diplomacies made a new nation possible. Anyhow, the romantic quality of Scotland rolled all about me as much in the last reek of Glasgow as in the first rain upon the hills. The tall factory chimneys seemed trying to be taller than the mountain peaks as if this landscape were full as its history has been full of the very madness of ambition. The wage slavery we live in is a wicked thing, but there is nothing in which the Scotch are more piercing and poetical. I might say more perfect than in their Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the master of valentry the most thrilling of all fictitious villains. It is what makes the mastery of love it the most thrilling of all historical villains. It is poetry, it is an intensity, which is on the edge of madness, or what is worse, magic. Well, the Scotch had managed to apply something of this fierce romanticism, even to the lowest of all lordships and serfdoms, the proletarian inequality of today. You do meet now and then in Scotland, the man you never met anywhere else but in novels. I mean the self-made man, the hard insatiable man, merciless to himself as well as to others. It is not enterprise, it is kleptomania. He is quite mad and a much more obvious public pest than any other kind of kleptomaniac. But though he is a cheat, he is not an illusion. He does exist. I have met quite two of him. Him alone among modern merchants we do not weakly flatter when we call him a bandit. Something of the irresponsibility of the true dark ages really clings about him. Our scientific civilization is not a civilization. It is a smoke nuisance. Like smoke it is choking us. Like smoke it will pass away. Only a one or two scotsman in my experience was it true that where there is smoke there is fire. But there are other kinds of fire and better. The one great advantage of this strange national temper is that from the beginning of all chronicles it has provided resistance as well as cruelty. In Scotland nearly everything has always been in revolt, especially loyalty. If these people are capable of making Glasgow they are also capable of wrecking it. And the thought of my many good friends in that city makes me really doubtful about which would figure in human memories as the more huge calamity of the two. In Scotland there are many rich men so weak as to call themselves strong. But there are not so many poor men weak enough to believe them. As I came out of Glasgow I saw a man standing about the road. They had little lanterns tied to the fronts of their caps like the fairies who used to dance in the old fairy pentamines. They were not however strictly speaking fairies. They might have been called gnomes since they worked in the chasms of those purple and chaotic hills. They worked in the mines from whence comes the fuel of our fires. Just at the moment when I saw them moreover they were not dancing nor were they working they were doing nothing. Which in my opinion and I trust yours was the finest thing they could do. The sectarian of society. A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom. For while men are and should be various there must be some communication between them if they are to get any pleasure out of their variety. And an intellectual formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy. If we all start with the agreement that the sun and moon exist we can talk about our different visions of them. The strong-eyed man can boast that he sees the sun as a perfect circle. The short-sighted man may say, or if he is an impressionist boast, that he sees the moon as a silver blur. The color-blind man may rejoice in the fairy trick which enables him to live under a green sun and a blue moon. But if once it be held that there is nothing but a silver blur in one man's eye or a bright circle like a monocle in the other man's then neither is free, for each is shut up in the cell of a separate universe. But indeed an even worse fate, practically considered, follows from the denim of the original intellectual formula. Not only does the individual become narrow but he spreads narrowness across the world like a cloud. He causes narrowness to increase and multiply like a weed. Or what happens is this, that all the short-sighted people come together and build a city called Myopia where they take short-sightedness for granted and paint short-sighted pictures and pursue very short-sighted policies. Meanwhile all the men who can stare at the sun get together on Salisbury Plain and do nothing but stare at the sun. And all the men who see a blue moon band themselves together and assert the blue moon not once in a blue moon but incessantly. So that instead of a small and very group you have enormous monotonous groups. Instead of the liberty of dogma you have the tyranny of taste. Allegory apart, instances of what I mean will occur to everyone. Perhaps the most obvious is socialism. Socialism means the ownership by the organ of government, whatever it is, of all things necessary to production. If a man claims to be a socialist in that sense he can be any kind of man he likes in any other sense. A bookie, a Mahatma, a man about town and archbishop, a Margate. Without recalling at the moment clear-headed socialists in all of these capacities. It is obvious that a clear-headed socialist that is a socialist with greed can be a soldier like Mr. Blatchford or a don like Mr. Ball or a bath chairman like Mr. Meek or a clergyman like Mr. Conrad Noel or an artistic traceman like the late William Morris. But some people call themselves socialists and will not be bound by what they call a narrow dogma. They say that socialism means far, far more than this. All that is high, all that is free, all that is, etc., etc. Now mark their dreadful fate for they become totally unfit to be tradesmen or soldiers or any other stricken human thing but become a particular sort of person who is always the same. When once it has been discovered that socialism does not mean a narrow economic formula it is also discovered that socialism does mean wearing one particular kind of clothes, reading one particular kind of books, hanging up one particular kind of pictures and in the majority of cases even eating one particular kind of food. Or man must recognize each other somehow. These men will not know each other by a principle like fellow citizens. They cannot know each other by a smell like dogs. So they have to fall back on general coloring on the fact that a man of their sort will have a wife in pale green and Walter Crane's triumph of labor hanging in the hall. There are of course many other instances where modern society is almost made up of these large monochrome patches. Thus I for one regret the supercession of the old Puritan unity founded on theology but embracing all types from Milton to the grocer by that newer Puritan unity which is founded rather on certain social habits certain common notions both permissive and prohibitive in connection with particular social pleasures. Thus I for one regret that if you are going to have an aristocracy it did not remain a logical one founded on the science of heraldry the thing asserting and defending the quite defensible theory that physical genealogy is the test. Instead of being as it is now a mere machine of Eaton and Oxford for varnishing anybody rich enough with one monotonous varnish and it is supremely so in the case of religion. As long as you have a creed which everyone in a certain group believes or is supposed to believe then that group will consist of the old recurring figures of religious history who can be appealed to by the creed and judged by it the saint, the hypocrite, the brawler, the weak brother these people do each other good or they all join together to do the hypocrite good with heavy and repeated blows but once break the bond of doctrine which alone holds these people