 Section 1 of fancies versus fads. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. Fancies versus Fads by G.K. Chesterton. Introduction. I have strung these things together on a slight enough thread. But as the things themselves are slight, it is possible that the thread and the metaphor may manage to hang together. These notes range over very, very gated topics and in many cases were made at very different times. They concern all sorts of things, from Lady Barristers to cavemen and from psychoanalysis to free verse. Yet they have this amount of unity in their wandering, that they all imply that it is only a more traditional spirit that is truly able to wander. The wild theorists of our time are quite unable to wander. When they talk of making new roads, they are only making new ruts. Each of them is necessarily imprisoned in his own curious cosmos. In other words, he is limited by the very largeness of his own generalization. The explanations of the Marxian must not go outside economics, and the student of Freud is forbidden to forget sex. To see only the fanciful side of these serious sex may seem a very frivolous pleasure, and I will not dispute that these are very frivolous criticisms. I only submit that this frivolity is the last lingering form of freedom. In short, the note of these notes, so to speak, is that it is only from a normal standpoint that all the nonsense of the world takes on something of the wild interest of wonderland. I mean it is only in the mirror of a very moderate sense in sanity, which is all I have ever claimed to possess, that even insanities can appear as images clear enough to appeal to the imagination. After all, the ordinary, orthodox person is he to whom the heresies can appear as fantasies. After all, it is we ordinary human and humdrum people who can enjoy eccentricity as a sort of elf land, while the eccentrics are too serious even to know that they are elves. When a man tells us that he disapproves of children being told fairy tales, it is we who can perceive that he is himself a fairy. He himself has not the least idea of it. When he says he would discourage children from playing with tin soldiers, because it is militarism, it is we and not he who can enjoy and fancy the fantastic possibilities of his idea. It is we who suddenly think of children playing with little tin figures of philanthropists, rather round and with tin top hats, the little tin gods of our commercial religion. It is we who develop his imaginative idea for him by suggesting little leaden dolls of conscientious objectors in fixed attitudes of refined repugnance, or a whole regiment of tiny Quakers with little grey coats and white flags. He would never have thought of any of these as substitutes for himself. His negation is purely negative. Or when an educational philosopher tells us that the child should have complete equality with the adult, he cannot really carry his idea any farther without our assistance. It will be from us and not from him that the natural suggestion will come, that the baby should take its turn and carry the mother, the moment the mother is tired of carrying the baby. He will not, when left to himself, call up the poetical picture of the child, wheeling a double perambulator with the father and mother at each end. He has no motive to look for lively logical developments. For him the assimilation of parent and child is simply a platitude, and an inevitable part of his own rather platitudinous philosophy. It is we and not he who can behold the whole vista and vanishing perspective of his own opinions, and work out what he really means. It is only those who have ordinary views who have extraordinary visions. There is indeed nothing very extraordinary about these visions except the extraordinary people who have provoked some of them. They are only very sketchy sort of sketches of some of the strange things that may be found in the modern world. But however inadequate be the example, it is nonetheless true that this is the sound principle behind much better examples. And that in those great things, as in these small ones, sanity was the condition of satire. It is because Gulliver is a man of moderate stature that he can stray into the land of the giants and the land of the pygmies. It is Swift and not the professors of La Pluta who sees the real romance of getting sunbeams out of cucumbers. It would be less than exact to call Swift a sunbeam in the house. But if he did not himself get much sunshine out of cucumbers, at least he let daylight into professors. It was not the mad Swift but the sane Swift who made that story so wild. The truth is more self evident in men who were more sane. It is the good sense of Rabble that makes him seem to grin like a gargoyle. And it is in a sense because Dickens was a Philistine that he saw the land so full of strange gods. These idle journalistic jottings have nothing in common with such standards of real literature except the principle involved. But the principle is the right one. But while these are frivolous essays pretending only to touch on topics and theories they cannot exhaustively examine, I have added some that may not seem to fit so easily even into so slightest scheme. Nevertheless they are in some sense connected with it. I have opened with an essay on rhyme because it is a type of a sort of tradition which the anti-traditionalists now attack. And I have ended with one called Milton and Mary England because I feel that many may understand my case against the new Puritans if they have no notion of how I should attempt to meet the more accepted case in favor of the old Puritans. Both these articles appeared originally in the London Mercury and I desire to express my thanks to Mr. J. C. Squire for his kind permission to reprint them. But in the latter case I had the further feeling that I wished to express somewhere the historical sentiment that underlies the whole, the conviction that there did and does exist a more normal and national England which we once inhabited and to which we may yet return, and which is not a utopia but a home. I have therefore thought it worthwhile to write this line of introduction to show that such a scrapbook is not entirely scrappy and that even to touch such things lightly we need something like a test. It is necessary to have in hand a truth to judge modern philosophies rapidly and it is necessary to judge them very rapidly to judge them before they disappear. End of Section 1 Claimed for his aesthetic authority that hey diddle diddle will rank as an idol if I pronounce it chaste. In face of a satire which still survives the fashion it satirized, it may require some moral courage seriously to pronounce it chaste, or to suggest that the nursery rhyme in question has really some of the qualities of an idol. Of its chastity, in the vulgar sense, there need be little dispute despite the scandal of the elopement of the dish with the spoon, which would seem as free from grossness as the loves of the triangles. And though the incident of the cow may have something of the moon-struck ecstasy of endymion, that also has a silvery coldness about it worthy of the wilder aspects of Diana. The truth more seriously tenable is that this nursery rhyme is a complete and compact model of the nursery short story. The cow jumping over the moon fulfills to perfection the two essentials of such a story for children. It makes an effect that is fantastic out of objects that are familiar, and it makes a picture that is at once incredible and unmistakable. But it is yet more tenable, and here more to the point that this nursery rhyme is emphatically a rhyme. Both the lilt and the jingle are just right for their purpose, and are worth whole libraries of elaborate literary verse for children. And the best proof of its vitality is that the satirist himself has unconsciously echoed the jingle even in making the joke. The meter of that nineteenth-century satire is the meter of the nursery rhyme. Hey-diddle-diddle the cat in the fiddle, and hey-diddle-diddle will rank as an idol, are obviously both dancing to the same ancient tune, and that by no means the tune of the old cow died of, but the more exhilarating air to which she jumped over the moon. The whole history of the thing called rhyme can be found between those two things, the simple pleasure of rhyming diddle to fiddle, and the more sophisticated pleasure of rhyming diddle to idol. Now the fatal mistake about poetry, and more than half of the fatal mistake about humanity, consists in forgetting that we should have the first kind of pleasure as well as the second. It might be said that we should have the first pleasure as the basis of the second, or yet more truly the first pleasure inside the second. The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. The heart of the tree remains the same however many rings are added to it, and a man cannot leave his heart behind by running hard with his legs. In the core of all culture are the things that may be said, in every sense, to be learned by heart. In the innermost part of all the poetry is the nursery rhyme, the nonsense that is too happy even to care about being nonsensical. It may lead on to the more elaborate nonsense of the Gilbertyan line, or even the far less poetic nonsense of some of the Browning-esque rhymes. But the true enjoyment of poetry is always in having the simple pleasure, as well as the subtle pleasure. Indeed it is on this primary point that so many of our artistic and other reforms seem to go wrong. What is the matter with the modern world is that it is trying to get simplicity in everything, except the soul. Where the soul really has simplicity is can be grateful for anything even complexity. Many peasants have to be vegetarians, and their ordinary life is really a simple life. But the peasants do not despise a good dinner when they can get it. They will foot down with enthusiasm, because they have not only the simple life, but the simple spirit. And it is so with the modern modes of art, which revert very rightly to what is primitive. But their moral mistake is that they try to combine the ruggedness that should belong to simplicity with a superciliousness that should only belong to satiety. The last futurist draftmanship, for instance, evidently has the aim of drawing a tree that might be drawn by a child of ten. I think the new artists would admit it, nor do I merely sneer at it. I am willing to admit, especially for the sake of argument, that there is a truth of philosophy and psychology in this attempt to attain the clarity even through the crudity of childhood. In this sense I can see what a man is driving at when he draws a tree merely as a stick with smaller sticks standing out of it. He may be trying to trace in black and white or gray a primeval and almost prenatal illumination that it is very remarkable that a stick should exist and still more remarkable that a stick should stick up or stick out. He may be similarly enchanted with his own stick of charcoal or gray chalk. He may be enraptured, as a child is, with the mere fact that it makes a mark on the paper. A highly poetic fact in itself. But the child does not despise the real tree for being different from his drawing of the tree. He does not despise Uncle Humphrey because the talented amateur can really draw a tree. He does not think less of the real sticks