 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Alarms and Discursions by G. K. Chesterton Section 13, Chapters 37-39 The High Plains By high plains I do not mean table lands. Table lands do not interest one very much. They seem to involve the boar of a climb without the pleasure of a peak. Also they are vaguely associated with Asia and those enormous armies that eat up everything like locusts, as did the army of Xerxes, with emperors from nowhere spreading their battalions everywhere, with the white elephants and the painted horses, the dark engines and the dreadful mounted bowmen of the moving empires of the east, with all that evil insolence, in short, that rolled into Europe in the youth of Nero. And after having been battered about and abandoned by one Christian nation after another, turned up in England with Disraeli and was christened, or rather pagan, imperialism. Also it may be necessary to explain, I do not mean high plains, such as the Theosophists and the Higher Thought Centers talk about. They spell theirs differently, but I will not have theirs in any spelling. They, I know, are always expounding how this or that person is on a lower plain, while they, the speakers, are on a higher plain. Sometimes they will almost tell you what plain, as in 5994, or plain F sub-plain 304. I do not mean this sort of height, either. My religion says nothing about such plains, except that all men are on one plain, and that by no means a higher one. They are saints indeed in my religion, but a saint only means a man who really knows he is a sinner. Why then should I talk of the plains as high? I do it for a rather singular reason, which I will illustrate by a parallel. When I was at school learning all the Greek I have ever forgotten, I was puzzled by the phrase, oinon milan, that is, black wine, which continually occurred. I asked what it meant, and many most interesting and convincing answers were given. It was pointed out that we know little of the actual liquid drunk by the Greeks, that the analogy of modern Greek wines may suggest that it was dark and sticky, perhaps the sort of syrup always taken with water. That archaic language about color is always a little dubious, as where Homer speaks of the wine-dark sea, and so on. I was very properly satisfied and never thought of the matter again until one day, having a decanter of cleric in front of me. I happened to look at it. I then perceived that they called wine black because it is black. Very thin, diluted, or held up abruptly against a flame, red wine is red. But seen in body, in most normal shades and semi-lights, red wine is black, and therefore was called so. On the same principles I call the plains high because the plains always are high. They are always as high as we are. We live climbing mountain crest and looking down at the plain, but the phrase is an illusion of our arrogance. It is impossible even to look down at the plain, for the plain itself rises as we rise. It is not merely true that the higher we climb, the wider and wider is spread out below us, the wealth of the world. It is not merely that devil or some other respectable guide for tourists takes us to the top of an exceedingly high mountain and shows us all the kingdoms of the earth. It is more than that, in our real feeling of it. It is that in a sense the whole world rises with us, roaring, and accompanies us to the crest like some clanging chorus of eagles. The plains rise higher and higher like swift grey walls piled up against invisible invaders, and however high a peak you climb, the plain is still as high as the peak. The mountain tops are only noble because from them we are privileged to behold the plains, so the only value in any man being superior is that he may have a superior admiration for the level and the common. If there is any prophet in a place craggy and precipitous, it is only because from the veil it is not so easy to see all the beauty of the veil, because when actually in the flats one cannot see their sublime and satisfying flatness. If there is any value in being educated or imminent, which is doubtful enough, it is only because the best instructed man may feel most swiftly and certainly the splendor of the ignorant and the simple, the full magnificence of that mighty human army in the plains. The general goes up to the hill to look at his soldiers, he withdraws himself, not because his regiment is too small to be touched, but because it is too mighty to be seen. The chief climbs with submission or goes higher with great humility since, in order to take a bird's eye view of everything, he must become small and distant, like a bird. The most marvelous of those mystical cavaliers who wrote intricate and exquisite verse in England in the 17th century, I mean Henry Vaughn, put the matter in one line, intrinsically immortal and practically forgotten. O holy hope and high humility. That adjective high is not only one of the sudden and stunning inspirations of literature, it is also one of the greatest engraveous definitions of moral science. However far aloft a man may go, he is still looking up, not