 This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton. Preface and Chapter 1. Preface. These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission of the editor of the Daily News, in which paper they appeared. They amount to no more than a sort of sporadic diary, a diary recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy. The only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep. Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the topics, they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays with hearty relief from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed post or a lamp post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen, that is, never realized. He could not write an essay on such a post or wall. He does not know what the post or wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay as, the bed post, its significance, security essential to idea of sleep, night felt as infinite, need of monumental architecture, and so on. He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude toward window blinds even in the form of a summary. The window blind, its analogy to the curtain and veil, is modesty natural, worship of and avoidance of the sun, etc., etc. None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a colored cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows, but anyone else may do better if anyone else will only try. CHAPTER I Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly in the front garden because their villa was a model one. The front garden was about the same size as the dinner table. It consisted of four strips of gravel, a square of turf with some mysterious pieces of cork standing up in the middle, and one flower bed with a row of red daisies. One morning while they were playing in these romantic grounds, a passing individual, probably the milkman, leaned over the railing and engaged them in a philosophical conversation. The boys whom we will call Paul and Peter were at least sharply interested in his remarks for the milkman, who was, I need say, a fairy, did his duty in that state of life by offering them in the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for. And Paul closed with the offer, with a businesslike abruptness, explaining that he had long wished to be a giant, that he might stride across continents and oceans and visit Niagara, or the Himalayas, in an afternoon dinner stroll. The milkman produced a wand from his breast pocket, waved it in a hurried and perfunctory manner, and in an instant the model villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll's house at Paul's colossal feet. He went striding away with his head above the clouds to visit Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to the Himalayas he found they were quite small and silly looking, like little cork rockery in the garden, and when he found Niagara it was no bigger than the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world for several minutes, trying to find something really large and finding everything small. Till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five prairies and fell asleep. Unfortunately his head was just outside the hut of an intellectual backwoodsman who came out of it at that moment with an ax in one hand and a book of neocatholic philosophy in the other. The man looked at the book, and then at the giant, and then at the book again, and in the book it said, It can be maintained that the evil of pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe. So the backwoodsman put down his book, took his ax, and, working eight hours a day for about a week, cut the giant's head off, and there was an end of him. Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddly enough, made exactly the opposite request. He said he had long wished to be a pygmy about half an inch high, and of course he immediately became one. When the transformation was over he found himself in the midst of an immense plain, covered with tall green jungle and above which at intervals rose strange trees each with a head like the sun in symbolic pictures, with gigantic rays of silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward the middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such romantic and impossible shape, yet of such stony height and dominance that it looked like some incident of the end of the world. And far away on the faint horizon he could see the lines of another forest, taller and yet more mystical, of a terrible crimson color, like a forest on fire forever. He set out on his adventures across that colored plain, and he has not come to the end of it yet. Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit for children, and indeed the motive with which I have introduced it is not childish but rather full of subtlety and reaction. It is in fact the almost desperate motive of excusing or palliating the pages that follow. Peter and Paul are the two primary influences upon European literature today, and I may be permitted to put my own preference in its most favorable shape, even if I can only do it by what little girls call telling a story. I need scarcely say that I am the pygmy. The only excuse for the scraps that follow is that they show what can be achieved with the commonplace existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other great literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest by sprawling all over the world, growing used to travel in geographical variety, being at home everywhere, that is, being at home nowhere, that it be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heart-rending sight, and the two alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling's school advises us to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long enough, he may even be moved to take off his coat to us, and that is a far greater compliment than his taking off his hat. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts, actually before us, force them to turn into adventures, force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose. The purpose of the Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man may see if he is active, and strides from continent to continent like a giant in my tail. But the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have taken the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself, and made an idle diary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident in walking in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says that these are very small affairs, talked about in very big language, I can only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills. But I would add, this not an important fact, that molehills are mountains. One has only to become a pygmy like Peter to discover that. I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the most celebrated of alpine guides when he took Jesus to the top of an exceedingly high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large, it is from the level that things look high. I am a child of the level and have no need of that celebrated alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help, but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything is an attitude of mind, and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder. End of Preface and Chapter 1 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 2 A Piece of Chalk I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort, and picked up a walking stick, and put six very bright-colored chalks in my pocket. I then went into the kitchen, which, along with the rest of the house, belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village, and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper. She had a great deal, in fact, she had too much, and she mistook the purpose and the rationality of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper, he must be wanting to tie up parcels, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my metal capacity. Hence, she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least, and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw, she offered to overwhelm me with note paper, apparently supposing that I did my notes in correspondence on old brown paper wrappers from motives of economy. I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade that I not only liked brown paper, but I liked the quality of brownness in the paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods or in beer, or in the peat streams of the north. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-colored chalk or two, you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold and blood red and sea green like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness. All this I said, in an off-hand way, to the old woman, and I put the brown paper in my pocket, along with the chalks, and possibly other things. I suppose everyone must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket. The pocket knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets, but I found it would be too long, and the age of the gray epics is past. With my stick and my knife, my chalks, and my brown paper, I went out to the great-downs. I crawled across those colossal contours that express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the smoothness of the great-cart horses, or the smoothness of the beech tree. It declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful. As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly as any of its cottages. But for power it was like an earthquake. The villages in the immense valley were safe. One could see for centuries. Yet the lifting of the whole land was like the lifting of one enormous wave to wash them all away. I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw. Do not for heaven's sake imagine I was going to sketch from nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred and monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colors on brown paper. They are much better worth drawing than nature. Also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it. But I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds, so I drew the soul of the cow, which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight. And the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns, and the mystery that belongs to all beasts. But though I could not, with a crayon, get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much about nature because they did not describe it much. They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills, but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about nature, but they drank in perhaps much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a scour of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo. But as I sat scrawling the silly figures on the brown paper, it began to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk and that a most exquisite and essential chalk behind. I searched all my pockets, but I could not find any white chalk. Now those who are accustomed with all the philosophy, may religion, which is typified in the art of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown paper art reveals is this, that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color. It is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red hot, it draws roses. When it grows white hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing. The chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a color. