 Section 1 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 1 On Seriousness. I do not like seriousness. I think it is irreligious. Or if you prefer the phrase, it is the fashion of all false religions. The man who takes everything seriously is the man who makes an idol of everything. He bows down to wood and stone until his limbs are as rooted as the roots of the tree, or his head as fallen as the stone sunken by the roadside. It has often been discussed whether animals can laugh. The hyena is said to laugh, but it is rather in the sense in which the MP is said to utter an ironical cheer. At the best, the hyena utters an ironical laugh. Broadly, it is true that all animals except man are serious, and I think it is further demonstrated by the fact that all human beings who concern themselves in a concentrated way with animals are also serious. Serious in a sense far beyond that of human beings concerned with anything else. Horses are serious. They have long, solemn faces. But horsey men are also serious. Jockeys or trainers or grooms, they also have long, solemn faces. Dogs are serious. They have exactly that combination of moderate conscientiousness with monstrous conceit, which is the makeup of most modern religions. But however serious dogs may be, they can hardly be more serious than dog fanciers, or dog stealers. Dog stealers indeed have to be particularly serious, because they have to come back and say they have found the dog. The faintest shade of irony, not to say levity, on their features would evidently be fatal to their plans. I will not carry the comparison through all the kingdoms of natural history, but it is true of all who fix their affection or intelligence on the lower animals. Cats are as serious as the Sphinx who must have been some kind of cat to judge by the attitude. But the rich old ladies who love cats are quite equally serious about cats and about themselves. So also the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats, also crocodiles and beetles and all kinds of things. But they were all serious and made their worshippers serious. Egyptian art was intentionally harsh, clear and conventional, but it could very vividly represent men driving, hunting, fighting, feasting, praying. Yet I think you will pass along many corridors of that coloured and almost cruel art before you see a man laughing. Their gods did not encourage them to laugh. They were told by housewives that beetles seldom laugh. Cats do not laugh, except the Cheshire Cat, which is not found in Egypt, and even he can only grin. And crocodiles do not laugh. They weep. This comparison between the sacred animals of Egypt and the pet animals of today is not so far-fetched as it may seem to some people. There is a healthy and an unhealthy love of animals and the nearest definition of the difference is that the unhealthy love of animals is serious. I am quite prepared to love a rhinoceros with reasonable precautions. He is doubtless a delightful father to the young rhinoceroses. But I will not promise not to laugh at a rhinoceros. I will not worship the beast with the little horn. I will not adore the golden calf. Still less will I adore the fattened calf. On the contrary, I will eat him. There is some sort of joke about eating an animal or even about an animal eating you. Let us hope we shall perceive it at the proper moment if it ever occurs. But I will not worship an animal. That is, I will not take an animal quite seriously. And I know why. Wherever there is animal worship, there is human sacrifice. That is, both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience. Suppose a thousand black slaves were sacrificed to the black beetle. Suppose a million maidens were flung into the Nile to feed the crocodile. Suppose the cat could eat men instead of mice. It could still be no more than that sacrifice of humanity that so often makes the horse more important than the groom or the lap dog more important even than the lap. The only right view of the animal is the comic view. Because the view is comic, it is naturally affectionate. And because it is affectionate, it is never respectful. I know no place where the true contrast has been more candidly, clearly, and for all I know, unconsciously expressed, than in an excellent little book of verse called Bread and Circuses by Helen Perry Eden, the daughter of Judge Perry, who has inherited both the humour and the humanity in spite of which her father succeeded as a modern magistrate. There are a great many other things that might be praised in the book, but I should select for praise the same love of animals. There is, for instance, a little poem on a cat from the country who has come to live in a flat in Battersea. Everybody at some time of their lives has lived or will live in a flat in Battersea, except perhaps the prisoner of the Vatican, and the verses have a tenderness with a twist of the grotesque, which seems to me the exactly appropriate tone about domestic pets. And now you're here. Well, it may be the sun does rise in Battersea, although today be dark. Life is not shorn of loves and hates, while there are sparrows on the slates and keepers in the park, and you yourself will come to learn the ways of London, and in turn assume your cockney cares, like other folk that live in flats, chasing your purely abstract rats upon the concrete stairs. That is like hood at his best. But it is, moreover, penetrated with the profound and true appreciation of the fundamental idea that all love of the cat must be founded on the absurdity of the cat, and only thus can a morbid idolatry be avoided. Perhaps those who appeared to be witches were those old ladies who took their cats too seriously. The cat in this book is called Fourpaz, which is as jolly as a gargoyle, but the name of the cat must be something familiar, and even jeering if it be only Tom or Tabby or Topsy, something that shows man is not afraid of it. Otherwise the name of the cat will be...pushed. But when the same poet comes accidentally across an example of the insane seriousness about animals that some modern humanitarians exhibit, she turns against the animal lover, as naturally and instinctively as she turns to the animal. A writer on a society paper had mentioned some rich woman who had appeared on cup-day gowned in some way or other, and inserted the tearful parenthesis that she has just lost a dear dog in London. The real animal lover instantly recognises the wrong note and dances on the dog's grave with a derision as unsympathetic as swift. Dear are my friends, and yet my heart still light is undimmed the eyes that see our set depart snatched from the season by appendicitis or something quite as smart. But when my chinchin drew his latest breath on Marie's outspread apron, slow and weasley, I simply sniffed. I could not take his death so peeking easily. Grief courts these ovations, and many press my sable-suaded hand, noting the blackest of Lucille's creations, inquire and understand. It is that balance of instincts that is the essence of all satire. However fantastic satire may be, it must always be potentially rational and fundamentally moderate, for it must be ready to hit both to right and to left at opposite extravagances. And the two extravagances which exist on the edges of our harassed and secretive society today are cruelty to animals and worship of animals. They both come from taking animals too seriously. The cruel man must hate the animal, the crying must worship the animal, and perhaps fear it. Neither knows how to love it. End of Section 1 Recording by The Story Girl Section 2 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 Elsie Selwyn. The Uses of Diversity by G.K. Chesterton Section 2 Lamp Posts In contemplating some common object of the modern street, such as an omnibus or a lamp post, it is sometimes well worth while to stop and think about why such common objects are regarded as commonplace. It is well worth while to try to grasp what is the significance of them, or rather the quality and modernity which makes them so often seem not so much significant as insignificant. If you stop the omnibus while you stop to think about it, you will be unpopular. Even if you try to grasp the lamp post and your effort to grasp its significance, you will almost certainly be misunderstood. Nevertheless, the problem is a real one and not without bearing upon the most poignant politics and ethics of today. It is certainly not the things themselves, the idea and upshot of them that are remote from poetry or even mysticism. The idea of a crowd of human strangers turned into comrades for a journey as full of the oldest pathos and piety of human life. That profound feeling of mortal fraternity and frailty, which tells us we are indeed all in the same boat, is not the less true of expressed in the formula that we are all in the same bus. As for the idea of the lamp post, the idea of the fixed beacon of the branching thoroughfares, the terrestrial star of the terrestrial traveler, it could not only be but actually is the subject of countless songs. Nor is it even true that there is something so trivial or ugly about the names of the things as to make them commonplace in all connections. The word lamp is especially beloved by the more decorative and poetic writers. It is a symbol on very frequently a title. It is true that if Ruskin had called his elegant work the seven lamp posts of architecture, the effect to a delicate ear would not have been quite the same. But even the word post is in no sense impossible in poetry. It can be found with a fine military ring in phrases like the last post or dying at his post. I remember indeed hearing when a small child the line in Macaulay's armada about with loose rain and bloody spur rode inland many a post and being puzzled at the picture of a pillar box or a lamp post displaying so much activity. But certainly it is not the mere sound of the word that makes it unworkable in the literature of wonder or beauty. Omnibus may seem at first sight a more difficult thing to swallow if I may be allowed a somewhat giant-esque figure of speech. This, it may be said, is a cockney and ungainly modern word as it is certainly a cockney and ungainly modern thing. But even this is not true. The word omnibus is a very noble word with a very noble meaning and even tradition. It is derived from an ancient in Adam and Tyne tongue which has rolled it with very authoritative thunders. Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus. It is a word really more human and universal than republic or democracy. A man might very well consistently build a temple for all the tribes of men, a temple of the largest pattern and the loveliest design of omnibus. It is true that the dignity of this description has really been somewhat diminished by the illogical habit of clipping the word down to the last and least important part of it. But that is only one of many modern examples in which real vulgarity is not in democracy but rather in the loss of democracy. It is about as democratic to call an omnibus a bus as it would be to call a democrat a rat. Another way of explaining the cloud of commonplace interpretation of modern things is to trace it to that spirit which often calls itself science but which is more often mere repetition. It is proverbial that a child looking out of the nursery window regards the lamppost as part of a fairy tale of which the lamplighter is the fairy. That lamppost can be to a baby all that the moon could possibly be to a lover or a poet. Now it is perfectly true that there is nowadays a spirit of cheap information which imagines that it shoots a shining point when it merely tells us that there are 900 lampposts in the town all exactly alike. It is equally true that there is a spirit of cheap science which is equally cocksure of its conclusiveness when it tells us that there are so many thousand moons and suns all much more alike than we might have been disposed of fancy. And we can say of both these calculations that there is nothing really commonplace except the mind of the calculator. The baby is much more right about the flaming lamp than the statistician who counts the post in that street, and the lover is much more really right about the moon than the astronomer. Here the part is certainly greater than the whole for it is much better to be tied to one wonderful thing than to allow a mere catalog of wonderful things to deprive you of the capacity to wonder. It is doubtless true to a definite extent that a certain sameness in the mechanical modern creations makes them actually less attractive than the freer recurrences of nature, or in other words that twenty lamp hosts really are much more like each other than twenty trees. Nevertheless, even this character will not cover the whole ground for men who do not cease to feel the mystery of natural things, even when they reproduce themselves almost completely as in the case of pitch darkness or a very heavy sleep. The mere fact that we have seen a lamp host very often, and that it generally looked very much the same as before would not of itself prevent us from appreciating its elf and fire any more as the child. Finally, there is a neglected side of this psychological problem which is, I think, one aspect of the mystery of the morality of war. It is not altogether an accident that while the London lamp host has always been mild and undistinguished, the Paris lamp host has been more historic because it has been more horrible. It has been a yet more revolutionary substitute for the guillotine, yet more revolutionary because it was the guillotine of the mob as distinct even from the guillotine of the Republic. We hanged aristocrats upon it, including, unless my memory misleads me, that exceedingly unpleasant aristocrat who promulgated the measure of war economy known as let them eat grass. Hence it happened that there has been in France a fanatical and flamboyant political newspaper actually called La Lantaine, a paper for extreme Jacobins. If there were a paper in London called the lamp host, I can only imagine it as a paper for children. As for my other example, I do not know whether even the French revolution could manage to do anything with the omnibus, but the Jacobins were quite capable of using it as a tumble-roll. In short, I suspect that cockney things have become common place because there has been so long lacking in them a certain savor of sacrifice and peril, which there has been in the nursery tale for all its innocence and which there has been in the Parisian street for all its iniquity. The new wonder that has changed the world before our eyes is that all this crude and vulgar modern clockwork is most truly being used for a heroic end. It is most emphatically being used for the slaying of a dragon. It is being used much more unquestionably than the lantern of Paris to make an end of a tyrant. It was a canned phrase in our cheaper literature of late to say that the new time will make the romance of war mechanical. Is it not more probable that it will make the mechanism of war romantic? As I said at the beginning, the things themselves are not repulsively prosaic. It was their associations that made them so, and today their associations are as splendid as any that ever blazed into shield or embroidered a banner. Much of what made the violation of Belgium so violent a challenge to every conscience lay unconsciously and the fact that the country which had thus become tragic had often been regarded as common place. The unpardonable sin was committed in a place of lampposts and omnibuses. In similar places has been prepared the just wrath and reparation and the legend of it will surely linger even in the omnibus that has carried heroes to the mouth of hell and even in the lamppost whose lamp has been darkened against the dragon of the sky. End of section 2 read by Elsie Selwyn. Section 3 of the uses of diversity. This is the 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 Spirits The magazines continue to abound in articles about spiritualism. Those articles which expose and explode spiritualism are certainly calculated to make converts to that novel creed. But fortunately the balance is redressed by the articles which defend and expound spiritualism which will probably make any thoughtful convert hastily recant his conversion. I believe myself that nothing but advantage can accrue to spiritualism from all criticisms founded on materialism. I think there is a mystical minimum in human history and experience which is at once too obscure to be explained and too obvious to be explained away. It may be admitted that a miracle is rarer than a murder but they are made obscure by somewhat similar causes. Thus a medium will insist on a dark room. An murder is said to have a slight preference for a dark night. A medium is criticized for not submitting to a sufficient number of scientific and impartial judges. But a murderer seldom collects any considerable number of impartial witnesses to testify to his performance. Many supernatural stories rest on the evidence of rough, unlettered men like fishermen and peasants and most criminal trials depend on the detailed testimony of quite uneducated people. It may be remarked that we never throw a doubt on the value of ignorant evidence when it is a question of a judge hanging a man but only when it is a question of a saint healing him. Morbid in historical people imagine all sorts of ghosts and demons that do not exist. Morbid in historical people also imagine all sorts of crimes and conspiracies that do not exist. A great many spiritual communications may be auto suggestions and a great many apparent murders may be suicides. But there is a limit to the probability of self-destruction. So there is a limit to the probability of self-destruction. Now I think it worthwhile to concentrate our common sense not on where these messages come from or why they come but simply on the messages. Let us consider the thing itself about which there is no doubt at all. Let us consider not whether spirits can speak to us or how they speak but simply what they say or are supposed to say. If spirits in heaven or in scandals on earth or fiends somewhere else have brought us a new religion let us look at the new religion on its own merits. Well this is the sort of thing the spirits are supposed to write down and very possibly do write down. You make death an impenetrable fog while it is a mere golden mist torn easily aside by the shafts of faith and revealing life as not only continuous but as not a change. I cannot express myself as I wish it is more like leaving prison for freedom and happiness not that your present life lacks joy it is all joy but you have to fight with imperfections. Here we have to struggle only with lack of development there is no evil only different degrees of spirit. The interrogator Mr. Basil King who narrates his experiences in an interesting article in Nash's magazine proceeds to ask whether the lack of development is due to the highly practical thing we call sin. To this the spirit replies they come over with the evil as it were cut out and leaving blanks in their souls these have by degrees to be filled with good. Now I will wave the point whether death is a mist or a fog or a front door or a fire escape or any other physical metaphor being satisfied with the fact that it is there and not to be removed by metaphors but what amuses me about the spirit is that for him it is both there and not there death is nonexistent in one's sentence and of the most startling importance six sentences afterwards the spirit is positive that our existence is not cut in two by a great change at the moment of death but the spirit is equally positive a little lower down that the whole of our human evil is instantly an utterly cut out of us and all at the moment of death if a man suddenly supernaturally loses about three quarters of his ordinary character might it not be described as a great change why does so enormous a convulsion at the exact moment of death if death is nonexistent and not to be considered the spiritualist is here contradicting himself not only by making death very decidedly a great change but by actually making it a greater change than Dante or Saint Francis thought it was a Christian who thinks the soul carries its sins to purgatory makes life much more continuous than this spiritualist who says that death and death alone alters a man by blast of magic the article bears the modest title of the abolishing of death and the spirit does say that this is possible except when he forgets and says the opposite he seldom contradicts himself more than twice in a paragraph but since he says clearly that death abolishes sin and equally clearly that he abolishes death is an interesting speculation what happens next and especially what happens to sin a subject of interest to many of us Mr. Basil King asked the spirit who had told him that animals are human whether it is wrong to destroy animal life it may be remarked that the questions Mr. King asks are always much more acute than the answers he gets the answers about killing of animals is this never destroy life life is the absolute power which overrules all else there can be no cessation it is impossible and that is all and for man's considering whether he shall or shall not kill a tomcat it does not seem very helpful logically if it means anything it would seem to mean that you may do anything to the cat for its nine lives are really an infinite series in short you can kill it because you cannot kill it but it is obvious that if a man relies on this reason for killing his cat it is an equally good reason for killing his creditor creditors are also immortal a solemn thought creditors also pass through a golden mist torn easily aside by the shafts of faith and have all the evil of their souls including let us hope their avarice cut out of them with the acts of death without noticing anything in particular in short Mr. Basil King when he asks a reasonable question about a real moral question the relations of man and the animals gets no reply except a hodgepodge of words which might mean anarchy and may mean anything from beginning to end the spirit never answers any real question on which the real religions of mankind have been obliged to legislate and to teach the only practical deduction would be that it is no disadvantage to have sinned in this life as in the other case that it is no disgrace to kill either a creditor or a cat if it means anything it means that and if it is spirits and not spifications the spirits mean that and I do not desire their further acquaintance in the section 3 section 4 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 4 Tennyson I've been glancing over two or three of the appreciations of Tennyson appropriate to his centenary and have been struck with a curious tone of coldness towards him in almost all quarters now this is really a very peculiar thing for it is a case of coldness to quite brilliant and unquestionable literary merit whether Tennyson was a great poet I shall not discuss I understand that one has to wait about 800 years before discussing that and my only complaint against the printers of my articles is that they will not wait even for much shorter periods but the Tennyson was a poet is as solid and certain as that Roberts is a billiard player the Tennyson was an astonishingly good poet is as solid and certain as that Roberts was an astonishingly good billiard player even in those matters of art there are some things analogous to matters of fact it is no good disputing about tastes partly because some tastes are beyond dispute if anyone tells me that there has fallen a splendid tear from the passion flower at the gate or that tears from the depth of some divine despair is not fine poetry I am quite prepared to treat him as I would one who said that grass was not green or that I was not corpulent and by all common chances Tennyson ought to be preserved as a pleasure a sensuous pleasure if you like but certainly a genuine one there is no more reason for dropping Tennyson than for dropping Virgil we do not mind Virgil's view of Augustus nor need we mind Tennyson's view of Queen Victoria beauty is unanswerable in a poem as much as in a woman there were Victorian writers whose art is not perfectly