together and each will gravitate to his own kind outside the group the hypocrites will all get together and call each other saints the saints will get lost in a desert and call themselves weak brethren the weak brethren will get weaker and weaker in a general atmosphere of imbecility and the brawler will go off looking for somebody else with whom to brawl this has very largely happened to modern English religion I have been in many churches chapels and halls where a confident pride in having got the seeds was coupled with a quite paralyzed in capacity to get beyond catch words but wherever the falsity appears it comes from neglect of the same truth that men should agree on a principle that they may differ on everything else that God gave men a law that they might turn it into liberties there was hugely more sense in the old people who said that a wife and husband ought to have the same religion then there isn't all the contemporary watching about sister souls and kindred spirits and auras of identical color as a matter of fact the more the sexes are in violent contrast the less likely they are to be in violent collision the more incompatible their tempers are the better obviously a wife's soul cannot possibly be a sister's soul it is very seldom so much as a first cousin there are very few marriages of identical taste and temperament they are generally unhappy but to have the same fundamental theory to think the same thing of virtue whether you practice it or neglect it to think the same thing of sin whether you punish or pardon or laugh at it in the last extremity to call the same thing duty and the same thing disgrace this really is necessary to a tolerably happy marriage and is much better represented by a common religion than it is by affinities and auras and what applies to the family applies to the nation a nation with a root religion will be tolerant a nation with no religion will be bigoted lastly the worst effect of all is this yet when men come together to profess a creed they come courageously though it is to hide in catacombs and caves but when they come together in a clique they come sneakishly eschewing all change or disagreement though it is to dine to a brass band in a big London hotel for birds of a feather flock together but birds of the white feather most of all the fool for many years I had sought him and at last I found him in a club I had been told that he was everywhere but I had almost begun to think that he was nowhere I had been assured that there were millions of him but before my late discovery I inclined to think that there were none of him after my late discovery I am sure that there is one and I inclined to think that there are several say a few hundreds but unfortunately most of them occupying important positions when I say him I mean the entire idiot I have never been able to discover that stupid public of which so many literary men complain the people one actually meets in trains or at tea parties seem to me quite bright and interesting certainly quite enough so to call for the full exertion of one's own widths and even when I have heard brilliant conversationalists conversing with other people the conversation had much more equality in give and take than this age of intellectual snobs will admit I have sometimes felt tired like other people but rather tired with men's talk and variety than with their stolidity or sameness therefore it was that I sometimes longed to find the refreshment of a single fool but it was denied me turn where I would I found this monotonous brilliancy of the general intelligence this ruthless ceaseless sparkle of humor and good sense the mostly fools theory has been used in an anti-democratic sense but when I found at last my priceless ass I did not find him in what is commonly called the democracy nor in the aristocracy either the man of the democracy generally talks quite rationally sometimes on the anti-democratic side but always with an idea of giving reasons for what he says and referring to the realities of his experience nor is it the aristocracy that is stupid at least not that section of the aristocracy which represents it in politics they are often cynical, especially about money but even their boredom tends to make them a little eager for any real information or originality if a man like Mr. Winston Churchill or Mr. Wyndham made up his mind for any reason to attack syndicalism he would find out what it was first not so the man I found in the club he was very well dressed he had a heavy but handsome face his black clothes suggested the city and his gray mustaches the army but the whole suggested that he did not really belong to either but was one of those who dabble in shares and who play at soldiers there was some third element about him that was neither mercantile nor military his manners were a shade too gentlemanly to be quite those of a gentleman he involved an unction and over emphasis of the club man then I suddenly remembered feeling the same thing in some old actors or old play goers who had modeled themselves on actors as I came in he said if I was the government and then put a cigar in his mouth which he lit carefully with long intakes and breath then he took the cigar out of his mouth again and said I'd give it him as if it were a quite separate sentence but even while his mouth was stopped with the cigar his companion or interlocutor leapt to his feet and said with great heartiness snatching up a hat well I must be off Tuesday I dislike these dark suspicions but I certainly fancied I recognized the sudden genealogy with which one takes leave of a bore when therefore he removed an archotic stopper from his mouth it was to me that he addressed the belated epigram I'd give it him what would you give them I asked the minimum wage I'd give them beans he said I'd shoot them down, shoot them down every man jack of them I lost my best train yesterday and here's the whole country paralyzed and here's a handful of obstinate fellows standing between the country and coal I'd shoot them down that would surely be a little harsh I pleaded after all they're not under martial law though I suppose two or three of them have commissions in the yeomanry he repeated and his eyes and face which became startling and separate like those of a boiled lobster made me feel sure that he had something of the kind himself besides I continued wouldn't it be quite enough to confiscate their money well I'd send them all the penal servitude anyhow he said and I'd confiscate their funds as well policy is daring and full of difficulty I replied but I do not say that it is wholly outside the extreme rights of the Republic but you must remember that though the facts of property have become quite fantastic yet the sentiment of property still exists these coal owners though they have not earned the mines though they could not work the mines do quite honestly feel that they own the mines hence your suggestion of shooting them down or even of confiscating their property raises very what do you mean pass the man with a cigar with a bullying eye who you're talking about I'm talking about what you were talking about I replied as you put it so perfectly about the handful of obstinate fellows who are standing between the country and the coal I mean the men who are selling their own coal for fancy prices and who as long as they can get those prices care as little for national starvation as most merchant princes and pirates have cared for the provinces that were wasted or the peoples that were enslaved just before their ships came home but though I am a bit of a revolutionist myself I cannot quite go with you in the extreme violence you suggest you say I say he cried bursting through my speech with a really splendid energy like that of some noble beast I say I take all these blasted minors and I had risen solely to my