because they are live sticks and can grow and branch and curve in a way uncommon in walking sticks. Because he has a single eye he can enjoy a double pleasure. This distinction, which seems strangely neglected, may be traced again in the drama and most other domains of art. Reforms insist that the audiences of simpler ages were content with bare boards or rudimentary scenery if they could hear Sophocles or Shakespeare talking a language of the gods. They were very properly contented with plain boards. But they were not discontented with pageants. The people who appreciated Antony's oration as such would have appreciated Aladdin's palace as such. They did not think gilding and spangles, substitutes for poetry and philosophy because they are not. But they did think gilding and spangles great and admirable gifts of God because they are. But the application of this distinction here is to the case of rhyme in poetry. And the application of it is that we should never be ashamed of enjoying the thing as a rhyme as well as enjoying it as a poem. And I think the modern poets who try to escape from the rhyming pleasure in pursuit of a freer poetical pleasure are making the same fundamentally fallacious attempt to combine simplicity with superiority. Such a poet is like a child who could take no pleasure in a tree because it looked like a tree, or a play-goer who could take no pleasure in the forest of Arden because it looked like a forest. It is not impossible to find a sort of prig who professes that he could listen to literature in any scenery, but strongly objects to good scenery. And in poetical criticism and creation there has also appeared the prig who insists that any new poem must avoid the sort of melody that makes the beauty of any old song. Poets must put away childish things. Including the child's pleasure in the mere sing-song of irrational rhyme. It may be hinted that when poets put away childish things they will put away poetry. But it may be well to say a word in further justification of rhyme as well as poetry in the child as well as the poet. Now the neglect of this nursery instinct would be a blunder, even if it were merely an animal instinct or an automatic instinct. If a rhyme were to a man merely what a bark is to a dog or a crow to a cock it would be clear that such natural things cannot be merely neglected. It is clear that a canine epic about Argus instead of Ulysses would have a beat ultimately consisting of barks. It is clear that a long poem like Chanticleer written by a real cock would be to the tune of a cockadoodle do. But in truth the nursery rhyme has a nobler origin. If it be ancestral it is not animal. Its principle is a primary one, not only in the body but in the soul. Milton prefaced Paradise Lost with a ponderous condemnation of rhyme. And perhaps the finest and even the most familiar line in the whole of Paradise Lost is really a glorification of rhyme. Season's return, but not to me return, is not only an echo that has all the ring of a rhyme in its form, but it happens to contain nearly all the philosophy of rhyme in its spirit. The wonderful word return has not only in its sound but in its sense the hint of the whole secret of song. It is not merely that its very form is a fine example of a certain quality in English, somewhat similar to that which Mrs. Weynel admirably analyzed in a former issue of this magazine in the case of words like Unforgiven. It is that it describes poetry itself, not only in a mechanical but a moral sense. Song is not only a recurrence, it is a return. It does not merely like the child in the nursery take pleasure in seeing the wheels go round. It also wishes to go back as well as round, to go back to the nursery where such pleasures are found, or to vary the metaphor slightly, it does not merely rejoice in the rotation of a wheel on the road as if it were a fixed wheel in the air. It is not only the wheel but the wagon that is returning. That laboring caravan is always traveling towards some camping ground that it has lost and cannot find again. No lover of poetry needs to be told that all poems are full of that noise of returning wheels and none more than the poems of Milton himself. The whole truth is obvious, not merely in the poem but even in the two words of the title. All poems might be bound in one book under the title of Paradise Lost, and the only object of writing Paradise Lost is to turn it, if only by a magic and momentary illusion, into Paradise We Gained. It is in this deeper significance of return that we must seek for the peculiar power and the recurrence we call rhyme. It would be easy enough to reply to Milton's strictures on rhyme in the spirit of a sensible, if superficial, liberality, by saying that it takes all sorts to make a world, and especially the world of poets. It is evident enough that Milton might have been right to dispense with rhyme without being right to despise it. It is obvious that the peculiar dignity of his religious epic would have been weakened if it had been a rhymed epic, beginning of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal root. But it is equally obvious that Milton himself would not have tripped on the light-fantastic tow with quite so much charming cheerfulness in the lines, but come thou goddess fair and free in heaven ye-clept euphrosiny, if the goddess had been e-clept something else, as for the sake of argument, syrinx. Milton in his more reasonable moods would have allowed rhyme and theory a place in all poetry as he allowed it in practice in his own poetry, but he would certainly have said at this time, and possibly at all times, that he allowed it in inferior place, or at least a secondary place. But is its place secondary? And is it in any sense inferior? The romance of rhyme does not consist merely in the pleasure of a jingle, though this is a pleasure of which no man should be ashamed. Certainly most men take pleasure in it. Whether or not they are ashamed of it. We see in it the older fashion of prolonging the chorus of a song with syllables like rumpty-tumpty or pluralural. We see it in the similar but later fashion of discussing whether a truth is objective or subjective, or whether a reform is constructive or destructive, or whether an argument is deductive or inductive, all bearing witness to a very natural love for those nursery rhyme recurrences which make a sort of song without words, or at least without any kind of intellectual significance. But something much deeper is involved in the love of rhyme as distinct from other poetic forms, something which is perhaps too deep and subtle to be described. The nearest approximation to the truth I can think of is something like this, that while all forms of genuine verse recur, there is in rhyme a sense of return to exactly the same place. All modes of song go forward and backward like the tides of the sea, but in the great sea of Homeric and Regillian hexameters, the sea that carry the laboring ships of Ulysses and Onius the thunder of the breakers is rhythmic, but the margin of the foam is necessarily irregular and vague. In rhyme there is rather a sense of water poured safely into one familiar well, or, to use a noble or metaphor, of ale poured safely into one familiar flaggin. The armies of Homer and Virgil advance and retreat over a vast country, and suggest vast and very profound sentiments about it, about whether it is their own country or only a strange country, but when the old nameless ballad boldly rhymes the bonny ivy tree to my ink country, the visionet once dwindles and sharpens to a very vivid image of a single soldier passing under the ivy that darkens his own door. Rhythm deals with similarity, but rhyme with identity. Now, in the one word identity, are involved perhaps the deepest and certainly the dearest human things. He who is homesick does not desire houses or even homes. He who is lovesick does not want to see all the women with whom he might have fallen in love. Only he who is seasick, perhaps, may be said to have a cosmopolitan craving for all lands or any kind of land. And this is probably why seasickness, like cosmopolitanism, is never yet been a high inspiration to song. Songs, especially the most poignant of them, generally refer to some absolute, to some positive place or person for whom no similarity is a substitute. In such a case, all approximation is merely asymptotic. The prodigal returns to his father's house and not the house next door, unless he is still an imperfectly sober prodigal. The lover desires his lady and not her twin sister, except in old complications of romance. And even the spiritualist is generally looking for a ghost and not merely for ghosts. I think the intolerable torture of spiritualism must be a doubt about identity. Anyhow, it will generally be found that where this call for the identical has been uttered most ringingly and unmistakably in literature, it has been uttered in rhyme. Another purpose for which this pointed and definite form is very much fitted is the expression of dogma, as distinct from doubt or even opinion. This is why, with all allowance for a decline in the most classical effects of the classical tongue, the rhymed Latin of the medieval hymns does express what it had to express in a very poignant poetical manner, as compared with the reverent agnosticism so nobly uttered in the rolling unrhymed meters of the ancients. For even if we regard the matter of the medieval verses as a dream, it was at least a vivid dream, a dream full of faces, a dream of love, and of lost things. And something of the same spirit runs in a vaguer way through proverbs and phrases that are not exactly religious but rather in a rude sense philosophical, but which all move with the burden of returning, things to be felt only in familiar fragments, on reviant toujours. It's the old story, it's love that makes the world go round, and all roads lead to rhyme. We might almost say that all roads lead to rhyme. Milton's revolt against rhyme must be read in the light of history. Milton is the renaissance frozen into a Puritan form, the beginning of a period which was in a sense classic, but was in a still more definite sense aristocratic. There the classicist was the artistic aristocrat, because the Calvinist was the spiritual aristocrat. The seventeenth century was intensely individualistic. It had both in the noble and the innoble sense of respect for persons. It had no respect, whatever, for popular traditions. And it was in the midst of its purely logical and legal excitement that most of the popular traditions died. The parliament appeared and the people disappeared. The arts were put under patrons where they had once been under patron saints. The schools and colleges at once strengthened and narrowed the new learning, making it something rather peculiar to one country and one class. A few men talked a great deal of good Latin, where all men had once talked a little bad Latin. But they talked even the good Latin, so that no Latinist in the world could understand them. They confined all study of the classics to that of the most classical period, and grossly exaggerated the barbarity and barrenness of patriotic Greek or medieval Latin. It is as if a man said that because the English translation of the Bible is perhaps the best English in the world, therefore Addison and Peter and Newman are not worth