appreciable apart from their enthusiasm St. Agnes's Yeast is a fine book but not quite so fine a book as it seemed when one's own social passions were still yeasty Browning and Coventry Patmore are justly admired but they are most admired where they are most agreed with but St. Agnes's Eve is an unimpeachably beautiful poem whether one believes in St. Agnes or detests her one would think that a man who had thus left indubitably good verse would receive natural and steady gratitude like a man who left indubitably good wine to his nephew or indubitably good pictures to the national portrait gallery nevertheless as I have said the tone of all the papers modernist or old fashioned has been mainly frigid what is the meaning of this I will ask permission to answer this question by abruptly and even brutally changing the subject my remarks must first of all seem irrelevant even to a frontery they shall prove their relevance later on interning the pages of one of the papers containing such a light and unsympathetic treatment of Tennyson my eye catches the following sentence by the light of modern science and thought we are in a position to see that each normal human being in some way repeats historically the life of the human race this is a very typical modern assertion that is it is an assertion for which there is not now and never has been a single spot or speck of proof little about what the life of the human race has been and none of our scientific conjectures about it bear the remotest resemblance to the actual growth of a child according to this theory a baby begins by chipping flints and rubbing sticks together to find fire one so often sees babies doing this about the age of five the child before the delighted eyes of his parents founds a village community by the time he is eleven it has become a small city state of ancient Athens encouraged by this the boy proceeds and before he is fourteen has founded the Roman Empire but now his parents have a serious setback having watched him so far not only with pleasure but with a very natural surprise they must strengthen themselves to endure the spectacle of decay they have now to watch their child going through the decline of the western empire and the dark ages they see the invasion of the Huns and that of the Norsemen chasing each other across his expressive face he seems a little happier after he has repeated the battle of Shalom in the unsuccessful siege of Paris and by the time he comes to the twelfth century his boyish face is as bright as it was of old when he was repeating Pericles or Camillus I have no space to follow this remarkable demonstration of how history repeats itself in the youth how he grows dismal at twenty-three to represent the end of medievalism brightens because the renaissance is coming darkens again with the disputes of the later reformation broadens placidly through the thirties as the rational eighteenth century till at last about forty-three he gives a great yell and begins to burn the house down as a symbol of the French Revolution such we shall all agree is the ordinary development of a boy now seriously does anyone believe a word of such Bosch does anyone think that a child will repeat the periods of human history will never allow for a daughter in the stone age or excuse a son because he is in the fourth century BC yet the writer who lays down this splendid and staggering lie calmly says that by the light of modern science and thought we are in a position to see that it is true seeing is a strong word to use of our conviction that icebergs are in the north or that the earth goes round the sun yet anybody can use it of any casual or crazy biological fancy seen in some newspaper or suggested in some debating club this is the rooted weakness of our time science which means exactitude has become the mother of all in exactitude this is the failure of the epic and this explains the partial failure of Tennyson he was par excellence the poet of popular science that is of all such cloudy and ill-considered assertions as the above he was the perfectly educated man of classics and the half educated man of science no one did more to encourage the colossal blunder that the survival of the fittest means the survival of the best one might as well say that the survival of the fittest means the survival of the fattest Tennyson's position has grown shaky because it rested not on any clear dogmas old or new but on two or three temporary we might say desperate compromises of his own day he grasped at evolution not because it was definite but because it was indefinite not because it was daring but because it was safe it gave him the hope that man might one day be an angel and england a free democracy but it soothed him with the assurance that neither of these alarming things would happen just yet Virgil used his verbal felicitis to describe the eternal idea of the roman imperium Tennyson used his verbal felicitis for the accidental equilibrium of the british constitution to humble and war down the proud is a permanent idea for the policing of this planet but that freedom should slowly broaden down from precedent to precedent merely happens to be the policy of the english upper class it has no vital sanction it might be much better to broaden quickly one can write great poetry about a truth or even about a falsehood but hardly about a legal fiction the misanthropic idea as in Byron is not a truth of the immortal lies as long as humanity exists humanity can be hated wherever one shall gather by himself Byron is in the midst of him it is a common and recurrent mood to regard man as a hopeless yahoo but it is not a natural mood to regard man as a hopeful yahoo as the evolutionists did as a creature changing before one's eyes from bestial to beautiful a creature whose tail has just dropped off while he is staring at a far off divine event this particular compromise between contempt and hope was an accident of Tennyson's time and like his liberal conservatism will probably never be found again his weakness was not being old fashioned or new fashioned but being fashionable his feet were set on things transitory and untenable compromises and compacts of silence yet he was so perfect a poet that I fancy he will still be able to stand even upon such clouds end of section 4 this is a recording by coffee lover 17 section 5 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 the domesticity of detectives I have just been entertaining myself with the last sensational story by the author of The Yellow Room which was probably the best detective tale of our time except Mr. Bentley's admirable novel Trent's Last Case the name of the author of The Yellow Room is Gaston Le Roux I have sometimes wondered whether it is the alternative nom de flume of the writer called Maurice Leblanc which gives us the stories about our Saint-Lupin the gentleman burglar there would be something very symmetrical in the inversion by which the red gentleman always writes about a detective and the white gentleman always writes about a criminal but I have no serious reason to suppose the red and white combination to be anything but a coincidence and the tales are of two rather different types those of Gaston Le Red are more strictly of the type of the mystery story in the sense of resolving a single and central mystery those of Maurice Le White are more properly adventure stories in the sense of resolving a rapid succession of immediate difficulties this is inherent in the position of the hero the detective is always outside the event while the criminal is inside the event some would express it by saying that the policeman is always outside the house when the burglar is inside the house but there is one very French quality which both these French writers share even when their writing is very far from their best it is a spirit of definition which is itself not easy to define to say it is scientific will only suggest that it is slow it is much truer to say it is military that is it is something that has to be both scientific and swift it can be seen in much greater Frenchmen as compared with men still greater who were not Frenchmen Jules Verne and H.G. Wells for instance both wrote fairy tales of science Mr. Wells has much the larger mind and interest in life but he often lacks one power which Verne possesses supremely the power of going to the point Verne is very French in his rigid relevancy Wells is very English in his rich irrelevance he is there as English as Dickens the best passages in whose stories are the stoppages and even stopgaps in a truly French tale there are no stoppages every word however dull is deliberate or directed towards the end the comparison could be carried further back among the classics the romance of Dumas may seem a mere riot of swords and feathers it is often spoken of as a mere revel and adventure and variety the madness of romance but it is not a mere riot but rather a military revolution and even a disciplined revolution certainly a very French revolution it is not a mere mad revel but a very gorgeous and elaborate banquet planned by a great cook a very French cook Scott was a greater man than Dumas and a greater novelist on the note of the serious humours of humanity but he was not so great a storyteller because he had less of something that can only be called the strategy of the soldier the three musketeers advanced like an army with their three servants and their one ally they march, maneuver, deploy wheeling into positions and almost making patterns they are always present wherever their author wants them which is by no means true of all the characters of all the novelists Dumas and not Scott ought to have written the life of Napoleon Dumas was much nearer to Napoleon in the fact that there was most emphatically a method in his madness nobody ever called Scott mad and certainly nobody could ever call him a thoughtical he was as incapable of the conspiracy which carried off General Monk in a box as Dumas was incapable of the curse of Megmerleys or the benediction of Louis Vernon but there is eternally present in the Frenchman something which may truly be called presence of mind there to be an artist is not to be absent minded however harmless or happy the holidays of the mind may be art is to have the intellect and all its instruments on the spot and ready to go to the point as when but a little while ago a good artist stood by the banks of the marne and saved the world with one gesture of living logic of the Latin but though the strategy of the French story is allied to the strategy by which the French army has always affected the larger matters of mankind I doubt whether such a story ought to deal with such matters I mentioned at the beginning M. Gaston de Rue's last mystery story because I think I know why it is not anything like so good as his first mystery story the truth is there are two types of sensational romance between which our wilder sensationalists seem to waver and I think they are generally at their strongest in dealing with the first type and at their weakest in dealing with the second for the sake of a convenient symbol I may call them respectively the romance of the yellow room and the romance of the yellow peril we might say that the great detective story deals with small things while the small or silly detective story generally deals with great things it deals with diabolical diplomatists darting about between Vienna and Paris and Petrograd with vast cosmopolitan conspiracies ramifying through all the sellers of Europe or worse and most widespread of all occult and mystical secret societies from China or Tibet the vast and vague Oriental terrorism which I call for convenience here the yellow peril on the other hand the good detective story is in its nature a good domestic story it is steeped in the sentiment that an Englishman's house is his castle even if like other castles it is the scene of a few quiet tortures or assassinations in other words it is concerned with an enclosure a plan or problem set within certain defined limits and that is where the French writer's first story was a model for all such writers and where it ought to have been