 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Alarms and Discursions by G. K. Chesterton. Section 9, Chapter 25-27 The Field of Blood In my daily paper this morning, I read the following interesting paragraphs which take my mind back to an England which I do not remember and which, therefore, perhaps, I admire. Nearly sixty years ago, on September 4, 1850, the Australian General Hainow, who had gained an unenviable fame through the world by his ferocious methods in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution in 1849, while on a visit to this country, was belabored in the streets of London by the draymen of Messiers Barkley, Perkins and Company, whose brewery he had just inspected in company of an agitant. Popular delight was so great that the government of the time did not dare to prosecute the assailants, and the general, the woman flogger as he was called by the people, had to leave these shores without remedy. He returned to his own country and settled upon his estate at Césarquise, which is close to the commune above mentioned, by his will the estate passed to his daughter, after whose death it was to be presented to the commune. This daughter had just died, but the communal council, after much deliberation, has declined to accept the gift and ordered that the estate should be left to fall out of cultivation and be called the bloody meadow. Now that is an example of how things happen under an honest democratic impulse. I do not dwell especially on the earlier part of the story, though the earlier part of the story is astonishingly interesting. It recalls the days when Englishmen were potential lighters, that is, potential rebels. It is not for lack of agonies of intellectual anger. The sultan and the late King Leopold have been denounced as hardly as general Hino, but I doubt if they would have been physically thrashed in the London streets. It is not the tyrants that are lacking but the draymen. Nevertheless, it is not upon the historic heroes of Barclay, Perkinson country that I veiled all my hope. Fine as it was, it was not a full and perfect revolution. A brewer's draymen beating an imminent European general with a stick, though a singularly bright and pleasing vision, is not a complete one. Only when the brewer's draymen beats the brewer with a stick shall we see the clear and radiant sunrise of British self-government. The fun will really start when we begin to thump the oppressors of England as well as the oppressors of Hungary. It is, however, a definite decline in the spiritual character of draymen that now they can thump neither one nor the other. But as I have already suggested, my real quarrel is not about the first part of the extract, but about the second. Whether or no the draymen of Barclay and Perkinson have degenerated, the Commune, which includes Cisarches, has not degenerated. By the way, the Commune, which includes Cisarches, is called Cisarches. I trust that this Frank of Awol will excuse me from the necessity of mentioning either of these places again by name. The Commune is still capable of performing direct democratic actions, if necessary, with a stick. I say with a stick, not with sticks, for that is the whole argument about democracy. A people is a soul, and if you want to know what a soul is, I can only answer that it is something that can sin and that can sacrifice itself. A people can commit theft, a people can confess theft, a people can repent of theft. That is the idea of the Republic. Now, most modern people have got into their heads the idea that democracies are dull, drifting things, a mere black swarm or slide of clerks to their accustomed doom. In most modern novels and essays, it is insisted, by a way of contrast, that a walking gentleman may have adventures as he walks. It is insisted that an aristocrat can commit crimes, because an aristocrat always cultivates liberty. But in truth, a people can have adventures, as Israel did crawling through the desert to the Promised Land. A people can do heroic deeds, a people can commit crimes. The French people did both in the Revolution. The Irish people have done both in their much purer and more honorable progress. But the real answer to this aristocratic argument, which seeks to identify democracy with a drab utilitarianism, may be found in action such as that of the Hungarian Commune, whose name I declined to repeat. This Commune did just one of those acts that proved that a separate people has a separate personality. It threw something away. A man can throw a banknote into the fire. A man can fling a sack of corn into the river. The banknote may be burnt as a satisfaction of some scruple. The corn may be destroyed as a sacrifice to some god. But whenever there is sacrifice, we know there is a single will. Men may be disputatious and doubtful, may divide by very narrow majorities in their debate about how to gain wealth. But men have to be uncommonly unanimous in order to refuse wealth. It wants a very complete committee to burn a banknote in the office grate. It needs a highly religious tribe, really, to throw corn into the river. This self-denial is the test and definition of self-government. I wish I could feel certain that any English county council or parish council would be single enough to make that strong gesture of a romantic refusal. Could say, no rent shall be raised from this spot. No grain shall grow in this spot. No good shall come of this spot. It shall remain sterile for a sign. But I am afraid they might answer, like the imminent sociology in the story. That it was a whisked of spice. The strangeness of luxury. It is an English misfortune that what is called public spirit is so often a very private spirit. The legitimate but strictly individual ideals of this or that person who happens to have the power to carry them out. When these private principles are held by very rich people, the result is often the blackest and most repulsive kind of despotism, which is benevolent despotism. Obviously it is the public which ought to have public spirit. But in this country and at this epic, this is exactly what it has not got. We shall have a public wash house and a public kitchen long before we have a public spirit. In fact, if we had a public spirit, we might very probably do without the other things. But if England were properly and naturally governed by the English, one of the first results would probably be this. That our standard of excess or defect in property would be changed from that of the plutocrat to that of the moderately needy man. That is, while property might be strictly respected, everything that is necessary to a clerk would be felt and considered on quite a different plane from anything which is a very great luxury to a clerk. This sane distinction of sentiment is not instinctive at present, because our standard of life is that of the governing class, which is eternally turning luxuries into necessities as fast as pork is turned into sausages and which cannot remember the beginning of its needs and cannot get to the end of its novelties. Take for the sake of argument the case of the motor. Doubtless, the Duke now feels it as necessary to have a motor as to have a roof, and in a little while he may feel it equally necessary to have a flying ship. But this does not prove, as the reactionary skeptics always argue, that a motor really is just as necessary as a roof. It only proves that a man can get used to an artificial life. It does not prove that there is no natural life for him to get used to. In the broads eye view of common sense, there abides a huge disproportion between the need for a roof and the need for an aeroplane, and no rush of inventions can ever alter it. The only difference is that things are now judged by the abnormal needs when they might be judged merely by the normal needs. The best aristocrat sees the situation from an aeroplane. The good citizen, in his loftiest moments, goes no further than seeing it from the roof. It is not true that luxury is merely relative. It is not true that it is only an expensive novelty which we may afterwards come to think a necessity. Luxury has a firm philosophical meaning, and where there is a real public spirit, luxury is generally allowed for. Sometimes rebuke, but always recognized instantly. To the healthy soul there is something in the very nature of certain pleasures which warns us that they are exceptions, and that if they become the rules, they will become very tyrannical rules. Take a harassed seamstress out of the Harrow Road, and give her one lightning hour in a motor car, and she will probably feel it is as splendid, but strange, rare, and even terrible. But this is not, as the relatives say, merely because she has never been in a car before. She has never been in the middle of a Somerset Cowslip Meadow before, but if you put her there, she does not think it terrifying or extraordinary, but merely pleasant, and free, and a little lonely. She does not think the motor monstrous because it is new. She thinks it is monstrous because she has eyes in her head. She thinks it is monstrous because it is monstrous. That is, her mothers and grandmothers and the whole race by whose life she lives have had, as a matter of fact, a roughly recognizable model of living. Sitting in a green field was a part of it. Traveling as quick as a cannonball was not. And we should not look down on the seamstress because she mechanically imits a short, sharp scream whenever the motor begins to move. On the contrary, we ought to look up to the seamstress and regard her cry as a kind of mystic omen or revelation of nature, as the old gods used to consider the howls emitted by chance females when annoyed. For that ritual yell is really a mark of moral health, of switch response to the stimulations and changes of life. The seamstress is wiser than all the learned ladies, precisely because she can still feel that a motor is a different sort of thing from a meadow. By the accident of her economic imprisonment it is even possible that she may have seen more of the former than the latter. But this has not shaken her cyclopean sagacity as to which is the natural thing and which the artificial. If not for her, at least for humanity as a whole, there is little doubt about which is the more normally attainable. It is considerably cheaper to sit in a meadow and see motors go by than to sit in a motor and see meadows go by. To me personally at least it would never seem needful to own a motor any more than to own an avalanche. An avalanche, if you have luck I am told, is very swift, successful and thrilling way of coming down a hill. It is distinctly more stirring