reading. We can imagine what men in such a mood would have said of the rude, rhymed hexameters of the monks. And it is not unnatural that they should have felt a reaction against rhyme itself. For the history of rhyme is the history of something else, very vast and sometimes invisible, certainly somewhat indefinable, against which they were in aristocratic rebellion. That thing is difficult to define in impartial, modern terms. It might well be called romance, and that even in a more technical sense, since it corresponds to the rise of the romance languages as distinct from the Roman language. It might more truly be called religion. For historically it was the gradual reemergence of Europe through the Dark Ages, because it still had one religion, though no longer one rule. It was in short the creation of Christendom. It may be called legend, for it is true that the most overpowering presence in it is that of omnipresent and powerful popular legend. So that things that may never have happened, or as some say could never have happened, are nevertheless rooted in our racial memory like things that have happened to ourselves. The whole Arthurian cycle, for instance, seems something more real than reality. In the faces of that darkness of the Dark Ages Lancelot and Arthur and Merlin and Mordred are indeed faces in a dream. They are like faces in a real dream. A dream, in a bed, and not a dream in a book. Subconsciously, at least, I should be much less surprised if Arthur was to come again than I should be if the Superman were to come at all. Again the thing might be called gossip, a noble name, having in it the name of God, and one of the most generous and genial of the relations of men. For I suppose there has seldom been a time when such a mass of culture and good traditions of craft and song have been handed down orally by one universal buzz of conversation, through centuries of ignorance down to centuries of greater knowledge. Education must have been an eternal viva voce examination, but the men passed their examination. At least they went out in such rude sense, masters of art, as to create the song of Rollin and the round Roman arches that carry the weight of so many Gothic towers. Finally, of course, it can be called ignorance, barbarism, black superstition, a reaction towards obscurantism and old night, and such a vie is eminently complete and satisfactory only that it leaves behind it a sort of weak wonder as to why the very youngest poets do still go on writing poems about the sort of Arthur and the Horn of Rollin. All this was but the beginning of a process which has two great points of interest. The first is the way in which the medieval movement did rebuild the old Roman civilization. The other was the way in which it did not. A strange interest attaches to the things which had never existed in the pagan culture, and did appear in the Christian culture. I think it is true of most of them that they had a quality that can be very approximately be described as popular, or perhaps as vulgar, as indeed we still talk of the languages which at that time liberated themselves from Latin as the vulgar tongues. And to many classicists, these things would appear to be vulgar in a more vulgar sense. They were vulgar in the sense of being vivid almost to excess of making a very direct and unsophisticated appeal to the emotions. The first law of heraldry was to wear the heart upon the sleeve. Such mediaevalism was the reverse of mere mysticism, in the sense of mere mystery. It might more truly be described as sensationalism. One of these things for instance was a hot and even impatient love of color. It learned to paint before it could draw, and could afford the two pence colored long before it could manage the penny plain. It culminated at last of course in the energy and gaiety of the Gothic, but even the richness of Gothic rested on a certain psychological simplicity. We can contrast it with the classic by noting its popular passion for telling a story in stone. We may admit that a Doric portico was a poem, but no one would describe it as an anecdote. The time was to come when much of the imagery of the cathedrals was to be lost, but it would have mattered the less that it was defaced by its enemies if it had not been already neglected by its friends. It would have mattered less if the whole tide of taste among the rich had not turned against the old popular masterpieces. The Puritans defaced them, but the Cavaliers did not truly defend them. The Cavaliers were also aristocrats of the new classical culture, and used the word Gothic in the sense of barbaric. For the benefit of the Teutonists we may note in parentheses that if this phrase meant that Gothic was despised, it also meant that the Goths were despised. But when the Cavaliers came back after the Puritan interregnum they restored not in the style of Pugin, but in the style of Wren. The very thing we call the Restoration, which was the Restoration of King Charles, was also the Restoration of St. Paul's, and it was a very modern Restoration. So far as we might say that simple people do not like simple things, this is certainly true if we compare the classics with these highly colored things of medievalism, or all the vivid visions which first began to glow in the night of the Dark Ages. Now one of these things was the romantic expedient called Rhyme, and even in this, if we compare the two, we shall see something of the same paradox by which the simple like complexities, and the complex like simplicities. The ignorant like rich carvings, and melodious and often ingenious rhymes. The learned like bare walls and blank verse. In the case of Rhyme it is peculiarly difficult to define the double and yet the very definite truth. It is difficult to define the sense in which Rhyme is artificial and the sense in which it is simple. In truth it is simple because it is artificial. It is an artifice of the kind enjoyed by children and other poetic people. It is a toy. As a technical accomplishment it stands at the same distance from the popular experience as the old popular sports, like swimming, like dancing, like drawing on the bow, anybody can do it, but nobody can do it without taking the trouble to do it, and only a few can do it very well. In a hundred ways it was akin to that simple and even humble energy that made all the lost glory of the guilds. Thus their Rhyme was useful, as well as ornamental. It was not merely a melody, but also a mnemonic, just as their towers were not merely trophies but beacons and belfries. In another aspect Rhyme is akin to rhetoric, but of a very positive and emphatic sort, the coincidence of sound giving the effect of saying it is certainly so. Shakespeare realized this when he rounded off a fierce or romantic scene with a rhymed couplet. I know that some critics do not like this, but I think there is a moment when a drama ought to become a melodrama. Then there is a much older effect of Rhyme that can only be called mystical, which may seem the very opposite of the utilitarian and almost equally remote from the rhetorical. Yet it shares with the former the tough texture of something not easily forgotten, and with a latter the touch of authority, which is the aim of all oratory. The thing I mean may be found in the fact that so many of the old proverbial prophecies from Merlin to Mother Shipton were handed down in Rhyme. It can be found in the very name of Thomas the Rhymer. But the simplest way of putting this popular quality is in a single word. It is a song. Rhyme corresponds to a melody so simple that it goes straight like an arrow to the heart. It corresponds to a chorus so familiar and obvious that all men can join in it. I am not disturbed by the suggestion that such an arrow of song, when it hits the heart, may entirely miss the head. I am not concerned to deny that the chorus may sometimes be a drunken chorus in which men have lost their heads to find their tongues. I am not defending but defining. I am trying to find words for a large but elusive distinction between certain things that are certainly poetry and certain other things which are also song. Of course it is only an accident that Horace opens his greatest series of odes by saying that he detests the profane populace and wishes to drive them from his temple of poetry. But it is the sort of accident that is almost an allegory. There is even a sense in which it has a practical side. When all is said, could a whole crowd of men sing the Descende Coella, that noble ode, as a crowd can certainly sing the DSC Ray, for that matter, down among the dead men? Did Horace himself sing the Horatian Odes in the sense in which Shakespeare could sing or could hardly help singing the Shakespearean songs? I do not know. Having no kind of scholarship on these points, but I do not feel that it could have been at all the same thing, and my only purpose is to attempt a rude description of that thing. Rhyme is consonant to the particular kind of song that can be a popular song, whether pathetic or passionate or comic, and Milton is entitled to his true distinction. Nobody is likely to sing Paradise Lost as if it were a song of that kind. I have tried to suggest my sympathy with Rhyme in terms true enough to be accepted by the other side as expressing their antipathy for it. I have admitted that Rhyme is a toy and even a trick of the sort that delights children. I have admitted that every Rhyme is a nursery rhyme. What I will never admit is that anyone who is too big for their nursery is big enough for the kingdom of God, though the God were only Apollo. A good critic should be like God in the great saying of a Scottish mystic. George MacDonald said that God was easy to please and hard to satisfy. That paradox is the poise of all good artistic appreciation. Without the first part of the paradox, appreciation perishes, because it loses the power to appreciate. Good criticism, I repeat, combines the subtle pleasure in a thing being done well with the simple pleasure in it being done at all. It combines the pleasure of the scientific engineer in seeing how the wheels work together to a logical end with the pleasure of the baby and seeing the wheels go round. It combines the pleasure of the artistic draftsman in the fact that his lines of charcoal, light and apparently loose, fall exactly right and in perfect relation with the pleasure of the child in the fact that the charcoal makes marks of any kind on the paper. And in the same fashion it combines the critic's pleasure in a poem with the child's pleasure in a rhyme. The historical point about this kind of poetry, the rhyme to romantic kind, is that it rose out of the dark ages with the whole of this huge popular power behind it. The human love of a song, a riddle, a proverb, a pun, or a nursery rhyme. The sing-song of innumerable children's games, the chorus of a thousand campfires and a thousand taverns. When poetry loses its link with all these people who are easily pleased, it loses all its power of giving pleasure. When a poet looks down on a rhyme, it is, I will not say as if he looked down on a daisy, which might seem possible to the more literal-minded, but rather as if he looked down on a lark, because he had been up in a balloon. It is cutting away the very roots of poetry. It is revolting against the nature because it is natural, against sunshine