but has not been a model for himself the point about the yellow room is that it was a room that is it was a box in which Dumas kidnapped General Monk the writer dealt with the quadrate or square which Mrs. Battle loved the very plan of the problem looked like a problem in the fourth book of Euclid he posted four men on four sides of a space and a murder was done in the middle of them to all appearance in spite of them in reality by one of them now a sensational novelist of the more cosmopolitan sort could of course have filled the story with a swarm of Chinese magicians who had the power of walking through brick walls or of Indian mesmerists who could murder a man merely by meditating about him on the peaks of the Himalayas or merely by so human and hum-drama trifle as the secret society of German spies which had made a labyrinth of secret tunnels under all the private houses in the world these romantic possibilities are infinite and because they are infinite they are really unromantic the real romance of detection works inwards towards the household gods even if they are household devils one of the best of Sherlock Holmes stories turns entirely on a trivial point of housekeeping the provision of curry for the domestic dinner curry is, I believe, connected with the East and could have been made the excuse for infinities of sham occultism and Oriental torments the author could have brought in a million yellow cooks to poison a yellow condiment but the author knew his business much better it did not let what is called infinity in the book it did not let what is called infinity and should rather be called anarchy invade the quiet seclusion of the British criminal's home he did not let the logic of the yellow room be destroyed by the philosophy of the yellow peril that is why I lament the fact that the ingenious French architect of the original yellow room seems to have made an outward step in this direction not indeed towards the plains of Tibet but towards the hardly less barbaric plains of Germany in his last book, Roulatabia Shekrup concerns the manufacture of a torpedo big enough to smash a town and an object of that size may be a sensation but will not long be a secret it may be inevitable that a French patriot should now write even his detective stories about the war but I do not think this method will ever make the French mystery story what the war itself has been a French masterpiece has to die per francos end of section 5 section 6 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 George Meredith the death of George Meredith was the real end of the 19th century not that empty date that came at the close of 1899 the last bond was broken between us and the pride and peace of the Victorian age our fathers were all dead we were suddenly orphans we all felt strangely and sadly young a cold enormous dawn opened in front of us we had to go on to tasks which our fathers fine as they were did not know and our first sensation was that of cold and undefended youth Swinburne was the penultimate Meredith the ultimate end it is not a phrase to call him the last of the Victorians he really is the last no doubt this final phrase has been used about each of the great Victorians one after another from Matthew Arnold and Browning to Swinburne and Meredith no doubt the public has grown a little tired of the positively last appearance of the 19th century but the end of George Meredith really was the end of that great epic no great man now alive no great power powers or its peculiar limits like all great epics like all great things it is not easy to define we can see it, touch it, smell it eat it but we cannot state it it was a time when faith was firm without being definite was a time when we saw the necessity of reform without once seeing the possibility of revolution it was a sort of exquisite interlude in the intellectual disputes a beautiful accidental truce in the eternal war of mankind things could mix in a mellow atmosphere its great men were so religious that they could do without a religion they were so hopefully and happily republican that they could do without a republic they are all dead and deified and it is well with them but we cannot back into that well poised pantheism and liberalism we cannot be content to be merely broad for us the dilemma sharpens is divide of the men left alive there are many who can be admired beyond expression but none who can be admired in this way the name of that powerful writer, Mr. Thomas Hardy was often mentioned in company with that of Meredith but the coupling of the two names is a philosophical and chronological mistake Mr. Hardy is holy of our own generation which is a very unpleasant thing to be he is shrill and not mellow he is the unknown god he knows the god or thinks he knows the god and dislikes him he is not a pantheist he is a pandiabolist the great agnostics of the Victorian age said there was no purpose in nature Mr. Hardy is a mystic he says there is an evil purpose all this is as far as possible from the plentitude and rational optimisms of Meredith and when we have disposed of Mr. Hardy what other name is there we pretend to recall the heroic Victorian age the Roman curse lies upon Meredith like a blessing Ultimus Suorum Moriatur he has died the last of his own the greatness of George Meredith exhibits the same paradox or difficulty as the greatness of Browning the fact that simplicity was the center while the utmost luxuriance and complexity was the expression he was as human as Shakespeare and also as affected as Shakespeare it may generally be remarked I do not know the cause of it that the men who have an odd or mad point of view express it in plain or bold language the men who have a genial and everyday point of view express it in ornate and complicated language Swinburne and Thomas Hardy talk almost in words of one syllable but the philosophical upshot can be expressed in the most famous of all words of one syllable damn their words are common words but their view, thank God, is not a common view they denounce in the style of a spelling book while people like Meredith are unpopular through the very richness of their popular sympathies men like Browning or like Francis Thompson praise God in such a way sometimes that God alone could possibly understand the praise but they mean all men to understand it they wish every beast and fish and flying thing to take part in chorus of the cosmos on the other hand those who have bad news to tell are much more explicit and the poet whose object it is to depress the people take care that they do it I will not write anymore about those poets because I do not profess to be impartial or even to be good tempered on the subject to my thinking the oppression of the people is a terrible sin but the depression of the people is a far worse one but the glory of George Meredith is that he combines subtlety with primal energy he criticized life without losing his appetite for it in him alone being a man of the world did not mean being a man disgusted with the world as a rule there is no difference between the critic and ascetic except that the ascetic sorrows with a hope and the critic without a hope but George Meredith loves straightness even when he praised it crookedly he adored innocence even when he analyzed it tortuously he cared only for unconsciousness even when he was unduly conscious of it he was never so good as he was about virgins and school boys in one curious poem containing many fine lines he actually rebukes people for being quaint or eccentric and rebukes them quaintly and eccentrically he says of nature the great earth mother whom he worshiped she by one sure sign can read have they but held her laws and nature dear they mouth no sentence have inverted wit more prizes she her beast than this high breed rye in the shape she wastes her milk to rear that is the mark of the truly great man that he sees the common man afar off and worships him the great man tries to be ordinary and becomes extraordinary in the process but the small man tries to be mysterious and becomes lucid in an awful sense for we can all see through him end of section 6 this is a recording by coffee lover 17 section 7 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 Elissa Grazer the uses of diversity by G.K. Chesterton the Irishman the other day I went to see the Irish plays recently acted by real Irishman peasants and poor folk under the inspiration of Lady Gregory and Mr. W.B. Yates over and above the excellence of the acting and the abstract merit of the plays both of which were considerable there emerged the strange and ironic interest which has been the source of so much fun and sin and sorrow the interest of the Irishman in England since we have sinned by creating the stage Irishman it is fitting enough that we should all be rebuked by Irishman on the stage we have all seen some obvious Englishman performing a patty it was perhaps a just punishment to see an obvious patty performing the comic and contemptible part of an English gentleman I have now seen both and I can lay my hand on my heart though my knowledge of physiology is shaky about its position and declare that the Irish English gentleman was an even more abject and crawling figure than the English Irish servant the comic Irishman in the English plays was at least given credit for a kind of chaotic courage the comic Englishman in the Irish plays was represented not only as a fool but as a nervous fool a fussy and spasmodic prig who could not be loved either for strength or weakness but all this only illustrates the fundamental fact that both the national views are wrong both the versions are perversions the rollicking Irishman and the priggish Englishman are alike the mere myths generated by misunderstanding it would be rather nearer the truth if we spoke of the rollicking Englishman and the priggish Irishman but even that would be wrong too unless people are near they had better not be near in neighborhood the bible tells us to love our neighbors and also to love our enemies probably because they are generally the same people and there is a real human reason for this you think of a remote man merely as a man that is you think of him in the right way suppose I say to you suddenly oblige me by brooding on the soul of the man who lives at 351 High Street Islington perhaps now I come to think of it you are the man who lives at 351 High Street Islington in that case substitute some other unknown address and pursue the intellectual sport now you will probably be broadly right about the man in Islington whom you have never seen or heard of because you will begin at the right end the human end the man in Islington is at least a man the man in Islington is certainly a soul he also has been bewildered and broadened by youth he also has been tortured and intoxicated by love he also is sublimely doubtful about death you can think about the soul of that nameless man who is a mere number in Islington High Street but you do not think about the soul of your next door neighbor he is not a man he is an environment of a dog he is the noise of a pianola he is a dispute about a party wall he is drains that are worse than yours or roses that are better than yours now all these are the wrong ends of a man and a man like many other things in this world such as a cat or nine tails has a large number of wrong ends and only one right one these adjuncts are all tails so to speak a dog is a sort of curly tail to a man a substitute for that which man so tragically lost at an early stage of evolution and though I would rather myself go about trailing a dog behind me than tugging a pianola or towing a rose garden yet this is a matter of taste and they are all alike appendages or things depended upon man but besides his twenty tails every man really has a head an identity a soul and the head of a man is even harder to find than the head of a sky terrier for man has nine hundred and ninety nine wrong ends instead of one it is no question of getting hold of the sow by the right ear it is a question of getting hold of the hedgehog by the right quill of the bird by the right feather of the forest by the right leaf