say than a glacier, which moves an inch in a hundred years. But I do not divide these pleasures either by excitement or convenience but by the nature of the thing itself. It seems human to have a horse or a bicycle, because it seems human to potter about. And men cannot work horses nor can bicycles work men enormously far of their ordinary haunts and affairs. But about motoring there is something magical like going to the moon. And I say the thing should be kept exceptional and felt as something breathless and bizarre. My ideal hero would own his horse but would have the moral courage to hire his motor. Fairy tales are the only sound guidebooks to life. I like the fairy prince to ride on a white pony out of his father's stables, which are a vibary and gold. But if in the course of his adventures he finds it necessary to travel on a flaming dragon, I think he ought to give the dragon back to the witch at the end of the story. It is a mistake to have dragons about the place. For there is truly an air of something weird about luxury. And it is by this that healthy human nature has always smelt and suspected it. All romances that deal in extreme luxury, from the Arabian knights, the novels Wida and Israeli, have, it may be noted, a singular air of dream and occasionally of nightmare. In such imaginative debauches there is something as occasional as intoxication. If that is still countered occasionally. Life in those preposterous palaces would be an agony of dullness. It is clear we are meant to visit them only as in a flying vision. And what is true of the old freaks of wealth, flavor and fierce color and smell, I would say also of the new freak of wealth, which is speed. I should say to the Duke, when I entered his house at the head of an armed mob, I do not object to your having exceptional pleasures if you have them exceptionally. I do not mind your enjoying the strange and alien energies of science if you feel them strange and alien and not your own. But in condemning you, under the seventh section of the eighth decree of the Republic, to hire a motor car twice a year at Margate, I am not the enemy of your luxuries, but rather the protector of them. That is what I should say to the Duke, as to what the Duke would say to me, that is another matter and may well be deferred. The Triumph of the Donkey Doubtless the unsympathetic might state my doctrine that one should not own a motor like a horse, but rather use it like a flying dragon in the simpler form that I will always go motoring in somebody else's car. My favorite modern philosopher, Mr. W. W. Jacobs, describes a similar case of spiritual delicacy misunderstood. I have not the book at hand, but I think that Job Brown was reproaching Bill Chambers for a wasteful drunkenness, and Henry Walker spoke up for Bill and said he scarcely ever had a glass, but what someone else paid for it, and there was an unpleasantness all round then. Being less sensitive than Bill Chambers, or whoever it was, I will risk this rude perversion of my meaning, and concede that I was in a motor car yesterday, and the motor car most certainly was not my own, and the journey, though it contained nothing that is especially unusual on such journeys, had running through it a strain of the grotesque, which was at once wholesome and humiliating. The symbol of that influence was that ancient symbol of the humble and humorous, a donkey. When I first saw the donkey, I saw him in the sunlight as the unearthly gargoyle that he is. My friend had met me in his car. I repeat firmly, in his car, at the little painted station in the middle of the warm wet woods and hop fields of that western country. He proposed to drive me first to his house beyond the village before starting a longer spin of adventure, and we rattled through those rich green lanes, which have in them something singularly analogous to fairy tales, whether the lanes produced the fairies or, as I believe, the fairies produced the lanes. All around in the glimmering hop yard stood those little hop kilns like stunted and slanting spires. They looked like dwarfish churches. In fact, rather like many modern churches I could mention, churches all of them small in each of them a little crooked. In his elfin atmosphere we swung round a sharp corner, and halfway up a steep white hill, we saw what looked at first like a tall black monster against the sun. It appeared to be a dark and dreadful woman walking on wheels and waving long ears like a bat. A second glance told me that she was not the local witch in the state of transition. She was only one of the million tricks of perspective. She set up in a small wheel cart drawn by a donkey. The donkey's ears were set just behind her head, and the hole was black against the light. Perspective is really the comic element in everything. It has a pompous Latin name, but it is incurably gothic and grotesque. One simple proof of this is that it is always left out of all dignified and decorative art. There is no perspective in the Elgin Marbles, and even the essentially angular angles in medieval stained glass, almost always, as it says in Patience, can try to look both angular and flat. There is something intrinsically disproportionate and outrageous in the idea of the distant objects dwindling and growing doorfish, the closer objects swelling enormously and intolerably. There is something frantic in the notion that one's own father, by walking a little way, can be changed by a blast of magic to a pygmy. There is something farcical in the fancy that nature keeps one's uncle in an infinite number of sizes according to where he is to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers. All bears in route into toy bears. As if on the ultimate horizon of the world, everything was sardonically doomed to stand up laughable and little against heaven. It was for this reason that the old woman and her donkey struck us at first, when seen from behind, as one black grotesque. I afterwards had the chance of seeing the old woman, the cart and the donkey, fairly in flank and in all their length. I saw the old woman and the donkey the saunt as they might have appeared heraldically on the shield of some heroic family. I saw the old woman and the donkey dignify, decorative, and flat as they might have marched across the Elgin marbles. Seen thus under an equal light, there was nothing especially ugly about them. The cart was long and sufficiently comfortable. The donkey was stolid and sufficiently respectable. The old woman was lean but sufficiently strong and even smiling in a sour, rustic manner. But seen from behind, they looked like one black monstrous animal. The dark donkey cars seemed like dreadful wings. And the tall, dark back of the woman, erect like a tree, seemed to grow taller and taller till one could almost scream. Then we went by her with a blasting roar like a railway train and fled from her over the brow of the hill to my friend's home. There we paused only for my friend to stock the car with some kind of picnic paraphernalia, and so started again as it happened by the way we had come. Thus it fell that we went shattering down that short, sharp hill again before the poor old woman and her donkey had managed to crawl to the top of it. And seeing them under a different light, I saw them very differently. Black against the sun they had seen comic, but bright against the greenwood and grey cloud. They were not comic, but tragic. For there are not a few things that seem fantastic in the twilight, and in the sunlight are sad. I saw that she had a grand gong to mask of ancient honor and endurance, and wide eyes sharpened to two shining points, as if looking for that small hope on the horizon of human life. I also saw that her cart contained carrots. Don't you feel, broadly speaking, a beast, I asked my friend, when you go so easily and so fast, for we had crashed by so that the crazy cart must have thrilled in every stick of it. My friend was a good man and said yes, but I don't think it would do her any good if I went slower. No, I assented after reflection. Perhaps the only pleasure we can give to her or anyone else is to get out of their sight very soon. My friend availed himself of this advice in no-niggered spirit. I felt as if we were fleeing for our lives in throttling fear after some frightful atrocity. In truth there is only one difference left between the secrecy of the two social classes. The poor hide themselves in darkness, and the rich hide themselves in distance. They both hide. As we shot, like a lost boat over a cataract, down into a whirlpool of white roads far below, I saw a far of black dot crawling like an insect. I looked again, I could hardly believe it. There was the slow old woman with her slow old donkey still toiling along the main road. I asked my friend to slacken, but when he said of the car, she's wanting to go. I knew it was all up with him. But when you have called a thing female, you have yielded to it utterly. We passed the old woman with a shock that must have shaken the earth if her head did not reel in her heart quail. I know not what they were made of, and when we had fled perilously on in the gathering dark, spurning haemless behind us, suddenly cold out. Why, what asses we are? Why, it is she that is brave, she and the donkey. We are safe enough. We are artillery and plate armor, and she stands up to us with matchwood and a snail. If you had grown old in a quiet valley and people began firing cannonballs as big as calves at you in your 70th year, wouldn't you jump? And she never moved an eyelid. Oh, we go very fast and very far, no doubt. As I spoke, came a curious noise, and my friend, instead of going fast, began to go very slow. Then he stopped, he got out, and then he said, I left the stepney behind. The gray moths came out of the wood and the yellow stars came out to crown her as my friend with the lucidity of despair explained to me, on the sound of scientific principles, of course, that nothing would be any good at all. We must sleep the night in the lane, except in the very unlikely event of someone coming to carry a message to some town. Twice I thought I heard some tiny sound of such approach, and it died away like wind in the trees, and the motorist was already asleep when I heard it renewed and realized something certainly was approaching. I ran up to the road and there it was, yes, it, and she. Thrice had she come, once comic and once tragic and once heroic, and when she came again it was as if in pardon on a pure errand of prosaic pity and relief. I am quite serious. I do not want you to laugh. It is not the first time a donkey has been received seriously, nor