because it is bright, or mountains because they are high, or moonlight because it is mysterious. The freezing process began after the Reformation with a fastidious search for finer yet freer forms. Today it has ended in formlessness, but the joke of it is that even when it is formless, it is still fastidious. The new anarchic artists are not ready to accept everything. They are not ready to accept anything except anarchy. Unless it observes the very latest conventions of unconventionality, they would rule out anything classic, as coldly as any classic ever ruled out anything romantic. But the classic was a form, and there was even a time when it was a new form. The men who invented sapphix did invent a new meter. The introduction of a Elizabethian blank verse was a real revolution in the literary form, but Valley Bray, or nine-tenths of it, is not a new meter any more than sleeping in a ditch as a new school of architecture. It is no more a revolution in literary form than eating meat raw as an innovation in cookery. It is not even original because it is not creative. The artist does not invent anything but only abolishes something. But the only point about it, that is to my present purpose, is expressed in the word pride. It is not merely proud in the sense of being exalted, but proud in the sense of being disdainful. Such outlaws are more exclusive than aristocrats, and their anarchial arrogance goes far beyond the pride of Milton and the aristocrats of the new learning. And this final refinement has completed the work which the senior aristocrats began. The work now most evident in the world. The separation of art from the people. I need not insist on the sensational and self-evident character of that separation. I need not recommend the modern poet to attempt to sing his Valley Bray in a public house. I need not even urge the young imagist to read out a number of his disconnected images to a public meeting. The thing is not only admitted but admired. The old artist remained proud in spite of his unpopularity. The new artist is proud because of his unpopularity. Perhaps it is his chief ground for pride. Dwelling as I do in the Dark Ages, or at least along the medieval fairy tales, I am yet moved to remember something I once read in a modern fairy tale. As it happens I have already used the name of George MacDonald, and in the best of his books there is a description of how a young miner in the mountains could always drive away the subterranean goblins if he could remember and repeat any kind of rhyme. The impromptu rhymes were often doggerel, as was the dog-latan of many monkish hexameters or the burden of many rude border ballads. But I have a notion that they drove away the devils, blue devils of pessimism, and black devils of pride. Anyhow, Madame Montessori, who has apparently been deploring the educational effects of fairy tales, would probably see in me a pitiable example of such early perversion, for that image, which was one of my first impressions, seems likely enough to be one of my last. And when the noise of many new and original musical instruments with strange shapes and still stranger noises has passed away like a procession I shall hear in the succeeding silence only a rustle and scramble among the rocks, and a boy singing on the mountain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Brandon. Fancies vs. Fads by G.K. Chesterton. Hamlet and the Psychoanalyst. This morning, for a long stretch of hours before breakfast, and even as it were, merging into breakfast, an almost overlapping breakfast, I was engaged in scientific researches in the great new department of psychoanalysis. Every journalist knows by this time that psychoanalysis largely depends on the study of dreams. But in order to study our dreams, it is necessary to dream. And in order to dream, it is necessary to sleep. So while others threw away the golden hours in lighter and less learned occupations, while ignorant and superstitious peasants were already digging in their ignorant and superstitious kitchen gardens to produce their ignorant and superstitious beans and potatoes, while priests were performing their pious mummeries and poets composing lyrics on listening to the skylock, I myself was pioneering hundreds of years ahead of this benighted century, ruthlessly and progressively probing into all the various horrible nightmares from which a happier future will take its oracles and its commandments. I will not describe my dreams in detail. I'm not quite so ruthless a psychologist is all that. And indeed it strikes me as possible that the new psychologist will be rather a bore at breakfast. My dream was something about wandering in some sort of catacombs under the Albert Hall, and it involved eating jumbles. A brown flexible cake now almost gone from us, like so many glories of England. And also arguing with a theosophist. I cannot fit this in very well with Freud and his theory of suppressed impulses. For I swear I never in my life suppressed the impulse to eat a jumble or to argue with a theosophist. And as for wandering about in the Albert Hall, nobody could ever have had an impulse to do that. When I came down to breakfast I looked at the morning paper. Not as you humorously suggest at the evening paper. I had not pursued my scientific studies quite so earnestly as that. I looked at the morning paper, as I say, and found it contained a good deal about psychoanalysis. Indeed it explained almost everything about psychoanalysis except what it was. This was naturally a thing which newspapers would present in a rather fragmentary fashion. And I fitted the fragments together as best I could. Apparently the dreams were merely symbols. And apparently symbols of something very savage and horrible which remained secret. This seems to me a highly unscientific use of the word symbol. A symbol is not a disguise but rather a display. The best expression of something that cannot otherwise be expressed. Eating a jumble may mean that I wish to bite off my father's nose. The mother complex being strong on me. But it does not seem to show much symbolic talent. The Albert Hall may imply the murder of an uncle but it hardly makes itself very clear. And we do not seem to be getting much nearer the truth by dreaming. If we hide things by night more completely then we repress them by day. Anyhow the murdered uncle reminds me of Hamlet of whom Moronon. At the moment I am merely remarking that my newspaper was a little vague. And I was all the more relieved to open my London Mercury and find an article on the subject by so able and suggestive a writer as Mr. J. D. Bairsford. Mr. J. D. Bairsford practically asked himself whether he should become a psychoanalyst or continue to be a novelist. It will readily be understood that he did not put it precisely in these words. He would probably put psychoanalysis higher and very possibly his own fiction lower. For men of genius are often innocent enough of their own genuine originality. That is a form of the unconscious mind with which none of us will quarrel. But I have no desire to watch a man of genius tying himself in knots and perhaps dying in agony in the attempt to be conscious of his own unconsciousness. I have seen too many unfortunate skeptics thus committing suicide by self-contradiction. Hegel and his determinists in my youth bullied us all about the urgent necessity of choosing a philosophy which would prove the impossibility of choosing anything. No doubt the new psychology will somehow enable us to know what we are doing about all that we do without knowing it. These things come and go and pass through their phases in order. From the time when they are as experimental as Freudism to the time when they are as exploded as Darwinism. But I never can understand men allowing things so visibly fugitive to hide things that are visibly permanent like morals and religion. And what is in question here? The art of letters. Ars Lunga Ciencia Brevis. Anyhow, as has been said, psychoanalysis depends in practice upon the interpretation of dreams. I do not know whether making masses of people, chiefly children, confess their dreams would lead to a great output of literature, though it would certainly lead to find out anything of human nature to a glorious output of lies. There is something touching in the inhuman innocence of the psychologist who is already talking of the scientific exactitude of results reached by one particular sort of evidence that cannot conceivably be checked or tested in any way whatever. But as Mr. Bairford truly says, the general notion of finding signs in dreams is as old as the world. But even the special theory of it is older than many seem to suppose. Indeed, it is not only old but obvious. It was never discovered because it was always noticed. Long before the present fashion, I myself, who heaven knows, am no psychologist, remember saying that as there is truth in all popular traditions, there is truth in the popular saying that dreams go by the rule of contraries. That is, that a man does often think at night about the very things he does not think by day. But the popular saying had in it a certain virtue never found in the anti-popular sciences of our day. Popular superstition has one enormous element of sanity. It is never serious. We talk of ages like the medieval as the ages of faith. But it would be quite as true a tribute to call them the ages of doubt, of a healthy doubt, and even a healthy derision. There was always something more or less consciously grotesque about an old ghost story. There was fun mixed with the fear, and the Yokels knew too much about turnips, not occasionally, to think of turnip ghosts. There is no fun about psychoanalysis. One Yokel would say, are. They do say dreams go by contraries. And then the others would say are. And they would all laugh in a deep internal fashion. But when Mr. J. D. Bersford says that Freud's theory is among scientific theories the most attractive for novelists, it was a theory of sex. The all but universal theme of the novel. It is clear that our audience is slower and more solemn than the Yokels. For nobody laughs at all. People seem to have lost the power of reacting to the humorous stimulus. When one milkmaid dreamed of a funeral, the other milkmaid said, that means a wedding. And then they would both giggle. But when Mr. J. D. Bersford says that the theory adumbrated the suggestion of a freer morality by dwelling upon the physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of impulse, the point seems somehow to be missed. Not a single giggle is heard in the deep and disappointing silence. It seems truly strange that when a modern and brilliant artist actually provides jokes far more truly humorous than the rude jests of the Yokels and the milkmaids, the finer effort should meet with feebler responses. It is but an example of the unnatural solemnity, like an artificial vacuum in which all these modern experiments are conducted. But no doubt if Freud had enjoyed the opportunity of explaining his ideas in an ancient alehouse, they would have met with more spontaneous applause. I hope I do not seem unsympathetic with Mr. Bersford, or not only admire his talent, but I am at this moment acting in strict obedience to his theories. I am, I say it proudly, acting as a disciple of Freud. Who apparently forbids me to conceal any impulse presumably