if we have never known the forest we shall know at least the forest a thing grown grandly out of the earth we shall realize the roots toiling in the terrestrial darkness the trunks reared in the silvin twilight but to find the forest is to find the fringe of the forest to approach it from without is to see its mere accidental outline ragged against the sky it is to come close enough to be superficial the remote man therefore may stand for manhood for the glory of birth or the dignity of death but is difficult to get Mr. Brown next door with whom you have quarreled about the creepers to stand for these things in any satisfactorily symbolic attitude you do not feel the glory of his birth you are more likely to hint heatedly at its ingloriousness you do not on purple and silver evenings dwell on the dignity and quietude of his death you think of it, if at all rather as sudden and the same is true of historical separation and proximity I look forward to the same death as a Chinaman barring one or two Chinese tortures perhaps I look back to the same babyhood as an ancient Phoenician unless indeed it were one of that special confirmation class of Sunday school babies who were passed through the fire to Malik but these distant or antique terrors seem merely tied on to the life they're not part of its texture Babylonian mothers, however they yielded to etiquette, probably loved their children and Chinaman unquestionably reverenced their dead it is far different when two people are close enough to each other to mistake all the acts and gestures of everyday life it is far different when the Baptist baker in Islington thinks of Iris death, coming often and dying Hamlets in distant colonies in English prisons or on English gibbets there, childhood and death have lost all their reconciling qualities the very details of them do not unite but divide hence England and Ireland see the facts of each other without guessing the meaning of the facts for instance in England and Ireland it is far different when the people think of the facts for instance, we may see the fact that an Irish housewife is careless but we fancy falsely that this is because she is scatterbrained whereas it is on the contrary because she is concentrated on religion or conspiracy or tea you may call her inefficient but you certainly must not call her weak in the same way the Irish see the fact that the Englishman is unsociable you do not see the reason which is that he is romantic this seems to me the real value of such striking national sketches as those by Lady Gregory and Mr. Singe which I saw last week here is a case where mere accidental realism the thing written on the spot the slice of life may for once in a way do some good all the signals all the flags all the declaratory externals of Ireland are almost certain to mistake if the Irishman speaks to us we are sure to misunderstand him but if we hear the Irishman talking to himself it may begin to dawn on us that he is a man end of the Irishman section 8 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 Elissa Grazer the uses of diversity by G.K. Chesterton Ireland and the domestic drama in a sense so gigantic that it would have staggered the statesman who once used the phrase we have called in the new world to redress the balance of the old the new world has found new worlds to conquer it has new tasks not only drastic but delicate not only political but psychological among the things which America may yet help us to achieve is one about which I feel strongly and even painfully the reconciliation a thousand times thwarted but now a thousand times more necessary between the English and the Irish the triangular table of such a peace conference should not, and perhaps had better not be found in any public building rather it should be found in every public house and even in every private house the chain should come through something which is far nobler and more eternal than diplomacy or politics talk it should come through the only real public opinion which is always uttered in private the public opinion that is a mass of private opinions a famous Irishman said of the Irish that they were too poetical to be poets but that they were the greatest talkers since the Greeks my personal memory does not stretch back to the greatest period of Greece and perhaps the best talker I ever knew was an Irishman who is now living in America and I will confidently affirm talking in America it may be true that he is too poetical to be a poet anyhow he is not too poetical to be the father of a poet he is Mr. J. B. Yates the father of Mr. W. B. Yates and he has lately been persuaded to write and print some of the good things he has said all his life first in the form of a book of letters and later of a book of essays essays Irish and American published by Mr. Fisher Unwin but my real satisfaction in the social and political sense is to know not that he has written a little but that he has spoken much for out of such seemingly lost and wasted words come the real international understandings there was a type of detachment during the late war not to be confused with what I can only call the view of the vulgar peacemonger it was not the patronizing pacifism of the gentlemen who took a holiday in the Alps and said he was above the struggle as if there were any out from which the soul can look down on Calvary there is indeed one mountain among them that might be very appropriate to so detached an observer the mountain named after pilot the man who washed his hands the isolation I mean is far removed from such impudence the defense of this detachment is that it is not really detached it was not in difference but indignation it was not without foundation it was only without proportion indeed the real case against it was that while its expression was largely cynical its motive was largely sentimental such was the irritation of Mr. Bernard Shaw such was the irritation of many Irish men much more national than Mr. Bernard Shaw their irritation can be analyzed in a simple phrase it annoyed them that the men who were wrong should be right it annoyed them that all the snobs and sneaks of our corrupt Parliamentarianism should free the world by accident in the quarrel with Prussia they could not really doubt they did not really doubt that England was right but they did doubt whether England had any right to be right it is a view I think self-stultifying and even suicidal for the great work will be remembered and the meaner workers forgotten and it is madness to praise the Persians on the eve of Marathon because one has quarrelled with some silly archon at Athens whose very name will be lost in a few years but it is not a treasonable far less a treacherous view and its anger is the same as the popular anger it arouses this is the Irish mood common sense and common sympathy must deal with and this is the peculiar value of real Irish intellectual detachment like that of Mr. Yates first of all a man like Mr. Yates is so genuinely detached that he can be definite and clear in his sympathy with the Allies he would be capable of the supreme impartiality of seeing that England could be right although she had been wrong and even that Ireland could be wrong although she had been wronged but all the time he would play with the perennial fount of satire and insight on the fundamental spiritual facts that falsify the English position in Ireland he would make us feel that we were only right in one thing because we were so wrong in many things there are many examples of this in his little book of essays but the one I would emphasize here especially is his very vital point about the domestic nature of the whole sociology of Ireland here again he is all the more impressive for being in a sense impartial or even what some would call indifferent he is not what is called orthodox he might well be called skeptical he has cultivated rather continental aesthetics than Catholic apologetics it is solely by a serene insight into what his French teachers would call the Vrij Verité that he sees the way the world ought to go and pauses upon the phrase the return to the home Irish education, he declares must always depend on the fact that the child's mind is full of the drama of the home it marks his judicial emancipation that he contrasts this domestic drama favourably with two other types of teaching one of which would be called conventional and conservative conventional and advanced he criticizes the old English public school boy he also criticizes, I agree to state, the new American woman the two things called in England the public school and the high school are counted almost contraries merely because one is old and the other new but the critic sees them to be essentially the same because in both cases the school overshadows the home a profound practical instance of the root realities of the Irish national claim here is a case in which home rule literally means the rule of the home it will never be possible to establish the English fashion in Ireland and I for one should not pretend to be sorry if it were possible to spread the Irish fashion to England for the drama of the home is really very dramatic it is one of those facts that are confused and hidden in the social machinery which is the mere scene shifting and stage carpentering of the domestic drama the household is the lighted stage on which the actors appeal literally to the gods it is in private life that things happen a human being is born at home he generally dies at home and the social philosophy that can deal with nothing but his coffin carried out of the house is merely a philosophy of boxes and parcels and luggage and labels half our human effort is now wasted on mere transit, transport and exchange the commonwealth is a clearing house of cases we never open and presents we never enjoy rulers and reformers are a race of rather pedantic porters always carrying an unknown present to an unknown person not unfrequently, I fancy the wrong present to the wrong person some of our strenuous social organizers may be content to spend Christmas at Sharon Cross Station for the pride of controlling the traffic and the luggage but I confess I find it more exciting to be at the end of the journey where the Christmas gifts can be seen End of Ireland and the domestic drama Section 9 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 Japanese Is it not time that we western people protested against being perpetually brow beating with the high morality of the Orient especially of Japan I remember a curious occasion some years ago when certain able journalists on a socialist paper in Fleet Street suddenly burst into a blazing excitement about King Ahsoka the relations with this prince could not be called intimate in point of fact he died some thousands of years ago somewhere in the middle of Asia but it seemed that in him we had lost our only reliable moral guide religion was a failure and human life on the whole a tragedy the King Ahsoka was all right he was faultlessly just infinitely merciful the mirror of the virtues the prop of the poor outsiders were naturally interested in the sources of this revelation and after some discussion it was discovered a mildly pointed out that this description of the King's virtues is only found on a few of the King's own official inscriptions Ahsoka may have been a very nice man but we have only his own word for it that he was so nice as all that and even at the benighted west it might not be impossible to find monarchs who were very just and mighty according to their own proclamations and courts that were exemplary in the court circular it had never struck these simple Ahsokaites in Fleet Street that the pompous enunciation of ideals probably meant no more in Bengal than in Birmingham in the ancient east than in the modern west it is as if a Hindu should say that under the sublime French monarchy every king had to be a good Christian for he was called on coins and apartments the most Christian king it is as if an Arab said that honour was so high and sensitive among English MPs that they constantly called each other with a burst of admiration the honourable member for tooting it