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers. Virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment. It means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong. It means something flaming like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colors, but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so godly, as when he paints in white. In a sense, our age has realized this fact and expressed it in our solemn custom. For if it were really true that white was a blank and colorless thing, negative and noncommittal, then white would be used instead of black and gray for the funeral dress of this pessimistic period. We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of spotless silver linen with top hats as white as wonderful arum lilies, which is not the case. Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk. I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town nearer than Chichester, at which it was even remotely probable that there would be such a thing as an artist's color-man. And yet without white my absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedience, then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter again and again, so that the cows stared at me and called the committee. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hourglass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some saltwater with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely out of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece off the rock I sat on. It did not mark so well as the shop chalks do, but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realizing that this southern England is not only a grand peninsula, but a tradition and a civilization. It is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk. All this talk of a railway mystery has sent my mind back to Willow's memory. I will not merely say that this story is true, because as you will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and no conclusion. It is, like most of the other things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else, which would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen. For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them. What we call as triviality is really the tag-ands of numberless tales. Ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. My experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate, not fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents, what there were of them, but I am not making up the atmosphere of the landscape, which were the whole horror of the thing. I remember them vividly, and they were, as I shall now describe, about noon of an Ashen autumn day some years ago. I was standing outside the station at Oxford, intending to take the train to London. And for some reason, out of idleness, or the emptiness of my mind, or the emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice fell upon me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step out on the road and walk at least some part of the way to London. I do not know if other people are made like me in this matter, but to me it is always dreary weather, what may be called useless weather, that slings into life a sense of action and romance. On bright blue days I do not want anything to happen. The world is complete and beautiful, a thing for contemplation. I no more ask for adventures under that turquoise dome than I ask for adventures in church. But when the background of man's life is a grey background, then in the name of man's sacred supremacy I desire to paint on it in fire and agor. When the heavens fail, man refuses to fail. When the sky seems to have written on it in letters of lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall happen. Then the immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises up and decrees that something shall happen. If it be only the slaughter of a policeman. But this is the digressive way of stating what I have said already, that the bleak sky awoken me a hunger for some change of plans, that the monotonous weather seemed to render unbearable the use of the monotonous train, and that I set out into the country lanes out of the town of Oxford. It was perhaps at that moment that a strange curse came upon me out of the city and the sky. Whereby it was decreed that years afterward I should, in an article in The Daily News, talk about Sir George Trevelyan in connection with Oxford, when I knew perfectly well that he went to Cambridge. As I crossed the country everything was ghostly and colorless. The fields that should have been green were as gray as the skies. The treetops that should have been green were as gray as the clouds and as cloudy. And when I had walked for some hours the evening was closing in. A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon, as if pale with reluctance to leave the world in the dark. And as it faded more and more the skies seemed to come closer and to threaten. The clouds which had been merely sullen became swollen, and then they loosened and let down the dark curtains of the rain. The rain was blinding and seemed to beat like blows from an enemy at close quarters. The skies seemed bending over and bawling in my ears. I walked on many more miles before I met a man, and in that distance my mind had been made up, and when I met him I asked him if anywhere in the neighborhood I could pick up the train for Paddington. He directed me to a small silent station. I cannot even remember the name of it, which stood well away from the road and looked as lonely as a hut on the Andes. I do not think I have ever seen such a type of time and sadness and skepticism, and everything devilish as that station was. It looked as if it had always been raining there, ever since the creation of the world. The water strained from the soaking wood of it as if it were not water at all, but some loathsome liquid corruption of the wood itself, as if the solid station were eternally falling to pieces and pouring away in filth. It took me nearly ten minutes to find a man in the station. When I did, he was a dull one, and when I asked him if there was a train to Paddington his answer was sleepy and vague. As far as I understood him, he said there would be a train in half an hour. I sat down and lit a cigar and waited, watching the last tail of the tattered sunset and listening to the everlasting rain. It may have been in a half an hour or less, but a train came rather slowly into the station. It was an unnaturally dark train. I could not see a light anywhere in the long black body of it, and I could not see any guard running beside it. I was reduced to walking up to the engine and calling out to the stoker to ask if the train was going to London. Well, yes, sir, he said, with an unaccountable kind of reluctance, it is going to London, but it was just starting, and I jumped into the first carriage. It was pitch dark. I sat there smoking and wondering as we streamed through the continually darkening landscape lined with desolate poplars until we slowed down and stopped irrationally in the middle of a field. I heard a heavy noise as if someone clambering off the train, and a dark ragged head suddenly put itself into my window. Excuse me, sir, said the stoker, but I think perhaps you ought to know that there's a dead man in this train. Had I been a true artist, a person of exquisite susceptibilities and nothing else, I should have been bound, no doubt, to be finally overwhelmed with this sensational touch and to have insisted on getting out and walking. As it was, I regret to say, I expressed myself politely but firmly to the effect that I didn't care particularly if the train took me to Paddington. But when the train had started with its unknown burden, I did do one thing and do it quite instinctively without stopping to think or to think more than a flash. I threw away my cigar. Something that is as old as man and has to do with all mourning and ceremonial told me to do it. There was something unnecessarily horrible, it seemed to me, in the idea of there being only two men in that train and one of them dead and the other smoking a cigar. And as the red and gold of the butt end of it faded like a funeral torch trampled out at some symbolic moment of a procession, I realized how immortal ritual is. I realized what is the origin and essence of all ritual, that in the presence of those sacred riddles about which we can say nothing, it is more decent merely to do something. And I realized that ritual will always mean throwing away something, destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods. When the train panthered at last into Paddington Station I sprang out of it with a sudden released curiosity. There was a barrier and officials guarding the rear part of the train. No one was allowed to press towards it. They were guarding and hiding something. Perhaps death in some too shocking form. Perhaps something like the Merce them matter, so mixed up with human misery and wickedness that the land has to give it a sort of sanctity. Perhaps something worse than either. I went out, gladly enough, into the streets and saw the lamp shining on the laughing faces. Nor have I ever known from that day to this into what strange story I wandered or what frightful thing was my companion in the dark. CHAPTER IV THE PERFECT GAME We have all met the man who says that some odd things have happened to him, but that he does not really believe that they were supernatural. My own position is the opposite of this. I believe in the supernatural as a matter of intellect and reason, not as a matter of personal experience. I do not see ghosts. I only see their inherent probability. But it is entirely a matter of the mere intelligence, not even of the motions. My nerves and body are altogether of this earth, very earthy. The people of this temperament, one weird incident, will often leave a peculiar impression. And the weirdest circumstances that ever occurred to me occurred a little while ago. It consisted in nothing less than my playing a game and playing it quite well for some seventeen consecutive minutes. The ghost of my grandfather would have astonished me less. On one of these blue and burning afternoons I found myself to my inexpressible astonishment playing a game called croquet. I had imagined that it belonged to the Epic of Leech and Anthony Trellop, and I had neglected to provide myself with those very long and luxuriant side whiskers which are really essential to such a scene. I played it with a man whom we will call Parkinson, and with whom I had a semi-philosophical argument which lasted through the entire contest. It is deeply implanted in my mind that I had the best of the argument, but it is certain, and beyond dispute, that I had the worst of the game. Oh, Parkinson Parkinson, I cried, patting him affectionately on the head with a mallet. How far you really are from the pure love of the sport, you who can play. It is only we who play badly who love the game itself. You love glory, you love