one riding a donkey with respect. The End of CHAPTERS 25-27 At a quiet and rustic, though fairly famous church in my neighborhood, there is a window supposed to represent an angel on a bicycle. It does definitely and indisputably represent a nude youth sitting on a wheel, but there is enough complication in the wheel and sanctity, and I suppose in the youth, to warrant this working description. It is a thing of floored renaissance outline that belongs to the highly pagan period which introduced all sorts of objects into ornament. Personally I can believe in the bicycle more than any angel, than they say are now imitating angels in their flying machines, that is, not in any other respect that I have heard of. So perhaps the angel on the bicycle, if he is an angel and if it is a bicycle, was avenging himself by imitating man. If so, he showed that high order of intellect, which is attributed to angels in medieval books, though not always perhaps in the medieval pictures. For wheels are the mark of a man, quite as much as wings are the mark of an angel. Wheels are the things that are as old as mankind and yet strictly peculiar to man, that are prehistoric, but not prehuman. A distinguished psychologist, who is well acquainted with physiology, has told me that parts of himself are certainly levers, while other parts are probably pulleys, but that after feeling himself carefully all over, he cannot find a wheel anywhere. The wheel, as a motive movement, is a purely human thing. On the ancient esthetic of Adam, which like much of the rest of his costume has not yet been discovered, the heraldic emulum was a wheel, peissant. As a mode of progress, I say it is unique. Many modern philosophers, like my friend before mentioned, are ready to find links between man and beast and to show that man has been in all things the blind slave of his mother earth. Some of a very different kind are even eager to show it, especially if they can be twisted to the discredit of religion. But even the most eager scientists have often admitted in my hearing that they would be surprised if some kind of cow approached them moving solemnly on four wheels. Wings, fins, flappers, claws, hooves, webs, trotters, and all these, the fantastic families of the earth come against us and close around us. Fluttering and flapping and rustling and galloping and lumbering and thundering. But there is no sound of wheels. I remember dimly, if indeed I remember a rite, that in some of those dark prophetic pages of scripture that seem of cloudy purple and dusky gold, there is a passage in which the seer beholds a violent dream of wheels. Perhaps this was indeed the symbolic declaration of the spiritual supremacy of man. Whatever the birds may do above or the fishes beneath his ship, man is the only thing to steer, the only thing to be conceived as steering. He may make the birds his friends if he can, he may make the fishes his gods if he chooses. But most certainly he will not believe a bird at the masthead and is hardly likely that he will even permit a fish at the helm. He is, as Swinburne says, helmsman and chief, and he is literally the man at the wheel. The wheel is an animal that is always standing on its head, only it does it so rapidly that no philosopher has ever found out which is its head. Or if the phrase be felt as more exact, it is an animal that is always turning head over heels and progressing by this principle. Some fish, I think, turn head over heels, supposing them for the sake of argument to have heels. I have a dog who nearly did it, and I did it once myself when I was very small. It was an accident and as delightful novelist Mr. D. Morgan would say, it never can happen again. Since then no one has accused me of being upside down, except mentally. And I rather think that there is something to be said for that, especially as typified by the rotary symbol. A wheel is the sublime paradox. One part of it is always going forward, the other part always going back. Now this, as it happens, is highly similar to the proper condition of any human soul or any political state. Every sane soul or state looks at once backwards and forwards and even goes backwards to come on. For those interested in revolt, as I am, I only say meekly that one cannot have a revolution without revolving. The wheel, being a logical thing, has reference to what is behind as well as what is before. It has, as every society should have, a part that perpetually leaps helplessly at the sky and a part that perpetually bows down its head into the dust. Why should people be so scornful of us who stand on our heads? Bowing down one's head in the dust is a very good thing. The humble beginning of all happiness. When we have bowed our heads in the dust for a little time, the happiness comes. And then, leaving our heads in the humble and revered position, we kick up our heels behind in the air. That is the true origin of standing on one's head and the ultimate defense of paradox. The wheel humbles itself to be exalted. Only it does it a little quicker than I do. Five hundred and fifty-five. Life is full of a ceaseless shower of small coincidences, too small to be worth mentioning except for a special purpose, often too trifling even to be noticed, any more than we notice one snowflake falling on another. It is this that lends a frightful plausibility to all false doctrines and evil fads. There are always such crowds of accidental arguments for anything. If I said suddenly that historical truth is generally told by red-haired men, I have no doubt that ten minutes' reflection, in which I declined to indulge, would provide me with a handsome list of instances in support of it. I remember a riotous argument about bacon and Shakespeare, in which I offered quite at random to show that Lord Roseberry had written the works of Mr. W. D. Yates. No sooner had I said the words than a torrent of coincidences rushed upon my mind. I pointed out, for instance, that Mr. Yates' chief work was the secret Rose. This may easily be paraphrased as the quiet or modest Rose, and so, of course, as the prim Rose. A second after, I saw the same suggestion in the combination of Rose and Berry. If I had pursued the matter, who knows, but I might have been a raving maniac by this time. We trip over these trivial repetitions and exactitudes at every turn, only they are too trivial even for conversation. A man named Williams did walk into a strange house and murder a man named William's son. It sounds like a sort of infanticide. A journalist of my acquaintance did move quite unconsciously from a place called Overstrand to a place called Overroads. When he had made this escape, he was very properly pursued by a voting card from Battersea, on which the political agent, named Byrne, asked him to vote for a political candidate named Byrne's. And when he did so, another coincidence happened after. And when he did so, another coincidence happened to him, rather a spiritual than a material coincidence, a mystical thing, a matter of a magic number. For a sufficient number of reasons the man I know went up to vote in Battersea in a drifting and even dubious frame of mind. As the train slid through swampy woods and sullen skies, there came into his empty mind those idle yet awful questions which come when the mind is empty. Fools make cosmic systems out of them. Naves make profane poems out of them. Men try to crush them like ugly lust. Religion is only the responsible reinforcement of common courage and common sense. Religion only sets up the normal mode of health against the hundred modes of disease. But there is this about such ghastly, empty enigmas, that they always have an answer to the obvious answer. The reply offered by daily reason. Suppose a man's children have gone swimming. Suppose he is suddenly throttled by the senseless fear that they are drowned. The obvious answer is, only one man and a thousand has his children drowned. But a deeper voice, deeper being as deep as hell answers, and why should not you be the thousandth man? What is true or tragic out is also true of trivial doubt. The voter's guardian devil said to him, if you don't vote today, you can do fifteen things which will quite certainly do some good somewhere. Please a friend, please a child, please a maddened publisher. And what good do you expect to do by voting? You don't think your man will get in by one vote, do you? To this he knew the answer of common sense. But if everybody said that, nobody would get in at all. And then there came that deeper voice from Hades, but you are not settling what everybody shall do, but what one person on one occasion shall do. If this afternoon you went your way about more solid things, how would it matter and who would ever know? Yet somehow the voter drove on blindly through the black name London Roads and found somewhere a tedious polling station and recorded his tiny vote. The politician for whom the voter had voted got in by 555 votes. The voter read this the next morning at breakfast, being in a mortuary and expansive mood, and found something very fascinating, not merely in the fact of the majority, but even in the form of it. There was something symbolic about the three exact figures. One felt it might be a sort of motto or cipher. In the great book of seals and cloudy symbols, there is just such a thundering repetition. 666 was the mark of the beast. 