could hardly be more absurd if the Japanese declared that an English Duke must have an elegant figure for they had seen an illusion to his grace and yet it is with just this comic solemnity that we are asked to accept the moral pretensions of the east today and especially the moral pretensions of Japan my eye has just fallen upon two newspaper paragraphs each of which exclaimed mournfully what a pity it was that we had not the high conception a chivalric devotion which the Japanese called Boushido or some such name as if we had no chivalrous principles in Europe and as if they had no unchivalrous practices in the far east if we see no beauty in Excalibur are we likely to take more seriously the two swords of some outlandish diamo if we are truly dumb after the death of Roland are we likely to shout with enthusiasm at the site of Harakiri here is perhaps the queer's case of all many of these orientalists have lately been filled with horror at finding that young Turks still propose to be Turkish and that advanced Japan is still unaccountably Japanese Dr. Parker damned Abdul Hamid these modern humanitarians cannot understand any people wishing to get rid of Abdul Hamid without also wishing to become exactly like Dr. Parker in the same way they are horrified that the Japanese government has very abruptly condemned some criminals to be conspiring against the sacred person of the Mikado it never seems to occur to them that you can take off a Turk's turban without taking off his head and that under a Brixton bowler the head would go on thinking the same thoughts would strike them that the man of the Far East still has a yellow skin even when you have also given him a yellow press but the most astounding version of the thing I found in the following paragraph the opening paragraph of an article on the Japanese condemnations of an influential weekly paper Japan has followed western ways in a great many respects but it is saddening to learn that she is adopting the most reprehensible methods of Russia and Spain in dealing with men and women who have the intelligence to be ahead of their time and have the courage to avow their opinions this really strikes me as colossal I quite agree that Japan has imitated many western things I also think that Japan has mostly imitated the worst western things that is the cause of my very defective sympathy with Japan if they had imitated Dante or medieval architecture if they had imitated Michelangelo or Italian painting if they had imitated Rousseau and the French Revolution then I as a European should have felt at least flattered but the Japanese have only imitated the worst things of our worst period the inhuman commercialism of Birmingham the inhuman militarism of Berlin I feel as if I had looked into a mirror and seen a monkey or if this metaphor be counted uncharitable I feel just as some coarse but kindly man might feel if a little brother began to imitate only his vices I say this to show how easily I embrace the idea that Japan might borrow from us bad things as well as good and then I turn with astonishment nay consternation to the paragraph I have quoted Japan it seems has evolved from Russia and Spain the reprehensible habit of executing people without adequate trial trial by jury with complete reports in the newspapers next day was the common practice all over the Far East until the dreadful example of Spain somehow crept across two continents and destroyed it such a thing as autocratic execution was unknown in the East such a notion as that of despotism had never occurred to the Japanese up to that last last moment when they heard of Russia county councils had been buzzing in every town republics established in every island of the East before the European came pulling booths were at the end of every street and ballot boxes rattled over all Asia but alas they heard of Spain they heard that in Spain the trials of rebels and arms had occasionally been conducted in secret and this was enough to destroy the long and famous tradition of free democracy in the Far East now I do think that compared with this amazing Bosch Gilbert's Mikado with his punishment lingering with boiling oil in it might be called a good solid sensible picture of Japan Eastern despotism has many advantages and I do not doubt that many of its decisions were not lingering but as rough and rapid as they were just but to what mental state have people come if they cannot see that Europe has been upon the whole the home of democracy and Asia upon the whole the home of despotism really Japan is not so bearing a resource as this writer supposes the Far East really has no need to go to Russia for autocracy or to Spain for torture it has done very artistic things in that way itself and if Spain and Russia have indeed been polarized and tortured it is much more historically likely that they got it from Asia than that Asia ever had the slightest need to borrow it from them the plain facts of course are perfectly simple Japan has borrowed our guns and telephones but she has not borrowed our morality and morally speaking I really do not see why she should under all Japan's elaborate armor plating she is still the same strange heathen and heroic thing she has still the two deep oriental habits prostration before despotism and ferocity of punishment she still thinks in the eastern style that a king is infinitely sublime the brother of the sun and moon she still thinks in the eastern style that a criminal is infinitely punishable something with boiling oil in it why on earth should Japan abandon the adoration of the Mikado and the destruction of his enemies merely because a scientific apparatus has made the Mikado more victorious and the destruction of his enemies more easy end of section 9 section 10 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 10 Christian Science I have read recently within a short period of each other two books that stand in an odd relation and illustrate the two ways of dealing with the same truth the first was Mrs. Eddie's Science and Health and the other a very interesting collection of medical and ecclesiastical opinion called Medicine and the Church it is edited by Mr. Jeffrey Rhodes and published by Keegan Paul of the first work the Christian Science Bible my recollections are somewhat wild and whirling my most vivid impression is of one appalling passage to the effect that the continued perusal of this book through the crisis of an illness had always been followed by recovery the idea of reading any book through the crisis of an illness is rather alarming but I inclined to agree that anyone who could read science and health through the crisis of an illness must be made of an adamant which no malady could dissolve nevertheless it is a mistake to oppose Christian Science on the impossibility or even the improbability of its cures there is always this tendency for normal men to attack abnormalities on the wrong ground their arguments are as wrong as their antagonism is right thus the only sensible argument against female suffrage is that with her social and domestic powers woman is as strong as man but silly people will attack female suffrage on the ground that she is weaker than man or again the only sensible argument against socialism is that every man ought to have private property but the rich and antisocialists will give themselves away by trying to maintain that only a few people ought to have property and even that only in the shape of monstrous American trusts in the same way there is great danger that the modern world may give battle to mrs. eddie upon the wrong terrain and give her the opportunity or rather her more clear headed lieutenants of claiming some popular success there is such a thing as spiritual healing no one has ever doubted it except one dingy generation of materialists in chimney pot hats if we seem to stand with the materialists and mrs. eddie seems to stand for the healing she will have a chance of success the man whose toothache has left off will think with gratitude of the healer and with some indifference of the scientist explaining the difference between functional and organic toothaches I will grant what mrs. eddie does to people's bodies it is what she does to their souls that I object to mrs. eddie summarizes the substance of her creed in the characteristic sentence but in order to enter into the kingdom the anchor of hope must be cast beyond the veil of matter into the shekinah into which Jesus has passed before us now personally I should prefer to sow the anchor of hope in the furrows of primeval earth or to fill the anchor to the brim with the wine of human passion or to urge the anchor of hope to a gallop with the spurs of moral energy or simply to pluck the anchor petal by petal or spell it out letter by letter but whatever slightly entangled metaphor we take to express our meaning mrs. eddie's creed in mine is that she anchors in the air while I put an anchor where the groping race of men have generally put it in the ground and this very fact that we have always thought of hope under so rooted and realistic a figure is a good working example of how the popular religious sense of mankind has always flowed in the opposite direction to Christian science it has flowed from spirit to flesh and not from flesh to spirit hope has not been thought of as something light and fanciful but as something wrought in iron and fixed in rock in short, the first and last blunder of Christian science is that it is a religion claiming to be purely spiritual now being purely spiritual is opposed to the very essence of religion all religions, high and low true and false have always had one enemy which is the purely spiritual faith healing has existed from the beginning of the world but faith healing without material act or sacrament never it may be the ancient priest curing with holy water or the modern doctor curing with colored water in either case you cannot do without the water it may be the upper religion with its bread and wine or the under religion with its eye of newt and toe of frog in both cases what is essential is the right materials savages may invoke their demons over the dying but they do something else as well to do them justice they dance round the dying or yell or do something with their bodies the Quakers, I mean the really admirable old fashioned Quakers were far more ritualistic than any ritualists the only difference between a ritualist curate and a Quaker was that the Quaker wore his queer vestments all the time the peculiar people do without doctors but they do not do without oil they are not so peculiar as all that the book which Mr. Jeffrey Rhodes has edited is just what was wanted for the fixing of these facts of flesh and spirit when I was a boy people used to talk about something which they called the quarrel between religion and science it would be very tedious to recount the quarrel now the rough upshot of it was something like this that some traditions too old to be traced came in vague conflict with some theories much too new to be tested many things many things three thousand years old had forgotten their reason for existing many things a few years old had not yet discovered theirs to this day this remains roughly true all the relations between science and religion the truths of religion are unprovable the facts of science are unproved it really looks just now as if a reconciliation would be made between religion and science a reconciliation well embodied in Mr. Rhodes's work I will not any longer dispute the divine mission of Mrs. Eddy I think she was supernaturally sent on earth to reconcile all the Parsons and all the doctors in a healthy hatred of herself here is the reconciliation of science and religion you will find it in medicine and the church in this interesting book all the clerics become as medical as they can and all the doctors become as clerical as they can with the one honorable object keeping out the healer the chaplain sits on one side of the bed and the physician on the other while the healer hovers around baffled and furious and they do well for there really is a great link between them it is the link of the union of flesh