 Section 25 of the Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Uses of Diversity by G. K. Chesterton on Stage Costumes. While watching the other evening a very well managed reproduction of a Midsummer Night's Dream, I had the sudden conviction that the play would be much better if it were acted in modern costume. Or at any rate, in English costume. We all remember hearing in our boyhood about the absurd conventionality of Garrick and Mrs. Siddons when he acted Macbeth in a tie wig and a tailcoat. And she acted Lady Macbeth in a crinoline as big and stiff as a cartwheel. This has always been talked of as a piece of comic ignorance or impudent modern entity. As if Rosalind appeared in rational dress with a bicycle. As if Portia appeared with a horsehair wig and side whiskers. But I am not so sure that the great men and women who founded the English stage in the 18th century were quite such fools as they looked, especially as they looked to the romantic historians and eager archaeologists of the 19th century. I have a queer suspicion that Garrick and Siddons knew nearly as much about dressing as they did about acting. One distinction can at least be called obvious. Garrick did not care much for the historical costume of Macbeth, but he cared as much as Shakespeare did. He did not know much about that prehistoric and partly mythical Celtic chief. But he knew more than Shakespeare, and he could not conceivably have cared less. Now the Victorian age was honestly interested in the dark and epic origins of Europe, was honestly interested in Picts and Scots and Celts and Saxons, in the blind drift of the races and the blind drive of the religions. Ossian and the Arthurian revival had interested people in distant dark-headed men who probably never existed. Freeman, Carlisle, and the other Tutanists had interested them in distant fair-headed men who almost certainly never existed. Pussy and Pugin and the first high-churchmen had interested them in shaven-headed men, dark or fair, men who did undoubtedly exist, but whose real merits and defects would have startled their modern admirers very considerably. Under these circumstances it is not strange that our age should have felt a curiosity about the solid but mysterious Macbeth of the Dark Ages, but all this does not alter the ultimate fact that the only Macbeth that mankind will ever care about is the Macbeth of Shakespeare and not the Macbeth of history. When England was romantic it was interested in Macbeth's kilt and claymore, in the same way if England becomes a republic it will be specially interested in the Republicans and Julius Caesar. If England becomes Roman Catholic it will be specially interested in the theory of chastity and measure for measure, but being interested in these things will never be the same as being interested in Shakespeare and for a man interested in Shakespeare a man merely concerned about what Shakespeare meant, a Macbeth in powdered hair and knee breeches is perfectly satisfactory. For Macbeth, as Shakespeare shows him, is much more like a man in knee breeches than a man in kilt. His subtle hesitations and his suicidal impendence belong to the bottomless speculations of a highly civilized society. The out-out brief candle is far more appropriate to the last waxed taper after a ball of powder and patches than to the smoky but sustained fires and iron baskets which probably flared and smoldered over the swift crimes of the 11th century. The real Macbeth probably killed Duncan with the nearest weapon and then confessed it to the nearest priest. Certainly he may never have had any such doubts about the normal satisfaction of being alive. However regrettably negligent of the importance of Duncan's life he had, I fancy, few philosophical troubles about the importance of his own. The men of the Dark Ages were all optimists. As all children and all animals are, the madness of Shakespeare's Macbeth goes along with candles and silk stockings. That madness only appears in the Age of Reason. So far, then, from Garrick's anachronism being despised, I should like to see it imitated. Shakespeare got the tale of the Seas from Athens as he got the tale of Macbeth from Scotland. And having reluctantly seen the names of those two countries in the record, I am convinced that he never gave them another thought. Macbeth is not a Scotch man. He is a man. But thesesis is not only not an Athenian. He is actually an unmistakably an English man. He is the Super Squire, the best version of the English country Gentleman, better than Wardle in Pickwick. The Duke of Athens is a Duke. That is a Duke. But not of Athens. That free city is thousands of miles away. If the Seas came on the stage in Gators or a shooting jacket, if bottomed the weaver wore a smock frock, if Hermia and Helena were dressed as two modern English schoolgirls, we should not be departing from Shakespeare but rather returning to him the cold, classical draperies of which he probably never dreamed, but with which we drape. Aegisthus or Hippolita are not only a nuisance but a falsehood. They misrepresent the whole meaning of the play. For the meaning of the play is that the little things of life as well as the great things stray on the borderland of the unknown, that as a man may fall among devils for a morbid crime or fall among angels for a small piece of piety or pity, so also he may fall among fairies through an amiable flirtation or a fanciful jealousy. The fact that a backdoor opens into Elfland is all the more reason for keeping the foreground familiar and even prosaic, for even the fairies are very neighborly and firelight fairies. Therefore the human beings ought to be very human in order to effect the fantastic contrast. And in Shakespeare they are very human. Hermia, the Vixen, and Helena, the Maypole, are obviously only two excitable and quite modern girls. Hippolita has never been in Amazon. She may perhaps have once been a suffragette. The Cicis is a gentle man, a thing entirely different from a Greek oligarch. That golden good nature which employs culture itself to excuse the clumsiness of the uncultured is a thing quite peculiar to those lazier Christian countries where the Christian gentle man has been evolved. For nothing in this world can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it. Or, again, in that noble scrap of sceptical magnanimity which was unaccountably cut out in the last performance. The best in this kind are bachatos, and the worst are nor worse if imagination amend them. These are obviously the easy and reconciling comments of some kindly but cultivated squire who will not pretend to his guests that the play is good, but who will not let the actors see that he thinks it bad. But this is certainly not the way in which an Athenian Tory like Aristophanes would have talked about a bad play. But as the play is dressed and acted at present, the whole idea is inverted. We do not seem to creep out of a human house into a natural wood, and there find the superhuman and supernatural. The mortals in their tunics and togas seem more distant from us than the fairies in their hoods and peaked caps. It is an anticlimax to meet the English elves when we have already encountered the Greek gods. The same mistake, oddly enough, was made in the only modern play worth mentioning in the same street with a Midsummer Night's Dream, Peter Pan. Sir James Berry ought to have left out the fairy dog who puts the children to bed. If children had such dogs as that, they would never wish to go to fairy land. This fault or falsity in Peter Pan is, of course, repeated in the strange and ungainly incident of the father being chained up in the dog's kennel. Here, indeed, it is much worse, for the man-like dog was pretty untouching, the dog-like man was ignominious and repulsive. But the fallacy is the same. It is the fallacy that weakens the otherwise triumphant poetry and wit of Sir James Berry's play, and weakens all our treatment of fairy plays at present. Fairyland is a place of positive realities, play in laws, and a decisive story. The actors of a Midsummer Night's Dream seem to think that the play was meant to be chaotic. The clowns thought they must be always clowning, but in reality it is the solemnity, nay, the conscientiousness of the locals that is akin to the mystery of the landscape and the tale. End of section 25 For that matter, in the present season, I believe very much in the fireside man, but the very word selected for this withering insinuation shows the shallowness of the philosophy which prompts it. Surely there could not be a more stunted stupidity than the suggestion that a thing must be mild and monotonous because it has to do with fire. Why should the woman be tame because she is nearest to the wildest thing in the world? It is much more absurd to say it is prosaic to live by the fireside than to say it is prosaic to live upon the edge of a precipice. It is tenable that some people would be prosaic anywhere, but it is not the fault of the precipice. It would sound paradoxical even in a fairy tale to say that a princess was always yawning with ennui because she was introduced to a golden griffin or a crimson dragon. And in the round of daily fact, fire is about the nearest thing to a dragon that we know. Those who cannot get a fairy tale out of the fire will not get it out of anything else. It may be affirmed with fair certainty that the people who talk most scornfully about the fireside woman do not get it at all and do not wish her to get it at all. Herein lies all the absurdity of the alternatives to domesticity paraded by our progressive friends. I am not speaking, of course, of work that must be done, especially in abnormal times. I am speaking of the psychology of tedium and of the romance of life. It is apparently demanded that the fire should be concealed in the entrails of an engine, that it should work through a labyrinth of bolts and bars, that it should litter around it numberless dreary offices and leave behind it a train of indirect and mechanical servants, each further than the last from the least faint vibration of the original energy. Then, if in some outlying shed a woman has to stand counting tickets or tying up parcels from morning till night, that woman is supposed to be free. She has burst the fetters. She is living her own life, but there is supposed to be nothing but dullness for the woman who is face to face with that elemental fury which drives and fashions the whole. There is nothing poetical as compared with the tickets and labels in the woman who repeats the primordial adventure of Prometheus, and there is nothing artistic as compared with the shed about the terrestrial light which turns the grayest room to gold, which