including the impulse to laugh. I may no disrespect to Mr. Bersford, but my first duty of course is to my own psychological inside. And goodness knows what damage might not be done to the most delicate workings of my own mental apparatus. As Mr. Arnold Bennett called it, if I were to subject it to the sudden and violent strain of not smiling at the scientific theory, which is attractive because it is sexual, or of forcing my features into a frightful composure when I hear of the spiritual necessity for the liberation of impulse. I am not quite sure how far the liberation of impulse is to be carried out in practice by its exponents in theory. I do not know whether it is better to liberate the impulse to throw somebody else out of an express train in order to have the carriage to oneself all the way, or what may be the penalties for repressing the native instinct to shoot Mr. Lloyd George. But obviously the greater includes the less, and it would be very illogical if we were allowed to chuck out our fellow traveler, but not to chaff him, or if I were permitted to shoot at Mr. George, but not to smile at Mr. Bersford. And though I am not so serious as he is, I assure him that in this I am quite as sincere as he is. In that sense I do seriously regret his seriousness. I do seriously think such seriousness is a very serious evil. The impulse to laugh at the mention of morality as free, or of sex science as attractive, is one of the impulses which is already gratified by most people who have never heard of psychoanalysis and is only mortified by people like the psychoanalysts. Mr. Bersford must therefore excuse me. If with a sincere desire to follow his serious argument seriously, I note at the beginning a certain normal element of comedy of which critics of his school seem to be rather unconscious. When he asks whether this theory of the nemesis of suppression can serve the purposes of great literary work, it would seem natural at first to test it by the example of the greatest literary works. And judged by this scientific test it must be admitted that our literary classics would appear to fail. Lady Macbeth does not suffer as a sleepwalker because she has resisted the impulse to murder Duncan, but rather by some curious trick of thought because she has yielded to it. Hamlet's uncle is in a morbid frame of mind, not as one would naturally expect because he had thwarted his own development by leaving his own brother alive and in possession, but actually because he has triumphantly liberated himself from the morbid impulse to pour poison in his brother's ear. On the theory of psychoanalysis has expounded a man ought to be haunted by the ghosts of all the men he has not murdered. Even if they were limited to those he has felt a vague fancy for murdering. They might make a respectable crowd to follow at his heels. Yeah, Shakespeare certainly seems to represent Macbeth as haunted by Banquo, whom he removed at one blow from the light of the sun and from his own subconsciousness. Hell ought to mean the regret for lost opportunities for crime, the insupportable thought of houses still standing unburned or unburgled, or of wealthy uncles still walking about alive with their projecting watch chains. Yet Dante certainly seemed to represent it as concerned exclusively with things done and done with and not as merely the morbidly congested imagination of a thief who had not thieved and a murderer who had not murdered. In short, it is only to apparent that the poets and sages of the past knew very little of psychoanalysis and whether or no Mr. Bearsford can achieve great literary effects with it, they managed to achieve their literary effects without it. This is but a preliminary point and I touch the more serious problem in a few minutes if the fashion has not changed before then. For the moment I only take the test of literary experience and of how independent of such theories have been the real masterpieces of man. Men are still excited over the poetic parts of poets like Shakespeare and Dante. If they go to sleep, it is over the scientific parts. It is over some system of the spheres which Dante thought the very latest astronomy or some argument about the humors of the body which Shakespeare thought the very latest physiology. I appeal to Mr. Bearsford's indestructible sense of humanity and his still undestroyed sense of humor. What would have become of the work of Dickens if it had been rewritten to illustrate the thesis of Darwin? What even of the work of Mr. Kipling have modified to meet the theories of Mr. Kid? Believe me, the proportions are as I have said. Art is long, but science is fleeting. And Mr. Bearsford's subconsciousness, though stout and brave, is in danger of being not so much a muffled drum as a drum which somebody silences forever by knocking a hole in it, only to find nothing inside. But there is one incidental moral in the matter that seems to me topical and rather arresting concerns the idea of punishment. The psychoanalysts continue to buzz in a mysterious manner around the problem of Hamlet. They are especially interested in the things of which Hamlet was unconscious, not to mention the things of which Shakespeare was unconscious. It is in vain for old-fashioned rationalists like myself to point out that this is like dissecting the brain of Puck or revealing the real private life of Punch and Judy. The discussion no longer revolves around whether Hamlet is mad. But whether everybody is mad, especially the experts investigating the madness. And the curious thing about this process is that even when the critics are really subtle enough to see subtle things, they are never simple enough to see self-evident things. A really fine critic has reported as arguing that in Hamlet, the consciousness willed one thing and the subconsciousness another. Apparently the conscious Hamlet had unreservably embraced and even welcomed the obligation of vengeance. But the shock, we are told, had rendered the whole subject painful and started a strange and secret aversion to the scheme. It did not seem to occur to the writers that there might possibly be something slightly painful at the best in cutting the throat of your own uncle and the husband of your own mother. There might certainly be an aversion from the act, but I do not quite see why it should be an unconscious aversion. It seems just possible that a man might be quite conscious of not liking such a job. Where he differed from the modern morality was that he believed in the possibility of disliking it and yet doing it. But to follow the argument of these critics, one would think that murdering the head of one's family was a sort of family festivity or family joke. A gay and innocent indulgence into which the young prince would naturally have thrown himself with thoughtless exuberance, but for the dark and secretive thoughts that had given him an unaccountable distaste for it. Suppose it were born in upon one of these modern middle-class critics of my own rank and routine of life, possibly, through his confidence in the messages of a spiritualist seance, that it was his business to go home to Brompton or Serbitsen and stick the carving knife into Uncle William, who had poisoned somebody and was beyond the reach of the law. It is possible that the critic's first thought would be that it was a happy way of spending a half-holiday, and that only in the critic's subconsciousness the suspicion would stir that there was something unhappy about the whole business. But it seems also possible that the regret might not be confined to his subconsciousness, but might swim almost to the surface of his consciousness. In plain words this sort of criticism has lost the last rags of common sense. Hamlet requires no such subconscious explanation, for he explains himself and was perhaps rather too fond of doing so. He was a man to whom duty had come in a very dreadful and repulsive form, and to a man not fitted for that form of duty. There was a conflict, but he was conscious of it from beginning to end. He was not an unconscious person, but a far too conscious one. Strangely enough, this theory of subconscious repulsion in the dramatic character is itself an example of subconscious repulsion in the modern critic. It is the critic who has a sort of subliminal prejudice which makes him avoid something that seems very simple to others. The thing which he secretly and obscurely avoids from the start is the very simple fact of the morality in which Shakespeare did believe, as distinct from all the crude psychology in which he almost certainly did not believe. Shakespeare certainly did believe in the struggle between duty and inclination. The critic instinctively avoids the admission that Hamlet's was the struggle between duty and inclination, and tries to substitute a struggle between consciousness and subconsciousness. He gives Hamlet a complex to avoid giving him a conscience, but he is actually forced to talk as if it was a man's natural inclination to kill an uncle, because he does not want to admit that it might be his duty to kill him. He is really driven to talking as if some dark and secretive monomania alone prevented us all from killing our uncles. He is driven to this because he will not even take seriously the simple, and if you will, primitive morality upon which the tragedy is built. For that morality involves three moral propositions from which the whole of the morbid modern subconsciousness does really recoil as from an ugly jar of pain. These principles are, first, that it may be our main business to do the right thing, even when we detest doing it. Second, that the right thing may involve punishing some person, especially some powerful person. Third, that the just process of punishment may take the form of fighting and killing. The modern critic is prejudiced against the first principle and calls it asceticism. He is prejudiced against the second principle and calls it vindictiveness. He is prejudiced against the third and generally calls it militarism. That it actually might be the duty of a young man to risk his own life much against his own inclination by drawing a sword and killing a tyrant. That is an idea instinctively avoided by this particular mood of modern times. That is why tyrants have such a good time in modern times. And in order to avoid this plain and obvious meaning of war as a duty and peace as a temptation, the critic has to turn the whole play upside down and seek its meaning in modern notions so remote as to be in this connection meaningless. He has to make William Shakespeare of Stratford one of the pupils of Professor Freud. He has to make him a champion of psychoanalysis, which is like making him a champion of vaccination. He has to fit Hamlet's soul somehow into the classifications of Freud and Jung, which is just as if he had to fit Hamlet's father into the classifications of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He has to interpret the whole thing by a new morality that Shakespeare had never heard of because he has an intense internal dislike of the old morality that Shakespeare could not help hearing of. And that morality, which some of us believe to be based on a much more realistic psychology, is that punishment as punishment is a perfectly healthy process, not merely because it is reform, but also because it is expiation. What the modern