 11. Science and the Savages A permanent disadvantage of the study of folklore and kidrid subjects is that the man of science can hardly be in the nature of things very frequently a man of the world. He is the student of nature. He is scarcely ever a student of human nature. And even where this difficulty has overcome, and he is in some sense a student of human nature, this is only a very faint beginning of the painful progress towards being human. For the study of primitive race and religion stands apart in one important respect from all or nearly all the ordinary scientific studies. A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer. He can understand entomology only by being an entomologist or perhaps an insect. But he can understand a great deal of anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies. Hence arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records of ethnology and folklore. The fact that the same frigid and detached spirit which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany leads to disaster in the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe. It is not necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to men. That same suppression of sympathies, that same waving of way of intuition or guesswork which makes a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of a man. He is making himself inhuman in order to understand humanity. An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many men of science. But in this matter their defect arises not from ignorance of the other world, but from ignorance of this world. For the secrets about which anthropologists concern themselves can be best learned not from books or voyages, but from the ordinary commerce of man with man. The secret of why some savage tribe worships monkeys or the moon is not to be found even by traveling among those savages and taking down their answers in a notebook, although the cleverest man may pursue this course. The answer to the riddle is in England. It is in London. Nay, it is in his own heart. When a man has discovered why men in Bond Street wear black hats, he will at the same moment have discovered why men in Timbuktu wear red feathers. The mystery in the heart of some savage war dance should not be studied in books of scientific travel. It should be studied at a subscription ball. If a man desires to find out the origins of religions, let him not go to the Sandwich Island. Let him go to church. If a man wishes to know the origins of human society, to know what society philosophically speaking really is, let him not go to the British Museum. Let him go into society. This total misunderstanding of the real nature of ceremonial gives rise to the most awkward and dehumanized versions of the conduct of men in rude lands or ages. The man of science, not realizing that ceremonial is essentially a thing which is done without a reason, has to find a reason for every sort of ceremonial, and as might be supposed, the reason is generally a very absurd one. Absurd because it originates not in the simple mind of the barbarian, but in the sophisticated mind of the professor. The teamed man will say, for instance, the natives of Mumbo-Jumbo land believe that the dead man can eat and will require food upon his journey to the other world. This is attested by the fact that they place food in the grave, and that any family not complying with this right is the object of the anger of the priests and the tribe. To anyone acquainted with humanity, this way of talking is topsy-turvy. It's like saying the English in the 20th century, believe that a dead man could smell. This is attested by the fact that they always covered his grave with lilies, violets, or other flowers. Some priestly and tribal terrors were evidently attached to the neglect of this action, as we have records of several old ladies who were very much disturbed in mind because their wreaths had not arrived in time for the funeral. It may be, of course, that savages put food with the dead man because they think that a dead man can eat, or weapons with the dead man because they think that a dead man can fight. But personally, I do not believe that they think anything of the kind. I believe they put food or weapons on the dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because it is an exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do. We do not understand, it is true, the emotion which makes us think it obvious and natural, but that is because, like all the important emotions of human existence, it is essentially irrational. We do not understand the savage for the same reason that the savage does not understand himself, and the savage does not understand himself for the same reason that we do not understand ourselves either. The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind, it is finally and forever spoiled for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite. This mortal has put on immortality. Even what we call our material desires are spiritual because they are human. Science can analyze a pork chop and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein, but science cannot analyze any man's wish for a pork chop and say how much of it is hunger and how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful. The man's desires for the pork chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven. All attempts therefore at a science of any human things, at a science of history, a science of folklore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy. You can no more be certain in economic history that a man's desire for money was merely a desire for money than you can be certain in hagiology that a saint's desire for God was merely a desire for God. And this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few instruments or with very plain instruments, but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay, which was always falling apart into new fragments and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed. As one of the enormous follies of folklore, let us take the case of the transmigration of stories and the alleged unity of their source. Story after story, the scientific mythologists have cut out of its place in history and pinned side by side with similar stories in their museum of fables. The process is industrious. It is fascinating. And the whole of it rests on one of the plainest fallacies in the world. That a story has been told all over the place at some time or other. Not only does not prove that it never really happened, it does not even faintly indicate or make slightly more probable that it never happened. That a large number of fishermen have falsely asserted that they have caught a pike two feet long does not in least affect the question of whether anyone ever really did so. That numberless journalists announce a Franco-German war merely for money is no evidence one way or the other upon the dark question of whether such a war ever occurred. Doubtless in a few hundred years the innumerable Franco-German wars that did not happen will have cleared the scientific mind of any belief in the legendary war of 70 which did. But that will be because if folklore students remain at all their nature will be unchanged. And their services to folklore will be still as they are at present greater than they know. For in truth these men do something far more godlike than studying legends. They create them. There are two kinds of stories which the scientists say cannot be true because everybody tells them. The first class consists of the stories which are told everywhere because they are somewhat odd or clever. There is nothing in the world to prevent their having happened to somebody as an adventure anymore than there is anything to prevent their having occurred as they certainly did occur to somebody as an idea. But they are not likely to have happened to many people. The second class of their myths consist of the stories that are told everywhere for the simple reason that they happened everywhere. Of the first class for instance we might take such examples as the story of William Tell now generally ranked among legends upon the sole ground that it is found in the tales of other peoples. Now it is obvious that this was told everywhere because whether true or fictitious it is what is called a good story. It is odd, exciting, and it has a climax. But to suggest that some such eccentric incident can never have happened in the whole history of archery or that it did not happen to any particular person of whom it is told is stark impudence. The idea of shooting at a mark attached to some valuable or beloved person is an idea doubtless that might easily have occurred to any inventive poet. But it is also an idea that might easily occurred to any boastful archer. It might be one of the fantastic appresses of some storyteller. It might equally well be one of the fantastic appresses of some tyrant. It might occur first in real life and afterwards occur in legends. Or it might just as well occur first in legends and afterward occur in real life. If no apple has ever been shot off a boy's head from the beginning of the world it may be done tomorrow morning and by someone who has never heard of William Tell. This type of tale indeed may be pretty fairly paralleled with the ordinary anecdote terminating in a repartee or an Irish bull. Such a retort as the famous genie voile pas la nécessité, we have all seen attributed to Talleyrand or Voltaire, to Henry Quintuaire, to an anonymous judge, and so on. But this variety does not in any way make it more likely that the thing was never said at all. It is highly likely that it was really said by somebody unknown. It is highly likely that it was really said by Talleyrand. In any case it is not any more difficult to believe that the monk might have occurred to a man in conversation than to a man writing memoirs. It might have occurred to any of the men I have mentioned. But there is this point of distinction about it that it is not likely to have occurred to all of them. And this is where the first class of so-called myth differs from the second to which I have