reclose the woman's raggedous children round the hearth with the colors of a company of Fra Angelico, so that the mere reflections of the flame can conquer the solid hues of drab and dust, and all her household is clothed with scarlet. The fire is in this, perhaps, the finest and simplest symbol of a truth persistently misunderstood. These elementary things, the land, the roof, the family, may seem mean and miserable, and in a cynical civilization very probably will seem mean and miserable, but the things themselves are not mean or miserable, and any reformer who says they are is not only taking hold of the stick by the wrong end, he is cutting off the branch by which he is hanging. The stamp of social failure is not that men have these simple things, but rather that they do not have them, or even when they do, do not know that they have them. If the fireside woman is dull, it is because she never looks at the fire, it is because she is not, in the wise and philosophical sense, enough of a fire worshiper, and she lacks this faculty because the whole drift of the modern world discourages that creative concentration, that intensive cultivation of the fancy, which filled the lies of our fathers with crowds of little household gods, and which created all the lesser and lighter sanctities that surround Christmas. Amid the wild and wandering adventures of the fireside are some which made possible the very scientific progress which is prone to carp at it. The engine of which I spoke recently was, we have all been told, suggested because James Watt looked at the kettle. I will not conceal a suspicion that our society might have evolved better if he had looked at the fire. I mean, of course, if he had not only looked at it, but seen it, which is not always the same thing. If he had seen what there is to be seen, he might possibly have done many things. He might, for instance, have revived the trade guilds of Glasgow, which failed to grasp his discovery. He might have taught them to take hold of the new energy and turn it towards democracy. Instead of going off and handing it over his invention to the capitalists for the defect which betrayed all Watt's school and generation, full as it was of a virile and thrifty radicalism, was precisely that it did not draw from these primal sources of piety and poetry. It was not sufficiently religious and, therefore, not sufficiently domestic. And the rich wrote it down at last, for the hearth is the only possible altar of insurrection, as even the pagans knew. From that fire alone are taken the flaming brands which can really waste the wicked cities. The truth can be told well enough by saying that James Watt would not really have comprehended the word Christmas and would have been much annoyed if told to consider the eulog instead of the kettle. He was the fireside man, but he was not domestic enough to be dangerous, for it is the domestic man and not the wild man, just as it is the domestic dog and not the wild dog who really fights with thieves and dies at his post. There has not been a genuine popular war in England since the war of Watt, Tyler and the origin of that. It will be remembered was strictly domestic. It was so domestic that it would not happen at all in the modern world. Watt, Tyler would simply be automatically shot into prison for resisting a rational and necessary scientific inspection. It was the growth of an unhuman and unhome-like philosophy that made all the difference between the Watt of the 14th century and the Watt of the 19th. And the spirit of real democracy will not re-emerge until it rises from the fireside and comes forth in the red reality of fire, the giant of Christmas brandishing the eulog for a club. But there is another feature in the flaming hearth which illustrates its natural kinship with Christmas. It is a place as Christmas is a time and these vivid limitations are vital to man as a mystic. It is not merely that the idea of everything being in its right place makes all the difference between a fire in a house and a house on fire. It is that the fireplace is a frame and it is the frame that creates the picture. By being tied to a special spot the sacred dragon becomes more powerful and in the high imaginative sense more free. This is that link between hearths and altars which the heathen felt and of which I have already spoken. If the household be the heart of politics the fire is the heart of the household and the vital organ is spread equally everywhere only in the very low organisms. The universe of the mere universalist is one of the very low organisms that the osophic generalizations about nirvana and the all may be compared to the American fashion of abolishing the fireplace altogether and heating the whole house artificially to the same temperature. A depressing habit I can imagine that a system of hot water pipes might satisfy a pantheist. The notion suggests a rather dreary parody of pan in his pipes. I can imagine that a Buddhist might want his whole house warmed like the palm house at Kew. But I think a limited and localized fire will always be as much associated with Christians as it has always been associated with Christmas. Shakespeare himself, like a large and liberal fire round which winter tales are told, has hit the mark in this matter exactly as it concerns the poet or maker of fictive things. Shakespeare does not say that the poet loses himself in the all, that he dissipates concrete things into a cloudy twilight, that he turns this home of ours into a vista or any vaguer thing. He says the exact opposite. It is a local habitation and a name that the poet gives to what would otherwise be nothing. This seeming narrowness which men complain of in the altar and the hearth is as broad as Shakespeare and the whole human imagination and should command the respect even of those who think the cult of Christmas really is all imagination. Even those who can only regard the great story of Bethlehem as a fairy tale told by the fire will get agree that such narrowness is the first artistic necessity even of a good fairy tale. But there are others who think, at least, that their thought strikes deeper and pierces to a more subtle truth in the mind. There are others for whom all are fairy tales and even all our appetite for fairy tales draw their fire from one central fairy tale as all forgeries draw their significance from a signature. They believe that this fable is a fact and that the other fables cannot really be appreciated even as fables until we know it is a fact. For them, personality is a step beyond universality. One might almost call it an escape from universality. And what they follow is as much something more than pantheism as a flame is something more than a temperature. For them, God is not bound down and limited by being merely everything. He is also at liberty to be something. And for them, Christmas will always deal with a reality exactly as Shakespeare's poetry deals with and unreality. It will give not to airy nothing, but to the enormous and overwhelming everything. A local habitation and a name. End of Section 26. Section 27 of the Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton. More Thoughts on Christmas Most sensible people say that adults cannot be expected to appreciate Christmas as much as children appreciate it. At least Mr. G.S. Street said so, who is the most sensible man now writing in the English language. But I am not sure that even sensible people are always right. And this has been my principal reason for deciding to be silly. A decision that is now irrevocable. It may be only because I am silly, but I rather think that relatively to the rest of the year, I enjoy Christmas more than I did when I was a child. Of course children do enjoy Christmas. They enjoy almost everything except actually being smacked. From which truth the custom no doubt arose. But the real point is not whether a schoolboy would enjoy Christmas. The point is that he would also enjoy no Christmas. Now I say most emphatically that I should denounce, detest, abominate, and abjure the insolent institution of no Christmas. The child is glad to find a new ball, let us say, which Uncle William, dressed as St. Nicholas in everything except the halo, has put in his stocking. But if he had no new ball, he would make a hundred new balls out of snow. And for them he would be indebted not to Christmas, but to winter. I suppose snowballing is being put down by the police like every other Christian custom. No more will a prosperous and serious city man have a large silver star splashed suddenly on his waistcoat, veritably investing him with the order of the star of Bethlehem. For it is the star of innocence and novelty, and should remind him that a child can still be born. But indeed in one sense we may truly say the children enjoy no seasons because they enjoy all. I myself am of a physical type that greatly prefers cold weather to hot. And I could more easily believe that Eden was at the North Pole than anywhere in the tropics. It is hard to define the effect of weather. I can only say that all the rest of the year I am untidy, but in summer I feel untidy. Yet although according to the modern biologists my hereditary human body must have been the same essential type in my boyhood as in my present decrepitude, I can distinctly remember hailing the idea of freedom and even energy on days that were quite horribly hot. It was the excellent custom at my school to give the boys a half-holiday when it seemed too hot for working. And I can well remember the gigantic joy which I left off reading Virgil and began to run around and round a field. My tastes in this matter have changed. Nay, they have been reversed. If I now found myself, by some process I cannot easily conjecture, on a burning summer day running round and round a field, I hope I shall not appear pedantic if I say I should prefer to be reading Virgil. And thus it is really possible, from one point of view, for elderly gentlemen to frolic at Christmas more than children can. They may really come to find Christmas more entertaining as they have come to find Virgil more entertaining. And in spite of all the talk about the coldness of classicism, the poet who wrote about the man who in his own country home fears neither king nor crowd was not by any means incapable of understanding Mr. Wardle. And it is exactly those sentiments and similar ones that the adult does appreciate better than the child. The adult, for instance, appreciates domesticity better than the child. And one of the pillars and first principles of domesticity, as Mr. Bellock has rightly pointed out, is the institution of private property. The Christmas pudding represents the mature mystery