applause, you love the earthquake voice of victory, you do not love croquet. You do not love croquet until you love being beaten at croquet. It is we the bunglers who adore the occupation and the abstract. It is we to whom it is art for art's sake. If we may see the face of croquet herself, if I may so express myself, we are content to see her face turned upon us in anger. Our play is called amateurish, and we wear proudly the name of amateur. For amateur is but the French for lovers. We accept all adventures from our lady, the most disastrous or the most dreary. We wait outside her iron gates, I allude to the hoops, vainly essaying to enter. Our devoted balls, impetuous and full of chivalry, will not be confined within the pedantic boundaries of the mere croquet ground. Our balls seek honour in the ends of the earth. They turn up in the flower beds and the conservatory. They are to be found in the front garden and the next street. No, Parkinson, the good painter has skill. It is the bad painter who loves his art. The good musician loves being a musician. The bad musician loves music. With such a pure and hopeless passion do I worship croquet. I love the game itself. I love the parallelogram of brass marked out with chalk or tape, as if its limits were the frontiers of my sacred fatherland. The Four Seas of Britain. I love the mere swing of the mallets and the click of the balls is music. The four colours are to me sacramental and symbolic, like the red of martyrdom or the white of Easter day. You lose all this, my poor Parkinson. You have to solace yourself with the absence of this vision by the paltry consolation of being able to go through the hoops and to hit the stick. And I wave my mallet in the air with a graceful gaiety. Don't be too sorry for me, said Parkinson, with his simple sarcasm. I shall get over it in time, but it seems to me that the more a man likes a game, the better he would want to play it. Granted that the pleasure in the thing itself comes first, does not the pleasure of success come naturally and inevitably afterwards, or take your own simile of the night and his lady-love? I admit the gentleman does first and foremost want to be in the lady's presence, but I never heard yet of a gentleman who wanted to look an utter ass when he was there. Perhaps not, though he generally looks at I replied, but the truth is that there is a fallacy in the simile, although it was my own. The happiness at which the lover is aiming is an infinite happiness which can be extended without limit. The more he is loved, normally speaking, the jollier he will be. It is definitely true that the stronger the love of both lovers, the stronger will be the happiness. But it is not true that the stronger the play of both croquet players, the stronger will be the game. It is logically possible, follow me closely here, Parkinson, it is logically possible to play croquet too well to enjoy it at all. If you could put this blue ball through that distant hoop as easily as you could pick it up with your hand, then you would not put it through that hoop any more than pick it up with your hand. It would not be worth doing. If you could play unerringly, you would not play at all. The moment the game is perfect, the game disappears. I do not think, however, said Parkinson, that you are in any immediate danger of affecting that sort of destruction. I do not think your croquet will vanish through its own faultless excellence. You are safe for the present. I again caressed him with the mallet, knocked the ball about, wired myself, and resumed the thread of my discourse. The long warm evening had been gradually closing in, and by this time it was almost twilight. By the time I had delivered four more fundamental principles and my companion had gone through five more hoops, the dusk was urging upon dark. We shall have to give this upset, Parkinson, as he missed the ball almost for the first time. I can't see a thing. Nor can I, I answered, and it is a comfort to reflect that I could not hit anything if I saw it. With that I struck a ball smartly and sent it away into the darkness toward where the shadowy figure of Parkinson moved in the hot haze. Parkinson immediately uttered a loud and dramatic cry. The situation indeed called forth. I had hit the right ball. Stunned with astonishment, I crossed the gloomy ground and hit my ball again. It went through a hoop. I could not see the hoop, but it was the right hoop. I shuddered from head to foot. Words were wholly inadequate, so I slouched heavily after that impossible ball. Again I hit it away into the night, and in what I supposed was the vague direction of the quite invisible stick, and in the dead silence I heard the stick rattle as the ball struck it heavily. I threw down my mallet. I can't stand this, I said. My ball has gone right three times. These things are not of this world. Pick up your mallets, said Parkinson, have another go. I tell you I dare it. I made another hoop like that. I should see all the devils dancing there on the blessed grass. Why devils, asked Parkinson. They may be only fairies making fun of you. They are sending you the perfect game, which is no game. I looked about me. The garden was full of a burning darkness in which the faint glimmers had the look of fire. I stepped across the grass as if it burnt me. Picked up the mallet and hit the ball somewhere. Somewhere where another ball might be. I heard the dull click of the balls touching, and ran into the house like one pursued. End of Chapter 4 This is LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 5 The Extraordinary Cab Man From time to time I have introduced into this newspaper column the narration of incidents that have really occurred. I do not mean to insinuate that in this respect it stands alone among newspaper columns. I mean only that I have found that my meaning was better expressed by some practical parable out of daily life than by any other method. Therefore I propose to narrate the incident of the Extraordinary Cab Man, which occurred to me only three days ago, and which slight as it apparently is, aroused in me a moment of genuine emotion bordering upon despair. On the day that I met the Strange Cab Man I had been lunching in a little restaurant in Soho in company with three or four of my best friends. My best friends are all either bottomless skeptics or quite uncontrollable believers, and the whole argument worked out ultimately to this, that the question is whether a man can be certain of anything at all. I think that he can be certain, for if, as I said to my friend furiously brandishing an empty bottle, it is impossible intellectually to entertain certainty, what is this certainty which is impossible to entertain? If I have never experienced such a thing as certainty, I cannot even say that a thing is not certain. Similarly, if I have never experienced such a thing as green, I cannot even say that my nose is not green. It may be as green as possible, for all I know, if I have really no experience of greenness. So we shouted at each other and shook the room because metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing. And the difference between us was very deep because it was a difference as to the object of the whole thing called broad-mindedness or the opening of the intellect. For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely forever. But I said that I opened his intellect as I opened my mouth in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely forever and ever. Now, when this argument was over, or at least when it was cut short, for it will never be over, I went away with one of my companions who, in the confusion, and comparative insanity of a general election, had somehow become a member of parliament, and I drove with him in a cab from the corner of Leicester Square to the member's entrance of the House of Commons where the police received me with a quite unusual tolerance. Whether they thought that he was my keeper or that I was his keeper is the discussion between us which still continues. It is necessary in this narrative to preserve the utmost exactitude of detail. After leaving my friend at the House, I took the cab on a few hundred yards to an office in Victoria Street which I had to visit. Then I got out and offered him more than his fare. He looked at it, but not with the surly doubt and general disposition to try it on, which is not unknown among normal cab men. But this was no normal, perhaps no human cab men. He looked at it with a dull and infantile astonishment, clearly quite genuine. Do you know, sir, he said, you've only given me one shilling eight pence. I remarked with some surprise that I did know it. Now, you know, sir, he said, in a kindly appealing reasonable way, you know that ain't the fare from Houston. Houston, I repeated vaguely, for the phrase at that moment sounded to me like China or Arabia. What on earth has Houston got to do with it? You hailed me just outside Houston Station," began the man with astonishing precision, and then you said, What in the name of Tartarus are you talking about, I said, with Christian forbearance? I took you to the southwest corner of Leichester Square. Leichester Square, he exclaimed, loosening a kind of cataract of scorn. Why, we ain't been near Leichester Square today. You hailed me outside Houston Station. And you said, Are you mad, or am I? I asked with scientific calm. I looked at the man. No ordinary dishonest cab man would think of creating so solid and colossal and creative a lie. And this man was not a dishonest cab man. If ever a human face was heavy and simple and humble, and with great big blue eyes protruding like a frog's. If ever, in short, a human face was all that a human face should be, it was the face of that resentful and respectful cab man. I looked up and down the street, and unusually dark twilight seemed to be coming on, and for one second the old nightmare of the skeptic would hit its finger on my nerve. What was certainty? Was anybody certain of anything? Heavens, to think of the dull rudge of the skeptics who go on asking whether we possess a future life. The exciting question for real skepticism is whether we possess a past life. What is a minute ago rationalistically considered except a tradition and a picture? The darkness grew deeper from the road. The cab man calmly gave me the most elaborate details of the gesture, the word, the complex, but consistent course of action, which I had adopted since that remarkable occasion when I had hailed him outside Houston Station. How did I know, my skeptical friends would say, that I had not hailed him outside Houston? I was firm about my assertion. He was quite equally firm about his. He was obviously quite as honest a man as I, and a member of a much more respectable profession. In that moment the universe and the stars swung just a hair's breath from their balance, and the foundations of the earth were moved. But for the same reason that I believe in democracy, for the same reason that I believe in free will, for the same reason that I believe in a fixed character of virtue, the reason that could only be expressed by saying that I do not choose to be a lunatic, I continued to believe that this honest cab man was wrong, and I repeated to him that I had really taken him out