previously referred. For there is a second class of incident found to be common to the stories of five or six heroes, say Sigurd to Hercules to Rustam to the Sid and so on. And the peculiarity of this myth is that not only is it highly reasonable to imagine that it really happened to one hero, but it is highly reasonable to imagine that it really happened to all of them. Such a story for instance is that of the great man having his strength swayed or thwarted by the mysterious weakness of a woman. The anecdotal story, the story of William Tell, is, as I have said, popular because it is peculiar. But this kind of story, the story of Samson and Deliah of Arthur and Guinevere, is obviously popular because it is not peculiar. It is popular as good quiet fiction is popular because it tells the truth about people. If the rune of Samson by a woman and the rune of Hercules by a woman have a common legendary origin, it is gratifying to know that we can also explain as fable the rune of Nelson by a woman and the rune of Parnell by a woman. And indeed I have no doubt whatever that some centuries hence the students of folklore will refuse altogether to believe that Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert Browning and will prove their point up to the hilt by the unquestionable fact that the whole fiction of the period was full of such elopements from end to end. Possibly the most pathetic of all the delusions of the modern students of primitive belief is the notion that they have about the thing they call anthropomorphism. They believe that primitive men attributed phenomena to God in human form in order to explain them because his mind in its sullen limitation could not reach any further than his own clownish existence. The thunder was called the voice of a man, the lightning the eyes of a man, because by this explanation they were made more reasonable and comfortable. The final cure for all this kind of philosophy is to walk down a lane at night. Anyone who does so will discover very quickly that men pictured something semi-human at the back of all things, not because such a thought was natural but because it was supernatural, not because it made things more comprehensible, because it made them a hundred times more incomprehensible and mysterious. For a man walking down a lane at night can see the conspicuous fact that as long as nature keeps to her own course she has no power with us at all. As long as a tree is a tree it is a top-heavy monster with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one leg. But so long as a tree is a tree it does not frighten us at all. It begins to be something alien, to be something strange, only when it looks like ourselves. When a tree really looks like a man our knees knock under us and when the whole universe looks like a man we fall on our faces. Please visit LibriVox.org Heretics by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 12 Paganism and Mr. Lowe's Dickinson Of the new paganism, or neo-paganism, as it was preached flamboyantly by Mr. Swinburne, or delicately by Walter Pater, there is no necessity to take any very grave account, except as the thing which left behind it incomparable exercises in the English language. The new paganism is no longer new and it never at any time or the smallest resemblance to paganism. The ideas about the ancient civilization which it has left loose in the public mind are certainly extraordinary enough. The term pagan is continually used in fiction and light literature as meaning a man without any religion, or as a pagan was generally a man with about half a dozen. The pagans, according to this notion, were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state, whereas if there were two things that the best pagan civilization did honestly believe in, they were a rather too rigid dignity and a much too rigid responsibility. Pagans are depicted as above all things inebriate and lawless, whereas they were above all things reasonable and respectful. They are praised as disobedient when they had only one great virtue, civic obedience. They are envied and admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin, despair. Mr. Lowe Dickinson, the most pregnant and provocative of recent writers on this and similar subjects, is far too solid a man to have fallen into this old era of mere anarchy of paganism. In order to make hay of that Hellenic enthusiasm, which has as its ideal mere appetite and egotism, it is not necessary to know much philosophy, but merely to know a little Greek. Mr. Lowe Dickinson's knows a great deal of philosophy and also a great deal of Greek, and his error, if error he has, is not that of the crude hedonist, but the contrast which he offers between Christianity and paganism in the matter of moral ideals, a contrast which he states very ably in a paper called How Long Halt Yee, which appeared in the Independent Review, does, I think, contain an error of a deeper kind. According to him the ideal of paganism was not, indeed, a mere frenzy of lust and liberty and caprice, but was an ideal of full and satisfied humanity. According to him the ideal of Christianity was the ideal of asceticism. When I say that I think this idea wholly wrong as a matter of philosophy and history, I am not talking for the moment about any ideal Christianity of my own, or even of any primitive Christianity undefiled by after events. I am not, like so many modern Christian idealists, basing my case upon certain things which Christ said. Neither am I, like so many other Christian idealists, basing my case upon certain things that Christ forgot to say. I take historic Christianity with all its sins upon its head. I take it as I would take Jacobism, or Mormonism, or any other mixed or unpleasing human product, and I say that the meaning of its action was not to be found in asceticism. I say that its point of departure from paganism was not asceticism. I say that its point of difference with the modern world was not asceticism. I say that St. Simon's stylities had not his main inspiration in asceticism. I say that the main Christian impulse cannot be described as asceticism, even in the ascetics. Let me set about making the matter clear. There is one broad fact about the relations of Christianity and paganism, which is so simple that many will smile at it, but which is so important that all moderns forget it. The primary fact about Christianity and paganism is that one came after the other. Mr. Loes Dickinson speaks of them as if they were parallel ideals, even speaks as if paganism were the newer of the two and the more fitted for a new age. He suggests that the pagan ideal will be the ultimate good of man, but if that is so, we must at least ask with more curiosity than he allows for why it was that man actually found his ultimate good on earth under the stars and threw it away again. It is this extraordinary enigma to which I propose to attempt an answer. There is only one thing in the modern world that has been face to face with paganism. There is only one thing in the modern world which in that sense knows anything about paganism, and that is Christianity. That fact is really the weak point in the whole of that hedonistic neo-paganism of which I have spoken. All that genuinely remains of the ancient hymns or the ancient dances of Europe, all that has honestly come to us from the festivals of Phoebus or Pan, is to be found in the festivals of the Christian Church. If anyone wants to hold the end of a chain which really goes back to the heathen mysteries, he had better take hold of a festoon of flowers at Easter or a string of sausages at Christmas. Everything else in the modern world is of Christian origin, even everything that seems most anti-Christian. The French revolution is of Christian origin. The newspaper is of Christian origin. The anarchists are of Christian origin. Physical science is of Christian origin. The attack on Christianity is of Christian origin. There is one thing and one thing only in existence at the present day which can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is Christianity. The real difference between paganism and Christianity is perfectly summed up in the difference between the pagan or the natural virtues and those three virtues of Christianity which the Church of Rome calls virtues of grace. The pagan or rational virtues are such things as justice and temperance and Christianity has adopted them. The three mystical virtues which Christianity has not adopted but invented are faith, hope, and charity. Now much easy and foolish Christian rhetoric could easily be poured out upon those three words but I desire to confine myself to the two facts which are evident about them. The first evident fact in marked contrast to the delusion of the dancing pagan, the first evident fact I say is that the pagan virtues such as justice and temperance are the sad virtues and that the mystical virtues of faith, hope, and charity are the gay and exuberant virtues and the second evident fact which is even more evident is the fact that pagan virtues are the reasonable virtues and the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity are in their essence as unreasonable as they can be. As the word unreasonable is open to misunderstanding the matter may be more accurately put by saying that each one of these Christian or mystical virtues involves paradox in its own nature and that this is not true of any of the typically pagan or rationalistic virtues. Justice consists in finding out a certain thing due to a certain man and giving it to him. Temperance consists in finding out the proper limit of a particular indulgence and adhering to that. But charity means pardoning what is unpardonable or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless or it is no virtue at all and faith means believing the incredible or it is no virtue at all. It is somewhat amusing indeed to notice the difference between the fate of these three paradoxes in the fashion of the modern mind. Charity is a fashionable virtue in our time. It is lit up by the gigantic firelight of Dickens. Hope is a fashionable virtue today. Our attention has been arrested for it by the sudden and silver trumpet of Stevenson. But faith is unfashionable and it is customary on every side to cast against it the fact that it is a paradox. Everybody mockingly repeats the famous childish definition that faith is the power of believing that which we know to be untrue. Yet it is not one atom more paradoxical than hope or charity. Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in the earthquake and eclipse. And it is true that there is a thing crudely called charity which means charity to the deserving poor. But charity to the deserving poor is not charity at all but justice. It is the undeserving who require it and the ideal either does not exist at all or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man and the virtue either does not exist at all or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful. Now the old pagan world went perfectly straightforward until it discovered that going straightforward is an enormous mistake. It was noble and beautifully reasonable and discovered in its death pang this lasting and valuable truth, a heritage for the ages that reasonableness will not do. The pagan age was truly an Eden or a golden age in this essential sense that it is not to be recovered. And it is not to be recovered in this sense again that while we are certainly jollier than the pagans and much more right than the pagans there is not one of us who can by the utmost stretch of energy be so sensible as the pagans. That naked innocence of the intellect cannot be recovered by any man after Christianity and for this excellent reason that every man after Christianity knows it to be misleading. Let me take an example. The first that occurs to the mind of this impossible plainness in the pagan point of view. The greatest tribute to Christianity in the modern world is Tennyson's Ulysses. The poet reads into the story of Ulysses the conceptions of an incurable desire to wander. But the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all. He desires to get home. He displays his heroic and unconquerable qualities in resisting them as fortunes which balk him. But that is all. There is no love of adventure for its own sake. That is a Christian product. There is no love of Penelope for her own sake. That is a Christian product. Everything in that old world would appear to have been clean and obvious. A good man was a good man and a bad man was a bad man. For this reason they had no charity. For charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul. For this reason they had no such thing as the art of fiction, the novel. For the novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity. For them a pleasant landscape was pleasant and an unpleasant landscape was unpleasant. Hence they had no idea of romance. For romance consists in thinking a thing more delightful because it is dangerous. It is a Christian idea. In a word we cannot reconstruct or even imagine the beautiful and astonishing pagan world. It was a world in which common sense was really common. My general meaning touching the three virtues of which I have spoken will now I hope be sufficiently clear. They are all three paradoxical. They are all three practical and they are all three paradoxical because they are practical. It is the stress of ultimate need and the terrible knowledge of things as they are which led men to set up these riddles and to die for them. Whatever may be the meaning of the contradiction it is the fact that the only kind of hope that there is in a use in a battle is a hope that denies arithmetic. Whatever may be the meaning of the contradiction it is the fact that the only kind of charity which any weak spirit wants or which any generous spirit feels is the charity which forgives the sins that are like scarlet. Whatever may be the meaning of faith it must always mean a certainty about something we cannot prove. Thus for instance we believe by faith in the existence of other people. But there is another Christian virtue, a virtue far more obviously and historically connected with Christianity, which will illustrate even better the connection between paradox and practical necessity. This virtue cannot be questioned in its capacity as a historical symbol. Certainly Mr. Lowe's Dickinson will not question it. It has been the boast of hundreds of the champions of Christianity. It has been the taut of hundreds of the opponents of Christianity. It is in essence the basis of Mr. Lowe's Dickinson's whole distinction between Christianity and paganism. I mean of course the virtue of humility. I admit of course most readily that a great deal of false Eastern humility, that is a strictly ascetic humility, mixed itself with the mainstream of European Christianity. We must not forget that when we speak of Christianity we are speaking of a whole continent for about a thousand years. But of this virtue, even more than of the other three, I would maintain the general proposition adopted above. Civilization discovered Christian humility for the same urgent reason that it discovered faith and charity, that is because Christian civilization had to discover it or die. The great psychological discovery of paganism which turned it into Christianity can be expressed with some accuracy in one phrase. The pagan set out with admirable sense to enjoy himself. By the end of his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else. Mr. Lowe's Dickinson has pointed out in words too excellent to need any further elucidation the absurd shallowness of those who imagine that the pagan enjoyed himself only in a materialistic sense. Of course he enjoyed himself not only intellectually, even he enjoyed himself morally. He enjoyed himself spiritually. But it was himself that he was enjoying. On the face of it a very natural thing to do. Now the psychological discovery is merely this, that whereas it had been supposed that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, the truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing our ego to zero. Humility is the thing which is forever renewing the earth and the stars. It is humility and not duty which preserves the stars from wrong and from the unpardonable wrong of casual resignation. It is through humility that the most ancient heavens for us are fresh and strong. The curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be weary of wonders. If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the most fearful and beautiful of meteors. Now that we see it for the hundredth time we call it in the hideous and blasphemous phrase of Wordsworth, the light of common day. We are inclined to increase our claims. We are inclined to demand six suns, to demand a blue sun, to demand a green sun. Humility is perpetually putting us back in the primal darkness. There all light is lightning startling and instantaneous until we understand that original dark in which we have neither sight nor expectations. We can give no hearty and childlike praise to the splendid sensationalism of things. The terms pessimism and optimism like most modern terms are unmeaning. But if they can be used in any vague sense as meaning something, we may say that in this great fact pessimism is the very basis of optimism. The man who destroys himself creates the universe. To the humble man and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun. To the humble man and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea. When he looks at all the faces in the street, he does not only realize that men are alive, he realizes with a dramatic pleasure that they are not dead. I have spoken of another aspect of the discovery of humility as a psychological necessity because it is more commonly insisted on and is in itself more obvious. But it is equally clear that humility is a permanent necessity as a condition of effort and self-examination. It is one of the deadly fallacies of Jingo politics that a nation is stronger, or despising other nations. As a matter of fact, the strongest nations are those like Prussia or Japan, which began from very mean beginnings, but have not been too proud to sit at the feet of the foreigner and learn everything from him. Almost every obvious and direct victory has been the victory of the plagiarist. This indeed only a very paltry byproduct of humility. But it is a product of humility and therefore it is successful. Prussia had no Christian humility in its internal arrangements. Hence its internal arrangements were miserable. But it had enough Christian humility slavishly to copy France, even down to Frederick the Great's poetry, and that which it had the humility to copy, it had ultimately to honor to conquer. The case of the Japanese is even more obvious. Their only Christian and their only beautiful quality is that they have humbled themselves to be exalted. All this aspect of humility, however, as connected with the matter of effort and striving for a standard set above us, I dismiss, as having been sufficiently pointed out by almost all idealist writers. It may be worthwhile, however, to point out the interesting disparity in the matter of humility between the modern notion of the strongman and the actual records of the strongman. Carlisle objected to the statement that no man could be a hero to his valet. Every sympathy can be extended for him in the matter if he merely or mainly meant that the phrase was the disparagement of hero worship. Hero worship is certainly a generous and human impulse. The hero may be faulty, but the worship can hardly be. It may be that no man would be a hero to his valet, but any man would be a valet to his hero. But in truth, multi-proverb itself and Carlisle's stricter upon it ignore the most essential matter at issue. The ultimate psychological truth is not that no man is a hero to his valet. The ultimate psychological truth, the foundation of Christianity, is that no man is a hero to himself. Cromwell, according to Carlisle, was a strong man. According to Cromwell, he was a weak one. The weak point in the whole of Carlisle's case for aristocracy lies indeed in his most celebrated phrase. Carlisle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a