of property, and the proof of it is in the eating. I have always held that Peter Pan was wrong. He was a charming boy and sincere in his adventurousness. But though he was brave like a boy, he was also a coward like a boy. He admitted it would be a great adventure to die, but it did not seem to occur to him that it would be a great adventure to live. If he had consented to march with the fraternity of his fellow creatures, he would have found that there were solid experiences and important revelations even in growing up. They are realities which could not possibly have been made real to him without wrecking the real good in his own juvenile point of view. But that is exactly why he ought to have done as he was told. That is the only argument for parental authority. In dealing with childhood, we have a right to command it, because we should kill the child if we convinced it. Now the mistake of Peter Pan is the mistake of the new theory of life. I might call it Peter Pan Theism. It is the notion that there is no advantage to striking root. Yet if you talk intelligently to the nearest tree, the tree will tell you that you are an unobservant ass. There is an advantage in root, and the name of it is fruit. It is not true that the nomad is even freer than the peasant. The Bedouin may rush past on his camel, leaving a whirl of dust, but dust is not free because it flies. Neither is the nomad free because he flies. You cannot grow cabbages on a camel, any more than in a condemned cell. Moreover, I believe camels commonly walk in a comparatively leisurely manner. Anyhow, most merely nomadic creatures do, for it is a great nuisance to carry one's house with one. Gypsies do it, so do snails, but neither of them travel very fast. I inhabit one of the smallest houses that can be conceived by the cultivated classes. But I frankly confess I should be sorry to carry it with me wherever I went out for a walk. It is true that some motorists almost live in their motorcars, but it gratifies me to state that these motorists generally die in their motorcars too. They perish, I am pleased to say, in a startling and horrible manner, as a judgment on them for trying to outstrip creatures higher than themselves, such as the gypsy and the snail. But broadly speaking, a house is a thing that stands still, and a thing that stands still is a thing that strikes root. One of the things that strike root is Christmas, and another is Middle Age. The other great pillar of private life besides property is marriage. But I will not deal with it here. Suppose a man has neither wife nor child. Suppose he has only a good servant, or only a small garden, or only a small house, or only a small dog. He will still find he has struck unintentional root. He realizes there is something in his own garden that was not even in the Garden of Eden, and therefore is not, I kiss my hand to the socialists, in Kew Gardens or in Kensington Gardens. He realizes what Peter Pan could not be made to realize, that a plain human house of one's own, standing in one's own backyard, is really quite as romantic as a rather cloudy house at the top of a tree, or highly conspiratorial house underneath the roots of it. But this is because he has explored his own house, which Peter Pan and such discontented children seldom do. All the same the children ought to think of the never-never land, the world is outside, but we ought to think of the ever-ever land, the world which is inside, and the world which will last, and that is why wicked as we are, we know most about Christmas. End of Section 27. Section 28 of the Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. The Uses of Diversity by G. K. Chesterton. Dickens again. I am sorry that the Comic Costume Festival, which was organized for Christmas by one of the chief Dickensians' societies, has unavoidably fallen through. It is not for me to reproach those traitors who found it impossible to turn up, for I was one of those traitors myself. Whatever character it was that I was expected to appear in, I suppose, or possibly Uriah Heap, was under a final press of business refused by me. These Dickensian enthusiasts were going to have a Christmas party at Rochester, where they would brew punch and drink punch and drive coaches and fall off coaches, and do all the proper pick-wicky and things. How many of them were ready to make a hole in the ice, to be wheeled about in a wheelbarrow, or to wait all night outside a lady's school the official documents have not informed me? But I would gladly take a moderate part. I could not brew punch for the pick-wick club, but I could drink it. I could not drive the coach for the pick-wick club, or indeed for any club except the suicide club, but I could fall off the coach amid repeated applause and enthusiastic concours. I should be only too proud if it could be said of me, as of Sam's hyperbolical old gentleman who was tipped into the hyperbolical canal, that is at was found, but I can't be certain his Ed was in it. It seems to me like a euthanasia, more beautiful than the passing of Arthur. But though the failure of this particular festivity was merely accidental, like my own unfortunate fall off the coach, it is not without its parallel in the present position of Dick Kansians and Christmas. For the truth is that we simply cannot recreate pick-wick club, unless we have a moral basis as sturdy as that of Dickens, and even a religious basis as sturdy as that of Christmas. Men at such a time turn their backs to the solemn thing they are celebrating, as the horses turn their backs to the coach. But they are pulling the coach, and the best of it is this, that so long as the Christmas feast had some kind of assumed and admitted meaning, it was praised and praised sympathetically by the great men whom we should call most unsympathetic with it. That Shakespeare and Dickens and Walter Scott should write of it seems quite natural. They were people who would be as welcome at Christmas as Santa Claus. But I do not think many people have ever wished they could ask Milton to eat the Christmas pudding. Nevertheless, it is quite certain that his Christmas Ode is not only one of the richest, but one of the most human of his masterpieces. I do not think that anyone, especially wanting a rollking article on Christmas, would desire by mere instinct the literary style of Addison. But yet it is quite certain that the somewhat difficult task of really lacking Addison is rendered easier by his account of the cloverly Christmas than by anything else he wrote. I even go so far as to doubt whether one of the little cratchits who stuffed their spoons in their mouths, lest they should scream for goose, would have removed the spoon to say, oh, that Tennyson were here. Yet certainly Tennyson's spirits do seem to revive in a more or less real way at the beginning of the Christmas bells in the most melancholy part of in memoriam. These great men were not trying to be merry. Some of them indeed were trying to be miserable. But the day itself was too strong for them. The time was more than their temperaments. The tradition was alive. The festival was roaring in the streets so that prigs and even prophets who are sometimes still worse were honestly carried off their feet. The difficulty with Dickens is not any failure in Dickens, nor even in the popularity of Dickens. On the contrary, he has recaptured his creative reputation and fascination far more than any of the other great Victorians. Macaulay, who was really great in his way, is rejected. Cobbott, who was much greater, is forgotten. Dickens is not merely alive. He is risen from the dead. But the difficulty is in the failing under his feet, as it were, of that firm historic platform on which he had performed his Christmas pantomimes. A platform of which he was quite as unconscious as we, most of us, are of the floor we walk about on. The fact is that the fun of Christmas is founded on the seriousness of Christmas. And to pull away the latter support, even from under a Christmas clown, is to let him down through a trapped door. And even clowns do not like the trapped doors they do not expect. Thus it is unfortunately true that so glorious a thing as a Pickwick party tends to lose the splendid quality of a mere mummery and become that much more dull and conventional thing, a covent garden ball. We are not ourselves living in the proper spirit of Pickwick. We are pretending to be old Dickens characters when we ought to be new Dickens characters in reality. The conditions are further complicated by the fact that while reading Dickens may make a man Dickensian, studying Dickens makes him quite the reverse. One might as well expect the age custodian of a museum of sculpture to look and dress like the Apollo, Bill Vadere, as expect the Pickwickian qualities in those literary critics who are attracted by the Dickens fiction as the materials for a biography of the subject of a controversy as a mass of detail, as a record and a riddle. Those who study such things are a most valuable class in the community and they do good service to Dickens in their own way. But their type and temperament are not, in the nature of things, likely to be full of the festive magic of their master. Take for example these endless discussions about the proper ending of Edwin Drude. I thought Mr. William Archer's contributions to the query some time ago were particularly able and interesting. But I could not with my hand on my heart call Mr. William Archer a festive gentleman or one supremely fitted to follow Mr. Swiveller as perpetual grand and glorious apollos or again I see that Sir William Robertson Nickel has been writing on the same Drude mystery and I know that his knowledge of Victorian literature is both vast and exact. But I hardly think that a Puritan Scott with a sharp individualistic philosophy would be the right person to fall off the coach. Sir William Nickel, if I remember right, once forcibly described his individualist philosophy as firing out the fools and certainly the spirit of Dickens could be best described as the delight in firing them in. It is exactly because Christmas is not only a feast of children but in some sense a feast of fools that Dickens is in touch with its mystery. End of section 28. Section 29 of the Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Devorah Allen. The Uses of Diversity by G. K. Chesterton. Section 29. Taffy. I do not understand Welshman. When we say we do not understand such and such a person we usually mean that he has been making himself a nuisance. He has been bothering us in some way and the puzzle of his motives and further intentions has become a practical one. I do not mean anything of the kind here. I mean barely what I