feet before I was profoundly moved and I stood staring at that mental monster oh I said so it is the minors who are all to be sent to penal servitude so that we may get more coal it is the minors who are to be shot dead every man jack of them or if once they are all shot dead they will start mining again you must forgive me sir I know I seem somewhat moved the fact is I have just found something something I had been looking for for four years well he asked with no unfriendly stare what have you found no I answered shaking my head sadly I do not think it would be quite kind to tell you what I have found he had a hundred virtues including the capital virtue of good humor and we had no difficulty in changing the subject and forgetting the disagreement he talked about society his town friends and his country sports and I discovered in the course of it that he was a county magistrate a member of parliament and a director of several important companies he was also that other thing which I did not tell him the moral is that a certain sort of person does exist to whose glory this article is dedicated he is not the ordinary man he is not the minor who is sharp enough to ask for the necessities of existence he is not the mine owner who is sharp enough to get a great deal more by selling his coal at the best possible moment he is not the aristocratic politician who has a cynical but fair sympathy with both economic opportunities but he is the man who appears in scores of public places open to the upper middle class or that less known but more powerful section the lower upper class men like this all over the country are really saying whatever comes into their heads in their capacities of justice of the peace candidate for parliament colonel of the omenry old family doctor poor law guardian coroner or above all arbiter in trade disputes he suffers in the literal sense from softening of the brain he has softened it by always taking the view of everything most comfortable for his country his class and his private personality he is a deadly public danger but as i have given him his name at the beginning of this article there is no need for me to repeat it at the end end of section 6 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 7 the conscript and the crisis very few of us ever see the history of our own time happening and i think the best service a modern journalist can do to society is to record as plainly as ever he can exactly what impression was produced on his mind by anything he has actually seen and heard on the outskirts of any modern problem or campaign though all he saw of a railway strike was a flat meadow in Essex in which a train was become for an hour or two he will probably throw more light on the strike by describing this which he has seen than by describing the steely kings of commerce and the bloody leaders of the mob whom he has never seen nor has anyone else either if he comes a day too late for the battle of Waterloo as happened to a friend of my grandfather he should still remember that a true account of the day after Waterloo would be a most valuable thing to have though he was on the wrong side of the door when Rizzo was being murdered we should still like to have the wrong side described in the right way upon this principle I who know nothing of diplomacy or military arrangements have only held my breath like the rest of the world in Germany for bargaining will tell quite truthfully of a small scene I saw one of the thousand scenes that were so to speak the anti-rooms of that inmost chamber of debate in the course of a certain morning I came into one of the quiet squares of a small French town and found its cathedral it was one of those grey and rainy days which rather suit the Gothic the clouds were ledden like the spires and the jeweled windows the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping with damp and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were scoured with old rains and new I went into the round deep porch with many doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain I also found a notice of services etc and among these I found the announcement that at eleven thirty that is about a half hour later there would be a special service for the conscripts that is to say the draft of young men who were being taken from their homes in that little town and sent to serve in the French army sent as it happened at an awful moment when the French army was encamped at a parting of the ways there were already a great many people there when I entered many of all kinds but in all attitudes kneeling, sitting or standing about and there was that general sense that strikes every man from a Protestant country whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or likes it I mean the general sense that the thing was going on all the time that it was not an occasion but a perpetual process as if it were a sort of mystical inn several tricolours were hung quite near the altar and the young men when they came in filed up the church and sat right at the front they were of course every imaginable social grade for the French conscription is really strict and universal some looked like young criminals some like young priests some like both some were so obviously prosperous and polished that a barrack room seemed to them like hell others by the look of them had hardly ever been in so decent a place but it was not so much the mere class variety that most sharply caught an Englishman's eye it was the presence of just those one or two kinds of men who would never have become soldiers in any other way there are many reasons for becoming a soldier it may be a matter of hereditary luck or abject hunger or heroic virtue or fugitive vice there may be an interest in the work or lack of interest in any other work but there would always be two or three kinds of people who would never tend to soldiering all those kinds of people were there a lad with red hair, large ears and very careful clothing somehow conveyed across the church that he had always taken care of his health not even from thinking about it but simply because he was told and that he was one of those paths from childhood to manhood without any shock of being a man in the role in front of him there was a very slight and vivid little Jew of the sort that is a tailor and a socialist by one of those accidents that make real life so unlike anything else he was the one of the company who seemed especially devout behind these stiff or sensitive boys were ranged the ranks of their mothers and fathers with knots and bunches of their little brothers and sisters the children kicked their little legs wriggled about the seats and gaped at the arched roof while their mothers were on their knees praying their own prayers and hearing their crying the grey clouds of rain gathered I suppose more and more for the deep church continuously darkened the lads in front began to sing a military hymn in an odd rather strange voices I could not disentangle the words but only one perpetual refrain so that it sounded like then this ceased and silence continued the coloured windows growing gloomier and gloomier with the clouds in the dead stillness a child started crying suddenly and incoherently in a city far to the north a French diplomatist and a German aristocrat were talking I will not make any commentary on the thing that could blur the outline of its almost cruel actuality I will not talk nor allow anyone else to talk about clericalism and militarism those who talk like that are made of the same mud as those who call all the angers of the unfortunate socialism the women who were calling in the gloom around me on God and the mother of God were not clericalists or if they were they had forgotten it and I will bet my boots the young men were not militarists quite the other way just then the priest