sureer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of men. But the essential point of it is merely this, that whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect all men. All men can be criminals if tempted. All men can be heroes if inspired. And this doctrine does away altogether with Carlisle's pathetic belief, or anyone else's pathetic belief, in the wise few. There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved in all essential points exactly like a small mob. Every oligarchy is merely a knot of men in the street. That is to say it is very jolly, but not infallible. And no oligarchies in the world's history have ever come off so badly in practical affairs as the very proud oligarchies, the oligarchy of Poland, the oligarchy of Venice. And the armies that have most swiftly and suddenly broken their enemies in pieces have been the righteous armies, the Muslim armies, for instance. Or the Puritan armies. And a religious army may, by its nature, be defined as an army in which every man is taught, not to exalt, but to abase himself. Many modern Englishmen talk of themselves as the sturdy descendants of their sturdy Puritan fathers. As a fact, they would run away from a cow. If you asked one of their Puritan fathers, if you asked Bunyan, for instance, whether he was sturdy, he would have answered with tears that he was as weak as water. And because of this he would have borne tortures, and his virtue of humility, while being practical enough to win battles, will always be paradoxical enough to puzzle pendants. It is at one with a virtue of charity in this respect every generous person will equally agree that the one kind of pride which is wholly damnable is the pride of the man who has something to be proud of. The pride, which proportionally speaking does not hurt the character, is the pride in things which reflect no credit on the person at all. Thus it does a man no harm to be proud of his country, and comparatively little harm to be proud of his remote ancestors. It does him more harm to be proud of having made money, because in that he has little more reason for pride. But it does him more harm still to be proud of what is nobler than money intellect, and it does him most harm of all to value himself for the most valuable thing on earth, goodness. The man who is proud of what is really creditable to him is the Pharisee, the man whom Christ himself could not forbear to strike. My objection to Mr. Lowes Dickinson and the reasserters of the Pagan Ideal is then this. I accuse them of ignoring definite human discoveries in the moral world. Discoveries as definite, though not as material, as the discovery of the circulation of the blood. We cannot go back to an ideal of reason and sanity, for mankind has discovered that reason does not lead to sanity. We cannot go back to an ideal of pride and enjoyment, for mankind has discovered that pride does not lead to enjoyment. I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking every man starts at the beginning and goes in all probability just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean above all things the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past. I accuse Mr. Lowes Dickinson and his school of reaction in the only real sense. If he likes, let him ignore these great historic mysteries, the mystery of charity, the mystery of chivalry, the mystery of faith. If he likes, let him ignore the plow or the printing press. But if we do revive and pursue the Pagan Ideal of a simple and rational self-completion, we shall end where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity. End of Chapter 12. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Heretics by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 13. Kelts and Keltophiles Science in the modern world has many uses. Its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich. The word kleptomania is a vulgar example of what I mean. It is on a par with that strange theory, always advanced when a wealthy or prominent person is in the dock, that exposure is more of a punishment for the rich man. Than for the poor. Of course, the very reverse is the truth. Exposure is more of a punishment for the poor than for the rich. The richer a man is, the easier it is for him to be a tramp. The richer a man is, the easier it is for him to be popular and generally respected in the cannibal islands. But the poorer a man is, the more likely it is that he will have to use his past life whenever he wants to get a bed for the night. Honor is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for the hall porters. This is a secondary matter, but it is an example of the general proposition I offer. The proposition that an enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defenses for the indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these defenses generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science or pseudoscience has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of the races. When a wealthy nation, like the English, discovers the perfectly patent fact that it is making a ludicrous mess of the government of a poorer nation like the Irish, it pauses for a moment in consternation and then begins to talk about Celts and Teutons. As far as I can understand the theory, the Irish are Celts and the English are Teutons. Of course, the Irish are not Celts any more than the English are Teutons. I have not followed the ethnological discussion with much energy, but the last scientific conclusion which I read inclined on the whole to the summary that the English were mainly Celtic and the Irish mainly Teutonic. But no man alive with even the glimmering of a real scientific sense would ever dream of applying the terms Celtic or Teutonic to either of them in any positive or useful sense. That sort of thing must be left to people who talk about the Anglo-Saxon race and extend the expression to America. How much of the blood of the Angles and Saxons, whoever they were, their remains in our mixed British, Roman, German, Dane, Norman, and Picard stock is a matter only interesting to wild antiquaries. And how much of that deluded blood can possibly remain in that roaring whirlpool of America, into which a cataract of Swedes, Jews, Germans, Irishmen, and Italians is perpetually boring, is a matter only interesting to lunatics. It would have been wiser for the English governing classes to have called upon some other god. All other gods, however weak and warring, at least boast of being constant. But science boasts of being in a flux forever, boasts of being unstable as water. In England and the English governing classes never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed for an instant that they had no other god to call on. All the most genuine Englishmen in history would have yawned or laughed in your face if you had begun to talk about Anglo-Saxons, if you had attempted to substitute the ideal of race for the ideal of nationality. I really did not like to think what they would have said. I certainly should not like to have been the officer of Nelson who suddenly discovered his French blood on the eve of Trafalgar. I should not like to have been the Norfolk or Suffolk gentlemen who had to expound to Admiral Blake by what demonstrable ties of genealogy he was irrevocably bound to the Dutch. The truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society. It is a product of the human soul and will. It is a spiritual product and there are men in the modern world who would think anything and do anything rather than admit that anything could be a spiritual product. A nation, however, as it confronts the modern world is a purely spiritual product. Sometimes it has been born in independence like Scotland. Sometimes it has been born in dependence in subjugation like Ireland. Sometimes it is a large thing cohering out of many small things like Italy. Sometimes it is a small thing breaking away from larger things like Poland. But in each and every case its quality is purely spiritual or if you will purely psychological. It is a moment when five men become a sixth man. Everyone knows it who has ever founded a club. It is a moment when five places become one place. Everyone must know it who has ever had to repel an invasion. Mr. Timothy Healy, the most serious intellect in the present House of Commons, summed up nationality to perfection when he simply called it something for which people will die. As he excellently said in reply to Lord Hugh Cecil, no one, not even the noble Lord, would die for the meridian of Greenwich, and that is the great tribute to its purely psychological character. It is idle to ask why Greenwich should not cohere in this spiritual manner while Athens or Sparta did. It is like asking why a man falls in love with one woman and not with another. Now of this great spiritual coherence, independence of external circumstances, or of race, or of any obvious physical thing, Ireland is the most remarkable example. Rome conquered nations, but Ireland has conquered races. The Norman has gone there and become Irish. The Scotchman has gone there and become Irish. The Spaniard has gone there and become Irish. Even the bitter soldier of prom oil has gone there and become Irish. Ireland, which did not exist even politically, has been stronger than all the races that existed scientifically. The purest Germanic blood, the purest Norman blood, the purest blood of the passionate Scotch patriot, has not been so attractive as a nation without a flag. Ireland, unrecognized and oppressed, has easily absorbed races as such trifles are easily absorbed. She has easily disposed of physical science as such superstitions are easily disposed of. Nationality in its weakness has been stronger than ethnology in its strength. Five triumphant races have been absorbed, have been defeated by a defeated nationality. This being the true and strange glory of Ireland, it is impossible to hear without impatience of the attempt so constantly made among her modern sympathizers to talk about Celts and Celtism. Who were the Celts? I defy anybody to say. Who are the Irish? I defy