say. The distant Trojans never injured me. Taffy never came to my house or stole any part of the provisions. On the contrary, historically speaking I went to Taffy's house and took away a good deal of what belonged to him. I do not think that Taffy is a thief. I do not even know enough about him to make sure of the preliminary statement that he is a Welshman. I mean quite simply and ingenuously that I know nothing about Wales, not even, for certain, that there is such a place. I went indeed a few weeks ago to a curious place full of rocks and the people there said it was Wales but then other people said that these people were very sly and that you could not believe anything they said. But then as I did not believe the second people who did not believe the first people came back to the same comfortable condition as before which is one of blank and disinterested nations. It is a condition I am in with regard to a large number of things in this world. I keep my faith for the things of another world. About this world I am a complete agnostic. But in this particular case of ignorance I rather fancy that I am not alone. I think that the great majority of Englishmen have no real notion of the Welsh type or spirit, whatever it is. They have conceptions of the Scot and the Irishmen, false conceptions, but always containing some lines of a true tradition. The Englishman does, so to speak, understand the Scotchman, even when he misunderstands him. The Englishman does know what the Irish are even while he demands indignantly of heaven why they are. The Stingy Puritan in Plaid trousers is a very crude and unjust version of that queer blend that makes the Scot. The combination of a certain coarseness of fibre with great intellectual keenness for abstract and even mystical things. Still it is a version. The prose and poetry of the Scot remain in the character. The picture of Paddy at Donnybrook leaves out all the subtlety and self-tormanting irony that are mixed up with the pugnacity of the Irish. Still the Irish are pugnacious. The Englishman has got the leading feature right. He knows that for all his economics the Scotchman often has a bee in his bonnet, and he knows that the Irishman generally has a wasp in his, a thing that will sting itself or anyone else merely for fun or glory. In these cases the caricature, those stiff, highly coloured, antiquated and largely false tells the remains of several truths. But who on earth has ever seen a caricature of a Welshman? In punch and such papers we never see anything but pictures of a Welsh woman as if there were no males in that peculiar country with the rocks. Even the woman is only marked as Welsh by wearing an extraordinary costume, rather like that of Cinderella's supernatural godmother. Without the artist suggesting any costume at all one would recognise the very silly portraits of Irishmen with long upper lips in the style of apes. Without any plaid trousers to assist the mind one could spot the stiff beards and rocky cheekbones of the Scotchman of Charles Keane. But if you took away the Welsh woman's extraordinary hat there would be nothing whatever to show that she was a Welsh woman. We have not in our minds a Welsh type to make fun of. It is interesting to remember that apparently Shakespeare had. This state of entire non-understanding, as distinct from misunderstanding of the Welsh seems to me just now to be not only unique but important and rather serious. For unless I am very much mistaken Wales is going to play some peculiar and perhaps dominant part in the developments of our extraordinary time. If the Welsh begin to influence us without our having yet even begun to imagine them we shall have the whole Irish business over again. The gradual or imperfect understanding of a thing in the process of wrestling with it in the dark. The indications of such a movement in Wales, wherever it is the suggestion of the growing influence of Welshmen whoever they may be is something that comes to us rather by widely distributed happenings and hints than in any theatrical example. Some, however, would call Mr Lloyd George a theatrical example. He has been called even more extraordinary things and in that degree the thing is true. Mr Lloyd George is very much more genuine and sincere and formidable in his capacity as leader of the little Welsh nation than he is in any of the other capacities in which he is foolishly praised and ridiculously reviled. But to anyone who really has an eye for history and action the smallest strike secretary in a Welsh railway or colliery bulks much bigger in the present picture is Mr Lloyd George. And it has been in Wales that many of the most dramatic and effective labour revolts have happened. Above all it was in Wales that they presented peculiar features of their own, bad or good, which marked them out from the whole temper and habit of England in recent times. The modern theory of animals was challenged in the episode of the ponies in the mines. The modern theory of Jews was challenged in the violent anti-Semite riots of the last few weeks. Things fierce and unfamiliar, things lost since the Middle Ages are coming upon us out of the West. As the curious incident of the quarrels between Welshmen and Jews has been mentioned I will take the opportunity here of correcting a curious mistake that clings to the minds of numbers of my correspondence. There is in particular a gloomy gentleman in America who keeps on asking me how my anti-Semite prejudice is getting on and generally displaying a curiosity about how many Hebrew teeth I have pulled out this week and how often a pogrom is held in front of my house. He appears to base it all on some statement of mine that Jews were tyrants and traitors. Upon this basis his indignation is eloquent, lengthy and, in my opinion, just. The only weakness affecting this superstructure is the curious detail that I never did say that Jews were tyrants and traitors. I said that a particular kind of Jew tended to be a tyrant and another particular kind of Jew tended to be a traitor. I say it again. Patent facts of this kind are permitted in the criticism of every other nation on the planet. It is not counted illiberal to say that a certain kind of Frenchman tends to be sensual. It is as plain as a pike staff that the Parisian tradition of life and letters has a marked element of sensuality. It is also as plain as a pike staff that those who are creditors will always have a temptation to be tyrants and that those who are cosmopolitan will always have a temptation to be spies. This has nothing to do with alleging that the majority of any people falls into its typical temptations. In this respect I should imagine that Jews varied in their moral proportions as much as the rest of mankind. Rehoboam was a tyrant, Jehoshaphat was not. In what is perhaps the most celebrated collection of Jews in human history the proportion of traders was one in twelve. But I cannot see why the tyrants should not be called tyrants and the traders' traders. Why Rehoboam should not cause a rebellion or Judas become an object of dislike merely because they happen to be members of a race persecuted for other reasons and on other occasions. Those are my views on Jews. They are more reasonable than those of the people that wreck their shops and much more reasonable than those of the people who justify them on all occasions. End of section 29 Section 30 of The Uses of Diversity. This is a LibriVox recording. Odd LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Elsie Selwyn. The Uses of Diversity by G. K. Chesterton. Section 30. Ego et Sawius Mayus. Accident has cut me off this week for many current publications and left me much to my own devices. It is therefore my immutable purpose to write an article about myself under the thin pretense of noticing a book about Mr. Bernard Shaw. This is all the more fun because it is exactly what Mr. Bernard Shaw would do himself. Nor should I blame him. I like Mr. Shaw's type of egoism. Because if he talks big, it is at least about big things. Things bound to be bigger than himself. I revolt not against the loud egoist but the gentle egoist who talks tenderly of trifles who says in guilds the amber of my cigarette holder. I find I cannot live without a cigarette holder. I resist this arrogant simply because it is more arrogant. For even so complete a fool cannot really suppose we are interested in his cigarette holder and therefore must suppose that we are interested in him. But I defend a dogmatic egoist precisely because he deals in dogmas. The Apostles Creed is not regarded as a pose of foppish vanity yet the word I comes before the word God. The believer comes first but he is soon dwarfed by his beliefs. Swallowed in a creative whirlwind in the trumpets of the resurrection. And if a man says he believes in the Superman or the socialist state I think I'm equally modest only not so sensible. Mr. Herbert Skimpal's book Bernard Shaw, The Man and His Work contains many suggestive and valuable things to which I cannot do justice including allusions to myself mostly only to flattering and in one case both amusing and mystifying. The book suggests that all the active figures in my idol fictions are made as fat as I am though I cannot recall that any of them are fat at all except a supernatural monster in a nightmare called the man who was Thursday. Let there be no alarm however that I shall talk about such nightmares or any of my own tales like Shaw I am egotistic about things that matter Mr. Skimpal says that while Shaw and I agree that the world should be adapted to the man. Chesterton includes our present institutions in the hearts of a man's soul which cannot be altered. Now there is here a potential mistake which I will not apologize for taking more seriously than any fancy about the figures in my very amateurish romances I did not say that I do not mind being called fat for deprived of that just I should be almost a serious writer I do not even mind being supposed to mind being called fat but being supposed to be contented and contented with the present institutions of modern society as a mortal slander I will not take from any man whatever are the institutions I defend they are not primarily those of the present they have been attempted in the past and I hope they may be achieved in the future but they are not present but conspicuous by their absence Mr. Skimpal truly says that I defend domesticity and piety and patriotism but these are not the typical institutions of today the typical institutions of today are a divorce court cutting up families with the speed of a sausage machine a science which preaches the destiny without the divinity of Calvinism and a finance that crosses all