made a short speech he did not utter any priestly dogmas whatever they are he uttered platitudes it says circumstances platitudes are the only possible things to say because they are true he began by saying that he supposed a large number of them would be uncommonly glad not to go they seemed to ascend to this particular priestly dogma with even more than their alleged superstitious credulity he said that war was hateful and that we all hated it but that in all things reasonable the law of one's own commonwealth was the voice of God he spoke about Joan of Arc and how she had managed to be bold and successful soldier while still preserving her virtue and practicing her religion then he gave them each a little paper book to which they replied after a brief interval for reflection while all this was happening something quite indescribable crowded about my own darkening brain as the clouds crowded above the darkening church they were so entirely of the elements and the passions that I cannot utter them in an idea but only in an image it seemed to me that we were barricaded in this church but we could not tell what was happening outside the church the monstrous and terrible jewels of the windows darkened shadow or light the nature of that light and the shapes of those shadows we did not know and hardly dared to guess the dream began I think with the dim fancy that enemies were already in the town and that the enormous oaken doors were groaning under their hammers then I seemed to suppose that the town itself had been destroyed by fire and it faced as it may be thousands of years hence and that if I open the door I should come out on a wilderness as flat and sterile as the sea and the vision behind the veil of stone that slaked through wilder with earthquakes it seemed to see chasms cloven to the foundation of all things and letting up an infernal dawn huge things happily hidden from us had climbed out of the abyss and were striding about taller than the clouds and when the darkness crept from the sapphires of Mary to the sanguine garments of St. John I fancied that some hideous giant was walking round the church and looking in at each window in turn sometimes again I thought of that church with colored windows as a ship carrying many lanterns struggling in a high sea at night sometimes I thought of it as a great colored lantern itself hung on an iron chain out of heaven and tossed and swung to and fro by strong wings the wings of the princes of the air but I never thought of it for the young man inside had saved as something precious and in peril or of the things outside but as something barbaric and enormous I know there are some who cannot sympathize with such sentiments of limitation I know there are some who would feel no touch of the heroic tenderness if some day a young man with red hair, large ears and his mother's lozenges in his pocket were found dead in uniform in the passes of the Vosés but on this subject I have heard many philosophies and thought a good deal for myself and the conclusion I have come to is sacra bentum par por la patre and it is not likely that I shall alter it now but when I came out of the church there were none of these things but only a lot of shops including a paper shop on which the posters announced that the negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily the miser and his friends it is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led by some special sort of lunatic a mild touch of madness may even keep a man safe or it may keep him modest so some exaggerations in the state may remind it of its own normal but it is bad when the head is cracked when the roof of the commonwealth has a tile loose the two or three cases of this that occur in history have always been gibbeted gigantically thus Nero has become a black proverb not merely because he was an oppressor but because he was also an esthete that is an ertomaniac he not only tortured other people's bodies he tortured his own soul into the same red revolting shapes though he came quite early in roman imperial history and was followed by many austere and noble emperors yet for us the roman empire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman the populace or barbarians from whom we come the hour when they came to the highest place of the earth saw the huge pedestal of the earthly omnipotence read on it divus Caesar and looked up and saw a statue without a head it is the same with that ugly entanglement before the renaissance from which alas most memories of the middle ages are derived Louis XI was a very patient impractical man of the world but like many good businessmen he was mad the morbidity of the intriguer and the torture clung about everything he did even when it was right and just as the great empire of Antonius and Aurelius never wiped out Nero so even the silver splendor of the later saints such as Vincent de Paul has never painted out for the British public the crooked shadow of Louis XI whenever the unhealthy man has been on top he has left a horrible saber that humanity finds still in its nostrils now in our time the unhealthy man is on top and he is not the man mad on sex like Nero or mad on steak craft like Louis XI he is simply the man mad on money our tyrant is not the setter or the torturer but the miser the modern miser has changed much the old miser of legends and anecdotes but only because he has grown yet more insane the old miser had some touch of the human artist about him in so far as that he collected gold a substance that can really be admired for itself like ivory or old oak an old man who picked up yellow pieces had something of the simple ardor something of the mystical materialism of a child who picks out yellow flowers gold is but one kind of colored clay but colored clay can be very beautiful the modern idolatry of wishes is content with far less genuine things the glitter of guineas is like glitter of buttercups the chink of pelf is like the chime of bells compared with the dreary papers and dead calculations which make the hobby of the modern miser the modern millionaire loves nothing so lovable as a coin he is content sometimes with the dead crackle of notes but far more often with the mere repetition of knots and a ledger all as like each other as eggs to eggs and as for comfort the old miser could be comfortable as many tramps and savages are when he was once used to being unclean a man could find some comfort in an unswept attic or an unwashed shirt but the Yankee millionaire can find no comfort with five telephones at his bedhead and ten minutes for his lunch the round coins in the miser stocking were safe in some sense the round knots in the millionaire's ledger are safe in no sense the same fluctuation which excites him with their increase depresses him with their diminution the miser at least collects coins his hobby is numismatics the man who collects knots collects nothings it may be admitted that the man amassing millions is a bit of an idiot but it may be asked in what sense does he rule the modern world the answer to this is very important and rather curious the evil enigma for us here is not the rich but the very rich the distinction is important because this special problem is separate from the old general quarrel about rich and poor that runs through the bible and all strong books old and new the special problem today is that certain powers and privileges have grown so world wide and unwieldy that they are out of the power of the moderately rich as well as of the moderately poor they are out of the power of everybody except a few millionaires that is misers in the old normal friction of normal wealth and poverty I am myself on the radical side I think that a Berkshire squire has too much power over his tenants that a Brompton builder has too much power over his workmen yet a west London doctor