of Lysus Square. He began with the same evident and ponderous sincerity. You hailed me outside Houston Station and you said, and at this moment there came over his features a kind of frightful transfiguration of living astonishment, as if he had been lit up like a lamp from inside. Why, I beg your pardon, sir, he said. I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon. You took me from Lysus Square, I remember now. I beg your pardon. And without this astonishing man let out his whip with a sharp crack at his horse and went trundling away. The whole of which interview, before the banner of St. George, I swear, is strictly true. I looked at the strange cab man as he lessened in the distance and the mists. I do not know whether I was right in fancying that although his face had seemed so honest there was something unearthly and demoniac about him when seen from behind. Perhaps he had been sent to tempt me from my adherence to those sanities and certainties which I had defended earlier in the day. In any case it gave me pleasure to remember that my sense of reality, though it had rocked for an instant, had remained erect. CHAPTER VI An Accident Some time ago I wrote in these columns an article called The Extraordinary Cab Man. I am now in a position to contribute my experience of a still more extraordinary cab. The extraordinary thing about the cab was that it did not like me. It threw me out violently in the middle of the strand. If my friends who read the daily news are as romantic and as rich as I take them to be, I presume that this experience is not uncommon. I suppose that they are all being thrown out of cabs all over London. Still, as there are some people, virginal and remote from the world, who have not yet had this luxurious experience, I will give a short account of the psychology of myself when my handsome cab ran into the side of a motor omnibus and I hope heard it. I do not need to dwell on the essential romance of the handsome cab. That one really noble modern thing which our age, when it is judged, will gravely put beside the Parthenon. It is really modern in that it is both secret and swift. My particular handsome cab was modern in these two respects. It was also very modern in the fact that it came to grief. But it is also English. It is not to be found abroad. It belongs to a beautiful romantic country where nearly everybody is pretending to be richer than they are and acting as if they were. It is comfortable, and yet it is reckless. And that combination is the very soul of England. But although I had always realized all these good qualities in a handsome cab, I could not experience all the possibilities or, as the moderns put it, all the aspects of that vehicle. My annunciation of the merits of a handsome cab had been always made when it was the right way up. Let me therefore explain how I felt when I fell out of a handsome cab for the first and I am happy to believe the last time. Polycrates threw one ring into the sea to propitiate the fates. I have thrown one handsome cab into the sea, if you will excuse a rather violent metaphor. And the fates are I am quite sure propitiated, though I am told they do not like to be told so. I was driving yesterday afternoon in a handsome cab down one of the sloping streets into the Strand, reading one of my own admirable articles with continual pleasure and still more continual surprise. When the horse fell forward, scrambled a moment, the king stones staggered to his feet again and went forward. The horses in my cabs often do this, and I have learned to enjoy my own articles at any angle of the vehicle. So I did not see anything at all odd about the way the horse went on again. But I saw it suddenly in the faces of all the people on the pavement. They were all turned towards me, and they were all struck with fear suddenly, with a white flame out of the sky. And one man half ran out into the road, with the movement of the elbow as if warding off a blow, and tried to stop the horse. Then I knew that the reins were lost, and the next moment the horse was like a living thunderbolt. I tried to describe things exactly as they seemed to me. Many details I may have missed or misstated. Many details may have, so to speak, gone mad in the race down the road. I remember that I once called one of my experiences narrated in this paper a fragment of fact. This is, at any rate, a fragment of fact. No fact could possibly be more fragmentary than the sort of fact that I expected to be at the bottom of that street. I believe in preaching to the converted, or I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion. Thus I have always urged in this paper that democracy has a deeper meaning than Democrats understand. That is, that common and popular things, proverbs and ordinary sayings, always have something in them unrealized by most to repeat them. Here is one. We have all heard about the man who is in a momentary danger and who sees the whole of his life past before him in a moment. In the cold, literal, and common sense of words, is obviously a thundering lie. Nobody can pretend that in an accident or a mortal crisis he elaborately remembered all the tickets he had ever taken to Wimbledon, or all the times he had ever passed the brown bread and butter. But in those few moments, while my cab was tearing toward the traffic of the Strand, I discovered that there is a truth behind this phrase, as there is behind all popular phrases. I did really have in that short and shrieking period the succession of a number of fundamental points of view. I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost as many seconds. My first religion was pure paganism, which among sincere men is more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeeded a state of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper name has ever been found. The ancients called the stoicism, and I think it must be what some German lunatics mean, if they mean anything, when they talk about pessimism. It wasn't empty and an open acceptance of the thing that happens, as if one had got beyond the value of it. And then, curiously enough, came a strong contrary feeling that things mattered very much indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic. It was a feeling not that life was unimportant, but that life was much too important ever to be anything but life. I hope that this was Christianity. At any rate it occurred at the moment when we went crash into the omnibus. It seemed to me that the handsome cab simply turned over on top of me like an enormous hood or hat. I then found myself crawling out from underneath it in attitudes so undignified that they must have added enormously to the great cause to which the anti-pureton league and I have recently dedicated ourselves. I mean the cause of the pleasures of the people. As to my demeanor, when I emerged, I have two confessions to make, and they are both made merely in the interest of mental science. The first is that, whereas I had been in a quite pious frame of mind the moment before the collision, when I got to my feet and found I had got off with a cut or two, I began like St. Peter to curse and swear. A man offered me newspaper or something that I had dropped. I can distinctly remember consigning the paper to a state of irremediable spiritual ruin. I am very sorry for this now, and I apologize both to the man and to the paper. I have not the least idea what was the meaning of this unnatural anger. I mention it as a psychological confession. It was immediately followed by extreme hilarity and I made so many silly jokes to the policeman that he disgraced himself by continual laughter before all the little boys in the street who had hitherto taken him seriously. There is one other odd thing about the matter, which I also mention, as a curiosity of the human brain or a deficiency of brain. At intervals about every three minutes I kept on reminding the policeman that I had not paid the cab man and that I hoped he would not lose his money. He said it would be all right and the man would appear. But it was not until about a half an hour afterwards that it suddenly struck me with a shock intolerable that the man might conceivably have lost more than half a crown that he had been in danger as well as I. I had instinctively regarded the cab man as something uplifted above accidents, a God. I immediately made inquiries and I am happy to say that they seem to have been unnecessary. But henceforward I shall always understand with a darker and more delicate charity those who take the tithe of mint and anise and common and neglect the weightier matters of the law. I shall remember how I was once really tortured with owing half a crown to a man who might have been dead. Some admirable man in white coats at the Charing Cross hospital tied up my small injury and I went out again into the strand. I felt upon me even a kind of unnatural youth. I hungered for something untried. So to open a new chapter in my life I got into a handsome cab. The end of Chapter 6 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 7 The advantages of having one leg A friend of mine who was visiting a poor woman in bereavement and casting about for some phrase of consolation that should not be considered either insolent or weak said at last, I think one can live through these great sorrows and even be the better. What wears one is the little worries. As quite right, Mom, answered the old woman with emphasis, and I ought to know, seeing I've had ten of them. It is perhaps in this sense that it is the most true that the little worries are the most wearing. In its vaguer significance, the phrase, though it contains a truth, contains also some possibilities of self-deception and error. People who have both small troubles and big ones have the right to say that they find the small ones the most bitter. And it is undoubtedly true that the back which is bowed under the loads incredible can feel a faint addition to those loads. A giant holding up the earth and all its animal creation might still find the grasshoppers a burden. But I'm afraid that the maxim that the smallest worries are the worst is sometimes used or abused by people because they have nothing but the smallest worries. The lady may excuse herself for reviling the crumpled rose leaf by reflecting with what extraordinary dignity she would wear the crown of thorns if she had to. The gentleman may permit himself to curse the dinner and tell himself that he would behave much better if it were a mere matter of starvation. We need not deny that the grasshopper on man's shoulder is a burden, but we need not pay much respect to the gentleman who is always calling out that he would rather have an elephant when he knows there are no elephants in the country. We may concede that a straw may break the camel's back, but we like to know that it really is the last straw and not the first. I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right to grumble so long as they grumble about something else. It is a singular fact that if they are sane they almost always do grumble about something else. To talk quite reasonably about your own quite real wrongs is the quickest way to go off your head. But people with great troubles talk about little ones, and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf very often has his flesh full of thorns. But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life, then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do know to deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them. That they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible. They cast no shadow before they have no atmosphere. No one ever had a mystical premonition that he was going to tumble over a hessok. William III died by falling over a molehill. I do not suppose that with all his varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a mountain. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man, not William III, to put up with pure inconveniences and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path. Bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements, waiting at a railway station, missing posts, finding unpunctuality when we want punctuality or, what is worse, finding punctuality when we don't. It is of the poetic pleasures to be drawn from all these that I sing. I sing with confidence because I have recently been experimenting in poetic pleasures which arise from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot, with the only alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork. A stork is a poetic simile, therefore I eagerly adopt it. To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if the thing itself symbolizes something other than isolation. If we wish to see what a house is, it must be a house in some uninhabited landscape. If we wish to depict what a man really is, we must depict a man alone in a desert or on a dark sea sand. So long as he is a single figure, he means all that humanity means. So long as he is solitary, he means human society. So long as he is solitary, he means sociability and comradeship. Add another figure, and the picture is less human, not more so. One is company, two is none. If you wish to symbolize human building, draw one dark tower on the horizon. If you wish to symbolize light, let there be no star in the sky. Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we call our day there is but one star in the sky, a large fierce star which we call the sun. One sun is splendid, six suns would be only vulgar. One tower of giato is sublime. A row of towers of giato would be only like a row of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower. The poetry of nature in seeing the single tree. The poetry of love in following the single woman. The poetry of religion in worshipping the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find the poetry of all human anatomy in standing on a single leg. To express complete and perfect legishness, the leg must stand in sublime isolation, like the tower in the wilderness. As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is that which stands most alone. This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity of some Doric column. The students of architecture tell us that the only legitimate use of a column is to support weight. This column of mine fulfills its legitimate function. It supports weight. Being of an animal and organic consistency, it may even improve by the process. And during these last few days that I am thus unequally balanced, the helplessness or dislocation of the one leg may find compensation in the astonishing strength and classic beauty of the other leg. Mrs. Mount Stuart Jenkinson in Mr. George Meredith's novel might pass by at any moment and seeing me in the stork-like attitude would exclaim with equal admiration and a more literal exactitude, he has a leg. Notice how this famous literary phrase supports my contentions touching this isolation of any admirable thing. Mrs. Mount Stuart Jenkinson, wishing to make it clear and perfect picture of human race, said that Sir Willoughby pattern had a leg. She delicately glossed over and concealed the clumsy and offensive fact that he had really two legs. Two legs were superfluous and irrelevant, a reflection and a confusion. Two legs would have confused Mrs. Mount Stuart Jenkinson like two monuments in London, that having one good leg he should have another, this would be to use vain repetitions as the Gentiles do. She would have been as much bewildered by him as if he had been a centipede. All pessimism has a secret optimism for its object. All surrender of life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity, all desolation has for its real aim this separation of something so that it may be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed. I feel grateful for the slight sprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating division between one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. In one of my feet I can feel how strong and splendid a foot is. In the other I can realize how very much otherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is wholly exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. If you wish to realize how fearfully and wonderfully God's image is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realize the splendid vision of all visible things, wink the other eye. End of Chapter 7 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Tremendous Trifles by G.K. Chesterton Chapter 8 The End of the World For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious town of Besencon which stands like a sort of peninsula in a horseshoe of river. You may learn from the guidebooks that it was the birthplace of Victor Hugo and that it is a military station with many forts near the French frontier. You will not learn from guidebooks that the very tiles on the roofs seem to be of some cointure and more delicate color than the tiles of all the other towns of the world. That the tiles look like the little clouds of some strange sunset or like the lustrous scales of some strange fish. They will not tell you that in this town the eye cannot rest on anything without finding it in some way attractive and even elvish. I was wandering in the streets at a street corner a gleam of green fields through a stunted arch or some unexpected color for the enamel of a spire or dome. Evening was coming on and in the light of it all these colors so simple and yet so subtle seemed more and more to fit together and to make a fairy tale. I sat down for a little outside a cafe with a row of little toy trees and came to the same place. He was one of those very large and dark Frenchmen a type not common but yet typical of France. The Rabbilesian Frenchmen huge, swarthy, purple faced a walking wine barrel. He was a sort of southern false staff if one can imagine false staff anything but English and indeed there was a vital difference typical of the two nations a while false staff would have been shaking with hilarity like a huge jelly full of the broad farce of the London streets this Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise as if pleasure were a kind of pagan religion. After some talk which was full of the admirable civility and equality of French civilization he suggested without either eagerness or embarrassment that he should take me in his fly hours ride in the hills beyond the town. And though it was growing late I consented for there was one long white road under an archway and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord. We drove through the strong squat gateway that was made by Romans and I remember the coincidence like a sort of woman that as we passed out of the city I heard simultaneously the three sounds which are the trinity of France they make what some poet calls a tangled trinity and I'm not going to disentangle it Whatever those three things mean how or why they coexist whether they can be reconciled or perhaps are reconciled already the three sounds I heard then by an accident all at once make up the French mystery for the brass band in the casino gardens behind me was playing with a sort of passionate levity of some ramping tune from a Parisian comic opera and while this was going on I heard also the bugles on the hills above that told of terrible loyalties and men always arming in the gate of France and I heard also fainter than these sounds and through them all the Angeles after this coincidence of symbols I had a curious sense of having left France behind me or perhaps even the civilized world and indeed there was something like a landscape wild enough to encourage such a fancy I have seen perhaps higher mountains but I have never seen higher rocks I have never seen height so near so abrupt and sensational splinters of rock that stood up like the spires of churches cliffs that fell suddenly and straight as Satan fell from heaven there was also a quality in the ride which was not only astonishing but rather bewildering which many must have noticed if they have driven a ridden rapidly up mountain roads I mean a sense of a gigantic gyration as of the whole earth turning about one's head it's quite inadequate to say that the hills rose and fell like enormous waves rather the hills seemed to turn about me like the enormous sails of a windmill a vast wheel of monstrous archangelic wings as we drove on and up the gathering purple of the sunset this dizziness increased confounding things above with things below wide walls of wood or rock stood out above my head like a roof I stared at them till I fancied that I was staring down at a wooden plain below me steeps of greens swept down to the river I stared at them until I fancied that they swept up to the sky the purple darkened, night drew near it seemed only to cut clearer the chasms and draw higher the spires of that nightmare landscape above me in the twilight was the huge black hulk of the driver and his broad black back was as mysterious as the back of death in Watt's picture I felt that I was growing too fantastic and I sought to speak of ordinary things I called out to the driver in French where are you taking me and it is a literal and solemn fact that he answered me in the same language without turning round to the end of the world I did not answer I let him drag the vehicle up dark steep ways until I saw lights under a low roof of little trees and two children one oddly beautiful playing at a ball then we found ourselves filling up the strict main street of a tiny hamlet and across the walls of its inn was written in large letters about Dumande the end of the world the driver and I sat down outside that inn without a word as if all ceremonies were natural and understood in that ultimate place I ordered bread for both of us and red wine that was good but had no name on the other side of the road was a little plain church with a cross on top of it and a cock on top of the cross this seemed to me a very good end of the world if the story of the world ended here it ended well then I wondered whether I myself should really be content to end here where most certainly there were the best things of Christendom a church and children's games and decent soil and a tavern for men to talk with men but as I thought a singular doubt and desire grew slowly in me and at last I started up are you not satisfied? asked my companion no I said I am not satisfied even at the end of the world then after a silence I said because you see there are two ends of the world and this is the wrong end of the world