frontiers with the same enlightened indifference that is shown by cholera these are the institutions of the instant and even Mr. Skimpal has realized them as those of the immediate future and a somewhat innocent passage he says that it is of no use for Shaw to point out to me the hope of a cosmetolytine future that internationalism social class feeling and the imperialism all point the same way he refuses to see it is indeed useless for Shaw to point out to me that I should follow the lead of these things since I happen to detest imperialism disbelieve in internationalism and distrust social class feeling so far as I know what it means I am well aware that an imperial chancellor in Berlin an international moneylender in Johannesburg and anarchist spy in Petrograd are all pointing the same way and that is why I feel pretty safe in going the other I warmly apologize to Mr. Skimpal for writing a personal explanation instead of a review of his book which contains many things while worth writing and reviewing notably the shrewd remark about Shaw's style in which what is a paradox in spirit is suddenly an epigram in form it takes our breath away rather by taking itself for granted than by defining itself like a defiance but I fancy Mr. Skimpal will sympathize with me if I am primarily concerned with his convictions as he is with mine I want to the vital point in emphasizing this matter of the things permanent in man when I say that religion and marriage and local loyalty are permanent in humanity I mean that they recur when humanity is most human and only comparatively decline when society is comparatively inhuman they have declined in the modern world they may return through the war but anyhow where we have the small farm and the free man and the fighting spirit there we shall have this elite to the soil and the roof and to the altar to take a more casual case I believe that when men are happy they sing not only at the piano but at the plow or at least in the intervals of plowing at their working in their walks abroad I am well aware that modern men do not sing in the street very much I am well aware that cosmopolitan money lenders never sing but die with all their music in them I know that the song of the happy meat contractor is not one of our present institutions I know that one can seldom come at dawn upon some solitary London banker caroling more sweetly than a lark even as clerks do not often sing in chorus of their ledgers but I still think it is more human to sing than not to sing and that being more human it is more permanent in humanity some righteous revolution will teach the bankers and contractors that little birds who can sing and won't sing must be made to sing or at any rate made to squeal and the interlude the instinctive song takes refuge in the lesser thing called poetry or even prose and tomorrow the fewer of personal sincerity may have passed and I shall return with a lowly air to literature End of section 30 Recording by Elsie Salwan Section 31 of the Uses of Diversity This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Larry Wilson The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton The Plan The Plan for a New Universe There is one theory of the origin of species which I have never seen suggested Probably this is because I have never read the numberless and voluminous works in which it has been suggested For I have read much matter things and nothing mad is likely to have been missed by the modern mind But since it shocked the respectability of agnostics to suggest that all creatures have been made different by God why did nobody suggest that they have been made different by man Why not trace the vast variety of animals as we can really trace the vast variety of dogs The dog is already almost a world in himself with all the appearance of distinct orders and types A Saint Bernard approaches the size and surpasses the legendary virtues of a lion While there is a sort of Pekingese which a man might almost tread on as a somewhat unpolicing insect Yet all this world of evolution has presumably had man for its God Suppose our sphere in space has itself been the island of Dr. Moreau Suppose man had some prehistoric civilization so colossal complete that all beasts were beasts of burden or all animals were domestic animals that all rabbits were pet rabbits or all fleas, performing fleas Suppose the tame bird came first and what we know as the wild bird afterwards Mr. Bernard Shaw in some of his early antedomestic diatribes compared a woman in the home to a parrot in the cage saying that mere custom made us think the connection natural. The answer it has always seemed to me is strangely obvious it is surely plain that the housewife is not the bird in the cage but the bird in the nest but if in that age of wild skeptics anyone had wished to outdo Mr. Shaw in paradox he could have done it brilliantly by this hypothesis that the colors of a parrot were actually produced in a cage and that an exiled bird only built himself a rude din of sticks and mud as an outlaw does when driven from his home Suppose in short that man has not only been a dog fancier but a wolf fancier and a hyena fancier suppose he really fancied a rhinoceros suppose some prehistoric squire kept a stud of giraffes or his moneylender got a peerage on the plea that he had improved the breed of crocodiles then we have only to suppose this universal zoo broken up like the Roman Empire and all we see is its neglect and riot. The tiger is a stray cat especially a large and handsome cat who took the prize and the prize giver and escaped to the jungle a whale with some sort of hornless cow sent into the sea like a new funland dog who suddenly refused to come back again this thesis accounts for the comparative rapidity of differentiation over which the geologists fight with the biologists it accounts rationalistically for those evidences of a creative purpose so distressing to a refined mind it accounts for the camel who seems always to have been in captivity an accounting for a camel is something above all it accounts for that very vivid impression of something in various species that was outrageous and exact Jeffries found in the farcical outlines of fish or bird the notion that they must have been produced without design to me this sounds like saying that the caricatures of Max Beerbaum must have been produced without design I could as easily believe so far as this mere aesthetic impression goes that the face on a gargoyle was merely molded by the pouring rain artistically the sunfish or the hornbill do not look in the least like accidents but it might be maintained that they look like fashions there are some tropical birds and fruits that really have the cut and colors of novelties in a shop window we might fancy that an elephant was designed in the same taste as Babylonian architecture or the leopard and the tiger to match the tapestries of the east there is probably somewhere a bird as sinister and terrifying as a top hat and in some luxuriant jungle a plant as preposterous as a pair of trousers the monsters may be only antiquated fashion plates for this is one of the numberless neglected fallacies in the clotted folly of eugenics even if we could in the abstract read humanity well there would be a flutter of modes and crazes about which was considered well bred the dog is bred with design but surely not always with discretion the doxund appears to have been pulled out on the rack of some demonic vivisectionist and somebody seems to have cut off the bulldog's nose most emphatically to spite his face on the analogy of the things we do breed the eugenist must be expected to produce a brood of hunchbacks or a pure race of albinos it is I hope unnecessary to remark that I do not believe in this theory but there have been people who might well have believed in it there were people who could believe in Swinburne's sentiment glory to man in the highest for man is the master of things he would have completed this consciousness in the port if he could have thought that the birds of Putney Heath where he walked or the fishes in the sea where he was so fond of swimming were doing tricks taught to them as to performing dogs suppose that such a fancy had fitted in with one of the humanitarian religions of that time how far would it have satisfied what was often called the religious sentiment he would not have satisfied the religious sentiment not even Swinburne's he would have cared as little as Shelley to claim the birds when he could not claim the sky he certainly would have been much annoyed with the notion of loving the fishes if he were not allowed to go on loving the sea and though he poisoned paganism with pessimism a thing not only more false but more frivolous though he tried to love the sea as a wanton to admire the sky as a tyrant and his love of nature not only is compared with Virgil or Dante but is compared with Wordsworth or Whitman yet he was like every poet elemental and what he loved were the elementary things and this is an essential of any poetry and any religion it must appeal to the origins and deal with the first things however much or little it may say about them it must be at home in the homeless void where the first star was made the one thing every man knows about the unknowable is that it is the indispensable now if any reader thinks that the scientific heresy I sketched above is too irrational for moderns to have held I have the pleasure of informing him that moderns are now about to announce or have already announced a new heresy somewhat analogous but much less rationalistic there is a new religion that is a new fault being found in the old religion there is a new plan for a new universe which may be expected to last for many a long month to come it is the view that seems to have satisfied Mr. Wells or at any rate Mr. Brittley it is the view which has been more than once suggested by Mr. Shaw and it is repeated in the skeleton of certain lectures he is delivering it is much more supernatural or even superstitious than my imaginary thesis for instead of giving to man more of the powers of God it arbitrarily imagines God and then limits him with the impotence of man he is not limited in his theologies by his own reason or justice or desire for the freedom of man he is limited by unreason and injustice and by the impossibility of freedom even for himself but I do not make this note upon the new development with any attention of discussing it thoroughly in its theological aspect though there is one aspect of that aspect which may respectfully be called the music when I was a boy Christianity was blamed by the free thinkers for its anthropomorphic demigod substituted by savages for the unknown