555 is the mark of the man. The triumphant Tribune and Citizen. A number so symmetrical as that really rises out of the region of science into the region of art. It is a pattern, like the egg and dart ornament, or the Greek key. One might edge a wallpaper or fringe a robe with a recurring decimal. And while the voter luxuriated in this light exactitude of the numbers, a thought crossed his mind and he almost slept to his feet. My good heavens, he cried. I won that election, and it was won by one vote. But for me it would have been the despicable broken back disjointed in harmonious figure 554. The whole artistic point would have vanished. The mark of the man would have disappeared from history. It was I who with masterful hand seized the chisel and carved the hero glyph. Complete and perfect. I clutched the trembling hand of destiny when it was about to make a dull square four and forced it to make a nice curly five. Why, but for me the cosmos would have lost a coincidence. After this outburst, the voter sat down and finished his breakfast. Ethan Dune. Perhaps you do not know where Ethan Dune is. Nor do I. Nor does anybody. That is where the somewhat somber fun begins. I cannot even tell you for certain whether it is the name of a forest or a town or a hill. I can only say that in any case it is of the kind that floats and is unfixed. If it is a forest, it is one of those forests that march with a million legs like the walking trees that were the doom of Macbeth. If it is a town, it is one of those towns that vanish like a city of tents. If it is a hill, it is a flying hill like the mountain to which faith lends wings. Over a vast dim region of England this dark name of Ethan Dune floats like an eagle doubtful where to swoop and strike. And indeed there were dark birds of prey enough or Ethan Dune wherever it was. But now Ethan Dune itself has grown as dark and drifting as the black drifts of the birds. And yet without this word that you cannot fit with a meaning and hardly with a memory you would be sitting in a very different chair this moment and looking at a very different tablecloth. As a practical modern phrase I do not commend it if my private critics and correspondents in whom I delight should happen to address me G.K. Chesterton, post restante Ethan Dune I fear their letters would not come to hand. If two hundred commercial travelers should agree to discuss a business matter at Ethan Dune from 5 to 515 I am afraid they would grow old in the district as white-haired wanderers. To put it plainly, Ethan Dune is anywhere and nowhere in the western hills. It is an English mirage and yet but for this doubtful thing you would have probably no daily news on Saturday and certainly no church on Sunday. I do not say that either of these two things is a benefit but I do say that they are customs and that you would not possess them except through this mystery. You would not have Christmas puddings nor probably any puddings. You would not have Easter eggs probably not poached eggs. I strongly suspect not scrambled eggs and the best historians are decidedly doubtful about curried eggs. To cut a long story short the longest of all stories you would not have any civilization far less any Christian civilization. And if in some moment of gentle curiosity you wish to know why you are the polished sparkling rounded and holy satisfactory citizen which you obviously are then I can give you no more definite answer geographical or historical but only toll in your ears the tone of the uncaptured name Ethan Dune. I will try to state quite sensibly why it is as important as it is and yet even that is not easy. If I were to state the mere fact from history books numbers of people would think it equally trivial and remote like some war of the picks and scots. The point perhaps might be put this way there is a certain spirit in the world which breaks everything off short. There may be magnificence in the smashing but the thing is smashed there may be a certain splendor but the splendor is sterile it abolishes all future splendors. I mean to take a working example York minister covered with flames might happen to be quite as beautiful as York minister covered with carvings but the carvings produce more carvings the flames produce nothing but a little black heat. When any act has this cul-de-sac quality it matters little whether it is done by book or sword by clumsy battle acts or chemical bomb the case is the same with ideas the pessimist may be proud figure when he curses all the stars the optimist may be an even prouder figure when he blesses them all but the real test is not in the energy but in the effect when the optimist has said all things are interesting we are left free we can be interested as much or as little as we please but when the pessimist says no things are interesting it may be a very witty remark but it is the last witty remark that can be made on the subject he has burnt his cathedral he has had his blaze and the rest is ashes the skeptic like bees give their one sting and die the pessimist must be wrong because he says the last word now this spirit that denies and that destroys had at one period of history a dreadful epic of military superiority they did burn York minister or at least places of the same kind roughly speaking from the 7th century to the 10th a dense tide of darkness of chaos and brainless cruelty poured on these islands and on the western coasts of the continent which well nigh cut them off from all the white man's culture forever and this is the final human test that the very chiefs of that vague age were remembered or forgotten according to how they had resisted this almost cosmic raid nobody thought of the modern nonsense about races everybody thought of the human race and its highest achievements Arthur was a kilt and may have been a fabulous kilt but he was a fable on the right side Charlemagne may have been a gall or a goth but he was not a barbarian he fought for the tradition against the barbarians the noists and for this reason also for this reason in the last resort only we call the saddest and in some ways the least successful of the Wessex kings by the title of Alfred the Great Alfred was defeated by the barbarians again and again he defeated the barbarians again and again but his victories were almost as vain as his defeats fortunately he did not believe in the time spirit or the trend of things or any such modern rubbish and therefore kept pegging away but while his failures and his fruitless successes have names still in use such as Wilton, Basing, and Dashdown that last epic battle which really broke the barbarian has remained without a modern place or name except that it was near Chippenheim where the Danes gave up their swords and were baptized no one can pick out certainly the place where you and I were saved from being savages forever but the other day under a wild sunset and moonrise I passed the place which is best reputed as Ethan Dune a high, grim, upland partly bare and partly shaggy like that savage and sacred spot in those great imaginative lines about the demon lover and the waning moon the darkness the red wreck of sunset the yellow and lurid moon the long fantastic shadows actually created that sense of monstrous incident which is the dramatic side of landscape the bare grey slopes seem to rush downhill like routed hosts the dark clouds drove across like driven banners and the moon was like a golden dragon like the golden dragon of Wessex as we crossed the tilt of the torn heath I saw suddenly between myself and the moon a black, shapeless pile higher than a house the atmosphere was so intense that I really thought of a pile of dead Danes with some phantom conqueror on the top of it fortunately I was crossing these ways with a friend who knew more history than I and he told me that this was a barrel older than Alfred older than the Romans older perhaps than the Britons and no man knew whether it was a wall or a trophy or a tomb Ethan Dunne is still a drifting name but it gave me a queer emotion to think that sword in hand as the Danes poured with the torrents of their blood down to Chippenham the great king may have lifted up his head and looked at that oppressive shape suggestive of something and yet suggestive of nothing he may have looked at it as we did and understood it as little as we the end of chapters 28 through 30 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Alarms and Discursions by G. K. Chesterton section 11 chapters 31 through 33 The Flat Free some time ago a subtropical dinner was given by some South African millionaire I forget his name and so very likely does he the humor of this was so subtle and haunting that it has been imitated by another millionaire who has given a North Pole dinner in a grand hotel on which he managed to spend gigantic sums of money I do not know how he did it perhaps they had silver for snow and great sapphires for lumps of ice anyhow it seems to have cost rather more to bring the Pole to London than to take Puri to the Pole all this one would say does not concern us we do not want to go to the Pole or to the hotel I for one cannot imagine which would be the more dreary and disgusting the real North Pole or the Shamwon but as a mere matter of psychology that merry pastime there is a question that is not unentertaining why is it that all this scheme of ice and snow leaves us cold why is it that you and I feel we would on the whole rather spend the evening with two or three stable boys in the pot house than take part in that pallid and arctic joke why does the modern millionaire jest bore a man to death with the mere thought of it that it does bore a man to death I take for granted and she'll do so until somebody writes to me in cold ink and tells me that he really thinks it is funny now it is not a sufficient explanation to say that the joke is silly all jokes are silly that is what they are for if you ask some sincere elemental person a woman for instance what she thinks of a good sentence from Dickens she will say that it is too silly when Mr. Weller Sr. assured Mr. Weller Jr. that the circumvented was a more tender word than circumscribed the remark was at least as silly as it was sublime it is in vain then to object to senseless jokes the very definition of a joke is that it need have no sense except that one wild and supernatural sense which we call the sense of humor humor is meant in a literal sense to make a game of man that is to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game it is meant to remind us human beings that we have things about us as ungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the elephant or the neck of the giraffe if laughter does not touch a sort of fundamental folly it does not do its duty in bringing us back to an enormous and original simplicity nothing has been worse than the modern notion that a clever man can make a joke without taking part in it without sharing in the general absurdity that such a situation creates it is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes joking is undignified that is why it is so good for one soul do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being of a foon you cannot if you are the court jester you must be the court fool whatever it is therefore that wearies us in these wealthy jokes like the North Pole dinner it is not merely that men make fools of themselves when Dickens describes Mr. Chuckster Dickens was strictly speaking making a fool of himself for he was making a fool out of himself and every kind of real lark from acting a charade to making a pun it does consist in restraining one's 999 serious selves and letting the fool lose the dullness of the millionaire's joke is much deeper it is not silly at all it is solely stupid it does not consist in ingenuity limited but merely of inanity expanded there is a considerable difference between a wit making a fool of himself