at least the wrong one for me this is the French end of the world I want the other end of the world drive me to the other end of the world the other end of the world he asked where is that? it is in waltham green I whispered hoarsely you see it on the London on the buses world's end and waltham green oh I know how good this is I love your vineyards and your free peasantry but I want the English end of the world I love you like a brother but I want an English cab man who will be funny and ask me what his fare is your vehicles stir my blood but I want to see a London policeman take oh take me to see a London policeman he stood quite dark in the middle, against the end of the sunset and I could not tell whether he understood or not I got back into his carriage you will understand I said if you ever are in exile even for pleasure the child to his mother the man to his country as the countrymen of yours once said but since perhaps it is rather too long a drive for the English end of the world we may as well drive back to Besencon only as the stars came out among those I wept for Waltham Green End of Chapter 8 This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 9 In the Place de la Besteel On the first of May I was sitting outside a café in the Place de la Besteel in Paris staring at the exultant column crowned with a capering figure which stands in the place where the people destroyed a prison and ended in age the thing is a curious example of how symbolic is the great part of human history as a matter of mere material fact the Bastille when it was taken was not a horrible prison it was hardly a prison at all but it was a symbol and the people always go by a sure instinct for symbols for the Chinaman for instance at the last general election or President Kruger's hat in the election before their poetic sense is perfect the Chinaman with his pigtail is not an idle flippancy he does typify with a compact precision exactly the thing that people resent in African policy the alien and grotesque nature of the power of wealth the fact that money has no roots that it is not a natural and familiar power but a sort of airy and evil magic calling monsters from the ends of the earth do people hate the mine owners who can bring a Chinaman flying across the sea exactly as the people hated the wizard who could fetch a flying dragon through the air it was the same with Mr Kruger's hat his hat that admirable hat was not merely a joke it did symbolize and symbolize extremely well the exact thing which are people at that moment regarded with impatience and venom the old-fashioned dingy republican simplicity the un-beautiful dignity of the bourgeois and the heavier truisms of political morality though the people are sometimes wrong on the practical side of politics they are never wrong on the artistic side so it was certainly with the best deal the destruction of the best deal was not a reform it was something more important than a reform it was an iconoclasm it was the breaking of a stone image the people saw the building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes and they struck at it as at a carved fact for all the shapes in which that immense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul perhaps the most oppressive are big buildings man feels like a fly an accident in the thing he has himself made it requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could un-make it therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual a ritual meaning far beyond its immediate political results it is a religious service if for instance the socialists were numerous or courageous enough to capture and smash up the bank of England you might argue forever about the in-utility of the act and how it really did not touch the root of the economic problem in the correct manner but mankind would never forget it it would change the world architecture is a very good test of the true strength of a society for the most valuable things in a human state are the irrevocable things marriage for instance and architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of you can turn a picture with his face to the wall it would be a nuisance to turn that Roman cathedral with his face to the wall a poem to pieces it is only in moments of very sincere emotion that you tear a town hall to pieces a building is akin to a dogma it is insolent like a dogma whether or not it is permanent it claims permanence like a dogma people ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world like impressionism in painting certainly it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky but along with this decision which is involved in creating a building there goes a quite similar decision in the more delightful task of smashing one the two of necessity go together in few places have so many fine buildings been set up as here in Paris and in few places have so many been destroyed when people have finally got into the horrible habit of preserving buildings they have got out of the habit of building them and in London one mingles as it were one's tears because so few are pulled down as I sat staring at the column of the best deal inscribed to liberty and glory there came out of one corner of the square which like so many such squares was at once crowded and quiet a sudden and silent line of horsemen their dress was of a dull blue plain and prosaic enough but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their helmets and their helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans I had seen them by twos and threes often enough before I had seen plenty of them in pictures toiling through the snows of Freeland or roaring round the squares at Waterloo but now they came file after file like an invasion and something in their numbers or in the evening light that lit up their faces and their crests or something in the reverie into which they broke make me inclined to spring to my feet and cry out the French soldiers there were the little men with the brown faces that had so often ridden through the capitals of Europe as Cooley to their own and when I looked across the square I saw that the two other corners were choked with blue and red held by little groups of infantry the city was garrisoned as against a revolution of course I had heard all about the strike chiefly from a baker he said he was not going to Chomer I said a French phrase he said another I said again and he thought I was a class conscious collectivist proletarian the whole thing was curious and the true moral of it not one easy for us as a nation to grasp because our own faults are so deeply and dangerously in the other direction to me as an Englishman personally steeped in the English optimism and the English dislike of severity the whole thing seemed to fuss about nothing it looked like turning out one of the best armies in Europe against ordinary people walking about the street the cavalry charged us once or twice more or less harmlessly but of course it is hard to say how far in such criticisms one is assuming the French populace to be what it is not as docile as the English but the deeper truth of the matter tingled so to speak through the whole noisy night France has a natural facility for feeling itself on the eve of something of the Bartholomew or the revolution or the commune or the day of judgment it is this sense of crisis that makes France eternally young it is perpetually pulling down and building up as it pulled down the prison and put up the column in the place de la bestie France has always been at the point of dissolution she has found the only method of immortality she dies daily End of Chapter 9 This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 10 on lying in bed lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling this however is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the premises I think myself that the thing might be managed with several pales of aspenol in a broom only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way on the color in great washes it might drip down again on one's face in floods of rich and mingle color like some strange fairy rain and that would have its disadvantages I'm afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form of artistic composition to that purpose indeed the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use in fact it is the only use I think of a white ceiling being put to for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have discovered it for years I've been looking for some blank spaces in a modern house to draw on paper is much too small for any really allegorical design as Cyrano de Bergerac says but when I try to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms such as we all live in I was continually disappointed I found an endless pattern and a complication of small objects like a curtain of fine links between me and my desire I examined the walls I found them to my surprise to be already covered with wallpaper and I found the wallpaper to be already covered with uninteresting images all bearing a ridiculous resemblance to each other I could not understand why one arbitrary symbol a symbol apparently devoid of any religious or philosophical significance should thus be sprinkled all over my nice walls in a sort of smallpox the Bible must be referring to wallpapers I think when it says use not vain repetitions as the Gentiles do I found the turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colors rather like the Turkish empire or like the sweetmeat called Turkish delight I do not exactly know what Turkish delight really is but I suppose it is Macedonian massacres everywhere that I went before my paintbrush I found that others had unaccountably been before me spoiling the walls, the curtains and the furniture with their childish and barbaric designs Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my back in bed then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision that breath of mere white paradise since it means purity and also means freedom but alas like all heavens now that it is seen it is found to be unattainable it looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the window for my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged never mind by whom by a person debarred from all political rights another end of the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been conceded yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that all the original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces and cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods I am sure that it was only because Michelangelo was engaged in the ancient and honorable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realized how the roof and chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens the tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is if a critical and unhealthy of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence there is none more menacing and dangerous than the exultation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality if there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays for cleanliness is made essential and godliness is regarded as an offense a playwright can attack the institution of marriage so long as he does not