world means by proposing to substitute pity for punishment is really very simple. It is that the modern world dare not punish those who are punishable, but only those who are pityable. It would never touch anyone so important as King Claudius or Kaiser William. Now, this truth is highly topical just now. The point about Hamlet was that he wavered very exclusively in something that had to be done, and this is the point quite apart from whether we ourselves would have done it. That was pointed out long ago by Browning in the statue and the bust. He argued that even if the motive for acting was bad, the motive for not acting was worse. And an action or inaction is judged by its real motive, not by whether somebody else might have done the same thing from a better motive. Whether or not the tyrannicide of Hamlet was a duty, it was accepted as a duty and it was shirked as a duty. And that is precisely true of a tyrannicide like that, for which everybody clamored at the conclusion of the Great War. It may have been right or wrong to punish the Kaiser. It was certainly no more right to punish the German generals and admirals for their atrocities. But even if it was wrong, it was not abandoned because it was wrong. It was abandoned because it was troublesome. It was abandoned for all those motives, weakness and mutability of mood, which we associate with the name of Hamlet. It might be glory or ignominy to shed the blood of imperial enemies, but it is certainly ignominy to shout for what you dare not shed, to fall a cursing like a common drab, a scullion. Granted that we had no better motives than we had then or have now, it would certainly have been more dignified if we had fatted all the region kites with this slave's awful. The motive is the only moral test. A saint might provide us with a higher motive for forgiving the warlords who butchered friat and edith cavell. But we have not forgiven the warlords, we have simply forgotten the war. We have not pardoned like Christ. We have only procrastinated like Hamlet. Our highest motive has been laziness. Our commonest motive has been money. In this respect, indeed, I must apologize to the charming and chivalrous Prince of Denmark for comparing him, even on a single point, with the princes of finance and the professional politicians of our time. At least Hamlet did not spare Claudius solely because he hoped to get money out of him for the salaries of the players or meant to do a deal with him about wines supplied to Elsinore or debts contracted at Wittenberg. Still less was Hamlet acting entirely in the interests of Shilok, an inhabitant of the distant city of Venice. doubtless, Hamlet was sent to England in order that he might develop further those higher motives for peace and pardon. It will not be noticed in him there. There the men are mad as he. It is therefore very natural that men should be trying to dissolve the moral problem of Hamlet into the un-moral elements of consciousness and unconsciousness. The sort of duty that Hamlet shirked is exactly the sort of duty that we are all shirking, that of dethroning justice and vindicating truth. Many are now in a mood to deny that it is a duty because it is a danger. This applies of course not only to international but internal and especially industrial matters. Capitalism was allowed to grow into a towering tyranny in England because the English were always putting off their popular revolution. Just as the Prince of Denmark put off his palace revolution. They lectured the French about their love of bloody revolutions exactly as they are now lecturing the French about their love of bloody wars. But the patience which suffered England to be turned into a plutocracy was not the patience of the saints. It was the patience which paralyzed the noble prince of the tragedy, Asidia, and the great refusal. In any case, the vital point is that by refusing to punish the powerful, we soon lost the very idea of punishment and turned our police into a mere persecution of the poor. End of Chapter 3, Recording by John Brandon Having lately taken part in a pageant of nursery rhymes in the character of Old King Cole, I meditated not so much on the glorious past of the great Kingdom of Colchester as on the more doubtful future of nursery rhymes. The modern movements cannot produce a nursery rhyme. It is one of the many such things they cannot even be conceived as doing. But if they cannot create the nursery rhyme, will they destroy it? The new poets have already abolished rhyme, and presumably the new educationalists will soon abolish nurseries. Or if they do not destroy, will they reform? Which is worse? Nursery rhymes are a positive network of notions and illusions of which they enlightened disapprove. To take only my own allotted rhyme as an example, some might think the very mention of a king, a piece of reactionary royalism, inconsistent with that democratic self-determination we all enjoy under some five controllers and a committee of the cabinet. Perhaps in the amended version he will be called President Cole. Probably he will be confused with Mr. G. D. H. Cole, the first president of the Guild Socialistic Republic. With the greatest admiration for Mr. Cole, I cannot quite picture him as so festive a figure, and I inclined to think that the same influences will probably eliminate the festivity. It is said that America, having already abolished the bowl, is now attempting to abolish the pipe. After that it might very reasonably go on to abolish the fiddlers, for music can be far more maddening than wine. Tolstoy, the only consistent prophet of the simple life, did really go on to denounce music as a mere drug. Anyhow, it is quite intolerable that the innocent minds of children should be poisoned with the idea of anybody calling for his pipe and his bowl. There will have to be some other version, such as, he called for his milk and he called for his lozenge, or whatever form of bodily pleasure is still permitted to mankind. This particular verse will evidently have to be altered a great deal. It is founded on so antiquated a philosophy that I fear even the alteration will not be easy or complete. I am not sure, for instance, that there is not a memory of animism and spiritism in the very word soul used in calling the monarch a mere old soul. It would seem that some other simple phrase such as a mere old organism might be used with advantage. Indeed, it would save more advantages than one. For if the reader will say the amended line in a flowing and lyrical manner, he cannot but observe that the experiment has burst the fetters of formal meter and achieved one of these larger and lovelier melodies that we associate with verse libra. It is needless to note the numberless other examples of nursery rhymes to which the same criticism applies. Some of the other cases are even more shocking to the true scientific spirit. For instance, in the typically old world rhyme of girls and boys come out to play, there appear the truly appalling words, leave your supper and leave your sleep. As the great medical reformer of our day observed in a striking and immortal phrase, all eugenists are agreed upon the importance of sleep. The case of supper may be more complex and controversial. If the supper were a really hygienic and wholesome supper, it might not be so difficult to leave it. But it is obvious that the whole vision which the rhyme calls up is utterly incompatible with a wise educational supervision. It is a wild vision of children playing in the streets by moonlight for all the world as if they were fairies. Moonlight, like music, is credited with a power of upsetting the reason, and it is at least obvious that the indulgence is both unseasonable and unreasonable. No scientific reformer desires hasty and destructive action, for his reform is founded on that evolution which has produced the anthropoid from the amoeba, a process which none have ever stigmatized as hasty. But when the eugenist recalls the reckless and romantic love affairs encouraged by such moonlight, he will have to consider seriously the problem of abolishing the moon. But, indeed, I have much more sympathy with the simplicity of the baby who cries for the moon than with the sort of simplicity that dismisses the moon as all moonshine. And, indeed, I think that these two antagonistic types of simplicity are perhaps the pivotal terms of the present transition. It is a new thing called the simple life against an older thing which may be called the simple soul, possibly exemplified so far as nursery rhymes are concerned by the incident of simple Simon. I prefer the old simple Simon who, though ignorant of the economic theory of exchange, had at least a positive and poetic enthusiasm for pies. I think him far wiser than the new simple Simon who simplifies his existence by means of a perverse and pedantic antipathy to pies. It is unnecessary to add that this philosophy of pies is applicable with peculiar force to mince pies and thus to the whole of the Christmas tradition which descended from the first carols to the imaginative world of Dickens. The morality of that tradition is much too simple and obvious to be understood today. Awful as it may seem to many modern people, it means no less than that simple Simon should have his pies, even in the absence of his pennies. But the philosophy of the two simple Simons is plain enough. The former is an expansion of simplicity towards complexity. Simon, conscious that he cannot himself make pies, approaches them with an ardor not unmixed with awe. But the latter is a reaction of complexity towards simplicity. In other words, the other Simon refuses pies for various reasons, often including the fact that he has eaten too many of them. Most of the simple life as we see it today is, of course, a thing having this character of the surfeit or satiety of Simon when he has become less simple and certainly less greedy. This reaction may take two diverse forms. It may send Simon searching for more and more expensive and extravagant confectionery, or it may reduce him to nibbling at some new kind of nut biscuit. For it may be noted in passing that it probably will not reduce him to eating dry bread. The simple life never accepts anything that is simple in the sense of self-evident and familiar. The thing must be uncommonly simple. It must not be simply common. Its philosophy must be something higher than the ordinary breakfast table and something drier than dry bread. The usual process as I have observed it in vegetarian and other summaries seems in one sense indeed to be simple enough. The pie man produces what looks like the same sort of pie or is supposed to look like it. Only it has thinner crust outside and nothing at all inside. Then, instead of asking simple Simon for a penny, he asks him for a pound or possibly a guinea or a five pound note. And what is strangest of all? The customer is often so singularly simple a Simon that he pays for it. For that is perhaps the final and most marked difference between Simon of the simple spirit and Simon of the simple life. It is the fact that the ardent and appreciative Simon was not in possession of a penny. The more refined and exalted Simon is generally in possession of far too many pennies. He is often very rich and needs to be. For the drier and thinner and emptier are the pies, the more he is charged for them. But this