and a fool making a wit of himself the true explanation I fancy may be stated thus we could all remember it in the case of the really in-spiriting parties and foolries of our youth the only real fun is to have limited materials and a good idea this explains the perennial popularity of impromptu private theatricals these fascinate because they give such a scope for invention and variety with the most domestic restriction of machinery a t-brosy may have to do for an admiral's cocked hat it all depends on whether the amateur actor can swear like an admiral a hearthrog may have to do for a bear's fur it all depends on whether the wearer is a polished and versatile man of the world and can grunt like a bear a clergyman's hat, to my own private and certain knowledge can be punched and thumped into an exact shape of a policeman's helmet it all depends on the clergyman I mean, it depends on his permission his imprimatur, his nahil obstite clergymen can be policemen rugs can rage like wild animals tea cosies can smell of the sea if only there is at the back of them all one bright and amusing idea what is really funny about Christmas charades in any average home is that there is a contrast between commonplace resources and one comic idea what is deadly dull about the millionaire banquet is that there is a contrast between colossal resources and no idea that is the abyss of inanity in such feasts it may be literally called a yawning abyss the abyss, the vast chasm between the money power employed and the thing it is employed on to make a big joke out of a broomstick a barrow and an old hat that is great but to make a small joke out of mountains of emeralds and tons of gold surely that is humiliating the North Pole is not a very good joke to start with and icicle hanging on one's nose is a simple sort of humor in any case if a set of spontaneous mummers got the effect cleverly with cut crystals from the early Victorian chandelier there might really be something suddenly funny in it but what should we say of hanging diamonds on a hundred human noses merely to make that precious joke about icicles what can be more abject than a union of elaborate and research arrangements with an old and obvious point the clown with its red-hot poker and the string of sausages is all very well in his way but think of a string of paté-de-foguerre sausages at a guinea-piece think of a red-hot poker cut out of a single ruby imagine such fantasticalities of expense with such a tameness and staleness of design we may even admit the practical joke if it is domestic and simple we may concede that apple pie beds and butter slides are sometimes useful things for the education of pompous persons living the higher life but imagine a man making a butter slide and telling everybody it was made with the most expensive butter picture an apple pie bed of purple and cloth of gold it is not hard to see that such schemes would lead simultaneously to a double boredom weariness of the costly and complex method and of the meager and trivial thought this is the true analysis I think of that chill and tedium that strikes to the soul of any intelligent man when he hears of such elephantine cranks that is why we should feel that freak dinners would not even be freakish that is why we feel that expensive arctic feasts would probably be a frost if it be said that such things do no harm I hasten in one sense at least to agree far from it they do good they do good in the most vital manner of modern times where they prove and print in huge letters the truth which our society must learn or perish they prove that wealth in society, as now constituted does not tend to get into the hands of the thrifty or the capable but actually tends to get into the hands of wasterls and imbeciles and it proves that the wealthy class of the day is quite as ignorant about how to enjoy itself as about how to rule other people that it cannot make its government govern or its education educate we may take as a trifling weakness of oligarchy but pleasure we do look to see in such a class and it has surely come to its decrepitude when it cannot make its pleasure, please the garden of the sea one sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of the culture, the remark that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty of the country this is an error rooted in the intellectual pride of mediocrity and it is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea that extremes meet thus to appreciate the virtues of the mob one must either be on a level with it as I am or be really high up like the saints it is roughly the same with aesthetics slang and rude dialect can be relished by a really literary taste but not by a merely bookish taste and when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk of nature in an appreciative way they really mean that they do not talk in a bookish way they do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones or pigs or slugs or horses or anything you please they talk pigishly about pigs and sluggishly I suppose about slugs and are refreshingly horsey about horses they speak in a stony way of stones and they speak in a cloudy way of clouds and this is surely the right way and if by any chance a simple intelligent person from the country comes in contact with any aspect of nature unfamiliar and arresting such a person's comment is always worth remark it is sometimes an epigram and at worst it is never a quotation consider for instance what wastes of words, imitation and ambiguity the ordinary educated person in the big towns could pour out on the subject of the sea a country girl I know in the country of Buckingham had never seen the sea in her life until the other day when she was asked what she thought of it she said it was like cauliflower now that is a piece of pure literature vivid entirely independent and original and perfectly true I had always been haunted with an analogous kinship which I could never locate cabbages always remind me of the sea always reminds me of cabbages it is partly perhaps the vain demingling of violet and green as in the sea a purple that is almost dark red may mix with a green that is almost yellow and still be the blue sea as a whole but it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that curl over cavernously like waves and it is partly again that dreamy repetition as of a pattern that made two great poets specialists and Shakespeare use a word like multitudinous of the ocean but just where my fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed so to speak to my imaginative rescue cauliflower are twenty times better than cabbages for they show the wave breaking as well as curling and the efflorescence of the branching foam blind, bubbling and opaque nor over the strong lines of life are suggested the arches of the rushing waves have all the rigid energy of green stalks as if the whole sea or one great green plant with one immense white flower rooted in the abyss now a large number of delicate and superior persons would refuse to see the force in their kitchen garden comparison because it is not connected with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books and songs the aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large and philosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep he would say that he was not a greengrocer who would think first of greens to which I should reply like Hamlet apropos of a parallel profession I would you were so honest a man the mention of Hamlin reminds me by the way that besides the girl who had never seen the sea I knew a girl who had never seen a stage play she was taken to Hamlet and she said it was very sad there is another case of going to the primordial point which is overlaid by learning and secondary impressions we are so used to thinking of Hamlet as a problem that we sometimes quite forget that it is a tragedy just as we are so used to thinking of the sea as vast and vague that we scarcely notice when it is white and green but there is another quarrel involved in which the young gentlemen of our culture comes into violent collision with the young lady of the cauliflower the first essential of the merely bookless view of the sea is that it is boundless and gives a sentiment of infinity now it is quite certain I think that the cauliflower simile was partly created by exactly the opposite impression the impression of boundary and the barrier the girl thought of it as a field of vegetables even as a yard of vegetables the girl was right the ocean only suggests infinity when you cannot see it a sea mist may seem endless but it is not a sea so far from being vague and vanishing the sea is the one hard straight line in nature it is the one plain limit the only thing that God has made that really looks like a wall compared to the sea not only sun and cloud are chaotic and doubtful but solid mountains and sanding forests may be said to melt and fade and flee in the presence of that lonely iron line the old naval phrase that the seas are England's bulwarks is not a frigid or an artificial metaphor he came into the head of some genuine sea dog when he was genuinely looking at the sea for the edge of the sea is like the edge of a sword it is sharp, military and decisive it really looks like a bolt or bar and not like a mere expansion it hangs in heaven gray or green or blue changing in color but changeless in form behind all the slippery contours of the land and all the savage softness of the forests like the scales of God held even it hangs a perpetual reminder of that divine reason and justice which abides behind all compromises and all legitimate variety the one straight line the limit of the intellect the dark and ultimate dogma of the world the sentimentalist sentimentalism is the most broken read on which righteousness can lean these were I think the exact words of a distinguished American visitor at the guild hall and may heaven forgive me if I do him a wrong it was spoken in illustration of the folly of supporting Egyptian and other oriental nationalism and it has tempted me to some reflections on the first word of the sentence the sentimentalist roughly speaking is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it he has no sense of honor about ideas he will not see that one must pay for an idea as for anything else he will not see that any worthy idea like an honest woman can only be one on its own terms and with its logical chain of loyalty one idea attracts him another idea really inspires him a third idea flatters him a fourth idea pays him he will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other the sentimentalist is a