anyone to be indifferent or to pretend not to know. Mr. W. B. Yates, the great Irish genius who has appeared in our time, shows his own admirable penetration in discarding altogether the argument from a Celtic race. But he does not wholly escape, and his followers hardly ever escape, the general objection to the Celtic argument. The tendency of that argument is to represent the Irish or the Celts as a strange and separate race as a tribe of eccentrics in the modern world, immersed in dim legends and fruitless dreams. Its tendency is to exhibit the Irish as odd because they see the fairies. Its trend is to make the Irish seem weird and wild because they sing old songs and join in strange dances. But this is quite an error. Indeed, it is the opposite of the truth. It is the English or odd because they do not see the fairies. It is the inhabitants of Kensington who are weird and wild because they do not sing old songs and join in strange dances. In all this, the Irish are not in the least strange and separate, are not in the least Celtic, as the word is commonly and popularly used. In all this, the Irish are simply an ordinary, sensible nation living the life of any other ordinary and sensible nation which has not been either sodden with smoke or oppressed by money lenders or otherwise corrupted with wealth and science. There is nothing Celtic about having legends. It is merely human. The Germans who are, I suppose, Teutonic, have hundreds of legends. Whenever it happens that the Germans are human, there is nothing Celtic about loving poetry. The English love poetry more perhaps than any other people before they came under the shadow of the chimney pot and the shadow of the chimney pot hat. It is not Ireland which is mad and mystic. It is Manchester which is mad and mystic, which is incredible, which is a wild exception among human things. Ireland has no need to play the silly game of the science of races. Ireland has no need to pretend to be a tribe of visionaries apart. In the matter of visions, Ireland is more than a nation. It is a model nation. This is the Libravox Recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Heretics by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 14 On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family The family may fairly be considered, one would think, an ultimate human institution. Everyone would admit that it has been the main cell and central unit of almost all societies of the two, except indeed such societies as that of like a demon, which went in for efficiency and has therefore perished and left not a trace behind. Christianity, even enormous as was its revolution, did not alter this ancient and savage sanctity. It merely reversed it. It did not deny the trinity of father, mother, and child. It merely read it backwards, making it run child, mother, father. Thus it called not the family, but the holy family. For many things are made holy by being turned upside down. But some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the family. They have impugned it, as I think wrongly, and its defenders have defended it and defended it wrongly. The common defense of the family is that amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defense of the family which is possible and to me evident. This defense is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one. It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city or the village, which only the willfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus, in all extensive and highly civilized societies, groups come into existence, founded upon what is called sympathy, and shout out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan. The thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow. But in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colors than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul. And their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge. We can see this change, for instance, in the modern transformation of the thing called the club. When London was smaller and the parts of London more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it still is in the villages, the opposite of what it is now in the great cities. Then the club was valued as a place where a man could be sociable. Now the club is valued as a place where a man can be unsociable. The more the enlargement and elaboration of our civilization goes on, the more the club ceases to be a place, where a man can have a noisy argument and becomes more and more a place, where a man can have what is somewhat fantastically called a quiet chop. His aim is to make a man comfortable, and to make a man comfortable is to make him the opposite of sociable. Sociability, like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. The club tends to produce the most degraded of all combinations. The luxurious anchorite, the man who combines the self-indulgent of Lucilus with the insane loneliness of St. Simon's stylities. If we were, tomorrow morning, snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate, then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence, then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuktu. He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth, he pretends to shoot tigers, he almost rides on a camel, and in all this he is still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born. And of this flight he is always ready with his own explanation. He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull, he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting. It is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians. The people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at. If he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to flee, in short, from the two stimulating society of his equals, of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself. The street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures are indeed very different from himself. But they do not pull their shape or color or custom into a decisive intellectual competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their own. The strange monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this. The camel does not contort his features into a fine snare because Mr. Robinson has not got a hump. The culture gentleman at number five does exhibit snare because Robinson has not got a dado. The vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly, but the major at number nine will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke. The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbors is that they will not, as we express it, mind their own business. We do not really mean that they will not mind their own business. If our neighbors did not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their rent and would rapidly cease to be our neighbors. What we really mean when we say that they cannot mind their own business is something much deeper. We do not dislike them because they have so little force and fire that they cannot be interested in themselves. We dislike them because they have so much force and fire that they cannot be interested in us as well. What we dread about our neighbors in short is not the narrowness of their horizon but their superb tendency to broaden it, and all the versions to ordinary humanity have this general character. They are not a version to its feebleness, as is pretended, but to its energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength. Of course this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing, as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has injustice to be pointed out. Bastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices, but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nijie, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has the description somewhere, a very powerful description in the purely literary sense, of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful, if we may regard it as pathetic. Nijie's aristocracy has aboutered all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell, but when Nijie has the incredible lack of humor and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves. We make our friends, we make our enemies, but God makes our next door neighbor. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature. He is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbor. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice, which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty may be a hobby, it may be a dissipation. We may work in the East End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East End, or because we think we are. We may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting. The most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, may be the result of choice or a kind of taste. We may be so made as to be particularly fond of lunatics or especially interested in leprosy. We may love Negroes because they are black, or German socialists because they are pedantic. But we have to love our neighbor because he is there. A much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which has actually given us. Precisely because he may be anybody, he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident. Doubtless men flee from small environments into lands that are very deadly, but this is natural enough for they are not fleeing from death, they are fleeing from life. And this principle applies to ring within ring of the social system of humanity. It is perfectly reasonable that men should seek for some particular variety of the human type, so long as they are seeking for that variety of the human type and not for mere human variety. It is quite proper that a British diplomatist should seek the society of Japanese generals if what he wants is Japanese generals. But if what he wants is people different from himself, he had much better stop at home and discuss religion with the housemaid. It is quite reasonable that the village genius should come up to conquer London if what he wants is to conquer London. But if he wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically hostile and also very strong, he had much better remain where he is and have a row with the rector. The man in the suburban street is quite right if he goes to Ramsgate for the sake of Ramsgate, a difficult thing to imagine. But if as he expresses that he goes to Ramsgate for a change, then he would have a much more romantic and even melodramatic change if he jumped over the wall into his neighbor's garden. The consequences would be bracing in a sense far beyond the possibilities of Ramsgate hygiene. Now exactly as this principle applies to the empire, to the nation, within the empire, to the city, within the nation, to the street, within the city, so it applies to the home, within the street. The institution of the family is to be commended for precisely the same reasons that the institution of the nation or the institution of the city are in this manner to be commended. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man to be besieged in the city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to be snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is not a thing from outside but a thing from inside. Above all, they all insist upon the fact that life, if it be truly stimulating and fascinating life, is the thing which of its nature exists in spite of ourselves. The modern writers, who have suggested in a more or less open manner that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course, the family contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like something resembling anarchy. It is easily because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the Commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa, excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpa is stupid, like the world, he is old, like the world. Those who wish rightly or wrongly to step out of all this, do definitely wish to step into a narrower world. They are dismayed and terrified by the largeness and variety of the family. Sarah wishes to find a world wholly consisting of private theatricals. George wishes to think the Trocadero or Cosmos. I do not say for a moment that the flight to this narrower life may not be the right thing for the individual, any more than I say the same thing about flight into a monastery. But I do say that anything is bad and artificial, which tends to make these people succumb to the strange delusion that they are stepping into a world which is actually larger and more varied than their own. The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. This is indeed the sublime and special romance of the family. It is romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is everything that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there. So long as you have groups of men chosen rationally you have some special or sectarian atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist. For an adventure is by its nature a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter, in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it, and in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge, all this falling in love is not truly romantic. It is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not drained before. Our father and our mother do lie and wait for us and leap out on us like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family, we step into a fairy tale. This color, as of a fantastic narrative, ought to cling to the family and to our relations with it throughout life. Romance is the deepest thing in life. Romance is deeper even than reality. For even if reality could be proved to be misleading, it still could not be proved to be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the facts are false, they are still very strange, and this strangeness of life, this unexpected and even perverse element of things as they fall out, remains incurably interesting. The circumstances we can regulate may become tame or pessimistic, but the circumstances over which we have no control, the main godlike to those who, like Mr. McAlber, can call on them and renew their strength. People wonder why the novel is the more popular form of literature. People wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple. It is merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear, and with much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song. It may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset it is written, to be continued in our next. If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a philosophical and exact deduction and be certain that we are finishing it right. With the adequate brain power, we could finish any scientific discovery and be certain that we were finishing it right. But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it not merely intellect, which is partly mechanical, but will, which is, in its essence, divine. The narrative writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. He can do it by the same divine caprice, whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows himself and to hell afterwards if he chooses. And the same civilization, the chivalric European civilization, which asserted free will in the 13th century, produced the thing called fiction in the 18th. When Thomas Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, he created all the bad novels in the circulating libraries. But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance. But if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else, which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life. He has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events. They are dull because they are omnipotent. They fail to feel adventures because they can make adventures. The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plane limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect. It is vain for the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings. To be born into this earth is to be born into congenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance. Of all these great limitations and the frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important. Hence it is misunderstood by the moderns who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty. They think that if a man makes a gesture, it would be a startling and romantic matter so the sun should fall from the sky. But the startling and romantic thing about the sun is that it does not fall from the sky. They are seeking under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations, that is a world where there are no outlines, that is a world where there are no shapes. There is nothing baser than the infinite. They say they wish to be as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves. End of Chapter 14. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Heretics by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 15 On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set In one sense at any rate it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man, but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that. It tells us the truth about its readers, and oddly enough, it tells us this all the more, the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacturer. The more dishonest a book is as a book, the more honest it is as a public document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man, an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and statute books and scriptures, but man's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and half-penny novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good literature. But from bad literature, he might learn to govern empires and look over the map of mankind. There is one rather interesting example of this state of things, in which the weaker literature is really the stronger and the stronger the weaker. It is a case of what may be called, for the sake of an approximate description, the literature of aristocracy, or if you prefer the description, the literature of snobbishness. Now if anyone wishes to find a really effective and comprehensive and permanent case for aristocracy, well and sincerely stated, let him read not the modern philosophical conservatives, not even Naichi, let him read the Bobel's novelettes. Of the case of Naichi I am confessively more doubtful. Naichi and the Bobel's novelettes have both obviously the same fundamental character. They both worship the tall man with the curling mustaches and herculean bodily power, and they both worship him in a manner which is somewhat feminine and hysterical. Even here however the novelette easily maintains its philosophical superiority, because it does not attribute to the strong man those virtues which do commonly belong to him, such virtues as laziness and kindliness, and a rather reckless benevolence and a great dislike of hurting the weak. Naichi on the other hand attributes to the strong man that scorn against weakness, which only exists among invalids. It is not however of the secondary merits of the great German philosopher, but of the primary merits of the Bobel's novelettes, that it is my present affair to speak. The picture of aristocracy in the popular sentimental novelette seems to be very satisfactory as a permanent political and philosophical guide. It may be inaccurate about details such as the title by which a baronet is addressed, or the width of a mountain chasm which a baronet can conveniently leap, but it is not a bad description of the general idea and intention of aristocracy as they exist in human affairs. The essential dream of aristocracy is magnificence and valor, and if the family herald's supplement sometimes distorts or exaggerates these things, at least it does not fall short in them. It never airs by making the mountain chasm too narrow, or the title of the baronet insufficiently impressive. But above this sane, reliable old literature of snobbishness, there has arisen in our time another kind of literature of snobbishness which with its much higher pretension seems to me worthy of very much less respect. Incidentally, if