alone will reveal another side of the same paradox. And if it be possible to spend a lot of money on the simple life, it is also possible to make a great deal of money out of it. There are several self-advertisers doing very well out of the new self-denial. But wealth is always at one end of it or the other. And that is the great difference between the two Simons. Perhaps it is the difference between Simon Peter and Simon Magus. I have before me a little pamphlet in which the most precise directions are given for a muck turkey, for a vegetarian midspie, and for a cautious and hygienic Christmas pudding. I have never quite understood why it should be a part of the simple life to have anything so deceptive and almost conspiratorial as an imitation turkey. The course and comic Alderman may be expected, in his festive rivalry, to muck a turtle, but surely a lean and earnest humanitarian ought not to muck a turkey. Nor do I understand the theory of the imitation in its relation to the ideal. Surely one who thinks meat-eating mere cannibalism ought not to arrange vegetables so as to look like an animal. It is as if a converted cannibal in the Sandwich Islands were to arrange joints of meat in the shape of a missionary. The missionaries would surely regard the proceedings of their convert as something less than approval and perhaps with something akin to alarm. But the consistency of these concessions I will leave on one side, because I am not here concerned with the concessions but with the creed itself. And I am concerned with the creed not merely as affecting its practice in diet or cookery, but its general theory. For the compilers of the little book before me are great on philosophy and books. There are whole pages about brotherhood and fellowship and happiness and healing. In short, as the writer observes, we have also some mental helps as set forth in the flood of psychology literature today but raised to a higher plane. It may be a little risky to set a thing forth in a flood or a little difficult to raise a flood to a higher plane, but there is, behind these rather vague expressions, a very real modern intelligence and point of view common to considerable numbers of cultivated people and well worthy of some further study. Under the title of How to Think there are 24 rules of which the first few are Empty your mind Think of the best things Appreciate Analyze Prepare physically Prepare mentally and so on. I have met some earnest students of this school who had apparently entered on this course but at the time of our meeting had only graduated so far as the fulfillment of the first rule. It was more obvious on the whole that they had succeeded in the preliminary process of emptying the mind than that they had as yet thought of the best things or analyzed or appreciated anything in particular. But there were others I willingly admit who had really thought of certain things in a genuinely thoughtful fashion though whether they were really the best things might involve a difference of opinion between us. Still, so far as they are concerned it is a school of thought and therefore worth thinking about. Having been able to this extent to appreciate their attempt to analyze. I have attempted to discover in my own mind where the difference between us really lies apart from all these superficial jests and journalistic points to ask myself why it is exactly that their ideal vegetarian differs so much from my ideal Christian and the result of the concentrated contemplation of their ideal is I confess that they are not impatient forward plunge in the progress of their initiation. I am strongly disposed to prepare physically for a conflict with the ideal vegetarian with the only hope of hitting him on the nose. In one of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse's stories the vegetarian rebukes his enemy for threatening to skin him by reminding him that man should only think beautiful thoughts to which the enemy gives the unanswerable answer skinning you is a beautiful thought. In the same way I am quite prepared to think of the best things but I think hitting the ideal vegetarian on the nose would be one of the best things in the world. This may be an extreme example but it involves a much more serious principle. What such philosophers often forget is that among the best things in the world are the very things which their placid universalism forbids and that there is nothing better or more beautiful than a noble hatred. I do not profess to feel it for them but they themselves do not seem to feel it for anything. But as my new idealistic instructor tells me to analyze I will attempt to analyze. In the ordinary way it would perhaps be enough to say that I do not like his ideals and that I prefer my own. As I should say I did not like the taste of nut cutlet so much as the taste of veal cutlet. But just as it is possible to resolve the food into formulas about protides so it is partly possible to resolve the religious preference into formulas about principles. The most we can hope to do is to find out which of these principles are the first principles. And in this connection I should like to speak a little more seriously and even a little more respectfully of the formulas about emptying the mind. I do not deny that it is sometimes a good thing to empty the mind of the mere accumulation of secondary and tertiary impressions. If what is meant is something which a friend of mine has called a mental spring clean then I can see what it means. But the most drastic spring clean in a house does not generally wash away the house. It does not tear down the roof like a cobweb or pluck up the walls like weeds. And the true formula is not so much to empty the mind as to discover that we cannot empty the mind by emptying it as much as we can. In other words, we always came back to certain fundamentals which are convictions because we can hardly even conceive their contraries. But it is the paradox of human language that though these truths are in a manner past all parallel hard and clear yet any attempt to talk about them always has the appearance of being hazy and elusive. Now, this antagonism when thus analyzed seems to me to arise from one ultimate thing at the back of the minds of these men that they believe in taking the body seriously. The body is a sort of pagan god though the pagans are more often Stoics than Epicureans. To begin with it is itself a beginning. The body, if not the creator of the soul in heaven is regarded as the practical producer of it on earth. In this their materialism is the very foundation of their asceticism. They wish us to consume clean fruit and clear water that our minds may be clear or our lives clean. The body is a sort of magical factory where these things go in as vegetables and come out as virtues. Thus digestion has the first sign of a deity that of being an origin. It has the next sign of a deity that if it is satisfied other things do not matter or at any rate other things follow in their place. And so they would say the services of the body should be serious and not grotesque and its smallest hints should be taken as terrible warnings. Art has a place in it because the body must be draped like an altar and science is paraded in it because the service must be in Latin or Greek or some heretic tone. I quite understand these things surrounding a god or an altar but I do not happen to worship at that altar or to believe in that god. I do not think the body ought to be taken seriously. I do not think the body ought to be insaneer when it is taken comically and even coarsely and I think that when the body is given a holiday as it is in a great feast I think it should be set free not merely for wisdom but for folly not merely to dance but to turn head over heels in short when it is really allowed to exaggerate its own pleasures it has its own rank and its own rights and its own place under government but the body is not the king but rather the court jester and the human and historical importance of the old jests and buffooneries of Christmas however vulgar or stale or trivial they appear is that in them the popular instinct always resisted this pagan solemnity about sensual things and was meant to feel rather a goose when he was eating goose and to realize that he is such stuff as stuffing is made of that is why anyone who has in these things the touch of the comic will also have the taste for the conservative he will be unwilling to alter what that popular instinct has made in its own absurd image he will be doubtful about a Christmas pudding or the pyramid or the Parthenon or anything that is not as round and ridiculous as the world and when Mr. Pickwick as round and ridiculous as any Christmas pudding or any world worth living in stood straddling and smiling under the mistletoe he disinfected that vegetable of its ancient and almost vegetarian sadness and heathenism of the blood of Baldur and of section four recording by Linda Johnson section five of fancies versus fads this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Campbell Shelp fancies versus fads by G.K. Chesterson section five Shakespeare and the legal lady I wonder how long liberated woman will endure the invidious ban which excludes her from being a hangman or rather to speak with more exactitude a hang woman the very fact that there seems something vaguely unfamiliar and awkward about the word is but a proof of the ages of sex oppression that have accustomed us to this sex privilege the ambition would not perhaps have been understood by the LibriVox and Jane Austen but it is now agreed that the farther we go beyond these faded proprieties the better and I really do not see how we could go further there are always torturers of course who will probably return under some scientific name obscurantists may use the old argument that woman has never risen to the first rank in this or other arts that Jack Ketch was not a meme Ketch and that the headsman was called Samson and not Delilah and they will be overwhelmed with the old retort that until we have hundreds of healthy women happily engaged in this healthful occupation it will be impossible to judge whether they can rise above the average or no tearful sentimentalists may feel something unpleasing something faintly repugnant about the new feminine trade and it is not true of course that crime is a disease and must be studied scientifically however hideous it may be death also is a disease and frequently a fatal one experiments must be made in it and it must be inflicted in any form however hideous in a cool and scientific manner it is not true of course that crime is a disease it is criminology that it is a disease it is a disease that is a disease but the suggestion about the painful duties of a policewoman leads naturally to my deduction about the painful duties of a hang woman and I make it in the faint hope of waking up some of the feminists that they may at least be moved to wonder what they are doing and to attempt to find out what they are not doing is obvious enough they are not asking themselves to perfectly plain questions first whether they want anybody to be a hang man they simply assume with panting and petuosity that we want everybody to be everything criminologists, constables baristas, executioners, torturers it never seems to occur to them that some of us doubt the beauty and