has too much power over the poor patients in the west London hospital but a Berkshire squire has no power over cosmopolitan finance for instance a Brompton builder has not money enough to run a newspaper trust a west end doctor could not make a corner in quinine and freeze everybody out the merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market the things that change modern history the big national and international loans the big educational and philanthropic foundations the purchase of numberless newspapers the big prices paid for peerages the big expenses often incurred in elections these are getting too big for everybody except the misers the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims there are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them the first is this that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies the moderately rich include all kinds of people even good people even priests are sometimes saints and even soldiers are sometimes heroes some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them some brewers have been known to sell beer but among the very rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident they may give their money away but they will never give themselves away they are egoistic secretive dry as old bones to be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it lastly the most serious point about them is this that the new miser is flattered for his meanness and the old one never was it was never called self-denial in the old miser that he lived on bones it is called self-denial in the new millionaire if he lives on beans a man like dancer was never praised as a Christian saint for going in rags a man like Rockefeller is praised as a sort of pagan stoic for his early rising or his unassuming dress his simple meals his simple clothes his simple funeral are all extolled as if they were creditable to him they are disgraceful to him exactly as disgraceful as the tatters and vermin of the old miser were disgraceful to him to be in rags for charity would be the condition of a saint to be in rags for money was that of a filthy old fool precisely in the same way to be simple for charity is the state of a saint to be simple for money is that of a filthy old fool of the two I have more respect for the old miser knowing bones and an attic if he was not nearer to God he was at least a little nearer to men his simple life was a little more like a life of the real poor the mysticog whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and impelpable and unnameable and subtly indescribable then elevate your aristocratic nose toward heaven and snuff up the smell of decay it is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech but it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment and though the attempt to a body is always inadequate the attempt is always made if the idea does not seek to be the word the chances are that it is an evil idea if the word is not made flesh it is a bad word thus Giotto or Fra Angelica would have at once admitted theologically that God was too good to be painted but they would always try to paint him and they felt very rightly that representing him as a rather quaint old man with a gold crown and a white beard like a king of the elves was less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express him in some way that is why the Christian world is full of gaudy pictures and twisted statues which seem to many refined persons more blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist the trend of good is always toward incarnation but on the other hand those refined thinkers who worship the devil whether in the swamps of Jamaica or the salons of Peras always insist upon the shapelessness the wordlessness the unutterable character of the abomination they call him a horror of emptiness as did the black witch in Stevenson's dynamite they worship him as the unspeakable name as the unbearable silence they think of him as the void in the heart of the whirlwind the cloud on the brain of the maniac the toppling turrets of vertigo or the endless corridors of a nightmare he was the Christians who gave the devil a grotesque and energetic outline with sharp horns and spiked tail it was the saints who drew Satan his comic and even lively the Satanists never drew him at all and as it is with moral good and evil so it is also with mental clarity and mental confusion there is one very valid test by which we may separate genuine if perverse and unbalanced originality and revolt from mere impudent innovation and bluff the man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea the charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained the first idea may really be very autray or specialist it may be very difficult to express to ordinary people but because the man is trying to express it it is most probable that there is something in it after all the honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable to describe the indescribable but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery but by refusing to come out of it perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of the thing called art and the people called art critics it is obvious that an attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holy cunning that has made them what they are it is equally obvious that a landscape painter expresses only half the landscape a portrait painter only half of the person they're lucky if they express so much and again it is more obvious that any literary description of the pictures can only express half of them and that the less important half still it does express something the thread is not broken that connects God with nature nor nature with men nor men with critics the Mona Lisa was in some respects not all I fancy what God meant her to be Leoniro's picture was in some respects like Lady and Walter Pater's rich description was in some respects like the picture thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature in the last resort can express something other than its own unhappy self now the modern critic is a humbug because he professes to be entirely inarticulate speech is his whole business and he boasts of being speechless before Botticelli he is mute but if there is any good in Botticelli there is much good and much evil too it is emphatically the critic's business to explain it to translate it from terms of painting to terms of diction of course the rendering will be inadequate but so is Botticelli it is a fact he would be the first to admit but anything which has been intelligently received can at least be intelligently suggested Pater does suggest an intelligent cause for the cadaverous color of Botticelli's Venus rising from the sea Ruskin does suggest an intelligent motive for turners destroying forests and falsifying landscapes these two great critics were far too fastidious for my taste they urged to access the idea that a sense of art was a sort of secret they were patiently taught and slowly learnt still they thought it could be taught and they thought it could be learnt they constrained themselves with considerable creative fatigue to find the exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has been cloned in Italian painting the same is true of Whistler in R.A.M. Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez they had something to say about the pictures they knew it was unworthy of the pictures but they said it now the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities Cubism and post-impressionism and Mr. Picasso are eulogists and nothing else they are not critics, at least of all creative critics they do not attempt to translate beauty into language they merely tell you that it is untranslatable that is unutterable, indefinable, indescribable impelpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it the cloud is their banner they cry to chaos an old night they circulate a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots and they seek to terrify democracy by the good old anti-democratic muddlements that the public does not understand these things that the likes of us cannot dare to question the dark decisions of our lords I venture to suggest that we resist all this rubbish by the very simple test mentioned above if there were anything intelligent in such art something of it at least could be made intelligible in literature man is made with one head, not with two or three no criticism of Rembrandt is as good as Rembrandt but it can be so written as to make a man go back and look at his pictures if there is a curious and fantastic art it is the business of the art critics to create a curious and fantastic literary expression for it inferior to it doubtless but still akin to it if they cannot do this, as they cannot if there is nothing in their eulogies as there is nothing except eulogy then they are quacks or the high priests of the unutterable if the art critics can say nothing about the artists except that they are good it is because the artists are bad and explain nothing because they have found nothing and they have found nothing because there is nothing to be found End of Section 7 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 8 The Red Reactionary The one case for Revolution is that it is the only quite clean and complete road to anything even to restoration Revolution alone can be not merely a revolt of the living but also a resurrection of the dead A friend of mine, one in fact who writes prominently on this paper was once walking down the street in a town of western France situated in that area it used to be called Lavendee which in that great creative crisis about 1790 formed a separate and mystical soul of its own and made a revolution against the revolution As my friend went down this street he whistled an old French air which he had found like Mr. Ghandish in his researches into history and which had somehow taken his fancy the song to which those last sincere loyalists went into battle I think the words ran My friend was and is a radical but he was and is an Englishman and it never occurred to him that there could be any harm in singing archaic lyrics out of remote centuries that one had to be a Catholic to enjoy the diocese or a Protestant to remember Lily Balero Yet he was stopped and gravely warned that things so politically provocative might get him at least its temporary trouble A little time after I was helping King George V to get crowned by walking round a local bonfire and listening to a local band just as a bonfire cannot be too big so by my theory of music a band cannot be too loud and this band was so loud, emphatic and obvious that I actually recognized one or two of the tunes and I noticed that quite a formidable proportion of them were Jacobite tunes that is tunes that had been primarily meant to keep George V out of his throne forever Some of the real eras of the old Scottish rebellion were played such as Charlie Is My Darling or What's a Steer Kimmer where men had stung while marching to destroy and drive out the monarchy under which we live They were songs in which the very kinsmen of the present king were swept aside as usurpers They were songs in which the actual words King George occurred as a curse and a derision They were played to celebrate his very coronation Played as promptly and innocently as if they had been grandfather's clock or rural Britannia That contrast is the measure not only between two nations but between two modes of historical construction and development or there is not really very much difference as European history goes in the time that has elapsed between us and the Jacobite and between us and the Jacobin When George III was crowned the gauntlet of the king's champion was picked up by a partisan of the stewards When George III was still on the throne the bourbons were driven out of France as the stewards have been driven out of England yet the French are just sufficiently aware that the bourbons might possibly return that they will take a little trouble to discourage it whereas we are so certain that the stewards will never return that we actually play their most passionate tunes as a compliment to their rivals and we do not even do it tauntingly I examined the faces of all the bandsmen and I am quite sure they were devoid of irony Indeed, it is difficult to blow a wind instrument ironically We do it quite unconsciously because we have a huge fundamental dogma which the French have not We really believe that the past is past It is a very doubtful point Now the great gift of a revolution as in France is that it makes man free in the past as well as free in the future Those who have cleared away everything could if they liked, put back anything But we who have preserved everything we cannot restore anything Take for the sake of argument the complex and many-colored ritual of the coronation recently completed That right is stratified with the separate centuries from the first rude need of discipline to the last fine shade of culture or corruption there is nothing that cannot be detected or even dated The fierce and childish vow of the lords to serve their lord against all manner of folk obviously comes from the real dark ages no longer confused even by the ignorant with the middle ages It comes from some chaos of Europe when there was one old Roman road across four of our counties and when hostile folk might live in the next village the sacramental separation of one man to be the friend of the fatherless and the nameless belongs to the true middle ages with their great attempt to make a moral and invisible Roman Empire or as the coronation service says to set the cross forever above the ball elaborate local tomfoolery such as that by which the lord of the manner of works up is alone allowed to do something or other these probably belong to the decay of the middle ages when that great civilization died in grotesque liberalism and entangled heraldry things like the presentation of the Bible bear witness to the intellectual outburst at the reformation things like the declaration against the mass bear witness to the great wars of the Puritans and things like the allegiance of the bishops bear witness to the wordy and parenthetical political compromises which to my deep regret ended the wars of religion my purpose here is only point out one particular thing in all that long list of variations there must be and there are things which energetic modern minds would really wish with the reasonable modification to restore Dr. Clifford would probably be glad to see again the great Puritan idealism that forced the Bible into an antique and almost frozen formality Dr. Horton probably really regrets the old passion that excommunicated Rome in the same way Mr. Bellock would really prefer the middle ages as Lord Roseberry would prefer the Erestian oligarchy of the 18th century the Dark Ages would probably be disputed from widely different motives by Mr. Rudger Kipling and Mr. Cunningham Graham but Mr. Cunningham Graham would win but the black case against conservative or evolutionary politics is that none of these sincere men can win Dr. Clifford cannot get back to the Puritans Mr. Bellock cannot get back to the medieval because alas there has been no revolution to leave them a clear space for building or rebuilding Frenchmen have all the ages behind them and can wander back and pick and choose but Englishmen have all the ages on top of them and can only lie groaning under that imposing tower without being able to take so much as a brick out of it if the French decide that their republic is bad they can get rid of it but if we decide that a republic was good we should have