philosophic profligate who tries to capture every mental beauty without reference to its rival beauties who will not even be off with the old love before he is on with the new thus if a man were to say I love this woman but I may someday find my affinity in some other woman he would be a sentimentalist he would be saying I will eat my wedding cake and keep it or if a man should say I am a Republican believing in the equality of citizens but when the government has given me my peerage I can do infinite good as a kind of landlord and wise legislator then that man would be a sentimentalist he would be trying to keep at the same time the classic austerity of equality and also the vulgar excitement of an aristocrat or if a man should say I am in favor of religious equality I must preserve the Protestant succession he would be a sentimentalist of a grosser and more improbable kind this is the essence of the sentimentalist that he seeks to enjoy every idea without its sequence and every pleasure without its consequence now it would really be hard to find a worse case of this inconsequent sentimentalism than the theory of the British Empire advanced by Mr. Roosevelt himself in his attack on sentimentalists for the imperial theory, the Roosevelt and Kipling theory of our relation to eastern races is simply one of eating the Oriental cake, I suppose the Sultana cake and at the same time leaving it alone now there are two sane attitudes of a European statesman towards eastern peoples and there are only two first he may simply say that the less we have to do with them the better that whether they are lower than us or higher they are so catastrophically different that the more we go our way and they go theirs the better for all parties concerned I will confess to some tenderness for this view there is much to be said for letting that calm immemorial life of slave and sultan, temple and palm tree flow on as it has always flowed the best reason of all, the reason that affects me most finely is that if we left the rest of the world alone we might have some time for attending to our own affairs which are urgent to the point of excruciation all history points to this that intensive cultivation in the long run triumphs over the widest extensive cultivation or in other words the making one's own field superior is far more effective than reducing other peoples fields to inferiority if you cultivate your own garden and grow an especially large cabbage people will probably come to see it whereas the life of one selling small cabbages around the whole district is often forlorn now the imperial pioneer is essentially a commercial traveler and a commercial traveler is essentially a person who goes to see people because they don't want to see him as long as empires go about urging their ideas on others I always have a notion that the ideas are no good if they were really so splendid they would make the country preaching them a wonder of the world that is the true ideal a great nation ought not to be a hammer but a magnet men went to the medieval Sabon because it was worth going to men went to old Japan because only there could they find the unique and exquisite old Japanese art nobody will ever go to modern Japan nobody worth bothering about I mean because modern Japan has made the huge mistake of going to the other people becoming a common empire the mountain has condescended to Mohammed and henceforth Mohammed will whistle for it when he wants that is my political theory that we should make England worth copying instead of telling everybody to copy her but it is not the only possible theory there is another view of our relations to such places as Egypt and India which is entirely tenable it may be said we Europeans are the heirs of the Roman Empire when all is said we have the largest freedom the most exact science the most solid romance we have a deep though undefined obligation to give as we have received from God because the tribes of men are truly thirsting for these things as for water all men really want clear laws we can give clear laws all men really want hygiene we can give hygiene we are not really imposing western ideas we are simply fulfilling human ideas for the first time on this line I think it is possible to justify the forts of Africa and the railroads of Asia on this line we must go much further if it is our duty to give our best there can be no doubt about what is our best the great thing our Europe has made is the citizen the idea of the average man free and full of honor voluntarily invoking on his own sin the just vengeance of his city all else we have done is mere machinery for that railways suggest only to carry the citizen forts only to defend him electricity only to light him medicine only to heal him popularism the idea of the people alive and patiently feeding history that we cannot give for it exists everywhere east and west but democracy the idea of the people fighting and governing that is the only thing we have to give those are the two roads but between them weekly waivers the sentimentalist that is the imperialist of the Roosevelt school he wants to have it both ways to have the splendors of success without the perils Europe may enslave Asia because it is flattery but Europe must not free Asia because that is responsible it tickles his imperial taste that the Hindus should have European hats it is too dangerous if they have European heads he cannot leave Asia asiatic yet he dares not contemplate Asia as European therefore he proposes to have in Egypt railway signals but not flags, dispatch boxes, but not valid boxes in short the sentimentalist decides to spread the body of Europe without the soul end of chapters 31 through 33 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Alarms and Discursions by G. K. Chesterton section 12 chapters 34 through 36 The White Horses it is within my experience which is very brief and occasional in this matter that it is not really at all easy to talk in a motor car this is unfortunate first because as a whole it prevents me from motoring and second because at any given moment it prevents me from talking the difficulty is not wholly due to the physical conditions though these are distinctly unconversational it's Gerald's Omar being a pessimist was probably rich and being a lazy fellow was almost certainly a motorist if any doubt could exist on the point it is enough to say that in speaking of the foolish prophets Omar has defined the difficulties of colloquial motoring with a precision which cannot be accidental their words to wind are scattered and their mouths are stopped with dust from this follows not as many of the cut and dried philosophers would say a savage silence and mutual hostility but rather one of those rich silences that make the mass and bulk of all friendship the silence of men rowing the same boat or fighting in the same battle line it happened that the other day I hired a motor car because I wanted to visit in very rapid succession the battle places and hiding places of Alfred the Great and for a thing of this sort a motor is really appropriate it is not by any means the best way of seeing the beauty of the country you see beauty better by walking and best of all by sitting still but it is a good method in any enterprise that involves a parody of the military or governmental quality anything which needs to know quickly the whole contour of a country or the rough relative position of men in towns on such a journey like jagged lightning I sat from morning till night by the side of the chauffeur and we scarcely exchanged a word to the hour by the time the yellow stars came out in the villages and the white stars in the skies I think I understood his character and I fear he understood mine he was a Cheshire man with a sour patient humorous face he was modest though a North countryman and genial though an expert he spoke when he spoke at all with a strong Northland accent and he evidently was new to the beautiful South country he was clear both from his approval and his complaints but though he came from the North he was agricultural and not commercial in origin he looked at the land rather than the towns even if he looked at it with somewhat more sharp and utilitarian eye his first remark for some hours was uttered when we were crossing the more coarse and desolate heights of Salisbury plain he remarked that he had always thought that Salisbury plain was a plain this alone showed that he was new to the vicinity but he also said with a critical frown a lot of this land ought to be good land enough why don't they use it he was then silent for some more hours at an abrupt angle of the slopes that lead down from what is called with no little humor Salisbury plain I suddenly saw as by accident something I was looking for that is something I did not expect to see we are all supposed to be trying to walk into heaven but we should be uncommonly astonished if we suddenly walked into it as I was leaving Salisbury plain to put it roughly I lifted up my eyes and saw the white horse of Britain one or two truly fine poets of the Tory and Protestant type such as Swinburne and Mr. Rudyard Kipling have eulogized England under the image of white horses meaning the white main breakers of the channel this is right and natural enough the true philosophical Tory goes back to ancient things because he thinks they will be anarchic things it would startle him very much to be told that there are white horses of artifice in England that may be older than those wild white horses of the elements yet it is truly so nobody knows how old are those strange green and wide hieroglyphs those straggling quadrupeds of chalk that stand out on the sides of so many of the southern Downs they are possibly older than Saxon and older than Roman times they may well be older than British older than any recorded times they may go back for all we know to the first faint seeds of human life on this planet men may have picked a horse out of the grass long before they scratched a horse on a vase or a pot or masked and masked any horse out of clay this may be the oldest human art before building or graving and if so it may have first happened in another geological age before the sea burst through the narrow straits of Dover the white horse may have begun in Berkshire when there were no white horses at Folkestone or New Haven that rude but evident white outline that I saw across the valley may have begun when Britain was not an island we forget that there are many places where art is older than nature we took a long detour through somewhat easier roads till we came to a breach or chasm in the valley from which