blessedness of these things and are rather glad to limit them like other necessary evils and this applies especially to the doubtful though defensible case of the advocate there is one phrase perpetually repeated and now practically stereotyped which to my mind concentrates and sums up all the very worst qualities in the very worst journalism all its paralysis of thought all its monotony of chatter all its sham culture and shoddy picturesqueness all its perpetual readiness to cover any vulgarity of the present with any sentimentalism about the past there is one phrase that does measure how long in ebb the mind of my unfortunate profession can sink it is the habit of perpetually calling any of the new lady baristas Porsche first of all of course it is quite clear that the journalist does not know who Porsche was if he has ever heard of the story of the merchant of Venice he has managed to miss the only point of the story suppose a man had been so instructed in the story of as you like it that he remained under the impression that Rosalind merely was a boy and was the brother of Celia we should say that the plot of the comedy had reached his mind in a rather confused form suppose a man had seen a whole performance of the play of 12th night without discovering the fact that the page called Cesario was really a girl called Viola we should say that he had succeeded in seeing the play without exactly seeing the point but there is exactly the same sense of calling a barista Porsche or even in calling Porsche a barista it misses in exactly the same sense the whole meaning of the scene Porsche is no more a barista than Rosalind is a boy she is no more the learned jurist whom Shylock congratulates then Viola is the adventurous page whom Olivia loves the whole point of her position is that she is a heroic and magnanimous fraud she has not taken up the legal but she has not sought that public duty or any public duty her action from first to last is wholly and entirely private her motives are not professional but private her ideal is not public but private she acts as much on personal grounds in the trial scene as she does in the casket scene she acts in order to save a friend and especially a friend of the husband whom she loves anything less like the attitude of an advocate who is conceived she seeks individually to save an individual and in order to do so is ready to break all the existing laws of the profession and the public tribunal to assume lawlessly powers she has not got to intrude where she would never be legally admitted to pretend to be somebody else to dress up as a man to do what is actually a crime against the law this is not what is now called the attitude of a public woman it is certainly not the attitude of a lady lawyer any more than of any other kind of lawyer but it is emphatically the attitude of a private woman that much more ancient and much more powerful thing suppose that Portia had really become an advocate merely by advocating the cause of Antonio against Shylock the first thing that follows is that as like as not she would be briefed in the next case to advocate the cause of Shylock against Antonio would in the ordinary way of business have to help Shylock to punish with Rune the private extravagances of Gratiano she would have to assist Shylock to destrain on poor Lancelot Gobo and sell up all his miserable sticks she might well be employed by him to ruin the happiness of Lorenzo and Jessica by urging some obsolete parental power or some technical flaw in the marriage service Shylock evidently had a great admiration for her forensic talents indeed that sort of lucid and detached admission of the talents of a successful opponent is a very Jewish characteristic there seems no reason why he should not have employed her regularly whenever he wanted someone to recover ruthless interest to ruin needy households to drive towards theft or suicide the souls of desperate men but there seems every reason to doubt whether the Portia whom Shakespeare describes for us is likely to have taken on the job anyhow that is the job and I am not here arguing that it is not a necessary job or that it is always an indefensible job many honourable men have made an arguable case for the advocate who has to support Shylock and men much worse than Shylock but that is the job and to cover up its ugly realities with a loose literary quotation that really refers to the exact opposite is one of those crawling and cowardly evasions and verbal fictions which make all this sort of servile journalism so useless for every worthy or working purpose if we wish to consider whether a lady should be a barista we should consider sanely and clearly what a barista is and what a lady is and then come to our conclusion according to what we considered worthy or worthless in the traditions of the two things but the spirit of advertisement which tries to associate soap with sunlight or grape nuts with grapes rescue an old romance of Venice and tries to cover up a practical problem in the robes of a romantic heroine of the stage this is the sort of confusion that really leads to corruption in one sense it would matter very little that the legal profession was formally open to women for it is only a very exceptional sort of woman who would see herself as a vision of beauty in the character of Mr. Sergeant BuzzFuzz and most girls are more likely to be stage-struck and want to be the real Porsche on the stage rather than law-struck and want to be the very reverse of Porsche in a law court for that matter it would make relatively little difference if formal permission were given to a woman to be a hangman or a torturer very few women would have a taste for it and very few men would have a taste for the woman who had a taste for it but advertisement by its use of the vulgar picturesque can hide the realities of this professional problem as it can hide the realities of tinned meats and patent medicines it can conceal the fact that the hangman exists to hang and that the torturer exists to torture similarly it can conceal the fact that the BuzzFuzz barista exists to bully it can hide from the innocent female aspirants outside even the perils and potential abuses that would be admitted by the honest male advocate inside and that is part of a very much larger problem which extends beyond this particular profession to a great many other professions and not least to the lowest and most lucrative of all modern professions that of professional politics I wonder how many people are still duped by the story of the extension of the franchise I wonder how many radicals have been a little mystified in remarking how many Tories and reactionaries have helped in the extension of the franchise the truth is that calling in crowds of new voters will very often be to the interest not only of Tories but of really tyrannical Tories it will often be in the interest of the guilty to appeal to the innocent if they are innocent in the matter of other people's conduct as well as of their own the tyrant calls in those he has not wronged to defend him against those he has wronged he is not afraid of the new tyrant masses who know too little he is afraid of the older and nearer nucleus of those who know too much and there is nothing that would please the professional politician more than to flood the constituencies with innocent Negroes or remote Chinamen who might possibly admire him more because they knew him less I should not wonder if the party system had been saved three or four times at the point of extinction by the introduction of new voters who had never had time to discover who deserved to be extinguished the last of these rescues by an inrush of dupes was the enfranchisement of women what is true of the political is equally true of the professional ambition much of the mere imitation of masculine tricks and trades is indeed trivial enough it is a mere masquerade the greatest of Roman satirists noted that in his day the more fast of the fashionable ladies liked to fight as gladiators in the amphitheater and killed like moths on a cork a host of women prophets and women pioneers and large-minded liberators of their sex in modern England and America but besides these more showy she gladiators there are also multitudes of worthy and sincere women who take the new or rather old professions seriously the only disadvantage is that in many of these professions they can only continue to be serious by ceasing to be sincere but the simplicity with which they first set out is an enormous support to old and complex and corrupt institutions no modest person setting out to learn an elaborate science can be expected to start with the assumption that it is not worth learning the young lady will naturally begin to learn law as gravely as she begins to learn Greek it is not in that mood that she will conceive independent doubts about the ultimate relations of law and justice just as the suffragettes are complaining that the realism of industrial revolution interferes with their new hobby of voting so the lady lawyers are quite likely to complain that the realism of legal reformers interferes with their new hobby of legalism we are suffering in every department from the same cross purposes that can be seen in the case of any vulgar patent medicine in law and medicine we have the thing advertised in the public press instead of analyzed by the public authority we want a portion but the theatrical portion who is also the real portion we do not want the woman who will enter the law court with the solemn sense of a lasting vacation we want a portion a woman who will enter it as lightly and leave it as gladly as she did the same thing is true of a fact nobler than any fiction the story so often quoted of the woman who won back medieval France Joan of Arc was a soldier not a normal soldier if she had been she would have been vowed not to the war for France but to any war with Flanders, Spain or the Italian cities to which her feudal lord might lead her if she were a modern conscript she would be bound to obey orders not always coming from St. Michael but the point is here that's merely making all women soldiers under either system could do nothing at all and both feudalism and conscription are much more magnanimous things than our modern system of police and prisons in fact there are few sillier implications than that in the phrase that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander a cook who really rules a kitchen on that principle would wait patiently for milk from the bowl because he got it from the cow it is neither a perceptible fact that the sexes must not specialised if one sex must specialise in adopting dubious occupations we ought to be very glad that the other sex specialises in abstaining from them that is how the balance of criticism in the commonwealth is maintained as by a sort of government and opposition in this as in other things the new regime is that everybody shall join the government the government of the moment will be monstrously strengthened for everybody will be a tyrant everybody will be a slave the detached criticism of official fashions will disappear and none was ever so detached as the deadly criticism that came from women when all women wear uniforms all women will wear gags for a gag is part of every uniform in the world end of section 5 recording by Campbell Shelp