that matters, it is much better literature. But it is immeasurably worse philosophy, immeasurably worse ethics and politics, immeasurably worse vital rendering of aristocracy and humanity as they really are. From such books as those of which I wish now to speak, we can discover what a clever man can do with the idea of aristocracy. But from the family herald's supplement literature, we can learn what the idea of aristocracy can do with a man who is not clever. And when we know that, we know English history. This new heuristicratic fiction must have caught the attention of everybody who has read the best fiction for the last fifteen years. It is a genuine or alleged literature of the smart set, which represents that set as distinguished not only by smart dresses but by smart sayings. To the bad baronet, to the good baronet, to the romantic and misunderstood baronet, who is supposed to be a bad baronet, but is a good baronet. This school has added a conception undreamed of by the former years, the conception of an amusing baronet. The aristocrat is not merely to be taller than mortal men and stronger and handsomer. He is also to be more witty. He is the long man with the short epigram. Many eminent and deservedly eminent modern novelists must accept some responsibility for having supported this worst form of snobbishness, an intellectual snobbishness. The talented author of Dodo is responsible for having, in some sense, created the fashion as a fashion. Mr. Hitchens, in The Green Carnation, reaffirmed the strange idea that young noblemen talk well, though his case had some vague biographical foundation and inconsequence and excuse. Mrs. Craigie is considerably guilty with a matter, although, or rather because, she has combined the aristocratic note with a note of some moral and even religious sincerity. When you are saving a man's soul, even in a novel, it is indecent to mention that he is a gentleman. Nor can blaming this matter be altogether removed from a man of much greater ability, and a man who has proved his possession of the highest human instinct, the romantic instinct. I mean Mr. Anthony Ho. In a galloping, impossible melodrama like The Prisoner of Zenda, The Blood of Kings fanned an excellent, fantastic thread or theme. But the Blood of Kings is not a thing that can be taken seriously. And when, for example, Mr. Ho devotes so much serious and sympathetic study to the man called Tristima Blent, a man who throughout burning boyhood thought of nothing but a silly old estate, we feel even in Mr. Ho the hint of this excessive concern about the oligarchic idea. It is hard for any ordinary person to feel so much interest in a young man whose whole aim is to own the house of Blent, at the time when every other young man is owning the stars. Mr. Ho, however, is a very mild case, and in him there is not only an element of romance, but also a fine element of irony, which warns us against taking all this elegance too seriously. Above all, he shows his sense in not making his nobleman so incredibly equipped with impromptu repartee. This habit of insisting on the wit of the wealthier classes is the last and most servile of all the servilities. It is, as I have said, a measurably more contemptible than the snobbishness of the novelette, which describes the nobleman as smiling like an Apollo or riding a mad elephant. These may be exaggerations of beauty and courage. The beauty and courage are the unconscious ideals of aristocrats, even of stupid aristocrats. The nobleman of the novelette may not be sketched with any very close or conscientious attention to the daily habits of nobleman, but he is something more important than a reality. He is a practical ideal. The gentleman of fiction may not copy the gentleman of real life, but the gentleman of real life is copying the gentleman of fiction. He may not be particularly good looking, but he would rather be good looking than anything else. He may not have ridden on a mad elephant, but he rides a pony as far as possible, with an heir as if he had. And upon the whole the upper classes not only especially desire these qualities of beauty and courage, but in some degree at any rate especially possess them. Thus there is nothing really mean or syncopatic about the popular literature, which makes all its marquees seven feet high. It is snobbishness, but it is not servile. Its exaggeration is based on an exuberant and honest admiration. Its honest admiration is based upon something which is in some degree, at any rate, really there. The English lower classes do not fear the English upper classes in the least. Nobody could. They simply and freely and sentimentally worship them. The strength of the aristocracy is not in the aristocracy at all. It is in the slums. It is not in the house of lords. It is not in the civil service. It is not in the government offices. And it is not even in the huge and disproportionate monopoly of the English land. It is in a certain spirit. It is in the fact that when a navvy wishes to praise a man, it comes readily to his tongue to say that he has behaved like a gentleman. From a democratic point of view, he might as well say that he has behaved like a vicar. The oligarchy character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest like many oligarchies on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich. The snobbishness of bad literature then is not servile, but the snobbishness of good literature is servile. The old-fashioned half-penny romance where the duchess sparkled with diamonds was not servile, but the new romance where they sparkle with epigrams is servile. For in thus attributing a special and startling degree of intellect and conversational or controversial power to the upper classes, we are attributing something which is not especially their virtue, or even especially their aim. We are in the words of Disraeli, who being a genius and not a gentleman, as perhaps primarily to answer for the introduction of this method of flattering the gentry. We are performing the essential function of flattery, which is flattering the people for the qualities they have not got. Praise may be gigantic and insane without having any quality of flattery, so long as it is praise of something that is not noticeably in existence. A man may say that a giraffe's head strikes the stars, or that a whale fills the German ocean, and still be only in a rather excited state about a favorite animal, but when he begins to congratulate the giraffe on his feathers and the whale on the elegance of his legs, we find ourselves confronted with that social element which we call flattery. The middle and lower orders of London can sincerely, though not perhaps safely, admire the health and grace of the English aristocracy, and this for the very simple reason that the aristocrats are, upon the whole, more healthy and graceful than the poor. But they cannot honestly admire the wit of the aristocrats, and this is for the simple reason that the aristocrats are not more witty than the poor, but a very great deal less so. A man does not hear, as in the smart novels, these gems of verbal felicity dropped between diplomatists at dinner, where he really does hear them is between two omnibus conductors in a block in Holborn. The witty peer whose impromptu fills the books of Mrs. Craigie or Miss Fowler would, as a matter of fact, be torn to shreds in the art of conversation by the first boot-black he had the misfortune to fall foul of. The poor are merely sentimental and very excusably sentimental if they praise the gentleman for having a ready hand and ready money. But they are strictly slaves and sycophants if they praise him for having a ready tongue. For that they have far more than themselves. The element of oligarchical sentiment in these novels, however, has, I think, another and subtler aspect—an aspect more difficult to understand and more worth understanding. The modern gentleman, particularly the modern English gentleman, has become so central and important in these books, and through them in the whole of our current literature and our current mode of thought, that certain qualities of his, whether original or recent, essential or accidental, have altered the quality of our English comedy. In particular, that stoical idea, absurdly supposed to be the English ideal, has stiffened and chilled us. It is not the English ideal, but it is, to some extent, the aristocratic ideal, or it may be only the ideal of aristocracy in its autumn of decay. The gentleman is a stoic because he is a sort of savage, because he is filled with a great elemental fear that some stranger will speak to him. That is why a third-class carriage is a community, while a first-class carriage is a place of wild hermits. But this matter, which is difficult, and may be permitted to approach in a more circuitous way. The haunting element of ineffectualness, which runs through so much of the woody and epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the last eight or ten years, which runs through such works of a real, though bearing ingenuity as Dodo, or concerning Isabel Carnaby, or even some emotions and a moral, may be expressed in various ways. But to most of us, I think it will ultimately amount to the same thing. This new frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an unuttered joy. The men and women who exchange the repartees may not only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next. They are joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not. Out of the emptiness of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Even when they talk pure nonsense, it is a careful nonsense, a nonsense of which they are economical. Or to use the perfect expression of Mr. W. S. Gilbert in Patience, it is such a precious nonsense. Even when they become lightheaded, they do not become lighthearted. All those who have read anything of the rationalism of the moderns know that their reason is a sad thing, but even their unreason is sad. The causes of this incapacity are also not very difficult to indicate. The chief of all, of course, is that miserable fear of being sentimental, which is the