we saw our friend the white horse once more at least we thought it was our friend the white horse but after a little inquiry we discovered to our astonishment that it was another friend and another horse along the leaning flanks of the same fair valley there was it seemed another white horse as rude and as clean as ancient and as modern as the first this at least I thought must be the aboriginal white horse of Alfred which I had always heard associated with his name and yet before we had driven into the wattage and seen King Alfred's quaint grey statue in the sun we had seen yet a third white horse and the third white horse was so hopelessly unlike a horse that we were sure that it was genuine the final and original white horse the white horse of the white horse Vale has that big babyish quality that truly belongs to our remotest ancestors it really has the prehistoric preposterous quality of Zulu or New Zealand native drawings this at least was surely made by our fathers when they were barely men long before they were civilized men but why was it made why did barbarians take so much trouble to make a horse nearly as big as a hamlet a horse who could bear no hunter who could drag no loaves what was this titanic subconscious instinct for spoiling a beautiful green slope with a very ugly white quadruped what for the manner of that is this whole hazardous fancy of humanity ruling the earth which may have begun with white horses which may by no means end with twenty horsepower cars as I rolled away out of that country still cloudily considering how ordinary men ever came to want to make such strange chalk horses when my chauffeur startled me by speaking for the first time for nearly two hours he suddenly let go one of the handles and pointed at a gross green bulk of down that happened to swell above us that would be a good place he said naturally I referred to his last speech of some hours before but he knows that he meant it would be promising for agriculture as a fact it was quite unpromising and this made me suddenly understand the quiet ardor in his eye all of a sudden I saw what he really meant he really meant that this would be a splendid place to pick out another white horse he knew no more than I did why it was done but he was in some unthinkable prehistoric tradition because he wanted to do it he became so acute in sensibility that he could not bear to pass any broad breezy hill of grass on which there was not a white horse he could hardly keep his hands off the hills he could hardly leave any of the living grass alone then I left off wondering why this primitive man made so many white horses I left off troubling in what sense the ordinary eternal man had sought to scar or deface the hills I was content to know that he did want it for I had seen him wanting it the long bow I find myself still sitting in front of the last book by Mr. H. G. Wells I say stunned with admiration my family says sleepy with fatigue I still feel vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells' book which I agree with and I still feel vividly the one thing that I deny I deny that biology can destroy the sense of truth which alone can even desire biology no truth which I find can deny that I am seeking the truth my mind cannot find anything which denies my mind but what is all this this is no sort of talk for a genial essay let us change the subject to have a romance or a fable or a fairytale come let us tell each other stories there once was a king who was very fond of listening to stories like the king in the Arabian Nights the only difference was that unlike that cynical oriental this king believed all the stories that he heard it is hardly necessary to add that he lived in England his face had not the swarthy secrecy of the tyrant of the Thousand Tales on the contrary his eyes were as big and innocent as two blue moons and when his yellow beard turned totally white he seemed to be growing younger above him hung still his heavy sword and horn to remind men that he had been a tall hunter and warrior in his time indeed with that rusted sword he had wrecked armies but he was one of those who will never know the world even when they conquer it besides his love of this old Chaucerian pastime of telling tales he was like many old English kings specially interested in the art of the bow he gathered round him great archers of the stature of Ulysses and Robin Hood and to four of these he gave the whole government of his kingdom they did not mind governing his kingdoms but they were sometimes a little bored with the necessity of telling him stories none of their stories were true but the king believed all of them and this became very depressing they created the most preposterous romances and could not get the credit of creating them your true ambition was sent empty away they were praised as archers but they desired to be praised as poets they were trusted as men but they would rather have been admired as literary men at last in an hour of desperation they formed themselves into a club or conspiracy with the object of inventing some story which even the king could not swallow they called it the League of the Longbow thus attaching themselves by a double bond to their motherland of England which has been steadily celebrated since the Norman conquest for its heroic archery and for the extraordinary credulity of its people at last it seemed to the four archers that their hour had come the king commonly sat in a green curtain chamber which opened by four doors and was surmounted by four turrets summoning his champions to him on an April evening he sent out each of them by a separate door telling him to return a morning with a tale of his journey every champion bowed low and girding on great armor as four awful adventures retired to some part of the garden to think of a lie they did not want to think of a lie which would deceive the king any lie would do that they wanted to think of a lie so outrageous that it could not deceive him and that was a serious matter the first archer who returned was a dark quiet clever fellow very dexterous in small matters of mechanics he was more interested in the science of the bow than in the sport of it also he would only shoot at a mark for he thought it cruel to kill beasts and birds and atrocious to kill men when he left the king he had gone out into the wood and tried all sorts of tiresome experiments about the bending of branches and the impact of arrows when even he found it tiresome he returned to the house of the four tourists and narrated his adventure well said the king what have you been shooting arrows answered the archer so I suppose said the king smiling but I mean I mean what wild things have you shot I have shot nothing but arrows answered the bowman obstinately when I went on out to the plane I saw in a crescent the black army of the Tartars the terrible archers whose bows are of vended steel and their bolts as big as javelins they spied me a far off and the shower of their arrow shot out the sun and made a rattling roof above me you know I think it wrong to kill a bird or worm or even a tartar but such is the precision and rapidity of perfect science that with my own arrows I split every arrow as it came against me I struck every flying shaft as if it were a flying bird therefore Sire I may say truly that I shot nothing but arrows the king said I know how clever you engineers are with your fingers the archer said oh and went out the second archer who had curly hair and was pale, poetical and rather effeminate had merely gone out into the garden and stared at the moon when the moon had become too wide, blank and watery even for his own wide, blank and watery eyes he came in again and when the king said what have you been shooting he answered with great volubility I have shot a man not a man from Tartary not a man from Europe, Asia, Africa or America not a man on this earth at all I have shot the man in the moon shot the man in the moon repeated the king with something like mild surprise it is easy to prove it said the archer with hysterical haste examine the moon through this particularly powerful telescope and you will no longer find any trace of a man there the king glued his big blue idiotic eye to the telescope for about ten minutes and then said you are right as you have often pointed out scientific truths can only be tested by the senses I believe you and the second archer went out in being of a more emotional temperament burst into tears the third archer was a savage, brooding sort of man with tangled hair and dreamy eyes and he came in without any preface saying I have lost all my arrows they have turned into birds then as he saw that they all stared at him he said well you know everything changes on earth mud turns into marigolds eggs turn into chickens one can even breed dogs into quite different shapes well I shot my arrows at the awful eagles that clashed their wings around the Himalayas great golden eagles as big as elephants which snapped the tall trees by perching on them my arrows fled so far over mountains and valleys that they turned slowly into fowls in their flight see here he threw down a dead bird and laid an arrow beside it can you see they are the same structure the straight shaft is the backbone the sharp point is the beak the feather is the rudimentary plumage it is merely modification and evolution after a silence the king nodded gravely and said yes of course everything is evolution at this the third archer suddenly and violently left the room and was heard in some distant part of the building making extraordinary noises either of sorrow or of mirth the fourth archer was a stunted man with a face as dead as wood but with wicked little eyes close together and very much alive his comrades dissuaded him from going in because they said that they had soared up into the seventh heaven of living lies and that there was literally nothing which the old man would not believe the face of the little archer became a little more wooden as he forced his way in and when he was inside he looked round with blinking bewilderment ha! the last said the king heartily welcome back again there was a long pause and then the snuttered archer said what do you mean by again? I have never been here before the king stared for a few seconds and said I sent you out from this room with the four doors last night after another pause the little man slowly shook his head I never saw you before he said simply you never sent me out from anywhere I only saw your four turrets in the distance and straight in here by accident I was born in an island in the Greek archipelago I am by profession an