much more difficulty if the French democracy actually desired every detail of the medieval monarchy they could have it I do not think they will or should but they could if another Dauphine were actually crowned at Reims if another Joan of Arc actually bore a miraculous banner before him if medieval swords shook and blazed in every gauntlet if the golden lilies glowed from every tapestry if this were really proved to be the will of France and the purpose of Providence such a scene would still be the lasting and final justification of the French Revolution for no such scene could conceivably have happened under Louis XVI the separatist and sacred things in the very laudable and fascinating extensions of our interest in Asiatic arts or faiths there are two incidental injustices which we tend nowadays to do our own records and our own religion the first is the tendency to talk as if certain things were not only present in the higher orientals but were peculiar to them thus our magazines will fall into a habit of wondering praise the Bushido the Japanese chivalry as if no western knights had ever vowed noble vows or as if no eastern knights had ever broken them or again our drawing rooms will be full of the praises of Indian renunciation and Indian unworldliness as if no Christians had been saints or as if all Buddhists had been but if the first injustice is to think of human virtues as peculiarly eastern the other injustice is a failure to appreciate what really is peculiarly eastern it is too much taken for granted that the eastern sort of idealism is certainly superior and convincing whereas in truth it is only separate and peculiar all that is richest, deepest and subtlest in the east is rooted in pantheism but all that is richest, deepest and subtlest in us is concerned with denying passionately that pantheism is either the highest or the purest religion thus in turning over some excellent books recently written on the spirit of Indian or Chinese art and decoration I found it quietly and curiously assumed that the artist must be at his best if he flows with the full stream of nature and identifies himself with all things so that the stars are his sleepless eyes and the forest his far flung arms now in this way of talking both the two injustices will be found insofar as what is claimed is a strong sense of the divine in all things the eastern artists have no more monopoly of it than they have of hunger and thirst I have no doubt that the painters and poets of the Far East do exhibit this but I rebelled at being asked to admit that we must go to the Far East to find it traces of such sentiment can be found, I fancy even in other painters and poets I do not question that the poet Wo-Wo that ornament of the 8th dynasty may have written the words even the most undignified vegetable is for this person capable of producing meditations not to be exhibited by much weeping but I do not therefore admit that a western gentleman named Wordsworth who made a somewhat similar remark had plagiarized it from Wo-Wo or was a mere occidental fable and travesty of that celebrated figure I do not deny that Tineshona wrote that exquisite example of the short Japanese poem entitled Honorable Chrysanthemum in Honorable Hole in Wall but I do not therefore admit that Tennyson's little verse about the flower in the cranny was not original and even sincere it is recorded for all I know of the philanthropic Emperor Bo that when he engaged in cutting his garden lawn with a mower made of alabaster and chrysobaro he chanced to cut down a small flower where upon being much affected he commanded his wise men immediately to take down upon tablets of ivory the lines beginning small and unobtrusive blossom with ruby extremities but this incident touching as it is does not shake my belief in the incident of Robert Burns and the Daisy and I am left with an impression that poets are pretty much the same everywhere in their poetry and in their prose I have tried to convey my sympathy and admiration for Eastern art and its admirers and if I have not conveyed them I must give it up and go on to more general considerations I therefore proceed to say with the utmost respect that it is cheap a rarefied and etherealized form of cheap for this school to speak in this way about the mother that bore them the great civilization of the West the West also has its magic landscapes though through our incurable materialism they look like landscapes as well as magic the West also has its symbolic figures only they look like men as well as symbols it will be answered and most justly that Oriental art ought to be free to follow its own instinct and tradition that its artists are concerned to suggest one thing or another that both should be admired in their difference profoundly true but what is the difference it is certainly not as the Orientalizers assert that we must go to the Far East for a sympathetic and transcendental interpretation of nature we have paid a long enough toll of mystics and even of mad men to be quit of that disability yet there is a difference it is just what I suggested the Eastern mysticism is an ecstasy of unity the Christian mysticism is an ecstasy of creation that is of separation and mutual surprise the latter says like say Francis my brother fire and my sister water and the former says my self fire and my self water whether you call the Eastern attitude an extension of oneself into everything or a contraction of oneself into nothing is a matter of metaphysical definition the effect is the same an effect which lives and throbs throughout all the exquisite arts of the East this effect is the same called rhythm a pulsation of pattern or ritual or of colors or of cosmic theory but always suggesting the unification of the individual with the world but there is quite another kind of sympathy the sympathy with a thing because it is different no one will say that Rembrandt did not sympathize with an old woman but no one will say that Rembrandt painted like an old woman no one will say that Reynolds did not appreciate children but no one will say that he did it childishly the supreme instance of this divine division is sex and that explains what I could never understand in my youth the one called the soul the bride of God or real love is an intense realization of the separateness of all our souls the most heroic and human love poetry of the world is never mere passion precisely because mere passion really is a melting back into nature a meeting of the waters and water is plunging and powerful but it is only powerful downhill a high and human love poetry is all about division rather than identity and in the great love poems even the man as he embraces the woman sees her in the same instant a far off a virgin and a stranger well the first injustice of which we have spoken still recurs and if we grant that the east has a right to its difference it is not realized in what we differ that nursery tale from nowhere about St. George and the dragon really expresses best the relation between the west and the east there were many other differences calculated to arrest even the superficial eye between a saint and a dragon but the essential difference was simply this that the dragon did want to eat St. George whereas St. George would have felt a strong distaste for eating the dragon in most of the stories he killed the dragon in many of the stories he not only spared but baptized it but in neither case did the Christian have any appetite for cold dragon the dragon however really has an appetite for cold Christian and especially for cold Christianity this blind intention to absorb to change the shape of everything and digest it in the darkness of a dragon's stomach this is what is really meant by the pantheism and cosmic unity of the east the cosmos as such is cannibal as all time ate his children the eastern saints were saints because they wanted to be swallowed up the western saint like St. George was sainted by the western church precisely because he refused to be swallowed the same process of thought that has prevented nationalities disappearing in Christendom has prevented the complete appearance of pantheism all Christian men instinctively resist the idea of being absorbed into an empire an Austrian a Spanish a British or a Turkish empire but there is one empire much larger and much more tyrannical which free men will resist with even stronger passion a free man violently resists being absorbed into the empire which is called the universe he demands home rule for his nationality but still more home rule for his home most of all he demands home rule for himself he claims the right to be saved in spite of Muslim fatalism claims the right to be damned in spite of theosophical optimism he refuses to be the cosmos because he refuses to forget it the mummer the night before Christmas Eve I heard a burst of musical voices so close that they might as well have been inside the house instead of just outside so I asked them inside hoping they might then seem farther away then I realized that they were the Christmas mummers who come every year in country parts to enact the rather rigid fragments of the old Christmas play of St. George the Turkish night and the very venal doctor I will not describe it it is indescribable but I will describe my parallel sentiments as it passed one could see something of that half failure that haunts our artistic revivals of medieval dances, carols and other elements in plays there are elements in all that has come to us from the more morally simple society of the middle ages elements which moderns even when they are medievalists find it hard to understand and harder to imitate the first is the primary idea of mummery itself if you will observe a child just able to walk you will see that his first idea is not to dress up as anybody but to dress up because of course the idea of being the king or uncle William will lead to his lips but it is generally suggested by the hat he has already let fall over his nose from far deeper motives Tommy does not assume the hat primarily because it is uncle William's hat but because it is not Tommy's hat it is a ritual investiture and is akin to those gorgon masks that stiffen the dances of Greece or those towering miters that came from the mysteries of Persia where the essence of such ritual is a profound paradox the concealment of the personality combined with the exaggeration of the person the man performing a rite seeks to be at once invisible and conspicuous it is part of that divine madness which all other creatures wonder at in man that he alone parades this pomp of obliteration and anonymity man is not perhaps the only creature who dresses himself but he is the only creature who disguises himself beasts and birds do indeed take the colors of their environment but that is not in order to be watched but in order not to be watched it is not the formalism of rejoicing but the formlessness of fear it is not so with men whose nature is the unnatural ancient Britons did not stain themselves blue because they lived in blue forests nor did Georgian bow and bells powder their hair to match in our declanscape the Britons were not dressing up as kingfishers nor the bow pretending to be polar bears nay, even when modern ladies paint their faces a bright mauve it is doubted by some naturalists whether they do it with the idea of escaping notice so merry makers or mummers adopt their costume to heighten and exaggerate their own bodily presence and identity not to sink it, primarily speaking in another identity it is not acting that comparatively low-profession comparatively I mean, it is mummery and as Mr. Kenseth would truly say all elaborate ritual is mummery that is, it is the noble conception of making man something other and more than himself when he stands at the limit of human things it is only careful fatists and people German philosophers who want to wear no clothes and be natural in their Dionysian revels natural men, really vigorous and exultant men want to wear more and more clothes when they are reveling they want worlds of waistcoats and forests of trousers and pagodas of tall hats toppling up to the stars thus it is with the lingering mummers at Christmas in the country if our more refined revivers or blazes or morris stances tried to reconstruct the old mummer's play of St. George and the Turkish Knight I do not know why they do not they would think at once of picturesque and appropriate dresses St. George's panoply would be pictured from the best books of armour and blazonry the Turkish Knights, Arms and Ornaments would be traced from the finest Saracenic Arabesques when my garden door opened when Christmas Eve and St. George of England entered the appearance of that champion was slightly different his face was energetically blackened all over with soot above which he wore an aged and very tall top hat he wore his shirt outside his coat like a surplus and he flourished a thick umbrella now do not I beg you talk about ignorance or suppose that the mummer in question is a very pleasant rat catcher who, in some ways, did this because he knew no better try to realize that even a rat catcher knows St. George of England was not black and did not kill the dragon with an umbrella the rat catcher is not under this delusion any more than Paul Veranoes thought that very good men have luminous rings around their heads any more than the pope thinks that Christ washed the feet of the twelve in a cathedral any more than the Duke of Norfolk on a tabard are like the lions at the zoo these things are denaturalized because they are symbols because the extraordinary occasion must hide or even disfigure the ordinary people black faces were to many evil mummeries what carved masts were to Greek plays it was called being visited my rat catcher is not sufficiently arrogant to suppose for a moment that he looks like St. George but he is sufficiently humble to be convinced that if he looks as little like himself as he can he will be on the right road this is the soul of mummy the ostentatious secrecy of men in disguise there are of course other medieval elements in it which are also difficult to explain to the fastidious medievalists of today there is for instance a certain output of violence into the void can best be defined as a raging thirst to knock men down without the faintest desire to hurt them all the rhymes with the old ring have the trick of turning on everything in which the rhinesters most sincerely believe merely for the pleasure of blowing off steam and startling yet careless phrases when Tennyson says that King Arthur drew all the petty princetums under him and made a realm and ruled his grave royalism is quite modern many medievals outside the medieval republics believed in monarchy as solemnly as Tennyson but that older verse when good King Arthur ruled this land he was a goodly king he stole three pecs of barley meal to make a bag pudding is far more Arthurian than anything in the idols of the king there are other elements especially that sacred thing that is anachronism all that to us is anachronism was to make evils merely eternity but the main excellence of the mumming play lies still I think in its uproarious secrecy if we cannot hide our hearts in healthy darkness at least we can hide our faces in healthy blacking if you cannot escape like a philosopher into a forest at least you can carry the forest with you like a jack in the green it is well to walk under the universal ensigns and there is an old tale of a tyrant to whom a walking forest was the witness of doom that indeed is the very intensity of the notion a masked man is ominous but who shall face a mob of masks end of section 8