and spirit which the heresy of the healer blasphemes the priest may have taken his spirit with a little flesh or the doctor his flesh with a little spirit but the union was essential to both with the religious there might be much prayer and a little oil with the scientific there might be much oil castor oil and precious little prayer but no religion disowns sacraments and no doctors disown sympathy and they are right to combine together against the great and horrible heresy the horrible heresy that there can be such a thing as a purely spiritual religion end of section 10 section 11 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 11 the lawlessness of lawyers Judge Perry is one of the men who have done mountains of good merely by being alive while so many judges act as if they were already dead not to say but Judge Perry might misunderstand a misuse of theological imagery he is somewhat anti-clerical which seems a waste of talent in a country where there is no clericalism in his last book Law and the Woman I find much with which I do not agree yet nothing which is not agreeable not only does he say everything with a disarming humor and candor but even in error he never loses sight of the large fact that sex relations do not depend on the exceptional action of law but on the normal action of creed and custom alone among such lawyers he understands that the poor live on laughter as on a fairy tale and can be more scientifically studied in the fictions of Jacob than the facts of Webb I might pursue the view further than he on some points as when he would infer the mere enslavement of women from some stories about the selling of wives he is doubtless correct in detail but the rhyme he gives to prove his point may almost be said to disprove it he quotes a jolly ballad about a man who tried to sell his wife with a halter around her neck and failing to do so tried to hang himself in the halter rather than go on living with her obviously this is simply the fable of the gray mare and does not mean that the man ruled his wife but rather that she ruled him I do not agree about divorce but I am not going to argue about it here or about any such problem of the sexes this is partly because I should have to begin about the nature of a vow and it feels like talking to a judge about the nature of an oath and might almost be contempt of court but it is more I hope for the manlier reason that I do not want to argue about something else I think this delightful book might really mislead by a view of progress which oversimplifies history the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the sons a monotonous process he begins his story of the subjection of women from the bible story of Adam and Eve he then proceeds at once to quote not the bible but John Milton and says it is almost exactly in the form in which a medieval man was want to explain to a medieval woman the kind of thing she really was now whatever Milton was he was not medieval he was in his own opinion and in real though relative truth highly modern and rationalistic and he would have regarded his somewhat contemptuous view of women as part of his emancipation from medievalism probably the very same attitude made him a proof of divorce and makes the difference between women's place in his epic and her place in Dante's on either side of that gothic gateway of the middle ages out of which he had emerged as he would have said into the daylight there it stood two symbolic statues of women at least of equal importance in the scheme Milton represented the weak woman by whom Satan had entered the world the other the strong woman by whom God had entered the world Milton and his Puritans deliberately battered and obliterated the image of the good woman and carefully preserved the bad woman to be a standing reproach to womanhood but they unquestionably thought that their anti-feminist iconoclasm was a great step in progress and the fact illustrates what an uncommonly crooked and difficult progress has really been nor is it difficult to discover even in the writer's own account whence his anti-feminism iconoclasm drew its force which is certainly not merely from the book of Genesis Judge Perry says perhaps disputably that the rude Saxons had more legal regard for women than the Romans but assuming for the sake of argument that the heathen Romans did give a low status to women they clearly cannot have got it either from the Hebrew scriptures or from the local church if he will ask where they did get it he will probably also found where Milton got it the truth is there was an element of intellectual brutality in the Renaissance and revival of the pagan world the very worship of power and reason embodied itself in a preference for the sex that was supposed superior in them new tyrannies as well as new liberties were encouraged by the new learning and Cervantes was laughing at the unreal adventurer who fancied he was unchaining captives at the very time when Hawkins the real adventurer was first leading negroes and chains those chains may be linked up again presently in the chain of my own argument here I used the matter merely to show the danger of trusting each ethical fashion as it comes there is one matter on which I would respectfully and seriously differ from Judge Perry and that does not concern laws about women but rather law itself in praising the judgment in the Jackson case despite its technical irregularity he speaks of a fine example of our judge made law and says but that is one of the sane and healthy attributes of our judicial system there comes a breaking point where a great judge recognizes that the precedents in the books are obsolete and what has to be stated is the justice of the case according to the now existing standard of human righteousness now it is shortly as plain as a pike staff that this doctrine makes a small number of very wealthy old gentlemen and wigs absolute despots over the whole Commonwealth the Emperor of China was supposed to state the justice of the case the Sultan of the Indies was supposed to judge by the existing standard of human righteousness if the judges are not restrained by the law what are they restrained by which every autocrat on earth has not claimed to be restrained by now there is certainly a case for personal and arbitrary government and as there are good sultans so are there good judges I should not be afraid to appear before Judge Perry and assume to imagine myself innocent though he were surrounded by genoceries and a secret divan or delivering dooms under an oak tree in a wild prehistoric forest I should not mind his having the power to skin me or boil me in oil for I feel sure he would recognize that these precedents were obsolete and not do it but it is by no means true that the confidence I should feel in Judge Perry would be extended to any judge who talked about obsolete precedents in human righteousness I should not trust a man who always took the side of the opinion which happened to be the top dog he understood for instance the case for pro bowers but in the mafficking time a dozen great judges would have been strained by any law to make a case against pro bowers feminism was the fashion and may have produced some acts of justice but imperialism was also the fashion and might have produced any acts of any injustice there is let us suppose an old statute that certain prisoners may be tortured for evidence but the judges disregard it and Judge Perry is satisfied but there are three very vital reasons why he should not be satisfied first it encourages legislators to be lazy and leave a bad statute they ought to repeal second they leave it so that it can be resharpened in some reaction or panic against particular people who will be tortured most important of all the same judge who has said that prisoners must not be tortured for evidence may say some fine mourning that prisoners might be vivisected for scientific inquiry and he may have the same reason for saying one is the other the simple reason that such talk is fashionable and the set is very small and very rich we are dealing strictly with fashion and not even in any large sense with public opinion it is often special and sometimes rather secretive Judge Perry even quotes a paradox of Lord Reading to the effect that persons like himself should administer justice and not law law is narrow and national might possibly lead a British minister to look no further than the British parliament as an appropriate place for telling the truth but justice being international and surveying the world from China to Peru perceives without difficulty the office of one particular Parisian newspaper which has the right to insist on an explanation but the vital point is this Judge Perry gives the instance of a judgment in which Mansfield overriding certain remote precedents and quaint survivals declared that there cannot be slaves in England I am sorry to mention such a detail but the fact is that the same judge made law is now declaring in the same way that there can be slaves in England a magistrate has forbidden men to leave an employer though the contract had admittedly terminated practical courts are overriding the obsolete and remote precedent of some man far in the midst of medievalism who is said to have had made a free contract with a wealthier fellow creature they are disregarding the quaint survivals in our language whereby the hand holding the tool is described as his hand where more vivid modern speech calls the man himself a hand merely one of the many hands of his briary and master there comes a breaking point and it is liberty that is broken whether the silent millions approve this judgment or the other judgments liberal or servile feminist or anti-feminist which Judge Perry quotes I will not debate but I leave the query to his very fair consideration for if those silent millions spoke I fancy they would surprise us in many matters but most of all in the discovery of how little they think of all of us judges, lawyers, literary fellows and the rest Judge Perry would be found among the few among the very few who amid all the insolence of our inconsistencies have never lost that rare and even awful thing the respect of the poor end of section 11 section 12 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 Marietta Fatima the Silva the uses of diversity by G.K. Chesterton our Latin relations it is odd how often one may hear in the middle of a very old and genuine English town the remark that it looks like a foreign town I heard it only yesterday standing on the run parts of the noble hill of Rye which overlooks the flats like amount of St. Michael left in land most people know that Rye contains a medieval monument which might almost be called a medieval prophecy a prophecy of modern things more awful than anything medieval it is an ancient tower which has not always been marked on maps with the name of Ypres but has always been actually pronounced by the name of wipers nothing could mark a thing as more continuously national than that Englishman sundered by vast centuries should actually make the same mistake and should mispronounce the same word in the same way there is in this small point a paradox we must understand especially just now if we are to have a really patriotic foreign policy it is very unlucky that for some time our teaching of history has been rather the un-teaching of history because it has been the un-teaching of tradition our history told us we were Teuton our legends told us we were Roman and as usual the legends were right it is not only true that England is nowhere more really English than where she is Roman it is even true that she is nowhere more really English than where she is French to take only the chance example with which I began above you could find nothing more national more typical more traditional as a real piece of English history in the very phrase the sank ports and it is all the more English because the word sank is French and the word port is Latin a Teutonist professor full of some folly about folk speech might insist on now calling them the five harbours or for all I know the five holes but his version is popular and