only at God, which is obvious, but in a manner at man also, seeing more and more all that is towering and mysterious in the dignity and destiny of the lonely house of Adam. I wrote some part of these rambling remarks on a high ridge of rock and turf overlooking a stretch of the central counties. The rides were slight enough in reality, but the immediate ascent had been so steep and sudden that one could not avoid the fancy that on reaching the summit one would look down at the stars. But one did not look down at the stars, but rather up at the cities, seeing as high in heaven the palace town of Elford, like a lit sunset cloud, and away in the void spaces like a planet in eclipse, Salisbury. So it may be hoped, until we die, you and I will always look up, rather than down, at the labors and the habitations of our race. We will lift up our eyes to the valleys from whence cometh our help. For from every special eminence and beyond every sublime landmark it is good for our souls to see only vaster and vaster visions of that dizzy and divine level, and to behold from our crumbling turrets the tall plains of equality, the chorus. One of the most marked instances of the decline of true popular sympathy is the gradual disappearance in our time of the habit of singing and chorus. Even when it is done nowadays it is done tentatively and sometimes inaudibly, apparently upon some preposterous principle, which I have never clearly grasped, that singing is an art. In the new aristocracy of the drawing-room a lady is actually asked whether she sings. In the old democracy of the dinner-table a man was simply told to sing, and he had to do it. I like the atmosphere of those old manklets. I like to think of my ancestors, middle-aged or venerable gentlemen, all sitting round the table and explaining that they would never forget old days or friends with a rumpty itty-itty, or letting it be known that they would die for England's glory with their tour-oil braille, etc. Even the vices of that society, which sometimes I fear rendered the narrative portions of the song almost as cryptic and inarticulate as the chorus, were displayed with a more human softening than the same vices in the saloon bars of our own time. I greatly prefer Mr. Richard Swiveller to Mr. Stanley Ortheris. I prefer the man who exceeded in rosy wine in order that the wing of friendship might never molt to feather to the man who exceeds quite as much in whiskies and sodas, but declares all the time that he's for number one and that you don't catch him paying for other men's drinks. The old men of pleasure with their tour-oil orail at least got some social and communal virtue out of pleasure. The new men of pleasure, without the slightest vestige of a tour-oil orail, are simply hermits of irreligion instead of religion, anchorites of atheism, and they might as well be drugging themselves with hashish or opium in a wilderness. But the chorus of the old songs had another use besides this obvious one of asserting the popular element in the arts. The chorus of a song, even of a comic song, has the same purpose as the chorus of a Greek tragedy. It reconciles men to the gods. It connects this one particular tale with the cosmos and the philosophy of common things. Thus we constantly find in the old ballads, especially the pathetic ballads, some refrain about the grass growing green or the birds singing or the woods being merry in spring. These are windows opened in the house of tragedy, momentary glimpses of larger and quieter scenes of more ancient and enduring landscapes. Many of the country's songs describing crime and death have refrains of a startling joviality like cock-crow, just as if the whole company were coming in with a shout of protest against so somber a view of existence. There is a long and gruesome ballad called the Berkshire Tragedy about a murderer committed by a jealous sister for the consummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the course which should come in a kind of burst runs, and I'll be true to my love if my love will be true to me. The very reasonable arrangement here suggested is introduced, I think, as a kind of throwback to the normal, the reminder that even the Berkshire Tragedy does not fill the whole of Berkshire. The poor young lady is drowned, and the wicked miller to whom we may have been affectionately attached is hanged, but still a ruby kindles in the vine and many a garden by the water blows. Not that Omar's type of hedonistic resignation is at all the same as the breezy impatience of the Berkshire refrain, but they are alike insofar as they gaze out beyond the particular complication to more open plains of peace. The chorus of the ballad looks past the drowning maiden and the miller's gibbet and sees the plains full of lovers. This use of the chorus to humanize and dilute a dark story is strongly opposed to the modern view of art. Modern art has to be what is called intense. It is not easy to define being intense, but roughly speaking it means saying only one thing at a time and saying it wrong. Modern tragic writers have to write short stories. If they