misrepresent the manners of society and I have met ipsonite pessimists who thought it wrong to take beer but right to take prusic acid especially this is so in matters of hygiene notably such matters as lying in bed instead of being regarded as it ought to be as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning it is upon the whole part of practical wisdom but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite misers get up early in the morning and burglars I am informed get up the night before it is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle a man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free flexible creative the things that should be unchangeable are his principles his ideals but with us the reverse is true our views change constantly but our lunch does not change now I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions but as for their lunch let them have it sometimes in the garden sometimes in bed and sometimes on the roof sometimes in the top of a tree let them argue from the same first principles but let them do it in a bed or a boat or a balloon this alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can insure it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite insure sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candor if ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail a man can get used to getting up at five o'clock in the morning a man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions the first experiment is commonly fatal let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue for those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added even for those who can do their work in bed, like journalists still more for those whose works cannot be done in bed as for example the professional harpooners of wales it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional but that is not the caution I mean the caution is this if you do lie in bed be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all I do not speak of course of the seriously sick but if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse then he will get up a healthy man if he does it for some secondary hygienic reason if he has some scientific explanation he may get up a hypochondriac end of chapter 10 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 11 The Twelve Men the other day while I was meditating on morality and Mr. H. Pitt I was, so to speak, snatched up and put into a jury box to try people The snatching took some weeks but to me it seemed something sudden and arbitrary I was put into this box because I lived in Battersea and my name began with a sea looking round me I saw that there were also summoned and in attendance in the court whole crowds and processions of men all of whom lived in Battersea and all of whose names began with a sea always summoned jurymen in this sweeping alphabetical way at one official blow, so to speak Battersea is denuded of all its seas and left to get on as best as it can with the rest of the alphabet a cumber patch is missing from one street a chisel pop from another three chuckster fields from Chuckster Field House and the children are crying out for the absent catcher boy the woman at the street corner is on top and will not be comforted we settle down with a rollicking ease into our seats for we are a bold devil may care raise the seas of Battersea and an oath is administered to us in a totally inaudible manner by an individual resembling an army surgeon in his second childhood we understand however that we are to well and truly try the case between our sovereign lord and king and the prisoner at the door, neither of whom has put in an appearance as yet just when I was wondering whether the king and the prisoner were perhaps coming to an amicable understanding in some adjoining public house the prisoner's head appears above the barrier of the dock he is accused of stealing bicycles and he is the living image of a great friend of mine we go into the matter of the stealing of the bicycles, we do well and truly try the case between the king in the affair of the bicycles and we come to the conclusion after a brief but reasonable discussion that the king is not in any way implicated then we pass on to a woman who neglected her children and who looks as if somebody or something had neglected her and I am one of those who fancy that something had all the time that the eye took in these light appearances and the brain passed these light criticisms there was in the heart a barbaric pity and fear which men have never been able to utter from the beginning but which is the power behind half the poems of the world the mood cannot even adequately be suggested except faintly by this statement that tragedy is the highest expression of the infinite value of human life never had I stood so close to pain and never so far away from pessimism ordinarily I should not have spoken of these dark emotions at all for speech about them is too difficult but I mention them now for a specific and particular reason to the statement of which I will proceed at once I speak these feelings because out of the furnace of them there came a curious realization of a political or social truth I saw with a queer and indescribable kind of clearness what a jury really is and why we must never let it go the trend of our epic up to this time has been consistently toward specialism and professionalism we tend to have trained soldiers because they fight better trained singers because they sing better trained dancers because they dance better specially trained laughers because they laugh better and so on and so on the principle has been applied to law and politics by innumerable modern writers many fabians have insisted that a greater part of our political work should be performed by experts many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should be altogether supplanted by the trained judge now if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable I do not know that there would be any fault to find with this but the true result of all experience and the true foundation of all religion is this that the four or five things that it is the most practically essential that a man should know are all of them what people call paradoxes that is to say though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of seeming verbal contradictions one of them for instance is the unimpeachable platitude that finds most pleasure for himself is often the man who least hunts for it another is the paradox of courage the fact that the way to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeful cliff above the tide may save his bones by that carelessness whoever will lose his life the same shall save it an entirely practical and perfect statement now one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught to every infant praddling at his mother's knee is the following that the more a man looks at a thing the less he can see it and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it the Fabian argument of the expert that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and was interested every day went on seeing more and more of its significance but he does not he goes on seeing less and less of its significance in the same way alas we all go on every day unless we are continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility seeing less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones now it is a terrible business for a man out for the vengeance of men but it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed as he can to other terrible things he can even grow accustomed to the sun and the horrible thing about all legal officials even the best about all our judges, magistrates barristers, detectives and policemen is not that they are wicked some of them are good not that they are stupid several of them are quite intelligent it is simply that they have got used to it strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock all they see is the usual man in the usual place they do not see the awful court of judgment they only see their own workshop therefore the instinct of Christian civilization has most wisely declared that into their judgments their shell upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the streets men shall come in who can see the court and the crowd and the coarse faces of the policemen and the professional criminals the wasted faces of the wastrels the unreal faces of the gesticulating council and see it all as one sees a new picture or a play hitherto unvisited our civilization has decided and very justly decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men it wishes for light upon that awful matter it asks men who know no more law than I know but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box when it wants a library catalog or the solar system discovered or any trifle of that kind it uses up specialists but when it wishes anything done which is really serious it collects twelve of the ordinary men in a standing round the same thing was done if I remember right by the founder of christianity end of chapter eleven this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org tremendous trifles by G. K. Chesterton chapter twelve the wind and the trees I am sitting under tall trees with a great wind boiling like surf about the tops of them so that their living load of leaves rocks and roars and something that is at once exultation and agony I feel in fact as if I were actually sitting at the bottom of the sea among mere anchors and ropes while over my head and over the green twilight of water sounded the everlasting rush of waves of oil and crash and shipwreck of tremendous ships the wind tugs at the trees as if it might pluck them root and all out of the earth like tufts of grass or to try yet another desperate figure of speech for this unspeakable energy the trees are straining and tearing and lashing as if they were the tribe of dragons each tied by the tail as I look at these top heavy giants tortured by an invisible and violent witchcraft a phrase comes back into my mind I remember a little boy of my acquaintance who was once walking in Battersea Park under just such torn skies and tossing trees he did not like the wind at all it blew in his face too much it made him shut his eyes and it blew off his hat of which he was very proud he was as far as I remember about four after complaining repeatedly the atmospheric that last to his mother well why don't you take away the trees and then it wouldn't wind nothing could be more intelligent or natural than this mistake anyone looking for the first time at the trees might fancy that they were indeed vast and titanic fans which by their mere waving agitated the air around them for miles nothing I say could be more human and excusable than the belief that it is the trees which make the wind the belief is so human and excusable that it is as a matter of fact the belief of about 99 out of 100 of the philosophers reformers sociologists and politicians of the great age in which we live my small friend was in fact very like the principal modern thinkers only much nicer and a little epilogue or parable which he has thus the honor of inventing the trees stand for all visible things and the