God who made all things now Christianity is blamed for the flat contrary because its God is unknown and not anthropomorphic enough 30 years ago we only needed the first person of the Trinity and 30 years later we have discovered that we only need the second this sort of fashion plate philosophy will no doubt go on as usual in a few decades we may be told that our fathers were profoundly right when they believed in the archangel Gabriel that made an despicable mistake when they believed in the archangel Raphael we shall learn that the seraphim are an exploded superstition but the cherubim a most valuable and novel discovery and as my note is not concerned with the theological neither is it directly concerned with the purely logical side of it here again it seems obvious that all the doubts which legitimately attached to the idea of a progressive humanity or absolutely fatal to the idea of a progressive divinity a man may be progressing towards God but what is God progressing towards and how does he know which of two developments in consciousness is the better e.g. an imaginative compassion or an imaginative cruelty if there be no aboriginal standard in his own nature I am here only concerned to note the failure of this fancy where it is parallel to the failure of the fancy I mentioned first and it is the weakness which would instantly be discovered in both of them not only by every poet but by every child it is that unless the sky is beautiful nothing is beautiful unless the background of all things is good it is no substitute to make the foreground better it may be right to do so for other reasons but not for the reason that it is the root of religion materialism says the universe is mindless and faith says it is ruled by the highest mind neither will be satisfied with the new progressive creed which declares hopefully that the universe is half-witted into section 31 section 32 of the uses of diversity this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the uses of diversity by G. K. Chesterton section 32 George Wyndham I believe more and more that there are no trivialities but only truths neglected the things I myself neglect accumulate in mountains I have made a note of one of them found in turning over the recent files of the nation elsewhere was a reminder about a book I had long admired and enjoyed but which had been crowded out of my mind by less pleasant things the book of recollections about George Wyndham by Mr. Charles Gaddy and published by Mr. Murray even now I cannot do justice to the book but I know Mr. Gaddy will approve of my saying a word to correct an injustice to the subject of the book some time ago the nation dismissed Mr. Gaddy's volume not with disrespect but with a certain distance and indifference evidently founded on a very mistaken idea it implied that Wyndham was after all an intellectual aristocrat whose culture was that of a clique and who did not test it enough in popular and practical politics the point is interesting chiefly because it is the precise reverse of the truth if anything could narrow a man like Wyndham it was being political like the nation what brought him to a universal brotherhood was getting far from politics like the nation his private life was much larger than his public life though that in turn was larger than most public lives in the parliamentary decline being a politician he had to be a parliamentarian and being a parliamentarian he had to be an oligarch in so far as he did hold the aristocratic theory it was exactly that aristocratic theory that forced him into political practice he knew well enough I think that the English parliament is an aristocracy he took the high ground responsibility of privilege but he was far too sincere to deny that it was privilege he said to a friend of mine who thus lamented his laborious parliamentary botherations you see I was born paid it was the aristocracy the nation reproves that necessitated the parliamentarism the nation desires or demands personally I should not desire either and I think the real wisdom was in a larger world outside both it was precisely where he was most domestic that he was most democratic he was a poet among poets exactly as he might have been a pedestrian among pedestrians or as he would have preferred to put it a tramp among tramps the sympathy with tramps might be taken literally for I remember him defending the gypsies when a more modern spirit wanted them taught the meaning of progress by being moved on by the police he may have been right to work in cabinets and committees but it was there that he was in a clique he may have been right not to follow his tastes but it was his tastes that were popular and what many cliques would call vulgar he may have been right not to be one of the idle rich but he might have been even more superior to the limits of the rich if he had been idler the beauty of Mr. Gaddy's book is that it is a brilliant scrapbook the very variegated nature of which expresses this almost vagabond liberality even when it merely notes down such things as single lines of Shakespeare over which Wyndham lingered or reproduces corners of carving or painting which arrested his eye the method seems to me to work rightly it seems somehow natural to talk of every other subject besides the subject himself as he was always ready to talk of every other subject and this aspect by itself accentuates the feeling that his holidays were his most useful days in this mood one may well wish that he had never been near himself called the cesspool of politics and one might well accept the nation's suggestion of his aloofness from its own favorite parliamentary business with a somewhat dry assent Wyndham certainly had little to do with the internal constructive legislation praised in progressive papers he can claim none of the glory of the great social reforms of the period just before the war he is not responsible for the permission to drag away a poor man's child as a raving maniac if his teacher thinks he is a little too stupid to learn or his teacher is a little too stupid to teach him he has not the honor of having abolished the habeas corpus act in order to allow amateur criminologist to keep a tramp in prison until they have invented a science of criminology he did not establish the labor exchanges and probably did not want to establish them any more than the labor exchanges vividly described in Uncle Tom's cabin it was not he who created by statute a servant class of men may dispend their own wages on doctors they might never want instead of on tools or tram tickets they urgently wanted he was largely detached from all this and when reading a real record like Mr. Gaddy's one is moved to wish that he had been even more detached from it during the liberty of his philosophical friendships one respects but regrets the loyalty of his political friendships and is sorry that common sense must be sacrificed to practical politics but when a book like Mr. Gaddy's has moved a reviewer to this mood of mere regret for a poet wasted in politics he turns upon him after all one answer which is itself unanswerable judged by one ultimate test he was after all right to remain in politics even in the last putrefaction of parliamentary politics at the price of nobody knows what pain and patience and contempt and concessions he alone among modern politicians did leave not merely a name but a thing that will remain after him as a scientific engine or a geographical discovery remains he achieved a work which has changed the whole destiny of western Europe the resurrection of Ireland there he established the free peasant a work organically different from all the modern reforms that are merely imposed whether right or wrong whether servile or socialist it is the difference between planting a tree and building a tower once planted the tree lives by its own life he and his admirers myself among the number might well be content to contemplate such a work without afterthoughts if there were not laid upon us like a load of memories and almost like a living chain the love of England for England alas has made today the worst possible compromise between aristocracy and democracy it has kept the aristocracy and lost the aristocrats the country is still as much ruled by squires but not so much by country gentlemen and the reform of the House of Lords seems to mean eliminating gentlemen and carefully preserving noblemen it is as if there were a complaint of martial law and it were met by keeping the whole machinery of militarism giving the arbitrary power to spies instead of soldiers or it is as if reactionaries erected a despotism and then called themselves reformers because they did not care what dirty fellow was despot but remote as Wyndham was from the sham gentry of the 20th century it would also be an error to merge him with the genuine gentry of the 18th it would be to mark the type so as to miss the man what distinguished him as an individual from good and bad squires was something far older than squire arty the true sense of the squire expectant eager to spring into the saddle of knighthood his courage was far less static than that of a country gentleman it was the thing in which a philologist might recognize that courage really means rushing or from which a professor will probably someday prove that courage really means running away he had that spiritual ambition which is itself the ascending flame of humility and which has been wanting to the English since the squire grew greater than the knight he seemed to await an adventure that never quite came to him on earth and his life and death were swift as if he were struck by lightning as with an accolade or had one spurs that were wings upon the wind and of section 32 section 33 of the uses of diversity this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Greg Giordano the uses of diversity by G. K. Chesterton section 33 four stupidities I have just seen a newspaper paragraph which, whether it refers to a fact or merely a suggestion seems to me to go down pretty well into that depth of mindlessness which calls itself the modern mind it's said that influence is being brought to bear on the American government to induce them to break a bottle of water instead of a bottle of champagne when they christen a battleship now it is not easy to deal adequately with the rich stupidity of that it is about five phallics thick stupidity obscuring stupidity until one reader can hardly see more than one of the jokes at a time there is something almost fascinating in the idea of trying to disentangle them first stupidity note the notion that there is something so intrinsically and supernaturally evil about an intoxicant that the pure temperance man will