meanest of all the modern terrors, meaner even than the terror which produces hygiene. Everywhere the robust and uproarious humor has come from the men who were capable not merely of sentimentalism, but a very silly sentimentalism. There has been no humor so robust or uproarious as that of the sentimentalist steel or the sentimentalist stern or the sentimentalist diggins. These creatures who wep like women with the creatures who laugh like men. It is true that the humor of McAlber is a good literature and that the pathos so little now is bad, but the kind of man who had the courage to write so badly in the one case is the kind of man who would have the courage to write so well in the other. The same unconsciousness, the same violent innocence, the same gigantic scale of action, which brought the Napoleon of comedy his Jenna, brought him also his Moscow. And herein is especially shown the frigid and feeble limitations of our modern wits. They make violent efforts, they make heroic and almost pathetic efforts, but they cannot really write badly. There are moments when we almost think that they are achieving the effect, but our hope shrivels to nothing, the moment we compare their little failures with the enormous in facilities of Byron or Shakespeare. For a hearty laugh, it is necessary to have touched the heart. I do not know why touching the heart should always be connected only with the idea of touching it to compassion or a sense of distress. The heart can be touched to joy and triumph. The heart can be touched to amusement, but all our comedians are tragic comedians. These later fashionable writers are so pessimistic and bone and marrow that they never seem able to imagine the heart having any concern with mirth. When they speak of the heart, they always mean the pangs and disappointments of the emotional life. When they say that a man's heart is in the right place, they mean apparently that it is in his boots. Our ethical societies understand fellowship, but they do not understand good fellowship. Similarly, our wits understand talk, but not what Dr. Johnson is called good talk. In order to have, like Dr. Johnson, a good talk, it is emphatically necessary to be, like Dr. Johnson, a good man, to have friendship and honor and an abysmal tenderness. Above all, it is necessary to be openly and indecently humane, to confess with fullness all the primary pities and fears of Adam. Johnson was a clear-headed, humorous man, and therefore he did not mind talking seriously about religion. Johnson was a brave man, one of the bravest that ever walked, and therefore he did not mind avowing to anyone his consuming fear of death. The idea that there is something English in the repression of one's feelings is one of those ideas which no Englishman ever heard of until England began to be governed exclusively by Scotchmen, Americans, and Jews. At the best, the idea is a generalization from the Duke of Wellington, who was an Irishman. At the worst, it is a part of that silly Tutenism, which knows as little about England as it does about anthropology, but which is always talking about Vikings. As a matter of fact, the Vikings did not repress their feelings in the least. They cried like babies and kissed each other like girls. In short, they acted in that respect, like Achilles, and all strong heroes, the children of the gods. And though the English nationality has probably not much more to do with the Vikings than the French nationality or the Irish nationality, the English have certainly been the children of the Vikings in the matter of tears and kisses. It is not merely true that all the most typically English men of letters like Shakespeare and Dickens, Richardson, and Thackeray were sentimentalists. It is also true that all the most typically English men of action were sentimentalists, if possible more sentimental. In the great Elizabethan age when the English nation was finally being hammered out, in the great 18th century when the British Empire was deemed built up everywhere, where, in all these times, where was this symbolic, stoical Englishman who dresses in drab and black and represses his feelings? Were all the Elizabethan paladins and pirates like that? Were any of them like that? Was Grenville concealing his emotions when he broke wine glasses to pieces with his teeth and bit them till the blood poured down? Was Essex restraining his excitement when he threw his hat into the sea? Did Raleigh think it's sensible to answer the Spanish guns only, as Stevenson says, with the flourish of insulting trumpets? Did Sidney ever miss an opportunity of making a theatrical remark in the whole course of his life and death? Were even the Puritans stoics? The English Puritans repressed a good deal, but even they were too English to repress their feelings. It was by a great miracle of genius assuredly that Carlisle contrived to admire simultaneously two things so irreconcilably opposed as silence and Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was the very reverse of a strong silent man. Cromwell was always talking when he was not crying. Nobody, I suppose, will accuse the author of grace-subbounding of being ashamed of his feelings. Milton indeed it might be possible to represent as a stoic, in some sense he was a stoic, just as he was a prig and a polygamist, and several other unpleasant and heathen things. But when we have passed that great and desolate name, which may really be counted an exception, we find the trade of English emotionalism immediately resumed and unbroken continuous. Whatever may have been the moral beauty of the passions of Etheridge and Dorset, sadly in Buckingham, they cannot be accused of the fault of vestidiously concealing them. Charles II was very popular with the English because, like all the jolly English kings, he displayed his passions. William the Dutchman was very unpopular with the English because, not being an Englishman, he did hide his emotions. He was, in fact, precisely the ideal Englishman of our modern theory and precisely for that reason, all the real Englishmen loathed him like leprosy. With the rise of the great England of the 18th century, we find this open and emotional tone still maintained in letters and politics, in arts and in arms. Perhaps the only quality which was possessed in common by the great Fielding and the great Richardson was that neither of them hid their feelings. Swift indeed was hard and logical because Swift was Irish, and when we passed to the soldiers and the rulers, the Patriots and the Empire-builders of the 18th century, we find, as I have said, that they were, if possible, more romantic than the Romancers, more poetical than the poets. Chatham, who showed the world all his strength, showed the house of common all his weakness. Wolf walked about the room with a drawn sword, calling himself Caesar and Hannibal, and went to death with poetry in his mouth. Clive was a man of the same type as Cromwell or Bunyan, or, for the matter of that, Johnson. That is, he was a strong, sensible man with a kind of running spring of hysteria and melancholy in him. Like Johnson, he was all the more healthy because he was morbid. The tales of the admirals and adventures of that England are full of brigadaccio, of sentimentality, of splendid affection. But it is scarcely necessary to multiply examples of the essentially romantic Englishmen, when one example towers above them all. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has said complacently of the English, we do not fall on the neck and kiss when we come together. It is true that this ancient and universal custom has vanished with some modern weakening of England. Sydney would have thought nothing of kissing Spencer. But I willingly concede that Mr. Broderick would not be likely to kiss Mr. Arnold Foster, if that be any proof of the increased manliness and military greatness of England. But the Englishman who does not show his feelings has not altogether given up the power of seeing something English in the great sea hero of the Napoleonic War. You cannot break the legend of Nelson, and across the sunset of that glory is written in flaming letters forever, the great English sentiment. Kiss me, Hardy. This ideal of self-oppression, then, is whatever else it is, not English. It is perhaps somewhat oriental. It is slightly Prussian. But in the main it does not come, I think, from any racial or national source. It is, as I have said in some sense, aristocratic. It comes not from a people, but from a class. Even the aristocracy, I think, was not quite so stoical in the days when it was really strong. But whether this unemotional ideal be the genuine tradition of the gentleman, or only one of the inventions of the modern gentleman, whom may be called the Decade Gentleman, it certainly has something to do with the unemotional quality of these society novels. From representing aristocrats as people who suppress their feelings, it has been an easy step to representing aristocrats as people who had no feelings to suppress. Thus the modern oligarchist has made a virtue for the oligarchy of the hardness as well as the brightness of the diamond. Like a sonateer addressing his lady in the 17th century, he seems to use the word cold, almost as a eulogym, and the word heartless as a kind of compliment. Of course, in people so we incurably kind-hearted and baby-ish as are the English entry, it would be impossible to create anything that can be called positive cruelty. So in these books, they exhibit a sort of negative cruelty. They cannot be cruel in acts, but they can be so in words. All this means one thing and one thing only. It means that the living and invigorating ideals of England must be looked for in the masses. It must be looked for where Dickens found it. Dickens, among whose glories it was to be a humorist, to be a sentimentalist, to be an optimist, to be a poor man, to be an Englishman. But the greatest of whose glories was that he saw all mankind in its amazing and tropical luxuriance and did not even notice the aristocracy. Dickens, the greatest of whose glories was that he could not describe a gentleman. End of chapter 15