only more pedantic the Latin was always the popular element which may not sound so odd if we happen to remember that the very word popular is Latin thus our alliance with the French and the Italians is not something to be supported for the sake of the last five years it is something to be solidified for the sake of more than a thousand the fact has been hidden by the historical accident that we have often been the antagonists of the French in particular rivalries for particular things but we were always much nearer to the French when we were their antagonists than to the Germans when we were their allies there was much more resemblance between a knight like the black prince and the knight like the knight than there ever was between a sailor like Nelson and a soldier like Bluchin a town like Rye is full of memories of fighting with the French especially in the middle ages of raids to unfro across the narrow seas in which the bells of the coast town churches were captured and recaptured and there are spirited stories of the Abbot of battle worthy to be turned into ballads but the very fact of these coast town raids suggests that it was coast against coast and even semen against semen but the whole point of Prussian war was that it was an inland thing the whole point of English war that it was an island thing the alliance with Prussia was never either popular or natural it was wholly aristocratic and artificial compared with that the medieval war was as friendly as a medieval tournament nor was it peculiar to the case of France it was true of all we call Latin all that remains of the Roman empire the latins even when treated as foes in politics were treated almost as friends as a tradition the English sailors sang in their idle moments farewell and adieu to you fine Spanish ladies even when they had devoted their working hours to singeing the beards of the fine Spanish gentlemen the children in the nursery sang in imaginative triumph the king of Spain's daughter came to visit me though there Elizabethan parents might have been lighting the beacons and calling out the train bands to prevent the king of Spain's son the noble Don John of Austria from paying them such a visit a thousand nursery rhymes and nonsense tags testify to a vast popular tradition that southern Europe was the world to which we belonged we belonged to a system of which Rome was the son and of which the old Roman provinces were planets we were never meant to pursue a meteor out of empty space the comet of cutonism our place was in an order and a watch of stars though one star might differ from another in glory our place was with that red star of gold which might well bear the name of Mars or that morning and evening star which the Latins themselves named Lucifer last to fade and first to return in every twilight of history Italy the light of the world a Latin alliance is founded on our history though not on our historians the French and English who fought each other round these southern harbors were also ready to help each other and often did help each other not only did they frequently go crusading together against the Turks but they would have been ready at any moment to go crusading against the Prussians Chaucer was exceedingly English and therefore partly French and he sends his ideal knight to fight the heathen in Prussia François was highly French and therefore respectful to the English and he says that the French and English always do courtesy but the Germans never the truth is that all the old English traditions scholarly and legendary Chivalric and Volga were at one in referring back to Roman culture until we come to a new crop of very crude pedants in the 19th century were prigs and many of them were snobs for it was largely a court fashion spread by court poets and court chaplains it was like a huge hideous gilded German monument unfortunately it has already fallen down but I think it undesirable that the mere discredited litter and lumber of it left lying about should forever prevent us from building anything else even after the ghastly enlightenment of the war there are people who cannot clear their minds of the notion that the Prussian is the progressive they think he is progressing now because he is picking up new things picking up new things is not the way to progress any more than picking up grass by the roots is the way to make it grow the northern barbarian always has picked up new things especially when they were other people's things it was still only picking up new things whether it was picking pockets or picking brains and there was always one other note about the new things that they never lived to be old the barbarians followed the creed of Arius as they followed the ensign of Attila but nobody remembers Attila as everybody remembered Alfred and those who more than people object to hearing the Athanasian creed they have no opportunity of objecting to hearing the Ariane creed the enthousiasms of semi savages do not last end of section 12 section 13 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 Elsie Selwyn the uses of diversity by G.K. Chesterton section 13 on pigs as pets a dream of my pure and aspiring boyhood has been realized in the following paragraph which I quote exactly as it stands a complaint by the Epping rural district council against the keeping a pig in her house has evoked the following reply I received your letter and felt very much cut up as I am laying in the pigs room I have not been able to stand up or get on my legs, when I can I will get him in his own room that was built for him as to getting him off the premises I shall do no such thing as he is no nuisance to anyone we have had to be in the pigs room now for 3 years I am not going to get rid of my pet we must all live together I will move him as soon as God gives me strength to do so the Reverend T.C. Spurgin observed the lady will require a good deal of strength to move her pet which weighs 40 stone it appears to me that the Reverend T.C. Spurgin ought as a matter of chivalry to assist the lady to move the pig if it is indeed too heavy for her strength no gentleman should permit a lady who is already very much cut up to lift 40 stone of still animated and recalcitrant pork he should himself escort the animal downstairs it is an unusual situation I admit and the normal life of humanity the gentleman gives his arm to the lady and not to the pig and it is the pig who is very much cut up but the situation seems to be exceptional in every way it is all very well for the lady to say that the pig is no nuisance to anyone as it seems it has established herself in the pig's private suite of apartments the question rather is whether she is a nuisance to the pig but indeed I do not think that this poor woman's fad is an inch more fantastic than many such oddities indulged by rich and reputable people and as I say I have from my boyhood entertained the dream I never could imagine why pigs should not be kept as pets to begin with pigs are very beautiful animals those who think otherwise are those who do not look at anything with their own eyes but only through other people's eyeglasses the actual lines of a pig I mean of a really fat pig are among the loveliest and most luxuriant in nature the pig has the same great curves swift and yet heavy which we see in rushing water or enrolling cloud compared to him the horse for instance is a bony, angular and abrupt animal I remember that Mr. H.G. Wells and arguing for the relativity of things a subject over which even the Greek philosophers went to sleep until Christianity woke them up pointed out that while a horse is commonly beautiful if seen in profile he is excessively ugly if seen from the top of a dog cart having a long and lean neck and a body like a fiddle now there is no point of view from which a really corpulent pig is not full of sumptuous and satisfying curves you can look upon a pig from the top of the most unnaturally loft dog cart you can if not pressed for time you can call the dog cart and I suppose a dog cart has as much to do with pigs as it has to do with dogs you can imagine the pig from the top of an omnibus from the top of the monument from a balloon or an airship and as long as he is visible he will be beautiful in short he has that fuller, subtler and more universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking gazing at pigs distinguished journalists mistake for a mere absence of shape and admirable quality while it creates admiration in the onlookers it creates modesty in the possessor if there is anything on which I differ from the monastic institutions of the past it is that they sometimes sought to achieve humility by means of emaciation and maybe that the thin monks were holy but I am sure it was the fat monks who were humble false staff says that to be fat is not to be hated but it is certainly to be laughed at and that it is a more wholesome experience I do not urge that it is effective upon the soul of a pig who indeed seems somewhat indifferent to public opinion on this point nor do I mean that mere fatness is the only beauty of the pig the beauty of the best pigs lies in a certain sleepy perfection of contour which links them especially to the smooth strength of our south english land in which they live there are two other things in which one can see this perfect and pigish quality one is in the silent and smooth swell of the Sussex Downs so enormous and yet so innocent the other is in the sleek strong limbs of those beach trees that grow so thick in their valleys these three holy symbols the pig the beach tree and the chalk down stand forever as expressing the one thing that England as England has to say that power is not inconsistent with kindness tears of regret come into my eyes when I remember that three lions or leopards or whatever they are in a domestic foreign way across the arms of England we ought to have three pigs pass into garden and on galls it breaks my heart to think that four commonplace lions are couched around the base of the Nelson column there ought to be four colossal Hampshire hogs to keep watch over some national spot perhaps some of our sculptures will attack the conception perhaps the ladies pig which weighs forty stone and seems to be the artist's model again we do not know what fascinating variations might happen in the pig if once the pig were a pet the dog has been domesticated that is destroyed nobody now in London can form the faintest idea of what a dog would look like you know a dash hound in the street you know a saint Bernard in the street but if you saw a dog in the street you would run from him screaming for hundreds if not thousands of years no one has looked at the horrible dog why then should we be hopeless about the substantial and satisfying thing called pig types of pigs may also be differentiated delicate shades of pig may also be produced a monstrous pig as big as a pony may perambulate the streets like a saint Bernard without attracting attention an elegant and unnaturally attentuated pig may have all the appearance of a greyhound there may be a little frisky fighting pigs like irish or scotch terriers there may be pathetic pigs like king Charles spaniels artificial breeding might reproduce the awful original pig tusks and all the terror of the forests something bigger more mysterious and more bloody than the bloodhound those interested in hairdressing might amuse themselves by arranging the bristles like those of a poodle those fascinated by the Celtic mystery of the western highlands might see if they could train the bristles to be a veil or a curtain for the eye like those of a sky terrier that sensitive and invisible Celtic spirit with elaborate training one might have a sheep pig instead of a sheep dog a lap pig instead of a lap dog what is it that makes you look so incredulous why do you feel slightly superior to the poor lady who would not be parted from her pig why do you not at once take the hog to your heart reason suggests his evident beauty evolutions suggests his probable improvement is it perhaps some instinct some tradition well apply that to women children animals and we will argue again end of section 13