not touch it even when they cannot intoxicate anybody it is as if a man were to insist on having a tea total boot polish or a tea total printing ink tea or even of hot milk becomes diabolic if you have boiled the kettle with methylated spirit Odde cologne is a black guard indulgence though you use it only to scent your handkerchief a liqueur containing alcohol such as ginger beer is simply and superstitiously an accursed thing which is not only not to be touched with the lips but not to be touched with the hands after this case the more intemperate temperance people cannot pretend any longer that their proposal is merely a social reform it is obviously and literally a mystical taboo I do not see what right such people have to mock if the savage is fear of a fetish still less at the peasants respect for the relic of a saint there might surely be such a thing as holy water if it be so certain as unholy water second stupidity the extraordinary confusion by which it becomes not only wicked to possess wine though you never drink it but becomes wicked even to destroy it this goes I think much further than this queer materialist madness has yet gone if a champagne bottle is smashed to smithereens over the prow of a ship I should have thought the most logical tea totaler would merely have been glad to have one champagne bottle less in the world as he would probably not be a person with any special sympathy with the old ceremonial's revelry that it is the only possible way in which I can imagine the thing affecting him we in England used to think we could trace a slight streak of fanaticism in good Mrs. Carrionation who used to do about breaking other people's wine and spirit bottles with her little hatchet but now would appear that Mrs. Carrionation was nobler one weekly compromising with the fiend of fermented drink perhaps nobbled by the liquor trade or worse still verging on the lowly state of a moderate drinker she ought to have been summoned before a tribunal of these new tea totalers and condemned for ever having gone near enough to a bottle to touch it even with a hatchet condemned for having as much as hung about the hellish tavern might have mounted to her head the principal is an interesting one and might be extended to many cases thus when the common hangman burned a book of treason or heresy he may be supposed to have been infected by the intellectual errors it contained thus when a censor blacks out a paragraph in a newspaper he may be held to have sinned even in looking to see where the paragraph was this apparently is the new barbaric fancy that certain vegetable drinks are so demonic that we not only are wrong when we drink them but are wrong when we do our best to render them undrinkable third stupidity the curious deadness of the mind in such men is illustrated at the next stage that of clinging convulsively to a mere form not only knowing but not so much as wondering first whether the idea is worth preserving and secondly whether they are preserving it the mark of this dead and broken traditionalism is always two-fold a keeping seen in these two facts that men alter a thing as if it had no sense in it yet they never have the sense to abolish what is for them a senseless thing I can see much dignity and absolute austerity and the refusal of symbol I can see some dignity even in dingy utilitarianism and the refusal of art I could respect the perfect complainess of an early Quaker like Penn when he would not take his hat off in a palace because it was an idle form I do not despise him because he came afterwards I believe to see that keeping your hat on is just as much of a form as taking it off and took off his hat like other people but if Penn had strictly confined himself say to taking off his hat-band with a laborious care every time he entered the royal presence I should say that he had lost both his Quakerism and his sociability he would have lost the independence that refused his recognition to the world and he would not have gained the disputable substitute of good manners similarly I could respect though I could not envy the flinty old Manchester manufacturers who regarded all expenditure on arms especially on drums flags or trumpets as so much babyish waste of money but I should not even have respected them if they had proposed that the British Army should fly the white flag in every battle because it was cheaper than a coloured one why have a flag at all if it comes to that or again I can understand the uncontroverted Scrooge with his bowl of gruel and I like the converted Scrooge with his bowl of punch but if Scrooge had insisted every Christmas on having a punch bowl with no punch in it I should not understand at all the stupidity besides the general deadness there's a strange special deadness to the human sentiment behind that special sort of ceremony don't express the sentiment if you think it a silly sentiment don't so express it as to prove that you haven't got it that sentiment is the ancient sentiment of sacrifice the thing's sacrifice may be anything wine as on the battleship gold as when on the doge through his ring into the sea as among the ancient pagans and very occasionally when tribes savage or civilized or seized with satanist panic amen but it must be something valuable where the particular thrill wholesome or unwholesome is not obtained it was generally the best sheep or the best ox and in the rare cases of human sacrifice generally somebody like the king's daughter like all human appetites it is both good and evil many roots a gesture of generosity an appeal to the unknown a guarantee against arrogance a dim idea of not taking all one's advantage from fortune but they all depend on the value and these men evidently understood none of them when they filled a bottle with water End of Section 33 Recording by Greg Giordano Newport Ritchie, Florida Section 34 of The Uses of Diversity This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Greg Giordano The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton On Historical Novels It is very easy, of course, to smile at such schoolboy fiction as the novels of Mr. Henty in which the same very English and modern young gentlemen from rugby or harrow turns up again and again as a young Greek a young Carthaginian a young Scandinavian a young Gaul a young British and almost everything short of a young Negro but Mr. Henty had the merits of his industry and fecundity and one of them was that he did take a boy's imagination into many and varied parts of human history however conventional the figure he followed through them might be The English boy will not find out as much about the soul of Carthage as a lover of letters made from Salamombo but at least you will know that Carthage was conquered and that is for various reasons a good thing for English people to know and since the Henty period our historical novels have fallen with terrible sameness into two or three grooves we might almost say the demand is not allowed to write an historical novel except about four different historical periods about six different historical characters and even about them he is not allowed to take any view except that taken by the other romances on the same subject now considering the countless millions of marvelous, amusing, unique and picturesque things that have thronged on top of each other through all our wonderful 3,000 years of European history the state of affairs is a Byzantine and been knighted as if no landscape painter ever painted anything but a large tree or as if none of our sculptors could model anything except the left leg you may write a novel about the time of Henry of Navarre in fact, it might also be said that you must write a novel about the time of Henry of Navarre if you go in for writing historical novels at all somebody, the publisher or the office boy makes you do this in this novel, Huguenots must be gallant gentlemen with a touch of bluffness Catholics must always be gallant gentlemen with a touch of slowness all important political questions must be settled by duels fought with long repairs at wayside ends you must stick to one side of the quarrel but even in that you must bring any of the charges that a person of the period might really have brought for instance the court must be perpetually engaged in plotting to stab the bluff Huguenot but you must not insist that the Huguenot was a Puritan and his objection to the court would largely be that it was a Renaissance court you must not however delicately bring in that presence of florid pagan sensuality into quorum which we feel in Brantone or the tales of the Queen of Navarre the Latins must stick to assassination there must be no people to speak of in Paris though it was the people of Paris who, for good or evil changed the whole course of the history men like Sully may be introduced but their talents must be entirely occupied in serving the Prince in the love affairs and in his duels and inns above all slap in the very middle of the wars of religion nobody must seem to have any clear idea of what his own religion is about you may also write a novel about the time of Richelot but it must be governed by the same principles Richelot must be a sinister yet magnanimous enemy of the hero he must try to kill the hero and unaccountably fail at this stage of the writing of historical novels it is important to be an imitator of Dumas there are critics who maintain that Dumas was largely written by imitators of Dumas this is an exaggeration but at the worst they were good imitators there are chapters in the triple tale of the musketeers of which I can only say that if anyone but he wrote them he could hire hearts and heads as well as hands but my warning to the young writer of entirely useless historical novels is this he must not go outside France or treat that country otherwise than as an insulated elf land he must not carry off General Monk in a box think what a frightful mistake would have been made from the English Puritan point of view if the artagnan had carried off this mistake all this happened in the time of Mazarin and not Richelieu but the principle will be found reliable the principle is that neither Richelieu or anybody else should show the faintest interest in the future of France you may write a novel about the French Revolution you may do it on your head as the jolly habitual criminals say the essential principles of this sort of novel are one that the populace of Paris from 1790 to 1794 never had any meals nor even sat down in a café they stood about in the streets all night and all day sufficiently sustained by the sight of blood especially blue blood two, all power during the terror was in the hands of the public executioner and of Robespierre