auctioneer and my name is punk the king sat on his throne for seven long instances like a statue and then there awoke in his mild and ancient eyes an awful thing the complete conviction of untruth everyone has felt it who has found the child obstinately false he rose to his height and took down the heavy sword above him plucked it out naked and then spoke I will believe your mad tales about the exact machinery of arrows for that is science I will believe your mad tales about traces of life in the moon for that is science I will believe your mad tales about jellyfish turning into gentlemen and everything turning into anything for that is science but I will not believe you when you tell me what I know to be untrue I will not believe you when you say that you did not set force under my authority and out of my house the other three may conceivably have told the truth but this last man has certainly lied therefore I will kill him and with that the old and gentle king ran at the man with uplifted sword but he was arrested by the roar of happy laughter which told the world that there is after all something which an Englishman will not swallow the modern Scrooge Mr. Vernon Smith of Trinity and the social settlement, Tooting author of A Higher London and the Boyg system at work came to the conclusion after looking through his select and even severe library that Dickens Christmas Carol was a very suitable thing to be read to char women had they been men they would have been forcibly subjected to Browning's Christmas Eve with exposition but Schiffle respaired the char women and Dickens was funny and could do no harm his fellow worker Wimpole would read things like three men in a boat to the poor but Vernon Smith regarded this as a sacrifice of principle or what was the same thing to him of dignity he would not encourage them in their vulgarity they should have nothing from him that was not literature still Dickens was literature after all not literature of a high order of course not thoughtful or purposeful literature but literature quite fitted for char women on Christmas Eve he did not however let them absorb Dickens without due antidotes or warning and criticism he explained that Dickens was not a writer of the first rank since he lacked the high seriousness of Matthew Arnold he also feared that they would find the characters of Dickens terribly exaggerated but they did not possibly because they were meeting them every day or among the poor there are still exaggerated characters they do not go to the universities to be universtified he told char women with progressive brightness that a mad wicked old miser like Scrooge would be really quite impossible now but as each of the char women had an uncle or a grandfather or a father-in-law who was exactly like Scrooge his cheerfulness was not shared indeed the lecture as a whole lacked something of his firm and elastic touch and toward the end he found himself rambling and in a sort of abstraction talking to them as if they were his fellows he caught himself saying quite mystically that a spiritual plane by which he meant his plane always looked to those on the sensual or the Dickens plane not merely austere but desolate he said quoting Bernard Shaw that we could all go to heaven as we can all go to a classical concert but if we did it would bore us realizing that he was taking his flock far out of their depths he ended somewhat hurriedly and was soon receiving that generous applause which is part of the profound ceremonialism of the working classes as he made his way to the door three people stopped him and answered him hardly enough but with an air of hurry which he would not have dreamed of showing to people of his own class one was a little schoolmistress who told him with a sort of feverish meekness and she was troubled because an ethical lecturer had said that Dickens was not really progressive but she thought he was progressive and surely he was progressive of what being progressive was she had no more notion than a whale the second person implored him for a subscription to some soup kitchen or cheap meal and his refined feature sharpened for this like literature was a matter of principle with him quite the wrong method he said shaking his head and pushing past nothing any good but the boy's system the third stranger who was male caught him on the step as he came out into the snow and starlight and asked him point blank for money he was a part of Vernon Smith's principles that all such persons are prosperous imposters and like a true mystic he held to his principles in defiance of his five senses which told him that the night was freezing the man very thin and weak if you come to the settlement between four and five on Friday week he said inquiries will be made the man stepped back into the snow with a not ungraceful gesture as of apology he had frosty silver hair and his lean face though in shadow seemed to wear something like a smile as Vernon Smith stepped briskly into the street the man stooped down as if to do up his bootlace it was however guiltless of any such dandyism and as the young philanthropist stood pulling on his gloves with some particularity a heavy snowball was suddenly smashed into his face he was blind for a black instant and then as some of the snow fell saw faintly as in a dim mirror of ice or dreamy crystal the lean man bowing with the elegance of a dancing master and saying imiably a Christmas box when he had quite cleared his face of snow the man had vanished for three burning minutes Cyril Vernon Smith was nearer to the people and more their brother than he had been in his whole life stepping pedantic existence for if he did not love a poor man he hated one and you never really regard a laborer as you're equal to you can quarrel with him dirty cat he muttered filthy fool mucking with snow like a beastly baby when will they be civilized by the very state of the street is a disgrace and a temptation to such tom pools why isn't all this snow cleared away and the street made decent to the eye of efficiency there was indeed something to complain of in the conditions of the road snow was banked up on both sides in white walls and toward the other the darker end of the street even rose into a chaos of low colorless hills by the time he reached them he was nearly knee deep and was in a far from philanthropic frame of mind solitude of the little streets was as strange as their white obstruction and before he had plowed his way much further he was convinced that he had taken a wrong turning and fallen upon some formless suburb unvisited before there was no light in any of the low dark houses no light in anything but the blank emphatic snow he was a modern and morbid hellish isolation hit and held him suddenly anything human would have relieved the strain if it had been only the leap of a garter then the tender human touch came indeed for another snowball struck him and made a star on his back he turned with a fierce joy and ran after a boy escaping ran with dizzy and violent speed he knew not for how long he wanted the boy he did not know whether he loved or hated him he wanted humanity he did not know whether he loved or hated it as he ran he realized that the landscape around him was changing in shape though not in color the houses seemed to dwindle and disappear in hills of snow as if buried the snow seemed to rise in tattered outlines of crag and cliff and crest but he thought of nothing of all these impossibilities until the boy turned to bay when he did he saw the child was clearly beautiful with gold-red hair and a face as serious as complete happiness and when he spoke to the boy his own question surprised him for he said for the first time in his life what am I doing here and the little boy with very grave eyes answered I suppose you are dead he had also for the first time a doubt of his spiritual destiny he looked round on a towering landscape of frozen peaks and plains and said is this hell and the child stared but did not answer he knew it was heaven all over that colossal country white as the world around the pole little boys were playing rolling each other down dreadful slopes crushing each other under falling cliffs for heaven is a place where one can fight forever without hurting Smith suddenly remembered how happy he had been as a child rolling about on the safe sandhills around Conway I'd above Smith's head higher than the cross of St. Paul serving over him like the hanging blossom of a hair-bell was a cavernous crag of snow a hundred feet below him like a landscape seen from a balloon lay snowy flats as white and as far away he saw a little boy stagger with many catastrophic slides to that toppling peak and seizing another little boy by the leg sent him flying away down to the distant silver plains there he sank and vanished in the snow as if in the sea but coming up again like a diver rushed madly up the steep once more rolling before him a great gathering snowball gigantic at last which he hurled back at the mountain crest and brought both the boy and the mountain down in one avalanche to the level of the veil the other boy also sank like a stone and also rose again like a bird but Smith had no leisure to concern himself with this for the collapse of that celestial crest had left him standing solitary in the sky on a peak like a church spire he could see the tiny figures of the boys in the valley below and he knew by their attitudes that they were eagerly telling him to jump then for the first time he knew the nature of faith as he had just known the fierce nature of charity or rather for the second time for he remembered one moment when he had known faith before it was when his father had taught him to swim and he had believed he could float on water not only against reason but what is so much harder against instinct then he had trusted water now he must trust air he jumped he went through air and then through snow there was a lightning swiftness but as he buried himself in solid snow like a bullet he seemed to learn a million things and to learn them all too fast he knew that the whole world is a snowball and that all the stars are snowballs he knew that no man will be fit for heaven till he loves solid whiteness as the little boy loves a ball of snow he sank and he sank and he sank and then as usually happens in such cases woke up with the start in the street true he was taken up for a common drunk but if you properly appreciate his conversion you will appreciate that he did not mind since the crime of drunkardness is infinitely less than that of spiritual pride of which he had really been guilty end of section 12 chapters 37 through 39