wind for the invisible the wind is the spirit which bloweth where it listeth the trees are the material things of the world which are blown where the spirit lists the wind is philosophy religion revolution the trees are cities and civilizations we only know that there is a wind because the trees on some distant hills suddenly go mad we only know that there is a real revolution as all the chimney pots go mad on the whole skyline of the city just as the ragged outline of a tree grows suddenly more ragged and rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails so the human city rises under the wind of the spirit into toppling temples or sudden spires no man has ever seen a revolution mobs pouring through the palaces blood pouring down the gutters the guillotine lifted higher than the throne a prison in ruins a people in arms these things are not a revolution but the results of revolution you cannot see a wind you can only see that there is a wind so also you cannot see a revolution you can only see that there is a revolution and there never has been in the history of the world a real revolution brutally active and decisive which was not preceded by unrest and new dogma in the reign of invisible things all revolutions begin by being abstract most revolutions begin by being quite pedantically abstract the wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved so there must always be a battle in the sky before there is a battle on the earth since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the kingdom it is lawful also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore the kingdom it is lawful to hope to hear the wind of heaven in the trees it is lawful to pray thine agar come on earth as it is in heaven the great human dogma then is that the wind moves the trees the great human heresy is that the trees move the wind when people begin to say that the material circumstances alone created the moral circumstances then they have prevented all possibility of serious change for if my circumstances have made me wholly stupid how can I be certain even that I am right in altering those circumstances the man who represents all thought as an accident of environment is simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts including that one to treat the human mind as having an ultimate authority is necessary to any kind of thinking even free thinking and nothing will ever be reformed in this age or country unless we realize that the moral fact comes first for example most of us I suppose have seen in print and heard in debating clubs and endless discussion that goes on between socialists and total abstainers the latter say that the drink leads to poverty the former that the poverty leads to drink I can only wonder at there either of them being content with such simple physical explanations surely it is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat leads to poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink the absence of strong civic dignity the absence of an instinct that resists degradation when you have discovered why enormous English estates were not long ago cut up into small holdings like the land of France you will have discovered why the Englishman is more drunken than the Frenchman the Englishman among his million delightful virtues really has this quality which may strictly be called hand to mouth because under its influence a man's hand automatically seeks his own mouth instead of seeking as sometimes should do his oppressor's nose and a man who says that the English inequality in land is due only to the economic causes or that the drunkenness of England is due only to economic causes is saying something so absurd that he cannot really have thought what he was saying yet things quite as preposterous as this are said are written under the influence of that great spectacle of babyish helplessness the economic theory of history we have people who represent that all great historic motives were economic and then have to howl at the top of their voices in order to induce the modern democracy to act on economic motives the extreme Marxian politicians in England exhibit themselves as a small heroic minority to induce the world to do what according to their theory the world always does the truth is of course that there will be a social revolution the moment the thing has ceased to be purely economic you can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy you must have a democracy in order to have a revolution I get up from under the trees for the wind and the slight rain of the wind have ceased the trees stand up like golden pillars in the clear sunlight the tossing of the trees and the blowing of the wind have ceased simultaneously so I suppose there are still modern philosophers who will maintain that the trees make the wind the end of chapter 12 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 13 The Dickensian He was a quiet man dressed in dark clothes with a large limp straw hat with something almost military and his mustache and whiskers but with a quite unmilitary stoop and very dreamy eyes he was gazing with a rather gloomy interest at the cluster one might almost say the tangle of small shipping which grew thicker as our little pleasure boat crawled up into the Yarmouth harbor a boat entering this harbor as everyone knows does not enter in front of the town like a foreigner but creeps around at the back like a trader taking the town in the rear the passage of the river seems almost too narrow for traffic and in consequence the bigger ships look colossal as we passed under a timbership from Norway which seemed to block up the heavens like a cathedral the man in a straw hat pointed to an odd wooden figurehead carved like a woman and said like one continuing a conversation now why have they left off having them they didn't do anyone any harm I replied with some flippancy about the captain's wife being jealous but I knew in my heart that the man had struck a deep note there has been something in our most recent civilization which is mysteriously hostile to such healthy and humane symbols they hate anything like that which is human and pretty he continued exactly echoing my thoughts I believed they broke up all the jolly old figureheads with hatchets and enjoyed doing it like Mr. Quilt I answered when he battered the wooden admiral his whole face suddenly became alive and for the first time he stood erect and stared at me do you come to Yarmouth for that he asked for what for dickens he answered and drummed with his foot on the deck no I answered I come for fun though that is much the same thing I always come he answered quietly to find Pegaty's boat it isn't here he said that I understood him perfectly there are two Yarmouths I daresay there are two hundred to the people who live there I myself have never come to the end of the list of batter seas but there are two to the stranger and tourist the poor part which is dignified and the prosperous part which is savagely vulgar my new friend haunted the first of these like a ghost to the latter he would only distantly elude the place is very much spoiled now trippers you know he would say not at all scornfully but simply sadly that was the nearest he would go to an admission of the monstrous watering place that lay along the front out blazing the sun and more deafening than the sea but behind out of earshot of this uproar there are lanes so narrow that they seem like secret entrances to some hidden place of repose there are squares so brim full of silence that to plunge into one of them is like plunging into a pool in these places the man and I paced up and down talking about Dickens or rather doing what all true Dickensians do telling each other verbatim long passages which both of us knew quite well already we were really in the atmosphere of the older England fishermen passed us who might well have been characters like Pegaty we went into a musty curiosity shop and brought pipe stoppers carved into figures from Pickwick the evening was settling down between all the buildings with that slow gold that seems to soak everything when we went into the church in the growing darkness of the church my eye caught the colored windows which on that clear golden evening were flaming with all the passionate heraldry of the most fierce and ecstatic of Christian arts at length I said to my companion do you see that angel over there I think it must be meant for the angel at the sepulcher he saw that I was somewhat singularly moved and he raised his eyebrows I dare say he said what is there odd about that after a pause I said do you remember what the angel at the sepulcher said not particularly he answered but where are you off to in such a hurry I walked him rapidly out of the still square past the fisherman's alms houses toward the coast he still inquiring indignantly where I was going I am going I said to put pennies and automatic machines on the beach I am going to listen to the blacks I am going to have my photograph taken I am going to drink ginger beer out of its original bottle I will buy some picture postcards I do want a boat I am ready to listen to a concertina and but for the defects of my education should be ready to play it I am willing to ride on a donkey that is if the donkey is willing I am willing to be a donkey all this was commanded me by the angel in the stained glass window I really think said the decency and that I had better put you in charge of your relations sir I answered there are certain writers to whom humanity owes much whose talent is yet of so shy or delicate or retrospective a type that we do well to link it with certain quaint places or certain perishing associations it would not be unnatural to look for the spirit of Horace Wallpole at Strawberry Hill or even for the shade of Thackery in old Kensington but let us have no antiquarianism about Dickens for Dickens is not an antiquity Dickens looks not backward but forward he might look at our modern mobs with satire or with fury but he would love to look at them he might lash our democracy but it would be because like a democrat he asked much from it we will not have all his books bound up under the title of the old curiosity shop rather we will have them all bound up under the title of great expectations wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make something of it swallow it with a holy cannibalism and assimilate it with the digestion of a giant we must take these trippers as he would have taken them and tear them out of their tragedy and their farce do you remember now what the angel said at the sebelker why seek ye the living among the dead he is not here he is risen with that we came out suddenly on the wide stretch of sands which were black with the knobs and masses of our laughing and quite desperate democracy and the sunset which was now in its final glory flung far over all of them a red flush and glitter like the gigantic firelight of Dickens in that strange evening light every figure looked at once grotesque and attractive as if he had a story to tell I heard a little girl who was being throttled by another little girl say by way of self indication my sister-in-law has got four rings aside her wedding ring I stood and listened for more but my friend went away the end of chapter