wrote long stories, as the man said in reality, cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings, brief but purely painful, and doubtless they bore some resemblance to some lives lived under our successful scientific civilization, lives which tend in any case to be painful and in many cases to be brief. But when the artistic people passed beyond the poignant anecdote and began to write long books full of poignancy, then the reading public began to rebel and to demand the recall of romance. The long books about the black poverty of cities became quite insupportable. The Berkshire tragedy had a chorus, but the London tragedy had no chorus. Therefore people welcomed the return of adventurous novels about alien places and times. The trenchant and sword-like stories of Stevenson. But I am not narrowly on the side of the Romanics. I think the glimpses of the gloom of our civilization ought to be recorded. I think that the bewilderments of the solitary and skeptical soul ought to be preserved. If it be only for the pity, yes, and the admiration of the happier time. But I wish that there was some way in which the chorus could enter. I wish that at the end of each chapter of stiff agony or insane terror the choir of humanity could come in with a crash of music and tell both reader and author that this is not the whole of human experience. Let them go on recording hard scenes or hideous questions, but let there be a jolly refrain. Thus we might read, as Anoria laid down the volume of Ibsen and went weirdly to her window, she realized that life must be to her not only harsher, but colder than it was to the comfortable and weak. With her to ral or ral, etc., or again, the young currant smiled rimly as he listened to his great-grandmother's last words. He knew only too well that since Fogg's discovery of the hereditary herriness of goat's religion stood on a very different basis from that which he had occupied in his childhood, with his rumpity, rumpity, and so on. Or we might read, Uriel Maybloom stared gloomily down at his sandals as he realized for the first time how senseless and antisocial are all ties between man and woman, how each must go his way or her way without any attempt to arrest the headlong separation of their souls, and that would come in one deafening chorus of everlasting humanity, but I'll be true to my love, if my love will be true to me. The records of the first majestic and yet fantastic developments of the foundations of St. Francis of Assisi is an account of a certain blessed brother Giles. I have forgotten most of it, but I remember one fact, that certain students of theology came to ask him whether he believed in free will, and if so, how could he reconcile it with necessity? On hearing the question, St. Francis' follower reflected a little while and then seized the fiddle, and began capering and dancing about the garden, playing a wild tune and generally expressing a violent and invigorating indifference. The tune is not recorded, but it is the eternal chorus of mankind that modifies all the arts and mocks all the individualism, like the laughter and thunder of some distant sea, a romance of the marshes. In books, as a whole, marshes are described as desolate and colorless, great fields of clay or sedge, vast horizons of drab-a-grey, but this, like many other literary associations, is a piece of poetic injustice. Monotony has nothing to do with a place. Monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sites, there are only dreary-site seers. It is a matter of taste, that of personality, whether marshes or monotonous, but it is a matter of fact and science that they are not monochrome. The tops of high mountains, I am told, are all white. The depths of primeval caverns, I am also told, are all dark. The sea will be gray or blue for weeks together, and the desert I have been led to believe is the color of sand. The North Pole, if we found it, would be white with cracks of blue, and endless space if we went there, would I suppose be black with white spots. If any of these were counted of a monotonous color, I could well understand it, but on the contrary they are always spoken of as if they had the gorgeous and chaotic colors of light of scope. Now exactly where you can find colors like those of a tulip garden or a stained glass window is in those sunken and sodden lands which are always called dreary. Of course the great tulip gardens did arise in Holland, which is simply one immense marsh. There is nothing in Europe so truly tropical as marshes. Also now I come to think of it there are a few places so agreeably marshy as tropics. Baitswamp and Fenlands in England are always especially rich in gay grasses or gorgeous fungoids and seem sometimes as glorious as a transformation scene but also as unsubstantial. In these splendid scenes it is always very easy to put your foot through the scenery. You may sink up to your armpits but you will sink up to your armpits in flowers. I do not deny that I myself am of a sort that sinks except in the matter of spirits. I saw in the West Counties recently a swampy field of great richness and promise. If I had stepped on it I have no doubt at all that I should have vanished. That aeons hence the complete fossil of a fat fleets Greek journalist would be found in that compressed clay. I only claim that it would be found in some attitude of energy or even a joy. This point is the most important of all for as I imagine myself sinking up to the neck in what looked like solid green field I suddenly remember that this very thing must have happened to certain interesting pirates quite a thousand years ago. For as it happened the flat Fenland in which I nearly sunk was the Fenland round the island of Athelmi which is now an island in the fields and no longer in the waters. But on the abrupt hillock a stone still stands to say that this was that embattled island in the parrot where King Alfred held his last fort against the foreign invaders in that war that nearly washed us as far from civilization as the Solomon Islands. Here he defended the island called Athelmi as he afterwards did his best to defend the island called England for the hero always defends an island a thing beleaguered and surrounded like the Troy of Hector and the highest and largest humanitarian can only rise to defending the tiny island called the earth. One approaches the island of Athelmi along a long low road like an interminable white string stretched across the flats and lined with those dwarfish trees that are elvish in their very dullness. At one point of the journey I cannot conceive why one is arrested by a tollgate at which one has to pay three pence. Perhaps it is a distorted tradition of those dark ages. Perhaps Alfred with his superior science of comparative civilizations had calculated the economics of Denmark down to the half-penny. Perhaps a dane sometimes came with two pence sometimes even with two pence half-penny after the sack of many cities even with two pence three farthings but never with three pence. Whether or no it was a permanent barrier to the barbarians it was only a temporary barrier to me. I discovered three large and complete coppers in various parts of my person and I passed on along that strangely monotonous and strangely fascinating path. It is not really fanciful to feel that the place expresses itself appropriately as the place where the great Christian king hid himself from the heathen. Though a marshland is always open it is still curiously secret. Fens like deserts are large things very apt to be mislaid. These flats fear to be overlooked in a double sense. The small trees crouched and the whole plains seemed lying on its face as men do when shells burst. The little path ran fearlessly forward but it seemed to run on all fours. Everything in that strange countryside seemed to be lying low as if to avoid the incessant and rattling rain of the Danish heroes. There were indeed hills of no inconsiderable height quite within call but those pools and flats of the old parrot seemed to separate themselves like a central and secret sea and in the midst of them stood up the rock of the Thelny as islet as it was to Alfred. And all across this recumbent and almost crawling country there ran the glory of the low wet lands. Grass lustrous and living like the plumage of some universal bird the flowers as gorgeous as bonfires and the weeds more beautiful than the flowers. One stoop to stroke the grass as if the earth were all one kind beast that could feel. Why does no decent person write an historical novel about Alfred at his fort in Thelny in the marshes of the parrot? Not a very historical novel not about his truth telling or his founding the British Empire or the British Navy or the Navy League or whichever it was he founded not about the Treaty of Wedmore and whether it ought as an imminent historian says to be called the Pact of Chippenham but an aboriginal romance for boys about the bare, bold, beatific fact that a great hero held his fort in an island in a river. An island is fine enough to be conscious or piratic unconsciousness but an island in the river sounds like the beginning of the greatest adventure story on earth. Robinson Caruso is really a great tale but think of Robinson Caruso's feelings if he could have actually seen England and Spain from his inaccessible isle. Treasure Island is a spirit of genius but what treasure could an island contain to compare with Alfred and then consider the further elements of juvenile romance in an island that was more of an island than it looked. If helmy was masked with marshes, many a heavy harnessed viking may have started bounding across a meadow only to find himself submerged in a sea. I feel the full fictitious splendor spreading round me. I see glimpses of a great romance that will never be written. I see a sudden shaft quivering one of the short trees. I see a red-haired man waiting madly among the tall gold flowers of the marshes leaping onward and lurching lower. I see another shaft quivering in his throat. I cannot see any more because as I have delicately suggested I am a heavy man. This mysterious marshland does not sustain me and I sink into its depths with a bubbling groan.