and these persons were subject to abrupt changes of mind and frequently redeemed their habit of killing people for no apparent reason by letting them off at the last moment for no apparent reason either three, aristocrats are of two kinds the very wicked and the entirely blameless and both are invariably good looking both also appear rather to prefer being guillotined four, such things as invasion of France the idea of a republic the influence of Rousseau the nearness of national bankruptcy the work of Carnot with the armies the policy of Pitt the policy of Austria the inter-radical habit of protecting one's property against foreigners in the presence of persons carrying guns at the battle of Almy all these things had nothing to do with the French Revolution and should be omitted now considering the number of picturesque struggles there have been in the world it seems to me that these subjects might be given a rest there has been next to nothing written for instance about the other wars of religion those that accompanied the construction of Catholic Europe rather than it's breaking up there was the iconoclast invasion of Italy which ends with the entrance of Charlemagne there's been next to nothing written about riots other than the Parisian the many riots of Edinburgh especially of those few days when it was almost as dangerous to be a doctor as to be a mad dog another advantage would be that coming fresh to his historical problem the writer might even read a little history and of section 34 recording by Greg Giordano Newport Richie, Florida section 35 of the Uses of Diversity this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton on Monsters I once saw in the newspapers this paragraph of which I make a note Leprechaun Cot great excitement has been caused in Mullengar in the west of Ireland by the report that the supposed Leprechaun which several children stated they had seen at Kalao near Delvin during the past two months was captured two policemen found a creature of dwarvish proportions in a wood near the town and brought the little man to Mullengar Workhouse where he is now an inmate he eats greedily but all attempts to interview him have failed his only reply being a peculiar sound between a growl and a squeal the inmates regard him with interest mixed with awe this seems like the beginning of an important era of research it seems as if the world of experiments had at last touched the world of reality it is as if one read great excitement has been caused in Rotten Row in the west of London by the fact that the centaur previously seen by several colonels and young ladies has at last been stopped in his lawless gallop or as if one saw in a newspaper slight perturbation has been caused in the west end of Margate by the capture of a mermaid or a daring fouler climbing the crags of the black mountains for a nest of eagles found somewhat unexpectedly that it was a nest of angels it is wonderful to have the calm admission in cold print of such links between the human world and other worlds it is interesting to know that they took the leprechaun to a workhouse it settles and settles with a very good instinct the claim of humanity in such sublime curiosities if a centaur were really found in Rotten Row would they take him to a workhouse or to a stable if a mermaid were really pushed up at Margate would they take her to a workhouse or to an aquarium if people caught an angel unawares would they put the angel in a workhouse or in an aviary the idea of the missing link was not at all new with Darwin it was not invented merely by those vague but imaginative minor poets to whom we owe most of our ideas about evolution men had always played about with the idea of a possible link between human and bestial life and the very existence or if you will the very non-existence of the centaur or the mermaid proves it all the mythologies had dreamed of a half human monster the only objection to the centaur and the mermaid was that they could not be found in every other respect their merits were of the most solid sort so it is with the Darwinian ideal of a link between man and the brutes there is no objection to it except that there is no evidence for it the only objection to the missing link is that he is apparently fabulous like the centaur and the mermaid and all the other images under which man has imagined a bridge between himself and brutality in short the only objection to the missing link is that he is missing but there is also another very elementary difference the Greeks and the medieval invented monstrosities but they treated them as monstrosities that is they treated them as exceptions they did not deduce any law from such lawless things as the centaur or the merman the griffin or the hippogriff but modern people did try to make a law out of the missing link they made him a law giver they were hunting for him like a criminal they built on the foundation of him before he was found they made this unknown monster the mixture of the man and the ape the founder of society and the accepted father of mankind the ancients had a fancy that there was a mongrel of horse and man a mongrel of fish and man but they did not make it the father of anything they did not ask the mad mongrel the ancients did not draw up a system of ethics based upon the centaur showing how man in a civilized society must take care of his hands but must not wholly forget his hooves they never reminded woman that though she had the golden hair of a goddess she had the tail of a fish but the moderns did talk to man as if he were the missing link they did remind him that he must allow for apish ability and bestial tricks the moderns did tell the woman that she was half a brute for all her beauty you can find the things said again and again in Schopenhauer and other prophets of the modern spirit that is the real difference between the two monsters the missing link is still missing and so is the merman on the top of all this we have the leprechaun apparently an actual monster at present in the charge of the police it is unnecessary to say that numbers of learned people have proved again and again that it could not exist it is equally unnecessary to say that numbers of unlearned people children, mothers of children workers, common people who grow corn or catch fish had seen them existing almost every other simple type of our working population had seen a leprechaun a fisherman had seen a leprechaun a farmer had seen a leprechaun even a postman had probably seen one but there was one simple son of the people whose path had never before been crossed by the prodigy never until then had a policeman seen a leprechaun it was only a question of whether the monster should take the policeman away with him into elf land the policeman as he would certainly have been fettered by the fatal love of the fairy queen or whether the policeman should take away the monster to the police station the forces of this earth prevailed the constable captured the elf instead of the elf capturing the constable the officer took him to the workhouse and opened a new epoch in the study of tradition and folklore what will the modern world do if it finds, as very likely it will that the wildest fables have had a basis in fact that there are creatures of the border land that there are oddities on the fringe of fixed laws that there are things so unnatural as easily to be called preternatural I do not know what the modern world will do about these things I only know what I hope I hope the modern world will be as sane about these things as the medieval world was about them because I believe that an ogre can have two heads that is no reason why I should lose the only head that I have because the medieval man thought that some man had the head of a dog that was no reason why he himself should have the head of a donkey the medieval man was never essentially weak or stupid about any of his beliefs however unfounded they were he did not lack judgment he only lacked the opportunities of judgment he had superstitions but he was not superstitious about them he was wrong about Africa but then to do him justice he did not care whether he was right he had got that particular thing which some modern people call the love of truth but which is really simply the power of taking one's own mistakes seriously he thought that ordinary men were a serious matter as they are he thought that extraordinary men were a fantastic fairy tale and he thought very rightly that the fairy tale was all the more fantastic if it was true he did not let dog-faced men affect his conception of mankind he regarded them as a joke the best as a practical joke but in our time I am sorry to say we have seen some signs of the possibility that such aberrations or monstrosities as spiritual science may discover will be taken as real tests of or keys to the human lot for instance the psychological phenomenon called dual personality is certainly a thing so extraordinary that any old-fashioned rationalist or agnostic would simply have called it a miracle and disbelieved it but nowadays those who do believe it will not treat it as a miracle that is, as an exception they try to make deductions from it theories about identity and metempsychosis and psychical evolution and God knows what if it is true that one particular body has two souls it is a joke as if it had two noses it must not be permitted to upset the dualities of our human happiness if someone says Jones blew his nose and Jones is of so peculiar a formation that one may with logical propriety ask which nose that is no reason why the ordinary formula should lose its ordinary human utility this is, I think one of the most real dangers that lie in front of the civilization that has just discovered the leprechaun we are going to find all the gods and fairies all over again all the spiritual hybrids and all the justs of eternity but we are not going to find them as the pagans found them in our youth in an atmosphere in which gods can be justed with or giants slapped on the back we are going to find them in the old age of our society in a mood dangerously morbid in a spirit only too ready for exception instead of the rule if we find creatures that are half human we may only too possibly make them an excuse for being half human ourselves I should not be very painfully concerned about the leprechaun if people had thrown stones at him as a bad fairy or given him milk and fire as a good one but there is something menacing about taking away a monster there is nothing sinister about putting a leprechaun in the workhouse the only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work End of section 35 End of the Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton